Fall is here. A crisp, chilly beginning to the school year and the 2014-2015 awards season, which recently kicked off North American leg with TIFF, the annual Toronto International Film Festival. As the festival drew to a close on Sunday September 14, let’s take a look at its highlights.
The award contenders are a mix of biopics and lead-character-driven dramas this year. The Imitation Game, directed by Morten Tyldum, took home TIFF’s Grolsh People’s Choice Award as the most popular film of the festival. BBC Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch stars as the mathematics and computer genius Alan Turing, whose computerized cryptoanalysis played a major role in helping the Allies win World War II by cracking intercepted German messages encrypted by the Axis encryption machine known as “Enigma.” In addition to Cumberbatch, the moving biopic boasts Keira Knightley (Begin Again) in the role of Joan Clarke, Turing’s platonic foil, and an ensemble cast of talented British actors: Mark Strong (Sherlock Holmes), Matthew Goode (A Single Man), Charles Dance (Game of Thrones), Allen Leech (Downton Abbey), and Rory Kinnear (Penny Dreadful).
Competing alongside The Imitation Game in the awards race is the biopic of another genius, the physicist Stephen Hawking, portrayed by Eddie Redmayne (Les Miserables), in The Theory of Everything, directed by James Marsh. The film introduces us to Hawking as a student at Cambridge University, and revolves around his relationship with Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones, Like Crazy), fellow Cambridge student, who later became his wife and stays by his side as his illness takes hold. It is, according to reviews, not a “love conquers all” portrayal, but more of a proof that, should love survive the battles and casualties it has to conquer, then it is more than enough.
Wild, a drama directed by Oscar-winning film Dallas Buyers’ Club’s Jean Marc Vallee, is based on the memoir of author Cheryl Strayed, who made the choice to go on a thousand-mile hike along the Pacific Crest, after the deaths of her mother and of her marriage. Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line) stars as Cheryl, a woman whose confession, “I’m lonelier in my life than when I’m out here,” sets her on journey alone in the wild to battle her own demons and come to terms with herself. Critics have praised Witherspoon for her performance, and she is definitely on track to become a nominee in the awards race this season.
A film receiving no less buzz and rave reviews is director Dan Gilroy’s debut, Nightcrawler, a twisted dark comedy about the world of freelance journalism. Jake Gyllenhaal (Prisoners) takes the lead as the crime-scene paparazzo, who spews out replies to his assistant’s anxious “You’ve got to call the cops,” with “I know, but at the right time.” Hidden secrets, withdrawn information, and deception reign in Nightcrawler’s world, one entangled web of explosive car-chasing rides you would not want to miss this fall.
Last but not least is Bennett Miller’s, the director of Moneyball and Capote’s, Foxcatcher, a brooding, intense film about two brothers Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum, 21 Jump Street and Mark Ruffalo, The Avengers), former Olympic wrestling champions, and their involvement with a neurotic millionaire, John du Pont (Steve Carell). Watch Foxcatcher, and you’ll discover how dark comedians like Carell, who was not Miller’s initial choice for the role until after a sit-down meeting with the director himself, could be.
Now we head back from Hollywood to local features by Canadian filmmakers, celebrated at the festival. This year’s Canadian Goose Award for Best Canadian Feature Film went to Felix et Meira, helmed by Montreal-born director Maxime Giroux. The film tells a story about Meira (Hadas Yaron), a married woman seeking freedom from her Montreal Orthodox Jewish community’s strictures and finding it in a young man, Felix (Martin Dubreuil), mourning his estranged father’s death. Meira’s story comes to a halt when she has to decide whether to leave her community for Felix or to stay.
Another Montreal born director, Jeffrey St. Jules, won the City of Toronto Award for Best Canadian Feature Film, for his film, Bang Bang Baby, a darkly comic and colorful parody of 50’s sci-fi films and musicals in the themes of small-town dreams, burden of family responsibilities, and chemical mutations. The film stars Jane Levy (Evil Dead) as the prim and sweet high-schooler Stepphy, who dreams about becoming a singer, in the small fictional Canadian town Lonely Arms. When her alcoholic father (Peter Stormae, Fargo) refuses to allow her to attend the American Ingenue Singing Competition in Manhattan, Stepphy’s dreams are crushed. At the same time, the local creep, Fabian (David Reale) tells her there is something toxic leaking from the town’s plant, and the singer of her dreams, Bobby Shore (Justin Chatwin, Shameless) arrives into Lonely Arms with a car in need of repair.
Several notable films in the awards race are mysteriously absent from the festival, having had their premieres somewhere else instead: from David Fincher’s Gone Girl (a drama about a crumbling marriage, which premiered at the New York Film Festival), Alejandro Inarritu’s Birdman (a drama about a fading actor who once played an iconic superhero and needs to patch up his life, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival), to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice (the highly anticipated film from the arthouse director dealing with the story of a detective investing the disappearance of a former girlfriend, which also premiered at Cannes).
Other films screened at the festival to look out for in the future include: Pride, a film about 1984 British gay activists who assist miners during the National Union Mineworkers strike, led by Bill Nighy (About Time), Andrew Scott (BBC Sherlock), and Dominic West (BBC The Hour); and The Riot Club, starring an ensemble cast of the next generation British actors (Sam Clafin (Hunger Games), Douglas Booth (Noah), Max Irons (The Host), and Olly Alexander (God Help the Girl), to name a few, and joined by Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones) and Holliday Grainger (The Borgias)) as Oxford students causing trouble in the university’s infamous Riot Club.
That’s it for the 2014 TIFF report. Judging from the festival lineup, this fall and the upcoming winter definitely has some exciting, unmissable films in store.
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