A Star is Born, First Man headed to Toronto festival
The stars will shine bright at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Audiences at the 43rd annual filmfest, which runs Sept. 6-16, will be among the first to see Bradley Cooper’s remake of A Star is Born, which co-stars Lady Gaga, and Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle’s space race drama First Man, starring Ryan Gosling.
Both of these films will make their premières at the Venice Film Festival before heading to Toronto.
A Star is Born and First Man were announced as part of TIFF’s gala selections and expect to see Cooper, Gaga and Gosling all walk the red carpet. If First Man producer Steven Spielberg turns up, it’ll mark his festival debut.
“The sweeping range in cinematic storytelling from around the world is a testament to the uniqueness of the films that are being made,” said Piers Handling, CEO and director of TIFF.
Other films slated to unspool include Steve McQueen’s heist thriller Widows, with Viola Davis, Colin Farrell and Liam Neeson; Montreal native Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner, starring Hugh Jackman as disgraced U.S. presidential candidate Gary Hart; and Robert Redford’s supposed last movie, The Old Man & the Gun.
Stories that focus on substance abuse will also figure into the lineup. In Ben is Back, Julia Roberts plays a mother whose troubled son (Manchester by the Sea’s Lucas Hedges) comes home for the holidays. Meanwhile, Timothée Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name) will return to TIFF playing a struggling drug addict in Beautiful Boy, with Steve Carell co-starring as his dad.
Netflix and Amazon will also have a presence this year. In addition to Beautiful Boy, Amazon will unveil Life Itself, from This is Us creator Dan Fogelman (and not to be confused with the samenamed 2014 documentary on Roger Ebert), while Netflix will bring Alfonso Cuaron’s autobiographically inspired Roma, as well as The Land of Steady Habits, with Ben Mendelsohn as a man suffering a late-life crisis.
Elsewhere, Montreal filmmaker Kim Nguyen’s The Hummingbird Project, about high-frequency trading in the ’90s, stars Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård and Salma Hayek.
Kingston, Ont.’s Patricia Rozema opens the special presentations program with Mouthpiece.
Finally, after an eight-year bigscreen absence, Emilio Estevez joins Alec Baldwin, Christian Slater and Gabrielle Union for The Public.