Toronto Film Festival has started and today we are spotlighting Period Set Films that will premiere there, starting with WIDOW CLICQUOT which, set in France during the Napoleonic Wars, tells the true story of the “Grande Dame of Champagne,” also known as Madame Clicquot after marrying the scion of a winemaking family. Though their marriage was arranged, a timeless love blossomed between Barbe-Nicole (Haley Bennett) and her poetic, unconventional husband, François (Tom Sturridge). After becoming a widow at age 27, she is determined to protect her family’s legacy. Determined to advance her husband's theories about soil chemistry, the configuring of vines, and revolutionary techniques in bottling, Barbe-Nicole wagers on the next harvest and her own blend of sparkling wine. Ben Miles, Sam Riley and our dearest Leo Suter also star.

Gemma Arterton and Ian McKellen star as adversaries forced to take desperate measures to save their careers, in THE CRITIC set in 1936. As the new steward of London’s Chronicle, David Brooke (Mark Strong) seeks to revive the financially troubled daily as the country’s most-read family paper. In the firing line is long time theatre critic Jimmy Erksine (Ian McKellen), whose extravagant prose and personal “proclivities” are distasteful to David. Jimmy has a lot to lose as an elderly gay man in a culture and legal system deeply hostile to homosexuality. Yet he cannot resist writing the flamboyantly merciless critiques that are his trademark. Actor Nina Land (Arterton), for whom the married David secretly carries a torch, is a regular target for Jimmy’s most withering remarks. As pressure to appease his employer mounts, Jimmy concocts a plot to entrap both David and Nina, herself secretly in love with a married painter (Ben Barnes). But with the Blackshirts taking to the streets amid anti-queer police raids, Jimmy may be grossly overestimating his ability to emerge from his elaborate scheme unscathed.

Set in British Mandatory Palestine, this tense historical thriller from Michael Winterbottom traces the origins of one of the world’s most complex conflicts. The year is 1938, and tensions run high in Tel Aviv, wherethe British struggle to maintain order among a mixed Palestinian and Jewish population. Yet English police officer Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) has made his home here and is madly in love with Shoshana (Irina Starshenbaum), daughter of Zionist Labour movement co-founder Dov Ber Borochov. As the paramilitary organization Irgun, led by poet Avraham Stern (Aury Alby), undertakes a violent campaign to evict the British authorities, Thomas and his superior officer Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling) adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward the resistance, intensifying their tactics to include torture. Meanwhile, Shoshana receives death threats for daring to fraternize with a member of the occupying forces. She loves Thomas, but she also believes in the pursuit of her people’s independence. She will be forced to choose between the two.

Set in the 1860s, Viggo Mortensen directed western THE DEAD DON'T HURT follows French-Canadian flower seller Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps)

The movie premiered this week at TIFF

and Danish carpenter Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen) who meet in San Francisco. Vivienne is irreverent, fiercely independent, and refuses to wed, but agrees to travel with Holger to his home near the quiet town of Elk Flats, Nevada. There, they begin a life together, Vivienne grows roses and waits tables at a tavern and Holger builds barns, until the couple are separated by Holger’s decision to fight for the Union in the burgeoning Civil War. Left on her own, Vivienne must fend for herself in a place controlled by corrupt Mayor Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston) and his business partner, powerful rancher Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt). Alfred's violent, wayward son Weston (Solly McLeod) aggressively pursues Vivienne, who is determined to resist his unwanted advances.