Oh, Canada: We stand in line for the always-incredible selection of films at TIFF once again. That’s right, motherfuckers: It’s early September after the whites get put away and before the leaves turn orange, which means it’s time for the best-goddamned fall festival on the planet. This year’s lineup at the annualToronto International Film Festival has so many good movies to choose from that it was genuinely challenging to narrow it down to five – in addition to the five selected below, we’ve got new films from David Cronenberg, Janicza Bravo, Coralie Fargeat, Andrea Arnold, Nacho Vigalando, Francis Ford and Gia Coppola, Sean Baker, Justin Kurzel, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, Halina Reijn, and many, many more – but we managed to find five that we’re definitely going to hit while we’re in Toronto. Stay tuned for more coverage, but in the meantime, here are the movies we’re most excited about this year.
The End
After spending years and years as a documentary filmmaker, Joshua Oppenheimer – he who made The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, which are about as far away as you can get from the traditional “talking heads” style of modern doc construction – is making his narrative feature debut. It’s only fitting, then, that his first fictional feature sounds like Melancholia if it had Busby Berkeley choreography. The End is about a rich family trying to make a normal life for themselves inside of their doomsday bunker until an intruder shows up. It’s got Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George McKay, and a whole host of other fantastic performers in it, and we’re sure that Oppenheimer has cooked up something special with this fucked up riff on the golden age of musicals. It’s a perfect pairing with that New Yorker article about tech barons panicking about how they’ll feed their security staff so the hired hands don’t kill them and take everything for themselves once shit hits the fan.
The Life of Chuck
We’re not the world’s biggest fans of Mike Flanagan – for every hit the guy makes (Gerald’s Game), it seems he stumbles into something that just doesn’t vibe with us in any way (Doctor Sleep), not to mention his Netflix work – but he’s going back to the Stephen King well with this adaptation of one of King’s more recent stories. “The Life of Chuck” was a real highlight of the short story comp If It Bleeds, centering around a beloved local son, named, you guessed it, Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), of a small town who begins to notice that things… aren’t quite right with his world. It’s bleakly sentimental King – which we would argue is the author at his modern best – and it’s sure to be an actual tearjerker, should Flanagan preserve the minutiae of the story in the transition to the screen. Hell, we’d go as far as to say that it’s not even “horror” as Flanagan usually makes it, and we’re excited to see how he handles this shift.
Queer
Call it fate, call it fortune, but Luca Guadagnino caught a weirdly lucky break when Challengers got pushed to 2024. Not only did a bisexual sex comedy reign over the box office chart for a week, but it also set the filmmaker up for a chance to have two acclaimed features come out in a single year. Queer is an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel of the same name – pre-Naked Lunch Burroughs, as well – in which Burroughs’s surrogate, William Lee (Daniel Craig), wanders around Mexico City and falls in love with a younger man (Hickory, North Carolina’s own Drew Starkey). When paired with its companion novel Junky, the book forms a pretty fascinating portrait of life on the margins in pre-Mattachine queer culture with all the joys and dangers that come with this kind of estrangement and discrimination. Of all the things Guadagnino could have adapted after… well, everything he’s already worked on, this one seems like the easiest of slam dunks.
Nightbitch
Marielle Heller always seems to bring the heat to TIFF when she comes with a new film – Can You Ever Forgive Me? remains the highlight of Melissa McCarthy’s career, and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was the perfect way to make a genuinely terrible idea into a really solid feature film – and now she’s throwing a curveball by changing genres and formats entirely. This ain’t no memoir, folks; it’s a horror film starring Amy Adams about a stay-at-home mom who occasionally turns into a dog. It’s a Searchlight release, meaning that the production was protected from any lawsuits about it infringing upon The Shaggy Dog’s copyright, and it was one of those titles that got the promotion from forgotten Hulu drop to award season platform rollout, so it’s gotta be pretty special. We’re just excited that more people will know Heller – a fantastic filmmaker – from something other than The Queen’s Gambit. Yes, we know she played the surrogate mother to Anya Taylor-Joy. Stop telling us that fact every time we talk about how much we loved The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
The Shadow Strays
If you haven’t seen Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us, get yourself in front of a television and watch it as soon as fucking possible – it’s streaming on Netflix, and it’s one of the best action movies of the 2010s (including the fucking Raid movies). If you have a sensitive stomach, grab a barf bag, too – Tjahjanto’s all about that real-ass ultraviolence, with horror movie gore punctuating the absurdly brilliant action sequences. So, it’s with that knowledge that we straight freaked the fuck out when we discovered that The Shadow Strays was on tap for this year’s Midnight Madness, which is about a vigilante campaign conducted by teenage assassins on the streets of Jakarta. If it’s an ounce as dope as the TIFF synopsis makes it sound, Tjahjanto’s cooked up another action classic – served rare and bloody, of course.