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The festival has already reached the halfway point and the critics have been really under whelmed with the line up this year.

After the screening of the Coen’s Brothers film Burn After Reading last Wednesday to huge applause from the public and grumbling from the critics. Lethargy has kicked in among the festival folk.

There has been no wind of a masterpiece in any of the films except for the Japanese animated feature Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea by Master Hayao Miyazaki. It is a magical retelling of the The Little Mermaid film.

Nothing has really shined other than this animated feature which has taken the best part of the festival by far.

Yes the performances of Kim Basinger and Charlize Theron in Guillermo Arraiga’s The Burning Plain impressed the critics. But the film on the whole was a far cry from the scriptwriters work with Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu. Another film by Marco Bechis Birdwatchers set amid a tribe of Amazon natives and biofuels also was received politely.

The two Italian films A Perfect Day and Giovanna’s Father failed to grab critical support. Several other films that picked up really strong failed to show any signs of greatness by the end like the Takeshi Kitano’s Achilles and the Tortoise and Christian Petzold’s Jerichow.

Smaller films has actually caught the eye of many of the critics this year with one of the reasons being the lack of American titles because of the recent writers strike that flat lined many interesting projects.

Claire Denis starred in the delicate Father-daughter film called 35 Shots of Rum continues to be the most talked about film of this year. The Marco Pontecorvo’s unsentimental clown tale Pa Ra Da has also been garnering some significant buzz.

Two other films also won good praise were the flirty Romanian fable Hooked and the heartfelt Czech film about sexual identity called The Country Teacher directed by Bodhan Slam.

Another film that has been growing on the critics with each screening is the Israeli documentary Z32. Yeo Joon Han’s Sell Out! a low budget Malaysian film that has also been popular among the critics in the last couple of days. Uberto Pasolini’s who first feature Machan deals with a fake Sri Lankan handball team earned a long applause in the Venice Days Section.

So even though there hasn’t been any big getting any praises the small films are surely going to take centre stage this year.

Click the thumbnails to see the new hi resolution pictures.