The Toronto Film Festival on Thursday returned post-strikes with Hollywood star wattage as Ben Stiller and director David Gordon Green gave a glittering lift-off for their opening night film Nutcrackers.
Gordon Green introduced Stiller to the crowd at Roy Thomson Hall in the Canadian city that seemed ready for film fest fun.
The Night at the Museum star then recalled making movies in Canada. “I’ve made a bunch of movies in Canada, and it’s always an amazing experience,” Stiller said.
His comments followed Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau touting Canada as a foreign location destination for Hollywood. “Our cities can sometimes sub in for American cities, Trudeau said, but increasingly they provide backdrops for homegrown Canadian stories. “We’re one of the few places in the world that understands diversity is important to tell stories that reach the world,” the Canadian leader added.
Director Gordon Green told the first-night Toronto audience that showing his films at TIFF “is like a rite of passage, like a birth for so many of the films I’ve made.”
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.
The ensemble cast for Nutcrackers includes Linda Cardellini, Edi Patterson, Tim Heidecker and Toby Huss. The comedy opening TIFF marks 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.
Launching this year with a mainstream Hollywood comedy in Toronto comes as Roy Thomson Hall is typically filled with ordinary moviegoers (and not only industry people as in Cannes and Venice).
Stiller’s crowd-pleaser marked a change of pace in Toronto from 2023 when Japanese anime legend Hayao Miyazaki’s final film The Boy and the Heron kicked off TIFF’s more solemn 48th edition.
Earlier on Thursday, TIFF featured red carpet premieres for Eddie Huang’s Vice Is Broke, the documentary about Vice Media going from boom to bust; Jia Zhang-Ke’s Caught By the Tides; and Samuel Van Grinsven’s Went Up The Hill, starring Vicky Krieps and Dacre Montgomery.
Toronto also opened Thursday with debuts for Durga Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse, starring Chloe Sevigny; Samir Oliveros’s The Luckiest Man in America; and a Midnight Madness premiere for The Substance, directed by Coralie Fargeat and starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley on hand at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.
Nutcrackers
Courtesy of TIFF
