The Toronto International Film Festival is bringing us some brilliant movies this year, and these are the action/adventure titles and adaptations.
This September, the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is providing us movie fanatics with plenty of genres to sink our teeth into, and fans better get ready to join in with some crazy journeys and shocking discoveries, as they're going all out with the first full festival since Covid-19 began.
While there aren't many titles compared to other genres, TIFF will be featuring some brand new, highly-anticipated action and adventure movies this year. Additionally, any bookworms out there will also be glad to know that there are a couple of exciting new adaptation movies based off best-selling novels and a very strange and remarkable true story. Let's take a look at what has been chosen for this category at this year's TIFF.
TIFF is introducing Catherine Called Birdy, a medieval comedy written and directed by Lena Dunham, who also made the film Sharp Stick with Jon Bernthal this year. Catherine Called Birdy is based on the 1994 novel of the same name by Karen Cushman. Dunham has been inspired by the book since she was only 10 years old; speaking with Vanity Fair, Dunham expressed her love for the story, saying that she became instantly intrigued by the novel when she saw it at the Barnes & Noble in New York, and said that she held Catherine Called Birdy in her arms and exclaimed, "I need this book!" Now, after a few decades, she has now made her dream come true with the adaptation into a feature film.
The story is set in 1290, in the Medieval English village of Stonebridge. We follow Lady Catherine, who is also commonly known as Birdy, the youngest child of Lord Rollo and Lady Aislinn. Her father is suffering financially as a consequence of his actions, and thus has plans for Catherine to marry into a wealthy family in order to fix the results of his greed.
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However, Birdy is quite hard to tame; she is free-spirited, intelligent, and adventurous, with a wild imagination, and no intentions of meeting any suitors. As she grows and her beliefs for her own right to independence develops, she faces many hurdles and obstacles between herself and her family. The heartwarming and inspirational story will premiere this year at TIFF and will be released later this September by Amazon Studios.
EO shared the Jury Prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, and is a cinephile's dream. Not only is Eo directed by the legendary Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski, who has been making movies since the '60s, but it also features the great Isabelle Huppert, and is also a reference to the French classic Au Hasard Balthazar by Robert Bresson. EO tells the story of a donkey who is initially cared for by the young Kasandra. The characters share a sweet relationship until they are forced to separate, and the donkey embarks on a bleak, painful adventure across the countryside from owner to owner, enduring the fragility, cruelty, misery, and failures of humanity; if Eo is anything like Bresson's film, it will be a sad, spiritual stunner.
Muru is a big, important action spectacle, a dramatic rendering of the notorious, polarizing 2007 police raids against the town and woods of Rūātoki, conducted by the New Zealand police. The film follows a police sergeant trying to reconnect with his son when he's called into service for the raid, which he and others are skeptical of. The police were supposedly seeking out the Tūhoe political activist Tame Iti and arrested 18 people (confiscating guns and ammunition along the way), but the entire operation was handled poorly and became a divisive issue in New Zealand politics.
Muru is famous for being the very first film to receive funding from the new Film Commission Fund from the country, Te Tumu Whakaata Taonga, which is set to fund more Māori films. Tame Iti actually stars in the film, which epically recreates the situation and explores the cultural context with extremely perceptive and gripping authenticity. Muru brings a new perspective to international cinema, shining an entertaining but powerful light on 21st century politics that often go overlooked.
This French action drama The Gravity (La Gravité) will be Burkinabé actor and writer Cédric Ido's second feature-length movie, which promises to be extremely different from his first feature-length film as a director (the funny movie about the immigrant experiences of Africans, Chateau).
Not much is yet known about The Gravity, but it does have a mysterious basic premise -- a cosmic event disrupts the physical laws of Earth, causing gravity itself to be affected. The film will center on a small suburb in Paris sometime in the future, and will feature an ensemble cast of Black characters. Despite only making short films and one feature for the past decade, Ido's work has become well known and has been shown in various film festivals worldwide, so fans are surely interested in seeing what he has up his sleeve this time.
South African filmmaker John Barker returns with The Umbrella Men, a fun comedy movie at TIFF that also features some wonderful action sequences, courtesy of Carnival. The film takes place during the vibrant musical festival, following a group of hard-on-their-luck musicians led by a prodigal son who has just returned after his father's death; the group plot to rob a bank during the wild festivities, blending in with the bright, massive crowd. With one major show-stopping sequence, The Umbrella Men uses its fun, well-choreographed action to boost the energy of this wonderfully feel-good film.
A new psychological thriller is coming to Netflix to scramble our minds. The Wonder is an adaptation of Emma Donoghue's best-selling novel of the same name and follows the story of a girl who can somehow survive without any food. The novel was actually inspired by a true story (and strange occurrence) called 'the fasting girls'. The story goes that there were reports all over Europe of girls who claimed that they could survive without food; one of which was 12-year-old Sarah Jacob in the 19th century, who went a shocking two years without eating, though she did eventually die from starvation, which caused her parents to be charged with manslaughter.
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The Wonder is directed by Sebastián Lelio, who won an Oscar for A Fantastic Woman and made the great films Gloria and Disobedience, so it seems as if Lelio is continuing his excellent pedigree of fantastically perceptive and compassionate explorations of a woman's psychology. The brilliant Floence Pugh headlines the cast of The Wonder as Lib Wright, who is an English nurse that was trained by Florence Nightingale. When she is brought to Ireland, she meets 11-year-old Anna O'donnell, who appears to have survived for month without any food. Shocked by everyone around her, she is claimed as a miracle and weirdly becomes a means of attracting passing tourists. It's up to Lib to get to the bottom of this so-called miracle, but there might be a more daunting reason for her survival.
Pugh's career kickstarted when she appeared in Marcella back in 2016 but became well recognized for her work in Little Women and has since starred in Black Widow and the cult horror film Midsommar. She is also about to appear alongside Harry Styles in 2022's Don't Worry Darling. The Wonder seems to solidify her stratospheric rise to stardom, and the film looks like a dark, tense addition to Lelio's masterful filmography. Viewers better get ready for some shocking discoveries at TIFF.
Sophie is a feature writer for MovieWeb and a University graduate with a BA Hons degree in Theatre and Performance from Northumbria University.