- 10 Queer Titles to Look Out For At the 2026 Reeling International Film Festival (September 14, 2026)
Every year, Chicago’s preeminent queer film festival—the second-longest-running in the world—gears up at the height of festival season to highlight the best in queer independent cinema. For its 44th edition, the Reeling Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival is set to present 36 features and 59 shorts (over 10 shorts programs) that celebrate the depth and breadth of the queer spectrum: gay infatuation, trans heartbreak, bisexual chaos, lesbian commitment issues, and the intensely political and historical lenses underneath which all of these struggles lie.
You can check out the schedule and secure tickets here; in the meantime, though, here are a few of the titles we’re most excited about.
La bola negra
One of the most hotly anticipated queer films of the year (and Reeling’s opening night film) is Netflix’s “La Bola Negra (The Black Ball),” a sprawling epic spanning three generations of queer men along important moments in Spanish history. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known collectively as Los Javis, won Best Director at Cannes and have built a massive tome set across a grand scale that seeks to interweave a country’s history with the history of queerness. The cast includes Spanish singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente in a breakout role, alongside comparative unknowns buoyed by bigger names like Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close. Buzz for this title is high between its Cannes and TIFF premieres, to say nothing of the fact that Netflix is actually shelling out for a theatrical release before it hits the streamer. It stands to reason that it’ll be worth checking out on a big, big screen.
I Am Going to Miss You
Daniel Ribiero’s “I Am Going to Miss You” takes the long history of the breakup story and finally views it through the lens of a T4T relationship, as a trans woman (Alice Marcone) and trans man (Gabriel Lodi) find their long-standing partnership complicated by the messy complications of life and cohabitation. Filmed with a kind of handheld immediacy by Ribiero (whose Brazilian coming-of-age story “The Way He Looks” is also a queer standard) and buoyed by sensitive performances from its leads, whose quotidian conflicts about the longevity of their bond feel universal and yet highly specific to their queer experience.
Jaripeo
One of the more striking docs to come out of Sundance this year, Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig’s “Jaripeo” turns a lens on the machismo and longing inherent to Mexican rodeos (jaripeo) and the gay men who exist within them. Built through dreamlike asides and largely told from the backseat of a car, “Jaripeo” sets among the hills and deserts of Michoacán a hidden world of macho men acting out their queer desires in ways that allow them to stay secret from the world… and even themselves. It’s only 70 minutes long, but within that short span contains multitudes about the innate loneliness that heteronormativity and toxic masculinity can instill in people, and the brief glimmers of joy and community that can be found in finding (and hooking up with) your people.
Lunar Sway
A dark crime comedy with the feel of the Coen Brothers and the heart of David Lynch, Nick Butler’s “Lunar Sway” keeps the gay cowboy theme a-runnin’ with the tale of Cliff (Douglas Smith), a heartbroken man who can’t stop thinking about his ex even as he’s reacquainted with his estranged birth mother (“Gilmore Girls”‘ Liza Weil). That’s just the first of many twists and turns Cliff’s life takes, from mid-karaoke blowjobs to motel hookups and a lot of queer yearning (and some genre flexibility to boot). (Protip: This writer will be introing and Q&Aing the film at Reeling when it screens September 21st.)
Meeting Marsha
Those of us who obsess over “The Parent Trap” might get a lot of mileage from this quirky lesbian romantic dramedy from McKenzie Goodwin, in which a struggling actress’s bid to propose to her alt-comic girlfriend gets interrupted by the sudden presence of her estranged mother (Elaine Hendrix), a flagging TV actress whose narcissism suddenly throws a wrench in an already comically fraught dynamic. Cue the bids for attention, the divided loyalties, the sudden arrival of the cops… and, of course, a cameo from fellow “Parent Trap” alumna Lisa Ann Walter.
Mermaid
A tender tale of queer solidarity, Reeling’s Narrative Centerpiece is Fia Perera’s heartfelt story of the bond between a grief-addled drag queen (Arturo Luíz Soria) and Cassie (Devyn McDowell), a 10-year-old trans child whose greatest dream is to become a mermaid. Together, they embark on a journey of transformation, as they do what queer folks have had to do throughout our history: Lean on each other in times of strife and help support our respective becomings. Bright, bittersweet, and heartfelt.
My Brother’s Killer
Director Rachel Mason (“Circus of Books”) has long been focused on using documentary to expound on the life of adult film actor Billy London, who made headlines in 1990 when he was brutally murdered in West Hollywood, with nary a clue as to who might have done it and why. With “My Brother’s Killer,” we see queer Angelenos working to close the cold case after three decades of mystery, unfolding across archival footage and contemporary glimpses at a community working to find justice.
Son of Sara
Queerness is no stranger to horror, and Houston Bone’s horror-comedy riff on “Rosemary’s Baby” should serve some suitable spookiness. The Rosemary in this story is Sara (Chlie Van Landschoot), a pregnant woman suddenly revisited by the father of her child, who invites her to his family estate in exchange for some financial assistance with her baby. You can see where this goes from here: Satanic rituals, gaslighting, all kinds of supernatural chicanery.
Test
One of the most exciting films out of the fest is Sam McConnell’s “Test,” which stars former bodybuilder Brock Yurich (who also writes) in a based-on-his-life story of a bisexual bodybuilder trying to balance his struggling career with his fraught relationship with his religious mess of a mom (Tammy Blanchard). To find his training and the increasing onslaught of performance drugs he needs to bulk up, Yurich’s Eddie turns to sexy livestreams for gay audiences, while he balances his attraction to both his ex-girlfriend and his older daddy of a bodybuilding coach. Shades of “The Iron Claw” and “Magazine Dreams” abound, as muscles sit right alongside misery in this deeply affecting drama.
The Celluloid Closet
Reeling is closing out with one of the quintessential texts in queer documentary: a 30th anniversary screening of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s recently restored “The Celluloid Closet,” which charts the history of queerness from the beginnings of cinema to the then-contemporary frontiers of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. Based on the seminal book by Vito Russo, “The Celluloid Closet” is a vital primer for both explicit and implicit queer readings of some of the most important milestones in cinema history, from the gender-bending trends of early silents to the stifling subtext of the Hays Code, to the growing representation that builds today.
- TIFF 2026: Woman Unknown, Lemonade, The Julia Set (September 13, 2026)
This year’s Centerpiece and Special Presentations section of the Toronto International Film Festival featured a striking postwar drama from Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy, a tender narrative debut from documentarian Kim Bartley, and the follow-up film from last year’s breakout star Chase Infiniti.
Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner “Woman Unknown,” the latest from writer-director May el-Touky, immerses you directly in the psyche of a woman doing her best to survive post-WWII Danish society. Before we meet Marie (Mathilde Arcel, who also took home the Volpi Cup at Venice for her shattering performance), we’re introduced to the haunting specter of the woman who came before her. The fabric of a silk wedding dress cascades through the darkness, the moon illuminating its pristine, white sheen. Marie awakes before the sun rises, leaving her partner to his slumber. We soon learn she is a maid and nanny in this well-to-do household. She’s also on the cusp of marrying her boss, rising above her station to become the new lady of the house.
Anyone in this position would already be walking on eggshells, but in Marie’s case she’s also harboring a dark secret from her past during the German occupation of Denmark. Like many women, she did what she had to do to survive. As the film progresses, we learn she’s haunted not just by the fear that her past will be exposed and, like other women branded collaborators, she’ll be violently stripped in the street, her hair shorn like a sheep, and her body painted with a red swastika, but also with physical pain and a personal anguish that will never leave her. The film is punctuated by several sequences of these women being violently humiliated in the streets, with el-Touky holding her camera on their faces as they are dehumanized. In one such interlude, the actress at the center evokes the great Falconetti in Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc.”
El-Touky’s deft script not only exposes the hypocrisy of a society that is so quick to punish these women but turns a blind eye on the businessmen like her fiancé who continued operating—and selling to Germans—during the occupation. It also explores the way in which for many women, occupation or no, their bodies do not belong to them. Staying uncomfortably close to Marie’s battered psyche, this is a brutal film about the insidious violence of occupation, the many ways we can lose our humanity, and a sharp rumination on whether or not resilience is always admirable.
With her first narrative feature film, documentarian Kim Bartley’s “Lemonade” is a tender, if somewhat cliched, look at perseverance in the face of a hard childhood. Lewis Brophy stars as Danny, a young man who’s been in the social services system most of his childhood. Separated from his brother for years and just shy of his 18th birthday, Danny makes a bad choice that lands him in jail. After turning eighteen, not only does he have to leave the youth home where he’s been living for the past few years, he also faces his court date as an adult.
Just as Danny must face the world on his own for the first time, Josh (Barry Keoghan, soulful as always), the caseworker who he thinks is responsible for his separation from his brother, re-enters his life. The two have much in common; Josh and his older brother also went through the system as kids. Like Danny’s mother, Josh’s older brother Gav (Graham Earley) is an addict. The film is at its strongest when it explores the similarities–and pointed differences–between these two sets of brothers. Unfortunately, the script teeters between exposition heavy dialogue and cliched plot points that pull down its otherwise clear-eyed vision of Danny’s world.
A side plot involving a girl named Mila (Carla Tous), who is unfortunately little more than a Gen Z twist on the manic pixie dream girl trope. She’s got a magic bag that seems to have everything you might need at any given moment (including batteries??) and even has a tattoo on her arm that reads: When life gives you lemons; make lemonade. Brophy and Tous have very little chemistry, and their scenes together fit incongruously with the emotional journey Danny is on with Josh, with his estranged mother, and most importantly with the little brother he so desperately wants to reconnect with. That said, the final reunion between the brothers is staged so beautifully, it could make a stone cry.
Following up her breakout turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning “One Battle After Another,” Chicago’s own Chase Infiniti stars as a young math whiz who finds herself in a bad romance during her freshman year of college in Niki Byrne’s “The Julia Set.” Set at a fictional called GBU, Infiniti is the titular Julia, a promising young mathematician who chose a school near home instead of the many spots she’d earned at Ivy League schools in order to be near her family and her older brother, who has Down Syndrome.
She soon stands out among her peers and is tapped by her TA Pascal (Christopher Briney) to join an elite study group led by a brilliant, award-winning professor (Nina Hoss) as they prepare to take the Putnam Exam, which could help define all of their futures. For Julia, this could mean a full ride to one of her dream schools. For Pascal, it’s his chance to prove the apple didn’t fall that far from the tree; his father (Jason Isaacs), we soon learn, is an overbearing Fields Medal winner who has a building named after him on campus, and has also done on a number on Pascal’s self-worth.
Julia is clearly much more naturally gifted than Pascal, and I winced the first time she made herself smaller so he could get the spotlight. As their relationship gets more intense, his jealousy of her talent manifests in more and more violent and manipulative ways. While their story arc borders on cliche, Byrne finds a refreshing way for Julia to come into her own.
Birney is an interesting young actor, who brought a lot of depth and sensitivity to his breakout role as Conrad in the streaming hit “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” and brings a similar complexity to a role that could have just been a stereotype. Infiniti imbues Julia with a rich interiority largely through her sharp eyes and body language. Gillian Anderson is perhaps a little under-used as Pascal’s mother, who let her own light dampen so her husband’s alleged genius could shine, but she gives one hell of speech to knock some sense into Julia that, while didactic, is something a lot of young women need to hear: Live your life for yourself while you’re young. There will be plenty of time to make compromises later on.
- TIFF 2026: Tender Loving Care, Bucking Fastard, A Long Winter (September 13, 2026)
Three of our best working filmmakers have new films on the fest circuit, and they all made the journey north to Canada this year to premiere them in Toronto. The very good news is that they all work, to varying degrees, and one is even among the best films you’ll see in 2026.
The standout is Mike Leigh’s devastating and beautiful “Tender Loving Care,” a dramedy that looks like it might be the legendary British filmmaker’s last. The man behind “Naked,” “Secrets and Lies,” “Topsy-Turvy,” “Happy-Go-Lucky,” and many more has been one of the most consistent directors we have for decades, and he has delivered a truly beautiful swan song, a movie that works as both a character study and a commentary on his entire career.
Most of all, it’s a film that reflects his deep humanism. Leigh understands people—how they move, think, and speak—as well as anyone, and he has poured that desire to find truth in his fellow man into this story about arguably one of the most important things you can do: Be present for someone else. It’s not about active empathy as much as it’s about just being there: Laughing, crying, feeling, and even just sitting in silence. Sometimes that’s all we can do, and all other people need. Mike Leigh’s films often feel like they find the extraordinary in ordinary lives. This is one of his best.
Kate O’Flynn (doing such a different register from her work on “Widow’s Bay“) stars as Amy, a social worker who works to protect young people, sometimes from themselves, and sometimes from their parents. She’s partnered with her best friend Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), a social worker who deals with the needy at the other end of life, assisting with the elderly as much as she possibly can. They’re both often pushed away by the people they encounter, whether it’s a mother fighting for custody of her kid or a woman who appears to be a hoarder and screams about her neighbor through a mostly-closed door. These scenes clearly followed Leigh’s unique process, one that isn’t improvisational as much as workshopped: The actors work with Leigh to find the right lines and beats within the construct of the plot. These clients may feel like narrative tangents, but they are essential to the fabric of the piece and the understanding that Amy and Rosie know how to actively listen more than most people.
They also love to drink wine and joke around with each other. Amy has actually come home to crash with Rosie after her garbage boyfriend went back to his wife. They laugh about each other’s love lives—Rosie is dating a firefighter that’s never seen—in a manner that makes their friendship 100% believable. Rarely has female friendship been captured with more veracity. It truly feels like these women have known each other for years.
Like a lot of best friends, Rosie has also known Amy’s parents, played by Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson, both spectacular. At first, it almost feels like this is a film about their love. They joke, laugh, worry about Amy, and even dance together. Have they found the love and care that Amy and Rosie have as friends more than in their romantic lives?
This is not that movie, even if it’s a part of the fabric of Leigh’s quilt. Without spoiling, the final act of “Tender Loving Care” dips into something heartbreaking, but it never loses its buoyancy. It’s a reminder of the value of human decency, of love, and of care. It’s kind of all we have.
A much different experience awaits you in Werner Herzog’s first narrative film in years, the truly bonkers, even for Werner, “Bucking Fastard,” a film that opens with the words “For David Lynch” and then unfolds as a movie the deceased auteur would have almost certainly loved. Herzog’s interests are all up there on the screen in this surreal, trippy, funny, strange flick that’s truly hard to put into words. The first hour of “BF” is among Herzog’s best filmmaking, his fluid camera gliding across the story of a two sisters too strange for this world. Just as it feels like the themes are coalescing it takes a sharp turn and becomes something even stranger in the caves of Northern Ireland. Werner sure loves his caves. This section of the film gets almost as lost as the sisters, but the final shot really works, a sort of refusal to give viewers a concrete ending, letting them wander the tunnels of this world, rolling the movie’s questions around in their heads instead of providing easy answers.
Herzog takes inspiration for his fairy tale from the true story of Freda and Greta Chaplin, twin sisters who wore the same clothes and spoke at the same time. They also terrorized a man with whom they were obsessed, even testifying at a trial about their persistence, reportedly in unison. Herzog’s sisters aren’t twins, but they are played by real-life siblings Kate Mara and Rooney Mara, as Joanie and Jeannie Holbrooke. And his film opens at his version of the trial, where neighbor Gareth Mulroney (Orlando Bloom) seeks a restraining order. The trial sets the stage for the weirdness to come as the Mara sisters speak often simultaneously—same cadence, emphasis, and words—giving the film a dreamlike rhythm right from the beginning.
After lighting Gareth’s post box on fire so he can no longer receive love letters, a kindly neighbor sweeps up the girls and puts them up in an apartment, where he protects and watches over them. A man named Timothy (Domhnall Gleeson) tries to train them to separate enough to be able to vacuum and open a can of sardines, while their internet celebrity status continues to grow. The apartment section of “Bucking Fastard” is fantastic stuff, feeling almost like a parallel to the film’s prologue, one in which the sisters speak of a dream about birds, creatures that often move and chirp in unison. In a sense, the Holbrookes have been put in a birdcage, admired by the men outside and protected by their keepers.
Believe it or not, “Bucking Fastard” gets much, much weirder. Eventually, the girls find themselves chiseling away in a tunnel in a cave, trying to find a path to a place where they belong. Herzog has made several films about people who don’t fit in normal society, and this one seems to suggest that it is up to those people to carve their own path. It’s captured in one of my favorite lines of the year: “Everyone should dig a tunnel through a mountain.” It’s rich coming from the man who made “Fitzcarraldo,” but it’s also, somehow, remarkably inspiring.
Finally, there’s the latest drama from the masterful director of “45 Years” and “All of Us Strangers.” Andrew Haigh never really makes the same movie twice, and yet all of his films, like Leigh, reflect a deep humanism, a desire to understand the complexity of people in a way that makes them feel genuine on-screen. His adaptation of a 2006 short story by Colm Toibin is so methodical that it can verge on feeling too slow, a pace that almost feels designed to capture the snowbound conditions in which it unfolds. You know how when you’re covered in snow gear and trudging up a hill that you don’t move at quite the same pace? There are parts of “A Long Winter” that verge on glacial, but strong performances and a truly moving final beat pull it all together.
Fred Hechinger does the best work of his career as Mike, who has returned home to his Colorado cabin in the ‘50s, just before his brother Tommy (Kit Connor) is leaving. He will be alone with a taciturn father (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and troubled mother (Caitriona Balfe). Despite efforts to put on a brave face, it seems like mom is the kind of soul who has been fighting depression for years, stuck in a desolate place she never wanted to be in. When the family goes into town for supplies, she sneaks a drink or two, and hides wine around the house. When dad takes the booze away, mom literally walks out the front door, disappearing just before a snowstorm. Everyone searches for her, hoping she made it to shelter, possibly even her brother’s (Martin Freeman) house before the storm really made everything deadly, but it becomes increasingly likely that she simply disappeared into the snow.
“A Long Winter” becomes not so much a survival story or a mystery but a study in sustained melancholy. Mike walks the hills, hoping to stumble onto something that he knows is buried in the snow, and that he doesn’t really want to find. His father becomes increasingly petulant, refusing to do the basic things around the house that mom did before, and Haigh slowly makes it clear how suffocating this life must have been for his wife. It’s really a study of what happens when you take away someone’s only escape, even if it’s the deadly one of alcohol addiction.
Haigh really takes his time with a movie that moves at the pace of a winter search. Men trudge through the snow, and silence fills a cabin without a motherly presence. He directs Hechinger and Moss-Bacharach to do a great deal in the quiet beats. Mike is also hiding his sexual urges, first aimed at a local cop and then a young man who dad hires to do the cooking and cleaning around the house. He is figuring out who he is in this motherless scenario, turning “A Long Winter” into a study of manhood. Is the son who won’t give up on a doomed search less of a man than the father who seems to have moved on? And is the father who mocks and demeans both his only true ally in his son and the new young man in his house really any kind of role model? Can you blame anyone for choosing the wilderness over oppressive depression?
“A Long Winter” is also a gorgeously shot movie, as the snowy landscapes are alternately striking and foreboding. There are times when one feels the pace of Haigh’s approach more than most of his films as we plod through the snow with these increasingly depressed characters, but it makes for a film that’s more haunting and deliberate than it might have otherwise been. And it allows for the film’s stunning final shot to feel like more of a release, an escape from an unwanted life.
- TIFF 2026: In the Heart of the South, Idda, Magazine (September 12, 2026)
In this year’s Discovery and Platform sections at the Toronto International Film Festival, I saw three films about women navigating their twenties, their artistic ambitious, and their interpersonal relationships with their closest friends: Alexandra Pechman’s “Magazine,” Nyla Innuksuk’s “In The Heart of the South,” and Irene Dionisio’s “Idda.” Two of these films are far more successful at processing the growing pains of your twenties through the lens of cinema than the third.
Following up her debut 2022 alien invasion debut “Slash/Back,” writer-director Nyla Innuksuk’s doesn’t totally pivot away from genre filmmaking, although she does have plenty to say about why certain stories are only allowed to be told through the lens of genre. “In The Heart of The South,” a title that is in reference to Toronto being south of the arctic from which its main Inuk protagonist Yura Ivalu (Anna Lambe) hails. Yura is the current it girl of the Toronto art world after her immersive virtual reality piece about residential schools shoots her to stardom.
A few film offers follow. In one meeting Yura has the opportunity to adapt an Inuit novel that will help teach white audiences; the other company is less up front with their well-meaning racism, claiming they want to platform Yura’s personal story — just it has to have genre hook. But really, it’s her story they assure her. As she frantically attempts to write an outline based on a traumatic story from her childhood, her estranged friend Sesi (Zorga Qaunaq) re-enters her life, and soon the truth about their shared past comes back to haunt her.
Yura has no qualms about commodifying her culture for the great good, when she’s the only Native artist in the room. However, as soon as Sesi enters the picture, not only does Yura begin to question her own “Inuit-ness,” she begins to spiral about her talent as an artist as well. Like Yura’s VR piece, Innuksuk uses immersive sound design to bring the audience into her psychosis. As Yura’s self-doubt grows, it also manifests as rashes on her skin, showing for the whole world her insecurities.
Qaunaq is deeply ominous as Sesi, while also being wonderfully mordant. As the tides turn on Yura and Sesi’s strange behavior begins to make more sense, both actresses manage to ground the more melodramatic elements of the plot in sincere emotionality. Innuksuk’s razor sharp satire bites not only into the white guilt ridden art and film world that’s more than ready to exploit Indigenous pain for profit, but also those Indigenous artists who are willing to sell their pain – and the pain of their communities – to the highest bidder in the name of speaking “the truth.”
In Irene Dionisio’s dizzying drama “Idda,” two women reconnect in their hometown of Catania in Sicily during the festival of Festival of Saint Agatha with plans to climb to the top of Mount Etna. Idda, we learn, is the feminine name given by the locals to the active volcano. Adele (Tecla Insolia) is a photographer, whose mother passed away a few years ago. Sofia (Romana Maggiora Vergano) is a dance teacher and free spirit. As these two women crash back into each other’s lives, Dionisio continually flashes to the volcano, its grey ash and red molten lava, destroying in its beautiful path. Cinematographer Gergely Pohárnok brings a rich and tactile texture to this world, while the film’s sound design wholly transports the viewer into the realm of the mountain.
As the women make their way up the mountain, a strange resentment bubbles between them. Dionisio allows this fissure to rumble without quite exploding for most of the film, much like the mountain itself. It’s alive, but under the surface. And while the final reveal at the end of the film doesn’t quite work, the film’s immersive world almost makes up for the distance we’re kept from these characters. Dionisio also does a wonderful job of bringing the local festival back to its pagan roots, contrasting the procession of the candalora of Saint Agatha to an altar up on the mountain for the nymph Aetna, who is said to have carried her child to term on the volcano’s peak.
Time, like the volcano’s ash, will come for everyone and everything, even if you’re able to capture a moment of it with a photograph. As the film progresses, Adele must learn to live with the ghosts of her past, and feel the warmth of the memories that remain, because even the painful ones remind us of what once was, and what still remains.
Sometimes at a festival like TIFF you discover a bold new voice with a distinct point of view or singular cinematic vision. Other times you watch a first time director and wonder if they’re even a storyteller, let alone a filmmaker. Unfortunately Alexandra Pechman’s debut film “Magazine” falls in the latter category. Set in 2011, the film follows Arizona transplant and wannabe poet Nora (Lily McInerny, whose wide eyes aren’t enough to add texture or internality to the hollowness of her character) during her stint as an unpaid summer intern at Platen, a fictional prestigious quarterly lit journal a la The Paris Review or Granta.
Early on she makes it clear she does not come from money, unlike it’s implied most of the young people who are able to live and work in NYC unpaid are. However, the economic disparity of Nora’s situation with her peers and the way this system weeds out working class youth is not really touched on again beyond a broadly stereotyped “writer actress model” rich girl who can’t utter a word without dropping the name of a famous person. Nora quickly finds herself in a situationship with Thomas (Joshuah Melnick), the associate editor who hired her, the power dynamics of which are only briefly addressed towards the end of the film. Delaney Rowe, who terminally online folks might know from her satirical rom com videos, has a cameo as the managing editor of the mag that proves just because you can make people laugh for 60 seconds online does not mean who can actually act
There are also brief moments within this literary milieu that aim for satire by falling embarrassingly short of the mark. For a character who claims to want to be a writer, we barely get a hint at what Noa has to say or worse why she even wants to be a poet. If the film had even vaguely hinted that it was about how at twenty-two you still need to find your voice, that would have been cliche, but at least it would have been some kind of arc. Instead we get a whole lot of nothing. All the characters are either painted in the broadest strokes, or left completely undeveloped; never once did I care about the emotional stakes of any of these characters.
Along with the poor writing, Pechman’s filmmaking itself leaves much to be desired. The dramatic tension is inert, leaning heavily on montage and soundtrack to move things forward. The sound edits are incompetent, with most songs ending abruptly, without any editorial thrust as to why. Ultimately, it’s a New York movie that makes New York seem incredibly insular and boring. It’s a film that is perhaps so specific it never manages to strike on any universal feeling nor find any kind of wisdom or truth. As for its period setting, if you’re nostalgic for your BlackBerry or Peter Pan collars, maybe that would elicit an emotion beyond boredom. Alas, I mostly just felt relief. . .when the film finally ended.
- TIFF 2026: River, Stuffed, The Housewife (September 12, 2026)
Sometimes themes emerge at festivals. Sometimes dispatches like this are merely about what played on the same day, location, or, in this case, both. While Sian Heder’s “Being Heumann” took the coveted spot of Opening Night at the Princess of Wales Theatre, three remarkably different films unfolded across the evening, just down the street at the Royal Alexandra. A horror film, morbid musical, and period drama filled the theatre for three movies in a row, and yours truly was there to report back. Sadly, only one truly made the impact it intended.
What if Leatherface could swim? This was the thought that possibly inspired Joshua Giuliano’s grisly debut, “River,” an IFC effort that should find a blood-loving audience outside of the fest circuit. Two modern-day scream queens in Jane Levy (“Evil Dead”) and Jessica Rothe (“Happy Death Day”) give their fearless, physical all, but the real star here is the sound design and remarkable POV choices that announce newcomer Giuliano as a major genre talent to watch. A lot of the buzz on the ground at TIFF this year has been the question of what could be this fest’s “Obsession”—the Curry Barker film premiered here almost exactly a year ago. “River” is too brutal to make that kinda bank, but it’s the kind of movie that horror fans will truly jump for, something they’ll tell their friends they need to see to believe.
“River” opens with one of its most remarkable scenes. As the camera slowly pans over an empty car with an open trunk, we hear the action that took place before the images on the screen. A couple talks, flirts, listens to music, and then notices someone watching them from the woods. Giuliano and his excellent cinematographer pan across the car from different angles as the sounds of violence fill the soundtrack, sometimes ending on something disturbing like a bloody dent in the car or a human leg. It’s a neat trick, but it’s also an overture to a film that will play with sound and POV in ways that horror often never considers.
The real action of “River” starts with the introduction of tough Lucy (Levy), gentle brother Drew (Max Mattern), and their virtually estranged sister Carla (Rothe). She’s come home after the death of their father, but don’t worry, this isn’t overtly “grief horror,” even if the different relationships these three had with dad feel like they influence their choices as they try to survive the worst night of their lives.
The trio heads out early with dad’s ashes to spread them on his favorite spot on the local river, just past a rickety bridge. After the ceremony, they discover their gas line has ruptured and they’re stuck. Carla swims to shore, but they spot a bloody, shirtless, masked figure before she gets there. From that point on, “River” is relentless, a slasher movie that somehow turns the open space of a river into someplace claustrophobic. You have no gas in your boat, and the shore contains its version of Michael Myers. What the F do you do? It’s the starting point for an insanely brutal journey, one that puts Levy through the wringer nearly as much as “Evil Dead,” and reminds viewers how remarkably physical she can be as a performer.
Levy and Rothe are fantastic, but it’s Giuliano’s use of space and sound that truly elevate “River” above your standard slasher flick. One game he loves to rewardingly play is to have his characters see something before we do—we watch their terrified expression, taking a beat in our own minds to imagine what they could possibly be seeing, before the camera reveals it. It’s remarkably effective, and it’s joined by some of the best genre sound design in years. This movie crunches and breaks in a manner that’s reminiscent of the IFC hit “In a Violent Nature.” With only a few tweaks it could actually have been a sequel to that movie in how it also presents an unkillable force of unimaginable violence through sound design and brutality.
“River” won’t be for everyone—it’s insanely violent—but those who like a slasher pic that isn’t afraid to slash will find so much to admire in a film that doesn’t just play like homage to the ‘70s and ‘80s era when slashers ruled but updates the aesthetics and structure of those films for a new era. The synopsis at TIFF references John Carpenter, which often feels like the kind of standard that does a midnight movie no favors because so few can live up to it. The best compliment I can pay this one is that I think John will dig it.
Theo Rhys’ “Stuffed” should be like shooting roadkill in a barrel for this fan of not just musical theater but morbid humor. Clearly inspired by dark musicals like Sweeney Todd and even Little Shop of Horrors, “Stuffed” is a unique love story with a slowing pulse, a movie about how we all long to be remembered, to do something extraordinary with our ordinary lives. Sadly, despite its captivating concept and influences, along with two committed leads, it’s a misfire, a movie that feels incredibly long at nearly two hours, and one that wastes its performances on characters on a story that never gets under your skin.
Harry Melling continues to impress as Bernie, an ordinary guy who works at the local sandwich factory and cares for a dementia-addled mother. He has absolutely nothing going for him, and he’ll have even less when mom dies. The aesthetic of Bernie’s life reminded me of several Tim Burton characters: oddballs who do their little best to rebel against a world of conformity. What can Bernie possibly do to find his purpose?
When he answers an ad in the paper via a website, he crosses paths with Araminta (Jodie Comer), an equally quirky soul with a morbid hobby. Araminta is a taxidermist, someone who brings home roadkill, skins it, and adds it to her house of silent, unmoving animal friends. She’s waiting on the ultimate prize: A human being. She convinces Bernie that the most extraordinary thing he could do is to live forever in her stuffed menagerie. As they both plan his death, doing things like fake his suicide, they get closer, leading to the question of if, through planning the goodbye for something with nothing, they’ve given him something to live for: Love.
All of this is set to original songs, most of them of the Les Mis sung-dialogue type. Rhys stays close on his talented performers, which allows them to emote through song, but leads to a shockingly flat film visually. There are two numbers with significant choreography—one in the factory with Bernie and another alongside his burning car—and they are easily the standout sequences in the film. I kept wanting the camera to pull back on these performers, to give them a chance to act with their bodies as much as their faces and voices. It leads to a movie that’s remarkably repetitive visually, while also spinning its wheels narratively for way too long. “Stuffed” needed another twist, character, or arc to justify its length. As is, it just feels too hollow.
Finally, there’s the disappointing “The Housewife,” a film that sadly fails a test of a fictional take on a true story in that a documentary about this subject would almost certainly be significantly more interesting. The biggest problem is that director Ben Shirinian never finds a visual language for this period drama, shooting it like a TV movie instead of a theatrical feature. Naomi Watts does her absolute best, but she gets lost in a character that screenwriter Alyssa Hill never quite figured out. On the one hand, Hermine Braunsteiner would be difficult for anyone to unpack, but Shirinian is too content to keep her as a mystery for the first half of the film and an unspeakable villain for the second. The result is a movie that has no real identity, not in character, visual, or theme.
Watts plays Hermine Ryan, a New York woman in Queens in the ‘60s. She’s the pillar of her community, admired by her neighbors and loved by her husband Russell (Luke Evans). When the New York Times gets a tip from Elie Wiesenthal that the Ryan house is hiding a Nazi right in a New York City borough, writer Joseph Lelyveld (Tye Sheridan) goes to the house to talk to Russell, falling for Hermine’s warmth and excellent oatmeal raisin cookies. Of course, it’s barely a spoiler to reveal that it’s not Russell that the Times, and eventually the U.S. Government (personified here by an immigration officer played by Michael Imperioli), should worry about: It’s “The Mare,” a female guard at Majdanek given that name because of how much she liked to kick prisoners. She was the first Nazi extradited from the United States, accused of collaborating in the murders of over 1,000 people.
Watts is most interesting in scenes in which she allows The Mare to sneak through the façade that she has created as a perfect immigrant wife. At first, she totally denies the charges, but Watts allows us to peek at the evil barely concealed underneath. Despite how the screenplay forces her to play aspects of Hermine that feel tailored to the movie more than real, Watts makes choices that shine through.
There’s not much to praise about the rest. It’s one of those historical dramas that means well, one that thinks the power of the true story will do the heavy lifting, but questions like what this narrative means in 2026 or how to make it visually engaging were never asked. The idea that a child-murdering Nazi could become a beloved Queens housewife is a fascinating one. But a movie needs to be more than just an idea.
