Toronto
film festival to open with WikiLeaks drama
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/toronto-film-festival-to-open-with-wikileaks-drama
The Toronto International Film Festival will open with the
WikiLeaks drama The Fifth Estate and showcase the adaptation of Tracy Letts’s
Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage
County.
The festival, which runs from September 5 to 15, has long
been viewed as a launching pad for Hollywood’s
Academy Awards contenders. Recent best picture winners Argo and The King’s
Speech both had premieres in Toronto.
This year’s line-up looks to be no different, with a
schedule featuring films starring George Clooney, Matthew McConaughey, Sandra
Bullock, Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman.
Bill Condon’s The Fifth Estate, which stars Benedict
Cumberbach as the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, will open the festival.
John Wells’s August: Osage
County, which stars Meryl
Streep and Julia Roberts, was among the 16 films announced.
Also in the line-up is the 1980s drama Dallas Buyers Club,
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée and starring McConaughey as a Texas man who fights his HIV diagnosis by
procuring medications himself.
In The Railway Man, directed by Jonathan Teplitzky, Firth
stars as a British prisoner of the Second World War who, years later, pursues
his captor. Kidman co-stars.
Other premieres include Steve McQueen’s slavery tale 12
Years a Slave, Ron Howard’s Formula One drama Rush, and Labor Day – Jason
Reitman’s adaptation of Joyce Maynard’s novel – starring Kate Winslet and Josh
Brolin.
Also premiering will be Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s
first feature film, You Are Here, a road-trip comedy starring Owen Wilson and
Zach Galifianakis.
The festival will premiere at least one notable posthumous
release: the romantic comedy Enough Said, which features one of James
Gandolfini’s final performances.
– AP