Toronto Film Festival So Far

16 September 2009

0Comments | Comment on this Article

Ok so we are half way through the Toronto Film Festival and as of yet that unknown crowd favourite is yet to be found.

Yes the magic of a Slumdog Millionaire or a Juno is yet to raise it's head at the this festival it has however earmarked a couple of serious Oscar contenders.

The big Oscar favourite so far is Jason Reitman's movie return, you may remember that he was the filmmaker behind Juno, and starring George Clooney.

In recent years Clooney has established himself as a serious actor and filmmaker with Good Night and Good Luck, Michael Clayton and Syriana under his belt, the latter giving him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

And it looks like more of the same with his latest picture Up In The Air as it has been a hit with  critics and they are already hanging a Best Actor Oscar nomination around the neck of George Clooney.

Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a corporate downsizing expert whose cherished life on the road is threatened just as he is on the cusp of reaching ten million frequent flyer miles and just after he's met the frequent-traveler woman of his dreams.

Another movie that is causing a bit of a stir is Brit flick An Education, which stars Carey Mulligan  and Peter Saarsgard.

Precious is still causing a stir on the festival circuit as it got it's screening earlier in the week.

Adapted from the 1996 Sapphire novel Push the movie won the Audience Award and the Grand Jury prize for Best Drama at the Sundance Film Festival back in January.

The movie follows teenager Precious Jones, played by newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, who has been impregnated twice by her father and is withstanding a hurtful relationship with her mother and is continuing to receive rave reviews.

Could there be new faces in the form of Sidibe and filmmaker Lee Daniels, in the Oscar nominations this time around?

Other performances whipping up a storm in Toronto include Heath Ledger's final big screen role in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Despite not being a complete performance, with Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law all stepping in to complete the movie, there is actually more of Ledger than you would expect and Imaginarium is an eye catching movie that sees Gilliam back to his best.

While there is much speculation around whether Viggo Mortensen will leave his acting career behind him or not his latest movie The Road has been showered with praise.

And it's Mortensen's performance in particular that everyone is enjoying as he follows up great turns in a History of Violence and Eastern Promises, for which he was Oscar nominated.

Matt Damon is another actor who had produced a fine performance in The Informant which could see him going head to head with pal George Clooney in the Best Actor category next year.

Based on Kurt Eichenwald's 2000 book, "The Informant" is the tale of Mark Whitacre (played by Matt Damon), an Ivy League Ph.D. who was a rising star at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the early 1990s.

The bipolar hero wound up blowing the whistle on the company's price fixing tactics and became the highest-ranked executive to ever turn whistleblower in US history.

Whitacre secretly gathered hundreds of hours of video and audio tapes over several years to present to the FBI which became one of the largest price fixing cases in history.

Once again Toronto, so far, has been a great indicator as to who may do well during the awards season but that little gem is yet to be uncovered.

The Toronto Film Festival runs from the 10th - 19th September.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw

0Comments | Be the first to comment!