You can thank “the Fonz.”
He was the first major actor to attend Toronto’s new film festival, back in 1977. Then called the Festival of Festivals, it was a relatively minor event where Henry Winkler came to publicize his Vietnam-veteran movie, Heroes.
Fifty years later, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has become nothing short of a movie-star aquarium, as well as an indispensable part of the awards-season grind and a weather vane for stardom itself.
In its early days, Toronto was not even Canada’s biggest city—that would have been Montreal—but it had the largest per capita moviegoing audience on the continent. And so the festival began as a passion project from three local cinephiles—the film producers Bill Marshall, Henk Van der Kolk, and Dusty Cohl—who dreamed it up during a meeting at the city’s Windsor Arms Hotel.
Many believe that TIFF’s starting gun was Chariots of Fire, which debuted there in 1981 and earned the festival’s People’s Choice Award. The film then pranced to Oscar glory and positioned the honor as a harbinger of more good things to come. Many others, from American Beauty and Slumdog Millionaire to The King’s Speech and Nomadland, would tread a similar path from Toronto acclaim to the Academy Awards.
The first confirmed sighting of a velvet rope happened in 1984, when Warren Beatty (the subject of a tribute) swept in with then girlfriend Diane Keaton and his pal Jack Nicholson. Pandemonium ensued, along with a party culture that would become a key feature of the festival’s hype machine.
Over the years, TIFF has been a nest for Jean-Luc Godard and David Cronenberg and has welcomed legends such as Sophia Loren and Christopher Plummer as well as modern-day heartthrobs like Jude Law and Timotheé Chalamet.
The 2025 edition will be no exception; paparazzi are already lining up their cameras in anticipation of Angelina Jolie, Keanu Reeves, Jacob Elordi, Idris Elba, Daniel Craig, Channing Tatum, Josh O’Connor, Margaret Qualley, Dustin Hoffman, and Jodie Foster.
The festival will screen nearly 300 titles from more than 50 countries, including documentaries, shorts, and the newer Primetime program, which highlights television series from around the world.
As far as film festivals go, Cannes and Venice might be the most glamorous, and Telluride more insider-y, but Toronto’s scale and scope means that it looms as the lumbering Tyrannosaurus rex, an all-you-can-eat buffet of cinematic delights.
Already, the tea-leaf reading is in overdrive. Will Amanda Seyfried go all the way, given the sotto voce conversation around her performance in The Testament of Ann Lee? (It’s a historical musical about the leader of the Shaker religious sect, directed by Mona Fastvold, who co-wrote The Brutalist.) There’s also buzz around Nuremberg, starring Rami Malek and Russell Crowe, which was directed by James Vanderbilt (of, yes, those Vanderbilts). And can anyone stop Frankenstein, the latest Mary Shelley unspooling from Guillermo del Toro? (It might earn bonus points from this crowd, because he shot the movie in Toronto, where he now lives.)
Moreover, might an Oscar nomination be within reach for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who gets very serious in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine?
Cameron Bailey, the C.E.O. of TIFF, is particularly eager to see Riz Ahmed in Hamlet, a modern take on the Shakespearean drama set in London’s beau monde. Other highlights will include Ballad of a Small Player, starring Colin Farrell (directed by Conclave’s Edward Berger), and Billy Corben’s out-of-nowhere documentary about butter-mad, scandal-plagued culinary personality Paula Deen, called Canceled: The Paula Deen Story.
Richard Linklater will show not one but two movies, and Scarlett Johansson is just one of several actors and directors bringing new work to the festival, with Eleanor the Great, about a nonagenarian (played by 95-year-old Oscar nominee June Squibb) who pretends to be a Holocaust survivor. Brian Cox will make his directorial debut at age 79 with Glenrothan, a family drama starring Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson. James McAvoy’s California Schemin’ concerns two Scottish men who aspire to be hip-hop stars, and Maude Apatow’s Poetic License is a comedy about college life.
One very important guest will be an enormous shark seen in a remastered version of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. It, like TIFF, is also turning 50 this year. We’re all going to need a bigger boat.
Shinan Govani is a longtime social columnist in Toronto and the author of Bold Face Names
