Jok­er and Ford v Fer­rari head­line the 2019 Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Festival

It’s been a long, hot sum­mer, and we’ve still got anoth­er month to go, but at least the end is now in sight. Every year, the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val puts a prop­er end to block­buster sea­son and ush­ers in the end-of-year pres­tige del­uge, with awards-friend­ly main­stream releas­es and pre­mieres from esteemed auteurs.

The TIFF selec­tion com­mit­tee announced their first round of films for the 2019 fes­tiv­i­ties just this morn­ing, and even with a huge ros­ter of titles still to be revealed, this year main­tains its rep­u­ta­tion as an epi­cen­ter of film cul­ture in North Amer­i­ca. Lots of excit­ing picks to mull over, so let’s not dal­ly any fur­ther and dive right in:

The super­heroes have final­ly infil­trat­ed the fes­ti­val cir­cuit. While TIFF has his­tor­i­cal­ly been resis­tant to the fran­chise vari­ety of stu­dio tent­pole (broad­ly appeal­ing Oscar favorites are the usu­al order of the day), Todd Phillips‘ Jok­er film with Joaquin Phoenix will head­line this year’s edi­tion. That’s one of the big­ger-tick­et items, along with the Tom Han­ks-led Mis­ter Rogers biopic A Beau­ti­ful Day in the Neigh­bor­hood and Steven Soder­bergh​‘s finan­cial-crime dra­ma The Laun­dro­mat, the lat­ter of which boasts a cast includ­ing Meryl Streep and Gary Old­man.

They’re not the only big stars sched­uled to appear in what Drake might refer to as ​“the Six.” Eddie Mur­phy tries to get some of the old mag­ic back as Rudy Ray Moore in the biopic Dolemite Is My Name, while Matt Damon goes head-to-head with Chris­t­ian Bale in James Man­gold​‘s high-speed peri­od piece Ford V Fer­rari. Not to men­tion the pre­mière of the strip­per-scam­mer caper Hus­tlers, which could con­ceiv­ably bring Car­di B and Jen­nifer Lopez to the red carpet.

But what of the big names behind the cam­era? Here’s a brief selec­tion: Noah Baum­bach (mar­riage two-han­der with Scar­lett Johans­son and Adam Dri­ver), Tai­ka Wait­i­ti (that zany Hitler com­e­dy we’ve heard so much about), Arman­do Ian­nuc­ci (a satir­i­cal riff on David Cop­per­field), the Safdie broth­ers (a dia­mond-theft crime saga led fea­tur­ing a resur­gent Adam San­dler) and Fer­nan­do Meirelles (a com­e­dy about the pass­ing of the torch from one Pope to the next).

And that still leaves a wind­fall of holdovers from Cannes, many of which we’ve already praised on the pages of this very site. Back on the Croisette, we were quite tak­en with Bong Joon-ho’s Par­a­site, Celine Sciamma’s Por­trait of a Lady on Fire, Ira Sachs’ Frankie, Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glo­ry, and Robert Eggers’ The Light­house, all of which will come to Toronto.

An embar­rass­ment of rich­es, tru­ly, and we’ve still got lots and lots of movies to reveal. For this critic’s mon­ey, the Mas­ters, Mid­night Mad­ness and Plat­form sec­tions are where we real­ly start to see the pro­gram­mers haul out the big guns.

The 44^th Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val will take place from 5 Sep­tem­ber to 15 September.