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John Turturro was recently making a few final polishes on his "Fading Gigolo," the rare film to lure Woody Allen back into acting. In Turturro's comedy, which he wrote and directed, Allen plays pimp to Turturro's novice male escort. "He wanted it to be a smart film," says Turturro of Allen. "It's actually a delicate comedy. You can do a really broad comedy and sometimes they can sustain, but usually they run out of steam after 45 minutes." It's the fifth film directed by the versatile Turturro, but there will be several first-time filmmakers at Toronto: Jason Bateman will present his directorial debut "Bad Words" and Mike Myers will debut his documentary "Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gorden." Also among the notable films looking for distribution is the WWII POW tale "The Railway Man," with Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, and "Can a Song Save Your Life?" from "Once" director John Carney. Starring Mark Ruffalo and Keira Knightley, it's about a down-on-his-luck music producer and an aspiring singer in New York. Particularly current is Bill Condon's "The Fifth Estate," which premieres just weeks after the sentencing of one of WikiLeak's greatest sources, Chelsea Manning (the Army private formerly known as Bradley Manning), and on the heels of the asylum drama of Edward Snowden, the leaker of NSA documents. "Because these issues are so pressing and important, we all felt a responsibility to make sure that it was as complete a picture as possible," says Condon. "Watching the Snowden story unfold has been strange because so many of the events are near what happened with Assange."
Though Toronto is primarily a place where movies get their start, this year's festival is full of endings. Two films co-starring the late "Glee" actor Corey Monteith will premiere: "All the Wrong Reasons," in which he plays a department store manager, and "McCanick," where he plays a felon on the run. Closing the festival will be "Life of Crime," with Jennifer Aniston and John Hawkes, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's crime novel "The Switch." The author died in August. Ahead of its September release, the romantic comedy "Enough Said" will premiere from writer-director Nicole Holofcener, who unfortunately first came to TIFF with her "Lovely & Amazing" on Sept. 11, 2001. This year, she'll be debuting one of the final films from James Gandolfini. He and Julia Louis-Dreyfus play divorced parents who meet at a party. "It feels exciting and bittersweet, says Holofcener. "The whole release of the movie feels bittersweet to me because of Jim's death. If he was coming with us to promote the movie and to open it with Julia and myself, it would be an all-around happy experience."
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