Venice Film Festival Begins

As far as I'm concerned, the Academy Awards season officially starts this week with the beginning of the Venice Film Festival...and already we're off to a rocky start. Specifically, there's bad news on two films I had looked forward to this fall. The reviews say Ang Lee's latest, Lust, Caution, is irritatingly overlong, while Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth supposedly gets lost in its own Pinter-esque circularity. I'd love to say I didn't see these criticisms coming, but both projects kind of reeked of ponderousness. Still, the only way to know for sure is to see them myself...