Oscar-tipped movies featuring a host of A-listers, including Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, will head to Toronto in September for the city’s annual film festival.
The lineup includes a number of major awards hopes as well as a strong showing for some of the next year’s biggest British movies. The initial announcement, one of many to come, is highlighted by Steven Soderbergh’s Panama Papers drama The Laundromat, starring Streep as well as Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, which is set to be one of Netflix’s biggest Oscar pushes of the season.
Two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks will also be unveiling his new film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a biopic of children’s TV staple Mister Rogers from Can You Ever Forgive Me? director Marielle Heller. “My challenge as a director was to get Tom Hanks to become less Tom Hanks,” Heller said to Entertainment Weekly. “This will feel very different from how you’ve seen him before.”
Jennifer Lopez will also bring her fact-based drama Hustlers to the festival, a film about a group of strippers who stole money from their white-collar clientele. It also stars Crazy Rich Asians breakout Constance Wu, Lizzo and Cardi B, who director Lorene Scafaria chased for two years to be in the movie.
Other true stories include Judy with Renee Zellweger playing Judy Garland, Ford v Ferrari, starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale, Harriet starring Cynthia Erivo as abolitionist and activist Harriet Tubman, Radioactive starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie, Just Mercy starring Michael B Jordan as civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, Hugh Jackman in Bad Education about the largest public school embezzlement scandal in history and The Two Popes starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce.
The festival has also recruited DC’s much-anticipated Joker, a gritty R-rated origins story starring Joaquin Phoenix as the anarchic Batman villain. “I wouldn’t quite classify this as like any genre,” Phoenix said to Collider. “I wouldn’t say it’s a superhero movie, or a studio movie … It feels unique.”
British films featured in the lineup include Ordinary Love, a romantic drama starring Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville as a couple facing the possibility of death, Military Wives, a feelgood comedy telling the true story of the choir that gained fame in 2011 starring Sharon Horgan and Kristin Scott-Thomas, an adaptation of Caitlin Moran’s semi-autobiographical bestseller How to Build a Girl starring Lady Bird’s Beanie Feldstein and Michael Winterbottom’s satire Greed starring Steve Coogan as a retail billionaire.
The much-anticipated adaptation of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, starring Ansel Elgort and Nicole Kidman, will also be shown as well as Thor: Ragnarok director Taiki Watiti’s offbeat second world war comedy Jojo Rabbit starring Scarlett Johansson, who will also appear in Noah Baumbach’s Netflix drama Marriage Story alongside Adam Driver.
Last year’s festival saw the world premiere of Green Book which went on to win the Oscar for best picture. This year, festivities begin on 5 September.