Hotlist

Now that the circus act has left Toronto, our critic picks the films that are bound for glory

A Dangerous Method

50/50

Shame

Monsieur Lazhar

Edwin Boyd

Rampart

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

An Awakening

Elles

Balancing offbeat humour and abject sentiment, Alexander Payne (Sideways, About Schmidt) rides the perfect wave between comedy and drama in this tale of a shattered family in Hawaii. George Clooney does a credible job of dulling his charisma as an ineffectual lawyer and father whose wife has been having an affair—something he discovers only after a powerboat accident has put her in a serious coma. But his unruly daughters, especially the elder teen played by Shailene Woodley, are the driving force of this movie, which follows a wonderfully unpredictable course through some breathtaking landscape. Payne does for Hawaii what he did for wine in Sideways. “In Hawaii,” says Clooney’s character, “some of the most powerful people look like bums and stuntmen.” That’s just one wry observation in a bittersweet social comedy that treats the Pacific “paradise” as lead character, portrayed, by turns, with rhapsodic beauty and idiosyncratic wit.

Moneyball Brad Pitt is having a remarkable year. First he plays the dark side of the American Dream in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes; now he switch-hits to the sunny side of that dream in Moneyball‘s amazing-but-true story of Billy Beane, a general manager who changed the face of major league baseball. Here, after a string of quirky, character roles, Pitt finally unleashes his natural wit and charisma in a role that soaks it up—he has the lustre of a latter-day Robert Redford. A movie star hitting his prime. But what makes the film really click is the hilarious odd-couple chemistry between Pitt and the deadpan Jonah Hill, cast as the nerdy Yale economist hired by Beane to build a winning strategy by number-crunching. Directed by Capote’s Bennett Miller, this is one helluva good sports movie. It’s a terrific movie, period. Pitt often gets more credit as a movie star than as an actor. But for this, he should get an Oscar nomination.