All manner of films lit up the screen—from awards fodder to indie darlings and even a few masterworks. Across 10 glorious days, we attended countless screenings and ate ungodly amounts of popcorn. Here are some highlights from the festival’s 49th edition.
The Instant Classic: The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)
Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is the new great American epic, presented in 70mm at the festival and shot with the largely obsolete VistaVision format. Running a mammoth 216 minutes—including a built-in intermission—Corbet’s film feels like a classic lost in time, firmly grounded in the past but thematically attuned to the present. Its tale about a Jewish-Hungarian architect immigrating to the United States is so individual in design and approach that it boldly juts out into the cinematic landscape, awing us from every angle. From the film it’s captured on to the rich details of each frame, The Brutalist is an experience whose very construction informs its stark meditation on American mythmaking. It’s perfection that breathes.
The Best Musical: Better Man (Michael Gracey)
It’s only fitting that the year TIFF finally goes full regalia is also the one brimming with musicals. From the star-studded Emilia Pérez to the festival closing The Deb to the highly divisive The End, the allure of song and dance was too difficult to ignore. Yet, none were as audacious and enveloping as Michael Gracey’s Better Man. This biopic of British singer-songwriter Robbie Williams tracks his childhood in Stoke-On-Trent, his stint in the boy band Take That, and his monumental, drug-addled rise as a solo artist. Oh, and he’s portrayed as a computer-generated monkey.
Better Man could have easily gone off the rails, but Gracey’s gamble pays off, resulting in one of the most visually arresting musicals in recent memory. While the cutting-edge technology behind Williams’ ape-self is impressive, the surreal timbre of each musical number is what places Better Man a cut above its contemporaries—with Williams’ record-breaking performance at Knebworth taking the form of a medieval battlefield. To see it is to believe it.
The Best of World Cinema: All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia)
Naturally, TIFF is a bastion of international cinema, highlighting underrepresented stories and voices across the globe. This year’s slate proved no different, but few were as spellbinding and dreamlike as Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. Its story of two nurses dealing with the possibility of romance doubles as a quiet but passionate treatise on Mumbai: a stifling city that never sleeps. Armed with a languorous pace and cinematography that captures the hectic beauty of Mumbai, Kapadia illuminates a female experience that’s rarely, if ever, acknowledged by commercial Hindi cinema. With each textured frame, Kapadia blurs the line between a “city of dreams” and a “city of illusions.”
The Oscar Shoo-in: Anora (Sean Baker)
Sean Baker’s Anora is a screwball comedy by way of Robert Altman—a rich and lived-in experience that, despite how outrageous it becomes, never fails to burst with painfully real emotions and outcomes. It continues Baker’s class-conscious exploration of the lives of sex workers with great hilarity and calamity, unfolding as a vibrant inversion of the Pretty Woman fantasy. At the heart of it lies Mikey Madison’s virtuosic turn as the titular character, whose innate physicality, vulnerability, and charisma results in one of the greatest performances of the 21st century. While far from typical Oscar bait, no recognition would be a tragedy.
The Sexiest Movie: Queer (Luca Guadagnino)
Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Queer features some of the most graphic gay sex scenes committed to mainstream cinema. But they also brim with warmth, beauty, and honesty, plunging us into the dreamy headspace of its junkie protagonist, played by Daniel Craig as he’s never been seen. From the surreal editing to the anachronistic needle drops (Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” plays over a 1940s-set Mexico City), Queer finds Guadagnino at his most playful and erratic. He conjures an experience that feels as overwhelming, rich, and kaleidoscopic as the romance it follows, rife with frames that practically swoon along with the characters. While its hallucinogenic final act may alienate some audiences, there’s no denying the film’s ability to burrow into its viewers’ souls. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ sumptuous, amorphous score pops our collective cherries.
The Nail Biter: Conclave (Edward Berger)
Of all the genre pieces that premiered at this year’s festival, a scathing look at the Catholic Church proved to be the most gripping and intense. Edward Berger’s Conclave imagines the secret process of electing a new pope, which quickly turns into a Machiavellian powder keg with vying Cardinals employing secrets and sabotage to strengthen their candidacy. Berger’s film channels the ‘70s political thriller, not only training its lens on the role of organized religion in a rapidly shifting world, but also the hypocrisies and social stagnation of the systems we adhere to. Operating with a hair-trigger sense of tension, Conclave wields sharp commentary on the fallacy of political gamesmanship, containing prescient observations on the American election process. It’s the rare thriller that feels both intimate and epic in scale, primed to explode with its final, delectable twist.
The “What the Fuck Did I Just Watch?!” Movie: The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
With The Substance, director Coralie Fargeat cements herself as the future of horror. Demi Moore stars as an aging movie star turned television exercise instructor. After she’s let go, she turns to a black-market drug that promises to unlock her full potential, but spawns a younger, better clone (Margaret Qualley) from her flesh. The two are warned to respect the procedure by alternating weeks or risk deadly consequences.
With this simple premise, Fargeat conjures a grotesque marvel—a body horror masterpiece that satirizes Hollywood’s obsession with patriarchal beauty standards. Unfolding at breakneck momentum, with some of the most palpable and ingeniously revolting practical effects, The Substance manifests as an unbelievably cathartic experience. Bursting with kaleidoscopic detail and overflowing with “WTF” moments, The Substance is not a cult classic in the making but one already made.
The Best Comedy: Friendship (Andrew DeYoung)
Starring I Think You Should Leave’s Tim Robinson, Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship revels in the same cringe comedy to produce extremely funny results. Centering on a suburban dad (Robinson) who strikes a bromance with his neighbour (Paul Rudd), the film quickly veers into uncomfortable and obsessive territory. Unfolding as an unhinged, feature length cousin to Robinson’s television show, Friendship deftly explores the struggle of adjusting to social conventions, often finding sudden jolts of humour in the unlikeliest and most mundane of places. DeYoung’s film becomes a gut-busting endeavor as we settle into Robinson’s stream of pathetic rage and inability to read social cues. Despite the wanton oddity, Friendship offers a perfect distillation of male bonding—and a hilariously uneventful drug trip sequence.
The Biggest Flop: Daniela Forever (Nacho Vigalondo)
Following in the footsteps of his high-concept Colossal, director Nacho Vigalondo delivers a romantic comedy that primarily takes place in the mind. Daniela Forever follows a bereaved man (Henry Golding) who is enrolled in a clinical drug trial that offers patients lucid dreams to curb their grief. After failing to follow the detailed prescription, he conjures an idealized world, rebuilding a relationship with his deceased girlfriend (Beatrice Grannò) in his very own dreamscape.
For as promising as Daniela Forever is, it’s a film that never rises above a cloying vision of romance and some one-note performances. Its structure, based around stylized versions of reality and dreams, quickly becomes a slog—with each jarring cut-to-black stifling the momentum it hopes to foster. Its fantastical cloak does little to hide how mundane it all feels. At least we can dream of a world where Vigalondo realizes his promising vision.
The Canadian Gem: Universal Language (Matthew Rankin)
Matthew Rankin’s Universal language reimagines Canada as a nation that feels recognizable but also alien, where the two official languages are Persian and French. It intertwines multiple storylines and arcs, creating a delightfully odd mosaic of the country’s history (fictional and real) and the “Two Solitudes” that continue to pervade. Rankin’s observant eye immerses us in a snowy Winnipeg, defined by its grey concrete, weird Persian store signage (Kleenex Emporium, Turkey Shop, and National Typewriter), and a Tim Hortons that serves double-doubles as Persian chai. Full of such little oddities, Universal Language is a masterful example of swift, detailed worldbuilding.
Rankin’s film wears its Canadiana on its sleeve, rife with pictures of Canadian politicians (most notably Francois Legault, the Quebec premier who infamously tabled a ban against religious head coverings) and amusing statements like “meet me at the Tim Hortons across from the Louis Riel grave.” It’s all part of a great deadpan vision that taps into some biting truths about Canada’s ever-changing notion of cultural identity—where a Persian-speaking West and a French-speaking East mirror the current national divide. It’s perhaps the most Canadian selection for the International Feature race ever, even concluding with a song from The Guess Who.
