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Hoffman, Buffalo films headed to TIFF
Posted: Thursday, August 19, 2010 3:15 am | Updated: 4:22 pm, Wed Aug 18, 2010.
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TORONTO -- Fairport native Philip Seymour Hoffman's directorial debut will premiere next month at the Toronto International Film Festival.
"Jack Goes Boating," adapted from Bob Glaudini's acclaimed off-Broadway play, is a story about two working class New York City couples that explores love, betrayal, friendship and grace.
Hoffman, an Oscar-winner for "Capote," stars alongside his "Doubt" co-star Amy Ryan, Daphne Rubin-Vega and John Ortiz.
The festival, running Sept. 9 to 19, will also feature a film shot in Buffalo. Keanu Reeves stars in Malcolm Venville's "Henry's Crime," about a man wrongly convicted for bank robbery who decides to pull a heist for real after he's released from prison. Several scenes for the film were shot in Buffalo in December 2009.
TIFF has long been a showcase for potential Academy Awards contenders and big fall releases.
Other actors-turned-directors premiering films at the festival include Ben Affleck, who also stars as a thief who falls for a bank manager his crew takes hostage in "The Town"; Robert Redford with the Abraham Lincoln assassination tale "The Conspirator," starring James McAvoy, Robin Wright Penn, Kevin Kline and Evan Rachel Wood in a tale of a union war hero defending a woman accused of aiding her son in Lincoln's assassination; David Schwimmer with "Trust," featuring Clive Owen and Catherine Keener as parents of a teenage girl raped by a pedophile she met online; and Emilio Estevez, who directs his father, Martin Sheen, in "The Way," a drama about a father on a pilgrimage after his son's death.
Other films debuting at Toronto star Nicole Kidman, Robert De Niro, Natalie Portman, Keanu Reeves, KeiraKnightley and Carey Mulligan.
Toronto festival director Piers Handling said the lineup reflects the "abundance of exciting works from established and emerging filmmakers in the world of cinema."
The festival also features Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart as parents grieving over the death of their son in John Cameron Mitchell's "Rabbit Hole"; Robert De Niro and Edward Norton in John Curran's "Stone," about a prison inmate plotting his release by manipulating a parole officer; and Natalie Portman as a ballerina in Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan," a psychological thriller set behind the scenes at a dance company.
Also premiering will be "Miral," from director Julian Schnabel ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"), with Freida Pinto in the tale of a girl growing up in war-torn East Jerusalem.
Among other Toronto premieres: George Hickenlooper's "Casino Jack," starring Kevin Spacey as disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff; John Madden's "The Debt," with Helen Mirren and Sam Worthington in a tale of Israeli agents tracking a Nazi war criminal; Mike Mills' "Beginners," about a son (Ewan McGregor) dealing with bombshell news after his 71-year-old father (Christopher Plummer) announces he is gay; and Tony Goldwyn's "Conviction," with Hilary Swank as a woman trying to clear her brother (Sam Rockwell) of a murder rap.
Knightley and Mulligan star with Andrew Garfield, recently cast in the title role of the next "Spider-Man" movie, in director Mark Romanek's "Never Let Me Go," a drama about boarding school friends coming to grips with their sheltered past as adults in the real world.