This post was originally published on here
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Courtesy of TIFF
Coming at the end of the three-festival pile-up that represents the official start of the fall film season, the Toronto International Film Festival, which kicks off today, is known for being less exclusive and more populist than glitzy Venice and pricey Telluride. On one level, this means it has a more expansive, wide-ranging lineup than either of its early-September siblings. On another, this can mean it’s often the foremost place to see middling biopics whose Oscar aspirations come from the sort of performances that could also be called impressions. Yet there’s still plenty to look forward to at this year’s TIFF, including new films from international auteurs, intriguing thrillers from stylish filmmakers, surprising forays into genre, and, sure, awards bait. Here are 11 titles we’re looking forward to seeing this year.
The prospect of Helen Mirren playing the legendary author Patricia Highsmith at her most unpredictably misanthropic should be enough of a selling point for A Talent for Murder. But this thriller, adapted from a play by Joanna Murray-Smith, also happens to come from photographer and music-video director Anton Corbijn, who hasn’t made a film since 2015’s Life with Robert Pattinson and Dane DeHaan. Here, Alden Ehrenreich co-stars as Edward Ridgeway, a man from Highsmith’s publishing house who travels to Switzerland, where the author spent the final decade of her life, to try to persuade her to write one last Tom Ripley novel. Olivia Cooke and Juliet Stevenson appear to be playing characters from the story the pair starts conjuring together as claustrophobic tensions build. —Alison Willmore
The great intellectual and academic Edward Said was a self-described workhorse who served as a tireless advocate for the Palestinian perspective in news shows, panels, and debates. Director Maiken Baird artfully weaves selections from that public record with home movies, lectures, and other docs to create an entirely archival feature, a kind of cinematic essay from Said in his own words. What begins as an account of his personal political awakening as someone living in exile expands into a history of how Palestine has been misrepresented and dehumanized in the western understanding — a film that spans decades but feels entirely of the moment. —AW
The lush new work from Anna Biller, the director of Viva and The Love Witch, is billed as “a tribute to Technicolor shockers,” which sounds about right for a filmmaker who has reveled in re-creating and interrogating cinematic styles of the past. Based on Yotsuya Kaidan, a 19th-century Japanese ghost story about a dead woman who haunts the husband who betrayed her, The Face of Horror transports its action to 14th-century England, where Kristine Froseth plays a farmer’s daughter who agrees to marry a knight (Jonah Hauer-King), unaware that he’s interested only in her family’s holdings and that he’ll soon have his eye on someone more aristocratic (Bella Heathcote). —AW
For his first film in five years, Iranian Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi has taken an unexpected turn toward horror and toward French actor Eva Green, who plays a novelist returning to her Turkish hometown of Mardin with her daughter, who is deaf. In a narrative that draws from Kurdish legend, environmental themes, and Ghobadi’s own experiences living in exile, the main character finds herself haunted by memories of a pair of sisters from her childhood and, possibly, by something supernatural having to do with the last two trees in an area devastated by deforestation, ones planted in memory of the girls. —AW
Mike Leigh’s latest film may well be his last, and if so, it’s one hell of a way to close out an incredible career. Tender Loving Care is a gentle, mournful, funny portrait of a family whose future is shadowed by uncertainty but tries to face life with cheeriness. Widow’s Bay breakout Kate O’Flynn, who got her start in Leigh’s 2008 Happy-Go-Lucky, is wonderful as Amy, a London social worker who moves back in with her irrepressible colleague and bestie, Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), after the end of a five-year relationship. While her parents, played by Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson, fret to themselves over whether their daughter, who’s devoted to her difficult work, is happy, they start dealing with their own health issues, bringing the story around to a wrenching conclusion. —AW
Bassam Tariq and Mahershala Ali are apparently never going to make Blade together, but during the time the Marvel project stalled out and fell apart, they did make something else. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, the second narrative feature from the These Birds Walk director, stars Ali as a Houston hit man, father of three, and devout Muslim whose faith is shaken after the death of his wife. Throw in a sinister John Cho with a gold grill and the promise that we’ll get to see Ali put those MCU sword-fighting skills to use onscreen, and the result seems like something worth showing up for — especially since it won’t require boning up on a whole back catalogue of superhero movies to prepare for it. —AW
Of the 20 or so screening rooms put into service for the Toronto Film Festival, one that’s always fairly vexing is the Imax room at the Scotiabank multiplex. TIFF doesn’t really traffic in movies that use large-format presentation. The viewer typically ends up watching something like The Danish Girl or Life Itself on a ludicrously oversize Imax screen. So to be able to see a movie like Everest: The Other Side, the latest from Free Solo Oscar winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, on a giant Imax screen as intended should be a real treat. The documentary, which chronicles a pair of mountain climbers who fall in love while planning to climb the North Face of Mount Everest and then ski down it, was shot specifically for the format. —Joe Reid
The feature-length debut from French cinematographer Marine Atlan, La Gradiva took the top prize at Cannes Critics’ Week but is making its North American premiere in Toronto. The film concerns a bus full of French high-school seniors on a trip to Pompeii, where the long gaze of history meets their hormonal entanglements and a bunch of Freudian desire. There’s always some trepidation about taking on a two-and-a-half-hour film said to feature “natural performances and a documentary-like approach to shooting” at a festival, where exhaustion becomes more and more of a factor as the week goes on. But messy French teens amid gorgeous Italian ruins, all of which was good enough to win a prize at Cannes? That’s an easy sell. —JR
Fans of TV’s Slow Horses will be excited to see that show’s Rosalind Eleazar starring as the title character in this A24 movie making its world premiere in Toronto. Eleazar plays a TV actress looking for a comeback but beset by her own demons as well as her family’s. Daniel Kaluuya plays her brother, and Chris Rock both directs — returning for his first film since 2014’s Top Five, which also premiered at TIFF — and co-stars as the director of a Dreamgirls revival that could be Misty’s big break. TIFF is setting hopes high for this one as a work of high Hollywood satire. The program description calls on comparisons to Robert Townshend’s Hollywood Shuffle and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. That’s setting a tough bar to clear, but what a thrill if Rock can do it. —JR
The phrase “Jordan Firstman, Oscar contender” has been a notion to wrestle with since the Club Kid reviews started emerging out of Cannes. The alt-comedian and queer provocateur (that’s code for “some gay guys like him, and some do not”) made a huge splash at Cannes with his directorial debut about a burned-out gay party boy who discovers he has a 10-year-old son. Now, after the film received a similarly enthusiastic reception at Telluride, all eyes turn to the more populist Toronto audiences. I’m forever chasing after a movie that’s authentically, sharply funny and disarmingly humane, and I’ve heard all three things about Club Kid. After watching Firstman deliver great comedic performances on TV’s English Teacher and I Love L.A., I don’t have much trouble believing he can really nail a role like this. —JR
Writer-director Lauren Miller Rogen’s directorial debut was the 2018 Netflix movie Like Father, starring Kristen Bell and Kelsey Grammer, but I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about For a Good Time, Call …, the 2011 comedy Miller Rogen co-wrote with Katie Anne Naylon and co-starred in opposite Ari Graynor. One of the great underappreciated comedies of the 2010s — right before studios stopped making movies like this — it made me instantly hopeful to see what Miller Rogen would do next. It has been 15 years, but I’m down to see if Babies has a bit of that spark. Of course, the premise sounds a lot less raunchy than For a Good Time …: Anna Kendrick and Seth Rogen play a longtime married couple who haven’t made the call on having kids until their friend Kate Berlant comes to live with them and brings her young daughter along. Kendrick surprised me once before at TIFF with the 2022 film Woman of the Hour. And Berlant delivered one of my favorite performances of the year in Maddie’s Secret. At the very least, Babies could be a good film-festival palate cleanser among the longer, heavier movies that make up much of the TIFF-goer’s schedule. —JR
Comedian and podcaster Caleb Hearon co-stars with Zooey Deschanel as siblings who have to return to their Missouri hometown when their father dies. Already complicated by grief, the homecoming is thrown into further chaos when they have to pore through their hoarder dad’s belongings for documents buried among the detritus that are crucial to settling his affairs. Hearon, who co-wrote the film with Ruby Caster, had a bit in his 2025 HBO special about his own hoarder father’s death; he’s also originally from rural Missouri, so this film has a deep personal connection. I’ve heard at least one person who has seen the film compare it warmly to the Bridget Everett TV series Somebody Somewhere. And Deschanel is an A+ movie sister. —JR
