‘Danny Boyle, please make another film about drugs’: Venice film festival’s feedback wall delivers home truths

The written forum allows members of the public to vent their fury at the movies they’ve seen – and the festival organisers In an industry that is reliant on the fickle vagaries of taste, film festivals exist to establish facts.

The reason why film-makers still go through the rigmarole of ferrying their cast to the red carpets of Venice, Cannes or Sundance is the need for empirical evidence of unambiguous quality: a solid-gold prize, a top score on the critics’ grid, a record-timed standing ovation that will convince every doubter that this is a great film.

Film festivals, in turn, need beautiful A-listers to attract coverage and sponsorship, and hence there is a constant risk that these annual events become gigantic hype machines, in which every turkey is a classic and every half-hearted performance a masterclass.

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