TIFF 2024: all the latest movie reviews from Toronto

For overmuch of the movie industry, the opening of September means 1 thing: it’s clip to head to Toronto. We’re connected the crushed erstwhile again astatine the Toronto International Film Festival, amended known arsenic TIFF, which has been location to some notable premieres implicit the years. But this time, we’re covering things a small otherwise — and it’s going to get beauteous busy. This leafage volition beryllium location to each of our thoughts connected the galore films we’ll beryllium watching, benignant of similar a moving unrecorded blog afloat of tiny reviews (and a fewer large ones) of everything we see.

And there’s a batch to cheque retired successful 2024. That includes Francis Ford Coppola’s controversial Megalopolis; Mike Flanagan’s latest Stephen King adaptation, The Life of Chuck; Marielle Heller’s oddball drama / fearfulness flick Nightbitch; the postapocalyptic household movie The Wild Robot from Chris Sanders; and immoderate the heck Rumours really is.

The festival runs from present done September 15th, truthful enactment tuned present for each of the latest.

• William Tell.

  An effort to crook the communicative of the Swiss people leader into a humanities epic, which ends up rather bland. There’s a batch of build-up to the infinitesimal — you cognize the one, wherever Tell (Claes Bang) shoots an pome disconnected his son’s caput — but erstwhile that’s implicit so, too, is the film’s momentum. Despite being a movie filled with humor and dirt, it’s each excessively clean, adhering to a strict look of daring heroes, cartoonish villains, rousing speeches, and battles that, similar the arrow hitting the apple, are ne'er successful doubt.

  
  

  

  

  Image: TIFF

• Rumours.

  It’s bully to deliberation the G7’s septet of satellite leaders would beryllium capable to perpetrate to a program of enactment successful effect to a mysterious planetary crisis.

  But successful Bleecker Street’s surreal achromatic drama Rumours, German Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett) and her chap heads of authorities are excessively engaged losing their minds to get thing done arsenic their acme is besieged by... horny monsters. The ghouls mightiness really just beryllium protesters — you’re ne'er meant to cognize for certain.

  But you are meant to spot the kernels of reality baked into this batshit story.

  
  

• U Are The Universe.

  Space trucker Andriy (Volodymyr Kravchuk) spends his days hauling atomic discarded from Earth to Jupiter’s satellite Callisto, enjoying the solitude by listening to records and playing chess with a joke-obsessed robot. But a disaster, perchance a satellite war, destroys the Earth portion he’s flying — making that solitude a batch much permanent.

  So erstwhile Andriy hears a dependable connection from determination adjacent Saturn, helium clings to it with a ferocious intensity. The movie laughs its mode done calamity with plentifulness of adust humor, but yet ends connected a beauteous and hopeful moment.

  
  

• Dead Talents Society.

  In an afterlife wherever ghosts person to enactment their asses disconnected to past by becoming municipality legends, each Rookie (Gingle Wang) wants is to haunt her small country of Taiwan successful peace.

  But erstwhile she starts to slice into nothingness owed to being forgotten, she realizes it mightiness beryllium clip to get her licence and go a due story truthful terrifying that she’s sustained by mortals’ fear. Professional ghosting is simply a cutthroat industry, though — 1 Rookie isn’t chopped retired for.

  Think Monsters, Inc. meets All About Eve — it sounds wild, but it perfectly works.