RECAP: Everything I Saw at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival
Photo by Mauro-Fabio Cilurzo on Unsplash
Another edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has wrapped, and like every year I try to see at least 10+ titles to take advantage of having one of the world’s best festivals in my home city.
There were a few buzzy releases that I was sad to miss out on (someone gift me a Patron tier membership so I can get into those early ticketing windows!). Namely, I couldn’t get into the Cannes Palme d’Or winner Fjord, or Jesse Eisenberg’s musical dramedy The Debut, or Martin McDonagh’s latest, Wild Horse Nine. But I had a great time nevertheless, and for the convenience of those who either don’t follow my Letterboxd or who want to read all my reactions in one place, scroll on! These are listed in the order I saw them, with the director’s name in brackets after the title.
The Julia Set (Niki Byrne)
Plot summary: A young math whiz (Chase Infiniti) preps for an elite math exam that will further her career, while contending with the personalities of her professors and fellow students.
Review: "It's just polynomial factorialization!"
Appreciate how this movie doesn't hand-hold the audience over its key topic; it's enough to know these characters are experts and build the story from there. The Julia Set is well-cast and well-written, even if it occasionally gives itself over to some overwrought speeches. I would've liked to see Chase Infiniti's character get more into what guides her approach to math, so we can appreciate her prowess more. Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson are clutch performers here, and Christopher Briney is supremely punchable.
Rating: 3.5/5
Furies (Rami Kodeih)
Plot summary: Two sisters in Beirut are compelled to plan a bank job after a corrupt system denies them access to their savings.
Review: More heists should be planned with Lego! This is a sharp, funny story set in Beirut in 2022. It's definitely not one of the Ocean's-style heists with slick professionals who are experts in their fields. It's more akin to the caper in It Was Just an Accident, with everyday people seizing on an opportunity to get a form of retribution amid a sociopolitical nightmare. The heist is only possible via a complex mix of planning, luck, and the community ties that the two sisters savvily take advantage of. The runtime could use a slight trim, but it's fun to see the genre played with in this way.
Rating: 4.5/5
Drifter (Sung Kang)
Plot summary: A lonely racetrack janitor (Kang) with a talent for drifting gets a chance to compete, while fending off personal struggles.
Review: Drifter is too much of a good thing, in several ways. The movie is dripping in heart, going so far as to include a letter to the audience reiterating that before the credits. Even the credits themselves include photos of the crew; something I don't think I've ever seen. All Kang needed to do was trust that we would pick that up on our own. As it stands, the movie is about 45 mins too long. Several subplots, like the central romance and the threat from a crime boss, are left dangling until they're wrapped up too conveniently at the end. Lose some of the sequences of people gazing at each other in garages lit by golden hour, and maybe one or two fewer apperances of instant dduk guk, and we'll be on our way.
Rating: 3/5
Bunker (Florian Zeller)
Plot summary: A successful architect (Javier Bardem) considers a proposal to build a doomsday bunker for a billionaire, threatening his relationships.
Review: Yet another movie set in a house I desperately want to live in (I'm a sucker for modernist houses with sharp lines, what can I say). Bunker engages with some heady, topical issues and is buoyed by some affecting performances, namely Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz as a married couple. As directed by Florian Zeller, the main issue for me was the turgid pacing. In a movie with relatively little plot, there's not much justification for so many sequences of characters wrestling with their thoughts. However, there's enough levity here that it balances out some of the slower sections. The metaphors in the script are not subtle, but it ought to connect with certain audiences - particularly those who relate to Bardem's wealthy architect and his need to protect what he's built.
Rating: 3.5/5
Bitter Christmas (Pedro Almodóvar)
Plot summary: A film director writes a new script, borrowing details from people he knows, posing questions over what’s permissible to use as inspiration.
Review: Admittedly I have a lot of catching up to do with Almodóvar's work, though I did recognize certain visual flourishes (the colours, my god, the colours!) and the detailed female characters the filmmaker is known for. Bitter Christmas is, in theory, something I'd normally leap for: anything that depicts the act of screenwriting or filmmaking usually has my attention. As self-referential as the film is, the flipping back and forth between Raúl the director's newest story and his act of writing defused some of the drama. I began to wonder whether it would be better to see the 2004 and 2026 stories are their own films, with only a few quick scenes of Raúl's work in the 2026 one. Nevertheless, it's not hard to get lost in Almodóvar's images, no matter how "minor" the story may be.
Rating: 3.5/5
La Bola Negra (Javier Ambrossi, Javier Calvos)
Plot summary: Three generations of gay men in Spain navigate oppression, war, and the cost of protecting art from people who want to destroy it.
Review: Epic in scope but still full of countless tiny, intimate moments. It's not hard not to feel adrift amid the changing time periods, violence and persecution, but the co-directors pull everything together in a tremendous crescendo. I can't say I'm familiar with the titular lost play or the Spanish literary scene during the civil war, so I was playing a bit of catch-up as I went along. Thankfully, the scene with Glenn Close crystallizes things for viewers like me who are getting a crash course in Spanish history. Side note: if we're looking for ways to punish the actual villains in society (billionaires, certain politicians), maybe dramatically voting to banish people with black and white balls would give it extra dramatic heft.
Rating: 4/5
Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple (Scot McFadyen, Sam Dunn)
Plot summary: A documentary about the titular drummer of Rush, who many fans may not know as well as they think.
Review: Count me among the number of people at the premiere of this doc who now feel they ought to be getting into Rush. This is a moving tribute to the virtuoso drummer Peart, who brought a polymath's sensibilities to a role that some music fans might discount. It immediately made sense to me when I saw Peart performing with the Buddy Rich Big Band at one point; Peart clearly approached the drums with the same intensity and theory as Rich, even if they played in different genres. Structured around seven tribute performances of Rush songs featuring several of Peart's drumming friends, the doc uses the titles and content of those songs to comment on different periods of Peart's life. Now if I could only get someone to let me try that Macallan 25! ($5,500 CAD per bottle last I checked)
Rating: 4/5
Alpha Gang (David Zellner, Nathan Zellner)
Plot summary: A quirky group of extraterrestrials (including Dave Bautista, Cate Blanchett, Lily Rose-Depp, Riley Keough and Bae Doona) descend on Earth with non-specific plans on how to conquer.
Review: The kind of movie where an alien wearing a gleaming suit of armour fires a bazooka and screams, "Bazooka!!". Alpha Gang is obsessively quirky, but almost inconsequential as a result. The Zellner brothers make a meal out of relatively few ingredients, as they juxtapose their alien characters' obsession with 50s biker culture against the backdrop of a non-specific European war. Since the characters are such blank slates, they're not the easiest to root for, and after a while all the cartoony violence loses some of its punch. But you can honestly say you've never seen something quite like this. I found myself wishing for just one short scene showing the aliens' superiors, their homeworld, or a glimpse of how their intel about Earth got so garbled. Would this be a good double feature with The History of Future Folk?
Rating: 4/5
Possible Love (Lee Chang-dong)
Plot summary: Two couples in South Korea negotiate their roles and relationship to each other in a society riven by late-stage capitalism.
Review: Lee Ye-ji already has a subject for a future documentary: how young Cheol's childhood really messed him up. I'm being trite, but I couldn't help but empathize with the young kid watching his parents fall apart, as they struggle in the aftermath of his father being laid off from his factory job and beaten by the police in the ensuing strike and crackdown.
There's some obvious connective tissue between this movie and Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice, which also depicts the drumbeat in South Korean society of the emotional and economic damage done when private equity destroys industrial jobs. The story is structured around Lee Ye-ji's attempt to make a documentary about the plant's closing. She's keen not to exploit her investor husband's money in the production process - a fact that only hits harder in the closing scenes when a character finds out some news via a workers' support group. Ahn Mi-ok, the wife of the laid-off worker, initially embraces the documentary, both as a way of telling her story and to spend time with the wealthy couple who seem to have taken an interest in her. And while Ye-ji wants to be seen as caring deeply about the workers' plight, it's possible she's not quite as much of an ally as she seems. And then in the background is her husband Ho-seok, a man Ye-ji needs for her film but who feels like he can't open up. The complicated relationships shown in Possible Love are expertly handled by Lee Chang-dong, leaving you with a sprawling, carefully observed story that might make you want to join a union.
Rating: 4.5/5
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (Bassam Tariq)
Plot summary: A devoutly Muslim hitman (Mahershala Ali) tries to provide for his family in the aftermath of his wife’s death.
Review: What, doesn't the Christofascist cult have their own enigmatic swordsman to face off against the righteous Muslim hitman? Seems like a recruitment failure. I was thoroughly enjoying this one all the way until the end, when the story takes a turn towards the supernatural in an unexpected (and not totally earned) way. Up until then, there's a thrilling atmosphere of dread punctuated by colourful characters and one-liners, all structured around a unique ticking clock: breastmilk for the anti-hero's baby daughter. Revenge movies with taciturn, zealous killers are a dime a dozen, but it's rare for their motivation to be something so essential that can't be easily found and that can expire or spill. Your enjoyment might hinge on how you read that ending, though; how much do you want all the plot threads to be resolved? While I don't expect a sequel, it feels like there's a whole movie of consequences that could be made.
Rating: 4/5
A Good Little Soldier (Stéphane Brizé)
Plot summary: A corporate HR manager in France struggles with the ethics of the new company she’s joined, while failing to find work-life balance.
Review: Many of the scenes in A Good Little Soldier felt eerily familiar; having worked in a corporate environment, the discussions about the branding campaign and what to depict in it are, sadly, not that far from the truth. The mandatory happiness workshop is also hilariously similar to sessions I've attended. The question the movie doesn't answer, unfortunately, is what the lead character is going to do about it. We see Carla struggle with the ethics of her job as an HR manager, and the impact her overworking is having on her relationship with her son. In fact, the movie is quite committed to never showing Carla very far from her office at any point; her life outside work may as well not exist. But the impression the final scene leaves us with is that Carla could end up continuing on as the soldier of the title, or she might blow everything up for the betterment of herself and (hopefully) the company. It leaves you wanting more, and not in the right way.
Rating: 3.5/5
Future Tense (Jenna Cato Bass)
Plot summary: A couple in futuristic South Africa win a contest to travel to the past, but one of them has other ideas about how to spend their vacation.
Review: Shows what can be achieved with a limited budget in a sci-fi. With only a handful of futuristic elements visible, Cato Bass uses the premise of her story (sending her characters to the 17th century on a time-travel vacation) to get the most out of the locations and the few noticeable VFX shots. The story works its way to a conclusion that doesn't hold the audience's hand - the exact logistics of what the characters find at their destination are fairly ambiguous. Personally I would have preferred to see Kristen Raath's character travel home and a quick view of her reacting to what she finds there, whether it be happy or sad. Also, how dare those weathly residents leave their dog in the past!
Rating: 4/5
Half (Samjad)
Plot summary: Brother and sister half-vampires in India clash with highway thugs.
Review: With more stabbings, bone crunching and skull smashing than you can count, this is a vampire movie light on the vampires but heavy on vengeance. Vampire mythology is more of a shorthand to help explain the central twins' immortality and strength; there may only be one quick example of someone feeding on blood in 96 minutes. You could, of course, see the highway brigands that the twins take on as a sort of vampire cult, feeding off of helpless travellers who pass through their land. That's about as much metaphor as Half has time for, though, since it's mostly just interested in setting up kill after kill. It would need a bit more character and lore to make it truly special, but it's fun to see a take on this genre from this part of the world.
Rating: 3.5/5