Latest in Toronto Film Festival

EXCLUSIVE: Gunpowder & Sky has acquired U.S. rights to the Irish sci-fi thriller Sea Fever, the Neasa Hardiman-directed pic that had its world premiere this fall at the Toronto Film Festival. It will now get a U.S. release in early 2020 via G&S’ multiplatform sci-fi label Dust. Hermione Corfield (Star Wars: The Last Je…

UK writer-director Michael Winterbottom has taken aim at Sony for cuts he says the studio made to his new movie Greed, which debuted at Toronto and rolls out this fall and winter. The prolific UK filmmaker, well known for The Trip franchise and movies including The Killer Inside Me, expressed frustration in a frank…

EXCLUSIVE: ARRAY Releasing has acquired worldwide rights excluding Canada to the drama The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, expanding the company’s slate of inclusive films. ARRAY founder Ava DuVernay said Thursday that the company plans a release for the Canadian film later this fall. Written and directed by…

EXCLUSIVE: Swiss-Peruvian filmmaker Klaudia Reynicke, whose Love Me Tender screened in the Toronto Film Festival’s Discovery strand this year, has signed with Los Angeles management and production outfit The Gotham Group. The company plans to spearhead efforts to adapt the film into a TV series. Love Me Tender world…

Antigone, the drama from Québécois writer-director Sophie Deraspe that just won the Best Canadian Feature Film prize for its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, has been selected to represent Canada in the 2020 Oscar International Feature Film race. The pic is hoping to become the ninth Canadian film to be…

EXCLUSIVE: HBO is nearing the big deal of the Toronto Film Festival, acquiring for a sum nearing $20 million world rights to Bad Education, the Cory Finley-directed fact-based dark comedy that stars Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney as supervisors in the Roslyn, Long Island, school district who masterminded the largest…

Rather than being a full-on biopic, Sony’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood takes us into Mr. Rogers life through the eyes of a 1998 Esquire journalist played by The Americans Primetime Emmy winner Matthew Rhys in the Sony film. Rhys plays Lloyd Vogel, an investigative journalist who is given a small profile…

When it comes to movies about the heart-wrenching experience of divorce, one has to arguably go back to the 1979 Dustin Hoffman-Meryl Streep 5-time Oscar winner Kramer vs. Kramer. While that pic explored issues, still relevant today, about female empowerment and single fatherhood, Netflix’s Marriage Story, which was…

British journalist Caitlin Moran began writing for the rock press in the early '90s, at the age of 16, and her experiences in the field provided the basis for her second novel, How to Build a Girl, in 2014. A film version has been in the works ever since the novel was first published, and this year director Coky…

“Nazis weren’t cool when I wrote it,” joked Jojo Rabbit filmmaker Taika Waititi about making and releasing his Adolf Hitler comedy in the current divided political climate, one where white supremacists have become some of President Donald Trump’s more ardent supporters. “People weren’t into this sh*t when I wrote it…

Terminal illness was a theme that cast a long shadow over this year's TIFF, but Maria Sødahl's film Hope came at the subject from a rather different perspective—from the Swedish director's own experience, in fact, when she was diagnosed with brain cancer several years ago. Nevertheless, the film is not in any way a…

Documentary director Ben Lawrence came to TIFF with his feature debut, in which an Australian photojournalist (Hugo Weaving) and a South Sudanese refugee (Andrew Luri) are forced to confront the horrors of war together. The story had been with Lawrence for a long time, he said—since 2002, in fact, when the director…