2016 Toronto International Film Festival

Here’s the pitch: two women with grudges from their past reunite at a party years later. Fueled by alcohol and gallons of rage, they start beating the living crap out of each other. I’m not talking about some light hair-pulling or petty slapping; I’m talking full-on rampant violence that would make Quentin Tarantino wince. That’s Onur Tukel’s ‘Catfight,’ a pitch-black comedy and political satire about two women with an insatiable hunger for revenge, where head-butts and punches are their only form of therapy.

It doesn’t hurt that Natalie Portman looks a lot like Jackie Kennedy. Dressed in pearls and a classic 1960s suit with a perfect bouffant hairstyle, she’s the splitting image of the former First Lady. But in Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s ‘Jackie,’ Portman’s performance goes beyond looks. As the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Portman flourishes in one of the best and most deeply human roles of her career.

The 50th anniversary of Star Trek this week really put in perspective just how long we’ve been living with the concept of extraterrestrial. In 2016, there’s something downright familiar about aliens, maybe because in most situations our conception of them remains rooted in our conception of ourselves: They look like us with pointy ears or a ribbed nose, or they don’t look like us, but they behave like us, with motivations and actions that are easily recognizable and understandable. One of Arrival’s greatest achievements is the way it makes alien seem alien again: Strange and inhuman and beyond the limits of our comprehension. It readjusts our thinking about what life on other worlds might be like. And in doing so, it also readjusts our thinking about what life on our world can be like.

Richard and Mildred Loving couldn’t have had a more perfect last name. The real-life interracial couple, whose 1958 marriage violated Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws and led to a landmark laws civil rights case, weren’t just incredible for how much they changed history, but for how deeply they loved one another despite all opposite. In the aptly titled historical drama ‘Loving,’ Jeff Nichols makes the couple’s warm devotion to one another the focal point of his quiet, intimate film.

A raw, exquisite portrait of young black masculinity, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight follows one life through three stages to tell a story of repressed desires and internalized suffering. Across three chapters we watch Chiron, a young South Florida boy, grow into a teen and later into a nearly unrecognizable man, as he seeks to understand the various shades of his identity.

Peter Sarsgaard often plays guys you can’t help but hate. From his ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ character to his ‘An Education’ con man to his Chuck Traynor in ‘Lovelace,’ Sarsagaard has mastered playing seedy jerks who pray on the weaknesses of others. In Antoine Fuqua’s ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ Sarsgaard takes on the role of the bad guy once more.

ScreenCrush’s Matt Singer and Erin Whitney are back from the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. You can read all of their coverage so far here, but if you want the digest version, they compiled this list of some of the fest’s highlights: the best performances, the biggest surprises, and the worst disappointments. What are the movies people are going to be talking about this fall? These. (Except the ones they didn’t like, of course.)

It would be inaccurate to say there’s never been a film like La La Land — there have been movies like it many times before — but it’s been a while. Movie musicals these days are mostly lifeless exercises in prestige and Broadway adaptation, The original movie musical — with songs writing explicitly for the screen — is about as rare a species as the South China tiger.

Let’s give the Blair Witch some credit: She may be a vengeful demon from the 17th century who likes to torture documentary filmmakers and camping enthusiasts, but as monstrous hell-beasts go, she’s pretty tech-savvy. Back in the olden days of 1999 when the first Blair With Project came out, cell phones and GPS barely existed; tricking unsuspecting college kids into getting lost in the backwoods of Maryland was a relative snap. This new generation of victims come equipped with all kinds of gadgets: GoPros and cell phones and drones capable of surveilling dozens of miles of land — all of which might help these truth seekers make their way back to civilization. The witch disables them all; draining the batteries from their surveillance equipment, blocking the signals from their global positioning systems, and crashing their drone in a tree. Mercifully, she doesn’t deactivate any of the cameras they’re wearing, so we can see her incessant torture of these poor unfortunate souls.

Amma Asante’s ‘A United Kingdom’ is both a love story and a tale of how one small union can usher in a larger one.