2023 Lineups from Venice and Toronto

On Monday, though, the Toronto International Film Festival unveiled a robust list of sixty films that will screen as Gala or Special Presentations during its forty-eighth edition (September 7 through 17). “We’re in great shape,” TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey tells the Hollywood Reporter, adding that this first wave of programming “includes many key films from the U.S.” The following day, Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera presented the full lineup for the festival’s eightieth edition (August 30 through September 9) and noted that the impact of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes would be “very modest” and that the only film “we lost” was Challengers.

That leaves plenty. Among the twenty-three films set to compete for the Golden Lion are David Fincher’s The Killer, an adaptation of the French graphic novel series starring Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton; Maestro, starring director Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan as his wife, actor and activist Felicia Montealegre; and Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, with Jacob Elordi as Elvis Presley and Cailee Spaeny as his wife.

The cast of Michael Mann’s Ferrari includes Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Sarah Gadon, and Jack O’Connell. Chances are, you’ve seen the trailer for Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, featuring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, and Willem Dafoe. Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is a 250-year-old vampire in Pablo Larraín’s El Conde.

Ava DuVernay’s Origin draws from Isabel Wilkerson’s book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Set on the border between Poland and Belarus, Agnieszka Holland’s The Green Border tells the story of a family of Syrian refugees, an English teacher from Afghanistan, and a young guard. And the big surprise in the competition lineup is Evil Does Not Exist, the latest feature from Drive My Car director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Barbera says it’s relatively short but delightful.

The Out of Competition lineup packs even greater surprises. There will undoubtedly be a lot of sound and fury in the wake of the invitations sent to Woody Allen (Coup de chance) and Roman Polanski (The Palace). Wes Anderson will bring his thirty-seven-minute Roald Dahl adaptation, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Barbera says that William Friedkin directed The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial from his wheelchair and that Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft would be a fine fit for Venice’s Art Biennale.

Frederick Wiseman’s four-hour Menus Plaisirs, shot in and around a Michelin three-star restaurant, is foremost among the nonfiction highlights. Venice’s Orizzonti program, a rough equivalent to Un Certain Regard in Cannes, features Shinya Tsukamoto’s Shadow of Fire, which is set just after the Second World War.

TIFF will bring a handful of Cannes favorites to North America, including Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera, Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest, Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, and Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner, Anatomy of a Fall. But the festival will also host several world premieres, and a good number of them are directed by actors. Maya Hawke plays Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat, directed by her father, Ethan. Anna Kendrick directs herself in Woman of the Hour as a contestant on The Dating Game in 1978. She ends up paired with real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala.

In The Dead Don’t Hurt, director Viggo Mortensen plays a Danish immigrant who falls in love with a French Canadian (Vicky Krieps) in 1860s San Francisco. Kristin Scott Thomas is a mother with three very different daughters (Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller, and Emily Beecham) in her North Star. Michael Keaton directs and stars in Knox Goes Away, a neonoir featuring James Marsden, Marcia Gay Harden, Joanna Kulig, and Al Pacino. Chris Pine is making his directorial debut with Poolman, a comedic mystery costarring Annette Bening, Danny DeVito, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

A highlight among TIFF’s other world premieres will be Ellen Kuras’s Lee, starring Kate Winslet as photographer and photojournalist Lee Miller; the amazing cast also features Marion Cotillard, Alexander Skarsgård, Andrea Riseborough, Josh O’Connor, and Noémie Merlant. Following The Assistant (2019), director Kitty Green and star Julia Garner are reuniting for The Royal Hotel, the story of a pair of backpackers who run into trouble in Australia.

Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money, a comedy about the GameStop short squeeze of 2021, stars Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Vincent D’Onofrio, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, and Seth Rogan. And Azazel Jacobs directs Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne in the family drama His Three Daughters.

Two of Venice’s competition titles are heading to Toronto, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast and Michel Franco’s Memory. Léa Seydoux and George MacKay play a couple with a dangerous connection in The Beast, and Memory stars Jessica Chastain, Peter Sarsgaard, Merritt Wever, Josh Charles, Elsie Fisher, and Jessica Harper.

Richard Linklater’s Hit Man will premiere out of competition in Venice before screening in Toronto. It’s based on Skip Hollandsworth’s 2001 Texas Monthly profile of a real-life undercover cop, Gary Johnson—played in the film by Glen Powell—who posed as a hit man with the aim of arresting the people who wanted to hire him. As Etan Vlessing notes in the Hollywood Reporter, more than “sixty Houston-area residents hired Johnson to shoot, stab, chop, poison, or suffocate those they wanted dead, including a spouse or boss.”