TIFF poised for crackerjack year
Lineup runs gamut from Oscar hopefuls to blockbusters
The Toronto International Film Festival has revealed the first part of the lineup for its much-anticipated 41st edition, set ultimately to screen nearly 400 films between Sept. 8 and 18.
Though far from a complete slate, the 17 galas and 48 special presentations announced in Toronto Tuesday run the expected gamut from Oscar hopefuls to art films to blockbuster world premieres — leaving TIFF once again poised for a crackerjack year.
Big-money extravaganzas abound, as usual: There’s Peter Berg’s sure-to-be-over-the-top disaster picture Deepwater
Horizon, starring Mark Wahlberg and Kate Hudson; Oliver Stone’s sure-to-be-over-the-top Snowden, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the whistleblowing Edward Snowdon; and there’s Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s sure-to-be-overthe-top sci-fi drama Arrival, starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner.
Torontonians and festival visitors can expect to find the red carpet rolled out the Lightbox doors for all of them — and possibly at Wahlburgers down the street for that first one.
Bookending the schedule is Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent
Seven remake (with Chris Pratt and Denzel Washington) as the opening night premiere, and Kelly Fremon Craig’s Edge of
Seventeen, which will close out the festival.
TIFF has become the de facto kickoff for Hollywood’s awards season in recent years, and the 2016 edition looks to be no different. Prognosticators will be keeping an eye on: American
Pastoral, the adaptation of Philip Roth’s masterful novel directed by and starring Ewan McGregor;
Bleed for This, a biopic of former boxing world-champion Vinny Paz starring best actor hopeful Miles Teller; Rob Reiner’s political drama LBJ, starring Woody Harrelson as a post-JFK assassination Lyndon B Johnson; Loving, a period picture about interracial marriage from Midnight Special director Jeff Nichols; and Birth of a
Nation, Nate Parker’s incendiary slave rebellion film, which was a mega-success at Sundance in January. Also from Sundance arrives
Manchester by the Sea, the hugely acclaimed drama by Kenneth Lonergan, director of 2011’s surprise hit Margaret. Many other films, meanwhile, hit Toronto after well-received premieres in Cannes: Andrea Arnold’s awardwinning American Honey, about teenagers carousing across the U.S.; Paul Verhoeven’s already controversial rape-revenge picture Elle, starring the incomparable Isabelle Huppert; Korean director Park Chan-wook’s divisive The Handmaiden; Jim Jarmusch’s understated
Patterson, with Adam Driver; Oscar-winning Iranian dramatist Asghar Farhadi’s The
Salesman (as in Death of A); and critical favourite Toni Erdmann by the terrific German filmmaker Maren Ade.
There is one notable absence: So far, no sign — perhaps disconcertingly — of Xavier Dolan’s Cannes Grand Prix-winning It’s Only the End of the World.
Rounding out the announcement are Barry, Vikram Gandhi’s biopic of a college-aged Barack Obama; Mick Jackson’s Denial, a courtroom drama about a holocaust denier; Illumination Entertainment’s super-huge animated comedy Sing, from the people who made Minions and The Secret Life of Pets; Michael Fassbender vehicle Trespass Against Us; Salt and Fire,
the latest movie by Werner Herzog, this one about a volcano; and La
La Land, the new musical drama reuniting Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone directed by Whiplash’s Damien Chazelle, which set the Internet quite alight last week with its just-debuted trailer.
Still to come are the titles filling out many of TIFF’s smaller programs, including Wavelengths,
Masters, and Canadian shorts and features. Those names are due to be revealed over the next several weeks.
TIFF has also instituted a new ticketing system — one that allows attendees to print tickets at home or store them on their smartphone for immediate entry, no tedious pickup required — that ought to keep box office volunteers nervous while any bugs are ironed out.
And, more controversially, there will be a new pricing scheme under which tickets for particularly hot gala screenings are “subject to a $2-$7 increase based on demand,” sort of like Uber’s surge rates. Whether that scheme will provoke festival-wide pandemonium remains to be seen.