Whether or not you’ve ever been to a film festival, their increasing emphasis could be changing the movies you watch. This article was published in the Film Stories Newsletter on 22nd August 2025. If you want similar witterings in your inbox every Friday, sign up below: The Venice and Toronto film festivals are well underway ... Are festivals changing how we watch movies?
Whether or not you’ve ever been to a film festival, their increasing emphasis could be changing the movies you watch.
This article was published in the Film Stories Newsletter on 22nd August 2025. If you want similar witterings in your inbox every Friday, sign up below:
The Venice and Toronto film festivals are well underway right now, and I’m stuck in London with wet socks. I can hear your sympathy through the screen, and it’s very welcome. So fair warning – I’m about to go so Inside Baseball we might learn what all the non-maths-y bits in Moneyball were about, because this has got me thinking about film festivals.
At the London Film Festival in 2022, a week of running between increasingly damp screening rooms at unseemly hours ended with Rian Johnson’s new Knives Out movie. Having debuted at the Toronto Film Festival a few weeks earlier, word on the critical street was good.
The word, it turned out, was more-or-less right. Glass Onion is a good film. Daniel Craig delves into and amps up the eccentricities of gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc; even today, it remains one of comparatively few films to directly address whatever the heck happened to us between 2020 and 2021; most of all, from its ludicrously twisty plot to its balmy Greek island vistas, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
With hindsight, though, I reckon few people would place it on a par with its predecessor. In fact, the very existence of 2019’s Knives Out does more to bash Glass Onion than any critic ever could. Blanc’s first outing is tighter, more satisfying and (whisper it) contains more genuinely scene-stealing performances (take a bow, Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis and Toni Collette) than its follow-up. It might be tough to compare Glass Onion to probably the finest murder mystery movie of the last decade or so but, well – Johnson did make the first one. He has only himself to blame.
Not that you’d necessarily get that out of responses from Toronto, or indeed London. There was such a tide of goodwill following Blanc’s second mystery that it was difficult not to get swept up in it – I know I did. The result was a five-star hype train which I’d reckon left a lot of regular punters disappointed when the film arrived in cinemas and streaming a few months later.
This was a festival season which had previously brought crowds The Banshees Of Inisherin, Women Talking, Aftersun, The Whale, The Fabelmans, and Bardo, False Chronicle Of A Handful Of Truths. Am I being selective in my choices, here? Almost certainly. But what I do remember was a distinct feeling that plenty of what I’d seen over the last two weeks had been, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty bloody miserable.
Glass Onion, then, was like a ray of Greek sunshine for rooms of vitamin-D-deficient film critics. Finally, something – murder aside – remotely cheerful; something funny, and not in a Triangle Of Sadness, “we’re making a serious point about arms dealers, actually” kind of way.
Something similar happened to Richard Linklater’s Hit Man – a refreshingly goofy comedy thriller which should have turned Glen Powell into the movie star he’s still trying very hard to be. But the film’s glowing notices out of Venice and London the following year pre-empted a much more middling reception on its Netflix debut almost a year later.
Of course film festivals, particularly the bigger kids (Cannes, Berlinale, Venice, Toronto and a rotating cast of other international cities) only cater to a tiny fraction of the filmgoing audience. But in today’s landscape, when original and auteur films are seen by increasingly few people, the early-autumn festival circuit arguably has a far bigger cultural impact than it has historically.
They’re the first stop on the Oscars calendar, itself still the most effective promotional tool for non-blockbuster cinema left standing (how many more people watched Anora after it won Best Picture this year?). They’re the start of the season beloved by film buffs for giving us interesting and mid-budget fare. Any studio worth its salt will save the bulk of its non-blockbuster budget for the last quarter of the year, when the famously amnesiac awards bodies have a chance of remembering their film when they start to fill in their ballots. The result has been a situation where the vast majority of studio films worth watching in the autumn have made at least one appearance at a half-dozen film festivals before being shown to the general public.
Which brings us back to the point that film festival reception does matter – if only because it kick-starts the conversation around most of the decent flicks likely to break through into the wider cultural conversation. No or negative buzz from a previously highly anticipated title can kill its box office and awards chances dead before it dips its toe into cinemas.
For comedy, this can be a double-edged sword. In an arena naturally predisposed to drama, anything light-hearted and popcorn friendly can easily feel more radical and inventive than something released on an ordinary Thursday. We’ve seen plenty of examples in recent years of good, solid action-comedies (The Fall Guy, which debuted at SXSW, is another) being hyped to high heaven after a festival premiere, only to fail to meet expectations on a general release.
What’s the takeaway, then? That film festivals are bad for cinema? Not really. For me, the condensing of mainstream serious cinema into the last few months of the year is a symptom of worse trends in the film industry, rather than a cause. But it seems pretty unavoidable that the film festival environment doesn’t do cinematic variety many favours. And with comedy still broadly struggling to break through at the box office, the space for making successful films to make us laugh is getting smaller and smaller.
Maybe I just need to lighten up. After all, it’s hard to enjoy anything with wet socks.
