TO WATCH AT TIFF

By now, a mere two days after the Toronto International Film Festival opened with Outlaw King, most critics will have seen a score or more of films, whether through pre-festival screenings, online links or at other events. (More than a dozen offerings from Cannes are at TIFF this year.) We are sometimes beholden to secrecy until the first public screening, but here are four I can recommend, and six more I’m excited to see with the rest of the crowds. Palme d’Or nominee and winner of the international critics’ prize at Cannes, Korean director Changdong Lee’s newest is a nail-biting thriller. A young man agrees to look after a cat for an old acquaintance, and starts falling for her. But a new man in her life raises complications and then questions. This was my favourite at the French festival.

THE WILD PEAR TREE Another Palme d’Or contender, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest clocks in at three hours and eight minutes, with a novella’s worth of subtitles. If that doesn’t scare you away, dive in and enjoy this fascinating, unpredictable story of a young man trying to make a go of being a writer.

FREE SOLO

This is not a lost Star Wars film. Directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the team behind the 2015 mountain-climbing documentary Meru, follow Alex Honnold as he attempts to become the first person to climb El Capitan, a 3,000-foot sheer granite cliff, with no safety gear. Don’t forget to breathe.

ENDZEIT

Translated as Ever After, this German zombie film imagines two scrappy female survivors caught outside the barricades that protect the last remnants of civilization. But what they find in the wilds isn’t just flesh-eating killers. There’s a gentle ecological underpinning to this admittedly violent horror story.

FIRST MAN

How has astronaut Neil Armstrong not had the big-budget biopic treatment until now? Not sure, but reactions from the recent world premiere in Venice suggest this film, from director Damien Chazelle and his La La Land star Ryan Gosling, has been worth the wait.

MEETING GORBACHEV Call this one last man; as the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev occupies a unique place in history. So, too, it could be argued does filmmaker Werner Herzog, the only man to have been shot with an air rifle during an interview and remarked: “It’s not significant.” Watching the latter interview the former? Count me in.

PETERLOO

Mike Leigh (Mr. Turner, Another Year) seems to be taking a page from the socially conscious style of his contemporary Ken Loach with this story of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which British soldiers attacked a pro-democracy rally in Manchester, killing 15 and injuring hundreds.

WIDOWS

Director Steve McQueen’s fantastic features have explored an Irish hunger striker (Hunger), a sex addict (Shame) and slavery in America (12 Years a Slave). His newest is a heist thriller, based on an ’80s crime drama and starring Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Colin Farrell and Liam Neeson. What more do you need?

ROMA

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón has shot classic literature (1998’s Great Expectations), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and two great science-fiction stories in Children of Men and Gravity. His newest is considerably more down-to-Earth; a very personal story about a year in the life of a middle-class family in 1970s Mexico City. Like many great directors, Cuarón seems invigorated by new subjects. This should be good.

HIGH LIFE

I admit to a weakness for smart science-fiction; if this list went to 11 it would include ANIARA, a Swedish movie about a passenger liner to Mars that gets lost in deep space. So French filmmaker Claire Denis’s English-language debut, starring Robert Pattinson as the caretaker on a ship hurtling toward a black hole, seems intriguing, to say the least.