From ‘Hamnet’ to ‘The Choral,’ Toronto festival previews top fall films

Screening over 200 movies in 11 days, the Toronto International Film Festival is wrapping up its 50th anniversary. I’ve attended 25 of these pageants of full-blown cinemania.

A lot has happened to the movie business in the interim: the rising costs of production; the erosion of theatrical attendance, which predated the pandemic, largely because of streaming; the advent of technologies like artificial intelligence. What hasn’t changed, at least for true believers, are the movie-mad audiences willing to immerse themselves in the larger-than-life experience of seeing movies communally on the big screen.

This immersion is particularly evident at TIFF, North America’s largest film festival. Here, hundreds of moviegoers often line up for hours to see movies from all over the world that may never get a proper release afterward.

For me, TIFF highlights one of the great boons of the filmgoing experience: the opportunity to watch movies showcasing different cultures and ways of seeing. TIFF has more than its share of red carpet celebs and Oscar bait. But if I were to cite a single festival theme, it is that movies – good, bad, or indifferent – can be a passport to global understanding. I view TIFF as a cinematic guidebook, my own personal Baedeker.

Which is not to say that the festival neglects its Canadian roots. Not at all. The opening night premiere was the moving if uneven documentary “John Candy: I Like Me,” about the beloved Canadian comic actor, who died at 43 in 1994. British Columbia native and co-producer Ryan Reynolds, wearing a “Canada” T-shirt, introduced the film with director Colin Hanks. Then Prime Minister Mark Carney, well-versed in Candy’s filmography, took to the stage and said, “In many of his films, there’d be a scene … where John would pivot, having been pushed too far.” Then he added, with a not so subtle reference to his counterpart down south, “Don’t push a Canadian too far.”

Of the more than 20 movies I saw at TIFF, probably the best upcoming film was the one I was most hoping would be good: “The Choral,” a comedy-drama starring Ralph Fiennes as a choirmaster in Yorkshire in 1916 when many of its men are being sent off to war. Fiennes has a way of underplaying that is far more eloquent than many an over-the-top emoter. The script is by Alan Bennett, one of the glories of British dramaturgy and a frequent collaborator with the film’s director, Nicholas Hytner (“The Madness of King George”). Simon Russell Beale all but steals the show in his cameo as the prickly British composer Edward Elgar. What a palpable pleasure the best British actors have for their profession!

Maybe the most talked-about movie was Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet,” based on the Maggie O’Farrell novel imagining the death of William Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, Hamnet, and its effect on his parents, played by Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. In this rendering, the Bard’s bride is the free-spirited firebrand, Agnes, rather than his real-life wife. The film makes much of the fact that Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” directly after his son’s death. The parallels drawn between the real-life and the onstage tragedy struck me as facile, but Buckley’s performance, in particular, is shattering. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard quite so much sniffling in a movie theater. The critic seated next to me was sobbing uncontrollably. Afterward, she apologized and I told her no need to. It’s not like she was the only one.

Confusingly, there was also a “Hamlet” at TIFF, set in the South Asian community of modern-day London. Elsinore is now a family mansion in the English countryside. With unrelenting ferocity, Riz Ahmed plays the Prince of Denmark, a role he has long coveted. To my surprise and delight, the actors all speak Shakespeare’s lines. The modernization, while not always successful, never loses sight of the play, not even when Hamlet is reciting “To be or not to be” while gripping the wheel of his car as he hurtles down the highway.

Agnieszka Holland’s disjointed, kaleidoscopic “Franz,” about the visionary Czech novelist Franz Kafka, is no one’s idea of a standard biopic. For much of the way I kind of wished it had been. But Idan Weiss, the actor playing Kafka, is such a dead ringer for the great author than the effect is, well, Kafkaesque. Speaking of Kafka to the trade journal Screen Daily, Holland, whose last film was the searing Ukraine immigration drama “Green Border,” said, “Unfortunately today, his vision of society, where law is arbitrary and the individual doesn’t matter, is very relevant.”