TIFF 2019: Toronto International Film Festival news and movie reviews

Whodunnits in the vein of Agatha Christie — like Knives Out, a romping delight from genre-bending Last Jedi auteur Rian Johnson — require a degree of prejudice in the reader in order to work properly. Characters are slotted into a type, usually owing to their occupation, nationality, or social standing, and then the fun of the story comes from how people act against (or within) type, subverting our guesses.

Christie, of course, was working in England a century ago; Johnson’s story is set in contemporary, richly autumnal patrician Massachusetts, in the home of a hugely successful mystery writer who has, unfortunately, turned up dead. And because this is America in 2019, the prejudices and privileges displayed by the family vying for his money are uniquely American, too.

Plenty of buzzy films premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival — this year, that included Joker, Jojo Rabbit, Knives Out, and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. But the festival programs hundreds of movies, which means that some noteworthy ones can fly beneath the radar.

It’s impossible to see everything at the festival, and many deserving films are still waiting for distribution and release. But here are five movies we saw at TIFF this year that are worth looking for in the months ahead: two documentaries, one period comedy, one drama, and a chilling religious horror film.

The upstairs-downstairs construct — in which the literal levels of a house demarcate the differences between the wealthy and those who serve them — has long worked as shorthand for class division and struggle. (See: every British period drama, ever.) The “upstairs” people are comfortable, happy, and prefer to be oblivious to what’s going on “downstairs” with the hired help, who do their work and live their lives invisibly alongside.

In Parasite, Korean horror master Bong Joon-Ho (The Host, Snowpiercer) draws on that visual metaphor for a twisty, pummeling thriller that’s among his best work. It’s thematically familiar territory for Bong; his films always pair heart-stopping and imaginative terror with humor and a healthy dose of raging at inequality. Parasite feels in many ways like the culmination.

Every marriage harbors the seeds of its own destruction. People who stay married just figure out how to keep those seeds from blooming into chokeweeds. But maybe the reverse is true, too: Every divorce contains, in microcosm, what made the pair get together in the first place.

Which is why the seemingly ironic title of Marriage Story is sincere, even affectionate. Noah Baumbach is America’s foremost chronicler of rough-hewn and disintegrating family units, and in Marriage Story, he pries open one divorce to find the beating heart inside. It’s a showcase for stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson as much as a triumph for Baumbach, recalling the wry humor and perfect pitch of Woody Allen’s best work, albeit with a touch less self-obsession (even though the couple seems at least partly, and probably inevitably, modeled on Baumbach’s divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh in 2013).

The Toronto International Film Festival obviously isn’t an American film festival. But with so many Hollywood movies and American indies playing in its venues, it can be easy to forget it’s in Canada.

And you can tell a lot about what’s going on in the world by looking at what the movies that surface at TIFF are interested in. In 2019, the unofficial theme of the festival (as it was at Cannes in May) seemed to sit at the intersection of privilege and the mistrust of the powerful. Movies about the CIA’s torture program, embezzlement on local and global scales, the death penalty, and anti-immigrant sentiment were among the festival’s most buzzed-about titles, alongside one particularly prominent entry that, in the end, exposed the emptiest of worldviews.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book’s fans will complain about the movie version, and that’s fine. But more literary adaptations are wrecked by slavish source fidelity than by imaginative tweaks. Movies and books are different media, and they have to tell stories in different ways. As long as the original’s soul is preserved, everyone wins.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why The Goldfinch doesn’t work on screen, or at least not in John Crowley’s adaptation. Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning 2013 novel, a doorstop at nearly 800 pages, meanders (somewhat tediously, for my taste) through the youth and early adulthood of a boy named Theo. Along the journey, it contemplates philosophical matters, like the effects of trauma or blind chance on our life paths, or the possibility of authentic art. It is not an obvious fit for a feature-length film.

Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, is uniquely chilling among supervillains for one very specific reason: He’s never had a definitive origin story. Since his creation in 1940, the Joker has simply been the personification of evil, reinterpreted by various writers to fit the story they want to tell on the page or screen.

The Joker’s seeming randomness, his refusal to be limited by any moral code or any whiff of history, is scary as hell. He’s what humans have always feared and fought: evidence of an uncaring universe, one that strikes at random. And personifications of inexplicable, snickering evil have shown up throughout human history, from folklore and legend all the way to characters like No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, who stalks around with a captive bolt stunner randomly killing people based on the flip of a coin.

Trailers for Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit strenuously clarify — as cheekily as anyone can — that the film is an “anti-hate satire,” presumably because some marketer at Fox Searchlight savvily intuited that images of a boy in a Hitler Youth outfit romping through the forest with Adolf Hitler wouldn’t go over very well, especially on the internet.

In truth, with some audiences, they still may not. But the “satire” moniker is apt: Jojo Rabbit does cartoonishly skewer the frenzy that enabled Hitler’s rise to power (and propagation of atrocities), filtered through the eyes of a bullied 10-year-old kid.

Let’s get one thing straight: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is not a biopic about Fred Rogers. The man who millions of children grew up knowing as Mister Rogers, their TV “neighbor,” was the subject of a strong (and very successful) biographical documentary in 2018. If you’re looking for the details of his life, start there.

What you’ll get from A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is much lighter on the backstory, though it’s got plenty of Rogers, too — played, in the year’s most perfect casting, by Tom Hanks. Instead of a retelling of the beloved children’s TV host’s life, this is a delightfully weird drama, framed and shot deliberately to feel like a grown-up episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. But it’s Matthew Rhys who stars as Lloyd Vogel, a version of real-life Esquire journalist Tom Junod, who was sent in 1998 to write a few hundred words about Rogers for a puff piece and wound up with a cover story and a changed life.

The American practice of capital punishment is inextricably linked to much of what’s wrong with our justice system — its focus on punitive rather than restorative measures; its indisputable bias against the poor, mentally ill, and marginalized; its captivity to racial bias. These issues aren’t up for much debate.

But despite support for abolishing or at least reforming the death penalty from both progressives and a healthy number of pro-life conservatives, it’s also not something most Americans have to think about a lot. Few people find their own lives touched by the death penalty, and it’s in the best interests of its supporters not to say much about the details in public.

On the surface, Hustlers sounds like a cross between a flashy tale of a glamorous strip club and a Robin Hood story. Young stripper Destiny (Constance Wu) becomes close friends with Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), the undisputed queen of a Manhattan club frequented by Wall Street high rollers. But when the 2008 recession hits, the women find themselves on hard times and hatch a plan to extract money from unsuspecting men — and it works.

Lopez and Wu anchor the film, but Hustlers also features an outstanding supporting cast (including Keke Palmer, Lili Reinhart, Lizzo, Cardi B, and Julia Stiles as the journalist interviewing Destiny and Ramona about the story). The story is less a flashy caper than a look into the effects of the recession through a more intimate, less political lens, a la other films like The Girlfriend Experience and Magic Mike.

People say art makes us more empathetic — and research seems to confirm this, to a degree — but I’ve always found the idea a little suspect; it’s not as if some of history’s greatest monsters weren’t also art lovers.

Nevertheless, a film can open your mind to others’ life experiences, if you’ll let it, and Honey Boy is no exception. But it also goes one step further: Honey Boy is, itself, an empathy-generating exercise for its creator, in a way that seems both extraordinarily painful and courageous. It’s an intensely personal project for writer and star Shia LaBeouf, one that walks a thin tightrope but pays off beautifully.

When, near the end of Trey Edward Shults’s extraordinary drama Waves, a father quotes Proverbs 10:12 to his teenaged daughter — “Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers up all offenses” — it’s no glib pronouncement, no easy bow tied onto a story of a struggling family, no motto cross-stitched onto a morality tale. American cinema is rife with movies about family dysfunction and heartache, but because there can only be so much plot packed into a feature-length movie, too often those movies come off as slick or insincere.

But Waves earns its grace-filled ending by asking us to live alongside a trial by fire. It sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it: You walk out with a weary, cleansed soul.

Every fall, right after Labor Day, one of the biggest events on the movie calendar gets underway: the Toronto International Film Festival, which most people call by its acronym, TIFF.

Since it launched in 1976, the 10-day event has become one of the largest and most prestigious in the world, propelling emerging filmmakers onto the international scene and awards hopefuls toward the big fall movie season. But there’s plenty about it that an average movie fan might not know. So as the 2019 edition of the festival kicks off on September 5, here’s some of the biggest questions about TIFF — and some answers.

The Lighthouse is, I can safely say, one of the most over-the-top movies I’ve ever had the good fortune to see. Robert Eggers — whose last film, the wild 2015 horror movie The Witch, lit Sundance on fire when it premiered — has clearly established himself as a no-holds-barred auteur of dread, madness, and mannered period dialogue.

Also gallows comedy. Also horror. What I’m trying to say is, The Lighthouse is a blast.

Everyone wants to imagine themselves the hero in a movie about heroes. Not everyone wants to consider what it would take to do what’s right when nobody may ever know — when their actions will be hidden.

A Hidden Life is not a hero’s story.