Toronto International Film Festival 2019

Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen swerves into the fast lane with an expertly plotted crime movie that’s a showcase for scrappiness.

The flip side to A Star Is Born, director Brady Corbet’s indie rise of a pop icon—played by a fearless Natalie Portman—is an uneven but fascinating spectacle.

Aaron Sorkin and Jessica Chastain pool their formidable talents to tackle a larger-than-life story that bubbles with smarts.

The world's worst film gets an affectionate making-of dramatization that's half as weird as the real thing.

Easily the best thing to happen to the undead since 28 Days Later, this unusually thoughtful zombie film peps up tired blood with fresh ideas.

Playwright David Hare recalls the true tale of David Irving, the Holocaust-denying historian, in a movie that's duller than its subject.

This meat-and-potatoes real-life disaster movie restages the 2010 oil-rig explosion that killed 11 men.

Imagine Maggie Smith’s cantankerous dowager in Downton Abbey as a bag lady—she's still lording it over everyone, but now she's dressed in a filthy men’s coat from a thrift store, with tape patching up the rips and unsightly brown smears down the back. Meet Miss Shepherd, an elderly homeless woman who lived in a camper van in playwright Alan Bennett’s front garden in London for 15 years. Smith played Miss Shepherd in Bennett’s hit 1989 play and takes on the role again in this hugely entertaining, big-hearted and funny film adaptation directed by his long-standing collaborator Nicholas Hytner (The History Boys). The film was shot in the actual house on the street where the real events took place. Alex Jennings plays Bennett, who buys his house in the late 1960s. His neighbors are writers and intellectuals—guilty liberals who put up with Miss Shepherd’s van parked outside their book-lined homes to prove how tolerant they are. When the local authorities threaten to shoo her, Bennett offers Miss S. the use of his front garden for a couple of weeks. She never leaves. His mother, visiting from Yorkshire, wonders what she does for a toilet. The film offers glimpses of Bennett’s private life, like his crush on a cocky young actor starring in one of his plays. But the focus is on the gloriously rude Miss Shepherd. Any whiff of charity ruffles her ego, so when a neighbor knocks on her window with a creme brulee, she accepts it with haughty contempt. Her delusions of grandeur are hila

This drone drama arrives so steeped in the clichés of the Hollywood terror-plot actioner—barking generals, truckloads of jihadis, a faintly exotic soundtrack—that it initially almost feels comical. Writer Guy Hibbert and director Gavin Hood then spend the next 102 minutes conscientiously subverting those overused tropes, with varying degrees of success.Helen Mirren is all business and shoulder pads as General Katherine Powell, a British officer overseeing antiterror operations in Kenya. When two of her most wanted targets appear at a safe house in Nairobi, she lobbies for an immediate American drone strike. But operating pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) isn’t so sure—especially when he realizes that the shack next door is home to a little girl so adorable she may as well have the words "innocent victim" tattoed on her forehead. The stage is set for a battle of wills and shifting legalities, as Powell’s higher-ups all attempt to hand off the hot potato, refusing responsibility either for the child’s life or for the many others at risk if the terrorists are allowed to escape.The strongest element here is a rich seam of murky Dr Strangelove humor—the buck-passing antics of cunning army liaison Alan Rickman and his cronies are theatrically hilarious. There are moments of well-judged tension, too, particularly after we meet a Kenyan operative on the ground: As he proved in Captain Philips, Barkhad Abdi is a master of out-of-his-depth-but-holding-it-together bluster.But when it targe

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film may not resound with the same cosmic heft of his mythical love story Tropical Malady (2004) or his Cannes-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives (2010), but this profoundly quiet sigh of regret is nevertheless the work of a master artist who’s become fluent with his muse. Shot in the months before Thailand’s most recent military coup and set in a remote clinic that was supposedly built atop a burial ground for the country’s ancient kings, Cemetery of Splendor occupies the sad limbo between imminent strife and past trauma.The story, such as it is, concerns a group of soldiers who’ve been felled by a strange outbreak of sleeping sickness, and the mystic bond that forms between an openhearted volunteer nurse named Jenjira (Weerasethakul veteran Jenjira Pongpas Widner) and Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), the patient who’s roused into the waking world by her tender care. Their relationship is strictly platonic—Weerasethakul’s films are less interested in romance than spiritual communion—but it opens the door for both of them to connect with the ghosts that so gently leave their fingerprints on the present.Viewers expecting the mythical pleasures of Weerasethakul’s previous work might be disappointed (there are no red-eyed jungle monsters, nor men turning into tigers), but that just makes the film’s detours into the surreal all the more organic and delightful. This is a movie in which the phantoms of history have been unloosed into the air

Robert Downey Jr. stars in the sort of legal drama that shouts where it could whisper and stomps where it could tiptoe—not always disagreeably

European actors (including future Mad Max Tom Hardy) do an uneven job bringing a "hey-yous-guys" Brooklyn crime drama to life.

Viciously funny, it twins the frenetic hunt for shocking footage with the career ambitions of a closet psycho, played by Jake Gyllenhaal.

One imagines the scariest thing to Kevin Smith would be the inability to speak—and that's exactly what he explores in this captivatingly weird horror-comedy.