Toronto International Film Festival: 7 must-see movies

The Toronto International Film Festival, often considered the unofficial launch of the Oscar season, kicks off tomorrow. The festival, now in its 40th year, offers a first look at many of the movies that will be vying for Academy Awards next year.

The line-up includes feature films starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch and Julianne Moore.

We take a look at seven of this year's festival movie highlights.

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Demolition

The Jake Gyllenhaal drama will open the Toronto festival on 10 September. Directed by Canadian Jean-Marc Vallee, best known for Dallas Buyers Club and Wild, the film stars Gyllenhaal as a forlorn investment banker whose life unravels after his wife dies. He begins to tear apart his old world to find out where he went wrong, but when he meets a single mom (Naomi Watts) he begins to see a way forward.

The Danish Girl

Eddie Redmayne will reunite with director Tom Hooper (Les Miserables) for this film about transgender artist Lili Elbe. The drama is based on the 2001 novel by David Ebershoff, about the life of Danish painter Einar Wegener, who became the first man to undergo a sex-change operation and became Lili. The novel focused on a love story between Wegener and his wife, Gerda Gottlieb, also a painter. Hooper describes the film as "an extraordinary love story and a story about finding your true self".

Freeheld

Julianne Moore, who recently won a best actress Oscar for her role as a college professor with Alzheimer's in Still Alice, tackles another tough subject in her latest film. This time Moore stars in the real-life story of New Jersey police detective Laurel Hester, who after being diagnosed with cancer fights to leave her pension to her partner, Stacie Andree. Ellen Page co-stars as Moore's girlfriend Stacie, a mechanic, and Steve Carell plays a gay rights activist.

The Martian

Ridley Scott's sci-fi adventure stars Matt Damon as an astronaut stranded on Mars, in a tale reminiscent of one of the storylines in Christopher Nolan's epic Insterstellar. Damon plays an astronaut who is presumed dead after a violent storm, and is left behind when the rest of his crew evacuate Mars to return to Earth. Damon must use his wits to survive and stay sane, unaware that two characters played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jessica Chastain are trying to save him.

Black Mass

This American crime biopic stars Johnny Depp in the true story of Whitey Bulger, a violent criminal and later FBI informer. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Whitey’s brother, a state senator, who becomes implicated in his brother's life of crime. The film follows Bulger from the 1970s as he becomes a crime boss of the Irish Winter Hill Gang.

The Program

Directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen, High Fidelity), The Program looks at the rise and fall of champion cyclist and self-confessed drugs cheat Lance Armstrong. Lone Survivor actor Ben Foster stars as the athlete in the film based on the book Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong by Sunday Times journalist David Walsh. Bridesmaids actor Chris O'Dowd plays Walsh, whose continuous efforts to investigate Armstrong were key to exposing the doping rings within pro-cycling.

Son of Saul

Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes's Holocaust drama was described as the "breakout hit" of this year's Cannes festival and now it is coming to Toronto. Son of Saul – which picked up the Grand Prix, the second-most prestigious Cannes prize after the Palme d'Or – looks at the 20th-century atrocity through the eyes of a Hungarian-Jewish prisoner (Geza Rohrig) determined to give his young son a proper burial within the confines of Auschwitz. In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw said that "by any standards, this would be an outstanding film, but for a debut it is remarkable".