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The Toronto Film Festival has announced new titles for its TIFF Docs and Contemporary World Cinema sections.

The TIFF Docs section will open with the previously announced Sacha Jenkins’ Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, and there’s a North American premiere for Laura Poitras’ opioid epidemic doc All the Beauty and the Bloodshed from Participant.

The festival will also feature newly-added world bows for Cine-Guerrilas: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels, by director Mila Rurajlic; Documentary Now!, by Alex Buono, Rhys Thomas and Micah Gardner; Sam Soko and Lauren DeFilippo’s Free Money, about a Kenyan village being given a universal basic income by an American organization; The Grab, from Blackfish director Gabriela Cowperthwaite; and Stephanie Johnes’ Maya and the Wave.

Other documentary first looks headed to Toronto include Mark Fletcher’s Patrick and the Whale; Sinead O’Shea’s Pray for our Sinners; Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot,...

Apple Original Films has green lit its Louis Armstrong documentary feature, Black & Blues: The Colorful Ballad of Louis Armstrong with Imagine Documentaries producing the documentary. The documentary, which is produced under Apple’s first-look agreement with Imagine Documentaries, will be directed by Emmy-nominated Sacha Jenkins , and produced by Jenkins, Julie Anderson, Sara Bernstein and Justin Wilkes. Imagine Documentaries Brian Grazer and Ron Howard will exec produce. The project is being produced in association with Universal Music Group’s Polygram Entertainment with Michele Anthony and David Blackman serving as executive producers.

The film offers a definitive look at the master musician’s life and legacy as a founding father of jazz, the first pop star, and a cultural ambassador of the United States. He was loved by millions worldwide but often mischaracterized for not doing enough to support the Civil Rights Movement. In reality, his fight for social justice was fueled...

Is Brad Pitt’s character in “Ad Astra” a sociopath? That is the nagging question after watching director and co-writer James Gray’s remarkably stylish and fascinating space drama, which follows astronaut Roy McBride (Pitt) on a mysterious trek to the edge of the solar system to find his estranged father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones).

At its core, “Ad Astra” is a family saga about a man grappling with the person he’s become by way of an increasingly intense desire to reconnect with his astronaut dad who abandoned him, the man whose otherworldly curiosity far superseded his paternal ambition. Clifford is more of a figment than an actual person in Roy’s eyes — a man who by default is heralded because he dared to go where no other had gone before, regardless of the casualties along the way. But Roy, a man whose conflicted emotions are confined to internal...

Other new openers include documentaries ’Armstrong’ and ’Pavarotti’, and Harry Wootliff’s debut feature ’Only You’.

It is a quiet week for new releases at the UK box office, with the top holdovers from last week likely to retain their places at the top of the chart.

Newcomers include Warner Bros’ horror sequel Annabelle Comes Home, the third entry in the successful franchise, which itself is a spin-off of The Conjuring series of films. Gary Dauberman directs the latest entry, which features Vera Farmiga in the cast. Farmiga appeared in the previous two Conjuring films and also stars in the upcoming sequel.

Nostalgia is one helluva drug. For instance, it can make you feel like there was actually a day when the entire United States banded together — just weeks after the Stonewall riots, and in the thick of the Vietnam War, supported by a president who would soon be on the verge of impeachment — in sheer fascination and pride over the news that a man had landed on the moon. At least, that’s the way the story goes in director David Fairhead’s new documentary, “Armstrong.”

To be honest, the idyll that the country was united on July 20, 1969, came (ironically) from the aforementioned President Richard Nixon himself, who phoned astronaut Neil Armstrong to congratulate him for his momentous moon arrival but especially for prompting a national day of celebration, complete with parades and other fanfare.

It’s an alluring sentiment that permeates the entire film, which almost deifies the eponymous rocketeer,...