Entertainment

TIFF 2019: Lucy in the Sky with Natalie Portman, Mick Jagger's The Burnt Orange Heresy to screen

The Toronto International Film Festival has added more titles, including the world premiere of an astronaut drama starring Natalie Portman and the gala presentation of an art thriller with Mick Jagger.
The Toronto International Film Festival has announced more titles for the upcoming edition, with movies featuring Natalie Portman (seen here), Mick Jagger, Kerry Washington, Daniel Radcliffe and Sterling K. Brown. (TIFF)

The Toronto International Film Festival has added more titles, including the world premiere of an astronaut drama starring Natalie Portman and the gala presentation of an art thriller with Mick Jagger.

Portman stars in Lucy in the Sky as an astronaut who returns to Earth after a space mission and begins to lose touch with reality as she dates a colleague, played by Jon Hamm.

The feature film directorial debut of Fargo series creator Noah Hawley will make its world premiere in the Special Presentations program during the festival's run from Sept. 5-15.

Meanwhile, Jagger appears in Giuseppe Capotondi's The Burnt Orange Heresy, which will make its North American premiere in Toronto after closing out the Venice International Film Festival on Sept. 7.

Jagger plays an art collector in a cast that also includes Elizabeth Debicki, Claes Bang and Donald Sutherland.

TIFF has added the art theft thriller The Burnt Orange Heresy, which stars Claes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki (seen here), with Donald Sutherland and Mick Jagger also among the cast. (TIFF)

Other newly announced world premieres in the Toronto film fest include the tragic family drama Human Capital by Marc Meyers, which is based on Stephen Amidon's novel and stars Liev Schreiber, Marisa Tomei, and Peter Sarsgaard.

American Son is a big-screen adaptation of an acclaimed Broadway play by Christopher Demos-Brown and has the same director, Kenny Leon, as well as original stars Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale. Washington and Pasquale play an estranged, interracial couple who reunite in a Florida police station to search for their missing son.

Daniel Radcliffe stars as a lovelorn man caught up in a clandestine world of deathmatch fighting in the action-comedy Guns Akimbo by Jason Lei Howden.

Bare-knuckle boxing is the focus of Jungleland by Max Winkler, starring Charlie Hunnam, Jack O'Connell, and Jessica Barden.

Synchronic stars Anthony Mackie (right) and Jamie Dornan as New Orleans paramedics who stumble upon a bizarre series of drug-related deaths. (TIFF)

In the sci-fi thriller Synchronic by Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan play New Orleans paramedics dealing with horrific deaths caused by a designer drug.

And Garrett Hedlund stars as a poacher in the Gregor Jordan-directed romantic drama Dirt Music, which is an adaptation of a Tim Winton novel.

Other newly added notables that aren't making their world premieres include the historical drama Seberg by Benedict Andrews, starring Kristen Stewart as real-life actress Jean Seberg, who was a target of an FBI surveillance program.

Kristen Stewart stars as American actress Jean Seberg, known for her roles in French New Wave films, in the political thriller Seberg. (TIFF)

Waves is a music-filled romantic drama directed by Trey Edward Shults and starring Lucas Hedges and Sterling K. Brown.

And The Aeronauts by Tom Harper stars Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne as pilot Amelia Wren and scientist James Glaisher.

Gael Garcia Bernal added to world cinema 

The Toronto festival also announced its 2019 Contemporary World Cinema program on Tuesday, a lineup that includes titles from 48 countries.

Chicuarotes, directed by actor-filmmaker Gael Garcia Bernal, centres on a group of teens in Mexico City attempting to improve their lives. (TIFF)

Among them is Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal's second feature film as director, the teen drama Chicuarotes, and Minhal Baig's American Muslim teen story Hala, produced by Jada Pinkett Smith.

The CWC program opens with Atiq Rahimi's Our Lady of the Nile, about a group of Rwandan girls in a Catholic boarding school.

Based on an acclaimed novel, Our Lady of the Nile is set in a prestigious Catholic girls' boarding school before the Rwandan genocide. (TIFF)

TIFF also announced 11 films for the auteur-filled Masters program Tuesday, including the world premiere of Devil Between the Legs by acclaimed Mexican director Arturo Ripstein, and the North American premiere of the modern-day England tale Sorry We Missed by British master Ken Loach.

Meanwhile, the Wavelengths program of international shorts and features by established and emerging talents will have a total of 37 titles.

Corrections

  • An earlier version of this story incorrectly included a caption describing Jean Seberg as a French actress.
    Aug 13, 2019 5:25 PM ET