By Justin Chang | Los Angeles Times
THERE is always something new to see at the Toronto International Film Festival, and always something old worth catching up with. It’s a lesson that should be kept in mind as the ever-competitive fall movie season—of which this now 41-year-old festival has long been an important pillar—gets under way.
Set to open on Thursday with Antoine Fuqua’s starry remake of The Magnificent Seven, this year’s event will unspool a whopping 296 features total. Of those films, 139 are having their world premieres in Toronto, including the much-anticipated likes of Oliver Stone’s biographical drama Snowden, Ewan McGregor’s Philip Roth adaptation American Pastoral and Christopher Guest’s comedy Mascots.
The other 157 films have already screened elsewhere, either in their home countries or at other festivals, such as Cannes, Sundance and Berlin, as well as the still-in-progress Venice and the recently wrapped Telluride.
Several of these titles—among them Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land and Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann—will look to build on their enthusiastic early acclaim. Another one, Nate Parker’s Sundance prizewinner The Birth of a Nation, has become such a lightning rod for controversy that it may well play like an entirely new film in Toronto, or at least a new experience.
And those are just the movies everyone recognizes and talks about. That the festival program contains still more multitudes—that it counts short masterworks, revived classics, below-the-radar genre items and avant-garde mind-blowers among its essential offerings each year—is a fact that easily gets lost amid the deafening reams of Oscar hype that issue forth from this event.
A massive annual confluence of art and industry, as well as a cinematic buffet of tremendous cultural and aesthetic diversity, is invariably reduced to just a handful of heat-seeking titles.
As much as I’m looking forward to some of them, many of which will reach American theaters in the weeks and months to come, Toronto offers no shortage of grand alternatives—the kinds of movies that, whether due to their subtitles or their subtleties, tend not to attract much attention from academy voters. There are many more worth seeking out than the 20 that I’ve chosen to highlight below—a mix of old and new, big and small, Hollywood and beyond—but when a festival boasts nearly 300 films to choose from, a critic must start somewhere.
Here are 10 films that I’m looking forward to seeing in Toronto (in alphabetical order):
- Arrival. The prospect of a brainy science-fiction thriller coupled with the muscular filmmaking prowess of Denis Villeneuve (Sicario, Prisoners) would be a considerable lure even without the presence of Amy Adams in the lead role.
- Austerlitz. A master of the hands-off, long-take documentary, Sergei Loznitsa trains his camera on tourists paying their respects (or not) at the sites of former Nazi death camps. Sounds like people-watching at its most perversely revealing.
- Heal the living. Katell Quillevere’s Love Like Poison and Suzanne have earned her a sterling reputation among the ranks of French up-and-comers. Her latest, a medical drama in which three separate tales are fated to converge, looks like a serious leap forward.
- Into The Inferno. How has Werner Herzog not made a documentary about volcanoes before this? As ever, his eye for untamable natural wonders shows no sign of cratering.
- Jackie. Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy could have the makings of a high-wire triumph or Diana-level disaster. After the wonders he worked with his previous biopic, Neruda (see below), I trust Pablo Larrain knows his business.
- Moonlight. Directed by Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy), this three-part story about the young life of a gay black man from Miami has already drawn raves from Telluride.
- My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea. Sometimes a title’s enough.
- Nocturnal Animals. Tom Ford’s gorgeous A Single Man struck me as the work of not just an exacting stylist but a born filmmaker, not to mention a skillful director of actors. Here’s hoping his long-overdue sophomore feature, another major showcase for Amy Adams, bears that out.
- A United Kingdom. After Loving, another historical dramatization of an interracial marriage in a less forgiving era, this one directed by Amma Asante (Belle) and starring David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike.
- Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey. Terrence Malick’s cosmic rumination on the origins of the universe is being presented in a Cate Blanchett-narrated feature-length version, as well as a Brad Pitt-narrated 45-minute IMAX version. In either form, it could be glorious or insufferable—or both.
Here are 10 films in Toronto that I’ve seen and recommend (in alphabetical order):
- The Age of Shadows. Kim Jee-woon (mildly) tones down the ultraviolence of I Saw the Devil with this thrillingly taut and intricate 1920s spy yarn, which will represent South Korea in the Oscar race for best foreign-language film.
- Aquarius. A career-crowning performance by the great Sonia Braga drives this sophomore work from Kleber Mendonça Filho (Neighboring Sounds), the cinematic poet laureate of Brazilian real estate.
- Elle. Don’t let the reductive “rape comedy” claims scare you away from Paul Verhoeven’s exacting psychological chiller, starring Isabelle Huppert at the top of her game.
- The Handmaiden. Park Chan-wook’s meticulously constructed thriller transplants Sarah Waters’ Victorian-set page-turner Fingersmith to 1930s Korea with delectably twisted results.
- La La Land. Fronted by the incandescent duo of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, Damien Chazelle’s fever dream of a Hollywood musicale is intoxicating in a way that few contemporary movies are.
- Manchester By The Sea. Kenneth Lonergan’s small-town drama is a masterful, symphonic portrait of loss, grief and everyday survival, centered around the finest performance of Casey Affleck’s career.
- Neruda. Pablo Larrain liberates an often moribund genre with possibly the most inventive, freewheeling movie about an artist since Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There.
- Sieranevada. Cristi Puiu’s Bucharest-set family talkathon sports perhaps the festival’s most enigmatic non sequitur of a title, as well as some of its most rigorously humane filmmaking.
- Things To Come. Another superlative showcase for Isabelle Huppert, this tenderly woven drama about a middle-aged professor, wife and mother weathering challenges on all fronts won Mia Hansen-Løve a directing prize in Berlin.
- Toni Erdmann. I may have saved the best for last: Maren Ade’s unclassifiable tour de force brought down the house at Cannes and will continue to do so, I suspect, at Toronto and beyond. n