Last year, the Toronto International Film Festival peaked—at least from a publicity perspective—with a sold-out Q&A with Taylor Swift about her self-directed music video for “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version),” framed by the fest as a “short film” and lauded by CEO Cameron Bailey as evidence that its maker is a “brilliant visual thinker.” To give Swift credit where it’s due, “All Too Well” was one of the only entries at last year’s TIFF screened on 35 mm; somewhere, Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan were surely pumping their fists.
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
This year, TIFF’s ostensible main event is a live concert featuring Canadian rock icons Nickelback, who are in town with a slick vanity doc called Hate to Love: Nickelback in tow. It’s a title that gestures toward the band’s status as a platinum-plated punch line: the way their Dune-size earworms always remind you of songs by other, better groups. “I’m always at the opposite end of the spectrum, the opposite end of hipster culture,” lion-tressed frontman Chad Kroeger crowed back in 2012. But leaving aside the obvious observation that Nickelback, whether you hate to love them or love to hate them, are several hundred floors below Swift in the Tower of Song, the real question would seem to be what end of the spectrum TIFF is on these days.
Given the backdrop of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, which has already wreaked havoc with fall release schedules and beyond, it makes sense that TIFF would double down on films made by and/or about figures from other streams of entertainment: not only Nickelback, but also Paul Simon and Lil Nas X, who’ll both be in town to flog feature-length documentaries crafted in their image.
It’s also undeniably cool that the festival will play host to the world premiere of A24’s restored version of Stop Making Sense, the 1984 Talking Heads concert film directed by Jonathan Demme, which will be beamed to IMAX theaters worldwide following a live interview between Spike Lee and the band’s four famously fractious core members. Lee is also in town to pick up a TIFF Tribute Award, an honor whose guidelines are historically amorphous enough to apply to pretty much any A-lister who shows up at the Pearson Airport: Meryl Streep, Joaquin Phoenix, Jessica Chastain, Brendan Fraser … the list goes on.
None of the abovementioned movie stars will be at TIFF this year, and the ones who are will be wearing different hats (or perhaps berets). In a move that seems either ingenious or cynical—or maybe just pragmatic—the festival has invited a seemingly disproportionate number of features directed by famous actors, including Chris Pine’s Poolman, Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour, Ethan Hawke’s Wildcat, and Michael Keaton’s Knox Goes Away. Not having seen any of these movies, I can’t vouch for their quality one way or the other, and yet it’s probably fair to say that they are less anticipated than, say, Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, which premiered in Venice last week without its director-star present.
Celebrity has become an inextricable part of global film-festival culture, and as cathartic as it can be—especially for those of us who live here—to poke and prod at instances of overt starfuckery, the fact is that TIFF is typically in sync with other top-tier festivals when it comes to the way red-carpet glamour is used to facilitate other endeavors. Cooper’s absence in Venice is a sign of the times, and most of that festival’s big-ticket titles—such as Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things and David Fincher’s The Killer—premiered without most or all of their star talent. Elsewhere, films like Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla and Michael Mann’s Ferrari were granted promotional waivers owing to their specific production circumstances (Adam Driver used the opportunity to bring the fight to the festivals). All but The Killer will be at next month’s New York Film Festival, and their absence from TIFF does feel a bit conspicuous, even though it should be said that the reasons certain films do or don’t get programmed at TIFF (or anywhere) run deeper, and murkier, than the simple question of taste.
Not that matters of palate are irrelevant. The key difference between TIFF and Cannes or Venice is that it exists not as a cinematic tourist trap, but as a public-facing, metropolitan festival with hundreds of screening slots; ever since its inception in the late 1970s, the festival has used the lure of Hollywood to leverage a more diverse programming slate. Since the mid-2000s, however, TIFF has leaned into its unofficial—but widely recognized—status as a launching pad for award season and, for better or for worse, specialized in splashy premieres for films that have gone on to Oscar glory: The Shape of Water; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; Green Book. While there’s surely enough overlap among moviegoers who care about the refined multiplex aesthetics of Mann and Fincher and those who lapped up Green Book to make a Venn diagram, their shared sliver is a pretty narrow one; when it comes to a certain stratum of North American auteurs, TIFF’s foothold would seem to be slipping, although it is hosting new work by Richard Linklater, Alexander Payne, Kitty Green, and Harmony Korine this year (and it did manage to scoop its competitors last year to get Steven Spielberg for The Fabelmans).
It’s hard to be all things to all people, especially in a period that’s been extremely destabilizing for arts organizations, big and small, around the world: The impact of the strikes is compounded by the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic and the continued effects of streaming on in-person moviegoing of all kinds, which is itself complicated by the increased presence of companies like Netflix and Amazon on festival screens. (Netflix has a number of big movies in Toronto, including Reptile, Pain Hustlers, Ru, and Fair Play.) In this context, the oddly timed announcement that TIFF is about to lose its largest (and one of its longest-tenured) corporate sponsors in the Canadian telecommunications giant Bell is a gut punch. Not that it’s the only festival under duress: This week, reports that the Berlinale was considering ending the contract of its respected—and artistically ambitious—director Carlo Chatrian in order to make the selection more accessible was met with dismay in cinephile corners, while Venice chief Alberto Barbera has been pilloried for somehow including new movies by Luc Besson, Roman Polanski, and Woody Allen in the same year—an unheroic trio that stands in extreme contrast to TIFF’s more cautious, politically correct MO (the irony being that even crowd-pleasers like Three Billboards and Green Book ended up being labeled problematic upon wider release).
To people outside film culture—and maybe even more so to those who live and work in the bubble—the rhetoric emanating from a festival like TIFF can be enervating; while there’s technically nothing wrong with programming glossy hagiography like Thom Zimny’s Sly, which seeks to do for Sylvester Stallone what Netflix’s Arnold did for Herr Schwarzenegger, it’s hard to see how adding the film to the interview-driven “In Conversation” series will, per the official blurb, “ignite perspectives and drive profound change.” Or maybe it fits: To quote well-known diplomat Rocky Balboa, “If I can change, and you can change, everybody can change.”
There will, of course, be good movies to see at TIFF: The selection of Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s reportedly valedictory opus The Boy and the Heron as the festival’s opening-night film promises to get things off to an emotional start, and there are more impressive Canadians on display than Nickelback, including Atom Egoyan, whose new drama, Seven Veils, featuring Amanda Seyfried as an embattled opera director, feels like a return to form. The art-house selection is strong; it includes French director Justine Triet’s ferocious, Palme d’Or–winning courtroom thriller Anatomy of a Fall and Jonathan Glazer’s deeply unsettling period piece The Zone of Interest, which chronicles the lives of a German family living on the outskirts of Auschwitz. The common denominator between Triet’s and Glazer’s films, which were the talk of Cannes, is the presence of German virtuoso Sandra Hüller, recently tapped by The Hollywood Reporter as the actress of the year, and deserving of the accolade. After giving one of the most accomplished comic performances of this century in Toni Erdmann, Hüller navigates darker territory with aplomb, especially in Anatomy of a Fall, whose thrills hinge on the bitter intensity of her performance.
As for Oscar bait, one of the meatier offerings that’s been screened for review so far is Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money—precisely the kind of seriocomic, light-heavyweight entry that TIFF specializes in. The film centers on the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, wherein amateur investor Keith Gill (a.k.a. Roaring Kitty, played by Paul Dano) incited a small army of YouTube viewers to invest in—and exponentially inflate the value of—a seemingly moribund stock. In contrast to Gillespie’s 2017 breakthrough, I, Tonya—a mean-spirited burlesque of American idiocy that suggested Coen brothers cosplay—Dumb Money plays like a 21st-century Frank Capra movie, with a community of lovable, plugged-in outcasts rallying around an everyman speaking truth to power on their behalf. The bad guys, meanwhile, are obscenely wealthy hedge fund managers left stewing in their own privilege as a grassroots movement takes shape against them.
At times, Gillespie borrows too liberally from the Adam McKay playbook—sanctimonious dialogue punctuated by goofy, extremely online digressions—and the acting is uneven: Slamming Dano’s tightly focused understatement up against Pete Davidson’s slovenly shtick as Keith’s brother makes for some tonally wacky moments, to say the least. It’s also tough to get too caught up in proletarian, anti-corporate righteousness when we see real-life footage of Roaring Kitty being defended online by Dave Portnoy and, um, Elon Musk (a scene that gets laughs in all the wrong ways). Ideally, a movie about themes of class solidarity and the unifying-slash-destructive potential of the internet would be a bit more ambivalent instead of uplifting; it might even reflect on the irony of its own presence at a festival whose fortunes have been affected by filmdom’s own ongoing labor upheaval. For what it is, Dumb Money is likable enough. Hopefully, the rest of TIFF will showcase work that goes a little further—love it or hate it.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.