Hello! I hope you have had a productive week. Most of us have, of course, spent the past few days tying up loose ends, settling our affairs, and sending warm wishes to loved ones before AppleTV+’s pickle ball movie The Dink is released on Friday. Surely life as we know it will change forever once we’ve laid eyes on The Dink. 

But that’s okay! As we approach the dog days of summer, and a sort of seasonal affective disorder takes hold (surely I am not the only person who experiences summertime blues?), it is nice to look forward to the future, to what more and different awaits us in the time to come. 

Which is why the annual late-July announcements of fall festival lineups is always so well timed. How exciting it is to look forward to the end of August and the first tingling, back-to-school days of September. I love the event of the announcements; it’s a bit like opening Christmas presents. Sadly, though, this year we got a lot of socks. 

Yeah, the Venice and Toronto lineups have been released and they are a little underwhelming. That’s less surprising when it comes to Toronto; that festival has been in a slump for years, losing its splashy gala premieres to Venice and Telluride and a growing studio aversion to film festivals. But Venice typically gets a pretty starry array of movies. Not quite so much this year, perhaps because last year’s starry array was a string of duds (Jay Kelly, A House of Dynamite, The Smashing Machine, After the Hunt). That seems to have scared a lot of distributors off. Or there just weren’t enough big, festival-friendly movies to pick from. 

That said, there are still some things to look forward to, as we lurch out of the lands of IP blockbusters and into the more serious realm of autumn. Let’s take a look.