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The 10 Best Movies of 2024 Toronto International Film Festival

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The 10 Best Movies of 2024 Toronto International Film Festival

From a new Great American masterpiece to a tragic tale of love and war in the Italian Alps — the highlights of this year’s return-to-form TIFF

After a wobbly edition in 2023 — when an extended SAG strike ixnayed the star power and a number of major titles were conspicuous by their absence — this year’s Toronto International Film Festival felt a lot more like business as usual. Fans crowded King St. in front of the Princess of Wales Theatre, shrieking whenever Tom Hiddleston or Selena Gomez exited their black SUVs and strolled over for selfies. The Lightbox and the Scotia, those twin downtown multi-screen venues that get taken over by the festival, were filled with people chattering about everything from a Romanian documentary about the legacy of abuse to a biopic of Robbie Williams (in which the former Take That bad boy and chart-topping pop star was played by a digital chimpanzee). Lines snaked around blocks, impromptu applause broke out regularly during screenings and standing ovations — thankfully neither timed nor breathlessly reported by the trades — were the rule rather than the exception. It was arguably the first post-pandemic TIFF that felt like it was taking place in the pre-Covid days.

As always, this important staple of the fall festival circuit introduced a number of potential awards-season contenders and studio-to-streamer big spenders. It allowed movie lovers to catch up on spring festival titles that were building on early-buzz campaigns — after wowing Cannes audiences in May and shaking up Telluride over Labor Day weekend, both Anora and Emilia Pérez continued to win over crowds en masse. And it offered a wide range of dramas, comedies, docs, demented soon-to-be-cult movies and other, unclassifiable works ranging from a magical realist thriller courtesy of a Nigerian film collective (The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos) to a series of revealing roommate interviews in Montreal (Living Together).

There was a variety of great work to see, and below are the 10 best things we caught at this edition of TIFF. From a wildly ambitious throwback epic to an intimate chronicle of love and war in the Italian Alps, these were the highlights of the past nine days. (Honorable mentions: Diciannove, Happyend, No Other Land, Relay, Road Diary, Tata, Went Up a Hill, and the Tragically Hip docuseries No Dress Rehearsal.)

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