Sweet. The Toronto International Film Festival has announced more of its 2009 line-up including opening and closing night films.
The opening night film is Jon Amiel’s “Creation” starring Paul Bettany and his wife Jennifer Connelly and its essentially a biopic about Charles Darwin. The move is a little strange as TIFF usually opens up with a Canadian-made movie, but as its head programmer said today, “it has been a tradition, but it is not a law.” We honestly have little interest in that picture, but maybe TIFF could change our minds.
The biggest highlights to us?
– Ricky Gervais’ “The Invention of Lying” featuring appearances by Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Jeffrey Tambor and Jason Bateman among others.
-Steven Soderbergh’s black comedy, “The Informant” with Matt Damon
– Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” starring a tremendously good Abbie Cornish, which we saw at Cannes earlier this year and it was basically the best film that festival had to offer.
– “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” which was a hit during Sundance and apparently features a fiery performance by comedian MoNique.
-Aaron Schneider’s “Get Low” starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek and Lucas Black.
– French provocateur Bruno Dumont’s “Hadewijch” about a religious novice whose ecstatic, blind faith leads to her expulsion from a convent.
– Tim Blake Nelson’s “Leaves Of Grass,” which we’ve been waiting for, seemingly forever and stars Edward Norton as a pair of twins at odds with one anothers lifestyle (one’s straight laced, one’s a stoner that the “good” Norton has to help out) that we previewed in one our Most Anticipated ’09 pieces.
– Bong Joon-ho’s “Mother,” a Kafka-esque murder mystery noir we saw in Cannes and also loved, and we were JUST noting how this was one of the better pictures at the Croisette that still hasn’t been picked up for North American distribution. Hopefully TIFF will rectify that.
– “Partir” starring Kristen Scott Thomas
– Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn — the director behind the excellent and still yet unreleased “Bronson” (it won’t hit until the fall) — returns with “Valhalla Rising” a picture about a disfigured mute viking in that ancient era.
– Johnnie To’s “Vegeance,” starring French Icon Johnny Hallyday which we also saw in Cannes and liked despite it not really bring much new to the table.
– Neil Jordan’s “Ondine” which features a score by members of Sigur Ros and stars Colin Farrell.
Lots of other outlets have copied and pasted the press release if you want full details on each film. TIFF runs September 10-19 and hopefully we’ll be attending and covering in full force, much like we did last year. See our TIFF ’09 predictions piece, we’ve got a whole bunch of these right, but there’s admittedly smaller films like “Valhalla Rising,” “Ondine” that we had totally forgot about. They’re welcome additions though.
Films already announced for TIFF ’09 include many a Cannes ’09 film including Alain Resnais’ romantic folly, “Les Herbes Folles,” Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Air Doll,” the Un Certain Regard section award winner Corneliu Porumboiu’s “Police, Adjective,” Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s “Nymph” (one of our greatly anticipated Cannes films we missed), Andrea Arnold’s Jury Prize winner, “Fish Tank,” and Camera D’or winner Warwick Thornton’s “Samson and Delilah among many, many others.