By Original-Cin Staff

Even with a vastly reduced lineup, TIFF 2020 still offers an impressive array of features, shorts, and documentaries from across Canada and around the world. Now as always, though, there are only so many hours in a day, even if this year’s hybrid digital/drive-in model cuts down on the time-consuming commute-then-queue pattern of accessing screenings in Festivals’ past. Here, Original-Cin writers submit the top three films they are most excited to see. Really, just because we can.

Jim Slotek

Ammonite: Kate Winslet plays the 19th century paleontologist Mary Anning. Saoirse Ronan plays the woman in her life. (A) I love paleontology. (B) Ronan is like Meryl, anything she does will be part of the Oscar conversation.

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds: Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer previously collaborated on the volcano doc Into the Inferno. Here, they turn skyward to meteors and comets. I would pay to hear Herzog rhapsodize about anything, let alone the cosmos itself.

The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel: The people who brought 2003’s hit documentary The Corporation — which laid bare the pathological sociopathy of corporate behavior — have 17 years of malfeasance, social disaster, and corporate fuckery to catch up on. Have at it.

Linda Barnard

Concrete Cowboy: Idris Elba rides tall in the saddle with Ricky Staub’s father-son drama with a twist: it’s centred on Philadelphia’s storied Black urban cowboys. An intriguing look at a how the mythology of the Old West comes to Black culture as a father (Elba) and struggling son (Caleb McLaughlin of Stranger Things) try to mend a relationship.

Falling: Viggo Mortensen has shown his onscreen heft in varied roles. He makes his directing debut with Falling. He also wrote the script and stars as a gay son opposite a ferocious Lance Henriksen as his homophobic father in a story that feels even more immediate under COVID, when family members not intended to live together are forced into new and emotionally challenging situations.

Nomadland: Chloé Zhao’s third film sounds like a modern-day The Grapes of Wrath and reads like a similar indictment of society where people go from doing OK to destitute through no fault of their own. Fact-based and with Frances McDormand as a penniless 60-something woman whose van replaces the Joads’ jalopy as she heads west to find work where she can, finding others who are in the same leaky boat in this relatable tale.

Thom Ernst

David Byrne’s American Utopia: Believe me, I tried not to put this on my list. I wanted to be original and not so on the mark, but damn, this looks good. David Byrne’s musical interpretation of current America filtered through Spike Lee’s lens. How can that not be worth seeing?

I Care A Lot: This one is tagged as a “droll thriller”. I’m not sure what that means, but the idea of casting Peter Dinklage as a menacing mobster is enough to get me in the theatre (in a manner of speaking). Also, the film seems to have two villains, one who preys on the elderly (Rosamund Pike) and then there’s Dinklage.

Get the Hell Out: How can I not include at least one Midnight Madness film? The excitement for this one begins with its straight-out-of-the-gate title. This promises to be a mad ride of martial-arts violence and pandemic horror. It’s about politicans affected by a virus that turns them into insane, blood-thirsty zombies. And here’s the twist: It’s fiction!

Karen Gordon

Nomadland: I’ve been waiting to see writer/director Chloe Zhao’s follow up to the small, beautifully wrought, deeply affecting 2015 film The Rider, which had a cast of non-professional actors. This time she’s working with pros and two of the best — Frances McDormand and David Strathairn — on another movie about a small slice of Americana.

Another Round: Danish director Thomas Vinterberg makes subtle, quiet movies about relationships that get complicated. Another Round reteams him with the superb actor Mads Mikkelsen, their first collaboration since 2012’s excellent The Hunt.

One Night in Miami…: The incredibly talented Regina King is on a roll. She makes the leap from TV director to a feature film director with a story of four future Black American icons meeting up in the vibrant mid 1960s to talk about their role in the American civil rights movement.

Kim Hughes

Nomadland: Chloé Zhao’s follow-up to the arrestingly lovely The Rider takes a real-life, contemporary phenomenon—economically disenfranchised Americans drifting from place to place in live-in trailers seeking work, as documented by Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book — and builds a fictional story around a character played by Frances McDormand. Visually and thematically beguiling, guaranteed.

Another Round: Danish superstar Mads Mikkelsen reunites with countryman director Thomas Vinterberg — who last collaborated in 2012’s The Hunt — for this darkly comedic look at male bonding, aging, and how alcohol enhances and devastates both.

Falling: Almost everything Viggo Mortensen touches ends up impressing, mesmerizing or flattening me; hopes are high for his feature directorial debut which also stars Mortensen as a gay man dealing with his curmudgeonly, homophobic father’s slide into dementia. Co-stars Lance Henriksen and Laura Linney augur well for excellence.

Liam Lacey

The Best Is Yet To Come: This Beijing-based film, produced by China’s most important director, Jia Zhang-ke, is based on a true story about a crusading journalist dealing with discrimination and misinformation about a viral disease in China in 2003.

City Hall. Frederick Wiseman is a great documentary filmmaker who sticks to his lane in long, thorough examinations of the institutions that shape society. This one is about Boston’s City Hall.

The Inheritance: Black activism is the driving force of the moment and it would seem a mistake to miss this experimental feature from Ephraim Asili, re-enacting his experiences in a socialist collective with archival images of the collective, MOVE, destroyed by a Philadelphia police bomb in 1985.

Bonnie Laufer

One Night in Miami…: This is the film I am MOST looking forward to. Why? Two words. Regina King. This is King’s feature film directorial and there is no doubt it will be brilliant. Based on Kemp Powers’ play, it is a fictionalized account of a 1964 meeting between Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown. Who wouldn’t want to watch THAT?

Bruised: I am not a huge boxing fan but I am excited to see what Oscar winner Halle Berry does behind the camera with this directorial debut. The film follows a former MMA fighter struggling to regain custody of her son and restart her athletic career.

Falling: Let’s go three for three on directorial debuts. Viggo Mortenson (a TIFF favorite) will undoubtedly deliver a sensitive and well-crafted film. He not only directs but stars as John, a gay man whose conservative and homophobic father (Lance Henriksen) starts to exhibit symptoms of dementia, forcing him to sell the family farm and move to Los Angeles to live with John and his husband Eric. PLUS, David Cronenberg is in it!

Original-Cin writers will be covering TIFF 2020 as comprehensively as possible, including capsule reviews, press conferences, In Conversation With… and other events. Because of the new logistics of this year’s Festival, owing to the pandemic, we won’t be able to offer daily day-by-day advance previews as we have in the past. However, we will strive to bring the best of the Fest to you guys, our cherished readers, without whom we would be nothing. Don’t think we don’t know it.

Top 3 Films We Most Want to See at TIFF 2020

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