The Magnificent Seven – Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the 1960 Western, starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Peter Sarsgaard – will open the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, it was announced this morning.
In a morning press conference at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, festival co-directors Piers Handling and Cameron Bailey read out the titles of 68 features that will be screening in Toronto this year, mixing world premieres with well-received Cannes and Sundance titles.
In an unusual move, Handling and Bailey also announced this year’s closing night feature: The Edge Of Seventeen, a coming-of-age comedy from writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig starring Hailee Steinfeld, Blake Jenner and Woody Harrelson.
Harrelson will also be in town for the world premiere of Rob Reiner’s LBJ, in which he plays the eponymous US President other world premiere galas announced today include Peter Berg’s Deepwater Horizon, starring Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell and John Malkovich JT And The Tennessee Kids, Jonathan Demme’s document of a Justin Timberlake concert tour Mira Nair’s Queen Of Katwe, featuring Lupita N’yongo and David Oyelowo in the true story of an African chess prodigy J.A. Bayona’s A Monster Calls, a fable with a cast that includes Sigourney Weaver, Felicity Jones, Toby Kebbell and Liam Neeson Oliver Stone’s biopic Snowden, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the whistleblower who exposed America’s massive surveillance of its own citizens, and A United Kingdom, a docudrama about the romance of King Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo) and Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike) from Belle director Amma Assante.
Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, starring Amy Adams as a linguist tasked with interpreting Earth’s first extraterrestrial contact, will have its Canadian premiere as a gala presentation Jeff Nichols’s Loving, starring Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga and Michael Shannon, will have its North American premiere as a TIFF gala.
World premieres in the special presentations program include American Pastoral, a Philip Roth adaptation starring and directed by Ewan McGregor Mascots, the new ensemble comedy from Christopher Guest The Limehouse Golem, an English thriller starring Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke and Eddie Marsan Nick Cannon’s King Of The Dancehall, in which he stars as a Brooklynite swept up in Jamaican dancehall culture Denial, which dramatizes the trial of Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), sued for libel by Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall) Eleanor Coppola’s European drama Paris Can Wait, starring Diane Lane and Alec Baldwin Adam Smith’s Trespass Against Us, a crime drama starring Michael Fassbender, Brendan Gleeson, Rory Kinnear and Sean Harris, and Carrie Pilby, an adaptation of Caren Lissner’s YA novel starring Bel Powley (The Diary Of A Teenage Girl) as its precocious hero.
Special presentations arriving from Cannes include Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, a road movie starring Shia LaBeouf and Sasha Lane Maren Ade’s acclaimed three-hour comedy Toni Erdmann, with Sandra Hüller as a woman whose life is up-ended when her father (Peter Simonischek) masquerades as her life coach Things To Come, a character study from Mia Hansen-Løve starring Isabelle Huppert The Handmaiden and Elle, new psychological thrillers from Park Chan-wook and Paul Verhoeven, respecitively, and Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s drama about a week in the life of a New Jersey bus driver (Adam Driver).
From Sundance comes Nate Parker’s acclaimed historical drama The Birth Of A Nation, in which the filmmaker plays the slave preacher Nat Turner, and Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By The Sea, a drama Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams and Kyle Chandler.
Two years after Whiplash, writer/director Damien Chazelle is back at TIFF with La La Land, a musical that reunites Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, who co-starred in Crazy, Stupid, Love. and Gangster Squad seven years after he brought A Single Man to the festival fashion designer turned filmmaker Tom Ford returns with Nocturnal Animals, a romantic thriller starring Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Isla Fisher.
This is just a fraction of the films to be screened at TIFF, of course. Many more titles will be announced in the coming weeks visit the TIFF site for full details.
The Toronto International Film Festival runs September 8 through September 18, 2016.
