Hot button issues fuel this pressure cooker drama from the prolific and versatile Luca Guadagnino (Challengers; Call Me by Your Name). Julia Roberts plays an Ivy League professor, Alma Olsson, whose latest protege is a gifted Black student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri, The Bear). But when Maggie calls out Alma’s old friend and colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) for assault, Maggie doesn’t know who to believe.

Rose Byrne offers a brilliant performance as a woman faced with escalating anxieties and pressures looking after a sick daughter while dealing with a home that’s literally caving in.

George Clooney — sorry, Jay Kelly — is going through some things. He’s a world-famous movie star, a kind of latter-day Cary Grant with devilish good looks, charm, and urbanity. His success has exceeded all reasonable expectation, so why does he feel a nagging dissatisfaction? They say he only ever plays himself, but how can that be when he barely knows who he is in the first place? Touring Europe with his friend and manager Ron (Adam Sandler), Jay starts to ask himself some tough questions and reflect on the choices he’s made. Is this a meaningful life? Is change possible?

Colin (Harry Melling) is a young gay man who lives with his parents and sings in a barbershop quartet. He meets Ray (Alexander Skarsgard), a leather-clad, hyper-masculine biker straight out of a Tom of Finland drawing. They hook up in a dark alleyway — a one-way transaction that sets the power dynamic for their relationship. Colin naturally adopts the role of submissive, learning to cook and clean alongside whatever else Ray tasks him with. Despite his aptitude for obedience, Colin grows tired of sleeping on the floor and begins to wish for more.

Winner of multiple prizes at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, TIFF veteran Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sly, genre-bending political thriller stars Wagner Moura as Marcelo, a technology expert on the lam and seeking refuge in the Brazilian city of Recife in 1977.

Unfolding in real time over that single evening, Richard Linklater’s sardonic drama features a larger-than-life performance by Ethan Hawke as the ailing, alcoholic, and sexually ambiguous Hart. Featuring memorable supporting turns by Andrew Scott as Rodgers and Margaret Qualley as Hart’s protégé Elizabeth, Blue Moon is at once a lacerating study of solipsism and a bittersweet meditation on the vicissitudes of friendship and art.

In a pair of galvanizing, deeply honest performances, Will Arnett and Laura Dern play Alex and Tess Novak, whose marriage has reached an impasse. With amicable sorrow, the couple — parents of two young boys — mutually agree to split up. Yet, in director Bradley Cooper’s keenly observed comic drama, their separation leads to unpredictable midlife self-reckonings, most dramatically in Alex’s wild career pivot to become a confessional stand-up comedian in New York City’s West Village, where he finds new direction and camaraderie.

If you know, you know. Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert is the best-selling solo jazz recording and piano album of all time — 66 minutes of pure improv, a work of sublime introspection and intense rigor. While that might seem like rather esoteric ground for a biopic, Ido Fluk’s movie about the buildup to the 1975 concert is jokey, fun, and feminist. Rather than framing the story squarely around Jarrett (played by Past Lives’ John Magaro), this is the tale of Vera Brandes (Mala Emde), the concert’s 16-year-old promoter who refused to back down, even with the odds against her.

In a sleepy Massachusetts community in 1970, JB Mooney (Josh O’Connor) dreams big but isn’t much for the finer details. Noting the laughably low security at the local art museum, the unemployed carpenter drafts and clumsily orchestrates a less-than-daring heist that leaves him in possession of four modestly valuable paintings, but no clue as to what to do next. Feeling the heat from both local authorities and organized crime figures, the practically penniless JB goes on the lam, drifting through Nixon-era America.

Set in the Pacific Northwest during the first decades of the 20th century, Jockey director Clint Bentley’s beguiling adaptation of Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson’s novella stars Joel Edgerton as a humble labourer immersed in a rapidly changing world of natural splendour and voracious industry.

Step aside Anora, there’s a new bad bitch in town. Writer, director, and star Annapurna Sriram serves charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent in this sexy, campy throwback to sexploitation classics. Shot in glowing 16mm and buzzing with the no-f*cks-given energy of John Waters and Gregg Araki, Fucktoys is unapologetic in every way — a transgressive indie freak-out with an exquisite cinematic style. More than just pastiche, Sriram is reclaiming power, changing the rules, and giving the finger to a system built on exploitation.

Winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, the latest from Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi — his first following his most recent prison sentence — follows a group of citizens pondering revenge against a man they believe was their torturer.

Can love prevail when the world is falling apart? That’s the question Québécois filmmaker Anne Émond (Nuit #1) poses in this adventurous hybrid: a climate-crisis romantic comedy. Forty-five-year-old Adam (Patrick Hivon) runs a kennel for rescue dogs but struggles with depression when he can’t imagine humans extending that same rescue instinct to themselves. It’s only when he decides to purchase a therapeutic lamp — falling in love with the customer service operator on the other end of the phone (Piper Perabo) in the process — that he’s shaken out of his torpor. But even that faint flame will face environmental threats…

Abandoned by his mother at an all-boys water polo camp, 12-year-old Ben (Everett Blunck) is plunged into the deep end of toxic peer pressure. Almost debilitatingly shy and terrified of incurring the wrath of his feral campmates’ pint-sized ringleader (Kayo Martin), Ben joins the braying pack in mercilessly tormenting Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), an awkward kid whose unsightly skin rash has been branded “the plague” and deemed highly transmissible by the boys. But when Ben begins to find similar blemishes on his own body, he questions whether there might possibly be some credence to their wild claims…

1937: At the peak of Stalin’s purges, gulags were being filled with political prisoners — their letters burned, their due process denied. When a letter from a prisoner (Aleksandr Filippenko) claiming innocence miraculously slips through the censors and reaches the desk of the naïve, freshly graduated prosecutor Alexander Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov), the legal representative sets out to investigate, unaware of the labyrinthine bureaucracy awaiting him. Kornev finds his idealism challenged in his journey for answers as he discovers not only his own powerlessness as a cog in the Soviet machine, but the sheer corruption of the state itself.