Toronto film festival: the actor returns to the big screen for his first leading role since 2017 yet David Gordon Green’s charmless throwback comedy fails to justify why

The strange and spotty career of writer-director David Gordon Green – from rural indies such as George Washington and Undertow to stoner comedies such as Pineapple Express and Your Highness to star-led Oscarbait such as Our Brand is Crisis and Stronger to horror reboots such as the Halloween and Exorcist reworks – takes another new turn with this year’s Toronto film festival opener, the rather forced family comedy Nutcrackers. Green had said that the film is intended to evoke the sorts of universally appealing 80s comedies he grew up with, such as Overboard and Uncle Buck and after following the commercially lucrative low-budget model for horror, he was keen to see if it could work for another, less recently proven, genre.

Having also grown up with similar touchpoints while then also mourning the big screen comedy, it’s a plan I can get behind in theory but his charmless attempt, opening the festival with an embarrassing thud, does not deliver as promised. It doesn’t really deliver much of anything, another dead-ended left turn for a once-promising director and a waste of a star lured out of semi-retirement. Ben Stiller, who has been proving himself again behind the camera with Apple’s Severance, hasn’t taken on a lead role since 2017, a year where he was graced with scripts from Mike White and Noah Baumbach. His return here is rather baffling in comparison and a strange backwards step for an actor who had been focusing more on substance over slapstick.

Nutcrackers is screening at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution