Photo Source: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Adding to Toronto's star billing, galas are also planned for "Moneyball," in which Clooney's "Ocean's Eleven" sidekick Brad Pitt stars as baseball manager Billy Beane, and "Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding," in which Jane Fonda, who once epitomized '60s rebellion, returns as a hippie grandmother.
With the sprawling festival set to kick off Sept. 8 and run through Sept. 18, festival organizers announced their first group of selections Tuesday.
The Special Presentations lineup includes world premieres of "50/50," starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young cancer patient; Roland Emmerich's Elizabethan-era thriller "Anonymous," starring David Thewlis and Vanessa Redgrave; and "Woman in the Fifth," in which Ethan Hawke plays a writer who meets a mysterious stranger in Paris.
Clooney, whose "Up in the Air" drew applause when it played Toronto two years ago, not only stars in "Ides" but also directed and co-wrote the film based on Beau Willimon's play "Farragut North," with his Smoke House producing partner Grant Heslov. Sony will release the movie about backroom politics, which also stars Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti, on Oct. 7.
Alexander Payne directed Clooney's other feature "The Descendants" -- set for a Nov. 23 release by Fox Searchlight -- in which the star plays a dad reconnecting with his two daughters.
Several of the key players in last year's "The Social Network" -- producers Scott Rudin and Michael De Luca as well as Aaron Sorkin, who shares screenwriting credit with Steven Zaillian -- have joined forces for "Moneyball," the true-life baseball tale in which Pitt appears alongside Jonah Hill and Hoffman. On Sept. 23, Sony will releases the feature, which Bennet Miller directed after the studio parted ways with Steven Soderbergh.
"Peace," the third gala title announced Tuesday, was produced by BCDF Pictures and will be looking for a distributor in Toronto. Bruce Beresford directed the comedy about a New York lawyer, played by Catherine Keener, who takes her two teens, Elizabeth Olsen and Nat Wolff, to visit their grandmother, portrayed by Fonda, in upstate New York.
In addition to "The Descendants," Special Presentations is crowded with world premieres.
In Jonathan Levine's "50/50," coming from Summit on Sept. 30, Gordon-Levitt is surrounded by Seth Rogen, Anna Kendrick and Bryce Dallas Howard as his character deals with cancer.
"Anonymous," which Sony will release on Oct. 28, is a change-of-pace from director Emmerich, who usually traffics in apocalyptic disaster movies, but here examines the court intrigue around the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, which the movie credits to Edward De Vere, played by Rhys Ifans, with Redgrave on hand as Queen Elizabeth I.
In Pawel Pawlikowski's "Woman," which ATO Pictures will distribute Stateside, Hawke plays an American in Paris who gets mixed up with a stranger, Kristin Scott Thomas, whose "Sarah's Key" bowed at last year's Toronto fest.
The list of world premieres also includes Wang Xiaoshuai's "11 Flowers," about an 11-year-old boy who meets a murderer on the run; in Mathieu Demy's "Americano," starring Salma Hayek and Geraldine Chaplin, the French director, who happens to be the son of Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy, plays a man who returns to Los Angeles in search of his past; in Malgorzata Szumowska's "Elles," Juliette Binoche will be seen as a Paris-based journalist researching prostitution; Derick Martini's "Hick" stars Chloe Moretz as a 13-year-old who heads west in search of stardom, meeting Blake Lively along the way; Jason Segel plays a man searching for the meaning of life while on the way to a store to buy some glue in "Jeff," "Who Lives at Home," directed by the brothers Jay and Mark Duplass.
Like "Ides," William Friedkin's crime tale "Killer Joe," starring Matthew McConaughey and Emile Hirsch, will play Venice on its way to Toronto.
A couple of titles that were introduced at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year -- such as Drake Doremus' "Like Crazy," with Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones headlining, and Sean Durkin's "Martha Marcy May Marlene," starring Olsen and Sarah Paulsen -- have also been selected for the Special Presentations sidebar.
There are also a couple of films that were first seen in Cannes: Lynne Ramsay's "We Need to Talk About Kevin," which is built around a critically-applauded performance by Tilda Swinton and which was picked up by Oscilloscope, and Nadine Labaki's "Where Do We Go Now?," set against the backdrop of wartorn Lebanon.
And director Cameron Crowe, who in between narrative features has been busying himself helming music documentaries, will bring his newest doc "Pearl Jam Twenty," which takes a look back at the entire history of that band, as a world premiere.
– The Hollywood Reporter
