10 Best Movies of the 2017 Toronto Film Festival

Picking the 10 best films from a festival as big as Toronto — with more than 200 features unveiled to North American audiences for the first time — means zeroing in on the absolute best of the best, and though this year’s edition left Variety critics Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge without the kind of breakthrough discoveries that have made past editions so exciting (remember, last year yielded “Moonlight,” “La La Land,” and “Arrival,” to name just three), there’s no question that some of 2017’s best work was unveiled over the past 10 days in Toronto.

Add to that the Canadian premieres of such films as “Call Me by Your Name” — a radiant gay love story liberated from the kind of judgment and tragedy so common to the genre — and “The Disaster Artist” — James Franco’s “Ed Wood”-like homage to the worst film of the last 20 years, “The Room” — and the lineup starts to look pretty remarkable indeed. (Another more serious entry, Berlin-launched, Damascus-set “Insyriated,” humanizes the great crisis of our time, featuring a performance from Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass that belongs on year-end Oscar ballots.)

But with Toronto wrapped, it makes sense to acknowledge the new films that most impressed Variety’s two chief critics at the fest. What follows are 10 cinematic triumphs to watch for in the months ahead.

In what may be remembered as “the year of the boring biopic” at Toronto, this irreverent mock-doc retelling of U.S. Olympic ice skater Tonya Harding’s rise from obscurity and spectacular fall from grace was the glorious exception, a foul-mouthed, unapologetically tacky “true story” that proved as disruptive as a drunken ex-boyfriend at an intimate family wedding. Some might argue that Harding doesn’t deserve a movie, considering it was teammate Nancy Kerrigan’s knee that got smashed, although it’s hard to argue with producer-star Margot Robbie, who makes a good case that Harding was a victim in her own right, too. In a cutthroat, claw-for-glory turn that is clearly the performance of her career so far, Robbie reintroduces one of America’s most notorious athletes as a woman for whom degradation and abuse had been all but normalized, and who just might have seen handicapping a rival as the ultimate act of love. Director Craig Gillespie has the nerve to approach the subject as comedy (Allison Janney is hilariously inappropriate as Harding’s mother, who makes “Mommie Dearest” look sweet by comparison), using laughter and a generally irreverent approach to reveal how the American Dream is anything but fair.  

– Peter Debruge

A tense, precise, absorbingly authentic docudrama. It recounts and anatomizes, in riveting detail, the tragic car accident and its aftermath that cast its shadow over the political career of Edward M. Kennedy Jr. The Australian actor Jason Clarke looks the part to an astonishing degree (the squint, the hawkish profile), and he also nails the voice — not just the familiar Boston accent, but the dry understatement of it. The movie suggests that what happened at Chappaquiddick was worse than we think (Mary Jo Kopechne’s body was found in a position that implied she was struggling, for a while, to keep her head out of water). This makes Edward Kennedy’s decision not to report the crime an act of criminal negligence — but in spirit, it renders it something closer to an act of killing. Yet Ted, with the help of his father, Joe (Bruce Dern, whose eyes burn with the merciless ferocity of power), summons a version of the Deep State: all the Kennedys’ men. As a movie, “Chappaquiddick” shows us the logistical truth of the accident, the squirmier truth of what went on in Ted Kennedy’s soul, and the mechanism of cover-up that was woven into the Kennedys’ liberal legacy. In doing all this, the film achieves what too few American political dramas have: a reckoning.  

– Owen Gleiberman

As a world-famous platform for avant-garde voices and minority representation, the Toronto film festival has long been a place to discover films that challenge the predominately white, mostly male-driven status quo of the film industry itself. This year, women filmmakers and Native American portrayals were a common theme (the two combined in revisionist Western “Woman Walks Ahead” and Chloe Zhao’s contemporary Cannes treasure “The Rider”), though surely everyone was searching for any film that might carry the baton of last year’s breakout, and eventual best picture winner, “Moonlight.” A tiny Florida-set indie called “Life and Nothing More” comes closest, focusing on a fatherless black family struggling to make ends meet, and the mother’s valiant attempts to prevent her adolescent son from becoming a statistic (his dad is in prison, and if the teen slips up, he could easily be tried as an adult). Told with a direct, documentary-like eye for true, human moments, this engaging drama hails from Spanish-born helmer Antonio Méndez Esparza, who demonstrates an uncanny understanding of how such dynamics work in America. It could be tricky to find this modest film post-Toronto, though the search is worth it, especially to see Regina Williams’ turn as the all-American matriarch.

– P.D.

Playful, spectacular, mischievous, and audacious. Alexander Payne’s movie, a comedy about groups of miniaturized humans who live in tiny villages (all to save an overpopulated planet), is an outrageously matter-of-fact science-fiction fairy tale — a kind of live-action Pixar movie on acid. It’s “Honey, I Shrunk the Adults” made by a deadpan social satirist. In the not-so-distant future, scientists perfect a process for reducing humans to tiny figures. Payne knows that the most enticing way to treat this premise is with a restrained air of plausibility, and so we see how downsizing gets turned into a marketing bonanza: The hook is that those who volunteer will live like kings and queens. The idea appeals to Paul Safranek (Matt Damon), a mild-mannered occupational therapist, and his wife (Kristen Wiig). But Paul, it turns out, has a dark shock in store. “Downsizing” is the story of how he plugs back into his life. As Ngoc Lan, a Vietnamese prison escapee with a missing lower leg, Hong Chau starts off as a borderline stereotype — a bitter refugee spitting venom in broken English — and then melts into the film’s most surprising character. “Downsizing” risks, at times, being a bit too much, yet Payne has made that rare thing: a ticklish crowd-pleaser for grown-ups.  

– O.G.

It was an Ian McEwan adaptation, “Atonement,” that introduced the world to a young actress named Saoirse Ronan, and now, a decade later, Ronan finds herself wrestling with another of the English novelist’s seemingly impossible moral conundrums. Ronan plays Florence, a well-elevated young lady in 1960s Britain who finds herself entirely unprepared for what is expected of her on her wedding night. Her equally sheltered husband Edward (“Dunkirk” discovery Billy Howle) is no less awkward, making for one of the most awkward honeymoons ever committed to film. Clearly, their love is true, but when it comes to expressing their passion physically, they’re hopeless. Relatively new to TV directing, British stage director Dominic Cooke makes his big-screen debut with this tender, amusing, and ultimately heart-rending portrait. If the movie sounds impossibly prim for your liking, consider that any number of variations exist among those who “save themselves” for marriage, and the film — which touches on the issue of frigidity — could just as easily describe partners with mismatched kinks. In the annals of great English tragedies, consider this: Romeo and Juliet died young and naïve, but these two risk going their entire lives knowing they were unable to consummate their love.

– P.D.

Practically everyone agrees that Guillermo del Toro is a visionary director, capable of realizing fantastical creatures (the eyeless, elongated Pale Man of “Pan’s Labyrinth”) and worlds (the evocative Victorian house in “ Crimson Peak”), but something about the irrepressible Mexican auteur’s past work has always fallen slightly short of its true artistic potential … until now. Set at the height of the Cold War, when nobody trusts anybody, “The Shape of Water” centers on a forbidden connection between an amphibious man (Doug Jones, made up to look like the Creature From the Black Lagoon) and a mute cleaning woman (Sally Hawkins, silent, yet wonderfully expressive all the same), who meet in a military research laboratory where the scientific oddity is imprisoned by mad scientists and downright crazy G-men. In what amounts to a total reworking of his favorite genre, del Toro’s empathy naturally aligns with the monster, whom he surrounds with an ensemble of outsiders — Octavia Spencer as Hawkins’ co-worker, Richard Jenkins as the gay artist who lives next door — whose “invisibility” proves to be their greatest asset. With this poetic ode to voiceless people everywhere, del Toro has crafted his best movie yet.  

– P.D.

Greta Gerwig has long been an actress of winsome charisma, but the first film she has written and directed blasts beyond all expectations: It may be the most stunning debut by an American independent filmmaker since the glory days of Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, and Paul Thomas Anderson. Gerwig has constructed a thinly fictionalized version of her senior year in high school in Sacramento in the early 2000s, but this is no mere coming-of-age indie hipster trinket with laughs. It’s the rare drama that’s truly a memoir caught on film — like lightning in a bottle. Gerwig has come up with a style that feels quietly revolutionary: no plot, just one short scene after another, each chiseled to the bone, all melting into a flowing sense of experience. Saoirse Ronan plays Christine, who insists on the nickname Lady Bird, and the actress inhabits this 17-year-old girl with such poise and snark, such passion and doubt, such a poignant sense of dreams she may or may not be entitled to that her story becomes ours. The movie is rooted in the tensions Lady Bird feels growing up in a shabby middle-class family surrounded by wealthier kids, and in her desire to break free by going to college out east. But it’s really a drama about a girl who discovers the meaning of home by coming to see the beauty of every moment.

– O.G.

At Toronto, audiences could be forgiven for mistaking this rural quasi-mystery as a Coen brothers movie: A mordant colloquial critique set in an easy-to-rib conservative small-town American setting, the film stars Frances McDormand (Joel Coen’s wife), and screened adjacent to “Suburbicon” (which the Coens did write). But in fact, “Three Billboards” — which deservedly won Toronto’s audience prize — wasn’t their handiwork at all, but the latest combustible genre subversion from Irish filmmaker-playwright Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges”), and might be considered the yin to “Fargo’s” yang, as McDormand plays an indignant local mother who eggs the local police department into reopening the search for her daughter’s murderer/rapist by posting three accusatory billboards on the outskirts of town. No one mentions Twitter or Reddit or any other online flame-throwing forum, but the gesture might as well be a metaphor for how modern justice is done, now that a mere citizen can awaken sleeping giants by humiliating them in public. Packed with vivid characters (McDonagh favorite Sam Rockwell has never been better) and unforgettable confrontations (a trip to the dentist comes to mind), this layered and insightful satire promises retribution, only to become a profound tale of forgiveness and the wisdom of bookmark aphorisms.

– P.D.

A surprisingly honest and stirring biopic about the last two years of Nico, the Teutonic android chanteuse and former lead singer of the Velvet Underground. Trine Dyrholm, the 45-year-old Danish actress who plays her, looks like a long-black-haired, coldly fierce erotic-zombie version of Roseanne Barr. Her moroseness is mesmerizing, but she also gives Nico a tense intelligence, and when she’s onstage performing her listless cabaret doom rock, Dyrholm’s singing is uncanny. The movie sticks close to the desperate, scattered psychodrama of Nico’s final years — the period captured, with frightening close-up voyeurism, in the 1995 documentary “Nico Icon.” But “Nico, 1988” takes a more casual and, at times, even jaunty attitude toward its heroine’s depraved tug-of-war between life and death. She shoots heroin into her bruised ankle as if she were having a snack. She gives interviews and lords it over her band members during their van rides around Europe. And she reconnects with her son (Sandor Funtek), who’s now a junkie like his mother; she takes him on the road and tries, in her ultimate-bad-role-model way, to save him. There are no false arcs, but the writer-director, Susanna Nicchiarelli, takes us up close to Nico’s tattered charisma, all to figure out what made her tick.

– O.G.