MLast year’s Toronto Film Festival, a key stop on the fall tour for some of the season’s biggest new films, was rather subdued as strikes affected both the films in the program and the stars who were unable to attend.
But this year everything seems to be back to normal: The more commercially oriented festival offers A-list celebrities from Amy Adams to Florence Pugh to Hugh Grant, and Mike Leigh and Pamela Anderson are also back.
In what is set to be a jam-packed year for movies, here are some films to look out for:
Heretic
Whenever we’ve seen Hugh Grant explore his dark side on screen, it’s always been with a smile, as a savage PG villain in Paddington 2 and Dungeons & Dragons, or cheekily refusing to appear on the Oscars red carpet. But in his new horror film Heretic, scripted by the duo behind A Quiet Place, the actor seems to be staying in the shadows for once. He plays a man who happily lets in two door-to-door missionaries hoping to spread the gospel of God. But once they’re inside, they start to worry they might not be able to get out. A creepy trailer suggests he has a pretty terrifying plan for them.
Hard truths
The return of Mike Leigh, whose last film was Peterloo (2018) and whose last contemporary film was Another Year (2010), is arguably the most compelling reason to head to Canada this September. Originally expected at both Cannes and Venice, the writer-director’s latest, Hard Truths, will have its world premiere in Toronto, a commercially promising home for a film that sounds like one of his darkest and toughest yet. He reteams with his leading lady from Lies & Secrets, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who plays a woman overcome with anger at life’s everyday annoyances and whose family struggles to deal with her and the anger she carries within her. Described as tragicomic, the film sounds like the emphasis could be more on the tragedy.
Eden
After his Thai cave rescue drama Thirteen Lives received good reviews but was botched as a streaming release on Amazon (its star Viggo Mortensen later called it a “shameful” strategy), director Ron Howard is hoping for more buzz around his follow-up Eden, another tough survival story. Set in the late 1920s, the fact-based thriller follows an international group of settlers (including Jude Law, Sydney Sweeney, Ana de Armas and Vanessa Kirby) seeking a new, unexplored lifestyle on an uninhabited island in the Galápagos archipelago. But their arrogance and hubris leave them unprepared for the hell that awaits them. Eden premieres without any buyers, but has one of the festival’s star-studded casts and promises to be a sought-after title.
Night slut
It’s been a difficult few years for six-time Oscar nominee Amy Adams, whose last truly great film was 2016’s Arrival (a film she ironically lost for). Her string of disappointments (including Hillbilly Elegy, Dear Evan Hansen, and The Woman in the Window) hopefully ends with Nightbitch, a sharp-tongued black comedy about an exhausted housewife whose anger and frustration turn her into a dog. Based on the acclaimed novel by Rachel Yoder, the film comes from director Marielle Heller, who has shown a knack for telling the stories of nuanced and complex female characters in The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Can You Ever Forgive Me?
The last Republican
As Americans struggle to find common ground ahead of another divisive election, the answer seems simple: Hot Tub Time Machine. The 2010 comedy is a favorite of former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, and in his new documentary The Last Republican, he joins left-wing director Steve Pink in following him through his final year in office as he steps out of line and criticizes Donald Trump. He was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach the former president after the Jan. 6 riots before becoming a leading player in the ensuing investigation.
We live in time
Irish director John Crowley may not have the fondest memories of Toronto (his Brooklyn follow-up The Goldfinch was somewhat unfairly panned when it premiered in 2019), but five years later he returns to present his follow-up, the sweeping romantic drama We Live in Time. This time around he’s less constrained by expectations (it’s an original screenplay, not an adaptation), and he’s also joined by two of our most likable actors (Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield), who play a couple struggling to cope with a grim medical diagnosis and figure out how to spend their remaining time. The trailer promises a grand melodrama of unbridled emotion.
The Bibi File
Produced by Alex Gibney and directed by We Steal Secrets’ Alexis Bloom, The Bibi Files documentary was announced this week as a last-minute addition and promises to be one of the festival’s most talked-about films. It focuses on Benjamin Netanyahu and features previously unseen police interrogation footage from the time the Israeli prime minister was under investigation for bribery, fraud and breach of trust. The footage, which was kept under wraps due to the country’s privacy laws, was leaked to Gibney in 2023 and the filmmaker claims it shows him to be “bribable and corrupt”. The film is being presented as a work in progress, to be distributed by a brave buyer.
The Last Showgirl
Pamela Anderson is aiming for a wrestler-sized comeback, playing a Vegas showgirl facing the end of her career in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, a character drama that looks for a buyer on the festival circuit. It’s Anderson’s first leading role in years and follows the actress’s ongoing attempt to regain control of her narrative, following Pam & Tommy, a Hulu series she openly criticized after it was made without her involvement. It has since been the subject of a Netflix documentary and this is now a big step forward, with a Toronto premiere also starring recent Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis.
Elton John: Never too late
There are a number of musician documentaries at the festival (Andrea Bocelli and Paul Anka are also in the mix), but the most acclaimed film comes from the loudest star of the bunch: Elton John. In “Elton John: Never Too Late,” the singer’s husband David Furnish and September’s RJ Cutler combine previously unseen archive footage and intimate interviews to tell the highs and lows of a career like no other. The film follows John, who rose to egot status earlier this year, on his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour and will include a new original song.
The fire within
Befitting a film about a boxer’s long and arduous journey to training for the Olympics, The Fire Inside also had a difficult road to the screen. Based on the 2015 documentary T-Rex, which tells the story of record-breaking prodigy Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, the film was set to be adapted by Barry Jenkins after the premiere of Moonlight. Its script was then confirmed as the directorial debut of Black Panther cinematographer Rachel Morrison in 2019 and was then titled Flint Strong before production was shut down two days later due to the outbreak of the pandemic. Ice Cube later dropped out after reportedly refusing to get vaccinated, and Universal then assigned the film to Amazon-MGM, where production will resume in 2022. Now, after Paris, where Olympic fever is still in the air, the film will premiere at a festival that also features a boxing thriller (The Cut) and a wrestling drama (Unstoppable). A press release on Christmas Day suggests that the awards show is being considered, with recently nominated and ever-reliable Brian Tyree Henry serving as the coach.
