Director Francis Ford Coppola at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, southern France, on May 17. Coppola’s epic sci-fi drama Megalopolis will have its North American premiere at this year's Toronto International Film Festival.Scott A Garfitt/The Associated Press
New films starring Adam Driver, Julianne Moore, Daniel Craig, Nicole Kidman and Gillian Anderson are coming to next month’s Toronto International Film Festival, as organizers announced a surprisingly large number of high-profile, late-addition titles Tuesday while revealing this year’s full schedule.
The 20 new films – which span the Gala, Special Presentations, Centrepiece, Discovery and Special Events programs – bring the 49th annual festival’s total to 278 titles. By announcing so many new selections just three weeks before TIFF kicks off Sept. 5, organizers shook up the traditional rhythms of the film-festival calendar, as typically only a handful of additional movies get confirmed this close to launch.
Highlights include the North American premiere of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic sci-fi drama Megalopolis starring Driver and Aubrey Plaza, which premiered to polarizing reviews at this past spring’s Cannes Film Festival; the North American premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s drama Queer, an adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name, starring Craig; the world premiere of Marianne Elliott’s drama The Salt Path, starring Anderson and Jason Isaacs; the North American premiere of Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller Babygirl starring Kidman, Harris Dickinson and Antonio Banderas; the Canadian premiere of Jason Reitman’s dramatization of Saturday Night Live’s very first episode, titled Saturday Night; and the North American premiere of Brady Corbet’s epic post-Second World War drama The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody.
Also coming to TIFF after much industry speculation is Pedro Almodóvar’s drama The Room Next Door, starring Moore and Tilda Swinton. The film marks the Spanish director’s feature-length English-language debut, and its North American premiere in Toronto will set the stage for TIFF’s newly announced Lightbox retrospective of Almodóvar’s career, which will run in November.
TIFF will also welcome back two long-time festival veterans, Canadian Mina Shum and Oscar winner Damien Chazelle, as the two filmmakers will attend retrospective screenings of their respective breakthroughs, 1994′s Double Happiness and 2016′s Whiplash.
Organizers also announced Tuesday this festival’s off-screen programming. Highlights include the “In Conversation With …” series, which will feature live conversations with Cate Blanchett, Zoe Saldana, Steven Soderbergh and Hyun Bin and Lee Dong-wook; the Visionaries series, part of TIFF’s Industry Conference, featuring onstage dialogues with Alfonso Cuarón, Pete Docter, Franklin Leonard, Steven Moffat and Malala Yousafzai; the return of the Black Excellence Brunch, celebrating Black leaders in the Canadian and global film landscape; and the new event Play the Part, featuring a conversation between director Jia Zhang-Ke (at TIFF with his new film Caught by the Tides) and his protégé, filmmaker Rafael Manuel (102 Narra).
Tuesday’s news marks TIFF’s last official programming announcement leading up to next month’s festival. Single tickets for the 11-day event will go on sale to the public starting Aug. 26.