movies

The 49th Toronto International Film Festival is winding down, and the audience winner will be announced tomorrow. What film will win the prize? My money is on either “Anora” or “Conclave.” Other possibilities include “The Life of Chuck,” “Emilia Perez,” “Saturday Night” and “The Wild Robot.”

Having seen close to 40 films in 7 days, I managed to find 10 that stood ahead of the pack and are worthy of being called one of the year’s best.

Of course, I’m not counting the essential titles I saw at Cannes, which also screened at TIFF, and they include Sean Baker’s “Anora,” Coraline Fargeat’s “The Substance,” Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez,” “Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia,” Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” Boris Lojkine’s “The Story of Souleymane,” Ali Abassi’s “The Apprentice,” Leonardo Van Diji’s “Julie Keeps Quiet”, and Arnaud & Jean-Marie Larrieu’s “The Story of Jim.”

Having to cut it down to just 10 films wasn’t easy, I could have included Ron Howard’s “Eden,” far and away the darkest and most twisted film of his career. Paul Walter Hauser is great as a sad sack loser of a gameshow contestant in Samir Oliveros’ “The Luckiest Man in America.” I should also mention Morgan Neville’s Pharrell Williams doc “Piece by Piece,” which was a visually inventive treat.

It turns out that half my list is composed of films that premiered at Venice. Not a surprise. TIFF world premieres tend to be films that couldn’t get into Venice and/or Telluride. With that said, these are the 10 that stood out.

• “April” (Dea Kulumbegashvili)
• “The Brutalist” (Brady Corbet)
• “Conclave” (Edward Berger)
• “Queer” (Luca Guadagnino)
• “The Room Next Door” (Pedro Almodovar)
• “Babygirl” (Halina Reijn)
• “Hard Truths” (Mike Leigh)
• “Presence” (Steven Soderbergh)
• “Saturday Night” (Jason Reitman)
• “Friendship” (Andrew DeYoung)