The Toronto International Film Festival kicked off this year somewhat in the shadow of its more glamorous sibling in Venice, and its more intimate, better-heeled cousin in Telluride. But the singular appeal of this big, bustling festival in this big, bustling Canadian city (which ends on Sunday) is its enthusiasm. The streets are thronged, the screenings packed. The vibes might be best described as “normie movie-lover bonhomie.” People are simply everywhere, which feels like a welcome antidote to past years when TIFF has been derailed by COVID and Hollywood strikes. This time around, there were stars in abundance—from Jude Law and Mikey Madison to Cate Blanchett and Kaia Gerber—and fans practically standing on each others’ shoulders for a glimpse of them. Here are nine movies that caught my eye, ordered by release date. (Some are still seeking distribution.) Add them to your list!
Bring Them Down
The ascent of the hyper-versatile actor Christopher Abbott continues apace with Bring Them Down, a mordantly tense, near-nihilist Irish revenge drama in which Abbott transforms into a bearded, burdened rural Irish sheep farmer named Michael who speaks fluent Gaelic and cares for his sick father (Colm Meaney), a shipwrecked patriarch living out his days in the family’s filthy kitchen. A dispute over two dead rams pits Michael against his striving neighbors Gary (Paul Ready) and his son Jack (Barry Keoghan, incandescent as always). This is an effective thriller—the tension ratchets scene by scene—but a strangely moral one too, as Michael must decide how to settle the accounts and how much blood to spill. The dark irony of the story (the film is director Christopher Andrews’s feature debut) recalls the early plays of Martin McDonagh. Not an uplifting movie but a potent one, with Abbott a highly watchable figure of ambivalence, longing, and regret.
Opens on September 20.
Anora
Cannes’s Palme d’Or winner played to adoring crowds here at Toronto, and what a rollicking, electric delight Sean Baker’s new movie is. It’s the story of a New York stripper and sex worker, Ani (Mikey Madison, in what is surely the most exciting performance of the year), who falls for an oligarch’s playboy son, Ivan (Mark Eidelstein). Ivan is sweet and callow and irredeemably in the moment, and he has some powerful family interests that don’t want Ani in his life. Baker, who is the filmmaker behind Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, has not made a bad movie in his career, nor has he made one as purely enjoyable as this. My only reservation was its length—the movie stretches needlessly beyond two hours—but it lands in an unexpectedly intimate moment that takes your breath away.
Opens on October 18.
All We Imagine as Light
This patient and absorbingly beautiful Indian film, about the lives of two women—roommates and coworkers at a local hospital in contemporary Mumbai—won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and it’s a marvel of friendship and lovelorn struggle. The feature debut of Payal Kapadia, Light has a clarity about working-class existence that draws you in. Longing is its subject—Prabha s husband is far away in Germany, and her roommate, Anu, is swept up in a love affair with a young Muslim man. The film has the grace to spirit its characters away to a seaside village in its latter half where a dream logic descends and sadness and fantasy mix. Gorgeous.
Opens on November 15.
Babygirl
Is it surprising that the two of the best and most crowd-pleasing movies I saw at this festival (Anora and this one) were about sex? Perhaps reports of the death of the movie sex scene are premature. Babygirl is the supremely entertaining new film from Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn, and it has already attracted buzz for Nicole Kidman’s all-out brave performance as Romy Mathis, a tech CEO who descends into an S&M-ish affair with Samuel, an intern at the company she runs. (He’s played with sure-footed cockiness by Harris Dickinson.) The movie is about kink and shame and lust and helplessness, and also about marriage, family, and middle age. The sex scenes are so real that you watch them through your hands, but they hit hard, and Kidman’s performance is one of the year’s best.
Opens on December 25.
Santosh
Like festival gem All We Imagine as Light, the compelling police drama Santosh offers a closely observed view of life for women in contemporary India. Here we are inside a rural police force that our heroine, Santosh (Shahana Gaswami), a widow in desperate need of income, joins as a lady constable. She is tasked with an investigation of the brutal rape and murder of a young girl, and taken under the wing of an older female inspector (Sunita Rajwar)—who draws her into brutality and corruption. This one is a fascinating procedural: understated, human, and tense.
Opens in late 2024.
The Girl with the Needle
This feature by filmmaker Magnus von Horn is a little hard to casually recommend—a historical drama about a serial killer of infant newborns in gritty Copenhagen—and yet I found it darkly gorgeous and brave. It unfolds slowly, telling the story of a factory worker, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), who, believing her husband is dead or missing in the fields of WWI, has an ill-advised affair and finds herself pregnant and destitute. When she tries, horrifically, to abort the baby, she is saved and taken in by Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who specializes in finding infants adoptive parents. The second half of this film is uncompromising and horrific without ever being gruesome, and the black and white cinematography is unfailingly beautiful. It’s a movie about gothic monstrousness but it ends with unexpected grace. A bleak, uncompromising marvel.
Opens in December 2024.
The Quiet Ones
What if Michael Mann made a Danish heist film? That was my extremely satisfied reaction to this stylish crime movie, based on a real caper that took place in 2008 during the height of Europe’s financial crisis. Our hero is Kasper (Gustav Giese), an extravagantly tattooed boxer and young father, who falls in with a gang of thieves to pull off a major score, targeting millions. Nothing new here, but the movie, the second feature from filmmaker Frederik Louis Hviid, is well-paced, tense, lovely to look at, and threaded through with a mournful realism.
Opens in early 2025.
Happyend
A Japanese near-future story of political repression and teenage rebellion, Happyend is set at a high school where the students chafe under high-tech surveillance put in place by their principal and his corporate allies. Beyond the school, the Japanese government is increasingly gripped by xenophobia and police repression—and the stress of living under all of this runs fissures through a gang of teenage friends, bonded by their love of electronic music. It’s fascinating to see such age-old material—namely, teenage angst and revolt—set against the conformity of Japanese traditions and treated with cool understatement by filmmaker Neo Sora, making his feature debut. There are no storytelling fireworks, only a mounting sense of ominousness and dread, but the stakes for the young strivers at the movie’s heart are never less than sky-high.
Opens in 2025.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
Alexandra Fuller’s celebrated 2001 memoir about growing up as a white child in Rhodesia as it gained its independence and became Zimbabwe gets a finely detailed, hyper-focused adaptation in Embeth Davidtz’s debut directing effort. (Davidtz has a starring role as well.) Where Fuller’s book spans two decades, this film limits itself to a few months in 1980 in the life of eight-year-old Bobo (Lexi Venter, incredible). What’s remarkable about this light-footed film is its impressionistic, childlike vision of an African country on the verge of violence. Placing one’s sympathies in a story where the white farmers carry automatic weapons and African militants watch them from the bush is not easy, and Davidtz’s tone is bravely matter-of-fact. Her camera focuses closely on the dirt and casual disarray of Bobo’s life on the Rhodesian farm; we see the bugs and the snakes and chickens and the submachine guns all at once. When Robert Mugabe wins the election, the whites must flee and Bobo’s mother descends into alcoholism and madness. Short and lovely to look at, and marred (in my opinion) only by a note of fantasy at the end, this is a confident, provocative debut.
Seeking distribution.
