Toronto International Film Festival (tiff41) runs 8-18 September this year. Here's a preview of the program.
The festival opens with the Magnificent Seven remake starring Chris Pratt with Denzel and Ethan. Other mainstream blockbusters debuting include sci-fi thriller Colossal with Anne Hathaway, and A Monster Calls with Sigourney, Felicity, and Liam helping a troubled young boy. Fresh from Venice comes La La Land, Damien Chazaelle's go at reviving golden-age musicals, with Ryan and Emma (which Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of AVClub loves) and Denis Villeneuves's sci-fi thriller Arrival, also from Venice, which Peter Bradshaw (sadly, not on hand at Toronto) gave 4/5 stars to earlier.
Oliver Stone's Snowden starring Joe Gordon-Levitt premieres as does another biopic, LBJ, starring Woody (Harrelson, not Allen, though the latter might have been a wonderfully surreal twist). Snowden has not impressed; the Metacritic rating is in the 50's. Tom Ford the designer is back with a dark crime drama called Nocturnal Animals. Another is Jim Sheridan's drama set in a metal hospital, The Secret Scripture (Rooney Mara, Vanessa Redgrave star). From the UK comes Amma Asante's A United Kingdom,a drama about Botswanan President Seretse Khama's marriage two white Englishwoman Ruth Williams Khama, starring David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike.
Villeneuve’s Arrival will be a gala, and so will Mira Nair’s Queen Of Katwe starring Lupita Nyong’o, Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom, J.A. Bayona’s A Monster Calls, and Peter Berg’s Deepwater Horizon. Is the latter going to be an ecology-focused film, I wonder, or just another thriller (it stars Mark Wahlberg).
Literary adaptations include Ewan McGregor's directorial debut with an adaptation (long awaited by some) of Philip Roth's American Pastoral - and also Juan Carlos Medina directing an adaptation of Peter Ackroyd's spooky novel The Limehouse Golem, which stars the late Alan Rickman with Bill Nighy. Rachel Weisz's Denial describes the historian Deborah Lipstadt's battle with Holocaust denier David Irving.
There will also be imports from Sundance, Cannes, and the Berlinale, among others. Thus Andrea Arnold's soon-opening American Honey, Kenneth Lonergan's Casey Affleck vehicle Manchester (that one also in the NYFF, like Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, also here), Nate Parker's winner about Nate Turner from Sundance (opening in the US 7 Oct.) Brith of a Nation. There will be a Park Chan-wook adaptation of Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, moving the story's action from Victorian times to Thirties Korea.
The Toronto Midnight Madness sidebar will feature new work from Paul Schrader, an adaptation of Edward Bunker's action thriller novel Dog Eat Dogstarring Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe and Christopher Matthew Cook. And there will be a new film by Trollhunter director André Řvredal, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, starring Emile Hirsch, Brian Cox, and English lass Ophelia Lovibond. There will be a Ben Wheatley Thriller, Free Fire, in the same program.
Less definable or explicable titles include Catfight starring Anne Heche, Sandra Oh, and Alicia Silverstone and Nick Cannoin's Dance Hall, about the Jamaica dance scene.
Documentaries at Toronto will include I Am Not Your Negro, a history of race in modern America based on James Baldwin's unfinished Remember This House, and Jim Jarmusch's film about Iggy Pop's band "The Stooges," Gimme Danger. Gaza Surfing Club is about that unlikely activity in that unlikely location. Mascots is the latest mockumentary from Christopher Guest. There are two other mucial documentaries, one about Justin Timberlake by Jonathan Demme and one about the Rolling Stones by Paul Dugdale.
The whole huge program will close (perhaps again inexplicably) Kelly Fremon Craig's teen flick The Edge Of Seventeen, starring Hailee Steinfeld. Not to be confused with David Moreton's 1998 gay coming-of-age classic Edge of Seventeen starring Chris Stafford, which I doubt it will compete with in lasting value.
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