The 2016 Toronto International Film Festival's lineup was announced in a press conference on Tuesday—and it’s quite the stacked roster. Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven, starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt, will open the festival—widely seen as the first real stop on the awards-season circuit—on September 8. Hotly anticipated titles including Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation; Loving, starring Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton; and Manchester by the Sea, written and directed by Kenneth Logerman, are also slated for the fest. American Pastoral, the Philip Roth adaptation directed by Ewan McGregor, will make its world premiere there as well.
Biopics Snowden, directed by Oliver Stone and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Rob Reiner’s LBJ, starring Woody Harrelson, will also make their world premieres at TIFF. Also in the biopic clique is Bleed for This, which stars Miles Teller as boxing champ Vinny Pazienza, who struggles to make a comeback after a dangerous car accident.
Continuing the true-story trend will be Queen of Katwe, Mira Nair’s biopic about Phiona Mutesi, a young Ugandan who becomes a renowned chess whiz. Lupita Nyong’o also stars as Mutesi’s mother, in her first non-C.G.I. role since her brief appearance in 2014’s Non-Stop (and her first real starring role since she won an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave in 2013).
Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom will also bow in TIFF theaters, telling the true tale of Prince Seretse Khama of Botswana (played by David Oyelowo), who sparks controversy when he marries a white woman (Rosamund Pike).
Tom Ford will make a return with his sophomore film, Nocturnal Animals, a thriller about a gallery owner who receives a creepy novel from her estranged ex-husband. Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal will play the fraught ex-couple.
Also making an anticipated return is Damien Chazelle, following up the breakout success of Whiplash with La La Land. The musical stars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as a jazz pianist and aspiring actress who fall in love in Los Angeles, which in Chazelle’s hands looks like a romantic dreamscape. J.K. Simmons, who nabbed an Oscar for his role in Whiplash, will also star.
Already earning Oscar buzz, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson made it onto the festival’s lineup as well. The drama about a poetic bus driver earned rave reviews at Cannes for both Jarmusch and star Adam Driver.
High-school dramedy The Edge of Seventeen, starring Hailee Steinfeld and Woody Harrelson, will wrap things up as the fest’s closing-night film.
Get ready, because the awards-show buzz is only getting louder from here on out.
