For many of us, in and out of film festivals, there can be a desperate crave for the new, especially within the realm of the mainstream. The overwhelming glut of films that offer yet more of the same continue to dominate the marketplace and so when something provides a fresh concept, perspective or setting within a big studio framework, it can feel like a thrilling left turn on a road that too often feels boringly straightforward.
The slow crawl of diversity that’s allowed people other than the straight white male majority to lead and usher in big budget stories that have either never been told or have been told through the same standard lens has allowed us to revel in the newness it’s frequently provided. Recently, Dan Trachtenberg’s nifty Predator prequel Prey gave us an almost all-Indigenous American cast and an Indigenous female lead, the first for a franchise film of that scale and one of the many reasons it felt like such a triumph. And here at the Toronto film festival, on the same night that Billy Eichner premiered his gay romantic comedy Bros (the first time a studio has released a film with an all-queer cast), Viola Davis unleashes her “magnum opus”, period epic The Woman King, a rare $50m-budgeted action movie led by Black women.
