The Toronto International Film Festival showcases hundreds of films, features and shorts, in many languages, by directors with strings of hits, respected auteurs, and first-timers. Aisha and I recently spent a few days at the festival, and we got a chance to see some films that you, too, will likely get a chance to check out before too long. Here are some of our favorites.
Roofman, in theaters Oct. 10
Channing Tatum plays Jeffrey Manchester, a real armed robber who became famous in the late 1990s for robbing dozens of locations (many of them McDonald's) by cutting through their roofs and surprising the workers early in the morning, often forcing them into the walk-in refrigerator at gunpoint. He was often talked about in the press for being polite, and a "gentleman." After he was finally caught, he escaped from prison and was out for months, living a quiet life in a secret hideout inside a Toys "R" Us, going to church, and even dating a divorced mom played here by Kirsten Dunst.
Director Derek Cianfrance understands that Channing Tatum is a movie star for a reason. He is charming and funny, like a lot of people who commit crimes, and it's easy to see him as relatively harmless, until you think about all the people he likely traumatized by threatening them with guns (even if he never shot anyone). Sympathy for him is repeatedly built and then undermined, right up until the absolute last moments, when updates on the real Manchester inevitably roll by. It's an entertaining movie that also challenges the audience to think about good guys and bad guys, and what kinds of criminal acts by what kinds of perpetrators people decide to excuse as whimsical. — Linda Holmes
Blue Moon, in theaters Oct. 17, wide release Oct. 24
Blue Moon reunites director Richard Linklater with one of his frequent collaborators, Ethan Hawke. Hawke plays Lorenz Hart, the American lyricist who was responsible for, with his composing partner, Richard Rodgers, everything from "My Funny Valentine" and "The Lady Is a Tramp" to, yes, "Blue Moon." But Blue Moon the movie takes place on the night in 1943 when Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway, marking the beginning of Rodgers' collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II.
We spend the evening with Hart in the bar at Sardi's, the location of the Oklahoma! afterparty, where he chats with a friendly bartender (Bobby Cannavale) and distracts himself with a consuming fondness for a 20-year-old student named Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley) with whom he's become friendly. (As Hawke said at the festival, Hart is so pained over the loss of his professional collaborator that he would rather imagine a love story for himself than think about it.) As Hart yammers a mile a minute, others, including Rodgers himself (played by Andrew Scott) watch him spin out while trying (unsuccessfully) to take the instantly rapturous response to Oklahoma! in stride. It's a performance from Hawke that is courageously irritating, but also emotionally rich and sympathetic. Romantic partners are not, after all, the only ones it hurts to lose. — Linda Holmes
Hedda, in theaters Oct. 22; streaming on Prime Video on Oct. 29
(Do yourself a favor and try to prioritize this for the big screen if it's playing near you)
Filmmaker Nia DaCosta's only made a handful of features thus far (including a Candyman sequel and The Marvels), but she's played in a different genre with each one, and her latest film Hedda suggests period melodrama suits her best. I found it entrancing — a deliciously acidic and gorgeously rendered adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's classic Hedda Gabler. (The cinematographer is Sean Bobbitt, of 12 Years a Slave and The Place Beyond the Pines, among others.) She makes some considered alterations — the setting is mid-20th century England, and Tessa Thompson confidently steps into the titular role as the scheming social climber who throws a lavish and devastatingly consequential party in a mansion she and her "nice"-but-bland husband George (Tom Bateman) can barely afford. Thompson is so good here, but Nina Hoss as Eileen, Hedda's former lover and now the professional rival of George, threatens to steal the movie with a titanic performance. The text is rich with this one. — Aisha Harris
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, in theaters Nov. 26, on Netflix Dec. 12
Rian Johnson explained to the Toronto audience that the inspiration for Wake Up Dead Man was, in part, the work of Edgar Allan Poe. That suggests a darker and more somber tone, which is indeed what you get from this third entry in Johnson's Benoit Blanc detective series. In this one, Josh O'Connor plays a young priest named Jud. Jud is struggling with his purpose and trying to form bonds with a small, insular congregation. He is also up against its foreboding leader, Josh Brolin's Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, and Wicks' skeptical right-hand woman, played by Glenn Close. Of course, a murder occurs. Wake Up Dead Man is still a funny movie, but it takes seriously Jud's complex feelings about his calling, and both O'Connor and Close do fine dramatic work. Daniel Craig remains an enchanting central presence, and Blanc's compassion for Jud continues the series' focus on a tough detective with a foundational, hopeful kindness. — Linda Holmes
No Other Choice, in limited theatrical release Dec. 25; wide release in January
No Other Choice, the latest from Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Decision to Leave), is a well-paced tragic farce locked into the present moment. It's based on Donald Westlake's novel The Ax, and stars Lee Byung-hun as You Man-soo, a man who's let go by the paper production company to which he's devoted his entire career. Finding another job in the dwindling industry proves difficult (human labor is giving way to tech advancements, of course), and he and his family are at risk of losing their cherished home. And so he decides to eliminate the competition, as it were. Lee plays all the tonal notes of the script just right — the physical comedy, the bleak circumstances, the brutality. We may not be rooting for his character to succeed at his aims, but it's a credit to his performance that by the film's end, it's still possible to sympathize with, or at least understand, his plight. — Aisha Harris
The Christophers
At the time of my writing this, the astonishingly prolific Steven Soderbergh's The Christophers does not yet have a distributor. But this was one of my absolute favorites out of TIFF, and you should definitely keep it on your radar, because it's got many of the ingredients of a great Soderbergh film: a tight, well-crafted script (by Ed Solomon, who previously worked with the director on No Sudden Move); a con job; and fun performances that crackle, spark, and leap off the screen. Michaela Coel is Lori, a talented art forger who's surreptitiously hired by a pair of siblings to finish the incomplete paintings of their dying and estranged father Julian (Ian McKellen), a renowned artist. They plan to sell them for a huge sum once he's gone. Coel and McKellen have great chemistry as artists of different generations and vastly different experiences, and the film ends up more interested in existential questions than most con job films, about artistic exchange and the value of "authenticity," among other things. — Aisha Harris
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