Nocturnal Animals won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival tonight, as the festival drew to a close. The Grand Jury Prize is considered the ‘second place’ award, behind the Golden Lion – which went to The Woman Who Left this year.

Deadline has the full list of awards handed out tonight.

Sam Mendes Talks Jury Experience As Hollywood Wins Big On The Lido – Venice

Hollywood had a pretty good evening on the Lido tonight. After a few years of sitting on the sidelines at the Venice Film Festival, when movies like Spotlight and Birdman were overlooked for gold (or silver), a number of films and talent that are expected to figure in the awards conversation later this year were rewarded.

Among them, Tom Ford’s noir thriller Nocturnal Animals won the Grand Jury Prize; Hollywood musical love letter La La Land’s Emma Stone took the Best Actress Volpi Cup; and Noah Oppenheim won Best Screenplay for Pablo Larrain’s lauded Jackie.

The Grand Jury Prize is a very new distinction and Ford becomes the fourth director to win it. Former recipient Joshua Oppenheimer was on the jury this year. Nocturnal Animals was warmly embraced here ahead of its Venice bow and Ford flew back from Toronto to attend the ceremony tonight. He was visibly emotional, and charmed the audience by speaking in Italian saying he truly feels at home here. Focus releases Nocturnal domestically on November 11.

(Deadline)

Nocturnal Animals screened for the press today at the Toronto Film Festival (I think the ‘red carpet’ screening is this Sunday) and it received more fantastic reviews – here are a few of them:

Tom Ford’s ‘Nocturnal Animals’ Slays With Cynicism, Wins Over Toronto

Tom Ford‘s “Nocturnal Animals” premiered in Venice last week, but a dizzying amount of press and industry players showed for the Toronto International Film Festival screening of the designer-turned-director’s second feature.

The Princess of Wales theater hit capacity for the Amy Adams-Jake Gyllenhaal thriller, a screenplay Ford adapted from Austin Wright’s novel “Tony and Susan.”

Adams plays an icy modern artist named Susan who receives a package from her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). It’s his debut novel, titled “Nocturnal Animals,” a harrowing story of a husband and father named Tony whose wife and daughter are abducted by a group of West Texas thugs.

Susan is happy for the distraction, thanks to a growing divide with current husband Hutton (Armie Hammer). The structure of the film gets a bit meta, vacillating between Susan reading the novel — a complete depiction of the action within the book (Gyllenhaal also plays Tony in the story-within-the-story, as Susan sublimates her ex for his lead character) — and flashbacks to how Susan and Edward met, and eventually how she came to leave him.

It’s plenty of story to chew on, but nothing short of stunning.

Continue reading “Nocturnal Animals” screened today at Toronto Film Festival

Nocturnal Animals is premiereing at Venice Film Festival today and reviews from those at the press screening are popping up. Below is the first review I’ve found from a major film site – it doesn’t mention Isla’s performance but it is slightly spoilery regarding her character, so be warned! Be sure to follow us on Twitter @IslaFisherWeb where I’ll be retweeting more tidbits from the promotion today. Anything particularly Isla-related I’ll post here too.

I don’t think Isla is in attendance at the festival, but we’ll see for sure once the photocall starts very soon…

‘Nocturnal Animals’ Venice Review: Tom Ford Gambles Big and Wins on Second Feature
Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal star in a film that successfully melds grit and glamour, the past and the present, and fiction and reality

Given the challenge that most directors have making a single film, writer-director Tom Ford‘s sophomore effort is all the more impressive for being, essentially, two movies in one. One of those films is the kind of “sad people in nice houses” tale you might expect from the couturier-turned-filmmaker behind “A Single Man,” but the other one is the kind of down-and-dirty West Texas revenge thriller that calls to mind Sam Peckinpah.

“Nocturnal Animals” jumps between the “reality” of its own story and a novel that one of the characters is reading, and that’s a tricky leap to accomplish; look no further than another Venice entry, Wim Wenders‘s tedious “Les Beaux Jours d’Aranjuez,” for an example of how not to jump back and forth cinematically between a book and its author.

Amy Adams, already so impressive at this year’s Venice Film Festival with “Arrival,” plays a significantly different kind of character here: Susan is a successful L.A. gallery curator, but her neutral stare and smoky eye shadow speak volumes about her unhappiness. Her distant, withholding husband Hutton (Armie Hammer) is jetting off to New York on another attempt to save his failing business, leaving Susan alone in their glass-box house (complete with a Koons in the back yard) to read a galley of “Nocturnal Animals,” the first novel by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), who never remarried and who has dedicated the book to her.

Continue reading “Nocturnal Animals” premiereing at Venice Film Festival today