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At the outset of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, we put together a list of the most anticipated performances at the festival. For the most part, they did not disappoint. In particular, look for Eddie Redmayne (The Danish Girl), Brie Larson (Room), and Cate Blanchett (Truth) to show up throughout awards season, though Blanchett will have competition from herself in the wildly anticipated Carol. But there’s only so much you can glean from a film festival through anticipation alone. Discovery and surprise are the whole reason we go to these things, and the following performances were the ones that jumped out at me and demanded attention. And who am I not to give in to demands?

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Charlotte Rampling in 45 Years

It’s not like an actress as good as Charlotte Rampling can ever truly surprise you with a great performance. She’s reliably excellent in pretty much everything she does, and she and co-star Tom Courtenay had already won acting prizes for their work in the film at the Berlin Film Festival. But I still managed to be bowled over by Rampling’s performance. Director Andrew Haigh (Weekend) offers her what amounts to a showcase as Kate, one half of a longtime married couple approaching their 45th anniversary party. While she tries to put that together, she also must deal with a revelation from her husband that starts to call into question the entirety of their relationship. The shifting tectonic plates of their life together are played out quietly, sometimes entirely on Rampling’s stoic face. It’s fascinating and often heartbreaking to watch.

Anya Taylor-Joy in The Witch

I saw The Witch, which was already a sensation earlier this year at Sundance, on my last night in Toronto, and it was a hell of a note to go out on. “A New England Folk Tale,” as it’s subtitled, the story of a Puritan family in New England living on the edge of the woods where there are most DEFINITELY witches and they are most DEFINITELY looking to do them harm. Taylor-Joy plays the eldest daughter of the family, and it’s upon her that suspicion of witchcraft falls. She projects a great combination of teenage innocence and terror, with just enough willfullness to make you wonder.

Géza Rohrig in Son of Saul

Probably the best film I saw at the whole festival was this Hungarian film that played at Cannes earlier this year. It’s a Holocaust drama about the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners made to do hard labor, which in the camps mostly entailed disposing of the dead bodies. While whispers of an attempted uprising swirl around Rohrig’s Saul, he sets out to find a rabbi to bury a dead child he claims as his son. The film is as harrowing as that description makes it sound, and director Laszlo Nemes keeps his camera tightly focused on Rohrig at all times, making his performance a make-or-break proposition for the film. He doesn’t disappoint.

Julianne Moore in Maggie’s Plan

Writer/director Rebecca Miller (Personal Velocity; The Private Lives of Pippa Lee) came to TIFF with her most overtly comedic film yet, a tale of neurotic Brooklyn academics and all that that entails. Yes, it stars Greta Gerwig as a woman who can’t seem to figure out what she wants out of life. Yes, Ethan Hawke plays a selfish jerk of a writer. Yes, we wish we could have more of Maya Rudolph and Bill Hader as the sardonic best friends. But for all its tropes and trappings, the film is very funny and engaging, and it features a dynamite supporting performance by Julianne Moore, who gets to be terrifyingly funny as a kind of East-Coast intellectual take on Maude Lebowski. She plays Hawke’s Danish ex-wife, though her motivations and loyalties are never as simple as that description might suggest, and Moore gets to take the character down little back alleys and tangents, presenting her as silly but not unworthy of respect.

Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman in The Family Fang

Jason Bateman’s directorial effort was flying so low under the radar that I almost didn’t see it. If this few people were talking about a film with this much high-profile talent (in addition to Bateman and Kidman, Christopher Walken also co-stars), there had to be some kind of a cloud over it. But I ended up very much liking this little story of the grown-up children of a performance-art family whose parents performed what amounted to public pranks involving their children. As adults, Bateman and Kidman are messed up, but in very recognizable and human ways, and watching them try to reconcile their past with their present is funny and engaging. It’s nice to see Kidman play such an un-heavy character, and Bateman, doing a riff in his Arrested Development character, really pulls off his more dramatic moments.

David Oyelowo and Dianne Wiest in Five Nights in Maine

If The Family Fang was under the radar, Five Nights in Maine was off the radar entirely. Writer-director Maris Curran was making her feature debut, and the plot, about a widower coming to terms with his late wife’s cancer-stricken mother, was not the stuff film-festival dreams are made of. The draw here was the pairing of Oyelowo and Wiest as the main characters (plus the pleasant surprise of Rosie Perez as Wiest’s caregiver), and the two stars more than held up their end of the bargain. Sometimes it’s rewarding to just watch two great actors face off against each other, and that’s certainly what we got here.

Abraham Attah in Beasts of No Nation

Attah had just won an acting prize from the Venice Film Festival as Beasts was making its way to TIFF, and audiences here were quickly able to see why. As the child soldier at the center of the film, Attah has an intimidating task to carry out, and he is more than up to the challenge. Anyone who can hold up his end of the frame opposite Idris Elba is doing something very right.

Liev Schrieber in Spotlight

If Spotlight is indeed headed towards the Best Picture Oscar race, as many who saw it at TIFF have claimed, it’s going to be interesting to see how awards voters treat the cast. So much of the appeal of the film is how it declines to overplay its story, eschewing big Hollywood drama for a more disciplined look at the process of reporting a story as massive as church sex abuse. Michael Keaton is the lead, and he gets crucial support from Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, John Slattery, and Billy Crudup, among others, but for me it was Schrieber who stood out as the new-in-town Boston Globe publisher trying to set a tone for the paper while navigating the choppy parochial waters of Boston.

Susan Sarandon in The Meddler

It’s always worth celebrating when an actress of a certain age, still brimming with talent and massive movie-star charisma, gets a chance to show her stuff in a lead role. The Meddler is a modest film from director Lorene Scafaria (Seeking a Friend for the End of the World), but it gives Sarandon a great opportunity to play a layered comedic character. She weaves in between the seams of the overbearing mother type to present a woman who can’t not offer herself fully to her loved ones, and when those loved ones leave her or push her away, that energy has to go somewhere. Sarandon’s Marnie is a leaf in the breeze in some ways, but when she lands on something, it gets her full attention, to some delightful results.

Alicia Vikander in The Danish Girl

Vikander is definitely the it-girl of 2015 cinema, the ascendant Jessica Chastain appearing in multiple films (you’ve already had chances to see her in Ex Machina and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.). She’s already a household name among the critics and enthusiasts’ set, and everybody assumes she’s headed towards an Oscar nomination for something soon. It’ll most likely be for this film and her performance opposite Eddie Redmayne as a dedicated wife struggling to understand and support her husband through transition and transformation. Tom Hooper’s film filters the story of transgender Lili Elbe through the lens of Vikander’s character, which, despite whatever qualms I may have about point-of-view in a queer story, gives the actress amble opportunity to shine, and she truly does.