New York City’s last pickpocket doesn’t need a smartphone

The Toronto International Film Festival opened with the familiar mix of mainstream contenders, indie discoveries and streamer-backed premieres, and this year’s slate continued that pattern. The reporter on the ground says streamers are again prominent, using TIFF to preview a range of series and films that will populate the coming months. Notable names on this year’s program include Takashi Miike, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Werner Herzog, plus a four-hour documentary about Elon Musk.

One of the standout early screenings was John Turturro’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, slated for an October 30 theatrical release. Turturro’s character, Harry, is an old-school petty thief who struggles with modern tech and clings to cash-based methods; the film turns that generational mismatch into the hinge of a tense thriller after Harry accidentally lifts a crypto device. The reviewer called the movie a love letter to New York and praised Turturro’s performance as both morally flawed and oddly endearing.

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, due in theaters November 25, was another early highlight. Split between France and Japan, the three-hour drama revolves around a late-night encounter between Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira), who runs a nursing home, and Mari (Tao Okamoto), a playwright facing terminal cancer. The critic described the film as conversational and humane, with themes about work, care and how people treat one another, and said its length never felt burdensome.

On the streaming front, Netflix’s Below — available on October 8 — was noted for its Newfoundland setting and slow-build creature-movie tension. The reporter watched the first two of six episodes and found the series effective at mood and suspense, anchored by Josh Hartnett as a father of three confronting strange occurrences in a struggling fishing village. Other festival offerings mentioned included Duncan Jones’s animated Rogue Trooper, which the critic found visually striking but narratively lacking, and How We Stand, a multi-generation drama about sisters relocated to Los Angeles after the Indian Relocation Act whose release date was not listed in the excerpt.