Toronto fest scans year's best

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play a middle-aged couple who find their relationship entwined with that of a younger, sexier couple in While We’re Young, which looks to be one of the highlights of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play a middle-aged couple who find their relationship entwined with that of a younger, sexier couple in While We’re Young, which looks to be one of the highlights of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Film festivals, like college football teams, great chefs and world superpowers, have many rivals. The surprisingly competitive field of world-renowned festivals -- from Cannes and Berlin to Toronto -- all vie for prestige, honor, glory and the most inspiring and impressive lineups of films being released in a given year. But this year, the Toronto International Film Festival has definitely taken that rivalry up a notch: Their new policy strictly forbids any film that has already premiered elsewhere to play during the first four days of their festival, which, with the endless red carpet rolls for stars, directors and fans, is easily the most hyped and well-attended period of the whole festival.

It's a somewhat controversial plan -- especially to Telluride, Colo., a Labor Day weekend festival in the Colorado Rockies that has managed to sneak in such luminous fare as Argo and 12 Years a Slave right on the eve of the Toronto festival's opening night gala.

With their proximity to each other, in season, geography and prestige, it's logical that the Toronto festival, which runs the first two weeks in September, would also have something of a rivalry with the New York Film Festival, which starts in early October, and indeed the two often battle for the rights to screen some of the biggest and most anticipated films of the season (this year, with the New York festival snagging David Fincher's Gone Girl and P.T. Anderson's Inherent Vice for exclusive premieres, it would appear they've had a particularly good season). Besieged from all sides, it would seem, Toronto remains a pinnacle of international film festival mettle. They might have lost a couple of big fish (and you can consider Fincher's hotly anticipated film to be the veritable great white shark in this scenario), but there are still plenty of films big and small that have more than captured the moviegoing public's interest. Herewith, a list of some of the films I'm most excited about seeing in this year's edition, which began Thursday.

Foxcatcher: A drama based on the real and largely insane case of reclusive millionaire John du Pont (Steve Carell), who took an obsessive interest in the American Olympic wrestling team and Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) in particular, eventually leading to a bizarre tragedy. The film was a huge hit at Cannes this spring, with the general consensus being that Tatum and Carell (in a rare dramatic role) are absolutely excellent.

Haemoo: South Korean director Sung Bo Shim's film concerns a fishing boat crew who attempt to smuggle a group of Chinese would-be immigrants to Korea. The film, based on real events, is co-scripted by genre-bending genius Joon-ho Bong (Snowpiercer), which portends something pretty interesting, if not slightly inexplicable.

Force Majeure: Generating solid buzz at Cannes, Ruben Ostlund's encapsulated drama concerns a family on a ski vacation in the French Alps. When an avalanche threatens to engulf them at their chalet, the husband (Johannes Kuhnke) bolts, leaving his family to fend for themselves. Played as character farce on a Seinfeld episode (George, hearing the word "fire" at a kids' birthday party, pushes everyone out of his way to escape), here it becomes a door latch into the very psyche of the couple's relationship.

It Follows: David Robert Mitchell's second feature (his first: The Myth of the American Sleepover) was yet another well-received film at Cannes. The film utilizes a strong sexual metaphor to generate its spooky premise: A young woman (Maika Monroe) has an innocent-seeming sexual encounter, but becomes plagued by phantomlike monsters, a curse that she understands can only be lifted if she passes it on to someone else.

Manglehorn: The return of serious filmmaker David Gordon Green continues. After a slew of stoner comedies (including Pineapple Express, Your Highness), DGG repped the far more serious Joe at Toronto last year (also giving Nicolas Cage his best role in an eon) and has brought another intriguing possibility in 2014. The film stars Al Pacino -- another actor in need of some juice -- as a humble locksmith who is tormented by the dissolution of the great romantic love in his life, until Holly Hunter comes around to offer another option.

Mr. Turner: A new film from English auteur Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy) is always cause for celebration and this film, which stars Timothy Spall (in a Cannes-winning performance) as renowned English landscape artist J.M.W. Turner, appears to be no exception.

The Imitation Game: One of the big-deal films of the festival, it stars Toronto festival favorite Benedict Cumberbatch as famed mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing, whose brilliant code-breaking abilities were essential in Britain's efforts during World War II, but who was denounced shortly after the war for being gay. Cumberbatch's involvement surely helps the buzz, but it's one of the most anticipated films of the festival.

Two Days, One Night: The latest film from Belgian auteurs Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne stars the brilliant Marion Cotillard as a working-class mother who loses her job after a leave for mental illness and is given a weekend to convince her 16 co-workers, who voted her out, that she should be allowed to return. Cotillard is always good and given the talents of the Brothers Dardenne, the film should be absolutely mesmerizing.

While We're Young: I admit a strong bias toward Noah Baumbach's oeuvre, but like David Mamet and Marmite, it can be an acquired taste. His new film stars Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as a middle-aged couple whose lives are upended by the arrival of a hot, young couple (Adam Driver, who's everywhere, and Amanda Seyfried). This promises to be something of a comedy -- although with Baumbach at the controls, expect the laughs to be accompanied with a good deal of grimacing.

Whiplash: The film that took Sundance by storm (winning the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award) stars Miles Teller as a young drum prodigy at a high-end music academy, driven to near madness by the relentless and caustic drive of his teacher (J.K. Simmons), who expects nothing less than absolute perfection.

Winter Sleep: This Cannes Palme d'Or winner from Turkish master filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan sounds like a deep meditation on small-town life and the ways in which we all can be petty and small-minded. Set in a snowy summer vacation village half-deserted in the off-season, the film focuses on a successful innkeeper whose smug self-satisfaction is slowly stripped away as we learn more about him.

One quick end note: Mindful readers may recall I was very excited to see the great Filipino director Lav Diaz's four-hour epic Norte: The End of History last year, which was indeed one of the festival highlights. This year, Diaz returns to Toronto with a new film, From What Is Before, which runs at more than 5 1/2 hours but I'm afraid I simply have too many other films to see that coincide with the film's lone press screening and shall have to pass on this occasion.

This is a common and painful occurrence at the festival, which features some 300 films in the course of its 10-day run. On the first day alone, there are no fewer than a dozen films I would give my eyeteeth to see, all overlapping and rendering that absolutely impossible. Difficult choices are part of the gig, I'm afraid, so I shall have to attend Diaz's commendable effort at a later date.

MovieStyle on 09/05/2014

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