By David Germain
A showcase for potential Academy Awards contenders and big fall
releases, September's Toronto International Film Festival will
feature titles starring Nicole Kidman, Ben Affleck, Robert De Niro,
Natalie Portman, Keanu Reeves, Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan.

The Toronto festival announced many of the titles Tuesday that
will be screened at the event Sept. 9-19.

Affleck directs and stars in the heist tale "The Town," playing
a thief who falls for a bank manager his crew takes hostage on
their last job.

Other actors-turned-directors premiering films at the festival
include Robert Redford with the Abraham Lincoln assassination tale
"The Conspirator," starring James McAvoy, Robin Wright Penn, Kevin
Kline and Evan Rachel Wood; David Schwimmer with "Trust," featuring
Clive Owen and Catherine Keener as parents of a teenage girl raped
by a pedophile she met online; and Emilio Estevez, who directs his
father, Martin Sheen, in "The Way," a drama about a father on a
pilgrimage after his son's death.

Knightley and Mulligan star with Andrew Garfield, recently cast
in the title role of the next "Spider-Man" movie, in director Mark
Romanek's "Never Let Me Go," a drama about boarding school friends
coming to grips with their sheltered past as adults in the real
world.

The festival also features Kidman and Aaron Eckhart as parents
grieving over the death of their son in John Cameron Mitchell's
"Rabbit Hole"; De Niro and Edward Norton in John Curran's "Stone,"
about a prison inmate plotting his release by manipulating a parole
officer; Reeves in Malcolm Venville's "Henry's Crime," about a man
wrongly convicted for bank robbery who decides to pull a heist for
real after he's released from prison; and Portman as a ballerina in
Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan," a psychological thriller set
behind the scenes at a dance company.

Also premiering will be "Miral," from director Julian Schnabel
("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"), with Freida Pinto in the
tale of a girl growing up in war-torn East Jerusalem.

Toronto festival director Piers Handling said the lineup
reflects the "abundance of exciting works from established and
emerging filmmakers in the world of cinema."
Among other Toronto premieres: George Hickenlooper's "Casino
Jack," starring Kevin Spacey as disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack
Abramoff; John Madden's "The Debt," with Helen Mirren and Sam
Worthington in a tale of Israeli agents tracking a Nazi war
criminal; Mike Mills' "Beginners," about a son (Ewan McGregor)
dealing with bombshell news after his 71-year-old father
(Christopher Plummer) announces he is gay; and Tony Goldwyn's
"Conviction," with Hilary Swank as a woman trying to clear her
brother (Sam Rockwell) of a murder rap.