The Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing from September 4-14 with celebrities and films flooding downtown. The transition from the mountains to the big city is jarring, but it’s a festival packed full of film fans and a program chocked full of premieres.
Starting this weekend and into early next week I’ll be scrambling from theater to theater to catch as many as possible. Quick reactions below and on bluesky (@josh-c / @thesunbreak), with longer reviews to follow.
The Testament of Ann Lee
North American Premiere
Suspira, but make it holy!
Amanda Seyfried’s luminous eyes are watching God in Mona Fastvold’s maximalist epic of the original Dance Church. Swapping writing-directing duties with personal and professional partner Brady Corbet, with its ascetic certainty and towering ambitions, the film shares some resonant DNA with the Brutalist. Here, though, the immigrant to the New World is a real life figure who crossed the Atlantic to bring Shaking Quakerism across the sea in the late 1700s. Song and ecstatic movement displace carnal pleasures in a sweeping musical account of a colonial messiah whose enduring legacy was one of austere craftsmanship.
Fastvold’s tremendous swing at conveying the magnitude of faith succeeds across multiple dimensions of impeccable production and dazzlingly committed performances. One of the few big movies to live up to its ambitions so far at this festival.
Miroirs No. 3
North American Premiere
With something always just out of reach, Christian Petzold’s films have a certain rigor of academic riddles, albeit ones populated by characters brimming with curiosity and nursing their own quiet tragedies. With vibrant interiority Paula Beer’s melancholic university student becomes a makeshift bandage for a rural family in the wake of a freak car crash. With a fairy tale quality, it becomes a story of rebirth and healing. The great pleasure is in the final puzzle piece falling into place to reveal an unexpectedly richer, fuller whole.
The Lost Bus
World Premiere
Impossible to capture the enormity of the Camp Wildfire that devastated Paradise California in 2018, but Paul Greengrass does what he can with what looks like a limited budget and an unfortunately clunky script. Filming the rapidly spreading flames like a Monster of the Week, he brings us deep inside the dark belly of the beast. Matthew McConaughey plays a struggling bus driver trying to get his life back in order. His passengers on a terrifying ride through the towering inferno, traffic jam, and twisting roads include a teacher played by America Ferrera and 23 incredibly compliant schoolchildren. As the burning world closes in around them, the adults do have some moments. Similarly, when the film pulls beyond the smoke, ample bravery abounds across all levels of the disaster response, yet no real life heroics can entirely rescue this one.