The 2016 edition of the Toronto Film Festival started today, September 8, with a gala presentation of Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven, starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke. The night before the official launch, Michael Fassbender was the special guest of another gala, which included a q & a with the actor, musical numbers and a “talk show” hosted by “Jimmy Glick”, aka Martin Short.

It’s a fitting opening for this massive and eclectic event that, every year, picks up the energy stirred in Venice and gives it a more user-friendly tone, boosting Fall releases, polishing prospective awards strategic and enabling, through distribution and co-production deals, new and interesting projects. Case in point: Toronto 2016 wasn’t even 24 hours old and Focus Features had already announced a major coup, picking up the $35 million financing of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s next project, a still-untitled drama that will reunite him with his There Will Be Blood star, Daniel Day Lewis.

Like so many other distributors big and small, Focus comes to Toronto with the jewels in its Fall crown, all hoping to attract attention and traction: Tom Ford’s psycho-thriller Nocturnal Animals, fresh from Venice; the Civil Rights drama Loving, a Sundance hit that may or may not benefit from the controversy surrounding The Birth of a Nation’s director Nate Parker; and the fantasy A Monster Calls.

Growing more eclectic and comprehensive by the year – especially since moving from its artsy digs of Yorkville to the more corporate Bell Lightbox, to the chagrin of many faithful festival goers- Toronto is presenting 296 feature films, including 138 world premieres and 52 documentaries. The selection includes many titles seen in previous fests: Toni Erdmann, Manchester by the Sea, Arrival, American Honey, Elle, The Salesman, Voyage of Time, Neruda, Personal Shopper, The Handmaiden Planetarium, Paterson, Safari, The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez, Christine, in addition to the ones mentioned above.

World premieres include American Pastoral, an adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel starring and directed by Ewan McGregor; Oliver Stone’s biopic Snowden, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Shailene Woodley; Marc Foster’s All I See is You, starring Blake Lively and Jason Clarke, Peter Berg’s environmental disaster movie Deepwater Horizon, starring Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell; Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe, starring Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo; and the very talked-about first picture, Adam Smith’s crime drama Trespass Against Us, starring Michael Fassbender and Brendan Gleeson as a father-and-son criminal duo.

As usual, parties and special events will round up this already massive slate – including, on September 10, the Hollywood Foreign Press’s own reception honoring Toronto talent and filmmakers.