TORONTO -- As great as a film festival in New York may be -- and the venerable New York Film Festival is always formidable in its lineup and execution -- there is something particularly special about a festival that utterly takes over its home city.
For a smaller place like Park City, Utah (Sundance), or Columbia, Mo. (True/False), it's cute and sort of cool, but when you have a major metropolitan area like Toronto more or less shut down for a long weekend in the early days of the festival, it's particularly energizing.
In any Tim Hortons coffee shop you step into -- and, trust me, there are plenty from which to choose -- Toronto International Film Festival is the topic du jour, and not just the star sightings and celebrity buzz, but the films themselves. People in the city recognize that for this 10-day period, they are the hub of the entertainment universe. It's a bit like being caught up in the kind of unified sports fervor that takes over a city with a team making a championship run: Everyone is in this thing together, and speaks to the collective consciousness of the city.
This year, the Toronto International Film Festival slate is again comically, overwhelmingly massive -- some 300-plus features spread out over various subcategories -- but perhaps not quite as top-heavy as usual. There are the usual assortment of big Hollywood films, of course (The Martian, Black Mass, The Danish Girl), but not as many American auteurs (no Coen brothers film, or anything by Paul Thomas Anderson, for example), and no one film dominating the conversation that you sweat to anticipate. As such, the door is open for some of the smaller or international films playing here to really make a splash. I'm pleased to see that the three films I was most taken with at Sundance (The Witch, James White and Brooklyn) will all be playing there. Culling through the rest of the schedule, here are some of the films we are most hotly anticipating this year, in alphabetical order.
Beasts of No Nation: There was a lot of talk about director Cary Joji Fukunaga after his exemplary effort on HBO's first season of True Detective. Here's hoping this young, highly talented filmmaker gets his full due with this film, about a young African child soldier, and his savage commander (Idris Elba) in a film distributed exclusively by Netflix, a first for the streaming service.
Dheepan: This year's winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, Jacques Audiard's drama concerns a former Sri Lankan soldier who escapes the brutality of a civil war, and hides out in a suburb outside of Paris. Audiard's most recent features (A Prophet and Rust and Bone) were extremely well-crafted and genuinely moving, so working with this sort of powerful subject matter is something for which he seems to have a gift.
Green Room: It certainly sounds like something you might catch late at night on Showtime -- a small-time punk band runs afoul of a group of neo-Nazis in a music club deep in the backwoods of Oregon and have to survive long enough to escape -- but coming from Jeremy Saulnier, who turned a simple revenge flick into the rapturously unsettling Blue Ruin, and starring Patrick Stewart as the Nazis' leader, I think we can expect a good deal more than a splashy through-line.
High-Rise: Tom Hiddleston, featured in two high-profile Toronto festival films this year (this one and the Hank Williams bio-pic I Saw the Light), has a chance to make a splash like his fellow Brit Benedict Cumberbatch achieved in 2014, where he took the festival by storm on the strength of performances in The Imitation Game, August: Osage County and The Fifth Estate. Directed by the daringly enigmatic Ben Wheatley (Kill List), Hiddleston plays the lead in this adaption of the class-warfare novel by J.G. Ballard.
Love: Say what you might about French enfant terrible Gaspar Noe and his shock-value nature, his films have a way of sticking in your brain in a manner that suggests he's far more than a mere envelope-pusher. His new film, which reportedly offers a gaggle of graphic, unsimulated sex, promises to push his reputation for outrageousness to even further heights. The trailer alone practically singes your corneas. We just have to hope there's more going on here than what you might find at your average American porn site.
The Lobster: Yorgos Lanthimos' most recent Toronto festival film, the highly regarded Dogtooth, was absolutely mesmerizing in its dedicated bizarreness. It concerned a trio of siblings who spoke their own peculiar vernacular as they were forbidden to leave the confines of their house by their overprotective parents. His new film creates an even stranger conceit: In a peculiar hotel, guests are given 45 days to find a mate or forever be turned into wild animals. That it's one of the more anticipated films of the festival speaks to Lanthimos' ability to capture your attention and keep it, regardless of the eccentricity of his vision.
The Martian: This one needs a minimum of introduction. Directed by none other than Ridley Scott, starring Matt Damon, the adaptation of the wildly popular (originally self-published) novel by Andy Weir, which finds a lone astronaut stranded on Mars and the desperate measures NASA employs to try and save him, is a singular big ticket. Thing is, as interesting as Weir's abundant use of science in the novel was, much of the prose and the characterizations were purely amateurish. It will be interesting to see what Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard have done to round out Weir's compelling-but-limited vision.
The Memory of Justice: What would a Toronto International Film Festival experience be without at least one intimidatingly long film you likely wouldn't get a chance to see on the big screen elsewhere? As my man Lav Diaz doesn't have an entry this year, the pick here is this engrossing 1976 documentary from auteur Marcel Ophüls, which daringly explores the gamut of human wartime atrocities, from the Holocaust to Viet Nam, over the course of 4 1/2 hours (278 minutes).
Son of Saul: One of the heavy-buzz films out of Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix, Laszlo Nemes' searing Holocaust drama concerns the plight of a single Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz, forced to help dispose of the charred corpses of his fellow countrymen, and the extraordinary lengths he goes to in order to give at least one small victim a proper funeral.
Victoria: The Toronto festival has long been a showcase for directors to display their technical mastery (witness Alfonso Cuaron's breathless Gravity), and this stirring heist film from German director Sebastian Schipper promises to continue the tradition. The 138-minute thriller was shot in a single take, which sounds absolutely as improbable as pulling a cinderblock through the eye of a needle. Consider that it took the aforementioned Cuaron 14 days to prepare a single take of a street battle scene in Children of Men that lasted all of 7 1/2 minutes, and you begin to get the idea of just how insanely complex this shoot must have been. The story concerns a young woman in Berlin out late at a club, who gets drawn into a crowd of men who use her for a bank heist, but the true draw of the film is absolutely the audacity of its filmmakers.
MovieStyle on 09/11/2015