After years of pandemic delays and Hollywood strikes, the Toronto International Film Festival, which concludes on Sunday, felt particularly alive this year. Unlike recent years, there was no surefire hit like “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022) or “Oppenheimer” (2023) that premiered in the spring or summer, which added excitement and uncertainty going into awards season. Movies both big and small come to the Canadian city to launch Oscars campaigns, build audiences, announce major debuts and, in some cases, woo buyers that’ll release films over the coming months. But it’s also a great place to see how culture at large is shifting, at least as far as Hollywood is concerned. Here’s where we’re headed.
1. We’re all in the mood for love again …
If the September film season (which also includes major festivals in Venice, Italy, Telluride, Colo., and the upcoming one in New York), has shown something, it’s that many writers and directors are feeling romantic. There’s Sean Baker’s “Anora,” about a sex worker who marries the son of an oligarch, and William Bridges’s “All of You,” which depicts Brett Goldstein (of “Ted Lasso” acclaim) and Imogen Poots as best friends who can’t decide whether to date. Chemistry always wins out, of course, and it’s hard to deny the frisson between Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in John Crowley’s “We Live in Time,” an indie crowd-pleaser that’s ideal for crying your way through on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
2. … Or maybe it’s just lust.
Toronto was brimming with romantic tragedies, not comedies; perhaps because of ongoing conversations about non-monogamy and open relationships, there were a lot of affairs onscreen, too. The most successful scripts focused on intense, almost unnamable desire, often between two people who know it can’t last: In Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl,” Nicole Kidman plays a powerful executive who gets into a complicated psychosexual mess with her intern; in Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” based on the William S. Burroughs novel (published in 1985), Daniel Craig’s heroin-addled character deals with the hot-and-cold affections of a paramour while traveling through midcentury Mexico City and South America. Both films sizzle, and it’s no coincidence that the actors playing the young objects of these leads’ affections — Harris Dickinson and Drew Starkey, respectively — are proving themselves to be rising talents.
3. Another major star? Danielle Deadwyler.
The 40-something American actress has been one to watch since appearing in HBO’s Covid-era adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel “Station Eleven.” But with two films at Toronto, the dystopian “40 Acres” and “The Piano Lesson” — a Netflix retelling of the 1987 August Wilson family drama starring one of Denzel Washington’s sons, John David, and directed by another, Malcolm — she puts her strength and silent resolve on full, unignorable display. In the latter movie, she seethes … until she combusts.
4. We’ll be seeing red everywhere.
If last year was all about Barbie pink, this year’s shade is fresh blood red, a color that’s also been showing up in fashion and design. Cate Blanchett, who was in Toronto to promote “Disclaimer,” her thrilling new Apple TV+ series directed by Alfonso Cuarón, wore scarlet on the red carpet. So did Isabella Rossellini, probably in homage to all of the red in Edward Berger’s “Conclave,” a papal-succession story that was among the most beautiful and plainly enjoyable of the festival’s offerings. (Rossellini steals scenes as a Vatican nun.) Then there was the buzzy “Emilia Pérez,” a kind of gender-affirmation drug-war telenovela, which was co-produced by the French fashion house Saint Laurent and features the actress Zoe Saldana wearing one memorable glittery crimson suit.
5. In any language, Pedro Almodóvar will find fabulous collaborators.
There was also lots of great, glamorous color (red in particular) in the 74-year-old Spanish director’s “The Room Next Door,” his first English-language feature. It was fascinating to watch Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, who play recently reunited friends struggling with death, wear the same bright lipstick and jewel-toned shirts that Almodóvar’s Madrid-based heroines often prefer. And the filmmaker’s dreamlike take on New York — all snow and book-filled apartments — was similarly sensual. One only hopes that he keeps filming in America, working again and again with Moore and Swinton, just as he has with loyal friends like Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas and Rossy de Palma.
6. Hollywood isn’t yet tired of big men and their big stories.
All told, it felt like women won Toronto — and about time, too: Much of the conversation centered on actresses doing career-defining work. But even in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” filmmakers clearly haven’t tired of ponderous tales of men questing for power. In lighter terms, Jason Reitman’s antic “Saturday Night” focuses on the rise of the “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels. Yet the project that, surprisingly, had most of the festival talking was Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” an ambitious three-and-a-half-hour historical epic that follows Adrien Brody as a fictional Jewish Hungarian architect who immigrates to the United States after the Holocaust. It has an intermission — not that you’ll want to look away.
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