2015 Toronto Preview: The 11 Premieres We're Most Excited About

Hollywood is heading north of the border this week for the 40th annual Toronto International Film Festival, which kicks off on Thursday. Though the fest is considered the unofficial start to awards season, it also boasts plenty of other discoveries to be made beyond the high-profile prestige films vying for trophies.

Yahoo Movies will be on the ground in Canada this week to give you the up-to-the-minute scoop. Here are the 11 premieres that we’re most looking forward to, including Ridley Scott’s latest space shot (The Martian), director Jeremy Saulnier’s follow-up to his riveting indie breakout Blue Ruin (Green Room), and Michael Moore’s sure-to-be-hot-button documentary, his first in six years (Where to Invade Next). Not included on this list, we should note, are a host of major TIFF films that premiered earlier at Venice and Telluride, like Black Mass, Beasts of No Nation, The Danish Girl, Spotlight, Anomalisa, Room, and Legend.

Demolition
Jake Gyllenhaal’s run of post-Prince of Persia original films for adults (End of Watch, Prisoners, Nightcrawler, Southpaw and this month’s Everest) continues with this darkly comic drama about a shallow stockbroker who pulls his life apart after a car crash kills his wife (Heather Lind). Speaking of smart, grown-up entertainment, the film — which co-stars Chris Cooper and Naomi Watts — is the latest release from the prolific French-Canadian filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée (2013’s Dallas Buyers Club and 2014’s Wild).

Watch the ‘Demolition’ trailer:

Freeheld
A year after breaking hearts and winning her first Oscar playing a college professor struggling with Alzheimer’s disease in Still Alice, Julianne Moore is right back in tearjerker mode this fall. In Freeheld, she plays real-life, terminally ill New Jersey detective Laurel Hester, who battled to extend her pension benefits to her domestic partner Stacie Andree (Ellen Page). Expect Toronto to have a serious case of the sniffles after this drama bows.

The Martian
Matt Damon must really like it in space. Ridley Scott’s sci-fi thriller based on the best-selling 2011 novel marks the actor’s third high-profile adventure into the ether, following 2013’s Elysium and 2014’s Interstellar. This time, he plays an astronaut presumed dead on Mars who must survive on a limited food supply until help arrives. It might sound like a one-man show, but Scott enlisted a star-studded cast that includes Jessica Chastain (also coming off Interstellar), Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña, and Donald Glover. Don’t get your hopes up for actual Martians, though.

Watch the ‘Martian’ trailer:

Trumbo
This isn’t Dalton Trumbo’s first go-around at Toronto. The late screenwriter behind Roman Holiday and Spartacus was the subject of a 2007 documentary of the same name that also premiered at TIFF, and now he’s getting the full-on biopic treatment. Four-time Emmy winner Bryan Cranston plays the writer, who became the face of the Hollywood blacklist during the government’s take-down of presumed communists in the 1940s. Don’t worry Trumbo completists: The film contains the requisite shot of him typing away in the bathtub.

Truth
Nearly 40 years after playing Watergate whistleblower Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men, Robert Redford steps into the loafers of another iconic journalist, Dan Rather. This biographical drama written and directed by The Amazing Spider-Man scribe James Vanderbilt follows the CBS newsman as controversy erupts over his 2004 report questioning the military service of President George W. Bush. Cate Blanchett will add some sparks as his longtime producer Mary Mapes, on whose memoir the film is based. Here’s hoping the film lives up to Hollywood’s last 60 Minutes exposé, the thrilling 1999 drama The Insider.

Where to Invade Next
Famed rabble-rouser and documentarian Michael Moore returns to the fest where he showcased previous docs Bowling for Columbine and Capitalism: A Love Story. Details on his new project — about America’s military entanglements — have been mostly kept mum. But after tackling such controversial issues as gun control (Columbine), the war on terror (Fahrenheit 9/11) and healthcare (Sicko), we’re going to bet that he’ll be bringing his megaphone again.

Closet Monster
There are two reasons why this Canadian coming-of-age tale shot to the top of our gotta-see list: 1) Its story — about a young special-effects wiz whose struggle to come out of the closet results in strange body transformations — sounds straight out of a David Cronenberg script; and 2) it features a hamster voiced by none other than Blue Velvet’s Isabella Rossellini.

A Flickering Truth
This harrowing doc follows a group of film lovers in Afghanistan (including jailed filmmaker Ibrahim Arify) as they struggle to preserve more than 8,000 hours of movie footage — much of it going back decades — that came under threat with the rise of the Taliban. Prepare for an emotional history lesson — and a moving reminder of how and why we fall in love with movies in the first place.

Green Room
Last year’s Blue Ruin was a super-scuzzy breakthrough for writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, who upended the traditional revenge-thriller formula with a gnarled, nasty, and bleakly funny tale. This follow-up, starring Patrick Stewart and Anton Yelchin, promises to be equally corrosive: It’s the story of a group of young punk rockers who run into a gang of neo-Nazis in the rural Northwest, and must their fight way out of the woods. Gabba Gabba slay?

I Saw the Light
Tom Hiddleston has played a Marvel baddie, a rock n’ roll vampire, and even Prince Hal. Now, the English actor takes on one of his most daring roles yet, starring as country legend Hank Williams, the hard-living, heavenly-voiced country singer who died at the age of 29. Hiddleston will do his own singing in the film, which costars fellow Avengers alum Elizabeth Olsen as his wife, Audrey Williams, a respected musician in her own right. Hopefully, someone will make Hiddleston a Hank Williams action figure to play with.

The Program
Pompous pedal-pusher Lance Armstrong — we know, we know: ugggghhh — gets his own biopic courtesy of Stephen Frears, the director of such recent hits as The Queen and Philomena. But don’t expect this tale of Armstrong, who admitted in 2013 to doping during his award-winning cycling career, to find much glory in his story: Instead, it focuses on the conflict between Armstrong (played by The Messenger’s Ben Foster) and a vigilant reporter (St. Vincent star Chris O’Dowd). Between this and Spotlight, it’s a good festival for big-screen journalists, which we obviously endorse without a smidge of bias.

Watch ‘The Program’ trailer: