{"id":48770,"date":"2025-09-07T07:47:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T07:47:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/48770\/"},"modified":"2025-09-07T07:47:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T07:47:07","slug":"channing-tatum-brendan-fraser-join-crowded-best-actor-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/48770\/","title":{"rendered":"Channing Tatum, Brendan Fraser Join Crowded Best Actor Field"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tTwo of the 50th Toronto International Film Festival\u2019s highest-profile world premieres, Roofman<\/a> and Rental Family<\/a>, were held in back-to-back timeslots on Saturday evening. They\u2019re very different films, but both happen to center on well-meaning professional liars played by actors with high Q scores, and are crowd pleasers to the extent that they will be strong candidates for the fest\u2019s coveted audience award, which often presages Oscar success.<\/p>\n

\n\tRoofman, which premiered at Roy Thomson Hall, was directed by Derek Cianfrance<\/strong> from a script that he wrote with Kirt Gunn<\/strong>, and is based on a true story. It stars Channing Tatum<\/a><\/strong> as Jeffrey Manchester<\/strong>, a divorced father who turns to crime to try to better provide for his ex-wife and three young kids \u2014 namely, he robs dozens of McDonald\u2019s stores, as courteously as possible\u00a0\u2014 but ultimately gets busted and incarcerated. Eventually, he manages to escape from prison, but life as a fugitive takes him to unexpected places: he begins living in a wall at a Toys \u2018R\u2019 Us store, falls in love with one of its employees (Kirsten Dunst<\/strong>) and tries to reinvent himself as a better man.<\/p>\n

\n\tCianfrance has previously made first-rate films about love and\/or crime, 2010\u2019s Blue Valentine and 2012\u2019s The Place Beyond the Pines,\u00a0but he has never ventured as far into comedic territory as he does with this film. He largely pulls it off, thanks in no small part to a career-best turn from Tatum, who hasn\u2019t had a showcase of this quality since 2014\u2019s Foxcatcher, and who makes a strong case for a best actor Oscar nomination, which would be his first-ever recognition from the Academy. Dunst, too, is worthy of a serious look in the best supporting actress Oscar contest, in which she was previously nominated for 2021\u2019s The Power of the Dog.<\/p>\n

\n\tRoofman, which will receive a wide release in theaters on Oct. 10, is Paramount\u2019s primary priority this awards season.<\/p>\n

\n\tLater on Saturday, over at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Rental Family \u2014\u00a0the sophomore feature from the Japanese director Hikari<\/strong> (37 Seconds), who also helmed three episodes of Netflix\u2019s Emmy-winning 2023 limited series Beef \u2014 unspooled for its first paying audience. (Click here to read THR\u2019s review<\/a>.) The film, which Hikari co-wrote with Stephen Blahut<\/strong>, dramatizes something that may sound unusual to Americans, but apparently is increasingly popular in Japan: a service that allows people to rent strangers to fill roles in their lives or the lives of others.<\/p>\n

\n\tOscar winner Brendan Fraser<\/a><\/strong> plays a lonely, out-of-work American actor living in Japan who stumbles into a gig with one such rental service run by an entrepreneurial hardass (Sh\u014dgun Emmy nominee Takehiro Hira<\/strong>). He turns out to be good at the job, but begins to get a little too invested in the lives of some of his unwitting clients, including an elderly acting legend (Akira Emoto<\/strong>, who really is one) with a failing memory and a fatherless young girl (Shannon Gorman<\/strong>, in her acting debut) whose mother needs help getting her into a top school.<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019ve been told reliably that Rental Family is one of the best-testing movies in recent years, and I can see why. It\u2019s funny, it\u2019s moving and Fraser, with his vulnerable eyes and unmistakable decency, is impossible not to adore in a part that Jimmy Stewart<\/strong> would have been cast in a few decades ago. (I suppose one might describe Rental Family as Harvey meets Lost in Translation meets Her meets Parasite.) Searchlight will release the film on Nov. 21, and Fraser could well be nominated for the best actor Oscar just two years after his sole prior nom, for The Whale, which ultimately brought him a statuette.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two of the 50th Toronto International Film Festival\u2019s highest-profile world premieres, Roofman and Rental Family, were held in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48771,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[268],"tags":[35968,434,30169,18,117,19,17,35970,35877,22536],"class_list":{"0":"post-48770","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-brendan-fraser","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-channing-tatum","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-rental-family","16":"tag-roofman","17":"tag-toronto-2025"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}