The Toronto Film Festival lineup: Every movie you'll want to see for the rest of 2013
Sending normally level-headed film lovers into a flight-booking, hotel-securing, credit-card-maxing frenzy, the programmers of the Toronto International Film Festival (which runs September 5-15) today announced the fest's preliminary lineup. And as is often the case at the "festival of festivals"—dubbed so for its curatorial culling of hot movies from other annual fests—the slate is a doozy. The event kicks off with Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and winds down with Life Of Crime, a Jackie Brown prequel starring Mos Def (in the Samuel L. Jackson role) and John Hawkes (in the De Niro role). But the truly exciting titles are littered across the nine days in between. Eager to see what Alfonso Cuarón has been up to in the six years since Children Of Men? His new thriller, starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as stranded astronauts, premieres at TIFF. Curious how Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame) will boldly aestheticize American slavery? His period drama 12 Years A Slave is one of the fest's most talked-about "special presentations." Other fragrant scraps of cinephile bait include Night Moves, Kelly Reichardt's follow-up to Meek's Cutoff; the West Memphis Three drama Devil's Knot, from Atom Egoyan; and REAL, a new sci-fi film from Pulse director Kiyoshi Kurosawa.