King Street was thronged. Rush lines stretched blocks. Screenings were packed. But something nevertheless felt muted and anxious in Toronto this year. The red carpets were lonesome spectacles without movie stars to walk them, and who wants to go to a party if Kate Winslet or Michael Fassbender or Jodie Comer or Paul Dano—all with big movies at TIFF—aren’t there to rub shoulders with?
Or would this be the festival for purists? Sans celebrity distractions, might one appreciate the films on their own terms? Sure—but more questions still loom. Will studios buy them? And will there be any films next year? It was hard to know what to think about the strikes and rancor as TIFF churned its earnest way on, taking no sides, like a child of divorced parents. The only sensible strategy, amid it all, was to take in as many movies as one could. (The festival ends on Sunday.)
Below are the movies that grabbed me and gave me a little rush of optimism that impasses will be broken and creativity and commerce will gloriously reconcile. I’ve ordered them by release date, though some are still seeking distribution as I write. I expect—hope!—that they will be coming to a movie theater or streaming platform soon.
Dumb Money
This triumphantly unsubtle, highly watchable, and frequently hilarious film about the recent Reddit-fueled GameStop stock run-up takes one easy swing after another and connects again and again and again. Directed by Craig Gillespie and starring Paul Dano, Shailene Woodley, Pete Davidson, and many more in a big ensemble cast, Dumb Money is a case of Hollywood repackaging fist-pumping American populism and selling it back to us. Best not to overthink the simple pleasures here—among them dead-perfect needle drops and a jackrabbit pace. There is no doubt who we are supposed to root for and how we’re supposed to feel (Boo, hedge funds! Yay, meme-stock speculators!), but Dano is perfectly cast as the basement investor/everyman/folk hero Keith Gill, a.k.a. Roaring Kitty, and Dumb Money seems destined to be a minor hit. A historical document of our slightly curdled economic moment.
Opens in New York and LA on September 15 and nationwide on September 22
Anatomy of a Fall
I caught a screening of this Cannes darling (it won the Palme d’Or) a bit before Toronto, but I’m including it here because it played at the festival and is, so far, my runaway favorite film of the year, a fascinating and extremely human courtroom drama that has already been short-listed for an international-film Oscar by France. In an isolated alpine chalet, the husband of a novelist is found dead from a fall. His wife, played magnificently by Sandra Hüller (also in The Zone of Interest, see below), is immediately under suspicion, claiming to have been asleep when it happened. What transpires is a public accounting of the intimacies of a marriage and an exposure of fault lines from jealousy and loss. Riveting.
Opens in theaters October 13
Shayda
This powerful first film from Iranian-born Australian director Noora Niasari, coproduced by Cate Blanchett, had its debut at Sundance way back in January but played at Toronto and deserves to be seen for its central performance by the immensely talented Iranian actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who carried last year’s serial-killer drama Holy Spider. Here she’s the titular Iranian immigrant mother seeking refuge at a women’s shelter in Melbourne amidst a custody battle over her (adorable) six-year-old daughter. Filmed with striking realism, it’s a quietly engrossing drama that never tips into sentimentality or easy moralizing and builds tension as the abusive and menacing father, Hossein, fights to maintain his grip on wife and daughter.
Opens in theaters December 1
The Zone of Interest
Meticulous and unsettling, Jonathan Glazer’s loose adaptation of a 2014 Martin Amis novel is set at Auschwitz but keeps its rigorous attention on the striving, middle-class German family that runs the place. There is not one scene of violence, but horror shadows every frame as we follow the family’s domestic dramas and the all-too-human professional anxieties of Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller). The camp looms in the background, its haunting sounds constantly overheard, forcing us to think about accommodation, disassociation, and repression. These are themes with contemporary resonances, to be sure, but the movie is so subtle and carefully composed that it harnesses your empathy and sticks in your head like a provocation. A must-see.
Opens in theaters December 8
The End We Start From
Quiet, tense, and beautiful to look at, this dystopian drama, a first feature from the UK director Mahalia Belo, had its global premiere in Toronto. It’s an adaptation of the excellent 2017 novel by Megan Hunter (by the ace screenwriter and playwright Alice Birch) and tells the dreamlike story of catastrophic floods hitting London just as our unnamed protagonist gives birth to her son. Jodie Comer plays the new mother—in a wonderfully committed, highly physical role that will have people talking. A survival drama ensues, one resonantly focused on women and mothers and their particular forms of determination. Comer is radiant and resilient and keeps the film from turning bleak as she travels through a reeling, rain-soaked England. Katherine Waterston and Benedict Cumberbatch are also excellent in supporting roles.
Opens in theaters December 8
The Promised Land
The most end-to-end entertaining movie I saw at the festival is this Danish 18th-century epic starring Mads Mikkelsen as an army captain who is determined to make a life for himself in Denmark’s barren Jutland heath. Arrayed against him are Denmark’s idle aristocrats and land barons who are threatened by his farming ingenuity and turn to violence to stop him. One is particularly nasty: Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), as cruel a fop as any since Joffrey Baratheon on Game of Thrones. Their duel turns the movie into a kind of Nordic western with old-fashioned pleasures: romance; villainy; adventure; heroism; a bloody, gripping climax; and loads of gorgeous widescreen vistas along the way.
The film has distribution, but a US release date is still TBD.
How to Have Sex
Consider the title of this discomfiting first film from Molly Manning Walker a bit of a misdirect. Set at a cheap-and-cheerful Greek holiday hub overrun by hard-partying British young people, How to Have Sex follows three female teenage friends who charge off the plane, libidinous and vulnerable, and is most definitely not a vision of how to do anything, least of all come of age. The Brits sure can drink, and Tara—played by Mia McKenna-Bruce, who carries this movie brilliantly on her suntanned shoulders—is game for (almost) all of it, including flirting with the trio of half-dressed, dodgy boys in the hotel room next door. What happens next will not surprise you but is handled with authenticity and care. Youthful excess has a damaging power in this mesmerizing movie, especially as it relates to the complexities of consent and desire.
Coming to theaters in 2024
Wicked Little Letters
A somewhat silly, highly British, and pleasurably winning true-story period comedy about two neighbors in 1950s Littlehampton, England, who are uncertain friends and then enemies after filthy, profane letters begin arriving mysteriously in mailboxes (which the film delights in having our uptight characters read aloud). Olivia Colman is the religious, upstanding neighbor Edith—in perfect comic mode—and Jessie Buckley is the foul-mouthed Irish single mother, Rose, upon whom suspicion falls. There is something slightly anachronistic about the rousing feminist themes here, but the film is great fun and the Toronto audience was wildly cheering at the end, which crescendoes with hilarious profanities hurled by both bravura actresses.
Seeking US distribution
The Teacher
A pleasure of Toronto this year were the bounty of international films with vivid depictions of place—chief among them this absorbing first feature by British-Palestinian director Farah Nabulsi, which was shot in the West Bank and tells the story of a Palestinian teacher who gets caught up in a violent dispute with Israeli settlers. The story has contrivances and moments of melodrama, but the sensational, quietly commanding performance by the 46-year-old Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri was a standout at the festival. He carries the film, along with an appealing supporting performance by Imogen Poots, and I found myself moved and gripped by the film’s exploration of Palestinian anger and grief.
Seeking US distribution
Lee
To read all about the making of this satisfying biographical WW II–set drama of the photographer Lee Miller, please see our October cover profile of its star, Kate Winslet. Lee debuted at Toronto with immediate buzz growing for Winslet’s swashbuckling turn as Miller, who was the first photojournalist to document the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald (images published in Vogue) and who was photographed, famously, in Hitler’s bathtub. Winslet never disappoints, and the film’s wartime sequences, which also feature a convincing Andy Samberg in an entirely dramatic role, have a haunting power.
Seeking US distribution
