TIFF 2024 Report I

When you go to an event like the Toronto International Film Festival and just pound movies one after the other – I’ll have seen 17 in my first four days here – strange concordances make themselves known. A movie about a stripper followed by a movie about a showgirl. Two inspirational true-life sports movies, each trying to breathe new life into an old form. A Nick Drake cover song in the final scene of one screening, followed by a different Nick Drake cover song in an early scene of the next. And so on. After about seven days, the movies usually start melting into each other and it’s time to go home. But for now I’m still able to distinguish film from reality, so here are quick takes on 11 of the TIFF offerings I’ve seen so far, with information on their release dates where available.

But first, here's "Hard Truths" director and living legend Mike Leigh on pre-screening speech etiquette:

 “Anora” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) – This year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes is a hot ticket in Toronto, and for good reason: Sean Baker (“The Florida Project,” “Red Rocket”) is the rare American filmmaker able to portray the American underclass without condescension or patronizing but simple observational empathy. He also understands how sex work is both the oldest business profession and an integral cog in a system of capitalist patriarchy that needs women like Mikey Madison’s title character – a Noo Yawk stripper who falls in love with the son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn) – to function. Like many movies at this year’s TIFF, it’s overlong, with 10 to 15 minutes that could have been cut out of its second half, but it’s also so funny, so astute about human interaction, so coolly clear-eyed about the hypocrisies surrounding sex work, that it’s irresistible (as is Madison). “Anora” also has the grace to turn into an unexpectedly moving love story – just not the one you thought it was going to be at the start. (In theaters October 18.)

 “The Apprentice” (⭐ ⭐ 1/2) – Or: The Sorrows of Young Donald. Ali Abbasi’s bio-drama of Trump’s early days became immediately controversial at Cannes and wasn’t even supposed to be at Toronto, but after its recent pickup by distributor Briarcliff Entertainment, it appeared in town for a handful of sub rosa screenings, one of which I was lucky to attend. The movie details Trump’s rise in the 1970s and 1980s from an insecure Queens kid with a vision to a steamrolling bully and marital rapist under the tutelage of attorney and living embodiment of Satan Roy Cohn. Sebastian Stan uncannily captures the movements, gestures and speech patterns of The Former Guy, and Jeremy Strong is creepy as hell as Cohn. New York City in the gritty 70s is captured nicely – props for the Suicide song! But what’s missing from the movie is any dramatic tension to hold it together and push it forward. The only storyline is that the man became the monster he seemed destined to be; for any sense of tragedy, there’d have to be at least a glimmer of self-knowledge, and we all know that would dissolve Trump into a puddle like the Wicked Witch of the West. In a Q&A after the screening – in which more than one audience member commented that the film wasn’t hard enough on Trump – Abbasi said he wanted to make a character study rather than “a political movie,” which strikes me as disingenuous, naïve, or both. There's no way any movie about Donald Trump can’t not be political. (In theaters October 11.)

“Cloud” (⭐ 1/2) – The only movie I’ve seen at TIFF this year to leave me absolutely cold. An absurdist drama-action-comedy about an unscrupulous young eBay reseller (Masaki Suda) who becomes the quarry of a violent mob, it plays like a high-minded deconstruction of a low-down genre movie – an esoteric exercise that never connects. A Kafkaesque doodle that devolves into an endless, tedious warehouse shootout, it’s the kind of thing that makes one wonder where director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) got his reputation. (Seeking US distribution.)

“Conclave” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐) – Grade-A hokum that might as well have been titled “Twelve Angry Priests.” The old Pope dies, and the conclave of cardinals is called to the Vatican to elect a new one in Edward Berger’s old-fashioned barn burner of a mystery-suspense drama, adapted from a Robert Harris novel. Ralph Fiennes plays the principled ecclesiastic overseeing the voting, contending with the ambitions of candidates played by Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and others, all of them underplaying to the cheap seats as only classically trained hams can. It’s a big old Dad Book of a movie, with a script by Peter Straughan that must have been run through the Sorkinator and a twist at the end that marks one of my few legitimate film festival spit-takes. Dumb middlebrow fun, with enough glib parallels to the current US political scene to fool more than a few Academy voters, I'm betting. With Isabella Rossellini as a nun. (In theaters November 1.)

“The Fire Inside” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐) – The Claressa Shields Story, or how a girl from the most prostrate neighborhoods of a prostrate city – Flint, Michigan – became the first US woman boxer to take Olympic gold and the only US Olympic boxer to win back-to-back gold medals. Where most inspirational sports movies climax with the win, this debut from cinematographer-turned-director Rachel Morrison hits that high two-thirds in and spends the remaining time dramatizing the post-Games letdown. It has a fine Barry Jenkins ("Moonlight") script, a solid lead performance from Ryan Destiny, and a smattering of early Oscar talk for Brian Tyree Henry as Shield’s coach. (In theaters December 25.)

Here's a snippet of the post-screening Q&A in which Destiny talks about her training regimen while standing next to the woman she was training to play.

 “Hard Truths” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) – Mike Leigh is back in the modern-day bed-sits of England after some time exploring the period epic. Marianne Jean-Baptiste is brilliant as a woman whose vitriolic anger toward the world – expressed as a constant (and hilariously inventive) sense of complaint – masks a profound sadness whose wellsprings remain a mystery. A rich portrait of London’s middle-class Black community, with warm supporting performances and a gorgeous string score. Longtime fans of the director may notice that Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy is almost the diametric opposite of Sally Hawkins’ Poppy in Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” (2008) – one flower wilts while the other blooms. (No release date set as yet; probably end of 2024.)

 “The Last Showgirl” (⭐ ⭐ 1/2) – The second (or third) coming of Pamela Anderson? Yes and no. Gia Coppola’s sympathetic portrait of a Las Vegas showgirl aging out on the edge of 60 as newer, crasser stage shows come in is very much in “The Wrestler” mode and suffers from that overfamiliarity. It’s nothing that a better script and tauter direction couldn’t fix, and the supporting cast is fine, especially Kiernan Schipka and Brenda Song as young showgirls taken under the lead’s maternal wing and especially especially Dave Bautista as the show’s stage manager. It’s a nice comeback for Anderson and I’m happy for all the publicity she’ll get, but it’s a decent performance rather than a great one, minus the shades and minor chords another actor might bring. I am trying very hard to be nice here. (No release date set.)

 “The Listeners” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐) – Silly me: I went into this thinking it was a movie, and it turned out to be the first two episodes of a TV show. (My assumption being that every TIFF has to have a film where Rebecca Hall goes spectacularly bonkers and this was the 2024 entry.) Additional bait: Janicza Bravo directing her first project since the acclaimed “Zola.” Hall plays a British schoolteacher and happily married mother who starts hearing a rumbling hum coming from nowhere in particular, which drives her crazy until she meets others who can hear it too. Atmospheric, very well shot, and ambiguous enough that I now want to see the rest of this limited series, so I hope a streamer in the US buys the rights from the BBC.

Here's Hall describing what attracted her to the project in the post-screening Q&A; director Bravo is on the right and writer Jordan Tannahill is on the left.

“Nightbitch” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐) – The challenge when turning any book into a movie is extracting the filmmaker’s show from the writer’s tell, and this adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel – about an existentially exhausted new mother (Amy Adams) who fantasizes (or does she?) about metamorphizing into a wild dog – errs on the side of telling. But not too much: It’s still an entertaining and scarifying ride through a suburban zombieland of Music Together classes, Baby Mama Yoga, sleepless nights and loss of self, and Adams gives it her all. Scripted and directed by the gifted Marielle Heller (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”), with good support from Scoot McNairy as Adams’ husband – a tricky role pulled off with finesse, although some are arguing that he gets off too easy while others are arguing that he doesn't get off easy enough. (In theaters December 2026.)

“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) – A loving husband and father of two daughters (Missagh Zareh) is promoted to the post of judicial investigator just as the 2022 mass protests over the death of Mahsa Amini gather force. Mohammad Rasalouf directs a powerful story of a family’s disintegration under the pressures of the Iranian theocracy, with the narrative an allegory in miniature of life under totalitarian misogny. A nail-biter, arguably overlong in the final act, with a big old Chekhov’s gun that takes forever to fire but brings the house down when it does. Winner of the director’s prize at Cannes this spring, with heroic performances by Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki as the daughters and Soheila Golestani as their mother, the latter calling to mind Norma Aleandro in 1985’s Oscar-winning “The Official Story.” (In theaters November 27.)

“The Substance” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐) – The midnight movie to end all midnight movies, in which a fading Hollywood star (Demi Moore) is offered a chance to clone a younger version of herself (it’s a lot messier than it sounds). Margaret Qualley plays the new her, but the two don’t like sharing the same stage. Imagine if Frankenheimer's “Seconds,” “Sunset Blvd,” “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” an EC horror comic and the final act of “Re-Animator” all crossed streams, and you’re getting close to the tone of this gonzo body-horror comedy. Moore and Qualley are absolutely in on the joke, all the way to the absurdly bloody end. A lot of people love it – director Coralie Feargat clearly made it as a combination conversation piece/jaw-dropper – but for me, the too-muchness of its grand guignol fun eventually wore me out. As for all those goggling fish-eye lens and long, long corridors, I guess some people have simply watched “The Shining” too much. (In theaters September 20.)

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