The ongoing Hollywood strikes may have dimmed the usual glitz that comes with the fall festival circuit—the star-studded red carpets, the applause-filled Q&As, the endless photo shoots—but this year’s Toronto International Film Festival still featured hundreds of new titles from established auteurs and first-time filmmakers alike. Earlier this month, my colleague David Sims and I caught as many of TIFF’s offerings as we could, leaving with plenty of movies to discuss and recommend. Below, David and I have rounded up our favorites from this year’s festival, most of which will be in theaters or streaming before long. — Shirley Li
TIFF
The Royal Hotel (in theaters October 6)
Kitty Green quickly proved herself a master of the slow-burn nightmare with 2019’s The Assistant, a film starring Julia Garner as a young woman forced to tolerate her unseen studio-executive boss’s sexual indiscretions. In her follow-up, Green casts Garner as a young woman backpacking across Australia with her best friend (Jessica Henwick). When the pair take bartending jobs in a male-dominated remote mining town to make some cash, they dress for work, not for play—no skirts, no heels—and even claim to be Canadian to ward off judgment about their American backgrounds. But the line between a gaze and a leer can be terribly thin—and The Royal Hotel shows in taut, tense sequences how being accommodating only works so well as a defense mechanism. — Shirley Li
Anatomy of a Fall (in theaters October 13)
The winner of this year’s Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s French legal drama is amassing buzz as one of the fall’s clear art-house breakouts. The plot is straight out of a ’90s paperback best seller—a novelist (played by Sandra Hüller) is arrested for murder after her husband dies in a fall at their mountain home, and must fight to prove her innocence during a long and complex trial. But Triet’s film delves beyond the (thrillingly showy) French legal system and into the intricacies of a troubled marriage, asking the audience to consider whether every subtle sign of decay in a partnership should amount to motive. The film works largely because Hüller, a German actress probably best known for her role in Toni Erdmann, gives an extraordinary performance already being tipped for Oscar success. — David Sims
The Burial (in select theaters October 6, streaming on Prime Video October 13)
A legal drama about a man trying to save his business from a greedy investor may sound dreadfully serious, but this Maggie Betts–directed film—based on a 1999 New Yorker story—is a crowd-pleaser, full of well-drawn characters, show-stopping monologues, and a wonderfully energetic performance from Jamie Foxx. The actor stars as the boisterous personal-injury lawyer Willie E. Gary, who improbably joins forces with Jerry O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones), his first white client—a funeral-home director being bankrupted by a heartless corporation taking advantage of low-income communities. But The Burial isn’t just a skin-deep look at an unusual partnership; it also observes the way a courtroom distills people into tidy narratives according to attributes such as their race, class, and gender, producing a microcosm of society’s most basic impulses. — S.L.
TIFF
The Pigeon Tunnel (streaming on Apple TV+ October 20)
The documentarian Errol Morris is famous for using the “Interrotron,” a device for interviewing his subjects that allows him to look them in the eye as he explores their life stories. He’s used it on notably controversial figures such as Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld, and Steve Bannon, but in The Pigeon Tunnel he tries to capture the essence of a much more celebrated personality: John le Carré. In what was le Carré’s final major interview before his death in 2020, the British novelist and former spy talks Morris through his childhood, his complicated relationship with his con-man father, and his life in the world of clandestine intelligence. Through it all is the tension of whether one can truly know le Carré, a man who first made a living hiding his true self, and then another living as a writer delving into it. Morris captures that paradox, and the author’s effortless intelligence and charm, quite perfectly. — D.S.
The Holdovers (in theaters October 27)
After the muddled (if fascinating) Downsizing, Alexander Payne has tapped a familiar face for this return to form: a curmudgeonly Paul Giamatti, who last worked with the director on his Oscar-winning hit Sideways. In that film, Giamatti was a wine snob; here, he’s a classical-history teacher at a stuffy Massachusetts boarding school in the early ’70s, pressed into service as a caretaker for the few kids staying over during Christmas break. The Holdovers kicks off with all the grumpy cynicism of Payne’s past classics such as Election and Nebraska, but there’s a touch of holiday sweetness as it explores the deepening bonds between Giamatti’s character, a rebellious young student (Dominic Sessa), and a chef in mourning (the tremendous Da’Vine Joy Randolph). — D.S.
Nyad (in theaters October 20, streaming on Netflix November 3)
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are well regarded as documentary filmmakers, with work such as the Oscar-winning Free Solo and the Thai cave-diver film The Rescue earning great acclaim. Nyad is their first narrative feature, but it’s a close cousin of their prior films, as it also delves into the strange passions and the involved process behind an extreme athlete—in this case, the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad (played by Annette Bening). An accomplished athlete in the ’70s, Nyad resurfaced in the 2010s and declared that she would attempt a never-before-done free swim from Cuba to Florida. The film is a fairly standard triumph-over-adversity true story powered by strong work from Bening and Jodie Foster as her coach, Bonnie Stoll, but the exacting technical details of Nyad’s process are its most fascinating elements. — D.S.
TIFF
Dream Scenario (in theaters November 10)
The premise of Kristoffer Borgli’s dark and surreal dramedy is a zany bit of speculation: What if, out of nowhere, people around the world started dreaming of the same person, someone they’d never met before? That starts happening with milquetoast professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage), who begins popping up in people’s subconscious for no discernible reason, and becomes a strange celebrity. Cage, balding and sporting a bushy beard, plays the character’s growing egotism and mania wonderfully as the script spins into ridiculous directions; eventually, Borgli loses some grip on whatever metaphor for fame he’s exploring, but there are some hilarious (and terrifying) swerves along the way. — D.S.
Fallen Leaves (in theaters November 17)
The most consistent filmmaker working today might be Aki Kaurismäki, the Finnish master who produces a soft-spoken and mordant comedy every six years or so and never, ever misses the mark. Even by his high standards, Fallen Leaves—an 81-minute yarn about a halting but tender romance between a lonely supermarket stocker (Alma Pöysti) and an alcoholic contractor (Jussi Vatanen)—is close to perfect. As both scratch out fairly meager existences in Helsinki’s working class, they’re troubled by news of Russia’s nearby war against Ukraine and besieged by uncaring bosses. But Kaurismäki delights in depicting how they forge a connection, lobbing pithy line after pithy line along the way. — D.S.
Rustin (in theaters November 3, streaming on Netflix November 17)
Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, Rustin is a biographical drama about the civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin (played by Colman Domingo), an architect of 1963’s March on Washington who worked closely with leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph. George C. Wolfe’s film stresses Rustin’s status as a brilliant outsider, often ostracized even within the civil-rights community for his homosexuality and his past membership in the Communist Party. Domingo’s outsize performance gets across how he survived and succeeded through charm and sheer force of will. The film is most interesting when it examines the staging of the march, and the internecine politicking that went on behind the scenes, even as the script (co-written by Milk’s Dustin Lance Black) often veers into more typical biopic formula. — D.S.
American Fiction (in select theaters November 3, everywhere November 17)
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (a witty, wondrous Jeffrey Wright) is an English professor and an author, and, yes, he’s Black—but must all of his work be classified as Black writing? Frustrated that only stereotypical characters and narratives find success with mainstream readers, Monk comes up with an obnoxious parody of such novels, only for his work to become a hit. Based on Percival Everett’s book Erasure, the Watchmen writer Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut dissects Monk’s psyche with a surprisingly light touch, turning his grift into an intimate character study that explores his love life and family (including siblings played by Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown). Smart, meaty, and funnier than expected for a film juggling weighty relationship drama with the philosophical conundrums running through Monk’s head, American Fiction is a dramedy with a refreshing point of view. — S.L.
TIFF
The Boy and the Heron (in theaters December 8)
The masterful Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki has been supposedly approaching retirement since the mid-’90s; each of his films from Princess Mononoke on has been rumored to be his swan song. With The Boy and the Heron (originally titled How Do You Live?), the 82-year-old has made a transfixing statement on the perils of guarding one’s legacy too closely, and the necessity of letting younger generations conjure up new worlds on their own. The Boy and the Heron begins as a direct enough fable, following a 12-year-old who loses his mother during World War II and is then moved to the countryside when his father marries his mother’s younger sister. There, he encounters a mythical bird-creature and a forbidden tower containing a dimension beyond our own, but that’s merely scratching the surface of the wild dream logic that unfolds. The Boy and the Heron may or may not be Miyazaki’s final movie, but either way, it’s a staggering addition to one of animation’s most totemic filmographies. — D.S.
The Zone of Interest (in select theaters December 8)
Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer’s latest film, which tracks a family living just outside Auschwitz, casts an unsettling chill that’s hard to shake. All day, every day, the concentration camp’s commandant, Rudolf Höss (a real-life figure, played by Christian Friedel); his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller); and their children can hear screaming, but they go about their lives with blissful thoughtlessness. Based loosely on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, Glazer’s film would be a completely nauseating watch if not for the way the writer-director keeps the audience at a distance. He isn’t trying to humanize the Nazis or retell the terrors of Auschwitz; instead, he delivers a mesmerizing, almost anthropological study of how evil can manifest in mundane ways, through ordinary people. — S.L.
La Chimera (TBA)
There’s nothing quite like La Chimera—which is typical of the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who is fond of adding dashes of magic to tales that explore her country’s past. On paper, her latest effort sounds absurd beyond belief: It’s a film about a vaudevillian Italian troupe that robs ancient Etruscan tombs by using a vaguely mystic human dowsing rod (played by Josh O’Connor). The movie uses O’Connor, known for his stuffy work as Prince Charles in The Crown, wonderfully against type as an oddball in a group of outsiders who’s mysteriously connected to ancient times. In case that wasn’t enough, the film also features Isabella Rossellini as a swoony Italian grandma. — D.S.
Origin (TBA)
Ava DuVernay’s first film since 2018’s bizarre adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time attempts something even more ambitious, dramatizing Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents—a work of cultural anthropology that examines America’s history of racism through historical systems of caste, such as Nazi Germany and India’s stratified society. Origin plumbs all of that, but it also retells Wilkerson’s personal narrative, with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor playing the author as she faces personal tragedy and professional skepticism on the way to publishing her book. The overall result is possibly too muddled to function as a successful piece of dramatic storytelling, but too much inventiveness is on display to easily dismiss. — D.S.
TIFF
Woman of the Hour (TBA)
In a festival packed with directorial debuts from actors turned filmmakers, Anna Kendrick’s effort stands out for its gutsiness. Though the movie tells the story of the real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala (played by Daniel Zovatto), Woman of the Hour is not just a true-crime drama. It’s a study of how violence can loom at the margins of courtship—and how dangerous rejecting advances can be for women. Kendrick juxtaposes scenes of Alcala killing victims throughout the 1970s with sequences from the day he infamously appeared on the blind-matchmaking game show The Dating Game and wooed the contestant Cheryl Bradshaw (played by Kendrick herself). With so much screen time devoted to Alcala baiting, stalking, and hurting women, the movie can be punishing to watch; I certainly struggled to sit through my screening. Still, Kendrick proves herself a skillful director, with a knack for building suspense. — S.L.
Hit Man (TBA)
Leave it to Richard Linklater, the director behind Dazed and Confused and the Before trilogy, to pull off what’s perhaps TIFF’s most tonally versatile film. Hit Man tells the story of Gary Johnson (played by Glen Powell), a bland college professor who works part-time as a tech consultant for the local police department. When the precinct’s usual assassin impersonator—yes, such a thing exists—is sidelined during a sting, Gary steps in and proves himself a surprisingly dashing replacement. The movie is based on a Texas Monthly article, but Linklater has taken plenty of welcome liberties with the material, turning Gary’s tale into a delightfully mischievous romance-noir about the appeal of pretending to be someone else, if only for a while. The police scenes are just light enough to be funny, the screwball sequences are just dark enough to keep you on the edge of your seat, and Powell, along with a playful Adria Arjona as one of Gary’s marks, is obviously elated to be handling such twisty material. — S.L.
Sing Sing (TBA)
Few creative outlets exist for people in prison, but the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program isn’t just an extracurricular activity; for some inmates, it’s a lifeline. In Sing Sing, Colman Domingo delivers a soulful—but, crucially, never showy—performance as Divine G, a real-life former program participant who was incarcerated for murder but has long maintained his innocence. He’s surrounded by a skilled cast of actors, most of whom are real alumni of the RTA; together, they engage in acting exercises and brainstorms as they build their next show. The film can sometimes feel like an earnest documentary as a result, but Bryce Dessner’s score and Domingo’s deeply felt work help anchor Sing Sing as a lyrical depiction of a unique way of life. — S.L.
Sorry/Not Sorry (TBA)
How should we treat public figures who have abused their power? Sorry/Not Sorry, a documentary about the comedian Louis C.K.—who, in 2017, admitted to a pattern of sexual misconduct toward female comics—and his subsequent return to the stage never fully answers this question. But the film, directed by Caroline Suh and Cara Mones and produced by The New York Times, considers this through interviews with female comics who spoke up about C.K., as well as male colleagues who wrestle with how they responded to C.K.’s “open secret.” Though a movie with C.K.’s involvement would probably have been more illuminating, Sorry/Not Sorry remains a fascinating documentary as it breaks down, scene by scene, how easily misbehavior can be twisted into a punch line. — S.L.
TIFF
The Beast (TBA)
One of the oddest and most compelling films I encountered at TIFF this year was Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, the rare drama that actually bears comparison to surreal masterworks such as David Lynch’s Inland Empire. A three-part story that zaps from our present into the distant future and back to the turn of the 20th century, each strand of The Beast centers on a woman (Léa Seydoux) and a man (George MacKay) having a chance encounter and sensing some distant familiarity. Bonello uses these encounters to pose questions about love, desire, and more terrifying masculine urges, depicting moments of pure tenderness and tense, unsettling threat. — D.S.
Backspot (TBA)
The phrase cheerleading movie probably brings to mind montages of showstopping flips, energetic routines, and bitter rivalries between squads. But Backspot is not Bring It On. Rather, it’s an intense study of a perfectionist athlete whose enthusiasm and drive can work against her. It’s a film about mental gymnastics, in other words. Directed by the DJ turned first-time filmmaker D. W. Waterson, the story stars Reservation Dogs’ Devery Jacobs as Riley, a teenager whose joy and anxiety are wrapped up in her extracurricular activity; she’s dating her fellow cheerleader, Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo), and she sees her steely new coach, Eileen (Evan Rachel Wood), as akin to a demigod. Competition, then, both excites and scares her, and the film’s greatest strength is how it conveys that turmoil. Riley’s entire identity is cheerleading. Being so passionate about something is beautiful, the film posits, and brutal too. — S.L.
Concrete Utopia (TBA)
An earthquake destroys Seoul at the beginning of Concrete Utopia, but it would be a mistake to call South Korea’s Oscar entry a mere disaster movie. The film, directed and co-written by Um Tae-hwa, blends spectacle with social satire as it follows the people inside the only apartment complex still standing. What begins as a sanctuary for the city’s survivors rapidly turns into hell on Earth: Those who lived in the structure before the apocalypse clash with the desperate newcomers, corruption plagues their attempts to self-govern, and supplies rapidly dwindle as winter stretches on. Concrete Utopia traces familiar themes of class warfare—think Snowpiercer in a building—but sets itself apart with impressive production design, inventive set pieces, and an ensemble of memorable characters, including Yeong-tak (played by Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun), a man whose unyielding vigilance when it comes to protecting his home becomes calamitous. — S.L.
His Three Daughters (TBA)
Indie filmmaking is robust with stories about dysfunctional families, but His Three Daughters does more than just mine difficult dynamics for tension. Starring Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne as three stepsisters reuniting to care for their ailing father, the film is at once bitingly funny and disarmingly honest about how siblings treat one another under pressure. The writer-director Azazel Jacobs’s assured, dialogue-heavy script keeps the melodrama to a minimum, focusing instead on the ways in which each sister reacts to her situation. Moving but never maudlin, His Three Daughters is a film packed with delicate moments and realistic conversations, bolstered by a uniformly excellent cast. — S.L.