Programmers unveiled about three dozen new titles set to play at the 51st edition of the Toronto International Film Festival.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Films starring Adam Driver, Helen Mirren, Seth Rogen, Amanda Seyfried, Jay Baruchel, K-pop superstar Lisa and Sylvester Stallone (sort of) will make their world premieres at the 51st edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, organizers announced Monday.
After revealing a smattering of titles over the past few weeks, including the opening-night film, Being Heumann from CODA director Siân Heder, TIFF programmers unveiled about three dozen new titles set to play the festival’s high-profile Gala and Special Presentation programs.
Highlights include the world premieres of Chris Rock’s dramedy Misty Green, which focuses on an actor looking to rebuild her career and stars Driver, Daniel Kaluuya and Rosalind Eleazar as the title character; Anton Corbijn’s drama A Talent for Murder, with Mirren cast as the mystery novelist Patricia Highsmith; Lauren Miller Rogen’s romcom Babies, headlined by her husband, Seth, alongside Anna Kendrick (who also appears in Rock’s Misty Green); Tim Blake Nelson’s prison-set drama The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd starring Seyfried; Michael Dowse’s Canadian action-comedy The Stunt Driver, featuring Baruchel as a 1970s daredevil; and Sue Kim’s documentary Always Lalisa, which traces the Blackpink frontwoman as she charts a solo career.
One of the world premieres that many industry-watchers will be keeping a careful eye on, though, is I Play Rocky, from Green Book director Peter Farrelly. Dramatizing the tumultuous development and production of the 1976 boxing classic Rocky, the movie is led by the relatively unknown Anthony Ippolito as a young Stallone, and is set to arrive at TIFF with just the right kind of underdog spirit, crowd-pleasing storyline and filmmaker pedigree that could launch it as a major awards contender.
TIFF’s latest announcement arrives as competing fall festivals in Venice and New York, which bookend Toronto’s run date of Sept. 10-20, begin to reveal their own offerings.
At Cannes, TIFF sets the stage for its biggest, riskiest bet since the Lightbox
Last week, Venice announced that it would open its 83rd edition Sept. 2 with Danny Boyle’s Ink, which dramatizes the rise of media titan Rupert Murdoch (played by Guy Pearce), a buzzy title that will make its Canadian debut in Toronto a week or so later. At the same time, the New York Film Festival revealed that it would open its 64th edition Sept. 25 with the North American premiere of James Gray’s crime drama Paper Tiger, which made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this spring.
Going by the classifications of premiere status announced by Toronto organizers Monday, cinephiles are now able to tell that such TIFF titles as Possible Love, Lee Chang-dong’s long-awaited follow-up to his 2018 thriller Burning – which is marked as a “North American premiere” – will debut in Venice beforehand. The same line of thinking applies to Mike Leigh’s new drama, Tender Loving Care, which is noted as a “Canadian premiere,” and thus expected to first be screened at the Telluride Film Festival, which runs a few days before TIFF.
Meanwhile, a wealth of films that premiered at Cannes this past May will make victory laps at TIFF, including but not limited to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s epic-length dual character study All of a Sudden; Pedro Almodóvar’s meta melodrama Bitter Christmas; Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa, a modern-day retelling of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s decades-spanning queer Spanish drama La Bola Negra; Jordan Firstman’s exceptionally buzzy dramedy Club Kid; and Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning culture-clash drama Fjord.
While TIFF and other festivals have weeks to go before revealing their final lineups, an unusually large number of prestige-level fall films have yet to be confirmed for any festival runs, possibly indicating a new-found skittishness inside major Hollywood outfits when it comes to going the festival route.
This includes such seemingly festival-flavoured offerings as The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s semi-sequel to The Social Network; Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI-skewering drama Artificial; Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Tom Cruise comedy Digger; Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun; Tony Gilroy’s music-world drama Behemoth!; David O. Russell’s NFL-set biopic Madden; Chloe Domont’s darkly comic legal thriller A Place in Hell; and David Fincher’s untitled sequel to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.
TIFF is set to announce more titles, including selections from its Platform, Discovery and Primetime programs, over the course of the next few days. Further programming will be confirmed throughout the week of Aug. 3.