Jennifer Lopez arrives on the red carpet for the premiere of ‘Unstoppable’ during the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 6.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
The Toronto International Film Festival has had a tough go of it the past few years. The pandemic, the strikes and, during this year’s 49th edition, an escalating series of protests whose disruptions were wholly discombobulating. Yet despite the controversies, the past 11 days of TIFF felt more alive, transformative and essential than the festival has been in years – certainly since its pre-pandemic heyday of 2019, and perhaps even further back than that.
Sure, TIFF has become an increasingly hard-to-access machine of red-carpet glitz – but if anyone is still complaining about the festival’s prioritization of celebrity, they are two decades too late. TIFF is such an important cog in the global movie ecosystem because it has intently built its brand on the brightest of big names. And after 2023′s celeb-light edition, which at times felt like a contingency plan sketched on a napkin from the Lightbox’s Varda Café, this year’s TIFF needed to deliver. Which it did, some 700 times over.
That is how many actors and filmmakers, give or take, came through Toronto over the past week and a half, generating excitable Festival Street chatter (Florence Pugh! Andrew Garfield! Sydney Sweeney!) and red-meat tabloid fodder (what were Jennifer Lopez and Matt Damon whispering about at the party for Unstoppable?!). The high-end sponsors who so nakedly covet such hard-core celeb action – and who so quickly abandoned TIFF last year, leaving the organization holding the bag for $2.76-million in lost or reduced stakeholder participation – should be thrilled.
Sydney Sweeney poses with a fan at the premiere of "Eden" during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 7Cindy Ord/Getty Images
More importantly, though, the actual movies clicked. Nearly every big fall film was represented in the ever-massive lineup, so much so that even the most cynical of cinephile would have a hard time complaining.
Brady Corbet’s fantastically ambitious The Brutalist, an epic of architecture and Americana, transfixed audiences for its entire 215-minute run. Sean Baker’s madcap dark comedy Anora juiced screenings with the kind of propulsive electricity that recalled TIFF’s legendary Uncut Gems premiere from 2019. Justin Kurzel’s gritty neo-Nazi terrorism thriller The Order kept everyone gripping their seats, just as Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror extravaganza The Substance had others futilely looking under theirs for a TIFF-branded barf bag (a missed marketing opportunity, Rogers!).
The Canadian contingent was the strongest it has been in years, too, from R.T. Thorne’s propulsive and incendiary 40 Acres to Kazik Radwanski’s gently disarming Matt and Mara to Matthew Rankin’s wholly unique Universal Language, the latter of which took home the Best Canadian Discovery Award on Sunday.
And while I have issues with the narco-musical Emilia Perez, the papal thriller Conclave, and the especially superficial Saturday Night, the excitement each title generated with audiences should not be discounted.
Even the misfires felt magnificent in their own ways, from Francis Ford Coppola’s mind-bending mess Megalopolis to Joshua Oppenheimer’s ambitious but wobbly (and warbly) postapocalyptic musical The End. There was a genuine sense of adventure and risk laced throughout so much of this year’s programming.
Yet many of the movies noted above came to Toronto after previously making landfall at competing festivals. While TIFF audiences still found a way to award a Toronto-exclusive title, the Tom Hiddleston-led drama The Life of Chuck, as the winner of the coveted People’s Choice Award, TIFF must now seriously reconsider the question of what role the festival wants to take in the all-important, all-consuming awards-race landscape.
The Pocket Queen, from left, Kate Siegel, Stephen King, Q'orianka Kilcher, Annalise Basso, Mike Flanagan, Tom Hiddleston, Karen Gillan, and Chiwetel Ejiofor attend the premiere of "The Life of Chuck" at TIFF on of Sept. 6, 2024. The film directed by Mike Flanagan won the People's Choice Award at the 2024 festival.Chris Pizzello/The Associated Press
While the affable The Life of Chuck charmed audiences easily, TIFF’s other high-ish-profile world premieres – The Fire Inside, Unstoppable, Nutcrackers, Eden, The Return, Daniela Forever, K-Pops!, Without Blood, The Last Showgirl – each had the whiff of being a second- or third-best option, as if they were passed over by competing festivals and now presented TIFF the challenge of gussying up their prestige factor. If TIFF is still prioritizing world exclusives – movies that Toronto and Toronto alone can launch into Oscars contention – then this was a too-middling slate of 2.5-star scoops.
If, however, TIFF is recognizing that the premiere game has become fully rigged – that Venice and Telluride play a too-fierce game of hardball, but also that the vast majority of festival-goers don’t care to parse the differences between what is a world, international, North American or Canadian premiere – then this year’s edition felt like a welcome return to Toronto’s “festival of festivals” era. Whatever movie you wanted to watch, TIFF very likely had it.
Yet the one thing of which TIFF is absolutely confident – its plan to launch an official content market in 2026 – is facing an uphill battle that no amount of programming can immediately solve. While big deals might still trickle in over the next few weeks, there was a distinct lack of sales activity during the festival, with even the independently produced The Life of Chuck yet to find a buyer for distribution. This is not a small problem, given that TIFF just secured $23-million from the federal government on the pledge that it can become the hottest place in North America to buy and sell movies.
And the one big deal that did so far go down this year – the ten-figure acquisition of the Ben Stiller comedy Nutcrackers, which officially opened the festival – arrived with a smack of unintentional farce. The film was bought by U.S. streamer Hulu this past Friday, just a week after the movie’s director David Gordon Green made sure to let TIFF audiences know that he made the movie with a theatrical release in mind. Perhaps there is a good brand to be built on becoming a market of irony, but I’m not so sure that the industry agrees.
Speaking of disagreements: TIFF surely had to know that the world’s politics would make landfall inside its theatres. I’m just not sure that organizers would have picked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the conflict to ignite as many headlines as, say, the war in Gaza (although that crisis certainly made its presence known through a handful of protests, including one on opening night).
Protest outside the TIFF Lightbox over the documentary "Russians at War" at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 13, 2024.Paige Taylor White/The Canadian Press
Ultimately, it is understandable that TIFF had to prioritize safety above all else when organizers pulled the North American premiere of the controversial documentary Russians at War, citing security concerns. But it is a truly sad and shameful day when an arts organization is forced by the loudest, angriest voices in the room to suppress any film, especially one that even its most prominent critics have not even seen.
As TIFF prepares for its 50th anniversary next year, the organization faces a monumental inflection point: one of audience, industry and philosophy. But this year’s edition proved, above all else, that these are cultural fights worth waging.
Barry Hertz’s Top 10 Films of TIFF 2024
11. Bonus Entry: Disclaimer, episodes 1-7
10. Nightbitch
8. The Order
7. Ick
6. Rumours
4. The Shrouds
2. Anora