- Fantastic Fest 2026: Pathetic Fallacy, Upiro, Kick On, What Happened to Doris? (September 24, 2026)
Our final dispatch from this year’s Fantastic Fest is indicative of the remarkable range of the programming at the world’s best genre event: There’s a Spanish vampire movie, an Australian thriller, an American ghost story, and something almost indescribably built on dream logic. Three of them are worth a look when they get international release.
Let’s start with the best of the bunch, Adam Egypt Mortimer’s truly demented “Pathetic Fallacy,” a film inspired by the surreal horror visions of filmmakers like Nicolas Roeg, David Lynch, and Nicolas Winding Refn. It’s a work that defies explainer culture, unfolding like a nightmare one has while in the throes of unfathomable grief. Like “Lost Highway” or “Twin Peaks: The Return,” it doesn’t need to make practical sense as much as emotional sense, which allows Mortimer to craft a wildly unpredictable vision, one that’s set to new music by Johnny Jewel and star Scott Mescudi (aka Kid Cudi). To say that “Pathetic Fallacy” was like nothing else at Fantastic Fest would be an understatement. It’s like nothing else anywhere.
Cudi plays Asher, who has a meet-cute, romance, and tragedy in the first ten minutes of the film. The object of his affection is Iris (Jessica Rothe, in her third Fantastic Fest flick just this year), and her passing destroys Asher. Mortimer holds a scene in which she dies in Asher’s embrace a remarkably long time, her breathing getting shallower over about a full two minutes, one of the first signs that this is a filmmaker who isn’t scared to do things a little differently.
Before you know it, Asher has traveled to a mystical place known as Mount Samdi, a location that reportedly exists in between reality and fantasy, life and death. Mortimer takes him on an almost mythological journey, encountering monsters (like a serial killer played by Travis Fimmel), and even talking animals, including a spider voiced by Natasha Lyonne. Editor Vera Drew (“The People’s Joker”) spoke in the Q&A about likening Asher’s quest to that of a Disney character, except for the axe murders and nudity, of course. But talking rodents and people breaking into song? Very Disney.
“Pathetic Fallacy” is so brazenly original that its missteps are easily forgiven. It’s the kind of work that likely plays differently to its creator than its viewer, and that personal aspect can sometimes be distancing, resulting in a fantasy that’s going to be too weird for many. But sometimes art, especially genre art like the kind at Fantastic Fest, should be weird. It should be hard to unpack and predict and even explain to someone else in words. Like Lynch, Mortimer doesn’t hold your hand, challenging you to meet his undeniable vision halfway. It’s worth the effort.
More traditional chills unfold in the Spanish vampire thriller “Upiro,” a well-crafted piece of Gothic Horror reportedly based on an actual case recognized by the Catholic Church as vampirism. Writer Elena Munoz and director Oscar Martin use this story to unpack a film that’s also about gender roles in religion and the Age of Enlightenment. This moody film cleverly plays with issues of sexuality within the vampire myth, one that has been used to “explain” female desire for generations, but given a new, captivating twist here. In a Fantastic Fest of big names (Jessica Rothe times three!) and premieres from other fests (“Primetime,” “Victorian Psycho”), this was one of most-buzzed under-the-radar flicks.
Pauline Brisy is excellent as Ana, a novitiate at an isolated monastery in Spain in 1775. Her arrival seems to unearth something from the clay in this building, something seen watching the nuns from a malevolent POV, and eventually doing its bloodsucking under the cover of night. Martin films scenes of nuns being awoken in close-ups of their faces, a sucking sound coming from off camera as they convey something between pleasure and pain. One could read the scene as something the opposite of violent as Martin plays with the idea of a supernatural creature that leads to sexual awakening as much as immortal life.
This idea is taken even further when a Franciscan priest named Father Rubis (Diego Anido) comes to the monastery to figure out the root of the blood disease impacting these young women, and Ana, well, has an eye on him. Brisy, Anido, and others disappear into the fabric of this piece, one that feels truly transportive to a different time and place, an aesthetic enabled by top-notch production design and cinematography from Alberto Morago. “Upiro” sometimes feels a little longer than it should, but it reaches an unexpected final act with one terrifying reveal that stands among the best in the vampire genre in years.
Nick Kozakis’s “Kick On” made the double dip from TIFF’s Midnight Madness to Fantastic Fest, and it’s easy to see why it appealed to both programming teams. Early in the film, Kozakis actually has someone yell “Don’t do something stupid!” as a bar fight breaks out. This is a film about people “doing something stupid” over and over again to the point that most of them are dead.
The best way to describe it is if the Alfred Molina scene in “Boogie Nights” merged with the plot of “Green Room,” and all of it was bathed in intense, bloody make-up work. It’s one of those tense thrillers in which you wait to see exactly how it’s going to erupt into chaos, and Kozakis doesn’t hold back once it does, giving genre fans exactly what they want from a movie like this one. Some will argue that these characters are illogically stupid, but genre fans accept that kind of set-up when the pay-off is this viciously entertaining.
Like “Green Room,” the set-up is wonderfully simple: Four young people get booted from a bar and want to “kick on” to another party. These attractive Aussies find themselves in the lair of a Russian mobster named Ray (Nikolas Nikolaeff), an obvious lunatic who insists that they party with him instead of just buying their drugs and heading off into the night. Kozakis and his team put a lot of effort into designing and populating Ray’s space, as it’s pretty much the entire setting of the film. And, to the film’s benefit, they even drop in a few interesting characters around Ray, guys who will end more than mere soldiers for the bad guy.
The good guys are led by Eden (Markella Kavenagh), who makes the final dumb decision when she decides to steal some cash from the obviously unhinged Ray. Before you know it, Eden and her buddies are being beaten, attacked, and held prisoner for around 90 minutes.
Admittedly, Kozakis’s film turns into an exercise in style—we know almost nothing about anyone but Eden, who has a dying sister for whom she needs the cash, and Ray’s insecure role as the son of a famous crime lord—but it’s impressively rendered style, nonetheless. Yes, Saulnier’s obvious inspiration was better at finding ways to embed character beats into the non-stop action, but this movie has a slightly different goal—it’s far bloodier, playing almost like an “Evil Dead” movie in its bodily harm. It’s imperfect but also never boring, the kind of flick that works as well at midnight in Toronto as it does in Texas.
Sadly, there are large passages of “What Happened to Doris?” that qualify as boring, and it doesn’t really play well any time or any place. Nick Simon retells the story of Doris Bither, the reportedly true haunting that inspired “The Entity” over four decades ago, but he does so with too little veracity or personality, leading to a film that feels like little more than a “Conjuring” rip-off, and one that strands poor Heather Graham with direction that can’t get to a character that feels genuine. It may be a famous case, but it’s not a successful film.
Graham plays Bither, a single mother in Culver City who reported to experts at UCLA that she was being so aggressively haunted by a poltergeist that she claimed she had been sexually assaulted by one, and had the bruises on her body to prove it. Before you know it, a “Conjuring”-esque team of investigators are in the Bither apartment, including characters played by Marcus Coloma, Morgan Peter Brown, and Mimi Rogers, who is wasted in a part that’s basically just there to explain what might happening to Doris. She’s the answer to the title.
To be blunt, nothing in “What Happened to Doris?” feels like anything but actors on a set. There just hasn’t been enough effort put into the details to give it any texture, which means the scares and characters have no impact. Reading the Wikipedia page about the actual haunting is actually scarier.
- Netflix’s Reboot of “A Different World” Needs to Let Go of the Past (September 24, 2026)
“A Different World,” the Netflix reboot of the sitcom about life at the fictional Hillman College, spends too much time trying to be two things at once.
Like so many reboots, this version practically breaks a sweat attempting to appeal to the nostalgia surrounding the original, which aired on NBC from 1987 to 1993. Multiple characters from the first “Different World” return, most notably Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison) and Whitley Gilbert (Jasmine Guy), married Hillman alums who are recurring regulars in the Netflix iteration. References to specific episodes and moments abound. (Yes, Dwayne’s famous “Baby, please!” from the season five finale is mentioned more than once.) The same key spots on the Hillman campus, including Gilbert Hall, the women’s dorm named after Whitley’s wealthy family, and the Pit, the school cafeteria, remain central backdrops. The theme song is even the same, although it gets a soulful, slow, jammier spin via a performance by Brandy,
But this new “A Different World,” created by Felicia Pride, whose credits include “Queen Sugar” and “Bel-Air,” also wants to be its own distinct, contemporary thing. So what was once a traditional, three-camera sitcom is now a single-cam dramedy. The primary stars of the show are a bunch of young, impossibly attractive college students, some of whom have direct connections to figures from the first series. While its predecessor addressed the social issues of its time, including the HIV/AIDS crisis and the Rodney King verdict, this “Different World” seeks to do the same in 2026. One episode raises concerns about ICE; frustrations over the lack of federal funding for historically black colleges and universities like Hillman run throughout.
A Different World – Season 1. (L to R) Jordan Aaron Hall as Amir, Cornell Young IV as Shaquille, Chibuikem Uche as Kojo, Dasan Frazier as Xavier in Episode 108 of A Different World. Cr. ELI JOSHUA ADE/Netflix © 2026
Essentially, Pride and her team are trying to lay the outline of a new “Different World” on top of the first’s framework and hoping all the lines and edges sync up perfectly. But they don’t, quite, especially in the first half of the season. Like a college freshman, “A Different World” needs a semester—read: five episodes—to start to figure out its own identity. By the end of that first year, aka season one, it starts to gain more confidence. (Wondering where I learned to layer so many analogies into a single paragraph? That’s right: college!)
While Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet) was initially the main character starting college in the first “A Different World,” a spin-off of “The Cosby Show,” the protagonist this time is Deborah—pronounced with an emphasis on the “bor”—Wayne, daughter of Whitley and Dwayne. Played with low-key defiance by Tony Award winner Maleah Joi Moon, Deborah is financially privileged but academically challenged. Her family connections have guaranteed her a place at Hillman, coincidentally alongside her ex-boyfriend, Shaquille Johnson (Cornell Young IV), the school’s star quarterback and son of Dwayne’s BFF Ron Johnson (Darryl M. Bell), who also acts as his son’s overbearing manager.
Deborah and Shaquille are both entitled in certain ways. After skipping all of summer practice, Shaquille rolls up on campus in a sports car and expects to be able to start in the first game of the football season—his coach, played by Method Man, has some other ideas—while Deborah spouts off about her connections and maxes out her parents’ credit card. But the students who become part of their shared social circle don’t all come from cushy backgrounds. Deborah’s studious roommate Rashida (a charming and spirited Alijah Kai) is a Compton, California native who works at the Pit to put herself through school, while Andre (Jordan Aaron Hall) is attempting to get his life back on track after spending some time in juvie. Andre is also gay, a fact that his friends and the show treat with appropriate nonchalance.
The romantic entanglements of the main college-aged characters and, to a lesser extent, the adults, become more and more of a focus as the episodes progress, to the point where “A Different World” feels less like a coming-of-age comedy and more like a lightly steamy primetime soap. This might be less of a problem if the show didn’t constantly feel compelled to remind us of its roots by having figures from the original waltz into their kids’ dorm rooms or show up for campus events.
A Different World – Season 1. (L to R) Kadeem Hardison as Dwayne in Episode 105 of a Different World. Cr. Quantrell Colbert/Netflix © 2026
It makes sense that Whitley and Dwayne, separated and grappling with whether to divorce, are so front and center in Deborah’s life. Dwayne works at Hillman as the university’s provost and, later in the season, in a more prominent position, while Whitley proves to be the helicopter mom you always knew she would become if she ever had kids. (Perhaps because their relationship is so fraught, the chemistry between Guy and Hardison feels more forced than it should.)
But the parade of cameo appearances—there’s Jaleesa (Dawnn Lewis)! And Kimberly (Charnele Brown)! And Charmaine (Karen Malina White)! And Gina (Ajai Sanders)! And others that Netflix would prefer I not mention for spoiler reasons!—comes across mostly as fan service. To be clear: many “A Different World” fans will probably appreciate that service, which can be fun at times. But it also smacks of the dutiful.
Even though the NBC series sprang from “The Cosby Show,” it became a groundbreaking success in its own right as the first mainstream series to show what life looks like at an HBCU. It deserves to be remembered fondly and held up as a significant piece of television that paved the way for more recent depictions of college life like “grown-ish,” “Dear White People,” and “The Sex Lives of College Girls.” But too often, this “A Different World” feels so beholden to where it came from that it can’t quite break any new ground of its own.
All 10 episodes of season one were screened in advance for critics.
- The Death of Civic Space: John Wilson on “The History of Concrete” (September 24, 2026)
“It’s embarrassing to know so little about something that occupies so much of your visual environment.” A little over ten minutes into his film, “The History of Concrete,” director John Wilson shares these words in praise of that very material that so many of us trample on without thinking twice. His project offers that second look, a reminder that there’s no better way to move through the world than to be guided by curiosity, bolstered by the hope that stories can be found in the most unlikely places.
Wilson operates from a place of disarming honesty and, at the start of his film, admits that the success he got from the comedy docu-series “How To with John Wilson,” like the blemishes of gum on the NYC pavement, isn’t without its blemishes. In the midst of a difficult search to find a worthy follow-up project, he attends a workshop on how to write a Hallmark movie.
After watching one film called “’Twas the Date Before Christmas,” which tried to “fit a romance inside of a topic as unromantic as affordable housing,” he decides to pair the tried and true tactics of Hallmark movies with a subject that might test the limits of their effectiveness: making a project about concrete.
As is par for the course for Wilson’s projects, his work starts as one thing and quickly finds itself off the beaten path, touching on everything from the unique grieving rituals (key words: “tattooed flesh embalming”), the terrifying infrastructures (the BQE bridge) that we have made peace living with, and ultimately, about the things in life that will last and what’s worth patching up.
For Wilson, the film continues his commitment to finding interesting stories rooted in things most people would often overlook (or, in the case of concrete, just step over). “I’m a maximalist in a lot of ways, and I think being curious makes you less bored,” he shared.
As “The History of Concrete” expands, RogerEbert.com spoke with him about humanity’s penchant for creating new grieving rituals, the virtue of curiosity, and the discernment process behind a project like this, with so many footage options to choose from.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You port over your same “don’t show the host, only play the voice,” tactic from “How To with John Wilson.” Tell me more about your approach to narration, since when you’re recording your words, they’re divorced from where you were when you filmed the footage.
John Wilson: It can be quite fickle and dependent on mood. It’s very much a Jacob’s ladder type of process. In the case of something like my show, I usually start with a title, then try to shoot a few things relevant to the title itself.
So with something like “The History of Concrete,” I wanted to “get all the vegetables” out of the way, so to speak, which is why I included a couple of students who knew the difference between cement and concrete and could explain it. As I’m shooting, certain things will either happen to me in real life or will enter me emotionally, and I will need to write that into the script. I will look at all the footage and write a script on top of it so I’m constantly editing, writing, and shooting at the same time.
I’m wondering about how you choose to match footage with your words because the ways in which what we see on-screen contradicts what’s spoken–and when they align–are fascinating to take note of. The scene where you talk about the poor foundations of buildings like your gym is “making people really upset because the city doesn’t seem to acknowledge the problem.” You intersperse that with a humorous video of someone mollywopping an exercise ball.
That’s an example where it helps to have something as uniquely specific as that visual to build around. I started with this desire to use the shot of the gym flooding, then I was thinking, “Okay, what else do I have from this environment?” That is kind of the template I use for the sequences you see in the film going forward: I have a kernel of an idea, and then I try to either find something I already have or shoot something new that adds a punchline. I try to use the rule of threes when I can when writing certain sequences, but you don’t always need a punchline at the same time.
On that note of discernment, you talked about how, when making a feature, there are no time constraints apart from “consideration for the audience.” With your show, you were constrained by the straitjacket of twenty-eight minutes, but what guides you and editor Cori Wapnowska’s process when you have a cornucopia of footage to work with?
That first cut is really messy and has everything in it, and when I’m looking at what I’ve assembled, I am able to see the whole picture, where the actual emotional turns are and what the plot is. That version of the film also helps me determine which strong sequences, in isolation, I can build the film around and what can support the crescendo to those moments.
I try not to have any redundant revelations or ideas in the film. The temptation can be to double up, but I try to hold fast to that. If I repeat any beats, I want to reveal slightly different information in whatever comes next. For the most part, even if an interview feels like a non-sequitur, it needs to rhyme with something else in the film, or its inclusion needs to strengthen the film thematically by reinforcing a particular metaphor.
For example, there’s that sequence where I document a military exercise that takes place out of a high school at one point. You can take that as just an observation that I happened to tag on, but some of the intentionality there was to show how that fits in with this recurring theme of rule-following, our obsession with structure and order, and what it is about ourselves as a species that we feel a need to be told what to do.
Beyond those questions, one thing that felt like it unified “The History of Concrete” was your documentation of how people cannot help but use rituals to process grief and loss. It’s such a small part of the film, but I’m struck by that community that held a vigil for the fish that were killed when their pond was filled with concrete.
Yeah, I mean, we showcase Chef Boyardee’s grave here. I think death and fatality is a kind of recurring background theme in a lot of the work that I end up making. I think that there can be the death of a physical person, but I think there’s the death of civic space and these larger industries around us all the time, and we have different ceremonies for that. It feels like the new public ceremony is almost “protest for mourning.”
I feel like there are cultures that just kind of put you in a pine box, and it’s very unflashy, but then you have this industry of tattoo preservation where it feels like you’re mummifying somebody. I like, I’m constantly debating in my own life whether or not I should be sad about something disappearing or if I should be trying to figure out ways emotionally to deal with the disappearance of something. Looking at the different ways that other cultures grieve is a big part of that education.
Doesn’t it feel overwhelming, though, to know how to properly lament when it feels like the scale of things we should mourn for outstrips our ability to comprehend what we might be losing?
Yes, but this movie is dealing with a thousand-year timeline. I’m trying to acknowledge humans as grains of sand in this endless, infinite time. I try not to zoom out too far just because I need to keep the point sharpened to a degree.
It makes me think, though: what does a thousand-year city look like? How are we to live our lives on Earth knowing that we only have so much time here? It seems like many people’s answer is to engage in cyclical behavior. Is that something market forces determine and force on us, or something we naturally do to get through existing? I wonder if there’s a better way.
It ties back to that line your subject mentions about the BQE’s crumbling infrastructure: “We’re aware of a flaw but are incapable of stopping it.”
But are we really incapable of stopping it? I ultimately try to contain myself within a timeline that I can mentally comprehend, but that yields its own interesting challenges. It’s funny, because I was talking to the people who were in the tattoo preservation business, and I asked a couple of people in different interviews that weren’t in the movie, essentially, “What do you plan to do with this [business] after you pass away?” There’s no plan for that.
It becomes this act of kicking the can of preservation and legacy just further down the road. think people tend to think within a hundred years of their life, usually, or maybe even less. I think that’s mostly what you can comprehend because when you start to think about 10,000 years from now, it’s just like, “Why am I doing anything?”
When I look at your projects and the way you deploy humor, you often use it as a kind of weapon to subvert the dynamics of who holds power. By highlighting the absurdity of our existence, your humor calls into question the aforementioned market forces that shape our lives. How do you feel this idea has expanded with a project like “The History of Concrete?”
I think about that all the time. I try to be right on the razor’s edge as often as I can of what’s okay and what’s not, because I think that’s where a lot of the best comedy and art lies. I think humor can be an instrument to speak truth to power, and if I’m punching, I always try to punch up. I think there are some obvious villains out in the world that everyone can usually laugh at, whether it’s a cop doing something funny or even just the mayor, no matter how popular the mayor is. I think it’s pretty timeless to have an antagonistic relationship with the mayor in certain ways for a lot of New Yorkers.
Landlords too, which, as you’re a landlord, speaks to your willingness to fall on the blade yourself.
Yeah; I occupy a complicated place within the city that I acknowledge, and I try to lacerate myself in equal measure to a lot of the people within capital “P” politics.
I’m speaking to you in the middle of TIFF, and there’s a film that premiered, “Babies,” where a character played by Seth Rogen critiques the ways we praise babies for being “curious” when the only reason they’re curious is that they don’t know anything.
(Laughs) Yeah, I can relate.
That connects in some ways to what I feel is the thematic spine of this project because you say this line. “Once you’re used to something, it becomes kind of hard to change your lifestyle without external pressure.” It’s so easy to move through the world, simply accepting things as they are, and we lose that childlike curiosity. What helps you stay curious?
I tend to try to just run in a direction that nobody else is running in. I feel like I can’t work fast enough a lot of the time. There are just so many interesting and funny things to comment on and to explore within human relationships, and humanity’s relationship with the environment. You can literally pick anything … you can throw a dart at a board of words and just pick one, and then that’s your new obsession. You can find a galaxy within any one of those things.
There are a lot of things I want to see fixed in the city. I think a lot of New Yorkers have a signature thing they gripe about, and it ends up consuming their lives. Making art about something you would like to see improved will never get old.
In so many ways, I think part of me feels like I accidentally made this movie, and other parts of me feel like it was always meant to happen. I think it’s surreal that we’re talking about it right now and that what I’ve crafted is in any condition to analyze. I’m a maximalist in a lot of ways, and I think being curious makes you less bored. It makes you actually understand your environment rather than just passively walking through it.
Waking up from the matrix can be frustrating, but it’s also cool because it connects you with other people. I don’t know; meeting the world with your curiosity renews your faith in humanity in a certain way and helps you engage in things that you weren’t engaged in before.
- TIFF 2026: A Canadian Critic Looks At This Year’s Fest (September 23, 2026)
The 51st Toronto International Film Festival has wrapped, the culmination of eleven days showcasing hundreds of films, with thousands of patrons experiencing some of the best (and worst) of world cinema in 2026. A half million people came down to King Street on the opening weekend as part of the festival’s activation, taking in food stalls, art installations, and simply wandering the area trying to capture the vibe of the event.
This year marks another major transition for the festival, with their market endeavour taking over the convention centre just south of the TIFF Lightbox central venue. With tens of millions in funding, this market is a direct attempt to not only compete with the likes of Cannes, Berlin, the AFM and other major players on the industry side, but also to maximize the incubation of future projects that when birthed at this festival may return as part of the programming slate.
Putting this part of the event together has been a major endeavour, and it seems to have directly affected the way that screenings operated both for press/industry badge holders and the public alike. The screening schedule, always requiring a delicate balancing act to ensure ease of operation for theatre staff as well as the ability to see as many titles as possible, has never been more egregiously prepared. Almost two dozen titles would be stacked at the same time with giant gaps later in the day, with the opening days more crammed than ever, further making it seem that TIFF is really an opening weekend-only festival in all but name, especially when it comes to the major titles that are garnering international attention.
That said, there’s still plenty to celebrate about what was showcased, and there were direct improvements after the debacles of the last few years. Avi Nesher returned to TIFF for the fifth time with “Our Loves,” and during my conversation with the filmmaker he talked at length about what it meant to showcase his film here in the city, as well as a genuine desire for these cinematic spaces to be open to voices of all kinds. Hanaël El Yousfi’s “Daughters of Abraham” deftly tackled cultural divides with this gorgeously realized drama. Similarly, the Canadian/Ukrainian production “The Betrayers” was a hidden gem, tackling moral complexity and human frailty in fascinating ways, all enwrapped in the thorniest of issues including the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, the lingering scars of Soviet-era injustice, and the sordid vagaries of the Israeli political system.
TIFF did manage to snag a slew of World Premieres that were worthy of celebration, including the People’s Choice Runner-Up “I Play Rocky”. An ebullient telling of the story of Sly Stallone’s breakout film anchored by an astonishing take by relative newcomer Anthony Ippolito, the film had audiences cheering. Peter Farrelly garnered a Best Picture Academy Award after debuting “Green Book” here back in 2018, and Toronto may well be another launching pad for more Oscar glory.
TIFF Opening Gala “Being Heumann” by “CODA” helmer Sian Heder got plenty of plaudits, as did Bassam Tariq “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” and its standout performance by Mahershala Ali. “Closing Night” didn’t get as much love as I think it deserved, and the exceptional performances by the ensemble led by Naomi Watts and Sarah Paulson provided one of this year’s highlights.
Yet it was the Cannes titles like “Club Kid,” and especially the People’s Choice Winner “La Bola Negra,” that found their true mojo here. Neither film took top prize in Cannes, but local audiences deeply embraced both films, with A24’s multi-million-dollar gamble proving to be a wise one with the former, and the latter establishing itself as a front runner from NEON for this year’s Best pic race.
Other exceptional Canadian debuts included the Telluride-premiering “Elsinore” and “Everest: The Other Side.” The Andrew Scott drama took the International People’s Choice Award (the juggling of math to move “La Bola Negra” to the main slate leaving this film to triumph), and I was enthralled by a Shakespeare film by people that actually read the play and deeply understood its meaning. “Everest,” meanwhile, may in fact trump the sublime “Free Solo” by the simple fact that Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s documentary finally asks the most profound questions: should this film itself exist, should these adventures continue, and is the cost of capturing these incredible images worth the human cost? Screened on the giant IMAX screen, this was one of those gloriously cinematic experiences with deeper philosophical undertones that one craves from such an event.
Another Telluride title, “The Debut,” was absolutely one of the best to play here, and audiences lapped it up. Jesse Eisenberg’s wonderful ode to artistry, with mid-film applause-generating takes by Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti, is heightened by the film’s most glorious element, the perfectly pitched score by the writer/director/producer/ensemble star himself. In a casual conversation with Eisenberg, we discussed the miraculous music from Christopher Guest’s “A Mighty Wind” as an influence, his glorious use of suspended chords on the eminently hummable tunes, and how easily the show-within-the-movie could open without changing a note on Broadway. I’m desperate for the soundtrack to be released on vinyl to join other masterworks that toe the fine line between clever and stupid such as “Walk the Line,” “Original Cast Album: Co-Op” and John Mulaney’s “The Snack Lunch Bunch.”
Documentaries are a highlight of any TIFF, and this year saw some absolute stunners. “Rescue,” tackling the migration crisis on the Mediterranean, is a stunner, and Sine Plambech’s gorgeously rendered and deeply nuanced take easily one of the best of the year. Doc winner “Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been” is a sympathetic and musically sublime portrait of this legendary figure, a more focussed dive into the artist’s life and career following the Oscar-winning success of Morgan Neville’s shatteringly excellent “20 Feet from Stardom”. “Re/pair” is a fascinating film about the need for hard conversations, while “Black Sunflowers” showcases the tumultuous changes within Ukrainian youth culture during a time of war.
“Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple” dives into the musicianship of the late-Rush drummer in exemplary ways through the use of some of his friends behind the kit, while Joss Crowley’s “Pretenders” doc manages to tease from the band’s mercurial lead singer nuggets from Chrissie Hynde’s past that will sate fans of this iconic band.
There was no work that had a bigger divide between the lackluster programme description and the resulting film than Michael Maxxis’ magnificent “Gail”. Tracing a tour run by a Yonkers-based superfan obsessed with Canuck alt-rockers Our Lady Peace, this exquisite rumination on the highs and lows of audience obsessions results in a highly specific yet profoundly universal film that’s simultaneously hilarious and chilling. I dubbed it the “‘Grey Gardens’ of music docs,” and remain astonished about just how well it navigates the many pitfalls that stood in the way of its success.
Then there’s Matthew Rankin’s ribald, ridiculous, revelatory “Ladies and Gentlemen…Brian Mulroney.” The winner of the Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award, I had little faith this psychotronic political screed would work with the youths, many of whom were born well after the former Prime Minster held office, but I should have had more faith in this filmmaker’s brilliance. The mindbending fragmentation of actual historical elements merged into a handcrafted animated assault on the senses is as silly as its is sublime, yet again establishing the singular voice of this most remarkable of artists. Simply put, this film illustrates the greatness of my nation in all its nonsensical beauty and contradictions in way few works of art have ever been able to muster.
Changes made by the Academy have bolstered one section of TIFF to truly international importance, and that’s the juried Platform section. Meant to highlight films without distribution, since its inception the juried prize has already been an also-ran to the increasing number of People’s Choice winners. This year, however, TIFF joins the other members of the “Big 6” (Busan, Cannes, Sundance, Berlin, Venice) to have its prize mean automatic acceptance for any non-English winner to be eligible for Best International Feature consideration. For politically challenging films this is a boon, and this year’s winner, Theja Rio’s haunting “Angh,” set on the Indian/Burmese border, is the perfect example of a work that will greatly benefit from this bypassing of restrictive national nominating committees.
In terms of misfires, there were, of course, a few, but none compared to the vomitous “The Last Photographer” by Zack Snyder, truly one of the worst films I’ve seen showcased in such a major venue as I’ve experienced in three decades of attending this festival. My cry of “Apocalypse No!” resulted in the usual level of death threats and other nonsense on social media from the cultish fans of the filmmaker (one who I freely have championed in the past when deserved) yet I worry more that my describing just how abysmal the film is the more that certain filmgoers will masochistically seek it out rather than those receiving glowing praise above.
Time will tell if TIFF’s standing continues to slide as Venice, Telluride and a rising NYFF continue to drain some of its lustre. Its powerful role as the prime launching pad for the great films of the year has certainly abated, but there are still few events on the planet that come close to this range of cinematic expression gathered in one place open to the public to explore. The past few years have seen quite a few missteps, be they logistic or artistic, and that downward trend remains concerning. Yet there were still more than a few moments of pure joy to be experienced in 2026.
Toronto remains firmly in the conversation among the most important film showcases on the planet, and we can only hope that next year sees continued improvement, that the market mayhem is tamed, and that a redoubling of efforts is made to ensure that this storied festival continues to thrive well into its second half-century.
- TIFF 2026: The Assassin(s), Diary of a Mad Old Man, It’s My Time (September 23, 2026)
Fellow critic Cortlyn Kelly noted in her Gala Presentations dispatch an unexpected thematic arc of intergenerational, interpersonal conflict. The same could apply in to the three Gala films covered here: “The Assassin(s),” “Diary of an Old Man,” and “It’s My Time.” And yet there’s another narrative spine that connects them: these are projects that challenge our obsession with easy narratives, encouraging us not to be placated by the promise of easy answers. Sometimes, the bravest thing we can do is look at a tidy resolution and let our curiosity be the loose thread that unspools manufactured tidiness.
Director Hur Jin-ho delivered one of the best domestic thrillers of the past year with “A Normal Family,” and he applies the same skill of mining enjoyment from relational discord with his political thriller, “The Assassin(s).” It struggles to balance the sincerity of the story it’s trying to tell with its occasional slapstick elements, which can make it feel disjointed tonally. Still, this is a rivetingly told film about a part of Korean history that is deserving of the craft and care Hur and his collaborators have put forth. In clever and ironic fashion, by honing in on the localized elements of this story, it enables viewers to see its universal saliency: how this story about freedom of the press, the control of information by those in power, and the commitment to the truth are realities, struggles, and battles that we still have to contend with. More often than not, we’re living the histories we watch unfold on screen.
Even at over two hours, Hur wastes no time throwing viewers in the midst of the action. In 1974, South Korean prime minister Park Chung-hee narrowly survived an assassination attempt, but it led to the death of the first lady, Yuk Young-soo, and a young bystander. The security forces quickly capture and arrest Mun Se-gwang, a Korean Japanese man whose radical Maoist beliefs make him an easy scapegoat. But the more journalists in the Dong-sung Daily, such as Jae-hwan (Park Hae-il), and police detectives like Cheol-goo (Yoo Hai-jin), look closely at the situation, the more things do not add up. Six shots were fired while Mun’s pistol only carried five bullets; it is the type of discrepancy most might ignore for the sake of quick justice, but it is the journalists’ questioning that reveals a much larger conspiracy at hand.
It’s encouraging to see the vocation of journalism be framed with the reverence that it has in Hur’s film. It leads to some grandiloquent speeches, such as when editor Kim Jae-hwan impassionately says, “We also declare that the free press is the most fundamental social function to develop a free function, thus it should not be oppressed by any reason,” but in a world of muddled and mixed messaging, there is merit to stating your thesis so clearly. It is not all pontification though, as Hur delights in shifting the puzzle pieces into place for a grand reveal that feels both surprising and appointed all at once. The deeper the journalists dig, the more violent the opposition from those in power, which only bolsters their work. This creates a natural escalation of the film’s narrative, where Hur gets to flex his skills for directing close-quarters, period-accurate action scenes. Like the best journalistic story, he’s able to give us all the information we need while making the presentation of the narrative rousing and enthralling in its own right.
It might be easier to describe the freaky things that you do not see on screen in Wayne Wang’s “Diary of a Mad Old Man,” but do not mistake that as an admission that the film exists solely to titillate. While the film starts with a man, Utsugi (Lily Franky), masturbating and being unsuccessful at climaxing, and somewhere in between, he fantasizes about licking his daughter-in-law’s feet and having an eel inserted into him (not necessarily in that order), it uses its taboo exploration of sexuality to point at how society is ill-equipped for the reality that yes, the elderly have desires too. Based on Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel, Wang spins an intricate, challenging tale about what it means to still dream even when your body fails you, and that we push people towards an early grave the moment we put stipulations on what they can and cannot yearn for.
Seen through this lens, introducing viewers to Utsugi via a sequence of failed masturbation is a perfect encapsulation of the protagonist’s central struggle: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Right before his 69th (the entendres write themselves), Utsugi suffers a stroke that paralyzes his entire left side. The physical world seems to be closing in on him, limiting his options, and so Utsugi retreats to the only domain left: his mind. Indeed, there is nothing more terrifying than being trapped in a body you don’t recognize. His daughter-in-law, Susu (Fan Bingbing), stays behind to care for him while the rest of the family goes on vacation. He yearns for her, and for a while it seems that she returns his affections, although Wang keeps it ambiguous till a later reveal of whether their interactions are genuine or just filtered through Utsugi’s lust.
Curiously, the film I was left thinking about the most was Ti West’s “X,” which was part of a string of horror films that could chalk up their horrors to: “Isn’t it gross when old people want to have sex?” By framing the aging body as a creature of horror, it stigmatizes the idea that the elderly still have vibrant, pulsating desires. The film also challenges how society has propped up sexual experience and being desirable as being key to one’s identity. What does that mean for people like Utsugi, who is past his prime of desirability? Is he expected to simply not long for intimacy anymore? These questions do not justify the uncomfortable territory “Diary of an Old Man” steps into at times–after all, it is, at the end of the day, crudely reduced to a story of a man leering after his own daughter–in–law– but Wang’s warm lens and thoughtful framing of Utsugi are worth praising for taking a story that could have been just sickening and instead finding something touching and moving in all of its weirdness.
Director Bai Xue directs a different story on this similar idea of performing past one’s prime with her crowd-pleasing gem, “It’s My Time,” which is noteworthy purely for the fact that it finds a way to make solving Rubik’s cubes not only cinematic but exciting. It takes the straitjacket of a classic underdog sports story and applies it seriously to a supposedly stationary sport that reveals itself to be surprisingly kinetic. It helps to have a performer like Michelle Yeoh who commits wholeheartedly to the film’s premise and melodrama; you find yourself laughing with the characters and the drama that unfolds when a story like this could have easily served laughs by just poking fun at itself.
Xue knows that there are few more salient cinematic pleasures in life than seeing multi-generational protagonists fight and then make up, and she finds a worthy pairing to Yeoh in Liu Haoran. Haoran plays a former Rubik’s Cube champion who takes on a role as an instructor at a nursing home in order to pay off his debts. He tries to just coast, but his slacker pedagogy is quickly challenged by Yeoh’s Zhao Yanhong, an attendee who quickly proves herself to be a prodigy. The two strike up a partnership and Zhao prepares herself to compete for the World Cubing Championship.
As with any sports story, though, the sport is always secondary to what it unearths, and Zhao knows that her newfound enthusiasm for this sport is a way for her to not deal with her own interpersonal issues. It is easier to solve a problem where you know what the answer looks like even if the road to get there is windy. Xue finds ways to constantly make the actual solving of the cube feel dynamic, incorporating a mix of first-person POVs from the cube’s perspective and relying on quick editing to give a sense of urgency. The film is a powerful reminder that there’s never too late to start a new passion and that sometimes the most innocuous of hobbies can be an entrypoint for knowing ourselves better.
