The 39th Toronto International Film Festival will open on September 4, 2014 – though the exact nature of its opening remains a mystery. The opening night gala, almost always announced with a great deal of fanfare at TIFF’s kickoff press conference, was left unannounced, still to be confirmed.
Festival co-directors Piers Handling and Cameron Bailey did announce the festival’s closing night gala, though: that’s Alan Rickman’s A Little Chaos, a historical drama about Sabine De Barra, the woman who created the gardens of Versailles. Kate Winslet stars as De Barra Rickman plays the monarch Louis XIV.
The absence of the opening-night announcement left reporters buzzing about whether Handling and Bailey had been unable to secure a world-premiere guarantee for one of the 50-odd other films announced today – world-premiere status having been demanded by TIFF for any picture to play in the festival’s first four days.
Handling described this new policy as a way of “clarifying” bookings between the festival and producers and distributors after TIFF saw a number of supposed world premieres – including last year’s People’s Choice Award winner 12 Years A Slave – screened at the Telluride Film Festival as surprise or sneak-preview screenings.
Now, it’s questionable whether the people buying tickets to TIFF actually cares that they’re the first to see a movie, as long as the stars are in attendance and the movie in question doesn’t suck. But it’s something to talk about over the summer, and it gives journalists a way to make every fall picture that doesn’t come to Toronto – like David Fincher’s Gone Girl and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, both of which will debut at the New York Film Festival later in the fall – seem like it’s deliberately snubbing our humble little town.
But plenty of films won’t be snubbing TIFF, including two highly anticipated Reese Witherspoon pictures: The Good Lie, a Blind Side sort of movie in which she plays a cranky woman who takes a group of Sudanese refugees into her small-town home), and Wild, which casts her as a heroin addict whose recovery includes a 1000-mile journey across America. That these two films are directed by Canadians (Monsieur Lazhar’s Philippe Falardeau and Dallas Buyers Club’s Jean-Marc Vallée, respectively) is just a happy coincidence, I’m sure.
We’ll also be getting The Drop, one of James Gandolfini’s final pictures – though the trailer screened today was far heavier on star Tom Hardy and an adorable puppy – and The Judge, also known as That Movie In Which Robert Duvall And Robert Downey Jr. Play Father And Son.
An Education’s Lone Scherfig returns with another look into the creepy class structure of England, The Riot Club we’ll also be getting Denzel Washington’s new action thriller The Equalizer, the Cannes hit Foxcatcher – starring Steve Carell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo in a true story of debauchery, wrestling and murder – and Jon Stewart’s directorial debut Rosewater, starring Gael García Bernal as Maziar Bahari, an Iranian journalist whose appearance on The Daily Show led to his imprisonment and brutalization.
Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan star in Richard LaGravenese’s musical love story The Last Five Years Kendrick also stars in Cake, which features Jennifer Aniston as a woman haunted by the suicide of a member of her support group.
Judy Greer, Adam Sandler, Jennifer Garner, Emma Thompson and Rosemarie DeWitt are among the ensemble cast of Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Corey Stoll, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne, Timothy Olyphant and Jane Fonda fill out Shawn Levy’s This Is Where I Leave You and Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Amanda Seyfried and Adam Driver star in Noah Baumbach’s generational study While We’re Young.
One of my most anticipated pictures is a new production of Miss Julie starring Jessica Chastain and Colin Farrell, directed by Liv Ullmann I’m also looking forward to Mike Leigh’s Cannes-hailed Mr. Turner, starring the marvelous Timothy Spall. And Simon Pegg, Rosamund Pike and Christopher Plummer topline Hector And The Search For Happiness.
That’s only a fraction of the titles that will be playing the festival, of course, and more will be announced in the coming weeks. One of them might even be the opening-night gala. Stay tuned.
The 2014 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 4 to 14.
