Blockbuster movie season is over folks, welcome to the autumn cinema landscape. For the next four months or so, Oscar contenders will be the order of the day.
If there’s a moment that launches this it all off, it might be the Toronto International Film Festival. Considered by many to be the most important in North America, a whole bunch of film studios will be using it to launch their carefully selected Oscar bait. Expect biopics, experimental flicks and thought-provoking dramas galore.
If you’re looking for a head start on what to watch out for this autumn, here’s a choice selection of the most interesting films showing at the festival.
1.The Danish Girl
It probably won’t surprise anyone if this turns out to be the biggest film of the festival. Coming off the back of his Oscar-winning performance in The Theory of Everything
The film stars Redmayne in a fictionalised account of the life of Lili Elbe, one of the world’s first trans women to undergo gender reassignment surgery. While the trailer seems to deal with Elbe’s story with the right amount of sensitivity, some people have questioned the casting of a cis actor in the role.
If the movie manages to explore its subject matter successfully Redmayne could well be in line for another Academy Award nomination. Director Tom Hopper is something of a veteran when it comes to the Oscars game too, having directed both The King’s Speech
2. Hardcore
Toronto is usually more about big studios showing off their ‘clever’ films, but Hardcore is one of a handful of films entering the festival without a distributor. It almost definitely comes under the heading ‘experimental’, as the clip above shows.
Like a video game, the whole thing is shot from a first-person perspective. This is just scratching the surface of the film though. Directed by a Russian rockstar in Moscow, the story follows a cyborg called Henry who is trying to save his scientist wife. Oh, and Henry is played by a stuntman with a special kind of camera strapped to his face.
What the hell?
It’s not clear from the clip whether the action is being played straight or for laughs, but you’re unlikely to see anything as viscerally engaging for a long time.
3. Room
Brie Larson might be one of the most under-appreciated young actresses in all of Hollywood. Her 2013 film Short Term 12
Larson plays Ma, a young mother who has been held captive in a single room after being kidnapped. Seven years later, her only company is her five year old son, and the pair dream of getting out and seeing the world.
This is dark stuff. Based on the book by Emma Donoghue, which was partially inspired by the horrifying case of Joseph Fritzl, Room will follow Ma and her son on their journey beyond their single-roomed prison.
Screen veterans Joan Allen and William H. Macy will also star.
4. Beasts of No Nation
Somehow Netflix always manage to pick the most interesting projects. Beasts of No Nation is the streaming service’s first attempt at doing their own films, and centres around the life of a child soldier in Africa called Agu.
Watching the trailer it feels a lot like the film will show Agu’s transformation from an innocent child into an indoctrinated soldier, under the sway of Idris Elba’s charismatic commandant. From what we see of Elba he looks electric here, with a sense of menace and manipulation bubbling under the surface.
Beasts doesn’t appear to pull any punches either. Agu looks set to get ripped from his family and dragged into the full horror of child soldiers fighting a civil war in West Africa. This is backed up by the explicit detail of the book by Uzodinma Iweala it’s based on.
Can we just give another shout out to Idris Elba on this one? With this and his performance as Nelson Mandela in The Long Walk to Freedom, it’s starting to feel like he’s showing the rest of Hollywood up all by himself.
5. Kill Your Friends
Amongst all the very serious dramas screening in Toronto this week, Kill Your Friends might be something of a welcome change. A dark comedy set at the very peak of the Britpop nineties, Nick Hoult stars as a cut throat music A&R man looking for the next Blur or Oasis.
For those of us who remember Hoult in Skins, it’s kind of bizarre to realise he’s an actual movie star at the moment. Next year he’ll be in his third X-Men movie. However, Kill Your Friends looks like it might be a return to the kind of dark reckless humour he embodied as Tony Stonem.
The trailer feels a little bit like 24 Hour Party People
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