LONDON (AP) – The 12-day London Film Festival ends Sunday with “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” a small-town tragicomedy starring Frances McDormand and Woody Harrelson that is being tipped as an Oscar contender next year.
Martin McDonagh’s film won best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival and took the Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award last month, an early bell-weather for Hollywood’s coming awards season.
Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Loveless,” a piercing drama about a divorcing couple whose son disappears, won the best picture prize Saturday at the London Film Festival, where filmmaker Paul Greengrass said the industry needs to learn and change after the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
Zvyagintsev’s prize was the director’s second top trophy from the London festival. He received the best picture award in 2014 for “Leviathan,” a tragic satire of small-town corruption that brought the director criticism from Russian officials.
British director Andrea Arnold, president of the judging panel, said “Loveless” turned one family’s story into “a universal tragedy.”