The Best Films at the Toronto Film Festival 2024 Were Anchored in Heartbreak

It's a thrilling time of year for cinephiles, with the annual wave of fall festivals bringing a host of new films. Many of the best tend to converge at the Toronto International Film Festival with luminaries landing in Canada to unveil their latest projects. This year's festival brought with it extraordinary work from the likes of Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Florence Pugh, Nicole Kidman, Tilda Swinton, and even Pamela Anderson. Here are the movies you should look out for in future months.

Hard Truths

One of the best performances you'll see all year belongs to Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh's phenomenal Hard Truths. Jean-Baptiste first worked with the auteur in the 1996 film Secrets & Lies, and her turn in that film as a young woman searching for her birth mother earned her an Oscar. Here's hoping she gets another one for playing Pansy, a suburban British woman in turmoil, in Hard Truths. Leigh's return to contemporary storytelling after a time spent making period films is a slice-of-life look at a contemporary Black family with Pansy and her anguish at the center. Pansy's affliction is undefined but clearly the result of a serious mental health issue. At first, however, it presents as funny. Pansy complains about everything in a running monologue, frustrated by minutiae. (At one point, she inquires why a baby would be wearing clothes with pockets. What do they need pockets for?) Eventually, however, it becomes clear that to laugh at Pansy is to minimize her extreme pain—a pain that no one around her, including her husband (David Webber) and sister (Michele Austin), can alleviate. By the end of the film, your heart breaks for Pansy, who is stuck in a stasis from which she can't recover.

The Brutalist

Within the first minutes of Brady Corbet’s epic The Brutalist, it takes your breath away. Adrien Brody’s László Toth, a Hungarian Holocaust refugee, emerges on the deck of the ship, bringing him to America. He looks up and sees the Statue of Liberty, but it's presented upside down. It’s an apt metaphor for Corbet’s searing, three-and-a-half-hour take on the American Dream, which also features a 15-minute intermission. To watch The Brutalist is a commitment, but one that will be well-rewarded. Brody’s László was a celebrated architect in his native country, but when he arrives in the States at the behest of his cousin, who owns a small furniture store in Pennsylvania, László's wife (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy) remain unable to leave their homeland. Eventually, László's talents lead him to a wealthy, bombastic industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren, played with gusto by Guy Pearce. This man recruits Laszlo to build a community center that will serve as a monument to his late mother. László becomes obsessed with the project, driving him to disillusionment. Corbet, who shot the film in VistaVision, won the best director prize at Venice, and it fits. The Brutalist is a monumental achievement.

We Live in Time

You'll laugh way more than you expect to at We Live in Time, the romantic drama starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh as a couple dealing with her cancer diagnosis. The film from John Crowley, set to be released by A24, has a neat trick to it. It's told out of order, which means that you know Pugh's character—named Almut—is probably going to die very early into the runtime. The fact that that sad diagnosis doesn't come as a surprise means we have more time to enjoy the sweetness of their relationship. He's a recently divorced Wheetabix employee; she's an ambitious chef. She accidentally hits him with her car, setting up their hospital meet-cute. Pugh is absolutely magnetic as Almut, while Garfield is sweetly nerdy as Tobias, and you root for them to have as much happiness they can. You'll giggle—particularly in a birth sequence—and you'll cry. Of course.

The Last Showgirl

There was a lot of anticipation at TIFF around The Last Showgirl, which features Pamela Anderson in her most substantial film role to date. Could Anderson pull it off? We should have never doubted her. Anderson is wonderful as Shelley, a dancer who must reevaluate her life when she learns the long running revue she has been in for over 30 years is closing. Gia Coppola's film, written by Kate Gersten, is a perfect fit for the former Baywatch star, who plays Shelley as a consummate dreamer. The film is also a look at a corner of Vegas we don't often see, which can be sad, but not grim, as Shelley's makeshift family is full of love. Jamie Lee Curtis pours all she has into a portrayal of Shelley's best friend, a spray-tanned cocktail waitress who lives loudly and unabashedly.

Friendship

Once Friendship, directed by Andrew DeYoung, hits theaters—it is still seeking distribution—it is without a doubt going to become a new comedy classic. The movie starring I Think You Should Leave's Tim Robinson is one of the funniest I've seen recently. Robinson plays Craig Waterman, a guy who works a nondescript business job getting people addicted to apps. He becomes infatuated with Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd, in a mustache), a local weatherman who moves onto his block. After Austin—a true weirdo himself—reaches out, Craig thinks this new pal is the key to a better life, an illusion that shatters once Austin decides he doesn't want to hang out with Craig anymore. It sends Craig on a hilarious spiral that is hilarious and surreal. If you like Robinson's other work, you'll love this.

The End

After a premiere at the Telluride Film Festival just a few weeks ago, Joshua Oppenheimer's strange, inherently divisive, but altogether beguiling musical drama The End played TIFF. The film focuses on the members of an absurdly wealthy family (Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay) who have lived for decades in an underground complex while the rest of the world burns. (Their money comes from oil, so they are responsible for the terror they avoid but feel little guilt.) They have brought with them the finest works of art and a small team of support staff, and have created a routine to make their existence as luxurious as possible given the circumstances. Their insular world expands when a young woman (Moses Ingram) crashes through their barricades, and they decide to let her stay instead of sending her off to near-certain death. Her presence forces everyone else inside this compound to reckon with the ghosts of who they left behind to afford their survival. And it's all told in haunting song and dance.

The Wild Robot

One of the best animated films of the year debuted at TIFF in The Wild Robot, a gorgeous fable based on the children's book series by Peter Brown. Lupita Nyong'o provides her voice to the title character, a helper android called a Rozzum who crash lands on a remote island filled with incredibly adorable critters. Roz's programming assigns her to help out, but that's hard when there are no human tasks to complete. After an accident, she ends up in the possession of a little goose egg, and the gosling that is born (later voiced by Kit Connor) attaches to her. The art of The Wild Robot is spectacular, and the story will have you squealing from overwhelming sweetness.

The Room Next Door

Pedro Almodóvar's latest is another project that came to TIFF high off recent success overseas, having won the coveted Golden Lion at Venice. The Spanish director's first full-length English language film is a deeply moving adaptation of the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez. It stars Julianne Moore as Ingrid, a writer in New York who learns her old friend Martha, played by Tilda Swinton, has cancer. Ingrid begins visiting Martha, rekindling their lapsed connection as Martha reflects on her past as a war correspondent and a mother to an estranged daughter. And then Martha asks Ingrid a huge favor: can she accompany her upstate while she kills herself with a black market euthanasia pill, unwilling to let her disease give her more pain? What follows is a moving depiction of friendship in the face of death, as the women grapple with mortality in Almodóvar's astounding frames.

I'm Still Here

Brazilian director Walter Salles directs this true story with such intimacy that it almost feels like he invented the characters, but in actuality, his latest film is ripped from history. It opens in 1970 Rio de Janeiro, with Brazil under a military dictatorship. The Paiva family recognizes the encroachment of authoritarianism but also thrives in their love for one another. That happiness is ripped away when, one day, some strange men appear at their door and demand their father, Ruben (Selton Mello), a former congressman, come with them. He is never seen again. I'm Still Here primarily focuses on Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), Rubens's wife, who is also called in for questioning, and she tries to keep her family calm while investigating her husband's disappearance. Torres is spectacularly sturdy in the role as she remains steadfast in the face of unimaginable grief, and the film is somehow both warm and harrowing.

Happyend

This film from Neo Sora is a strangely tender vision of a potentially dark future. Taking place in a nondescript time, but at least a couple of years ahead from where we are now, it follows a group of Japanese high schoolers whose school installs a new surveillance system that docks points from them when they break the rules. But that's just one factor that complicates the relationship between longtime best friends Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka). As Yuta remains childlike and eager to party and play music, Kou is pulled toward political activism, feeling the pressure the government puts on him as a Korean national. It's a coming-of-age story filtered through a slightly askew lens that heightens its emotional power.