Does it feel like awards season? Like it or not, we've entered fall, when the more serious, prestigious (or, at the very least, the ones that pretend to be prestigious) movies start taking center stage. And I was very happy to back in the thick of it: For the first time in three years, I attended the Toronto Film Festival, which along with Venice and Telluride kick-start the annual Oscar conversation. I had very much missed Toronto, and while it's premature to say that any festival is all the way "back" after the pandemic, TIFF did its best to create a reasonable facsimile of its pre-Covid editions.
But because Toronto doesn't encompass everything that screened at other fall fests, I decided to put together the below rankings by including movies I've seen that premiered at Toronto or Telluride or Venice. (To further complicate things, I opted not to rank any films screened in Toronto that had bowed at Cannes back in May. You can see my rankings for Cannes 2022 right here.)
There were several strong movies near the top of my list, and no clear-cut "best," but for No. 1, I went with a bit of a surprise. Coming out of Venice, the reviews for Joanna Hogg's continuation of The Souvenir were polite but not exactly rapturous. So imagine my shock when I attended a 9am press screening of The Eternal Daughter and was fairly knocked out. The less one knows about this third chapter the better, but suffice it to say Tilda Swinton is remarkable. In a fair world, she and Cate Blanchett would be battling it out for acting prizes this awards season. But in life as in the movies, "fair" rarely factors into the equation.
Links lead to individual reviews. And, yes, The Greatest Beer Run Ever is as awful as you've heard.
31. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
30. Don't Worry Darling
29. Dalíland
28. My Policeman
27. Wendell & Wild
26. Butcher's Crossing
25. Blueback
24. Catherine Called Birdy
23. My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock
22. Athena
21. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
20. Good Night Oppy
19. The Inspection
18. The Wonder
17. Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues
16. A Compassionate Spy
15. The Woman King
14. Pearl
13. Bros
12. Other People's Children
11. Viking
10. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
9. Women Talking
8. Unruly
7. The Banshees of Inisherin
6. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
5. Saint Omer
4. Tár
3. No Bears
2. The Fabelmans
1. The Eternal Daughter
