Every so often, a film comes along that dominates the cultural conversation. In 2007, that film was Juno. It premiered on 8 September at the Toronto Film Festival. Before that, there was little hype: Juno was just considered a small indie comedy featuring some familiar faces. But it was the surprise favourite of the whole festival, receiving the biggest, longest, and loudest standing ovation in TIFF history (famed Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert began his write up of the screening with the words, “I don’t know when I’ve heard a standing ovation so long, loud and warm”).
Reviews from the festival were breathless. Hollywood Reporter summed up the response: “Juno defies expectations at every turn, giving the slip to anything saccharine or trite or didactic, looking to its characters for insight and complexity […] and, most crucially, taking a presumably stale storyline and making it into a buoyant comedy.”
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