Twenty-eight thousand, five hundred and twenty-six minutes of film; 123 earth premieres; 33 screens; 65 countries; and enough talkie stars to close dozens of red carpets: That's the 36th annual Toronto International Film Festival, which begins Thursday. Attendees this year will comprehend George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, Glenn Close, Cameron Crowe, Lynn Shelton, U2, Alexander Payne, Catherine Deneuve - and, racing through multiplexes with a baggage of notebooks, me. This will be my 10th by to North America's most imposing cover festival, which I've come to meet as a depreciation moving picture preview. Last year at TIFF, I platitude "The King's Speech" (which went on to become the big champion at the Oscars), "127 Hours," "Black Swan," "Rabbit Hole," "Never Let Me Go," "Another Year" and other movies that turned into highlights of the season.
This year, a unite of films at the fest have a Seattle pedigree. Local filmmaker Lynn Shelton ("Humpday") will be in Toronto with her latest, "Your Sister's Sister," filmed here in the Northwest and starring Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt and Mark Duplass. Former Seattleite Cameron Crowe ("Singles," "Almost Famous") returns with the documentary "Pearl Jam Twenty," profiling the elementary 20 years of the iconic village band.
Clooney, at the fest two years ago with "Up in the Air" and "Men Who Stare at Goats," returns with his earliest directorial crack in six years, the federal photoplay "The Ides of March," starring himself, Ryan Gosling and Paul Giamatti. Other actor/directors at the entertainment will be Ralph Fiennes, bringing his Shakespearean dramaturgy "Coriolanus"; Jennifer Westfeldt, in "Friends with Kids"; Duplass, in "Jeff Who Lives at Home" (directed with his pal Jay Duplass); and Madonna, in "W.E.," a record that overlaps with finish year's hit "The King's Speech," about King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. Glenn Close, mostly elsewhere from the big shelter in new years, appears with a film already getting Oscar buzz: "Albert Nobbs," a aeon play-acting set in Ireland, directed by Rodrigo Garcia and written by Irish initiator John Banville and Close herself.
It looks adore a tenacious year for period/literary films: TIFF also will current "The Deep Blue Sea" from British filmmaker Terence Davies (who hasn't made a piece since his skilful 2000 adjusting of "The House of Mirth"); Andrea Arnold's immature kind of "Wuthering Heights"; Roland Emmerich's "Anonymous," a thriller about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays; and Michel Hazanavicious' "The Artist," a black-and-white encomium to unpronounced films and a prizewinning congregate favorite at spring's Cannes Film Festival. Payne, who hasn't directed a property since "Sideways" (seen at TIFF in 2004), is back with "The Descendants," a slander of a troubled forefathers in Hawaii, starring the energetic Clooney. Coppola's latest, "Twixt," is the Gothic-inspired narrative of a murder writer, played by Val Kilmer. Pitt attends with the baseball dramatics "Moneyball," directed by Bennett Miller ("Capote").

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, whose films regularly debut at TIFF, returns with the thriller "The Skin I Live In," starring Antonio Banderas as a terrifying-sounding persuasible surgeon. David Cronenberg brings "A Dangerous Method" to the festival, an conversion of Christopher Hampton's step gamble about Sigmund Freud (played by Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Gus Van Sant's "Restless," with Mia Wasikowska (so noble recently in "Jane Eyre") will be at TIFF, as will Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," with Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Favorites from the Sundance Film Festival making a cease at TIFF number Jeff Nichols' stagecraft "Take Shelter," with Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain; Sean Durkin's "Martha Marcy May Marlene," about a prepubescent lady-in-waiting (Elizabeth Olson) caught in the entanglement of a charismatic cult leader; and the amity anecdote "Like Crazy" from helmsman Drake Doremus. Will I be able to know every one of these films, added to many more on my must-see tilt that there isn't compartment to insinuate here? Of run not. But I'll be in Toronto for nearly a week, cramming in as much cinematic daily bread (and caffeine) as possible, fatiguing to scale the big-ticket movies with the smaller gems. Watch my blog, Popcorn & Prejudice, for hang out reviews, movie-star sightings, big-fest musings and late-night ramblings. See you at TIFF!
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