"Venice vs Toronto."

"Venice is on the move," reports Wendy Ide, who, in the London Times, presents the title to this entry. "The festival's artistic director Marco Mueller has revealed that the dates of next year's Venice Film Festival will shift to coincide with those of the Toronto Film Festival - a declaration of war. There used to be an understanding that the two festivals could share key titles. It looks as if that age of collaboration is over and the battlelines are being drawn to vie for the big films."

"As if to prove that good things do, indeed, come to those who wait, Venice on its penultimate day delivered three of its strongest films," writes Shane Danielson at indieWIRE. "It was a pity, then, that almost no one was left to see them, having by then left the Lido with their minds already made up about this year's festival." The films: Darren Aronofsky's Golden Lion-winner, The Wrestler; Philippe Grandrieux's Un Lac; and Sylvie Verheyde's Stella.

Updated through 9/8.

In the Observer, Sight & Sound editor Nick James rounds up his impressions of several films that screened at the tail-end of the festival. Also: "Venice gossip" from Damon Wise.

Also from Venice, Boyd van Hoeij sends impressions of a slew of films into the Auteurs' Notebook.

Time's Richard Corliss on Smog: "One startling discovery was this 1962 film, directed by Franco Rossi.... It's a fascinating document of LA dolce vita, and of a city emerging from its legend, as seen by wise foreign eyes. Smog was the brightest surprise of this year's Biennale."

A few thoughts from Mick LaSalle as he made his way back across the Atlantic: "The Europeans have to collaborate with American distributors in figuring out how to market their work in the United States, to ask themselves what is it about their product that is missing in our market. Too often foreign films are advertised for their similarities to American films. But that's precisely the wrong stategy. If they're the same, then who needs them?"

"Why didn't anyone warn me that the city would break my heart?" asks Salon's The AV Club's Noel Murray and Scott Tobias saw nine films slated for TIFF even before they arrived in Toronto, "and we've written them up, posting in descending order from highest-rated to lowest-rated."

The Los Angeles Times opens a special TIFF section.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy is in Toronto.

"Opening night films aren't easy - especially when they have to be Canadian," write the Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik and Borys Kit. "So we should go easy on Passchendaele, the movie (pronounced 'Passion-dale') that kicked off the festivities north of the border Thursday night (and a movie which also happens to be the most expensive project in the history of Canada).... [I]t's a wartime romantic melodrama with scenes (and a score) of such schmaltz it sometimes makes The English Patient look like a PBS documentary.... Still, the film's third act picks up quite a bit; the action scenes, which show artillery fire devolving into hand-to-hand combat, flirts with Saving Private Ryan intensity." More from Scott Foundas. And Bruce Kirkland talks with director Paul Gross for the Toronto Sun.

"[A]fter a year of labor strikes and company retrenchments, the event may turn out to be yet another marker of film industry turmoil." Anthony Kaufman in the Wall Street Journal on Toronto. Then, Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay: "I ran into another sales agent who asked, 'Have you seen the Wall Street Journal article? It's another 'sky is falling' piece." This one's by Lauren AE Schuker and Peter Sanders and Scott comments on the key graphs before pointing to Scott Kirsner's comments as well.

"Warner Brothers, oddly enough, has turned out to be the festival's Big Daddy," writes Michael Cieply in the New York Times. "The studio that brought you The Dark Knight and managed to shake up the indie world by folding its specialty units New Line, Warner Independent and Picturehouse in the course of a year, is all over Toronto's schedule with pictures, several of them salvaged from operations that are being shut down."

"How to plan my Toronto schedule when there are a few dozen movies screening every day and I want to keep from knowing much of anything about them before I see them, so that I can (as much as humanly possible) avoid preconceptions, false expectations, artificial festival 'buzz,' and other distractions that have little or nothing to do with what's on those screens?" wonders Jim Emerson.

AJ Schnack is tracking docs.

Matt Mazur blogs for PopMatters.

Updates, 9/8: "Venice is over," sighs Agnès Poirier - with relief, evidently. "The awards have been given, the red carpet has been rolled up. Now we can say it: this was a terrible festival. Critics may squabble over many things, but on this they are united. This year's Venice was one of the worst, certainly the worst of the last ten years."

"What overall assessment can we give of the controversies, the attacks, and the critiques that were rampant in this year's festival?" asks Eugenio Renzi, wrapping the Cahiers du cinéma Venice journal. "Regarding the films, they seem to have been unfair, and given under false pretext."

Posted by dwhudson at September 7, 2008 8:56 AM