"Green Book" was awarded the Grolsch People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, cementing it as one to watch during the upcoming awards season.

Peter Farrelly's Deep South road trip movie starring Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali, which was recently acquired by Universal, beat out first runner-up "If Beale Street Could Talk," Barry Jenkins' James Baldwin adaptation, which Annapurna will release in November, and second runner-up Alfonso Cuarón's neo-realistic drama "Roma," which Netflix will open in December.

The People's Choice Midnight Madness Award went to Vasan Bala's "The Man Who Feels No Pain." David Gordon Green's "Halloween" was the first runner-up and Sam Levinson's "Assassination Nation" was the second runner-up.

The Telluride, Toronto and Venice film festivals have ended, meaning that most of the movies vying for attention this awards season have been seen and sussed. Times critics Justin Chang and Glenn Whipp, who were both in Toronto, discuss the films they saw and which movies they think we’ll be dissecting and debating for the next six months.

GLENN WHIPP: On our first full day here, I was seated in a theater, about to watch Lee Chang-dong’s provocative mystery “Burning” (which should definitely, finally, earn South Korea its first foreign-language feature nomination), when the Motion Picture Academy sent out an email blast announcing it had shelved the unpopular popular-film Oscar for this year and, hopefully, forever.

And while we didn’t need any more evidence to know that this proposed Oscar category would have created a pointless division between “popular” filmmaking and artistic achievement, many of the movies that played at Toronto and the other fall festivals offered plenty of additional proof.

For the movie “Her Smell,” which had its world premiere as part of the Toronto International Film Festival, writer-director Alex Ross Perry and actress Elisabeth Moss pushed their ongoing collaboration to new places.

Having previously worked together on “Listen Up Philip” and “Queen of Earth” the pair created something unique with the character or Becky Something, a ’90s rock star at the dizzying height of her wild behavior, notoriety and addictions, and then later in the calm of her sobriety and new-found self-awareness.

The movie has an unusual structure consisting of five extended sequences that capture Becky at pivotal moments. With long-take scenes of fast-paced dialogue, many characters coming in and out and an agitated style, making the movie proved to be a welcome challenge for both of them.

What are two words that strike fear into the hearts of those who work in Hollywood? “Film critics.”

So when a friendly game of word association went down at the Los Angeles Times’ photo and video studio at the 2018 Toronto International Film Studio, we had to get actors and filmmakers’ honest (and instant!) reactions on the topic.

Watch the full video to see what Natalie Portman, Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Barry Jenkins, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell, Olivia Wilde, Brian Tyree Henry, Claire Foy, Regina Hall, Geena Davis, Amandla Sternberg and many more had to say about critics, the Oscars and more. 

Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem have acted in four films together since they became a couple roughly a decade ago. But any more than that might have caused trouble in their relationship, the actress said.

“We’re not planning to do this every year -- it would be risky,” said Cruz, who was at the Toronto International Film Festival to promote “Everybody Knows,” her latest film with her husband. “I think it would be risky for any couple to make a movie every year. It wouldn’t make sense. But I think it also wouldn’t make sense to force it in the opposite direction and say no to something like this.”

This was the opportunity to work with Oscar-winning Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, who learned Spanish just so he could memorize all the lines of dialogue in the kidnapping drama, which premiered earlier this year at the Cannes film festival.

You could feel the excitement in the air before the packed Toronto premiere of “Roma,” the much-anticipated new movie directed by Alfonso Cuarón. A beautifully composed memory piece that conjures the faded Mexico City of the director’s 1970s childhood, the film was easily one of this 10-day event’s most breathlessly anticipated attractions. “Roma” arrived having already earned rapturous reviews at festivals in Telluride, Colo., and Venice, where, mere days earlier, it had won the Golden Lion, the top prize.

The bestower of that prize was the director Guillermo del Toro, Cuarón’s pal and countryman, who served as the president of the Venice competition jury. (Del Toro promised beforehand not to do any friendly favors for Cuarón’s film, and “Roma’s” unanimously glowing reception certainly made the choice beyond reproach.) Notably, Del Toro himself had won the Golden Lion just a year earlier for his period fantasy “The Shape of Water,” the first piece of hardware he collected en route to winning the Academy Award for best picture.

None of this necessarily means that the Golden Lion has suddenly become some hot new harbinger of awards-season glory; this is a prize, after all, that has in the past gone to more recondite pictures such as Alexander Sokurov’s “Faust,” Gianfranco Rosi’s “Sacro GRA” and Lav Diaz’s “The Woman Who Left,” none of which were made with dreams of Oscar in mind.

With a lineup boasting everything from Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-tipped “Roma” (ro-ma-ma) to the sheer star power of Lady Gaga (ooh-la-la), the 2018 Toronto International Film Fest was a starry-eyed cinephile’s dream. 

The annual Toronto fest played host to high-profile launches of Oscar hopefuls from Gaga’s musical vehicle “A Star Is Born” to the Viola Davis-starring "Widows" to Barry Jenkins’ Harlem-set follow up to “Moonlight,” “If Beale Street Could Talk.” 

In between all the prestige fare eyeing awards season runs there was much more to behold, absorb, digest and discuss, including a near-unrecognizable Nicole Kidman in Karyn Kusama’s L.A. noir “Destroyer,” the return of Michael Myers (and Jamie Lee Curtis) in a new “Halloween,” and the space hijinx of Claire Denis’ “High Life.” 

From the Los Angeles Times studio at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, Times writers Justin Chang and Jen Yamato discuss the standout films of the fest.

In 2006, after Oprah Winfrey selected his book as one of her book club picks, James Frey acknowledged on the talk show host’s program that he had fabricated much of his so-called memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.”

The book delved into Frey’s alcohol and drug addictions, which he said caused him legal trouble and eventually sent him to rehab. It was eventually shopped as a novel before being purchased by Random House.

Despite the controversy, however, director Sam Taylor-Johnson and her husband, actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, decided the story depicted in the book was still worthy of a film. 

“Burning,” the first new film from South Korean writer-director Lee Chang-dong since his acclaimed 2010 film “Poetry,” has arrived on a wave of high expectations. When “Burning” premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang called it “a quietly riveting stunner.”

The movie was also recently chosen to represent South Korea for this year’s foreign-language Academy Award, a prize for which the country had not even been nominated before.

Adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami, “Burning” is about a young man named Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in) who reunites with a woman he grew up with, Haemi (Jun Jong-seo). Just as the two seem to be becoming more than just friends, she leaves for a trip to Africa. When she returns, she is with Ben (Steven Yeun), a mysterious and mysteriously rich young man. Jongsu is consumed by feelings of jealousy and suspicion, and the story shifts into the mode of a thriller.

James Baldwin means different things to different people.

To some, Baldwin is the prototype of the artist as activist, his writing an example of how to battle injustice and prejudice against black people in America. To others, he’s one of the foremost purveyors of the black experience, his mastery of language precisely capturing what life was, and is, like for African Americans in an oppressive society.

Those two aspects are forcefully represented in Baldwin's 1974 novel “If Beale Street Could Talk,” noted Barry Jenkins, the Oscar-winning filmmaker of “Moonlight,” and a reason why he wanted to adapt the book for the screen.