TIFF 2024: Your guide to the buzzy movies and celeb sightings

The Toronto International Film Festival, Canada's festival of festivals, is back for another year. Running from Sept. 5 to Sept. 15, you can see the full list of films at their website — as well as a full schedule of when they will play. 

For a deeper dive — and how to plan your own visit — here's a breakdown of what this year's festival has to offer. 

Going for a comedy bookend this year, the festival will open with Ben Stiller's Nutcrackers and close with Rebel Wilson's The Deb.

Their special status makes a certain sense for each actor: Nutcrackers, about an unprepared man forced to take care of his orphaned nephews, marks Stiller's return to acting after a six-year hiatus. And The Deb, based on the Australian musical of the same name, marks Wilson's directorial debut — and premiering despite an ongoing defamation lawsuit against Wilson by her business partners, tied to its inclusion at the festival.

After a particularly rough few years for TIFF, celebrity sightings will be a major conversation piece this year. With the festival's cancellation of in-person events in 2020 due to COVID-19, subsequent online stagings and last year's Hollywood strikes, the event hasn't been quite as glitzy as fans would like. 

Predictions for this year run the gamut, though dedicated fan zones will be set up on David Pecaut Square and outside of the Princess of Wales and Royal Alexandra theatres. And while talent confirmation can come as late as five minutes before a red carpet, some stars have already made clear their intention to attend. 

That includes Amy Adams, Barry Keoghan, Will Ferrell, Riz Ahmed, Cate Blanchett, David Cronenberg, Denis Villeneuve, Angelina Jolie, Selena Gomez, Matt Damon, Jennifer Lopez and Alicia Vikander.

The unofficial theme of this year's festival seems to be the stories of bands and pop stars' rises and falls — told in nearly every way imaginable.

When it comes to straight music documentaries, set to screen are Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, Elton John: Never too Late, Paul Anka: His Way and Andrea Bocelli: Because I Believe. 

In the more unconventional vein, Better Man is a biopic about pop star Robbie Williams — with a rumoured fantastical and bizarre style that may or may not include a CGI monkey playing Williams. Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara documents the Canadian band's rise and toxic relationship with a particularly obsessive fan, and Piece by Piece documents producer, singer and rapper Pharrell Williams's chart-topping journey — entirely through Lego. 

Finally, there's K-Pops, which follows a washed-up drummer reconnecting with his estranged celebrity son. The film itself is not a documentary or biopic, but it stars and was directed by singer and rapper Anderson .Paak in his feature-film debut — with his real-life son (Soul Rasheed) also playing his onscreen one. 

TIFF may lack some of the big titles of festivals like Cannes, but it still has some buzzy films. Among the most anticipated is Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola's ambitious allegory for the fall of Rome, told through the lens of turn-of-the-century New York.

Many are watching closely for how the controversial project will land with Toronto audiences, as it has been plagued by savage and befuddled reviews, allegations of Coppola's inappropriate behaviour toward crew and a recent scandal in which made-up quotes by critics were included in a recent trailer. 

As another potential headscratcher, black comedy Nightbitch stars Amy Adams as an overworked mom who slowly comes to the belief that she is transforming into a dog. Meanwhile, Queer — Italian director Luca Guadagnino's first return to TIFF since 2017's Call Me by Your Name — promises to adapt William S. Burroughs's autobiography. It does so by creating, as the film's festival page describes, "a hallucinogenic odyssey bathed in desire."