Russell Crowe’s nerve-shredding portrayal of a notorious Nazi on trial and Angelina Jolie’s deeply personal dive into the world of French fashion led a busy Sunday of world premieres at the Toronto film festival.
Crowe’s depiction of the second-ranking Nazi, Hermann Goering, in “Nuremberg,” as he plays a cat-and-mouse game with a psychiatrist (Rami Malek), drew an unusually lengthy standing ovation at North America’s biggest movie fest.
The movie, out in theaters in November and based on Jack El-Hai’s book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” depicts Goering as a charming, smart and wily prisoner, while not shying away from the colossal evil in which he played a pivotal role.
“You can’t play a character like this and not walk away, at the end of the day, feeling things that maybe shake you about what went down,” Crowe told journalists on the world premiere’s red carpet.
Crowe speaks German in parts of the film, depicting how Goering believed he could use the post-World War II Nuremberg trials to justify his actions on a global stage.
The Oscar-winner signed up just after reading the script, in which he could see Goering’s “ambition bloom” and “how his egotism told him that he could control the narrative.”
The movie contains devastating archive footage of Nazi concentration camp victims being bulldozed into their graves — the same film reel that was shown in the real Nuremberg courtroom.
Director James Vanderbilt said he asked his actors not to research the footage before they were confronted with it on the day the scene was filmed.
Crowe’s role was “a dark person to play — that takes an emotional toll on an actor,” Vanderbilt told AFP.
“He was game for all of it, and I’m eternally grateful to him for that.”
In an early review, Deadline called the movie “unrelenting” and “enormously effective,” praising Crowe’s “stunning” performance.
– ‘Stitches’ –
Elsewhere at Toronto on Sunday, Angelina Jolie premiered “Couture,” a drama focusing on some of the human stories behind the often superficial world of fashion.
Set in Paris and coming from French director Alice Winocour, it follows an American filmmaker who is diagnosed with cancer as she prepares for a runway show, and told she needs a double mastectomy — echoing Jolie’s real-life health issues.
“It’s about couture — in French, it means stitches,” the actress told AFP.
“So stitches, when you think of our surgeries, our bodies, the way our lives and stories are sewn together, you understand what the film is.”
The film does not yet have a release date.
Meanwhile, Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao walked the red carpet for “Hamnet,” which colors in the gaps of the little we know about William Shakespeare and his wife, and a tragedy that inspired arguably his greatest work.
“To see them fall in love and come together, be torn apart… it’s an inner civil war that we all battle with as we grow and mature,” she told AFP.
The movie, starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, hits theaters in November and is expected to be an Academy Awards contender.
And at a Toronto press conference, stripper-turned-actor Channing Tatum said his performance in “Roofman,” which tells the true story of a man who robbed dozens of McDonald’s and hid out in a toy store, had helped him overcome “imposter syndrome.”
The film, out next month, recounts the life of Jeffrey Manchester, who robbed dozens of fast food stores through the 1990s, entering the restaurants through the roof.
He famously built a secret hideout inside a Toys “R” Us store in the city of Charlotte, coming out after closure at night to wash in the bathroom, surviving largely on snack food like M&Ms.
“For the very first time, maybe even on this movie, I feel like I’ve actually earned my seat at the table” with the role, Tatum said.
The Toronto International Film Festival runs until next Sunday.
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