Amazon-owned Withoutabox, the dominant indie film festival submission platform for the last decade, has decided to end its service. In a letter to users, the service – run through IMDbPro – said it would “phase out” the service over the next year. Withoutabox was the official platform for Sundance and had been used by…

Cutting Edge Group, the largest independent film music publisher, is expanding its role in the financing of indie films, advancing funds for music rights in the pictures. The latest is a just closed deal for the Bart Freundlich-directed drama After The Wedding, starring Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore. Cutting…

As festivals around the world continue to come to terms with the rise of serial television and new viewing platforms, TIFF hosted a special premiere this year of the first two episodes of Sorry For Your Loss, a 10-episode, half-hour drama from Facebook Watch. Directed by James Ponsoldt, it stars Elizabeth…

The rise and fall of John DeLorean, the automotive kingpin brought down by a cocaine scandal in 1982, is—surprisingly—the basis of one of the more purely entertaining films to screen at TIFF this year. Played for laughs, but with a core seriousness that notes the FBI's nefarious involvement in DeLorean's undoing, Nick…

Like many directors at TIFF this year, Annabel Jankel was inspired by a book, in this case Fiona Shaw's 2009 novel Tell It To The Bees, about an illicit love affair between two women in 1950s Britain. "I think [the attraction] was the sense of the outsider," mused Jankel when she arrived at the Deadline studio with…

Werner Herzog has breezed through films about all sorts of shady topics, and put himself in harm's way just as often, but with Meeting Gorbachev—a string of conversations with former Soviet head of state Mikhail Gorbachev, now 87—the unflappable Bavarian director finally found a subject that put him on the backfoot…

Many directors start a project and never get round to finishing it, but Olivier Assayas found, once he'd started writing his new film Non-Fiction, which received its Canadian premiere at TIFF, he could never get round to giving it up—even when he wanted to. Starring Guillaume Canet and Juliette Binoche…

Since it premiered at Sundance, Paul Dano's directorial debut Wildlife has been one of the more resilient titles on the festival circuit, stopping off at Cannes' Critics Week in May before pausing in Toronto on its way to the London Film Festival next month. Set in 1960s Montana, the film stars Ed Oxenbould as Joe…

Stopping off at TIFF before its October visit to the London Film Festival, Wash Westmoreland's Sundance hit Colette gave audiences a history lesson with the story of novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, also known as "the Venus of the Belle Époque". As played by Keira Knightley, Colette was a woman ahead of her time…

Amma Asante made it four for four with her latest release, having four consecutive releases in the official TIFF lineup. Continuing the director's interest in historical matters, Where Hands Touch tells the story of Leyna, a mixed-race girl coming of age during the Second World War. After the relatively gentle period…

Tim Sutton's Donnybrook got the Platform strand off to a bracing start, with its stark portrayal of the effects of meth addiction on rural America. Based on the 2012 novel by Frank Bill, it stars Jamie Bell as Jarhead Earl, an ex-soldier who needs to find some extra cash, fast, while his wife's homicidal dealer (Frank…

Director Stella Meghie isn’t giving up on the romantic comedy genre, giving it a “fresh spin” with her latest film, The Weekend, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. “For a while, people were saying it was out of fashion but I’m like ‘how?'”  said Meghie about the debate over the status of the rom-com. “I…