TIFF 2023: All the movies directed by big-name actors, ranked

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TORONTO — Though Toronto International Film Festival Chief Executive Cameron Bailey attributes it to the pandemic rather than the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, there’s no doubt that the heightened presence of actor-directors is among the main themes of this year’s edition. Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, Taika Waititi and Ethan Hawke were among the A-listers who stepped behind the camera for TIFF 2023 — and, in a spirit of friendly competition like Toronto’s coveted People’s Choice Award, we decided to rank them. Here’s how the big-name actors (as directors) stacked up.

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1. ‘Woman of the Hour’ (Anna Kendrick)

The host and a couple on a 1970s dating game show.

There’s the potential for a wacky, tacky 1970s Americana true-crime story in the premise of Anna Kendrick’s “Woman of the Hour” — an active serial killer who was on “The Dating Game” — that she instead pushes toward a more haunting and unnerving conclusion. With an assured mix of righteous anger and sad resignation, the film explores the things men get away with and that women are expected to put up with. Kendrick plays the woman who picked Rodney Alcala, eventually convicted of seven murders and implicated in many more, on the lighthearted TV game show and immediately realized the vibes were way off. Yet she is only one in a gallery of women depicted as falling into Alcala’s orbit in a chilling series of encounters. From Tony Hale’s bilious talk-show host to Pete Holmes’ skeevy neighbor to Daniel Zovatto’s cold-blooded portrayal of Alcala, the men in the story all try to placate women with the same dismissive words — you’re beautiful. And these women don’t want to be diminished like that anymore. — Mark Olsen

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2. ‘The Queen of My Dreams’ (Fawzia Mirza)

A beautiful young couple recline on the top of a green car.

Cinema is the gateway to intergenerational healing in Fawzia Mirza’s assured and vibrant feature directing debut — specifically, the love for the Bollywood romances of 1960s icon Sharmila Tagore that 22-year-old queer Muslim grad student Azra (Amrit Kaur) inherited from her conservative mother, Mariam (“Ms. Marvel’s” Nimra Bucha), growing up in a Pakistani Canadian immigrant family in 1990s Nova Scotia. That is, before the gulf between mother and daughter widened into an ocean, a rift exacerbated when Azra’s father, Hassan (Hamza Haq), has a heart attack while visiting his ancestral home in Pakistan and the film travels across the globe to continue its cross-cultural examinations. Vivid textures and palettes weave dreamy backdrops for Mirza’s cast as the filmmaker time-travels between worlds with style and confidence — Azra’s present, visiting Karachi as an outsider in 1999, and Mariam’s own youth, restlessly rebelling against social norms in the same city in 1969. A nimble Kaur shines in twin performances as both Azra and the younger version of her mother she never dreamed existed, bringing a shared understanding between the women, and new possibilities for them both, into focus. — Jen Yamato

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3. ‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ (Viggo Mortensen)

A woman in a hat in a remote town in the Old West.

For his second feature as director, Viggo Mortensen has turned to the western to explore bonds of love and what makes a family amid pictorial vistas and the vastness of nature. A cross-cultural vision of the frontier in which two wounded weirdos recognize something deep within each other and hold tightly to their connection, the film has a tender earnestness. A French-Canadian woman (Vicky Krieps) meets a Danish man (Mortensen) in a charming rom-com-style meet-cute in 19th century San Francisco; soon they are getting frisky by a campfire while making their way to the remote location they will fashion into a loving home, while also reluctantly inserting themselves into a growing local community. Krieps and Mortensen both have such unpredictably eccentric screen presences that they make a wonderful couple, with Mortensen the director patiently giving them both space for the kind of behavioral detail often rushed past. — M.O.

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4. ‘Hell of a Summer’ (Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk)

Two young men shining flashlights in a dark, creepy mist.

At TIFF even Finn Wolfhard (“Stranger Things”) and Billy Bryk (“Ghostbusters: Afterlife”) seemed shocked that someone gave them a bunch of money to make their own indie summer-camp slasher. But the actors turned writer-directors have done their homework, setting up a “Friday the 13th” riff with a dash of “Wet Hot American Summer” that jokes its way through its shaggiest corners. The setup is a classic: A group of horny camp counselors assemble for an orientation weekend before their campers arrive, unaware that a killer is already on the loose. Though light on gore — one particularly squishy kill is a rare exception to the film’s mostly cutaway thrills — Wolfhard and Bryk seem less interested in genuinely scaring their audience than crafting characters you either want to root for or watch die horrible deaths. Both also star as first-year counselors eager for their long-awaited glow-ups, bringing sardonic banter to a watchable ensemble of characters repping every teen trope in the genre book. But their best move as directors is casting “Fear Street‘s” Fred Hechinger, who deftly nails a tricky balance of cringe-inducing and endearing as an eccentric oddball named Jason who loves camp a little too much, a creative gambit that pays off as the film hurtles toward its surprisingly sweet conclusion. — J.Y.

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5. ‘Wildcat’ (Ethan Hawke)

A woman reads a letter at a mailbox labeled "O'Connor."

With a company of ensemble players comprised of longtime friends, frequent collaborators and his daughter, Ethan Hawke turns Flannery O’Connor’s life and work into a form of repertory theater. As the talented but unproven Flannery (Maya Hawke) struggles with her first novel, spars with her mother, Regina (Laura Linney), and nurtures a deep affection for Robert “Cal” Lowell (Philip Ettinger), the cast plays out scenes from O’Connor’s unsettling, unsentimental fiction, including her classic short stories “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” With this arresting (if at times disorienting) concept, “Wildcat” attempts to bring the sickness, strangeness, black humor and bright intelligence of O’Connor’s fiction to bear on the fusty biopic — but by the time it determines how to do so most effectively, the film is nearly over. One might think of “Wildcat’s” faults as a reflection of O’Connor as she’s depicted here, in the era before she returned to Georgia battling lupus and sharpened the pen that produced some of the most indelible writing of the 20th century. It feels like a film whose style is still being worked out, promising but not yet perfected: minor fiction. — Matt Brennan

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6. ‘Gonzo Girl’ (Patricia Arquette)

An old man sits on a couch and a young woman sits on the floor at his feet smoking.

Based on Cheryl Della Pietra’s roman à clef about her time as Hunter S. Thompson’s assistant in the 1990s, “Gonzo Girl” counts among its assets a surplus of charisma: Willem Dafoe as Walker Reade, dissolute counterculture relic attempting to squeeze out another book; Camila Morrone as Alley Russo, the talented young writer Reade teaches (well, forces) to let loose; even a delightful James Urbaniak as an editor too old, tired and jaded to party like he used to. (After six days of TIFF, I can relate.) Unfortunately, Patricia Arquette’s debut feature fails to carve a new path through the familiar thicket of the literary coming-of-age tale, wobbling uncertainly between side-eye at the old man’s excess and sympathy for his struggle to remain relevant. As a result, “Gonzo Girl,” admirably reluctant to judge its characters, emerges as a film dispiritingly unable to judge itself — stylistically and narratively, this bog-standard story of intergenerational (mis)understanding is an odd, unsatisfying match for its radical subject. The only thing “gonzo” here is the title. — M.B.

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7. ‘Ezra’ (Tony Goldwyn)

A boy play-fights with his grandpa while his dad looks on

At the outset, “Ezra” introduces the elements of a finely observed family dramedy, with Bobby Cannavale as Max, a short-fused stand-up whose autistic son Ezra (William Fitzgerald) is failing to thrive in gen pop at school. But its genuinely funny examination of a discordant family attempting to navigate the labyrinthine demands of the special education and medical systems cuts off at the half-hour mark. It’s replaced, after Max kidnaps Ezra, with a sort of chase movie, as Max’s ex Jenna (Rose Byrne) and father Stan (Robert De Niro) pursue Max and Ezra on their fugitive cross-country road trip to a gig on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” And though the Amber Alerts and bar fights and tense phone calls that follow may appear, on paper, to be compelling, I spent the entire film wishing it would return to the quieter, keener observations of its opening act, drawn out of believable characters rather than imposed by the labored plot. By the end I felt like Max’s exasperated manager (Whoopi Goldberg), who tries, to no avail, to keep him in line: “I really want you to fly,” she says. “But I need you to stop bombing the runway.” — M.B.

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8. ‘Next Goal Wins’ (Taika Waititi)

A soccer coach screaming while encircled by players in green jerseys.

With principal photography happening all the way back in 2019, Taika Waititi’s “Next Goal Wins” is the sort of misbegotten misfire that perhaps should have stayed on the shelf. Having suffered the biggest loss in the history of international soccer matches, the American Samoa national soccer team doesn’t even harbor hopes of winning a game when it brings in a new coach — it simply wants to score one goal. As a troubled, hard-drinking rage case who has run out of other opportunities, Michael Fassbender feels uncomfortably miscast in the role of coach Thomas Rongen and is unable to settle on a credible tone for the character, giving the film an awkwardly unreliable center. The reshoots that replaced Armie Hammer with Will Arnett are very noticeable, while Elisabeth Moss spends a fair amount of her brief screen time literally just standing around. (Waititi has a cameo as a local pastor.) Based on a true story told in a 2014 documentary, the film’s best moments capture the whimsical charms of Waititi’s earliest work, but they are in short supply in this muddled, erratic tale that is at best pleasantly forgettable. — M.O.

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9. ‘Poolman’ (Chris Pine)

A grizzled man in a hat flanked by an older couple.

Look. Nobody wanted Chris Pine’s directorial debut to sink like a stone. (He’s one of the preferred Hollywood Chrises, after all.) But his aggressively sunny mishmash of far better Los Angeles-set noirs, about a hapless pool cleaner sniffing out a web of corrupt politicians and greedy developers, practically invites comparison — take your pick from “The Long Goodbye,” “The Big Lebowski” and most of all “Chinatown,” which it unceasingly references — and not even Pine’s committed Dude-lite turn in short shorts can save it from itself. Have you ever been trapped at a party with someone who’s made being from L.A. their entire personality? Meet Darren Barrenman (Pine), a card-carrying member of the Los Angeles Breakfast Club (“Hello, Ham!”) who wears Bob’s Big Boy tanks and types daily affirmations to his hero, Erin Brockovich, on a typewriter. He’s the kind of Angeleno that, frankly, makes people hate Angelenos. The neo-noir comedy quickly becomes more exhausting than entertaining, even as excellent craftspeople help build his lived-in world of whimsy. (Erin Magill’s production design pulls more than its own weight; the film was shot on 35mm by Matthew Jensen.) It’s telling that Pine purportedly co-wrote the screenplay with Ian Gotler after inventing his protagonist as a gag on the “Wonder Woman 1984” set with Patty Jenkins, who serves as a producer on the pic. More effort seems to have gone into writing its quirky parade of characters than in giving them anywhere to go, making the journey a bigger slog than crossing the city in rush hour traffic. — J.Y.

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10. ‘North Star’ (Kristin Scott Thomas)

Three adult sisters huddle together at a dinner table.

Kristin Scott Thomas has worked with enough master filmmakers in her career — Robert Redford, Anthony Minghella and Robert Altman among them — to have picked up some tricks along the way. Unfortunately, in her feature debut, “North Star,” she seems eager to deploy all of them at once: Combining animation, farce, family melodrama and much more besides, Thomas’ autobiographical tale of three sisters returning home for their mother’s third marriage is cluttered and tin-eared, unable to pivot effectively from grief to extramarital pegging to sibling recrimination and back again. On their own, our protagonists offer promise: There’s Georgina, a National Health Service nurse with a loathsome husband (Emily Beecham); Victoria, a narcissistic movie star with a French playboy pursuer (Sienna Miller); and Katherine, a pioneering naval captain with commitment issues (Scarlett Johansson, with a distractingly undercooked English accent). All together, though, those individual foibles swamp the film’s most novel throughline, which is the remarkable coincidence that Thomas’ father and stepfather, both British navy pilots, died during their service only a few years apart. Indeed, the film’s one triumphant moment comes courtesy of Thomas the actor, with a graveside monologue in which the screen legend inhabits her own mother in order to take herself and her sisters down a notch: “I brought you up to be women,” she says, “not just to be daughters.” Would that Thomas the director had approached the material with such clear eyes. — M.B.

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11. ‘Knox Goes Away’ (Michael Keaton)

A man in dark glasses stands in a doorway.

In “Knox Goes Away,” his second effort as director-star, Michael Keaton plays a hitman with a fast-moving neurodegenerative disorder that will rob him of his memory in only a matter of weeks. Having already botched one job because of his onsetting confusion and lapses, which he hastily covers up, he scrambles to put his affairs in order as quickly as he can, cashing in various assets. Then his estranged son (James Marsden) arrives at his doorstep having just killed the online predator who impregnated his underage daughter. Keaton’s character sets about trying to clean up that situation as well, setting in motion a cat-and-mouse game with a detective (Suzy Nakamura) who comes to realize the two cases are connected. The script by Gregory Poirier tries too hard to keep the many plates spinning, and Keaton the director becomes overwhelmed by the fussiness of the storytelling. A few scenes between Keaton and Al Pacino as an aging thief convey the minor-key character study the rest of the film desperately needs. — M.O.