Besides the big titles that are rightfully dominating the initial conversation around the 40th Toronto International Film Festival, there are smaller films that could always surprise, and here’s some images from a couple.
While he’s usually known as a straight man in comedies, Jason Bateman has been branching out into directing. His latest effort is a drama called “Family Fang” starring Nicole Kidman, Christopher Walken, Maryann Plunkett and himself. Here’s the TIFF synopsis:
After an unlikely accident, a pair of grown siblings (Nicole Kidman and director-star Jason Bateman) are compelled to move back in with their eccentric parents (Christopher Walken and Maryann Plunkett), professional practical jokers whose lifetime of public interventions have alienated their children.
The Coen Brothers’ longtime collaborator Carter Burwell has written the score for the film.
We haven’t seen filmmaker Rebecca Miller in a long while. Her last picture, the underrated “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,” debuted at TIFF in 2009, and now she’s back with her latest project “Maggie’s Plan.” Starring Greta Gerwig, Julianne Moore, Ethan Hawke, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, Travis Fimmel, Ida Rohatyn, Wallace Shawn and Monte Greene, the movie is a romantic comedy, which is a change of pace for this drama-centric director (and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis, who also starred in her own “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” in 2005). Here’s the official synopsis:
Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha) stars in the new film from gifted writer-director Rebecca Miller (Personal Velocity), about a young woman whose determination to have a child involves her in a love triangle with an unhappy academic (Ethan Hawke) and his eccentric critical-theorist wife (Julianne Moore).
Bryan Cranston leads a cast including Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Louis C.K., Elle Fanning, John Goodman, Diane Lane, Alan Tudyk, Michael Stuhlbarg and Helen Mirren in "Trumbo," directed by Jay Roach, about the famed writer Dalton Trumbo. Here’s the official synopsis:
The successful career of 1940s screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) comes to a crushing end when he and other Hollywood figures are blacklisted for their political beliefs. TRUMBO (directed by Jay Roach) tells the story of his fight against the U.S. government and studio bosses in a war over words and freedom, which entangled everyone in Hollywood from Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) and John Wayne to Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger.
