The Oscar season is about to kick-off!
With the beginning of the awards season comes the festival season. The 2019 Toronto International Film Festival was the first to release their line up. This year’s slate boasted a wide array of films including potential crowd-pleasers like the Mister Rogers movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Cannes winner Parasite, and the most intriguing film of the festival, Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Gotham’s favorite bad guy.
The lineup is, as always, is full of hopefuls we’ll see over and over again on the awards circuit this fall. On the biopic front, there’s Tom Hanks as Mister Rogers in Beautiful Day, Renée Zellweger taking on Judy Garland in Judy, and Cynthia Erivo playing Harriet Tubman in Harriet. Shia LaBeouf’s life story will also play out in Honey Boy, starring Lucas Hedges.
There are also plenty of prestige titles in the lineup, like Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat, starring Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, and Antonio Banderas. Banderas also takes center stage in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, which some prognosticators think might be his ticket to an Oscar nomination. Along with that, the long-awaited adaptation of The Goldfinch will premiere, Annette Bening and Adam Driver in the political drama The Report, Matt Damon and Christian Bale in the race car epic Ford v Ferrari, and Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu in the stripper scam story Hustlers.
Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, starring Driver, and Scarlett Johansson are also on the docket, as is the black-and-white two-hander The Lighthouse, from spooky The Witch director Robert Eggers. The latter stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.
Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, the follow-up to Star Wars: The Last Jedi will premiere.
