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10 Must-See Movies Playing At TIFF 2013

There are literally too many potentially great movies playing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival for a single person to see them all over the course of the festival’s eleven-day run. The lineup for TIFF 2013 is one of its strongest yet, and for those of us fortunate enough to attend, it all but guarantees a fantastic two weeks of cinema, and for the rest of the movie watching public, it indicates good things for the upcoming fall and winter film seasons. In some cases, movies being screened at TIFF are set for release just weeks later in September, so the headstart festival audiences will have is not all that noteworthy. Others—such as You’re Next, for instance, which premiered at TIFF two years ago and finally saw a theatrical run this summer—may not be seen for some time.

[h2]1) Gravity[/h2]

Gravity

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Buzziest of all the TIFF 2013 films is the new Alfonso Cuarón space thriller starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Yes, Gravity is a movie that has been on moviegoer radars for weeks, months, even years. The magnificent trailer caught the attention of audiences back in May, but the hype surrounding this movie has been at a steady growth ever since Cuarón started showing amazing footage from it months earlier. He re-teams with the best cinematographer in the business, Emmanuel Lubezki, with whom he worked on the much-heralded Children of Men, and so a powerful visual experience can be all but assured with this one.

I’ve tried to avoid too many of the reviews, but the glimpses I’ve caught seem to reach a consensus around this movie being a game-changer. This, of course, brings us to the difficult terrain of cinematic expectations. With the buzz being as insane as it is for Gravity, the chances that it could live up to expectations becomes a more and more daunting prospect. Then again, the critics who have seen it already seem to think it meets and exceeds their wildest hopes for what it would be. We’ll all have to wait and see, but this is the one I’m most excited about seeing at the festival. The good news is that it’s also scheduled for an October 4th release everywhere, so the post-TIFF wait won’t be very long at all.

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