The 22 Most Exciting Films to Watch This Season
Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on September 22, 2023.
The ongoing Hollywood strikes may have dimmed the usual glitz that comes with the fall festival circuit—the star-studded red carpets, the applause-filled Q&As, the endless photo shoots—but this year’s Toronto International Film Festival still featured hundreds of new titles from established auteurs and first-time filmmakers alike. Earlier this month, my colleague David Sims and I caught as many of TIFF’s offerings as we could, leaving with plenty of movies to discuss and recommend. Below, David and I have rounded up our favorites from this year’s festival, most of which will be in theaters or streaming before long. — Shirley Li
The Royal Hotel (in theaters October 6)
Kitty Green quickly proved herself a master of the slow-burn nightmare with 2019’s The Assistant, a film starring Julia Garner as a young woman forced to tolerate her unseen studio-executive boss’s sexual indiscretions. In her follow-up, Green casts Garner as a young woman backpacking across Australia with her best friend (Jessica Henwick). When the pair take bartending jobs in a male-dominated remote mining town to make some cash, they dress for work, not for play—no skirts, no heels—and even claim to be Canadian to ward off judgment about their American backgrounds. But the line between a gaze and a leer can be terribly thin—and The Royal Hotel shows in taut, tense sequences how being accommodating only works so well as a defense mechanism. — Shirley Li
Anatomy of a Fall (in theaters October 13)
The winner of this year’s Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s French legal drama is amassing buzz as one of the fall’s clear art-house breakouts. The plot is straight out of a ’90s paperback best seller—a novelist (played by Sandra Hüller) is arrested for murder after her husband dies in a fall at their mountain home, and, gives an extraordinary performance already being tipped for Oscar success. —
