It was a mostly underwhelming edition of the Toronto film festival last year, aiming for a big comeback after the strikes affected the year prior. Disappointments such as Nightbitch, Eden, The Last Showgirl, Nutcrackers, The Return and The Cut were only mildly offset by the surprising appearance of Mike Leigh with his effectively gruelling drama Hard Truths.
But after spottier Venice and Telluride festivals than usual, worryingly light on slam-dunks, all eyes return to this year’s Toronto, hopeful that it might correct course for the season.
The Lost Bus
With Venice and Telluride snapping up most of the bigger hitters, Toronto has felt a little light on Oscar contenders in recent years (since 2017, only six Toronto world premieres have been nominated for best picture compared with 15 from Venice). But if bets were to be placed based on an initial glance at this year’s crop, The Lost Bus would seem like the safest pick. It’s the new film from Paul Greengrass, returning to the anxious immediacy of his fact-based retellings, having previously taken us back to the horror of September 11 (United 93), the Maersk Alabama hijacking (Captain Phillips) and the 2011 Norway terrorist attacks (22 July).
In The Lost Bus, he’s working with producer and recent Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis to tell the harrowing story of the 2018 Camp fire, the deadliest in California’s history. Another Oscar winner, Matthew McConaughey, stars as a bus driver trying to save some schoolchildren and their teacher, played by Oscar nominee America Ferrera. Given the ongoing wildfires that have affected California, including many of those within the entertainment industry, it sounds like a nail-biter that will also strike an emotional chord for many.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
It wasn’t as if Rian Johnson’s Knives Out came without fanfare (this was, after all, the director of 2012’s superb sci-fi thriller Looper), but no one expected it to create quite such a stir at 2019’s Toronto film festival. It was the kind of crowd-pleasing premiere film-makers dream about (the audience was as locked in and audibly enthused as I’ve ever heard at a festival) and restarted the whodunnit genre as we now know it. The Netflixication of the series (in pandemic times, the streamer paid $450m for two sequels) led to Glass Onion, which also premiered to Toronto in 2022. It was fun but notably inferior and now, with another three-year gap, the knives are out once again.
Daniel Craig is of course returning, and this time his suspects include Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Josh Brolin, Cailee Spaeny and Jeremy Renner, whose fictional hot sauce made a cameo in the last film. Little is known, as one would expect, but this time there’s a religious component and the mystery appears to unfold in England.
Christy
This Toronto promises a transformative role for Sydney Sweeney, a young actor who might be in need of some transformative PR after a rough few months. She became instant thinkpiece fodder when she appeared in a dubious American Eagle campaign about “good jeans” before her two summer indies died at the box office. She’s surely praying that Christy, an old-fashioned awards play, will redirect the narrative as she takes on the role of groundbreaking boxer Christy Martin. The film tells of her rise to fame in the 1980s as well as her destructive marriage to a man who tries to kill her.
It’s the latest from Australian director David Michôd, who broke out with electrifying crime drama Animal Kingdom but has struggled to make an impact since, with starry films such as War Machine and The King failing to land. Both Sweeney and Michôd (as well as those aiming to sell the film at the festival) will be hoping this one is a real contender.
Good Fortune
Aziz Ansari’s rise from standup to Parks and Recreation supporting player to Master of None creator took a pause after he was the focus of a questionable #MeToo exposé and then another when a film he was directing was shut down after star Bill Murray was accused of sexual misconduct. Bad luck followed as the Hollywood strikes delayed the start date of a film he was scheduled to write, direct and star in. But once the industry restarted, he finally got to the finish line with Good Fortune, a film he hopes will help revive the theatrical comedy experience. It’s a throwback to the kind of high-concept genre hybrid that would regularly hit big in the 1980s, focusing on a guardian angel who makes two men swap lives, one rich and one poor. The angel is played by Keanu Reeves (this will be his first non-franchise movie since 2019) with Seth Rogen, Keke Palmer and Sandra Oh also starring. This one has scored a plum Saturday night premiere (a slot previously given to The Fabelmans) so expectations are high.
The Fence
It’s unusual for a lot of esteemed European directors to premiere their films at Toronto, often preferring a Cannes or Venice debut, but Claire Denis bucked the trend back in 2018 with the gonzo, Robert Pattinson-led High Life, her first English-language movie. It was warmly received, and with her last film, romantic thriller Stars at Noon, opening to a cooler reception at Cannes, she’s now heading back to Toronto with her follow-up, The Fence. It’s a tense drama about a British-owned construction site in Africa and the fallout from an accident that kills a local worker. Matt Dillon, who is on a bit of an auteur run after working with Wes Anderson and Lars von Trier, stars with How to Have Sex breakout Mia McKenna-Bruce and Tom Blyth.
Roofman
Toronto is by far the most commercial-leaning of the upper-tier festivals and aside from the Oscar contenders, it’s been host to a long line of broad crowd-pleasers. Films such as Hustlers, Knives Out, Heretic, Halloween and Widows were all met with enthusiasm from both critics and general audiences and kicked off press cycles with added word-of-mouth buzz. This year, it feels like Roofman might do the same; it’s a film that looks like the kind of sturdy star-led comedy drama that would have been released back in the 2000s. It’s fitting that it’s also led by two stars of that era – Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst – heading up the true story of a runaway robber hiding in a Toys R Us who falls for one of the employees.
It’s directed by Derek Cianfrance, who broke out with devastating divorce drama Blue Valentine but hasn’t really found his footing since (with messy crime drama The Place Beyond the Pines and creaky melodrama The Light Between Oceans). Here’s hoping this one lands.
The Christophers
It’s never easy to predict what Steven Soderbergh will do next; he’s a chameleonic director whose repeated threats of retirement have thankfully proved empty. In the last few years, he’s given us a paranoid tech thriller, an unconventional haunted house story, a sexy London-set spy caper, a 50s-set crime drama and a semi-improvised Meryl Streep comedy, all either excellent or at the very least interesting. It tracks then that his next would be another left turn, this time all the way back to England with twisty black comedy The Christophers. He’s assembled a crackerjack cast – Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel and Baby Reindeer breakout Jessica Gunning – for a film about an artist who has to secretly complete the unfinished work of an ageing great for his greedy estranged children. It’s a rare lead role for Coel since her thrilling TV triumph I May Destroy You and the prospect of her paired with McKellen is something to get excited about.
The Choral
Last year, Ralph Fiennes charmed his way through awards season with his Conclave campaigning, alternating between serious and silly, rather like the film he was nominated for. There’s a chance he could be in the running again, leading another potential crowd-pleaser about a group of men trying to navigate difficult circumstances.
In The Choral, he plays a choir director trying to assemble singers in 1916 Yorkshire as the first world war rages on. It’s a reunion for director Nicholas Hytner and writer Alan Bennett, who came together for 2015’s middling Maggie Smith drama The Lady in the Van, but their work elsewhere still provides hope that this one could sing. It could be the kind of rousing, heartstring-yanking period piece that easily wins a classic Toronto afternoon audience over.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
Baz Luhrmann’s longtime passion for Elvis Presley has already brought us a maximalist biopic that focused on a more creatively and commercially prohibitive period for the singer. Elvis (2022) was a divisive big swing for critics but a hit with both audiences and the academy, and during production, Luhrmann announced a second Presley project.
Three years later and he’s bringing EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert to Toronto, his first world premiere at the festival (he’s tended to prefer Cannes for previous films). It’s the result of recently discovered archival footage, showing Presley during his Vegas residency in the 1970s. Unlike Elvis, this promises to show the singer unbound by limitations, the film flipping between excitable rehearsal footage, his electric performances and the thrilled celebrity audience.
Couture
After her big Marvel outing Eternals was a big flop and her much-buzzed Oscar play Maria was a bit of a buzzkill, Angelina Jolie is refusing to let any bad press slow down her comeback to acting. The Oscar winner is currently filming comedy Anxious People with Aimee Lou Wood and Jason Segel and will be attracting one of the biggest crowds this week when she premieres her new film Couture, a Paris-based drama. She’ll be playing a fashion-hating US film director, landing for fashion week, who finds her life intersecting with other international women involved with a show. It’s the latest film from Alice Winocour, who last came to Toronto with her sensitively drawn drama Paris Memories about a woman processing her experience of a terrorist attack. It’s become unusual to see Jolie play an everyday person without horns, superpowers or celebrity, so Couture could maybe act as the real start to her A-list return.