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The 15th Beijing International Film Festival has revealed that acclaimed Chinese director and actor Jiang Wen will preside over the Tiantian competition jury, with celebrated Chinese-American actor and filmmaker Joan Chen joining the panel.

The seven-member international jury brings together a cross-section of global film talent, including British director David Yates, Chinese actor Ni Ni, Finnish director Teemu Nikki, Swiss director and actor Vincent Perez, and Hong Kong art director Tim Yip.

Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr will lead the jury for the festival’s Forward Future strand.

The main competition lineup features a diverse slate of films vying for the award, including Hao Ming and Li Peiran’s “Better Me, Better You,” Li Yongyi’s “Deep in the Mountains” and Zhang Qi’s “Trapped,” all from China, and Emine Yildirim’s “Apollon by Day Athena by Night” (Turkey), Sora Hokimoto’s “Baus: The Ship’s Voyage Continues” (Japan), Maria Brendle...

Chinese actor-director Jiang Wen (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Let the Bullets Fly) will serve as the head of the main competition jury at the 15th Beijing International Film Festival, which will hand out its Tiantan Awards.

The jury will also include Chinese American director and actor Joan Chen (The Last Emperor), British director David Yates (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them), Chinese actor Ni Ni, Finnish director Teemu Nikki, Swiss director and actor Vincent Perez, and art director Tim Yip from Hong Kong. The panel will select the winners across 10 award categories, including best feature film, best director and best screenplay.

The festival also unveiled its 15 main competition films, with organizers saying they received a record 1,794 feature film submissions from 103 countries and regions, marking a 19 percent increase over last year.

The three Chinese films in the main competition lineup are Hao Ming and Li Peiran’s Better Me,...

J.D. Salinger's 1951 book "The Catcher in the Rye" might be one of the most widely read American novels ever. Its protagonist, the 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, has become a model for adolescent angst, constantly expressing his disgust for the world and calling everyone and everything he objects to "phony." He feels he can still connect with certain individuals as he comes of age, notably younger kids, but that he is growing distant from the rest of the world. When asked what he wants to do with his life, Holden pictures a fantasy wherein he stands in a field of rye situated on top of a cliff. As children play in the rye, it's his job to catch them before they fall off the precipice. He is the catcher in the rye.

Salinger's book has been widely scrutinized and reinterpreted. It's as celebrated for its understanding of angst as it is pilloried for its nihilism,...

The Toronto Film Critics Association has named RaMell Ross’s narrative debut Nickel Boys as its best movie of 2024, adding to the film’s award season prominence.

In voting on Sunday, Toronto film reviewers also gave the drama about a friendship between two young African American men navigating a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida the best director prize for Ross, who also shared the best adapted screenplay honor with Joslyn Barnes.

The best picture runner-ups were Sean Baker’s Anora and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, debuted at Telluride and stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.

In the acting categories, the best lead performance crown was shared by Marianne Jean-Baptiste for her role in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths and Mikey Madison for Anora. And the best supporting performance honor was split...

The 55th International Film Festival of India (Iffi) has unveiled its main competition lineup, with 15 features vying for the Golden Peacock award carrying an INR4 million prize purse, notably featuring nine films directed by women.

Among the world premieres are Manijeh Hekmat and Faeze Azizkhani’s Iranian drama “Fear & Trembling,” exploring an older woman’s struggles with isolation, and Nikhil Mahajan’s “Raavsaheb,” an Indian crime thriller examining man-animal conflict in tribal lands.

The slate includes festival circuit standouts like Louise Courvoisier’s “Holy Cow” (France), which nabbed the Un Certain Regard Youth Prize at Cannes 2024, and Saulė Bliuvaitė’s “Toxic” (Lithuania), winner of the Golden Leopard at Locarno 2024. Bogdan Mureșanu’s Romanian revolution drama “The New Year That Never Came” arrives fresh from winning Venice’s Horizons and Fipresci awards.

The lineup also includes Belkis Bayrak’s “Gulizar” (Turkey), which played at Toronto and San Sebastian, and George Sikharulidze’s “Panopticon” (Georgia-u.

While there’s a few more fall film festivals popping up in the next month, the major ones are behind us, which means we have a strong sense of the films to have on your radar in the coming months and even through 2025. We’ve asked our writers from across the globe to weigh in on their favorite world premieres from Locarno Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and BFI London Film Festival.

Our coverage will continue with a few more reviews this week, and far beyond as we provide updates on the journey of these selections, so continue to explore all of our festival coverage here. In the meantime, check out top picks from our writers below and return soon for our extensive year-end coverage.

Soham Gadre (@SohamGadre)

1. April (Dea Kulumbegashvili)

2 and 3. Youth (Homecoming and Hard Times) (Wang Bing...

The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival concluded on September 15th. In an unexpected outcome, the Stephen King adaptation “The Life of Chuck” won the People’s Choice Award. The award is the event’s most prestigious honor and selected by audience voting.

Directed by Mike Flanagan, “The Life of Chuck” tells the story of Charles Krantz in three chapters. Based on King’s novella, the film focuses on life, death, and finding meaning. Critic Chase Hutchinson praised the movie as a celebration of life’s meaningful moments.

Entering without a distributor, “The Life of Chuck” was not seen as a major contender. Its win provides a significant boost. Past People’s Choice Award winners have received Best Picture Oscar nominations 12 years in a row. Films like “Emilia Perez” and “Anora,” named runner-ups, had earned praise at Cannes but not the top TIFF prize.

In other categories, “The Substance” won for Midnight Madness.

Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck starring Tom Hiddleston is this year’s surprise winner of Toronto International Film Festival’s 2024 TIFF People’s Choice Award, a historically reliable bellwether of an Oscar nomination.

Over a sample pool of the last 15 years, all but one People’s Choice winner has gone on to garner a best picture Oscar nomination, and several – like 12 Years A Slave, Green Book and The King’s Speech – have won the top prize at the Academy Awards.

Yet The Life Of Chuck presents an anomaly – it currently lacks a US distributor. Buyers had been circling...

Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck starring Tom Hiddleston is this year’s surprise winner of Toronto International Film Festival’s 2024 TIFF People’s Choice Award, a historically reliable bellwether of an Oscar nomination.

Over a sample pool of the last 15 years, all but one People’s Choice winner has gone on to garner a best picture Oscar nomination, and several – like 12 Years A Slave, Green Book and The King’s Speech – have won the top prize at the Academy Awards.

Yet The Life Of Chuck presents an anomaly – it currently lacks a US distributor. Buyers had been circling...

The winners for this year’s Toronto International Film Festival have been announced, with Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck taking home the People’s Choice Award.

Check out the full list of winners below:

People’s Choice Award: The Life of Chuck, dir. Mike Flanagan

People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award: The Substance, dir. Coralie Fargeat

People’s Choice Documentary Award: The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, dir. Mike Downie

Short Cuts Award for Best International Film: Deck 5B, dir. Malin Ingrid Johansson

Short Cuts Award for Best Canadian Film: Are You Scared To Be Yourself Because You Think That You Might Fail?, dir. Bec Pecaut

Fipresci Award: Mother Mother, dir. K’naan Warsame

Netpac Award: The Last of the Sea Women, dir. Sue Kim

Best Canadian Discovery Award: Universal Language, dir. Matthew Rankin

Best Canadian Feature Film Award: Shepherds, dir. Sophie Deraspe

Platform Award: They Will Be Dust,...

Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck picked up the top People’s Choice honor Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival as its 2024 edition wrapped with renewed celebrity heat but still in the shadow of Venice and Cannes.

The Stephen King novella adaptation stars Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Karen Gillan and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a genre-tripping film about embracing hope in the face of tragedy and had a world premiere in Toronto. Flanagan in a statement thanked TIFF for the top audience award prize: “I’m absolutely overwhelmed. We’re so grateful that The Life of Chuck connected with audiences in such a powerful way, but never expected this.”

The second runner up for the People’s Choice Award was Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, a queer crime musical headed to Netflix that earned the jury prize in Cannes for the director, while the titular lead Karla Sofía Gascón became...

“The Life of Chuck,” director Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation starring Tom Hiddleston, has won the People’s Choice Award at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF organizers announced at an awards ceremony on Sunday.

In TheWrap’s review of the film, Chase Hutchinson called it “less of a horror film than it is an existential grappling with the end — while also being a jubilant celebration of the moments that make life worth living along the way. It’s Flanagan’s vibrant equivalent of Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Synecdoche, New York’ that finds hope and meaning in his own way just as it is one of the best modern Stephen King adaptations one could hope for.”

Unlike festivals like Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and Venice, Toronto does not give out a jury award to the festival’s top film. Instead, viewers at all public screenings are invited to vote for their...

The People’s Choice Award from the just-wrapped 2024 Toronto Film Festival has gone to The Life of Chuck, first runner-up is Emilia Pérez, and second runner-up is Anora. The Documentary Award goes to The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, and the Midnight Madness winner is The Substance.

Both runners-up Emilia Pérez and Anora were big winners at Cannes in May (the latter taking the Palme d’Or), but Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck was a TIFF world premiere and a surprise winner of this award.

Tom Hiddleston stars in the film based on King’s novella about three chapters in the life of an ordinary man named Charles Krantz. It is an unusual winner here for this award as it currently is looking for distribution and has no set release date, which means it could be the first People’s Choice winner in recent memory...

The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival has finally wrapped up, closing out a two-week frenzy of world premieres and screenings of highly anticipated offerings making their way across the international festival circuit. For many, TIFF (as well as the Venice and Telluride film festivals) marks the unofficial commencement of awards season, meaning the films that receive the People’s Choice Awards typically earn an early boost for their campaigns. Last year, the top prize went to Cord Jefferson’s publishing industry satire “American Fiction,” which would later earn the writer/director an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as a nomination for Best Picture. This year’s winner was Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation “The Life of Chuck,” starring Tom Hiddleston.

12 of the last 14 People’s Choice Award winners at TIFF went on to receive Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and four of them actually won the award.

Mathyas in Shepherds. Sophie Deraspe on her star Félix-Antoine Duval: 'When I prepared with him prior to shooting, I think the most important thing I told him is, “You cannot prepare that much, but the thing that you can do is to let your mind and heart and body and spirit open up to what can happen”' Sophie Deraspe's Shepherds (Bergers) transports us to the south of France where young Canadian Mathyas (Félix-Antoine Duval) has relocated from Montreal on impulse, with the romantic dream of becoming a sheep herder and writing a book about it. Based on the semi-autographic Where Are You From, Shepherd? it relates his experience of attempting to find his feet in the shepherding world at the same time as embarking on a relationship with a young bureacrat he meets, Élise (Solène Rigot), who makes an impetuous decision of her own.

This gentle drama, which has a strong documentary feel,...

Steeped in centuries of tradition yet timely in its themes, Conclave offers viewers a fascinating glimpse into the complex world of papal elections. Adapted from Robert Harris’ novel, the film follows the College of Cardinals as they gather in solemn ritual to select a new leader for the global Catholic Church. Held within the iconic halls of the Vatican, the story plays out like a dramatic House of Cards, as an unexpected death sparks secret deal-making between the most powerful prelates on Earth.

Led by Ralph Fiennes’ conflicted Cardinal Lawrence, over a dozen distinguished holy men assume their roles in history’s smallest yet most influential conclave. Each candidate arrives with supporters and dissenters, bringing eclectic backgrounds and beliefs that reflect the Church’s worldwide reach. An ultra-conservative Italian, a liberal Italian ally, an African hopeful, and more filter ideological divides into a shared quest for Christ’s vicar. Under...

Forget Pulp Fiction — how about some Pope fiction? Yes folks, following the Oscar- and BAFTA-award winning success of Edward Berger's anti-war epic All Quiet On The Western Front, the feted filmmaker is turning his attention from trench warfare to Catholic conspiracy with Conclave, an all-star adaptation of Robert Harris' international bestseller papal thriller. Ralph Fiennes leads the line-up for this one as Cardinal Lawrence, the man responsible for selecting a new Pope after the last one's death. It's a hard task made harder by some secretive shenanigans in the Vatican, as is evidenced in the gripping first trailer for the film. Check it out:

Gorgeous sets courtesy of Rome's legendary Cinecittà studios. Lavish production design. Acting heavyweights everywhere you turn. Volker Bertelmann back on scoring duties. Pardon the blasphemy but Jesus Christ this looks impressive! "No sane man would want the papacy. The men who are dangerous are the ones who do want it.

Nutcrackers, David Gordon Green’s heartfelt comedy starring Ben Stiller, is set to open the 2024 Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 5.

The TIFF opener — marking Stiller’s first starring role in a movie since Mike White’s Brad’s Status and Noah Baumbach’s Netflix family drama The Meyerowitz Stories in 2017 — will have a world premiere at Roy Thomson Hall, which is filled with ordinary moviegoers (and not only industry people as in Cannes and Venice).

Written by Leland Douglas, Nutcrackers follows Mike (Stiller), a straight-laced workaholic who has to travel to rural Ohio to care for his four nephews after their parents die in a car accident. After weeks of farm-life mayhem, Mike realizes he won’t have to find a new home for the orphaned children. They found a new home for him.

Nutcrackers — with an ensemble cast that includes Linda Cardellini, Edi Patterson, Tim Heidecker and Toby Huss — is...

Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has announced five features that will receive their world premieres at the upcoming festival in September, including Ron Howard’s survival thriller Eden and We Live In Time starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.

The roster includes Anderson .Paak’s dramatic comedy K-pops based on his life; Sophie Deraspe’s Shepherds, about a young advertising executive who trades in his Montreal life to become a shepherd in France; and Reema Kagti’s Superboys Of Malegaon based on the life of Nasir Shaikh, an amateur filmmaker from India, which looks at what happens when filmmaking and friendships collide.

Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer in Edward Berger’s All Quiet On The Western Front. Photo: Netflix World War I ended a little more than a century ago at this point, and it’s never felt like more of a historical blank slate on which to project our fears, our hopes,...