The Toronto International Film Festival begins Thursday, with Hollywood icons Russell Crowe, Sydney Sweeney, and Daniel Craig set to headline highly anticipated world premieres at the landmark 50th edition of North America’s biggest film showcase.
While TIFF may not carry the historic prestige of Cannes or Venice, it outshines rival festivals in size and influence, serving as a powerhouse launchpad for Oscar campaigns and drawing A-list celebrities, critics, and massive public audiences over 11 days of red-carpet glamour.
This anniversary edition will see appearances from Matthew McConaughey, Paul Mescal, Angelina Jolie, and Anya Taylor-Joy, alongside screenings from acclaimed French filmmakers Romain Gavras, Claire Denis, and Arnaud Desplechin, adding a European cinematic touch.
Among the major world premieres, Crowe delivers what organizers describe as a layered and hauntingly magnetic portrayal of Nazi leader Hermann Goering on trial in the historical drama Nuremberg, starring opposite fellow Academy Award winner Rami Malek.
“The unexpected part of this performance is you don’t expect to be disarmed by this person, who you know has done horrible things,” said TIFF director of programming Robyn Citizen. “And then, through the course of the movie, you are.”
Sweeney aims to pivot from her recent jeans ad controversy to Academy Award contender with “Christy,” a gritty, raw biopic of US female boxing pioneer Christy Martin.
“I think this is the role that’s going to make people take notice again of the actor that she is,” predicted Citizen.
In another harrowing true-life tale, McConaughey rescues schoolchildren from California wildfires in the emotionally searing action-thriller “The Lost Bus.”
With an estimated 400,000 annual attendees, the “audience-first” Toronto festival traditionally showcases splashy crowd-pleasers alongside awards fare.
This year marks the return for a third time at TIFF of Netflix’s popular “Knives Out” whodunit franchise, with former 007 actor Craig back investigating the latest murder in “Wake Up Dead Man.”
Josh Brolin plays an unnerving demagogue with a cult following in a film that “tackles current issues in a fun, locked-room, classical-plot way,” says Citizen.
French invasion
Several French auteurs are set to attend this year’s fest.
Matt Dillon appears in Denis’ drama “The Fence,” about a mysterious death on an African construction site, while Desplechin launches love story “Two Pianos” starring Charlotte Rampling.
Alice Winocour pairs with Jolie for Paris fashion drama “Couture.”
Gavras’s celebrity climate-change satire “Sacrifice” stars Taylor-Joy and Chris Evans as an eco-terrorist and a waning movie star, respectively.
Elsewhere, the festival’s comedy selections contain some of its starriest names.
Keanu Reeves plays an incompetent angel in Aziz Ansari’s body-swapping farce “Good Fortune,” while Channing Tatum portrays a real-life fugitive who lives clandestinely inside a Toys R Us store in “Roofman.”
Brendan Fraser plays a lonely actor available for hire at funerals and weddings in Tokyo-set “Rental Family.”
The Bard and the King
Toronto follows hot on the heels of the small but influential US-based Telluride festival, and as usual invites a selection of movies from that intimate event to make a bigger, second splash in the Canadian metropolis.
Among them, Mescal plays a young William Shakespeare in literary adaptation “Hamnet” from Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao — though the focus is squarely on the Bard’s long-suffering wife Agnes, played by a “transcendent” Jessie Buckley, says Citizen.
Director Edward Berger, on a hot run after “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Conclave,” will present Colin Farrell as a down-on-his-luck gambler pursued through the casinos of Macao by Tilda Swinton’s investigator in “Ballad of a Small Player.”
And fresh from Venice, Guillermo del Toro brings his reimagining of “Frankenstein” to Toronto.
Latino reggaeton megastar J Balvin makes his movie debut, playing a 1980s cop chasing cocaine smugglers to the remotest reaches of Nova Scotia in “Little Lorraine.”
“Brat” singer-songwriter Charli xcx has two new films — Gavras’s “Sacrifice,” and Polish arthouse drama “Erupcja.”
And Baz Luhrmann will premiere “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” featuring long-lost footage of The King that the director unearthed while making his 2022 biopic “Elvis.”
TIFF runs from Thursday through to September 14.
