Cynthia Erivo Gets Standing Ovation for "Prima Facie" at Toronto Film Festival

Cynthia Erivo could have picked anything after the“Wicked”movies. She picked a London courtroom. Her new film“Prima Facie”premiered Sunday night at the Toronto International Film Festival, and the audience at Roy Thomson Hall gave her a standing ovation.

The film adapts Suzie Miller’s one-woman play that won Olivier and Tony awards with Jodie Comer in the lead. Erivo plays a defense barrister who spends her days defending men accused of sexual assault. When a colleague assaults her, she has to navigate the same system from the other side, as the accuser. Susanna White directed, Miller wrote the screenplay, and the 106-minute film expands the story well beyond its solo stage roots. Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Ings also star.

There’s a business story here too. The film arrived in Toronto without a U.S. distributor, though Sony has the U.K. and international rights. That makes it one of the festival’s most talked-about titles still looking for an American home. It is a heavy, issue-driven drama about consent and the pressures survivors face, and those are exactly the kinds of stories that get people talking long after the credits roll.

Would you rather see a movie like this in a theater or wait to stream it at home?