Venice Critics and Audience Grids – Which Films Scored Highest?

Unlike the Cannes Film Festival where only critics get their grids, Venice allocates both critic and audience grids to assess how the public and the experts are reacting to the films in competition. This year, 3 different grids published their results on a daily basis: an Italian critics grid, a Venice audience critics grid (a panel of audience members selected by the festival) and an international critics grid, featuring critics from the US, UK, France and more.

This year, winner of the Italian critics and public grid is the same film – however, the international critics had a different take on what is the best of the fest.

Let’s go straight to the results:

International Critics Grid

Featuring critics from Hollywood Reporter, Playlist, ABC, Le Monde, Indiewire and more.

1st place – The Shape of Water (Overall score: 4.3/5)

2nd place – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Overall score: 4.0)

3rd place – Ex Libris – The New York Public Library (Overall score: 3.95)

Italian Critics Grid

Featuring critics from Il Figolio, Republica, Il Gironale and more.

1st place –Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Overall score – 4.44)

2nd place – The Shape of Water (Overall score: 4.05)

3rd place –Ex Libris – The New York Public Library (Overall score – 4.0)

Audience Grid

Top scoring films:

1st place –Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Overall score – 4.11)

2nd place – The Shape of Water (Overall score – 3.92)

3rd place – Suburbicon (Overall score: 3.88)

In all three grids, only two films are featured in the top 3 spots:

The Shape of Water

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

These 2 films were the most consistent performers across both local and international critic as well as audience members. Other American films, including mother!, Suburbicon and Downsizing, did not do consistently well on all 3 grids.

[author title=”Mina Takla” image=”http://i63.tinypic.com/33f730i.jpg”]Mina Takla is a foreign correspondent for AwardsWatch and the co-founder of The Syndicate, an online news agency that offers original content services to several film brands including Empire Magazine’s Middle East edition and the Dubai Film Festival. Takla has attended, covered and written from over 10 film festivals online including the Dubai International Film Festival, Abu Dhabi Film Festival, Cannes, Venice and Annecy Film Festivals. He been following the Oscar race since 2000 with accurate, office-pool winning predictions year after year. He writes monthly in Empire Arabia, the Arabic version of the world’s top cinema magazine and conducts press junkets with Hollywood stars in the UK and the US. He holds a Master’s degree in Strategic Marketing from Australia’s Wollongong University and is currently based in Dubai, UAE.[/author]