Daniel Craig leads Hollywood stars to Toronto for 50th film fest

Hollywood stars arrived in Toronto Thursday for a celebratory 50th edition of North America’s biggest film festival, with new movies from Daniel Craig, Sydney Sweeney and Matthew McConaughey among a packed lineup.

The Toronto International Film Festival dwarfs more famous rivals like Venice and Cannes for sheer scale, if not glitz and glamour, drawing an estimated 400,000 annual visitors to the Canadian metropolis.

Over 11 days of red-carpet galas, the “audience-first” fest showcases splashy crowd-pleasers in front of giant public audiences, while also serving as a key launchpad for Oscars campaigns.

This year, Netflix’s popular “Knives Out” whodunit franchise returns, with former 007 actor Craig back investigating the latest murder in “Wake Up Dead Man” in a Saturday night world premiere, alongside Glenn Close, Mila Kunis and Josh O’Connor.

Josh Brolin plays an unnerving demagogue with a cult following in a film that “tackles current issues in a fun, locked-room, classical-plot way,” said TIFF director of programming Robyn Citizen.

Sweeney aims to pivot from her recent jeans ad controversy to Academy Award contender with Friday’s premiere of “Christy,” a gritty, raw biopic of US female boxing pioneer Christy Martin.

In another harrowing true-life tale, launching Friday, McConaughey rescues schoolchildren from California wildfires in the emotionally searing action-thriller “The Lost Bus.”

For the festival’s 50th anniversary celebrations, stars Russell Crowe, Paul Mescal, Angelina Jolie and Anya Taylor-Joy will all hit the screenings and soirees.

TIFF “started out as festival of festivals, choosing the best work from around the world to show to Toronto audiences,” Citizen said.

While it has increasingly prioritized discovering new filmmakers, “certainly our public audience is what distinguishes us as a big festival,” she said.

– French invasion –

French directors are sure to bring a European flair.

Matt Dillon appears in Claire Denis’ drama “The Fence,” about a mysterious death on an African construction site, while Arnaud Desplechin launches love story “Two Pianos” starring Charlotte Rampling.

Alice Winocour directs Jolie for Paris fashion drama “Couture.”

Romain Gavras’s celebrity climate-change satire “Sacrifice” stars Taylor-Joy and Chris Evans as an eco-terrorist and a waning movie star, respectively.

Elsewhere, Crowe gives what organizers describe as a nuanced and eerily charismatic performance as Nazi Hermann Goering on trial in historical drama “Nuremberg,” opposite fellow Oscar-winner Rami Malek.

“You don’t expect to be disarmed by this person, who you know has done horrible things,” said Citizen. “And then, through the course of the movie, you are.”

Keanu Reeves plays an incompetent angel in Aziz Ansari’s body-swapping farce “Good Fortune,” while Channing Tatum portrays a real-life fugitive who lives clandestinely inside a toy store in “Roofman.”

Brendan Fraser plays a lonely actor for hire at funerals and weddings in Tokyo-set “Rental Family.”

– The Bard and the King –

Toronto follows hot on the heels of the small but influential US-based Telluride festival, and invites a selection of movies to make a bigger, second splash.

Among them, Mescal plays a young William Shakespeare in literary adaptation “Hamnet” from Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao — though the focus is squarely on the Bard’s long-suffering wife Agnes, played by a “transcendent” Jessie Buckley, says Citizen.

The film earned rave reviews and plenty of Oscar buzz in Telluride.

Director Edward Berger, on a hot run after “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Conclave,” will present Colin Farrell as a down-on-his-luck gambler in “Ballad of a Small Player.”

And fresh from Venice, director Guillermo del Toro brings his reimagining of “Frankenstein,” while Dwayne Johnson will promote “The Smashing Machine,” which has already drawn gushing predictions of a first Oscar nomination for the former pro wrestler known as “The Rock.”

TIFF runs until September 14.

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