There were a decent amount of happy discoveries across this year's Toronto Film Festival. Top among them might have been Her Smell, which is now my favorite Alex Ross Perry film. It's a grueling, alienating experience, telling the story of an out-of-control indie rocker (Elisabeth Moss) who puts everyone around her through hell. And, yet, where it goes is deeply moving. It's an imperfect but incredibly rewarding film.
In other words, it's the kind of movie you live for at a festival.
My rankings cover every film I saw that screened in Toronto, including ones I'd seen earlier at Sundance and Cannes. Links lead to individual reviews...
44. A Million Little Pieces
43. Freaks
42. Green Book
41. The Predator
40. Boy Erased
39. Fahrenheit 11/9
38. Giant Little Ones
37. The Hummingbird Project
36. A Faithful Man
35. Destroyer
34. Birds of Passage
33. Climax
32. Maya
31. Mid90s
30. Colette
29. Everybody Knows
28. White Boy Rick
27. Dogman
26. The Image Book
25. The Kindergarten Teacher
24. Wildlife
23. First Man
22. 3 Faces
21. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
20. The Sisters Brothers
19. Donnybrook
18. The Wild Pear Tree
17. Capernaum
16. Donbass
15. The Old Man & The Gun
14. Monsters and Men
13. Long Day's Journey Into Night
12. 22 July
11. Ash Is Purest White
10. Shoplifters
9. Hold the Dark
8. Her Smell
7. Non-Fiction
6. Vox Lux
5. If Beale Street Could Talk
4. Roma
3. Cold War
2. Burning
1. Widows
And now, a few caveats. I didn't include Suspiria or The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which both premiered in Venice but skipped Toronto. Also, I couldn't tell you with any certainty where any of the films in my Top 10 will ultimately land. Widows and Burning were practically a coin toss. So too were Cold War and Roma. Was Vox Lux's higher ambitions and shakier execution ultimately better than Olivier Assayas' relatively slight but pretty wonderful Non-Fiction? Have I yet to fully wrap my head around If Beale Street Could Talk? I don't have any answers, just vague guesses.
Is there anything else to add? I wrote a brief thing for MEL that encapsulated my on-the-fly observations about this year's Toronto. And I look forward to catching up with High Life, which (because of a festival schedule error) I had to miss. But I'll get to it ... and, hey, if I had seen High Life, I wouldn't have had time to fit in Her Smell. That's the way it works sometimes.
