TIFF 2022: The Movies We Most Want to See
By Original-Cin Staff
Daunting yet thrilling. Is there a more succinct way of describing the Toronto International Film Festival with its boundless selection, endless moving parts, and grocery list of world and international premieres?
With hundreds of films spread across multiple programs such as Contemporary World Cinema, Discovery, TIFF Docs, Midnight Madness, Wavelengths, Shortcuts, Platform, Special Presentations and Gala Presentations, there is obviously no shortage of choice.
While everyone has a different strategy for picking the films they most hope to see — proximity to movie stars, director dossier, a chance to experience distant worlds, advance buzz, coin-toss — the chances of seeing something great are phenomenal.
As we’ve stressed in this space before, the best advice is to be bold in your choices. Gala Presentations may dominate media coverage, but those marquee films will typically screen again later. Small, foreign, independent films are the heart of any film festival and discovery should be a priority.
Original-Cin is enormously excited to cover the 47th edition of TIFF, running for 11 days from September 8 through 18. After two years of digital screenings and drive-ins, the festival’s return to bricks-and-mortar cinemas is entirely welcome. As if to underscore that point, films such as the David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream and Korean War–set aviation drama Devotion are being screened exclusively in IMAX. Take that, stupid COVID.
For each day of TIFF, our intrepid writers offer capsule reviews of films we have seen as a guide to help you build a schedule. Interspersed are interviews and other ephemera.
Be sure to check out Jim Slotek’s interview with legendary singer-activist Buffy Sainte-Marie, at the festival with director Madison Thomas’ Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On, one of 79 female-helmed films screening at TIFF (if you believe the “directed by women” filter on the TIFF site).
Also incoming: Bonnie Laufer in conversation with acclaimed director Tyler Perry about A Jazzman’s Blues, based on Perry’s first-ever screenplay.
We kick off the festival with a list of films that, for multiple reasons, each of us is keen to see. Be sure to see how our choices stack up in our TIFF closing piece at the end of the festival, where we tally the good, the bad, and the ridiculous, all for the love of cinema.
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
Jim Slotek
I’m constantly impressed by the audacious choices Daniel Radcliffe has made since Harry Potter (Horns, Kill Your Darlings, Swiss Army Man). Here, he plays the guy who has defined musical spoofery since the ‘80s. It’s also written by Yankovic, which hints that we might not be seeing a memoir with the tightest grip on actual events. So, I’m looking forward to seeing Weird Al spoof himself in this Midnight Madness opener.
Fans of Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri have their own reasons to see his first film since then. For me, the draw is the reunion of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson for the first time since McDonagh’s brilliantly quirky In Bruges (which I’ve seen numerous times and even screened in my backyard). It’s also his first film in his native Ireland, set amid The Troubles in the 1920s.
The strange sensibilities of Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan) bode well for this much-talked-about comeback for Brendan Fraser. Fraser, whose stills from the film have fed social media for months, plays a morbidly obese writing instructor, falling into hermit behaviour and looking to revive a last real human relationship with his estranged teen daughter (Sadie Sink). It could be good-weird or bad-weird, but all eyes are on it.
Moonage Daydream
Thom Ernst
Moonage Daydream looks like the kind of movie David Bowie fans deserve following the weakly received bio-pic Stardust. The advance trailers for director Brett Morgen’s film suggest an epic journey through Bowie's life and career captured in interviews and live concert footage. I'm well beyond my cosplay days but tempted to attend the screening in my best Aladdin Sane costume.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Director Rian Johnson has taken back the murder mystery. He has added his dialect-specific detective genius, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig in a worthy career follow-up to James Bond) and crams the screen with prominent name suspects in this follow-up to Knives Out. Of course, we will have a chance to see Glass Onion when it gets its inevitable wide release in theatres, but why risk accidentally eavesdropping on spoilers?
When reviving careers, director Darren Aronofsky has something of the Tarantino touch. He gave Ellen Burstyn her meatiest role since The Exorcist in Requiem for a Dream, and he made us retake notice of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. Now he seems ready to do the same for Canada's foremost Dudley Doo-Right and Mummy stalker, Brendon Fraser, in The Whale. But even without the cool casting of someone we have all but forgotten, an Aronofsky film is always a mind-bender worth seeing.
No Bears
Karen Gordon
TIFF is where I first discovered Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. One of the most subtle and interesting storytellers I’ve encountered, he’s become one of my favourites. Unfortunately, in late July he was jailed by the Iranian regime, making this movie feel even more poignant and important to me. #FreeJafarPanahi
I’m always up for seeing what’s on Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund’s mind. He’s a sharp social satirist with a canny sense of human nature. Triangle of Sadness premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where it divided audiences sharply and still won the Palme D’or. I predict it will continue to divide, which is, after all, part of the fun.
A mystery thriller in an old hotel. A Victorian gothic movie, perhaps a ghost or ghostly story starring Tilda Swinton, written and directed by Joanna Hogg? Sign me up.
Daughter of Rage
Kim Hughes
This apparently “luscious and textured” remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru finds a 1950s-era British bureaucrat questioning his life choices after receiving a terminal diagnosis. The original film is beautiful and this adaptation — scripted by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro no less, and starring the reliably great Bill Nighy — sounds superb, heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure. Plus, the great Sandy Powell designed the costumes.
The first feature film from Nicaragua directed by a woman (!) follows an indigent child and her mother as they attempt to eke out a living in the shadow of Managua’s biggest landfill site. These kinds of stories are seldom told but are invariably worth hearing and director Laura Baumeister, who is also a sociologist, is certain to bring great insight and humanity to her debut feature.
As my esteemed colleague Jim Slotek noted, this one could go either way. I’m betting that director Darren Aronofsky will do here for Brendan Fraser what Quentin Tarantino did for John Travolta with Pulp Fiction: bring him back from the weeds and propel him forward. That said, fat roles can be fraught, as anyone who saw the detestable Shallow Hal can attest.
The Greatest Beer Run Ever
John Kirk
When the Mars Rover Opportunity landed on Mars, it was designed for a 90-day mission. That mission surpassed all expectations and turned into a 15-year odyssey that transformed Oppy (as the rover became affectionately known) from a mere robot into a well-loved member of the families of the engineers and scientists at NASA’s mission control. As Oppy navigates his way over the harsh Martian terrain, collecting information and sending it back over 34 million miles to Earth, I have strong hopes that the audience will feel more than scientific wonder at this incredible story of exploration. I hope they feel like they are a part of the dreams and hopes that drive the curiosity about space. I think anyone who is fascinated by the Apollo launches in the 70s and the space shuttle flights in the decades afterwards is going to marvel at this film. I know I will.
With Peter Farrelly’s success with Green Book (TIFF People’s Choice in 2018 and three Oscars) heralding the arrival of this film at TIFF, I’m very much looking forward to a Vietnam war story rich in political and social commentary… and with beer thrown into the mix. Based on a true story, John “Chickie” Donohue (Zac Efron) drunkenly agrees to a challenge to make a beer run to friends serving in 1967 Vietnam. Accompanied by veteran photographer Arthur Coates (Russell Crowe), Chickie learns about friendship and sacrifice while trying to make good on his bet to sneak into a war zone. This film offers a blend of wartime humour and humanism.
If there’s anything I’m up for, it’s a madcap, zany animated story with elements of the supernatural and dark comedy all woven together in what strangely promises to be a feel-good story that parents will have to definitely explain to their children, should there be children in the audience for this one. Featuring the voice talents of Jordan Peele, Keegan-Michael Key, Angela Bassett and — one of my favourite performers, Ving Rhames — there’s a lot this film promises. Throw in the filmmaking talents of BAFTA winner Henry Selick (Coraline, The Nightmare Before Christmas) and that promise is a good as kept.
R.M.N.
Liam Lacey
Romanian director Christian Mungiu, whose breakthrough was 2007’s abortion drama, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, brings a clear-eyed, artful perspective to the madness of political bigotry, a subject that has become increasingly urgent. I’m excited to see his R.M.N (a Romanian acronym for a brain scan or MRI) which follows a Roma worker who returns from Germany to his multiethnic Transylvanian village. A local bakery needs an EU grant to stay open, but a condition of the funding is the hiring foreign workers. That leads to an outburst of xenophobic outrage from the community. Critics at Cannes pointed to a 17-minute uncut scene of a raucous town meeting as the “showstopper” of the film.
For many cinephiles, Robert Bresson holds the position of patron saint, and his most revered film is his 1996 film Au Hasard Balthazar, the study of a life of a donkey, a symbol of Christ-like endurance. Now in his sixth decade as a director, the 84-year-old iconoclastic Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski (The Shout, Essential Killing) has reimagined the themes of Bresson’s work in EO (as in “hee-haw”), a film described by critic Jonathan Romney as a “flamboyant, visionary work,” presented as a series of vignettes on a donkey’s life in a tidy 86-minute package.
As Dennis Lim wrote in The New Yorker earlier this year, South Korean director Hong Sangsoo has become a cult favorite for “coaxing compelling moral dramas from prosaic scenarios.” In other words, his films do not belong to the Marvel Universe or, for that matter, the extreme films of his Korean contemporaries. His formally intricate dramas featuring flawed characters in socially awkward situations are both light and deep. In his latest, Walk Up, a middle-aged film director and his daughter — whom he has not seen in years — visit a four-story building owned by an interior designer, because the daughter is interested in a career in interior design. After drinks, the three of them go into the rooms on each floor, one at a time. I have a feeling we could all use more Hong Sangsoo in our lives.
The Good Nurse
Bonnie Laufer
It blows my mind that Steven Spielberg has never attended or featured one of his films at TIFF. I am beyond excited for his latest offering, which is loosely based on the famed director's life growing up in Arizona. How can this film, written by Tony Award–winner Tony Kushner and directed by Spielberg, be anything but brilliant? Plus, its all-star cast includes Michelle Williams, Seth Rogan, and Paul Dano. This has Oscar written all over it. If The Fabelmans moves me even half as much as Schindler's List did, I'm all in for the three-hour watch time.
Two words: Eddie Redmayne, who I’d watch reading a phone book (do they still have phone books?). Redmayne has proven time and again that he can tackle any role. From Les Miserable to winning the Oscar for portraying Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, Redmayne can do no wrong in my eyes. I can’t wait to see his chilling take on serial killer Charles Cullen, who murdered as many as 300 patients during his 16-year career as a nurse. There could be another award right around the corner.
As a die-hard Weird Al Yankovic fan, I was stoked that a movie was being made about his life. I was even more stoked when I found out that Daniel Radcliffe (of Harry Potter fame) is playing him. With Weird Al completely on board with this project, you just know that this movie will not only be weird, wacky and jam-packed with his brilliant musical parodies but it also feature Radcliffe tackling the accordion. Now THAT’S talent!