movies

The People’s Choice Award from the just-wrapped 2024 Toronto Film Festival has gone to The Life of Chuck, first runner-up is Emilia Pérez, and second runner-up is Anora. The Documentary Award goes to The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, and the Midnight Madness winner is The Substance.

Both runners-up Emilia Pérez and Anora were big winners at Cannes in May (the latter taking the Palme d’Or), but Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck was a TIFF world premiere and a surprise winner of this award.

Tom Hiddleston stars in the film based on King’s novella about three chapters in the life of an ordinary man named Charles Krantz. It is an unusual winner here for this award as it currently is looking for distribution and has no set release date, which means it could be the first People’s Choice winner in recent memory to not be currently considered a contender in the 2024 awards-season race. It has been called “an apocalyptic version of It’s a Wonderful Life,” and no doubt this award will speed up a distribution deal for the movie, which is atypical of King’s bread and butter but closer in spirit to the likes of movies like Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, which both went on to Oscar nominations for Best Picture.