Two of the 50th Toronto International Film Festival’s highest-profile world premieres, Roofman and Rental Family, were held in back-to-back timeslots on Saturday evening. They’re very different films, but both happen to center on well-meaning professional liars played by actors with high Q scores, and are crowd pleasers to the extent that they will be strong candidates for the fest’s coveted audience award, which often presages Oscar success.

Roofman, which premiered at Roy Thomson Hall, was directed by Derek Cianfrance from a script that he wrote with Kirt Gunn, and is based on a true story. It stars Channing Tatum as Jeffrey Manchester, a divorced father who turns to crime to try to better provide for his ex-wife and three young kids — namely, he robs dozens of McDonald’s stores, as courteously as possible — but ultimately gets busted and incarcerated. Eventually, he manages to escape from prison, but life as a fugitive takes him to unexpected places: he begins living in a wall at a Toys ‘R’ Us store, falls in love with one of its employees (Kirsten Dunst) and tries to reinvent himself as a better man.

Cianfrance has previously made first-rate films about love and/or crime, 2010’s Blue Valentine and 2012’s The Place Beyond the Pines, but he has never ventured as far into comedic territory as he does with this film. He largely pulls it off, thanks in no small part to a career-best turn from Tatum, who hasn’t had a showcase of this quality since 2014’s Foxcatcher, and who makes a strong case for a best actor Oscar nomination, which would be his first-ever recognition from the Academy. Dunst, too, is worthy of a serious look in the best supporting actress Oscar contest, in which she was previously nominated for 2021’s The Power of the Dog.

Roofman, which will receive a wide release in theaters on Oct. 10, is Paramount’s primary priority this awards season.

Later on Saturday, over at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Rental Family — the sophomore feature from the Japanese director Hikari (37 Seconds), who also helmed three episodes of Netflix’s Emmy-winning 2023 limited series Beef — unspooled for its first paying audience. (Click here to read THR’s review.) The film, which Hikari co-wrote with Stephen Blahut, dramatizes something that may sound unusual to Americans, but apparently is increasingly popular in Japan: a service that allows people to rent strangers to fill roles in their lives or the lives of others.

Oscar winner Brendan Fraser plays a lonely, out-of-work American actor living in Japan who stumbles into a gig with one such rental service run by an entrepreneurial hardass (Shōgun Emmy nominee Takehiro Hira). He turns out to be good at the job, but begins to get a little too invested in the lives of some of his unwitting clients, including an elderly acting legend (Akira Emoto, who really is one) with a failing memory and a fatherless young girl (Shannon Gorman, in her acting debut) whose mother needs help getting her into a top school.

I’ve been told reliably that Rental Family is one of the best-testing movies in recent years, and I can see why. It’s funny, it’s moving and Fraser, with his vulnerable eyes and unmistakable decency, is impossible not to adore in a part that Jimmy Stewart would have been cast in a few decades ago. (I suppose one might describe Rental Family as Harvey meets Lost in Translation meets Her meets Parasite.) Searchlight will release the film on Nov. 21, and Fraser could well be nominated for the best actor Oscar just two years after his sole prior nom, for The Whale, which ultimately brought him a statuette.