The Best And Worst of the 2016 Venice Film Festival

We try not to be partisan, but every year when the end of summer rolls around, it’s hard to ignore the slightly unseemly bunfight that breaks out between the various fall festivals trying to snag high-profile premieres. Venice, of course, has the advantage of coming first (indeed, the way it wraps around Telluride and overlaps with the first and biggest weekend of Toronto can make it feel like it goes on forever). But Telluride has that boutiquey exclusivity going for it, the New York Film Festival has snagged some big names in recent years, and TIFF’s sheer scale and profile means that, EscalatorGate or no, it’s widely touted as the heavyweight champion of the autumn. So collectively, we’re impartial, but personally, seeing as I’ve been lucky enough to cover Venice for The Playlist for the last three years, I’m obviously rooting for director Alberto Barbera to debut as many enticing prospects as possible on the Lido, and this year he didn’t disappoint. The Venice 2016 lineup kicked ass.

The awards were announced on Saturday night, with the big prize going to Lav Diaz’ “The Woman Who Left,” a win that was more or less foreseeable on account of its length, relatively obscurity and seriousness, and then was ironclad guaranteed when I didn’t manage to see it. Elsewhere, in general the jury, headed by Sam Mendes, did a thoughtful, egalitarian job that meant that almost all the hotly-tipped titles came away with something, with room for a couple of surprises (“The Bad Batch” taking the Special Jury Prize was unexpected, though worth it for Ana Lily Amirpour confirming she’s one of the four or five coolest women alive with her laid-back, off-the-cuff acceptance speech). But of course it wouldn’t have been how things had gone had we been in charge.

READ MORE: The 30 Most Anticipated Films Of The 2016 Toronto International Film Festival

It feels like only yesterday that the assembled press massed for the first press screening of opening film “La La Land,” and also like several hundred years ago, but here we go with The Playlist’s highlights and lowlights that characterized all the milliseconds and millennia of Venice 2016 —and note that the “best” section of last year’s equivalent post was only 5 movies strong, so a 7 best list is its own sort of endorsement, and the fact it could easily have gone to 10 or so even more so.

“La La Land”
Venice’s pole position in the fall festival race means that its opening film essentially commences the prestigey, awards-hopeful segment of the year, and also acts as a bullet to the brain with respect to the summer blockbuster months. And with summer 2016 being such a bummer, even more eyes than usual were on the Venice opener as a palate cleanser and a pace-setter, so there couldn’t have been a more perfect choice than Damian Chazelle‘s musical “La La Land.” Beautifully inventive and filled with hugely engaging filmmaking ideas that indicate his love for classical musicals without ever becoming beholden to them, the film features enormously endearing performances from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (she took the festival’s Volpi Cup award for Best Actress in a very competitive year for that category) and a satisfyingly bittersweet dollop of hard-won wisdom. [Review here]

“One More Time With Feeling”
Many tears were jerked during Venice this year, but the only film I can say made me cry while I was writing about it in the press room afterward (and still makes me a little shaky to think about, to be honest) was Andrew Dominik‘s sublime and heartrending 3D documentary about Nick Cave. And when was the last time you read “sublime and heartrending” in connection with “3D”? A beautifully honest and brave attempt on Cave’s part to understand the creative process (the film chronicles the recording of his new album Skeleton Tree, which is, incidentally, incredible) in the context of the death last year of his 15-year-old son Arthur, it’s a guided tour of grief given by one of the most generously introspective of artists. But it is also a stunning film from the great Dominik, who allows his friendship with Cave to inform the graceful, sympathetic and often breathtaking images, but never lets it cloud his judgement. It’s unlikely we’ll see a better, more moving or more compelling exploration of the experience and the meaning of grief for some time. [Review here]

“Arrival”
Denis Villeneuve‘s last film, “Sicario” was widely admired, but there were a lonely few who found it an unsatisfactory mix of restrained artfulness and genre thriller, and so to us it’s truly exciting that “Arrival” should meld its cerebral intelligence and its high-concept sci-fi so well. Villeneuve’s specialty, all the way back to the start of his current run of form “Incendies” but incorporating “Prisoners,” “Sicario” and even outlier “Enemy,” seems to be the ability to take splashy and potentially sensationalist storylines and treat them with a sober-mindedness and impeccable craft that allows us to take them seriously. But with screenwriter Eric Heisserer‘s adaptation of Ted Chiang’s short story “The Story of Your Life,” Villeneuve has found a story worthy of his skill in telling and then some. Featuring a beautifully modulated Amy Adams performance and a fearlessness in risking accusations of overreach by suppling answers to the big questions that most sci-fi movies daren’t even ask, “Arrival” filled me with wonder and a melancholic, long-view kind of hope and allowed me to write about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in my review, and I don’t think I can ask for more than that. [Review here]

“Jackie”
Though we try to maintain a level of objectivity about most filmmakers, Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain is one of the few that we’re unapologetically rooting for with every new movie —though to be fair, that’s based on a well-earned track record which has seen him expand, reinvent and challenge himself each time at bat. “Jackie” is probably his most perilous project yet —his English-language debut, starring Oscar-winning movie star Natalie Portman, details a few pivotal days in the life of Jacqueline Kennedy, one of the greatest of all American icons. Amazingly, he makes good with this brisk, caustic, layered film (Noah Oppenheim rightly won the Venice script prize), though while it completely delights us that it’s so much a Larrain film and not a regular prestige biopic, also has us worried for the same reason. We hope general audiences will not be sold the more stately, Oscar-bait version of the Jackie Kennedy story, because this playful, irreverent, arch deconstruction of the classical biopic sure ain’t that. [Review here]

“The Untamed”
Amat Escalante‘s follow-up to his Cannes Best Director win for the despairing and brutal “Heli” took many by surprise and proved one of the more divisive titles in a competition field that by and large yielded a more harmonious critical consensus than in most years. A provocative melding of “Heli”-style grim social commentary with psychosexual sci-fi elements (it quickly became known as the “sexy octopus alien” movie, perhaps to distinguish itself from “Arrival,” aka the “unsexy heptapod alien” movie), what I particularly enjoyed about “The Untamed” is a miles-deep pitch black ironic sense of humor that “Heli” had shown little evidence of. Some critics found the combination of genres and tones unconvincing, and I can see their point, yet I enjoyed the strange, dark energy given off in the collision between its oppositional impulses. It shared the Silver Lion prize with Andrei Konchalovsky‘s “Paradise” which suggests that this is the award that juries give to films whose formal audacity they admire without ever being quite able to embrace them as a whole, in which case Escalante should wear it as a badge of honor —it’s not at all lovable, nor does it want to be. [Review here]