For much of the film industry, the beginning of September means one thing: it’s time to head to Toronto. We’re on the ground once again at the Toronto International Film Festival, better known as TIFF, which has been home to some notable premieres over the years. But this time, we’re covering things a little differently — and it’s going to get pretty busy. This page will be home to all of our thoughts on the many films we’ll be watching, sort of like a running live blog full of small reviews (and a few big ones) of everything we see.
And there’s a lot to check out in 2024. That includes Francis Ford Coppola’s controversial Megalopolis; Mike Flanagan’s latest Stephen King adaptation, The Life of Chuck; Marielle Heller’s oddball comedy / horror flick Nightbitch; the postapocalyptic family film The Wild Robot from Chris Sanders; and whatever the heck Rumours actually is.
The festival runs from now through September 15th, so stay tuned here for all of the latest.
Highlights
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William Tell.
An attempt to turn the story of the Swiss folk hero into a historical epic, which ends up quite bland. There’s a lot of build-up to the moment — you know the one, where Tell (Claes Bang) shoots an apple off his son’s head — but once that’s over so, too, is the film’s momentum. Despite being a movie filled with blood and dirt, it’s all too clean, adhering to a strict formula of daring heroes, cartoonish villains, rousing speeches, and battles that, like the arrow hitting the apple, are never in doubt.
It’s nice to think the G7’s septet of world leaders would be able to commit to a plan of action in response to a mysterious global crisis.
But in Bleecker Street’s surreal black comedy Rumours, German Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett) and her fellow heads of state are too busy losing their minds to get anything done as their summit is besieged by… horny monsters. The ghouls might actually just be protesters — you’re never meant to know for certain.
But you are meant to spot the kernels of reality baked into this batshit story.
U Are The Universe.Space trucker Andriy (Volodymyr Kravchuk) spends his days hauling nuclear waste from Earth to Jupiter’s moon Callisto, enjoying the solitude by listening to records and playing chess with a joke-obsessed robot. But a disaster, possibly a world war, destroys the Earth while he’s flying — making that solitude a lot more permanent.
So when Andriy hears a voice message from somewhere near Saturn, he clings to it with a ferocious intensity. The film laughs its way through tragedy with plenty of dry humor, but ultimately ends on a beautiful and hopeful moment.
Dead Talents Society.In an afterlife where ghosts have to work their asses off to survive by becoming urban legends, all Rookie (Gingle Wang) wants is to haunt her little corner of Taiwan in peace.
But when she starts to fade into nothingness due to being forgotten, she realizes it might be time to get her license and become a proper myth so terrifying that she’s sustained by mortals’ fear. Professional ghosting is a cutthroat industry, though — one Rookie isn’t cut out for.
Think Monsters, Inc. meets All About Eve — it sounds wild, but it absolutely works.
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