2015 Toronto International Film Festival

If you feeling like throw up for a couple hours, take a look at the Wikipedia page for the Elisabeth Fritzl case. Fritzl was imprisoned in 1984 by her father Josef; she didn’t escape until 2008. In the intervening years, Josef repeatedly raped his daughter, and she gave birth to seven of his children; four of them remained incarcerated with Elisabeth, while the other three were adopted by Josef and his wife (he claimed he found them abandoned). Finally, after 24 years of the worst torture imaginable, Elisabeth managed to break free.

If you’ve watched a movie in the last 25 years and thought to yourself “God, this film looks great,” odds are it was shot by Roger Deakins. The master cinematographer of such modern classics as The Shawshank Redemption, No Country for Old Men, and Skyfall is considered the best director of photography working today by almost everyone on the planet (except the Academy, which has nominated him twelve different times but never given him an Oscar).

The best movie I saw at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival was Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Anomalisa. At the end of my review of the film, I noted that the film didn’t yet have a U.S. distributor, so readers would have to keep their ear to the ground to hear when they’d be able to see this masterpiece for themselves.

Spotlight is a story about the way things used to be done; a model of journalism in which a reporter might publish one article a year rather than one article a day (or, God help us, an hour). It follows the “Spotlight” unit of The Boston Globe, a four-person team of reporters who investigate big stories for as long as they need. In 2001, Martin Baron (Liev Schreiber) became the new editor of the Globe, and assigned the Spotlight writers the case of a Catholic priest accused of molesting numerous children. But rather than simply cover that one story, the Spotlight staff dug deeper into the Catholic Church’s history of hiding such crimes by moving priests from one place to another. Their work exposed systemic abuse stretching back decades and ultimately won a Pulitzer Prize… but wasn’t published until 2002.

A business trip to Cincinnati’s pretty mundane material for a stop-motion animated movie. Why not just shoot this story in live action? As Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Anomalisa begins, there’s no obvious answer to that question. A man flies into Ohio to present a speech to a customer service conference. He checks into his room at the Hotel Fregoli and thinks of an old girlfriend who lives in the area. These are completely ordinary events and people. Kaufman and Johnson could have been filmed them with human actors at much less expense and difficulty. Quickly, though, idiosyncracies begin to appear in the film’s depiction of reality — anomalies, you might call them — and it becomes clear that the stop motion is an essential element of both Anomalisa’s concept and execution, which are both about as perfect as any movie made anywhere on the planet this year.

The characters in Freeheld repeatedly tell one another that “life isn’t fair” — and with good reason. The film is about a decorated police officer who spent most of her life hiding her homosexuality to avoid discrimination and bigotry. After years in the closet, she finally falls in love and enters into a domestic partnership, only to be stricken with terminal cancer. All she wants to do is award her pension to her partner so that she can afford to keep their house, but the local government denies her request simply because her partner happens to be a woman. Every single aspect of this scenario is unfair.

When Vice President Joe Biden appeared on The Late Show last week, Stephen Colbert’s first question was about authenticity. “You’re not a politician who’s created some sort of facade to get something out of us,” Colbert said. “We see the real you. How did you maintain your soul in a city that is so filled with people who are trying to lie to us?”

The Martian is probably the most fun you will ever have watching a bunch of nerds solve math problems.

Naomi Watts’ is the second-billed star in Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition. On the film’s official Fox Searchlight website, her name appears above the title next to Jake Gyllenhaal’s. But she barely appears in the film’s trailer. She’s onscreen for less than one second. She says just three words. (“You miss her?”) It’s almost like the trailer is trying to hide her.

In 1962, Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut spent a week in a room at Universal Studios talking about movies. That interview became the book Hitchcock/Truffaut, which proceeds systematically as the two explore Hitchcock’s career, analyzing each of his films one by one. The discussion wasn’t filmed, but the audio was recorded, and now that audio forms the spine of Kent Jones’ Hitchcock/Truffaut documentary, which doesn’t so much adapt the book as it does bring it to life onscreen. Hearing Hitchcock and Truffaut makes clear something that’s easy to forget reading words on a page: That this conversation — maybe the greatest ever on the subject of films and filmmaking — was conducted through a translator. Hitchcock didn’t know French; Truffaut couldn’t understand English. But both spoke the language of cinema, which transcends communicative limitations.