'Joker' Wins Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival,
odd Phillips’ dark supervillain origin story “Joker” has come up trumps at the Venice Film Festival, taking the Golden Lion from a jury headed by Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel. Controversial veteran Roman Polanski, meanwhile, took the runner-up Grand Jury Prize for his film “An Officer and a Spy,” capping a festival marked by debate over gender representation and the impact of #MeToo in the industry.
It’s a rarity for a major Hollywood studio production to take the top prize at Venice, and unprecedented for a superhero-adjacent property to take any such honor, but the Warner Bros. title established itself early on as the festival’s lightning rod: a film that sparked headlines and critical discussion to the very end of the festival, as many other competing titles came and went without a ripple.
Variety chief critic Owen Gleiberman was among its many champions, acclaiming it as “a neo-‘Taxi Driver’ knockout: the rare comic-book movie that expresses what’s happening in the real world.” Other critics voiced reservations about the extremity of the film’s onscreen violence, and what they perceived as sympathetic centralization of a toxic male protagonist; we can expect the back-and-forth to continue when the film goes into general release on Oct. 4.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/variety.com/2019/film/festivals/venice-film-festival-awards-announced-live-updates-1203327388/amp/
= new reply since forum marked as read
