The 2024 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival starts today. This is my ninth year attending TIFF and I wouldn’t even say I am a regular at this point. Film camp is heavy this year in Toronto with the likes of Mike Leigh, Steven Soderbergh, Brady Corbet, Sean Baker and many, many other established filmmakers from all over the world.
One thing about TIFF in the last two years that not many have mentioned is that even with the festival taking place in the largest city in Canada, the entire event has centralized around King Street with all of the venues within walking distance of each other. In previous years I had many screenings taking place at the Elgin & Winter Garden venues, along with the Ryerson being the most frustrating one of them all with stiff seats and bad sound. With the venues all close together with the Roy Thomson Hall and Royal Alexandria (once again host to Midnight Madness, which I am attending once again this year), the Princess of Wales a block west, the TIFF Lightbox just one more block away and a few blocks north to the mammoth 14-screen Scotiabank Theatre, this has always been a festival where I can easily move between venues quickly and efficiently.
I always attend a combination of public and Press & Industry screenings, something of which I have no idea I keep up with, but it gives this moviegoer great access into everything the festival has to offer.
The festival opens with NUTCRACKERS, David Gordon Green’s newest movie which stars Ben Stiller as a city slicker forced to look after a quartet of mischievous rural orphans in this fish-out-of-water comedy that speaks to the hidden talents in each of us just waiting for a chance to shine.. This is a movie I fully plan to check out at the festival at some point. Closing the festival is THE DEB, Rebel Wilson’s directorial debut about Rebel Wilson’s directorial debut is a bold, outrageous, and funny Australian musical about two very different teenage cousins who initially clash but eventually join forces to make their mark on their town’s annual debutante ball. The movie had a bit of controversy over its closing status and clashes with producers but Ms. Wilson finally won out.
One picture I have been able to see ahead of the festival is THE SALT PATH which stars Gillian Anderson as Jason Isaacs as a long-married couple who embark on a 700 mile journey across England after Isaac’s character is diagnosed with a rare disease, and also lose their home at the same time. I will save more for when my reaction goes up, but make sure you see this on a huge theatre screen and not a small one.
One welcome inclusion is THE WILD ROBOT, which I think is one of the front-runners for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars for 2025. Animated movies have always had a home at TIFF (Hayao Miyazaki’s THE BOY & THE HERON opened the Festival last year and went on to win the same Oscar, and ABOMINABLE was also here a few years ago for example) and it’s great to also have the opportunity to view an adults only, Press & Industry screening WITHOUT kids running around (sorry, parents)! Whether lightning strikes twice with Oscar gold for this one is anyone’s guess, but either way it is a gorgeous looking movie that I can’t wait to see.
If you had to twist my arm and ask me which movie I am excited to see the most, I would of course tell you about my excitement to attend the Toronto premiere of Brady Corbet’s latest picture, THE BRUTALIST, a movie that should be making more news as it was shot in Vistavision (Boring Tech Notes: That’s 8-perf 35mm, filmed horiztionally. VERITGO was shot this way) and converted to 70mm for screening at TIFF’s heavenly Lightbox venue. Corbet is no stranger to TIFF with his VOX LUX wowing audiences when I first started attending as industry in 2017.
But of course, the awesomeness doesn’t stop there. There’s a huge mix of international and Canadian, foreign and American pictures from big to small. A few movies like MEGALOPOLIS, WE LIVE IN TIME and some other high profile titles will be coming to my home city and will happily review those movies when they come out. With that said, I will be attending the premiere of the highly ancitipated and Oscar-buzzed SUBSTANCE, but that’s also because it comes from filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, who I became a huge fan of . That, and it’s the opening night movie of Peter Kuplowsky’s Midnight Madness program. I want (and need) to be there!
This is just a small sampling of what to expect at TIFF 2024 this year. Watch our site and social media streams for more information and reaction reviews throughout the festival. For more information on screenings, movies and anything I am reviewing (and not reviewing), point your browser to www.tiff.net!
Great job sir