With Toronto International Film Festival 2024 starting next week, we thought we would give you Darren's Top 5 Most-Anticipated Films this year at the festival.
#TIFF24 starts Thursday, Sept 5, and runs till Sunday, September 15th!
Visit tiff.net/films?schedule to view the full schedule and tiff.net/films to see the full list of films.
With The Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan takes a detour from the macabre to explore one of Stephen King’s alternate sensibilities in an adaptation that carries the spirit of his most optimistic work. The world feels like it’s ending and everybody’s saying goodbye to Chuck. Wherever Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) goes, he can’t get away from Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston). His face is showing up on billboards, window signs — even TV commercials. What’s so special about this seemingly ordinary accountant and why does he warrant such a sendoff?
Their connection includes Marty’s ex-wife (Karen Gillan), her co-worker, his neighbour, and just about everyone else they know. Chuck’s life story soon begins to unravel in front of us, going back to a childhood with grandfather Albie (Mark Hamill), who teaches him about accounting and passes on a love for dancing, all the while keeping him from a prophetic secret in the attic.
The Life of Chuck starts grand and ends intimate, like a setting sun. It’s a Stand By Me for the multiple lives within each of us, pulled between our dreams and down-to-earth pragmatism. Fans of Flanagan’s skillful storytelling in The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and Doctor Sleep will easily see why he gravitated towards the unorthodox structure of this King novella. Coupled with his impressive knack for elevating simple conversations and interactions into memorable set pieces, Flanagan manages a rare feat: finding warmth in melancholy.
Based on historical events, this scintillating thriller from Oscar-winning director Ron Howard stars Jude Law (Vox Lux, TIFF ʼ18; Dom Hemingway, TIFF ʼ13) and Vanessa Kirby (Pieces of a Woman, TIFF ʼ20) as high-minded Europeans seeking a new life on a previously uninhabited island in the Galápagos archipelago. They and those who follow them believe they’ve found paradise — only to discover that hell is other people.
Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Law, also at the Festival in The Order) and his partner Dora Strauch (Kirby) flee their native Germany in 1929, repudiating the bourgeois values they believe are corroding mankind’s true nature. On the isle of Floreana, Friedrich can focus on writing his manifesto, while Dora resolves to cure her multiple sclerosis through meditation. Their hard-won solitude, however, is short lived.
They are joined by Margaret (Sydney Sweeney) and Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Bruehl), who prove to be earnest, capable settlers. Next comes Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas) a self-described Baroness and the “embodiment of perfection,” who arrives with two devoted lovers, an Ecuadorian servant, a wardrobe full of evening gowns, and plans to erect a luxury hotel. Between inclement weather, unruly wildlife, and a total lack of amenities, all three groups find life on Floreana arduous. But nothing will test their mettle more than the challenge of coexisting with desperate neighbours capable of theft, deception, and worse.
Written by Noah Pink (Tetris), Eden offers intrigue, suspense, and keen insights into the pitfalls of idealistic hubris.
It’s the mid-1970s, and a flipbook of Watergate, Vietnam, and rising counterculture make everything old in America feel broken, and everything new feel scary as hell. And now, yet another certainty is about to crack. Because in 90 minutes’ time, live, from New York, it’s Saturday Night.
SATURDAY NIGHT dives headfirst into the frenzied hour-and-a-half before a clutch of unknown, untrained, unruly young comedians took over network television and transformed the culture. Saturday Night Live would go on to become the late-night institution that brought John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and later Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, Will Ferrell, and others to our screens. But tonight, it’s barely contained madness backstage, with Canadian Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle, The Fabelmans, TIFF ’22) desperately trying to channel the chaos towards a vision even he’s not sure of.
On the eve of SNL’s 50th anniversary, it’s a particular pleasure to watch how unlikely it all was at the beginning. Chevy Chase honing the frat boy charm that would make him a movie star. Garrett Morris saying America’s racial quiet part out loud. Belushi a bundle of Id in the corner. Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, and Gilda Radner holding their own against a tide of comedy testosterone.
Director Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air, Ghostbusters: Afterlife) has made certified classics, but he’s never made a film like this. Fuelled by the same anarchic energy that drove the show to air, he orchestrates this tour de force as a glorious circus of talent, ambition, and appetite for risk, with the clock ticking down to showtime.
Desperate to secure her fading celebrity status, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a Hollywood actress-cum-TV exercise impresario, undergoes a black-market medical procedure that promises self-actualization, but culminates in the spawning of Sue (Margaret Qualley), a bold and brash clone of her younger self that perpetuates its existence via weekly spinal taps. The pair are warned to respect their new symbiotic relationship or risk corrosive consequences. But as Sue starts reserving more time in the limelight at the behest of a slimeball executive (Dennis Quaid) and her own growing ambition, Sparkle is soon faced with an existential threat, one that engenders a wicked feud with her tulpa and a knock-down, drag-out battle to reclaim her autonomy.
Taken at its premise, The Substance appears to be merely a well-trodden exercise in satirizing Hollywood’s contribution to patriarchal beauty standards. But just as her breakout Midnight Madness debut Revenge (TIFF ’17) uniquely reframed its horror sub-genre, Coralie Fargeat once more transforms a familiar feminine allegory by injecting an audacious tone of carnivalesque camp that ratchets its ingredients to perversely mythic heights. Seemingly intermingling bits of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor, and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, Fargeat’s stylish execution and deliriously breakneck momentum further cements an identity all her own. The result is an unforgettably twisted parable that features exceptionally embodied performances from Moore and Qualley, and outrageous body-horror on the order of FX legends like Screaming Mad George.
Exhilarating and piercingly resonant, the latest from director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, TIFF ’12; The Sisters Brothers, TIFF ’18) audaciously merges pop opera, narco thriller, and gender affirmation drama. Emilia Pérez is a rollercoaster in which crime, redemption, and karma collide, featuring fearless performances from Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, and the amazing Karla Sofía Gascón, an ensemble that collectively received the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
Rita Moro Castro (Saldaña) is a Mexico City defense attorney whose brilliant strategies have kept many murderous but wildly affluent clients out of jail. Her reputation draws the attention of Manitas Del Monte (Gascón), a notorious kingpin, who is secretly transitioning. He hires Rita to arrange an itinerary of under-the-table procedures with the world’s best surgeons, while making a plan for the wife (Gomez) and kids he’s leaving behind. The process is a success, Manitas’ murder is staged, and Emilia Pérez is born. This new identity affords Emilia the ability to create a whole new life for herself, but the past begins to creep back, threatening to undo everything she and Rita have worked so hard to achieve.
Written by Audiard with Thomas Bidegain, Nicolas Livecchi, and Léa Mysius, with music by Camille and Clément Ducol, Emilia Pérez upends expectations with its ingenious plot twists, eye-popping spectacle, and inspired musical detours, which find the entire cast singing, rapping, and dancing as a means to express the dreams and anxieties of an entire culture struggling against corruption, fear, and harmful stereotypes.
(Poster/Photo/Video credit: TIFF 2024)
Comentários