The hit Elizabeth Holmes documentary led to increased interest in the award-winning narrative series on Hulu as well as Bad Blood, a 2018 book on the scandal

• ‘Stranger than stranger-than-fiction’: how Lance Oppenheim made the year’s two buzziest films

• ‘You can’t make this stuff up’: why we remain fascinated by Elizabeth Holmes

Interest in Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos fraud scandal has surged amid buzz for You Can See Everything, the record-breaking documentary on the disgraced former CEO.

Viewership for The Dropout, the 2022 Hulu series starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, surged by 186% in September compared with the month prior, according to Variety, after the announcement on 6 September of the previously secret film’s first teaser.

This year’s festival offers an unusual Patricia Highsmith thriller, an adaptation of a hit stage show, a harrowing prison drama and a new way into the Rocky franchise

Defining Toronto’s place within the fall festival season has become a little harder in recent years. As fewer studios and film-makers want to brave the risks that come attached to premiering on such a stage (last year’s best picture winner One Battle After Another skipped festivals entirely and went straight to cinema), those that do tend to prefer Venice, Telluride and, especially this year, New York.

Last year’s biggest Toronto breakout was Obsession, a micro-budget, up-for-sale horror that played as part of the midnight madness strand, and while that film is now being pushed as an awards contender, it’s not what crowds and pundits typically expect from the starry, prestige-first festival. Is it best viewed now as a rough-and-ready genre hub or maybe a sales market, where perhaps we can still expect some Oscar contenders to be unveiled. It can make figuring out what to see and what to avoid a little harder – but here are some films to keep an eye on over the next week or so.

The 51st edition of the Canadian festival will also feature world premieres starring Taron Egerton, Amanda Seyfried and Chase Infiniti

World premieres of films led by Helen Mirren, Seth Rogen and Chris Rock lead the lineup for this year’s Toronto film festival.

The September festival, taking place after the Venice film festival, has previously seen the premieres of Oscar-winning movies such as Green Book, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Still Alice, Dallas Buyers Club and Silver Linings Playbook.

Event chairs Nicole Kidman, Beyoncé, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour have guests dress to the theme ‘Fashion is art’ at the event controversially funded by new honorary chairs Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos

Spurred on by a vision of the Shakers’ founding leader, Celia Rowlson-Hall masterminded the whirl of movement in Mona Fastvold’s feverish film

‘I’ll tell you something I’ve not told anyone,” says Celia Rowlson-Hall. “This might make me sound a little wild, but I don’t care.” The choreographer is recounting her experience on The Testament of Ann Lee, a fever dream of a film starring Amanda Seyfried as the leader of 18th-century Christian sect the Shakers, whose ecstatic prayer rituals could involve dancing for days. “The night before we started filming, I was sleeping and, literally, the ghost of Ann Lee was over my bed with angels around and she said: ‘Go forth!’” Rowlson-Hall laughs at herself for revealing this. “Was that my imagination allowing myself to go forth? Maybe, probably,” she smiles. “It was so intense that I will never forget it.”

In Mona Fastvold’s film, we see Lee, a blacksmith’s daughter from Manchester, having vivid religious visions that trigger her evangelism. Much like creative visions, I say. Maybe in a different time Lee would have been an artist? “She was an artist, without a doubt,” says Rowlson-Hall. To be an artist, she continues, “you have to believe in more than just what you see in front of you. It’s a concoction of faith and drive, a little delusion and a lot of energy. Like gunpowder.” Lee definitely had those qualities, leading the Shakers to the US, preaching piety, pacifism, celibacy and the confession of sins, and inspiring devotion as well as ire.

The Oscar-winning actor will star in the Cameron Crowe-directed feature about the singer-songwriter’s life

Meryl Streep is to play Joni Mitchell in a forthcoming biopic of the singer-songwriter directed by Cameron Crowe, according to record executive Clive Davis.

Davis confirmed the rumours surrounding the casting at his pre-Grammys party on Saturday, reports Rolling Stone. Last year, Anya Taylor-Joy was linked to the project in the role of the younger Mitchell, as was Streep’s Mamma Mia! co-star Amanda Seyfried.

The Testament of Ann Lee is a bonkers musical fantasia about an obscure religious sect. Its star and writer-director Mona Fastvold talk fear, bonding – and not needing an Oscar

Not many actors take an interest in the audience’s aftercare. When it comes to The Testament of Ann Lee, however, Amanda Seyfried is hands-on. “Did you watch it with someone you could talk to?” she asks, tilting her head sympathetically, then dipping her full-beam headlight eyes and giving a worried look when I admit that I saw it alone. “It’s nice to process it with somebody else.”

Her concern is understandable. Whatever feelings the film provokes, indifference will not be among them. Heady and rapturous, this is an all-round odd duck of a movie, the sort of go-for-broke phantasmagoria – an 18th-century musical biopic complete with feverish visions and levitating – that was once typical of Lars von Trier or Bruno Dumont. I confess I didn’t know exactly what to make of it, but I knew I had been through a singular experience. Its director, Mona Fastvold, seated beside Seyfried on a sofa in a London hotel room, looks delighted. “That’s my favourite sort of feeling,” she says.

Jessie Buckley and Timothée Chalamet might be winning all of the awards but as Oscar voting begins, these actors also deserve inclusion

Every January, if not earlier, awards narratives leading up to the Oscars take shape. While the specifics of the Academy Award nominations are never known in advance, and can always be counted on for some surprises when they’re actually unveiled, critics and pundits and fans all enter into that final stretch with a pretty good idea of who won’t be nominated.

Some of this is because of the endless spitballing. But the “won’t” list is also easy to compile because it ultimately houses almost everyone who acted in a movie over the past year. Twenty performances are selected for the Oscars annually, and given the other high-profile awards bodies with additional preferences, category numbers and a never-complete overlap with the Academy, let’s say about 40 are in the broader competition of real possibilities. But there are so many more great performances every year than that, across all sizes, scopes and genres.

Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar co-star as Sweeney’s secretive bosses in an upstate New York mansion, and director Paul Feig ramps up the sexual tension with evident gusto

Director Paul Feig is known for broad comedy; now he cranks up the schlock-serious dial for an outrageously enjoyable – or at any rate enjoyably outrageous – psycho-suspense thriller in the spirit of 90s erotic noir, adapted by screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine from the 2022 bestseller by Freida McFadden. We are back in the sleazy, glossy world of Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or Joe Eszterhas’s Basic Instinct, but skating quite close, though not too close, to satire.

The scene is a bizarrely opulent mansion somewhere in upstate New York, splendidly isolated among a sea of bland suburban housing; it is approached by a drive, once you have got past the electronic gates. And it is down this avenue that Millie (Sydney Sweeney) nervously drives, wearing fake glasses to make herself look more mature, to apply for the job of live-in housemaid to the wealthy couple that lives there; she is hoping her prospective employers will not notice the worrying inconsistencies in her CV. She is greeted with smiley, Stepford-blond blandness by Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried), who appears to adore Millie, and explains that the job entails cooking, cleaning and looking after her young daughter, Cece (Indiana Elle).