Toronto So Far: Forget the Awards Race! The Crowds Are Loving the Fest, From Spielberg to Weird Al Yankovic

thewrap.com:

really glad we came to Toronto!” said Spielberg, who’s been making movies for more than 50 years but said he’d never before brought a film to the festival.The lack of social distancing and the paucity of masks may have repercussions down the road, but it gave the festival’s first few days an exuberance that was sorely missed in 2021, when a scaled-down TIFF was a little depressing except when you were able to lose yourself in the films. (The previous year, the festival had been all-virtual, apart from some special screenings for locals only.)People came to this year’s festival badly wanting to celebrate, and so far the fest seems programmed to let them do just that, with an unexpectedly large number of mainstream crowd-pleasers screening in prime slots over the first four days.

If we can ignore the Oscar race for a little bit longer, this year’s festival is definitely giving us a brutally competitive race for the TIFF audience award, which could plausibly go to almost any of this weekend’s big premieres.Of course, the personality of a year at Toronto is not formed wholly by the most commercial entries, even if those seem to have seized most of the attention in the early going.

But TIFF has also seen smaller films get attention, including Elegance Bratton’s “The Inspection” (Jeremy Pope as a gay Black teenager who joins the Marines), Lila Neugebauer’s “Causeway” (with deeply understated performances by Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry), Mark Mylod’s “The Menu” (a very black comedy with a pitch-black performance from Ralph Fiennes) and Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm’s “The Good Nurse” (more great performances from Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne).On the documentary side, always a highlight at TIFF,.