TIFF 2024: The buzziest movies you can’t miss at this year’s Toronto film festival

The strikes are over, the virtual screenings are behind us and the Toronto International Film Festival is back in full form for its 49th annual edition. But with 278 titles to choose from, ticket-buyers need all the help they can get in knowing where to focus their attention, and which films to keep on their radar post-TIFF. To that end, The Globe has been busy combing this year’s slate to bring you our most anticipated TIFF 2024 titles.

TIFF Picks from Barry Hertz

Joseph Kahn's horror satire Ick is a stand out film in TIFF's Midnight Madness lineup for this year’s festival.TIFF

Ick

The Midnight Madness lineup for this year’s festival is appropriately all killer, no filler. But if one witching-hour title stands out from the rest of programmer Peter Kuplowsky’s slate, it’s this horror satire from Joseph Kahn. The director’s first film since 2017′s provocative hip-hop comedy Bodied – which also premiered at TIFF during Kuplowsky’s inaugural year overseeing Midnight Madness – Ick promises all manner of outré chaos as it follows a high-school science teacher (Brandon Routh) battling a parasitic alien entity.

Deragh Campbell offers compelling performances in two Canadian films, Measures for a Funeral & Matt and Mara, at TIFF.TIFF

Measures for a Funeral & Matt and Mara (tie)

Deragh Campbell, one of the most captivating performers of her generation, will offer a double dose of her towering talents this year in two Canadian films that couldn’t be more different from one another. In Sofia Bohdanowicz’s psychological drama Measures for a Funeral, Campbell stars as an academic piecing together the history of a long-forgotten violinist, while Kazik Radwanski’s romantic dramedy Matt and Mara has the actress stumbling into a relationship with her ex (BlackBerry’s Matt Johnson).

Nutcrackers

TIFF has a complicated track record when it comes to opening-night films, with the festival needing to balance star power with director pedigree and feel-good vibes. I have a feeling that Nutcrackers might do the trick, given that the movie features Ben Stiller in his first leading role in years, and a return to the world of comedy for director David Gordon Green after getting his head spun around in the Exorcist franchise.

TIFF Picks from Kate Taylor

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Iranian filmmakers have a talent for sly stories that use domestic upsets as subtle metaphors for the repression of an authoritarian theocracy. But with the anti-hijab movement exploding into the streets in 2022, they are increasingly getting right in the face of the regime – and paying the price. The Seed of the Sacred Fig pits a government investigator prosecuting activists against the women in his own family. It comes to Toronto with prizes from the Cannes and Sydney film festivals. Meanwhile, director Mohammad Rasoulof is living in exile in Hamburg, forced to flee Iran to avoid a prison sentence. His crime is making movies.

Conclave

Secretive and superbly costumed – that’s the Vatican. After the success of The Two Popes in 2019, who can say no to another papal drama with a top-draw cast? This time it’s an actual thriller, Conclave, based on the book by Robert Harris and brought to the screen by All Quiet on the Western Front director Edward Berger. Ralph Fiennes stars as the beleaguered Cardinal Lawrence, forced to organize a hasty conclave after the unexpected death of a pontiff. Stanley Tucci plays the leading liberal candidate for the papacy; Sergio Castellitto is the conservative, and Isabella Rossellini and John Lithgow also star.

Universal Language

The premise of Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language is irresistibly eccentric: Setting the film in Montreal and Winnipeg, he reimagines Canada as a nation bilingual in French and Farsi. After his surreal and screwball Mackenzie King biopic The Twentieth Century, Rankin returns with a film that promises a gentler satire of Canada, an off-beat comedy about a country of diasporas.

TIFF Picks from Brad Wheeler

Saturday Night

Like his late father, Ivan Reitman, director Jason Reitman has worked with original Saturday Night Live cast member Dan Aykroyd and no doubt heard the war stories from the groundbreaking show’s earliest days. For a film he describes as a “thriller-comedy,” Reitman zeroes in on the tense 90 minutes leading up to the broadcast of the debut episode of SNL, right up to the first ever “Live from New York …”

The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal

When Michael Barclay wrote his book The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip, the band itself did not participate in that 2018 rock bio, explaining that they’d tell their own story in the future. Now they are. For a four-part Prime Video documentary series, producer/director Mike Downie (brother of the band’s late singer) interviewed band members as well as famous fans such as Dan Aykroyd.

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band

As near as I know, Dan Aykroyd has no affiliation with this on-the-road rock doc. Nevertheless, anticipation is high for another Bruce Springsteen collaboration with director Thom Zimny. Springsteen has been a frequent TIFF attendee over the years, and we can expect the Boss’s presence for Road Diary, as he’s carved out a few free days on his current tour that match up with the world premiere.

TIFF Picks from Johanna Schneller

Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story

When the Irish writer Edna O’Brien died in July at 93, I was reminded of her incredible story: raised on a farm by an alcoholic father; spent five years in a convent; wrote her first novel The Country Girls in less than three weeks; was so frank about female sexuality and church-sanctioned patriarchal violence that the book was banned in Ireland. She kept on writing, every day, always about women’s inner lives, and also about abortion, the IRA. She had many affairs, threw swinging parties with the likes of Paul McCartney, took LSD with R.D. Laing and raised two children. How could a documentary about her not be fascinating?

40 Acres

I’m a fan of R.T. Thorne’s television work, and this is his feature directorial debut (he also co-wrote it). I’m a fan of Danielle Deadwyler, mesmerizing in everything she does, from Till to Atlanta to Station Eleven. And I’m a fan of smart postapocalyptic thrillers, because they’re a heightened vision of what we need to be thinking about – in this case, how environmental destruction and food insecurity will push humans into violence. Deadwyler plays a descendant of African-American farmers who settled in Canada after the U.S. Civil War; 200 years later, her family is under siege (again) by marauders. All real-world historical echoes, including the title – a reference to a Civil War promise of land for freed enslaved people, immediately broken by Abraham Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson – seem entirely intentional. And enticing.

Queer

I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, Call Me by Your Name – I was knocked sideways by director Luca Guadagnino, three films in a row. His past three … less (though I can’t get Bones and All out of my head). So I’m curious to see which Guadagnino we’ll get with Queer. On the one hand, it’s based on an autobiographical novel by William Burroughs, whose work has defeated many filmmakers. On the other, it stars Daniel Craig as a gay drug addict on an odyssey in 1940s Mexico City. Guadagnino claims it’s his most personal work yet, and that the sex scenes are “numerous and scandalous.” Good or less, it promises to be a ride.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Andrew Jackson succeeded Abraham Lincoln as U.S. President. Andrew Johnson succeeded Lincoln. This version has been updated.