The Toronto International Film Festival, Canada’s festival of festivals, is back for another year. Running from Sept. 5 to Sept. 15, you can see the full list of films at their website — as well as a full schedule of when they will play.
For a deeper dive — and how to plan your own visit — here’s a breakdown of what this year’s festival has to offer.
Opening and closing
Ben Stiller, left, appears in a scene from Nutcrackers. The film is slated to open the festival this year. (TIFF)
Going for a comedy bookend this year, the festival will open with Ben Stiller’s Nutcrackers and close with Rebel Wilson’s The Deb.
Their special status makes a certain sense for each actor: Nutcrackers, about an unprepared man forced to take care of his orphaned nephews, marks Stiller’s return to acting after a six-year hiatus. And The Deb, based on the Australian musical of the same name, marks Wilson’s directorial debut — and premiering despite an ongoing defamation lawsuit against Wilson by her business partners, tied to its inclusion at the festival.
Celeb sightings
Maya Hawke walks the red carpet before the TIFF premiere of the film Wildcat on Sept. 11, 2023. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)
After a particularly rough few years for TIFF, celebrity sightings will be a major conversation piece this year. With the festival’s cancellation of in-person events in 2020 due to COVID-19, subsequent online stagings and last year’s Hollywood strikes, the event hasn’t been quite as glitzy as fans would like.
Predictions for this year run the gamut, though dedicated fan zones will be set up on David Pecaut Square and outside of the Princess of Wales and Royal Alexandra theatres. And while talent confirmation can come as late as five minutes before a red carpet, some stars have already made clear their intention to attend.
That includes Amy Adams, Barry Keoghan, Will Ferrell, Riz Ahmed, Cate Blanchett, David Cronenberg, Denis Villeneuve, Angelina Jolie, Selena Gomez, Matt Damon, Jennifer Lopez and Alicia Vikander.
Music v. Hollywood
Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band is among a slew of music movies headed to TIFF. (TIFF)
The unofficial theme of this year’s festival seems to be the stories of bands and pop stars’ rises and falls — told in nearly every way imaginable.
When it comes to straight music documentaries, set to screen are Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, Elton John: Never too Late, Paul Anka: His Way and Andrea Bocelli: Because I Believe.
In the more unconventional vein, Better Man is a biopic about pop star Robbie Williams — with a rumoured fantastical and bizarre style that may or may not include a CGI monkey playing Williams. Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara documents the Canadian band’s rise and toxic relationship with a particularly obsessive fan, and Piece by Piece documents producer, singer and rapper Pharrell Williams’s chart-topping journey — entirely through Lego.
Finally, there’s K-Pops, which follows a washed-up drummer reconnecting with his estranged celebrity son. The film itself is not a documentary or biopic, but it stars and was directed by singer and rapper Anderson .Paak in his feature-film debut — with his real-life son (Soul Rasheed) also playing his onscreen one.
Hot films
Amy Adams appears in a scene from Nightbitch. (TIFF)
TIFF may lack some of the big titles of festivals like Cannes, but it still has some buzzy films. Among the most anticipated is Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s ambitious allegory for the fall of Rome, told through the lens of turn-of-the-century New York.
Many are watching closely for how the controversial project will land with Toronto audiences, as it has been plagued by savage and befuddled reviews, allegations of Coppola’s inappropriate behaviour toward crew and a recent scandal in which made-up quotes by critics were included in a recent trailer.
As another potential headscratcher, black comedy Nightbitch stars Amy Adams as an overworked mom who slowly comes to the belief that she is transforming into a dog. Meanwhile, Queer — Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s first return to TIFF since 2017’s Call Me by Your Name — promises to adapt William S. Burroughs’s autobiography. It does so by creating, as the film’s festival page describes, “a hallucinogenic odyssey bathed in desire.”
There is Saturday Night, which casts Vancouver’s Gabriel LaBelle (who made his TIFF debut two years ago playing a young Steven Spielberg proxy in The Fabelmans) as SNL creator Lorne Michaels.
And The Last Showgirl promises to act as a sort of comeback and personal commentary for its lead, Pamela Anderson. Coming after both Anderson’s memoir and the HBO series about her marriage with Tommy Lee Jones, it follows longtime Las Vegas dancer Shelley (Anderson) who must look for a new path in life when, at 50, her show gets cancelled.
Cancon
On the set of Universal Language. (Maryse Boyce)
Aside from Canadians in big roles, Canadian films themselves are having a moment at TIFF this year.
After landing at Cannes to solid critical reception, Guy Maddin’s political farce Rumours — about a meeting between the G7 world leaders gone horribly wrong — is set to make its North American premiere. Similarly, Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language cleaned up at Cannes, where it won the inaugural People’s Choice Award. Now, the surreal story of a tour guide wandering through a fantastical mix of Winnipeg and Tehran is also set to make its North American premiere at TIFF, while its selection as Canada’s official submission for the Oscars could see it headed to the Academy Awards in 2025.
Paying For It, meanwhile, is steeped in Canadiana. Adapted from the comic of the same name by Montreal’s Chester Brown and set in Toronto’s Kensington Market, it is a loose retelling of Brown’s relationship with filmmaker and MuchMusic VJ Sook-Yin Lee — as well as Brown’s frequenting of sex workers when that relationship dissolves.
The joint Canadian- and American-produced film The Order — starring Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult — promises to tell the sordid story of the white supremacist terrorist organization of the same name. The film is based on the bestseller The Silent Brotherhood, which detailed the group and their involvement in the 1984 assassination of radio host Alan Berg.
And further down the line, Young Werther sets the famously melodramatic 18th-century Goethe novel in modern-day Toronto. But instead of a self-serious, overly depressing story that prompted a rash of book bans over worries of copycat suicides, Young Werther‘s tale of a somewhat neurotic suitor and ensuing love triangle is charming enough to potentially earn a place as a sleeper hit of 2024.