TORONTO — “What have you seen that you liked?”
It’s the most common question heard around the Toronto International Film Festival, and one that elicits endless variations of answers. Because of the festival’s size and scope, there’s no better place to get a full picture of the coming fall movie season, and often those films are ultimately headed for the Academy Awards.
This year’s festival, which draws to a close Sunday, has been, pleasingly, slightly less tethered to awards season predictions than usual. The 40th TIFF opened with a movie not out until next spring (Jake Gyllenhaal’s “Demolition”) and another (Michael Moore’s “Where to Invade Next”) that’s still up for sale.
In Moore’s film, he travels to Europe looking to bring home civic lessons to better the United States — an invasion to pillage something more valuable than oil, he says. A reporter coming back to the U.S. from Toronto isn’t so different, planting one’s flag on a handful of movies that stood out amid the festival frenzy.
The general takeaway has been that the coming season may be a little weaker this year, and that the Oscar field, for now, remains wide open.
