Surprise Sensations
Toronto is a huge festival, meaning there is always at least a movie or two lurking quietly in the lineup, ready to blow up and startle the whole event. Last year, that movie was Green Book, a film barely on anyone’s radar that rode an audience award to a best-picture Oscar. This year, let’s hope whatever breaks out is a little less of, uh, a problem.
One such contender is Just Mercy, the new film from Short Term 12 director Destin Daniel Cretton. It’s a death row drama starring Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, and Brie Larson. So that’s two Oscar winners and a shoulda-been nominee (for Creed and Black Panther), in a story about the American justice system, arriving at a time when that whole thing is really, really broken. Sure, it’s maybe not initially as flashy-seeming as a Mister Rogers movie, or a film about how the Joker is bad, but it might have the makings of a festival sensation.
I’ve also got my eye on The Friend, a movie based on an Esquire article about a man who moves in with a terminally ill woman and her husband to help care for her. It stars Dakota Johnson, Jason Segel, and Casey Affleck, and just has the ring of something that could really hit a nerve at Toronto. In 2014, the Alzheimer’s drama Still Alice came out of nowhere at TIFF and eventually earned Julianne Moore an Oscar. Might this disease-focused weepy do something like that too? We’ll see.
It’s not likely, given its late position on the Toronto schedule—but I’m also holding out hope that Noah Hawley’s astronaut drama Lucy in the Sky, starring Natalie Portman, is worthwhile (and weird). I’m just fascinated by Portman’s continuing journey into the fringes of the psyche, and want to see her keep doing it. I’m also curious what Hawley is like as a filmmaker instead of a TV showrunner. Fingers crossed that Lucy in the Sky is more Fargo and less Legion.
I’ve similarly got a keen interest in Bad Education, from Cory Finley. His last film, Thoroughbreds, was an arresting Sundance curio, a really stylish, intriguing debut from a playwright turned director. For his sophomore outing, Finley has employed Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Ray Romano, and others to tell the true story of an embezzlement scheme in a public school system. It might just be a quirky little crime movie, but Finley’s first film had such a distinctive flair to it that he’s earned our attention.
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