Toronto International Film Festival 2019
Follow this year’s TIFF with exclusive coverage, including reviews, news and more
Each September, the Toronto International Film Festival screens more than 300 films from over 60 countries, drawing in an estimated 400,000 attendees. Open to the public, the annual showcase features movies from all genres in cinema, including Hollywood blockbusters, indies, documentaries and foreign films. Considered to be one of the most esteemed film festivals alongside the revered Cannes Film Festival, TIFF is known for its ability to generate Academy Award buzz.
When is the Toronto Film Festival?
The 44th annual TIFF runs September 5–15, 2019.
Where is the Toronto Film Festival?
The festival takes place at various venues in Toronto, Canada.
How do I get tickets?
Buy tickets at the official festival website.
Toronto Film Festival 2019
Toronto Film Festival 2018
Toronto Film Festival 2017
Toronto Film Festival 2016
Toronto Film Festival 2015
Evolution
Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s unforgettably unsettling Evolution is set on a rustic island somewhere off the coast of France, perhaps in the stretch of azure sea between the YA dystopia of The Giver and the chilly urban streets of Under the Skin. It's a place where single women with white brows and black pupils raise a generation of young boys without fathers (nowhere to be seen). During the days, the youths go swimming amongst the coral. At night, their mothers feed their kids a mush of curdled squid ink and inject their skinny arms with a vile sleep-inducing goop they refer to as “medicine.” One evening, a curious little boy named Nicolas (Max Brebant) manages to resist his dose, slipping out of the spartan house he shares with his mom (Julie-Marie Parmentier). He follows her to the shore, and that’s when things start to get weird. It’s been a decade since Hadzihalilovic’s only other feature, 2005’s Innocence, and it seems as though the writer-director has been hoarding her nightmares ever since. Tense with terror and told with abstractly beautiful imagery across long stretches of wordless quiet, Evolution watches its dark and mysterious world with the same curiosity that keeps Nicolas awake at night, his primal fears taking root in our own. The movie flirts with the outline of a coherent plot, but the answers to its dramatic questions have all sunk to the ocean floor in a plume of beatific marine footage and Cronenbergian body horror. (Especially when Nicolas is confined to a d
The Meddler
Imagine if Clueless had starred a 68-year-old Susan Sarandon as an overbearing mother and you’ll have the right idea about Lorene Scafaria’s The Meddler, a sweet and sneakily effective portrait of a woman learning how to re-engage with the world after the greatest loss of her life. Sarandon plays Marnie, a recent widow who’s been bequeathed more money than she can spend and more love than she can share. The only way she can cope with no longer being a wife is by doubling down on her activities as a parent, and so the film begins with the thickly accented New Jersey native uprooting herself from the East Coast and moving to downtown Los Angeles in order to be close to her daughter, Lori (the great Rose Byrne). Lori, alas, is too much of a raw nerve for her mom’s smothering displays of affection, so Marnie has no choice but to mother somebody else. Or, in her case, everybody else, beginning with one of the genius-bar technicians at her local Apple Store (Jarod Carmichael), whom she befriends and starts driving to night school. Elsewhere, Marnie tries to chip away at her fortune of guilt by sponsoring a wedding ceremony for one of Lori’s friends (Cecily Strong). The pathos behind these indiscriminate acts of generosity are transparent from the start (making the scenes in which Marnie visits a shrink a bit redundant), but Sarandon’s exuberant performance is delivered with care and conviction. Crucially, it feels like Marnie is beginning to understand herself. Writer-director Scaf
Hardcore
A revolution in action cinema that works despite its utter silliness (or because of it), Russia-born filmmaker Ilya Naishuller’s supercharged, wholly first-person coup achieves a near-experimental bliss—you won’t know how it was executed, nor will you care. The idea comes from video games and, before them, horror’s occasional camera-eye sequence, famously extended by Brian de Palma in movies like Blow Out. Hardcore turns this gimmick into a feature-length concept, not without precedent. Yet because it’s a gory nonstop fight movie (unlike, say, 1947’s first-person detective noir Lady in the Lake) the cameraman has to be as agile and fearless as a stuntperson, flinging himself into hand-to-hand combat, out the doors of exploding vehicles, over fences, down stairwells and onto the edge of a dorky dance number.The plot fits on a postage stamp: You're Henry, a mute cyborg suffering from a complete memory wipe. Nursing you back to health is the scientist girlfriend you can’t remember (Haley Bennett). As you make your brutal way through dozens—hundreds?—of unlucky henchmen toward an evil boss (Kozlovsky), you encounter Jimmy (District 9's Sharlto Copley, the movie’s default star), a chatty shape-shifter and helpful presence who sometimes appears as a British gangster, an exuberant brothel regular or a pot-smoking hippie.Hardcore isn't deep. It's not about complex ideas; it's not going to win any awards for female characters; even the CGI effects that supplant its euphoric takedowns
