Toronto film festival: Jennifer Lopez, Hugh Grant and Mike Leigh head lineup

Major new films from the directors Mike Leigh and Angelina Jolie and actors such as Jennifer Lopez, Hugh Grant and Pamela Anderson are toplining this year’s Toronto film festival.

The annual festival brings together a host of world premieres at a key stage in the race toward the Oscars.

Mike Leigh is set to return with his first film since 2018’s Peterloo, the contemporary drama Hard Truths. The film is led by his Secrets and Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste and is said to be “a tragicomic study of human strengths and weaknesses”.

The Oscar-winner Angelina Jolie will also premiere her new film as director, the wartime drama Without Blood, starring Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir. It is based on the short novel by the Italian writer Alessandro Baricco and focuses on the brutality of conflict. “This film raises different questions; there is no clear good and bad in this film, even though there is clearly bad, horrible, horrific and criminal behavior,” she said to Variety in 2022. Jolie said she read the novel during “a very dark time in my life” after her divorce from Brad Pitt.

Jennifer Lopez will also be heading to Toronto with her sports drama Unstoppable produced by her husband Ben Affleck and his fellow Oscar winner Matt Damon. The film stars the Emmy-winner Jharrel Jerome, known for Moonlight and When They See Us, as Anthony Robles, a wrestler born with just one leg.

The festival will also see the world premiere of Heretic, a new horror film starring Hugh Grant as a man who tests the faith of two missionaries through a series of bizarre games. The film comes from the screenwriters behind A Quiet Place.

Pamela Anderson will be enjoying her first leading role in over a decade in The Last Showgirl, a drama about a showgirl figuring her life out when her show abruptly closes. The film also stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Dave Bautista and will be heading to the festival as a sales title, hoping to be bought for distribution.

British titles at the festival also include The Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo’s adaptation of The Penguin Lessons, starring Steve Coogan as a disillusioned Englishman who finds friendship with a penguin in 1970s Argentina, an Andrea Bocelli documentary and The Cut, a drama starring Orlando Bloom as a boxer.

David McKenzie, the Scottish director of Hell or High Water, will bring his new thriller Relay to the festival, starring Riz Ahmed as a fixer and Lily James as his client. Dustin Hoffman, Jennifer Coolidge and Brian Cox will also topline Riff Raff, a crime comedy about a criminal reuniting with his family. The Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan will also face off against Christopher Abbott in the Irish thriller Bring Them Down about two warring families and an escalation of violence.

Other premieres include The Fire Inside, written by the Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins, which tells the true story of a groundbreaking boxer from Flint, Michigan, and a reunion for The English Patient stars Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in Uberto Pasolini’s The Return, a new telling of Homer’s Odyssey.

Previously announced premieres include Nightbitch, which stars Amy Adams as a woman who thinks she is turning into a dog, We Live in Time, a romantic drama starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, Nutcrackers, a comedy drama starring Ben Stiller, and Eden, a survival thriller from Ron Howard starring Sydney Sweeney and Jude Law.

The festival takes place from 5 to the 15 of September.