Toronto 2013: Watch trailers featuring Brad Pitt, George Clooney

Stars Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Sandra Bullock, Keanu Reeves and many more were included as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s first programming announcement Tuesday morning, which included opening and closing night titles, 16 galas and 55 special presentations.

If you want to get an early taste of what’s on offer at the festival, which will run Sept 5-15, here is a sampling of trailers from some high-profile titles.

The festival will open with the world premiere of “The Fifth Estate,” director Bill Condon’s dramatic look at Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl, Stanley Tucci, Laura Linney and Anthony Mackie. The film is based on the books “Inside WikiLeaks” by Daniel Domscheit-Berg and “WikiLeaks” by David Leigh and Luke Harding; the screenplay is by Josh Singer. “The Fifth Estate” is scheduled to be released in October.

In what looks to be an impressively large cast, Pitt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Cumberbatch and others star in Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave,” based on the autobiography of Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841.

It has been a long seven years since director Alfonso Cuarón’s last feature film, “Children of Men,” so there is a strong wave of expectation for his latest, “Gravity.” World premiering as the opening-night film of the Venice Film Festival before pulling into Toronto, the movie stars Bullock and Clooney as a pair of astronauts who find themselves endangered by a space walk gone wrong. Having hit a buzz during the recent Comic-Con in San Diego, “Gravity” may hit a rare sweet spot of highbrow festivals and genre-fan momentum.

Based on Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play, “August: Osage County” will have its world premiere at Toronto as just the kind of upper-middle-brow awards-expectant title the festival specializes in. A tale of family dysfunction directed by John Wells, the film has a cast that includes Streep, Julia Roberts, Cumberbatch (again), Ewan McGregor and Sam Shepard.

The Oscar-winning director of “A Beautiful Mind” is perhaps not the first person one would think of for a race car drama, but Ron Howard is, nevertheless, bringing to the screen the rivalry of two 1970s-era drivers, played by Brühl and Chris Hemsworth. With its screenplay by “The Queen” writer Peter Morgan, who worked with Howard ‘ “Frost/Nixon,” the film will perhaps not be as low-budget gritty as Howard’s 1977 feature directing debut “Eat My Dust.” The film also stars Olivia Wilde and Alexandra Maria Lara.

In his feature directing debut, Reeves also stars in “Man of Tai Chi,” which the festival’s official description rather tersely describes as the story of a young martial artist in the world of a high-stakes fight club.

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Follow Mark Olsen on Twitter: @IndieFocus