The 9 best movies we saw at the Toronto International Film Festival

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Set us as preferred TORONTO — At this year’s TIFF, audiences rallied around underdog stories, many of them involving actors going the distance.(Cue the “Rocky” theme.) And while an Oscar front-runner or two may have been unofficially coronated, we found plenty else to like — particularly these nine movies we’ll be taking home and mulling over in the weeks ahead.

Not even making a comedy about the assassination of Kim Jong Un — or a cartoon secretly about Israeli-Palestinian tensions — caused as much of a viral commotion as Seth Rogen’s insistence that he’s happy to be childless.“Babies,” his wife Lauren Miller Rogen’s dramedy, explains why, with sparkle and charm.

Los Angeles couple Annie (Anna Kendrick) and Aaron (Rogen) adore their friends’ kids, even letting newly seperated Eliza (Kate Berlant) and her daughter Eve (Delaney Claire Evans) crash in their living room for months, forgoing their right to smoke weed on their own couch.Kendrick’s Annie keeps up a running monologue in her head listing the pros and cons of parenthood, spilling everything that’s hard to say aloud, including how her best friend and business partner Becky (Issa Rae) is so distracted by pregnancy that it’s hurting their attempt to open an art studio.

Light and likable, “Babies” is a strong step for Lauren Miller Rogen’s directing career and for a conversation that should be easier to have.— Amy Nicholson Entertainment & Arts Real-life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara appear on screen together for the first time in the latest film from ever-eccentric director Werner Herzog.

And it is more than anyone might have hoped for, as the Maras play sisters who dress alike and talk oddly in unison and live their lives completely together.(The story is based on a real-life pair.) It is a tandem performance genuinely unlike any you have seen before, utterly mesmerizing and charming.

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