Many of this fall’s biggest films and buzziest awards contenders screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which ended last weekend. On the ground, the excitement meant sold-out theaters, crowded sidewalks, and a queue for a 9:45 a.m. showing of The Brutalist—a nearly four-hour-long epic—that wound past several blocks and led to a screaming match when someone tried to cut the line. The highlights below aren’t just for passionate cinephiles, though. They’re simply the best films I saw in Toronto, ones likely to resonate outside of the festival with audiences and critics alike. Almost all will hit theaters this season or start streaming before 2024 ends.
The Substance (now in theaters)
With her debut feature, 2018’s Revenge, Coralie Fargeat proved she has a knack for making phantasmagoric horror about femininity. But if that film, about a woman going after men who assaulted her, was a tough watch for its hyper-saturated violence, her second is an even nastier exercise in grotesque filmmaking. The Substance follows Elisabeth Sparkle (played by a ferocious Demi Moore), a fading celebrity who injects her body with an elixir to give birth—in disgustingly squelchy fashion—to a younger copy of herself whom she calls Sue (Margaret Qualley). She can only be Sue for seven days at a time, however, so after each blissful week, Elisabeth returns to her aging physique to simmer in self-hatred and an overwhelming desire to abuse the titular drug. Acerbic, visceral, and deliriously excessive, Fargeat’s takedown of Hollywood’s endless cycle of discarding older women for ingenues is unsubtle, but that’s the point. Vanity may be skin-deep, but it inspires terribly potent feelings.
Anora (in theaters October 18)
Anora (Mikey Madison, terrific) seems to possess zero insecurities. A 23-year-old Uzbek American sex worker who goes by “Ani,” the protagonist of this year’s Palme d’Or winner knows what she wants and thinks she’s found it when she falls for Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a goofily charming client who turns out to be a Russian oligarch’s son. When Ivan proposes marriage, Ani is whisked into a fairy tale that she’s fiercely determined to make her reality. As he did with films such as Tangerine, Red Rocket, and The Florida Project, the writer-director Sean Baker unearths the humanity in the chaos that can reign over the seediest corners of the United States, while observing how the American dream can curdle. Fizzy, tender, and equal parts funny and heartbreaking, Anora is a study of the struggle to defend one’s worth, as confident as its heroine.
Conclave (in theaters October 25)
When the pope suddenly dies, the cardinals must vote on the next Holy Father—but the proceedings, dogged by furious debates and ego-driven power plays, cause the front-runner to step down from his candidacy. Sound familiar? Conclave may be a thinly veiled election-year allegory, but Edward Berger, the director of the 2023 Best Picture nominee All Quiet on the Western Front, has taken the backroom politicking of shows such as House of Cards and grafted it onto the halls of Vatican City. The result is a highly entertaining, highly blasphemous tale about the men who want the papacy. It helps, too, that the film boasts a sinfully great lineup of character actors—Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini—led by a fine-tuned Ralph Fiennes as the one cardinal trying to prevent the transition from turning into a full-blown soap opera. They make the melodrama divine.
Emilia Pérez (in theaters November 1, streaming on Netflix November 13)
A Mexican cartel boss seeking a gender-affirming operation may not sound like the basis of a musical, but Jacques Audiard’s operatic vision—along with a committed cast going for broke—makes Emilia Pérez an exhilarating watch. Karla Sofía Gascón leads the ensemble as the titular heroine who transitions in secret with the help of Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer seeking changes of her own after years spent defending the corrupt. But when Emilia hopes to reunite with her family—including her wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and her two sons—she must reconcile her newfound happiness with the profound pain of her criminal past. Darkly comic yet unabashedly sentimental, the film is a testament to risk-taking; despite threatening to veer off the rails at any moment, Emilia Pérez’s insistence upon the redeeming power of self-acceptance keeps it grounded.
Bird (in theaters November 8)
The writer-director Andrea Arnold’s latest entry into her menagerie of movies—including Fish Tank and Cow—injects a dose of fantasy into the raw reality of coming of age that she is so adept at capturing. Bailey (played by newcomer Nikiya Adams) is a 12-year-old being raised by a father (an electric Barry Keoghan) who’s barely an adult himself. In her angst, she spends her days wandering the marshy surroundings of the tenement in which they squat, losing herself in nature. When she encounters a man named Bird (Passages’ Franz Rogowski, wondrous) seeking his long-lost parents, the pair build an unusual friendship that offers Bailey the assurance she didn’t realize she needed. For those willing to go along with Arnold’s whimsical flourishes of magical realism, Bird is a rewarding watch, an earnest film that argues for the necessity of an untamed spirit in the routine of everyday life.
Heretic (in theaters November 8)
For a wildly different take on religion from the aforementioned Conclave, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who co-wrote A Quiet Place with John Krasinski, have spun another taut horror-thriller out of a simple premise: When two Mormon missionaries (played by Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher and The Fabelmans’ Chloe East) visit a man interested in learning about their church, they quickly learn that he has a sinister ulterior motive involving his personal theory of theology. As the women attempt to flee, he also can’t resist talking endlessly about his sacrilegious observations—and the only reason the monologues work is because the villain in question is played by Hugh Grant. The actor gleefully channels the charm that made him a rom-com hero into a performance that’s unnerving yet appealing, providing good-old-fashioned, scenery-chewing fun. In other words: Grant is just a man, standing in front of two women, asking them to indulge his devilish ideas.
All We Imagine as Light (in theaters November 15)
Not much happens in Payal Kapadia’s textured, naturalistic film tracking two Hindu women in Mumbai going about their daily life. But their subtle, emotional journeys carry immense weight. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are roommates working as nurses at a local hospital; while the former quietly longs for her estranged husband, the latter, who’s younger and more gregarious, is in a secret relationship with a Muslim man. The women’s bond is strengthened by their similar routines and tested by their contrasting ideas about female autonomy in a patriarchal country. Kapadia constructs striking images that linger long after the credits roll, evoking the hope of generations of women to come. Elegant, sensual, and richly told, All We Imagine as Light is a gem that rewards the patient viewer.
Hard Truths (in theaters December 6)
Pansy (played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a tough woman to please, with far more grievances than the average person. She snaps at pretty much everything: dogs wearing coats (they already have fur!), pigeons in her yard (the grass is not for them!), charity workers seeking donations (why are they smiling!), the list goes on—and on, and on. But as funny as Hard Truths can be when capturing Pansy’s showdowns with strangers and loved ones alike, it’s not some caricature of a bitter woman. Written and directed by Mike Leigh—who last worked with Jean-Baptiste in 1996’s Secrets & Lies, a performance for which she nabbed an Oscar nomination—the film is a sensitive and empathetic look at a specific kind of heartbreak: the type that happens when life’s everyday trials have chipped away at a person’s innate joy for too long, leaving behind only resentment, anger, and fear. Jean-Baptiste is tremendous, taking a volatile character and revealing the human underneath.
The Room Next Door (in theaters December 20)
What would you do if a loved one asked you to be present for her death—albeit not at her bedside, just close enough so she doesn’t feel alone? In the Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language film, a cancer patient, Martha (a commanding Tilda Swinton), has obtained a drug that will allow her to depart when she chooses; all she yearns for is someone in “the room next door.” That someone is Ingrid (Julianne Moore, conveying a measured sympathy), a writer who, despite being terrified of death, agrees to help her friend. With memorably peculiar dialogue, The Room Next Door contemplates the reckoning with mortality everyone faces someday, whether or not it’s their time to go. It’s not only a vibrant movie but a tonal marvel: sweeping yet intimate, bold but thoughtful, serious and still absurd—and as sumptuous as life itself.
The Brutalist (release date TBD)
At three and a half hours long (with a 15-minute intermission), the Vox Lux director Brady Corbet’s latest film may as well be considered a brutalist structure itself. But The Brutalist is well worth its towering run time: It is a sprawling, decades-spanning epic that draws power from its emotional scope and scale. Adrien Brody stars as László Toth, a Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor arriving in America hoping to build both a life and a means for his remaining family to join him stateside after World War II. As Toth works to design and erect a Christian community center in Pennsylvania for Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a pompous, menacing industrialist, the story deconstructs many themes: the instability of modern American ideals, the foundational hardships of the immigrant experience, the need for preserving art and artists’ legacies. Though it contains perhaps one too many beats by the end, The Brutalist is a triumph of ambition, beyond deserving of its massive canvas.
Honorable Mentions:
Anchored by a pair of strong lead performances from Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield as a couple who contend with cancer, We Live in Time (in theaters October 11) is a warm and mature, if somewhat standard, relationship drama from the Brooklyn director John Crowley that’s sure to make parents cry. Family also takes center stage in The Seed of the Sacred Fig (in theaters November 27), shot in secret by the Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. In it, a couple and their two daughters begin to distrust one another after political protests over the death of Mahsa Amini start in Tehran. Despite a shaky final act, the film offers a sharp examination of paranoia. Speaking of movies that could use a little more editing, Nightbitch (in theaters December 6) won’t win Amy Adams that elusive Oscar, and the writer-director Marielle Heller has produced far more cohesive work. But the adaptation of the popular novel contains a winsome shagginess as it tells the ludicrous story of a stay-at-home mom slowly losing her composure and, well, turning into a dog.
I also admired a pair of feature-length debuts: Bring Them Down (release date TBD), written and directed by Christopher Andrews, stars Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan as members of competing shepherding families in a remote Irish town. It’s a tense and bleak but thoughtful thriller about the pull of violence, with some impressively staged sequences. Bonjour Tristesse (seeking distribution), meanwhile, is a lovely adaptation of the 1954 coming-of-age novel by Françoise Sagan that brings to mind Call Me by Your Name for its naive young protagonist and light-filled European setting. Written and directed by Durga Chew-Bose, the film features a mesmerizing performance from Chloë Sevigny as the enigmatic old friend of the teenage heroine’s father who ingratiates herself into their idyllic summer in the south of France. I found it to be a pleasant diversion at TIFF in particular: Fall may be about to begin, but it was nice to bask in just a little more sunshine.
