From Jojo Rabbit to The Lighthouse, these are your best TIFF bets
This year, more than a dozen high-profile titles played at the Cannes Film Festival in May, months before their TIFF debut
Chris Knight
The most fun part of a critic's job is to sing the praises of a great film that few people have yet seen. (Full disclosure: The second most fun part, and it's a close second, is to pen a scathing takedown of a piece-of-crap movie you hope no one will ever go see.)
But this means the Toronto International Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday with the documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, is the perfect venue for fun. This year, more than a dozen high-profile titles played at the Cannes Film Festival in May, months before their TIFF debut. Here are five of my favourites, and five more that I haven't yet seen but can't wait to.
Five sure things
When the latest from Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiercer, and the unfortunate misstep that was 2017's Okja) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, it was already on track as my favourite film of 2019. Set in South Korea, it's the story of an unqualified young man who gets a job as an English tutor in a wealthy household, then manages to find jobs there for the rest of his family, all the while hiding the fact that they're related. Darkly funny, the tale takes some devious twists on its way to a remarkably sentimental ending. Storytelling at its best.
This one won the Cannes screenplay prize for writer/director Céline Sciamma, but my money was on it taking the Palme d'Or, or at least an acting prize for one of its twin leads. Noémie Merlant plays Marianne, summoned to a remote home in Brittany to paint Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). The catch is that the portrait, to be sent to a prospective husband in Milan who will use it to decide whether to acquiesce to the marriage, must be painted in secrecy. Héloïse banished the previous (male) painter, so Marianne must pose as her companion, observing her by day and committing her to canvas by night. The delicate dance of artistic courtship gradually evolves into something more. There were moments in this superbly written, gloriously shot film that literally took my breath away.
Robert Eggers' delirious followup to his 2015 directing debut The Witch is another heartfelt horror, this one set in the late 19th century on a desolate lump of land where two men (a bearded Willem Dafoe and a moustachioed Robert Pattinson) have been set ashore to tend a lighthouse. Dafoe is the senior "wicky" (the term for those who keep the wicks trimmed) while Pattinson is the new guy, and the tension between them could be cut with a shucking knife, as Dafoe's character lords his position over the younger man, and madness threatens to envelope them both. This salty sea shanty features some ridiculously ribald language pitched midway between Shakespeare and Melville; I still can't get the phrase "monkey pump" out of my head.
Elia Suleiman wrote, directed and stars — yet barely speaks — in this gentle parable about bureaucracy, officialdom and the bizarre ways that humans treat one another the world over. And his stage is literally the world — the filmmaker, playing a Tati-esque, silent version of himself, travels from his native Nazareth to Paris and then New York, ostensibly on a quest to finance a new film — one producer argues that it's not Palestinian enough, whatever that means — but in reality to observe the bizarre goings-on in the world.
In 2016, British director Ken Loach won the Palme d'Or with I, Daniel Blake, a deeply humanistic look at an unemployed carpenter trying to make ends meet. Sorry We Missed You is very much in the same vein, as Ricky (Kris Hitchen) signs up with the gig economy as a freelance delivery-van driver, only to discover that the gig only works if nothing goes wrong — if he never misses a delivery window, never calls in sick, never has to deal with a family emergency. When one of those things happens, the whole enterprise quickly slides into chaos. This is such an emotionally wracking film that I'm not sure I could watch it a second time, but I'd be remiss in not recommending it for you to experience just once.
Five good bets
New Zealand creative force Take Waititi has gone from brilliant low-budget comedies (What We Do in the Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople) to Marvel mega-projects (Thor: Ragnarok). His newest looks like a Mel Brooks satire by way of Wes Anderson, as a German boy (Roman Griffin Davis) growing up during the Second World War navigates life with the help of his imaginary best friend Adolf (Waititi).
Is Fred McFeely Rogers the role that Thomas Jeffrey Hanks was born to play? We'll find out at TIFF in this film from Marielle Heller, who last year directed Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant to Oscar nominations in Can You Ever Forgive Me? But certainly the nicest guy in Hollywood would seem to be a cinch to portray the nicest guy on public television. And it doesn't hurt that last year's award-winning documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor reminded and/or taught legions of filmgoers what a force for good Rogers was.
I'm a sucker for the Michael Winterbottom / Steve Coogan show, as seen in 2005's Tristram Shandy, and then (alongside Rob Brydon) in the road-movie-comedies The Trip, The Trip to Italy and The Trip to Spain. (The Trip to Greece in in the works.) Greed is set on the Greek island of Mykonos, where a birthday party for a fashion-magnate billionaire (Coogan) is upended by the arrival of Syrian refugees. Expect high satire of high finance.
As TIFF opens with a documentary about his life, Robbie Robertson opens up about his past, present and future
TIFF Platform entries include films from Julie Delpy and Toronto's Kazik Radwanski
Ford v Ferrari / And We Go Green
In this based-in-fact story set at the Le Mans auto race of 1966, Matt Damon plays car designer Carroll Shelby. Christian Bale is driver Ken Miles. And the whole thing is under the direction of James Mangold, whose last film, Logan, was a superhero high point, and whose 3:10 to Yuma remains one of the best westerns of this century. But if Ford v Ferrari feels like too much fossil fuel for your liking, then check out the documentary And We Go Green, featuring Hollywood eco-warrior Leonardo DiCaprio in the story of the Formula E circuit, which is like Formula One but all-electric.
Proxima / Lucy in the Sky
One of the high points of last year's TIFF was First Man, the Neil Armstrong story. This year brings two women-in-space tales, albeit fictional. French filmmaker Alice Winocour's Proxima tells of an astronaut (Eva Green) trying to be a good mother while training for a year on the International Space Station. And Noah Hawley's feature debut, Lucy in the Sky, stars Natalie Portman as an astronaut whose return to Earth turns her world upside down as she becomes obsessed with going back to space.
The Toronto International Film Festival runs Sept. 5 through Sept. 15. More information at tiff.net.
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