- TIFF 2026: Julián, Sunburn, In Alaska (September 15, 2026)
It happens every year: Themes emerge from a film festival program that couldn’t be predicted going in, leading you to wonder what that says about how art engages with the real world that year. What does it say that these three films grapple, in very different ways, with youthful identity, and how the world can sometimes make it hard for kids and teens to find themselves?
It’s a scary world out there in 2026, and these films all, in their own way, offer an oasis from those fears through joyful animation, playful comedy, and an unexpected coming-of-age narrative. While the third film here misses some of its marks, the first two are absolute TIFF gems, the kind of movies that one hopes will have adoring fans when they leave the fest circuit.
The first of the pair is the latest from the geniuses at Cartoon Saloon (“Wolfwalkers”), the hand-drawn “Julián,” a movie that I’ve been telling people who ask what I’ve liked this year is “wonderful” because it’s truly the best word to describe this moving gem, one of the best animated films of 2026. Louise Bagnali adapts a slight children’s book by Jessica Love into a moving story of how aging can threaten to dull creativity, expression, and identity.
It’s a gorgeously rendered piece of art that hums with the specific vibrancy of its community while also exploring universally understood themes of family and dreams. Somewhat episodic and slight at first, “Julián” grows with its protagonist, capturing something familiar to anyone who remembers being told or shown that their childhood dreams were unrealistic. Seven-year-old Julián is so specifically himself but also speaks to the hopes of millions. He’s wonderful.
Julián wants to be a mermaid. It happens over a long summer with his abuela, who he barely knows but he’s forced to live with while his dad is away. At first, culture and age clashes lead to frustration, such as when Julian’s grandmother’s Afro-Caribbean cuisine doesn’t exactly vibe with the boy’s palate, but Bagnali pulls magic out of these moments, sometimes quite literally, such as when a sun that Julian has drawn in crayon comes to life and flits about the room. Is it Julian’s imagination? Magic? What’s the difference? The sprite known as Luna becomes Julian’s ally, a friend in a scary new place.
As for human beings, Julián befriends three local girls and becomes somewhat obsessed with their style, trying to grow his hair long and join them as a mermaid in a Brooklyn parade. Both Julián’s grandmother and abuela’s friends question the gender role for Julián, forcing him to cut his hair and act like a boy. Anyone who has been told their style, expression, or beliefs were too much will relate to Julián, a kid who just wants to have fun and be himself. We so often push that out of kids too early.
Julián’s creativity is mirrored in the film, which bursts with color and light in ways few animated films are allowed to (though it’s definitely a trend at Cartoon Saloon, a company that understands how to use form as much as the creative leaders at Studio Ghibli). The use of pinks and blues, the sunshine on the streets and in abuela’s apartment—everything shines but never in a way that detracts from the realism of this story. Bagnali threads the needle visually, marrying her protagonist’s creative mind to the world around him and reminding us how important it is to cherish both.
Serville Poblete’s “Sunburn” shares that blend of youthful exuberance, regional specificity, and charming characters. One of the bigger sleeper hits of TIFF 2026, it’s a buoyant gem, a movie inspired by hangout flicks like “Dazed and Confused” but with its own distinct, playful personality. The concept is simple yet engaging: On one of the hottest days of the summer, the power goes out in a Toronto apartment complex, forcing the young people outside to find some relief and something to do. We jump between characters in this brightly lit, colorful setting, falling in love with most of them thanks to Poblete’s incredible work with young performers, giving them confidence, backstory, and agency. This is a funny, sweet ensemble piece about some young people on the cusp of change while others are living for the moment.
If there are leads in this true tapestry piece, they are Shay (Joshua Obra) and Vince (Dashawn Blackwood), two teens becoming guys. They’re at that age when they can still be a little goofy and awkward, but also want to impress both girls and friends. I have three teenage boys—it’s rare to see that in-between space between childhood and adulthood so perfectly captured on film. There’s an age when a teenager is still kinda a kid but also moving toward being a man. And Shay and Vince are there: able to be goofy with the little ones in the complex, and serious with the older teens and twentysomethings.
“Sunburn” balances silly, nuanced comedy beats with conversations about what’s about to change. Again, trust this parent when I tell you that teenagers know when their youth is ending. And it’s funny to think about how a day without screens can send them reeling through their joyful present and into an unknown future.
It’s also a truly culturally vibrant film, with a cast of Jamaican, Filipino, and Guyanese performers, shot by Poblete and her team in the heat of a 100-degree day. It’s a movie with a pulse, which is so often lacking in our low-lit drama era, and it’s a movie that doesn’t just take the lives of young people seriously; it adores them.
Finally, there’s the more intense “In Alaska,” an Inuk-Canadian film directed by Jaap van Heusden and Vinnie Karetak. The teenage half is strong enough to overcome some drawbacks in the more procedural adult half of a thriller that plays better when it focuses on character and setting instead of plot. Shot in Canada’s northern wilderness, it’s a strikingly beautiful film at times, with the frozen tundra looking both terrifying and gorgeous. Leo Matthew Temela gives the kind of performance that should get a casting agent’s attention, but he’s on parallel tracks with Noomi Rapace, who often seems miscast and under-directed. Her involvement likely helped secure funding, but people will remember Temela’s half of the film.
In his debut role, Temela plays the deeply troubled Woody, a depressed Inuk teen who has attempted suicide numerous times. No one knows how to help him, and so you get the sense that they’ve given up. One day, he loads a rifle and heads out to a field, intending to end his life. When he can’t go through with it, he fires an errant shot that, believe it or not, hits the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, leading to a burst of oil that quickly pours millions of gallons of oil into the wild. Knowing this is a big problem, he takes off to find family who he can stay with in Nunavut, braving the deadly landscape as he tries both to hide from the authorities (led by Rapace) and find himself at the same time.
“In Alaska” is effective in its small beats: a character choice by Temela, a shot of the icy conditions, fluid editing. It’s less effective in the big picture, especially as Rapace’s half of the film drains some of the building energy from Temela’s. She’s not bad so much as unnecessary, even as the script tries to weave her mental health issues into Woody’s. In the end, “In Alaska” isn’t your average coming-of-age film, which makes it valuable; that, along with Temela’s brave work, is just enough.
- Venice 2026: The Biennale College (September 14, 2026)
This was my first year covering the Venice Film Festival for RogerEbert.com. It was also my first year participating in the Biennale College Panel, which convenes a small group of critics and historians at the Venice Film Festival to give notes on four features made by creative teams from different countries. The four are drawn from a larger group of proposed projects by filmmakers who all vied for the same top prize: a grant of $200,000 Euros (roughly $230,000 US) to shoot and finish a feature-length movie in about ten months, in time to premiere at the next festival.
The organizer and moderator for over thirty years is the great Peter Cowie, author of, by his own estimate, 35 books and editor of 100 more. He has written books on subjects drawn from many eras of film history, including biographies of Ingmar Bergman, John Ford, Louise Brooks, Joan Crawford, Akira Kurosawa, and Francis Coppola and surveys of cinema in Japan, Iceland, and Finland. It was an honor to get to know a man whose byline appears innumerable on my own bookshelves and has inspired me from my college days to the present, and whose wife Françoise is a delight. The panel included Stephanie Zacharek of Time, Chris Vognar of The Boston Globe (and RogerEbert.com), Finnish film scholar Sara Ehnholm Hielm, and former San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle.
It’s an honor for the directors of the final four movies to have been selected for Venice screenings at all, and a rare privilege for any filmmaker to get a greenlight to make something fast and cheap but with artistic control and a mandate to make it personal. From this writer’s perspective, it was a comparable honor to see new work by very different, as-yet-unknown filmmakers, who have long artistic journeys ahead of them but already demonstrate an exceptional sense of craft and a vision unlike any other’s.
“Moonfish” began its journey to the screen ten years ago, when a doctor misdiagnosed Brooklyn-based animator Daniel Zveriff’s benign arrhythmia for a potentially fatal heart condition. The two-week interval between thinking he was going to die and learning otherwise was marked by overwhelming fear, depression, and loneliness. Zvereff transferred his misery into this bespoke feature film, made for little money, but fueled by enough ambition to send a rocket into space.
In the future of “Moonfish,” all commerce and most of daily life are ruled by a handful of corporations that have divided all known planets and moons into real estate over which owners have total control. Teams of astronauts with mining skills extract lucrative minerals; they can spend months or years in space with no personal contact (except with their partner) and must perceive the universe beyond their capsule entirely through screens. They must meet their quotas, or the company will abandon them and leave them to die.
The story follows an unnamed astronaut (voiced by Morgan Spector) sent with his unnamed partner (Lucy Liu) to mine a distant asteroid. The hero’s partner dies in a spacecraft malfunction, leaving him to meet their quota while grieving the loss of a woman to whom he was very close (the movie doesn’t specify the exact nature of their relationship, but their chemistry confirms they were as close as two people can get). The setup might remind science fiction fans of both “Gravity” and “The Martian,” although it’s less extravagantly emotional than the former and lacks the disarming goofball charm of the latter.
But this is no copycat’s cut-and-paste job. In the manner of an Eastern European filmmaker from the Cold War era smuggling social criticism past state censors by wrapping it in metaphor, the film’s analogies for the challenges and injustices of modern life are plain to see, but only if you make a point of looking for them. The work stands on its own as a personal statement that becomes more emotionally involving as it goes along.
The monochrome visuals and 4×3 aspect ratio intensify the hero’s claustrophobic desperation, to the point where you may feel like you need a hit from an inhaler even if you’re not asthmatic. The biggest challenge facing this director moving forward is preventing the larger budgets he’s likely to get from suffocating the outlaw flame that burns so brightly in this first effort.
As the mythologically ripe title suggests, “Demeter in Exile” owes less to any feature that’s been widely released in recent years than the greatest hits of 20th century experimental cinema as selected by film history classrooms, including Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon,” Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” and Kenneth Anger’s “Eaux de Artifice.” Although it’s set in present-day Milan, it’s indebted to the ancient tale of Demeter and Persephone: the former, the goddess of the harvest, is stricken with sadness when her daughter suddenly disappears, not knowing that she was abducted to become the bride of Hades, ruler of the underworld.
The mother, Daria, is not a harvest goddess here, but a botanist who maintains a makeshift arboretum in her apartment in late summer, a time when many Milanese citizens have left town and those who remain feel stranded. (Notice a theme in these movies?) Lia, her daughter, serves as her devoted daily caretaker. The job is so emotionally and physically taxing that she feels as if she has no life of her own. But she suppresses the impulse to strike out on her own because it would feel uncaring and disloyal, instead channeling her frustrations into an art project that retells the myth of Demeter and Persephone.
First-time feature filmmaker Maria Giovanna Cicciari doesn’t follow that story exactly, however, treating it as loose inspiration and the origin point for a few echoes. There are no devilish abductions, but the pull of independent adult living does eventually turn into an equivalent of a seductive and dark force that could sever the daughter from the mother. She understands the value of restraint, and even when the movie seems about to land on a precise equivalent of the myth that inspired it, it pulls back at the last minute, leaving the viewer room to dream.
Another quasi-experimental narrative in the program is “Gu Shi,” by Amie Song, a young filmmaker who divides her time between China and the United States. As in the previous two films discussed here, the main characters go unnamed (what, if anything, could this indicate about the overall state of things?). And both the tale and its telling are at once heavily allegorical but unmoored enough from interpretive guideposts that the viewer can view things through their own prisms. (This Yankee imagines that if the point involves present-day China in any way, it’s self-preservation to keep things vague.)
The movie follows a family of four, identified as Mother, Father, Daughter, and Son. They’re traveling, perhaps migrating, from the ocean to a forest when their trip is interrupted by an accident that leaves the son confined to a bed. The family passes an undefined period of time by telling stories about the ocean, which are soothing and transportive but have the side effect of making the listeners forget. At the same time, the Daughter begins having a series of nightmares involving a girl in a green dress. As the movie progresses, our already limited ability to distinguish dreams and fantasies from reality shrinks, until the entire thing seems to be unfolding in a gentle fugue state, with sounds and music taking on eerie and unusual associations.
At times, “Gu Shi” strikes notes reminiscent of the 2005 art house hit “Tropical Malady,” which likewise treats a forest as a dreamspace, and presents sequences of events that felt less like stages in a narrative than lines from an incantation. But what is being conjured? “The Exterminating Angel,” mentioned in the preceding capsule, slides onto the mental viewscree again with its story of people trapped in a house, not because they’ve been imprisoned there by others but simply because, for their own mysterious reasons, they are unable to leave.
This is a slow, quiet movie. It requires patience and concentration from the audience to intuit or make meaning. But if you can free yourself of the usual expectations that audiences have been conditioned to bring into feature films, even ones that have no interest in meeting them, this is a rewarding experience, though more satisfying to discuss afterward.
“Tijuana, Todovia” is a bawdy comedy of the type that regularly played mainstream arthouses back in Pedro Almodovar and Gregg Araki’s golden era, but has been driven underground by a combination of homophobia, xenophobia, and an especially bland, dull anti-sex mindset.
It focuses on the relationship between two young queers in Tijuana, a chaotic horndog native named Chavo (producer-lead actor Humberto Busto of “Amores Perros”) and a Russian national named Maksim (Petr Filimonov) whose default expression is a bored, disdainful sneer better suited to an Oscar Wilde minor royal than a couch-surfer who doesn’t have two pesos to his name. Maksim fled his home country when his opposition to the Ukraine invasion made him an even bigger target than his queerness, and is at risk of deportation unless…
Well, let’s say the solution is a sitcom-ish way of kicking things off (even the characters seem to know this), but also a handy shortcut to the heart of a story about citizenship, love, sex, and the necessity of treating others decently even when you can’t stand them. This is the story of a couple unlikely to have ended up together through conventional means. The movie honors them by avoiding obvious jokes and sight gags, except when one could lead to a belly laugh, in which case it’s staged and played with gusto. The characters are so overflowing with life that even ones that appear in just a scene or two could be the stars of their own movie.
“Tijuana, Todovia” is written, edited, and directed by Gabriele Gonzalez Morales, whose director statement said the film was made to showcase the young, diverse, cosmopolitan Tijuana that the cast and crew know, which is a far cry from cinema’s usual representation, a dust-fogged hellhole where gringo frat boys lose their virginity and cops and drug dealers kill each other. The perspective here is that of an artist creating a comic fable from personal memories, which gives the movie a vivacious energy. It is also the fourth of the Venice student films to put a lonesome, rootless post-national existence at its center. And it has as much to say about technology’s effect on relationships as “Moonfish,” mainly by way of the characters’ incessant but narratively necessary cell phone usage.
It’s been said that the hardest thing to master in any form of storytelling is tone. Like other seriocomic filmmakers of recent decades who turned out to be artists of some significance (such as Wes Anderson, Jared Hess, and Boots Riley), Morales seems to have arrived not just with a tricky, arresting tone, but a unique rhythm as well. See a bored and immobile Maksim barely raising an eyebrow at those he considers stupid or pretentious, or Chavo going full Daffy Duck in situations that require a cool head, and the next time you encounter either of them, you’ll find yourself smiling even though they haven’t said anything yet.
- 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 (Noah Parker), 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.
