Early September marks the start of the autumn film festival season and the unofficial starting gun of the year-end awards race. Of the Big Four fests, Venice has the glamour, New York has the grit, Telluride has the insider cachet, and Toronto – Toronto has it all. Film industry buyers and international press descend on the five square blocks around downtown’s King and Richmond streets, along with film stars, film directors and a lot of film-loving Canadians: The Toronto International Film Festival is renowned for being among the most public-friendly of fests. This year’s TIFF runs September 5-15, with more than 200 feature films and nearly 50 shorts.
Say again? How does a moviegoer, professional or avocational, navigate such an overstuffed calendar? Triage, baby, triage: You look for directors and actors you recognise, place your bets and then keep an ear to the ground once you’re in town, because there’s always the little movie that’s suddenly a great big deal, and you just have to see it.
This year’s TIFF has on offer new films from Ron Howard (Eden, with Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby escaping civilisation on the Galápagos Islands), Julie Delpy (Meet the Barbarians, a small-town comedy of immigrant integration), Paul Schrader (Oh, Canada, reuniting the film-maker with Richard Gere 44 years after American Gigolo), David Cronenberg (The Shrouds, “the saddest movie [he] has ever made,” oh boy), Mati Diop (Dahomey, a documentary of African art repatriation), Mike Leigh (Hard Truths, with Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and singer-turned-director/star Anderson .Paak (K-Pops).
There will be biopics about Olympic boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (The Fire Inside, directed by Black Panther cinematographer Rachel Morrison) and World War II-era traitor Vidkun Quisling (Quisling: The Final Days), and there will be documentaries about Elton John (Elton John: Never Too Late), Paul Anka (Paul Anka: His Way), author Edna O’Brien (Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story) and former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger (The Last Republican).
And there will be a great many films from women directors, including TIFF 2024 Tribute Award honoree Angelina Jolie (Without Blood) and actress Rebel Wilson, whose behind-the-camera debut, The Deb, will serve as the festival’s closing-night film.
10 Must-See Movies At TIFF 2024
That said, here are the 10 buzziest titles playing in Toronto, soon to come to a theatre near you.
The World Premiere: The Holdovers
The world premieres are often the big news in Toronto, but when a film arrives in town with a Cannes Palme d’Or in tow and a rep as the celebrated director’s best work to date, attention must be paid. Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Red Rocket) spins a tragicomic love story about a New York sex worker and the idealistic son of a Russian oligarch.
The Buzz: Babygirl
Nicole Kidman stars as a steely business executive who embarks on an affair with a much younger intern (Harris Dickinson, the male model of Triangle of Sadness). Don’t tell the executive’s husband (Antonio Banderas) and definitely don’t tell HR. Directed by Halina Reijn in a change of pace from the cheeky horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies.
The Epic: The Brutalist
Actor-turned-maverick-director Brady Corbet (Vox Lux) goes for broke with this 3½-hour epic about a Hungarian architect (Adrian Brody) trying to rebuild his life – and build some buildings – over 30 years of post-World War II America. Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce and Joe Alwyn co-star. Shot in 70mm VistaVision, it arrives in Toronto on the heels of critical adjectives like “incredible,” “very ambitious” and “towering.”
The Thriller: The Cloud
An unnerving cyberthriller from the gifted Japanese genre-master Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse), about an online entrepreneur (Masaki Suda), whose life comes apart when he becomes the target of mysterious cyberattacks. As if you weren’t already paranoid about backing up your hard drive into the cloud.
The Comeback: The Last Dance
Le Cinema du Coppola, Part 1. from Gia Coppola (granddaughter of Francis), a drama about an ageing Las Vegas dancer trying to make sense of her life when she’s let go after a 30-year career. Jamie Lee Curtis and Dave Bautista co-star, but the hype is that this is a major comeback for the movie’s star, longtime tabloid fixture Pamela Anderson. Like, Oscar-worthy comeback? Stranger things have happened.
The Surreal: Nightbitch
Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel of a stressed-out new mother who unleashes her inner dog – no, really – becomes a work of dark-magical realism with Amy Adams by all accounts scarifyingly feral in the title role. The way-talented director Marielle Heller made the Mr. Rogers biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) but also the complex heroines of The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018).
The Bold: Queer
What, you expected something demure from director Luca Guadagnino? He gave us the three-way of this year’s Challengers and had Timothée Chalamet do unspeakable things to a peach in Call Me by Your Name (2017). Now he reimagines the novel by Beat writer William S. Burroughs (written in the early 1950s but not published until 1985) into a surreal vehicle for Daniel Craig as a gay expatriate in Mexico.
The Auteur: The Room Next Door
Director Pedro Almodóvar is in the midst of a remarkable late-career resurgence, and his first-ever English-language feature brings Tilda Swinton (who starred in Almodóvar’s brilliant 2020 short, The Human Voice) together with Julianne Moore as two women taking the long view of their lives, their choices and their mortality.
The Grandiose: Megalopolis
Le Cinema du Coppola, Part 2. Either the actual comeback story of the season or a car crash of epic proportions, Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making, $120 million labour of self-love divided Cannes into love-it/hate-it/what-the-hell? camps, and the gawkers will be lining up in Toronto to toss bouquets or brickbats. It’s the all-star tale of the fictional city of New Rome, complete with a Trump-y mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) and an architect hero (Adam Driver) who can stop time.
The Nostalgia Trip: Saturday Night
Can you imagine what it must have been like in the 90 minutes before the very first Saturday Night Live went on the air on October 11, 1975? Now you don’t have to: Jason Reitman (son of Ghostbusters director Ivan) takes us back to the real-time backstage chaos of Lorne Michaels’ (Gabriel LaBelle) insane gamble. Fittingly, a cast of unknowns play the Not Ready for Prime Time Players.
