The Hollywood strikes might have brought a new look to this year’s fall festival season, with stars and red carpets at a minimum, but the lineups are as stacked as ever, and, one might argue, suggest less focus on circus and more on cinema.

Venice gave us Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, David Fincher’s The Killer and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. Telluride gave us Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers and Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. And now the biggest of them all, at least when it comes to audience size, Toronto, lands this week with a long list of question marks. Here are the films worth keeping an eye on:

Wicked Little Letters

In a relatively short time, Olivia Colman has amassed the awards, respect and clout that most of her more established peers still hunger for, her name attached to a project an instant cause for intrigue. While most were unfair over her wrenching performance in Sam Mendes’ delicate two-hander Empire of Light (although she still nabbed a Golden Globe nomination), she remains a hot ticket, especially during Oscar season, and so all eyes are on the big Saturday night premiere of the fact-based mystery Wicked Little Letters, a film reuniting her with fellow Lost Daughter nominee Jessie Buckley. The pair play 1920s neighbours trying to find out who is behind a string of obscene letters.

Lee

After her Bafta-winning performance in the gruelling one-off drama I Am Ruth and her even more gruelling time holding her breath for James Cameron in Avatar 2, Kate Winslet is sticking to challenging territory with Lee, a long-gestating biopic of Lee Miller, a model turned war photographer. Oscar-winner Winslet has been attached to the project for eight years and has assembled a fine supporting cast including Marion Cotillard, Alexander Skarsgård, Josh O’Connor, Noémie Merlant and the recent best actress nominee Andrea Riseborough.

Dream Scenario

Films starring Nicolas Cage at Toronto aren’t always the safest bets (in previous years he’s yelled his way through the silly parenting horror Mom and Dad, the rickety Lovecraft adaptation Colour Out of Space, and the still unreleased western Butcher’s Crossing) but in line with some of his more recent leftfield picks such as Pig and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, this year’s Cage premiere offers up something a little more interesting. In the Ari Aster-produced Dream Scenario, which sees Cage graduating from Midnight Madness to Platform, he plays an academic who becomes an unlikely celebrity after appearing in people’s dreams, billed as a comedic spin on A Nightmare on Elm Street.

North Star

This year’s festival sees a host of actors step behind the camera, something that festival chief Cameron Bailey calls less the result of the actors’ strike, which would technically allow them to promote in person, and more the result of Covid, with increased time on hands. Chris Pine, Anna Kendrick, Patricia Arquette and Michael Keaton are among them, but the most interesting of the bunch might well be Kristin Scott Thomas. Her film North Star is a comedy drama where she stars as a woman getting married for the third time, causing her three daughters, played by Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller and Emily Beecham, to reckon with their own love lives. The script, which Scott Thomas co-wrote with the Bloomberg journalist John Micklethwait, is inspired by elements of her own family history.

Pain Hustlers

One of the biggest stars set not to attend this year’s festival is Emily Blunt, whose fact-based caper Pain Hustlers comes from big, bad Netflix, a streamer with a number of titles exempt from any potential waivers that would allow for promotion. After premiering the auteur-led titles Maestro and El Conde at Venice and acting contenders Nyad and Rustin at Telluride, this looks set to be the company’s most commercial, crowd-pleasing title of the awards season, riffing on films such as The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short in a tale of big pharma and the sales reps who helped kickstart the opioid epidemic. Chris Evans and Andy Garcia also star.

The End We Start From

After deservingly winning every award available for her show-stopping turn on stage in Prima Facie, playing a lawyer wrestling with the fallout from a sexual assault, Jodie Comer is set for a busy season on screen. She’s already received raves for her part in the male-dominated ensemble of Jeff Nichols’s 60s-set drama The Bikeriders, which premiered at this year’s Telluride festival, and is now tackling her first ever movie lead in The End We Start From. It might sound like a Colleen Hoover adaptation but is in fact a gritty survival thriller about an ecological crisis that leads to mass flooding in London. Comer plays a mother trying to protect her baby with strong support from Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong and Katherine Waterston.

Next Goal Wins

Taika Waititi scored a major hit at 2019’s festival with Jojo Rabbit, winning the coveted audience award, and months later picking up the best adapted screenplay Oscar. His latest, long-delayed comedy Next Goal Wins, will be hoping for a similar route (it’s even premiering on the same night of the festival as his last), telling the rags-to-riches story of the American Samoa football team and the unlikely coach, played by Michael Fassbender, who must lead them to glory. It marks the actor’s second film of the fall festival season, after The Killer premiered at Venice, and his biggest comedic role to date starring alongside another actor not exactly known for their lighter side: Elisabeth Moss.

Dumb Money

A movie based on the GameStop scandal of 2021 was inevitable, especially in a climate obsessed with trying to Social Network every viral tech tale out there, but it was less of a given that it would happen quite so quickly. Dumb Money is a film based on author Ben Mezrich’s almost instantaneous telling of what happened when Redditors took on Wall Street. Directed by Craig Gillespie, no stranger to pop biopics having directed I, Tonya, Mike and Pam & Tommy, it stars Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Shailene Woodley and, fresh from her Barbie bump, America Ferrera.

One Life

Acclaimed TV director James Hawes, whose credits include Doctor Who, Black Mirror and Slow Horses, makes his feature debut, recruiting his 2010 Enid lead Helena Bonham Carter alongside the two-time Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins. It’s the story of Nicholas Winton, a stockbroker who aided with the rescue of Jewish children in Czechoslovakia before the second world war began. His younger self will be played by Johnny Flynn, best known for playing David Bowie in 2020’s Stardust. With Hopkins experiencing a career resurgence after his career-best work in The Father, this has the makings of another big awards player.

The Critic

There’s a potentially fascinating relationship at the centre of 30s-set thriller The Critic, where Ian McKellen’s gay theatre critic is forced into an uneasy alliance with Gemma Arterton’s stage actor, someone he has regularly ripped to shreds in his reviews. Based on Anthony Quinn’s novel Curtain Call, it promises to be a tale of ruthless ambition and intrigue, bringing in the period’s rampant, state-supported homophobia to ground a wicked tale of backstabbing and blackmail. It also stars Mark Strong and Lesley Manville and most excitingly, marks Patrick Marber’s return to screenwriting, having shown us his knack for nastiness with Closer and Notes on a Scandal.

• This article was amended on 7 September 2023. An earlier version said that Kate Winslet had won two Oscars; she has won one.