Autumn's Awards Season Opens, and Italian Cinema Watches From the Wings

The Guardian's culture desk this week reviewed three films that will define the autumn awards conversation: a lavishly shot adaptation of John Steinbeck's East of Eden starring Florence Pugh, Eleanor Mortimer's deep-sea documentary How Deep Is Your Love, and Alejandro González Iñárritu's eco-satire Digger, with Tom Cruise as an oil tycoon whose drilling triggers a global crisis. Each review, published between 29 September and 1 October, signals the shape of the season ahead.

For the Cultura desk, the question is not which of these films is best but what the foreign press's attention reveals about the terms on which cinema now travels. The Guardian's reviewer found the Steinbeck adaptation 'brilliant, compelling TV' but lacking 'the heft to be a full examination of human nature'; the Iñárritu film was called 'exasperatingly laborious, self-congratulatory'; the Mortimer documentary was praised for its 'whimsical' approach to creatures threatened by sea mining.

The Venice Biennale's cinema section has long been the place where the international press first encounters the films that will dominate the months that follow. The three titles reviewed by the Guardian this week did not premiere in Venice — the Steinbeck adaptation is a television production, the Mortimer documentary showed at a different festival, and Iñárritu's film has followed its own path — but their reception illustrates the vocabulary the foreign press uses when it assesses ambitious work. 'Lavishly shot', 'whimsical', 'self-congratulatory': these are the terms that travel.

Italian filmmakers and producers read these reviews with particular attention, because the foreign press's judgment shapes which Italian films find international distribution and which remain at home. The Guardian's review of East of Eden notes that the adaptation 'lacks the heft to be a full examination of human nature' — a criticism that speaks to the difficulty any national cinema faces when it attempts the large-canvas social novel. Italian cinema has its own tradition of the family saga, from the postwar neorealists to the present, and the question of whether that tradition still commands the foreign press's attention is one the festival circuit asks each year.

What the wire shows is that the autumn's most-discussed releases are, this year, largely American and British productions. The Guardian's reviewers approached them with the confidence of a press that knows its readers will encounter these films. For Italian cinema, the consequence is not a verdict but a reminder: the foreign press's attention is a scarce resource, and the films that receive it are those that arrive with a clear argument about why they matter. The Biennale's cinema section, which convenes next year, will be the next occasion on which Italian work makes that case.

The three reviews also suggest a shift in what the foreign press rewards. Mortimer's documentary, set 5,000 metres down in the Pacific, was received as an eco-documentary with a light touch; Iñárritu's film, by contrast, was faulted for labouring its ecological message. The distinction matters for any cinema that wants to address climate and social crisis without losing its audience. Italian filmmakers working in documentary and fiction alike have made the same calculation in recent seasons, and the Guardian's reviews offer a useful measure of where the line currently falls.