The Venice and Telluride Film Festivals have already thrown up a small group of early contenders for this year's Oscars.
Black Mass, the long-awaited crime bio about ruthless Boston mobster Whitey Bolger, has won rave reviews at Venice while Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle's fiercely objective account of the life of the computer pioneer, has been devouring the kudos at Telluride. "Michael Fassbender owns the screen for the 125 minutes running time," was how Variety summed up its review of the Jobs movie.
A third contender is Tom Hooper's The Danish Girl, the period transgender drama which is reported to have received a ten-minute standing ovation at Venice on Friday night. All three will be released into what the trade papers call "the awards corridor" between now and Christmas along with Todd Haynes' Carol which became a contender in a positive showing at the Cannes Festival in May.
Carol, a lesbian-love story based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price Of Salt, will receive a gala premiere at the London Film Festival next month - before going on general release on 27th November.
Based on a book of the same name by a couple of Boston Globe reporters, Black Mass has passed through the hands of several directors (including Jim Sheridan and Barry Levinson) on its way to the screen and it nearly fell apart completely in 2013 when star Johnny Depp quit over a reported salary dispute.
But the project seems to have found the right steward in Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace director Scott Cooper and he helped to woo Depp back on board. The actor undergoes one of those famous Oscar transformations for Black Mass - using latex, contact lenses and receding blonde hair to change his appearance - and, according to Variety, he is fully restored to the daring, inspired performer of his early Tim Burton collaborations. After Venice and Telluride, Black Mass goes on to Toronto which runs from Thursday 10th Sept to 20th.
After The Social Network proved the dramatic potential of the computer industry, the same team was assembled for a look at the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. But David Fincher ultimately dropped out, along with backers Sony, and Aaron Sorkin's script fell into the lap of Danny Boyle, with Michael Fassbender taking over from Christian Bale in the lead. The result, by all accounts, works admirably, especially in the performances of Fassbender and Kate Winslet as his harried marketing executive Joanna Hoffman and the script, which, according to the Deadline Hollywood website, makes Steve Jobs feel like an action movie driven solely by words.
The Danish Girl is another biopic - starring last year’s Best Actor winner Eddie Redmayne (The Theory Of Everything) - as the title character, artist Einar Wegener, one of history's first recipients of gender reassignment surgery. And there will be further bios, and movies based on real life stories, between now and awards time, including I Saw the Light in which another prominent English actor Tom Hiddleston plays influential country and western musician Hank Williams Snr.
