Toronto International Film Festival: No Stars, But A Lot Of Good Movies
American Fiction won the People’s Choice Award. The prize often leads to the Best Picture Oscar.
“For the most part, this year’s TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival), which wrapped up with awards announced Sunday, was a far more muted affair — meaning that it allowed an exceptionally strong program of films to succeed on merits alone.” Film critic Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post believes the lack of star presence due to the strikes was a blessing for the festival.
One of the strongest examples of her theory is this year’s big winner: Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, the movie that won TIFF’s coveted audience award.
“Adapted by first-time filmmaker Cord Jefferson from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, the mordant, generous-hearted satire about race, identity, code-switching, and White liberal hypocrisy strikes a perfect balance of warm humor and bracing honesty,” writes Hornaday.
Another buzzy audience favorite, The Holdovers, was a runner-up for the award.
Alexander Payne’s tenderly funny portrait of an angst-ridden teenager and his grouchy teacher at a boys’ boarding school in the 1970s reunites Payne with his Sideways star Paul Giamatti with wonderful results. Both American Fiction and The Holdovers emerged as favorites early in the festival, as did Hit Man, Richard Linklater’s wickedly dark comedy, already screened in Venice, which features Glen Powell as a mild-mannered college professor who becomes an undercover cop-slash-assassin, and Wildcat, in which Ethan Hawke directs his daughter Maya Hawke.
The absence of distribution deals had a major impact this year. Wildcat and Hit Man, for example, were available for acquisition. “This is the sort of movie that a big studio would have bought at TIFF in the old days,” one high-level exec told The Hollywood Reporter’s writer Scott Feinberg at the festival. “It will surely sell soon, probably to a streamer,” wrote Feinberg. Other movies shared a similar fate. Some of the best-received films at this year’s TIFF arrived without distributors, including Christy Hall’s Daddio, Agnieszka Holland’s refugee drama Green Border and Azazel Jacobs’s His Three Daughters, starring Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne.
The Canadian festival is often a precursor for the Best Picture Oscar award. TIFF People’s Choice Award has been won by such eventual Best Picture Academy Award winners as Nomadland, Green Book, 12 Years a Slave, The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire, American Beauty, and Chariots of Fire. Among those that earned Best Picture nominations include last year’s winner, The Fabelmans, as well as Belfast, JoJo Rabbit, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Room, La La Land, The Imitation Game, Silver Linings Playbook, Precious, Life Is Beautiful, Places in the Heart and The Big Chill.
Sources: The Washington Post, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline
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American Fiction won the People’s Choice Award. The prize often leads to the Best Picture Oscar.
“For the most part, this year’s TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival), which wrapped up with awards announced Sunday, was a far more muted affair — meaning that it allowed an exceptionally strong program of films to succeed on merits alone.” Film critic Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post believes the lack of star presence due to the strikes was a blessing for the festival.
One of the strongest examples of her theory is this year’s big winner: Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, the movie that won TIFF’s coveted audience award.
“Adapted by first-time filmmaker Cord Jefferson from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, the mordant, generous-hearted satire about race, identity, code-switching, and White liberal hypocrisy strikes a perfect balance of warm humor and bracing honesty,” writes Hornaday.
Another buzzy audience favorite, The Holdovers, was a runner-up for the award.
Alexander Payne’s tenderly funny portrait of an angst-ridden teenager and his grouchy teacher at a boys’ boarding school in the 1970s reunites Payne with his Sideways star Paul Giamatti with wonderful results. Both American Fiction and The Holdovers emerged as favorites early in the festival, as did Hit Man, Richard Linklater’s wickedly dark comedy, already screened in Venice, which features Glen Powell as a mild-mannered college professor who becomes an undercover cop-slash-assassin, and Wildcat, in which Ethan Hawke directs his daughter Maya Hawke.
The absence of distribution deals had a major impact this year. Wildcat and Hit Man, for example, were available for acquisition. “This is the sort of movie that a big studio would have bought at TIFF in the old days,” one high-level exec told The Hollywood Reporter’s writer Scott Feinberg at the festival. “It will surely sell soon, probably to a streamer,” wrote Feinberg. Other movies shared a similar fate. Some of the best-received films at this year’s TIFF arrived without distributors, including Christy Hall’s Daddio, Agnieszka Holland’s refugee drama Green Border and Azazel Jacobs’s His Three Daughters, starring Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne.
The Canadian festival is often a precursor for the Best Picture Oscar award. TIFF People’s Choice Award has been won by such eventual Best Picture Academy Award winners as Nomadland, Green Book, 12 Years a Slave, The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire, American Beauty, and Chariots of Fire. Among those that earned Best Picture nominations include last year’s winner, The Fabelmans, as well as Belfast, JoJo Rabbit, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Room, La La Land, The Imitation Game, Silver Linings Playbook, Precious, Life Is Beautiful, Places in the Heart and The Big Chill.
Sources: The Washington Post, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline
