My mom mentioned something interesting the morning after we saw Blue Heron together for the second time. It was about a moment somewhere after the mid-point, just before Sophy Romvari’s film shifts into a different metaphysical space, before it all cracks. Young Sasha’s father is inside their home on Vancouver Island, camcorder in hand, recording his kids jumping on a trampoline, playing in the yard. “I thought it was longer,” she said. In the months since first seeing the movie at TIFF, my mom had often mentioned that moment in the film as the one that stuck with her most—it was big—and seeing it again, she was surprised to discover how small it really was. Memory is funny that way. Moments of personal importance grow and mutate and begin to colonize our memories until their outsized impact is matched only by the melodrama of the mind.

There is no melodrama in Blue Heron, though. Its memoiristic qualities, depicting in anecdotal scenes the emotional disintegration a family dealing with a troubled son, rest on an accumulation. Sasha’s brother Jeremy emerges as a tragic, sometimes scary sort of figure over the course of the film, whose defiant impulses build into real unease over what he might do next. He could do anything. Late in the film, it is mentioned that he once threatened to burn down the house with everyone in it. Yet again, in that description one might imagine melodrama, but the film maintains a distance, like a father recording is kids through a window, past trees and other objects. Almost every shot in the early section of the movie is peering past something, or through something, or perched at an odd omniscient angle, as though inhabiting the perspective of a nervous tourist attempting to capture an intimacy they can’t really touch. Through long lenses and a plethora of zooms—so documentary-like, and placing the film in conversation with everything from ‘70s American filmmaking to Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s The Curse—dissonance pervades. “Objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.”

Cinema and memory have always been closely linked. The ability to record a moment in time, by industrial, chemical means and optical illusion, neatly corresponds to the fixed and unfixed nature of the synapses in our brain. Real and material, yet elusive, ephemeral. To journey through memory is an act of reaching, of attempting to grasp. In Blue Heron, the camera is always reaching, surveying, trying to get close to a remembered truth, but never quite making it. This is the film’s tension, where even in idyllic scenes an unease peeks through. A day at the beach, the kids playing around, sometimes dancing up to the edge of safety in the water or on high rocks, the camera zooming in and out to find the details that make up memories, the foreground regularly broken by people and other things obscuring a clear view. It feels like Jaws minus the horror. The allusion may be unintentional, but Sophy shares Spielberg’s intuitive sense of cinematic language, in which the camera becomes an embodiment of viewpoint more than mere assemblage of well-manicured mise en scène.

The same is true of the editing in the film, which operates with the assuredness of basic visual connectivity and juxtaposition, but also a willingness to test the elasticity of time and space. Following the screening at the Fox Theatre, Sophy presented her staff pick for the month: M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. Not an obvious double-feature (unless you know Sophy’s die hard love for M Night), but watching the 2002 classic, the relationship to Blue Heron felt right. Two films, each about a family and a house. The spaces between characters explored within and around the spaces of the home, and the movement through those spaces as an intrinsic expression of time. It’s architectural filmmaking, and geographical. Blue Heron opens looking out from a high perch over a city and landscape, as though witnessing a neutral environment containing lives within it. The glimpses we get of those lives are brief, but jumping across time as only cinema can do enlivens them only further. Elisions carry weight, and when Sophy finally breaks time completely, those unseen spaces overwhelm.

In Signs, Mel Gibson plays an Episcopal priest who’s lost his faith after the horrible death of his wife. He no longer sees meaning in life. It’s all coincidence, which is to say, events carry no intrinsic value. No real emotional logic. But Signs is a religious film. Shyamalan imagines that coincidences are more than just coincidence. “Does God exist,” is a question the film cannot answer, but it makes the case for believing in the connective tissue of existence. That each thing affects the other just so, and we must only attune ourselves to the guidance of that faith. The priest’s late wife is a structuring absence, and the film is an attempt to understand that absence, to feel it, and to draw from it a means to move forward with the people we have left.

Sophy’s work has always been about moving forward, and in Blue Heron she confronts a similar absence. A lost sibling, and lost time. Largely set in the ‘90s, her evocation of the period is nostalgic, but in the Don Draper sense, “the pain from an old wound.” Its sun-kissed warmth is pervaded by mystery, longing, sadness, and decades of accumulated scarring. There are no answers in Blue Heron, only memories of what was, and a communion with the spirit of the past. When, late in the film, this communion is literalized, some greater epiphany dawns. In writing, and performance, and photography, and cutting Blue Heron opens a dialogue with the past that encompasses and overcomes the limits of language. Through a series of cuts, young Sasha witnesses her older self abscond with her brother, rescuing him for a few brief moments from the grips of time. Traipsing across rocks overlooking the sea, the two meet as human beings. Flesh and blood, able to speak to each other directly, almost jarringly so, unbound by any uncaring materiality. What’s lost is found. No longer mere remembrances of things past; time regained.

When I think about her, I think about history and I think about love. I think about her stories, and the cadence of her voice, and the sound of her smile, and I think about her personality, equal parts acidic and warm. When I was a newborn baby, my grandmother flew in from Israel to help my mom in those first months. I remember none of that, of course, except in memories handed down, but I always felt the closeness.

Both of my mother’s parents are gone now. Ari Shahar died in 2018. He was 90. This weekend, Eva Rachel Shahar followed him. She was also 90. Both were Holocaust survivors. My grandmother was born in Budapest in 1935. She was a child through the war, which of course shaped every fibre of her being, but hardly defined her. She grew up to be a determined woman, making an arduous journey through Europe, to Israel, establishing a life there with my grandfather, eventually welcoming my mother into their world. Soon after, they went to live for nearly a decade in Montreal, before returning to Israel to live as members of a kibbutz in the south with their four children. Through myriad more difficulties over the years, whether war, family drama, or illness, her love was felt strongly. Sometimes too strongly. She could hardly be described as an easy woman. She was complicated, and often difficult, but her love came through all the same. My grandmother had thirteen grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. Ninety years, and a profound legacy. I miss her.

475. That’s how many entries I logged on Letterboxd in 2025. 475 does not include the two films I’m planning on watching today, so I suppose that’ll make 477. So, 477 films. I can break it down further, like the fact that, according to Letterboxd, 401 of that 477 were feature films, as opposed to shorts. Then, if I account for all the rewatching I like to do, the number goes down to 360. So that’s 360 feature films I’ve watched at least once in 2025. Assuming, of course, that my tracking was consistent.

We can take this further, though. If I tabulate the number of new, 2025 feature releases that I saw this year, I land on 123. That’s 123 films from the year 2025 that I’ve seen. But that number’s not quite right, either, because it misses the films I saw at TIFF in 2024, which were only released this year. Then there are the movies I saw at TIFF this year, which will be 2026 films. At some point, I just give up. I saw a lot of movies. More than most normal people; fewer than some insane people I know and love. And much as people like to pretend otherwise, numbers don’t make a year. Not even a year in film.

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I am not a big list guy. I like reading them, but making them rarely feels right. The process is too arbitrary to matter, personally. This year, though, I found myself taking stock of what’s felt like an oddly good time at the movies. There were lulls, and certainly questions about whether it’d end up being a great year for cinema. A couple weeks ago, though, when I started thinking about the best films I saw, I discovered the list was long and varied. At first I had thought I’d like to do a Top 10 this year. Then I started considering a Top 20. Eventually a Top 30 or even 40 wasn’t out of the question, but then what’d be the point?

So I arrived at a different solution. A Top 10 list—ranked, for the good sport of it—but not definitively my ten best of the year. Rather, I attempted to craft a list that captured something of what excited me most at the movies this year, along a set of common themes. In particular, I discovered while assembling the list that in 2025, I could feel two great pulls. A pull toward the past, and a pull toward the future. Often, the same films did both, reckoning with relationships to history while charting paths forward in an unsettled world.

Many films fit criteria that broad, but I zeroed in on the ten that made the tension feel real and present. Other films are not lesser for failing to make the cut. Hamnet had me sobbing for an hour straight, and The Secret Agent welcomed me with its finely crafted universe, and Universal Language stunned me with its emotionally attuned absurdity. There were films I loved that caught flack, like Materialists, to my mind one of the sharpest movies about life as an urban millennial I’ve seen. After the Hunt, with all its cynicism about the post-MeToo era, has lodged itself quite firmly in my head.

Adam Curtis had Shifty, a new documentary series that I’m counting as a film, and one that could easily have fit my criteria. Ditto Eugene Kotlyarenko’s excellent The Code, which stars Red Scare Dasha, everyone’s favourite Dimes Square fascist, as a screwball comedy hero for the screenlife age. Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez’s Invention plumbed the depths of personal grief with astonishing creativity. Joel Potrykus’s Vulcanizadora is a tiny, funny, upsetting miracle of a film about men in crisis, and a welcome return by a great filmmaker.

I could go on, and on: Final Destination Bloodlines was among the best times I had in a theatre all year; Friendship was one of the funniest; David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds was one of the most profound (and funniest); Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon were small-stakes delights; Avatar: Fire and Ash was an incredible thing to witness; If I Had Legs I’d Kick You stressed me the hell out while making me laugh a lot and left me even more in awe of Rose Byrne; Alex Russell’s Lurker was a surprisingly intelligent and sticky little thriller; Splitsville had me rolling with laughter; Sentimental Value offered a rich portrait of family dysfunction; Wake Up Dead Man combined a fun murder mystery with serious insight into the value of faith; Misericordia swept me up with its darkly comic insanity; One of Them Days was proof that studio comedies can still kill with a packed audience; and Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project was meta-documentary perfection.

A few more titles are worth mentioning. The Mastermind is another masterpiece from America’s best filmmaker, but much as I adored Kelly Reichardt’s new film, I left it out of the Top 10 purely on theme, though it could still have fit. Lists are arbitrary, like I said. The same goes for Eddington, an incredible portrait of or terrible modern condition. The Testament of Ann Lee with its utopian visions, might well have fit on the list, too, but I’ll save that one. I struggled over The Phoenician Scheme, the film that turned me around to some extent on Wes Anderson’s recent run, and which has lingered in my mind as a hilarious, moving story about legacy. (There are also upcoming films like Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron and Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which might well have been here if not for the fact that I’m calling them 2026 pictures).

So, finally, after much whittling, I got it down to ten. And here they are:

10. Peter Hujar’s Day

Ira Sachs’ latest is also one of the last new films I managed to get in before the end of the year, and it completely blew me away. I wrote about the film for the newsletter, and knew it would be on this list. That’s because, among its many incredible qualities—its formal precision, its meta-fictional approach, its two fantastic performance—this rendering of an interview, in which the photographer Peter Hujar recounts a typical day in his life, is all about making the past present in a way that suggests a future, too. In attempting to hold onto this man lost to AIDS, the film discovers odd commonalities of human interest and desire contained within daily mundanity. What was true in the mid-1970s was true a thousand years before that, and will be true a thousand years hence. Amazing that a film so small can feel so huge.

9. Sinners

Sinners was the movie that turned it all around. When the year, at first, was shaping up to be nothing special, Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster vampire musical horror extravanganza shot life into moviegoing. Seeing the film with an opening night crowd in IMAX was absolutely electric. Coogler, too, reached into the past, mashing up history and genre to emerge with something so much greater than the some of its already excellent parts. When the veil was pierced, in the film’s most noteworthy sequence, it was like experiencing magic. Here was one of Hollywood’s biggest mainstream directors laying a claim to the future of the industry in every conceivable sense. At once grand, and completely personal, steeped in history and absolutely fresh all the same.

8. Marty Supreme

The future is Marty Supreme. It’s the Safdies, and Timothée Chalamet, and original filmmaking. It’s Marty Mauser, a character who exists in the 1950s, but whose energy belongs to 2025, and perhaps also 2055. I wrote yesterday about the synth music in the film, but it’s more than just the music. Marty Supreme is alive to the possibilities of mainstream American moviemaking in a manner truly unseen since the ‘70s. It’s alive to the world, too, in all its grave contradictions and beautiful, exciting moments of human connection. In its final frames, the film speaks beyond itself, to what lies in store for all of us. It is the need to live, not just among other people, but for them.

7. Henry Fonda for President

I waffled on including this film, which few have seen and which is impossible to access outside of random screenings being held, but ultimately I could not deny Alexander Horwath incredible documentary essay about Henry Fonda and how Fonda’s life an work reflected both the realities of American history, and its positive aspirations. Long and exhaustive, Henry Fonda for President has not left my mind since I saw it back in March. A film whose impression of what it means to be a good person, in the figure of Fonda, suggests so much about the world we should be making together, despite all the challenges.

6. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

I saw Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl back at TIFF 2024, and I feel I underrated it at the time, despite praising it to the hilt. Susan Chardy plays a woman who stumbles on her uncles dead body in the middle of the road one night on the way to a party. So the family gathers to have a funeral, but quickly we begin to understand there are buried secrets. All of this would be typical of an adult drama, but Nyoni is attentive to far more than just family spats at a funeral. Instead, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is about the modes of cultural communication that allow truths to be hidden, realities distorted. It’s a film about language, and custom, and tradition, and the ways those things create family and community, but also begin holding everyone back to the point of terrible absurdity. This, too, is a film fundamentally about the future, and the personal pain it takes to build one, even within the scope of family. That it does so with such great comic verve is only further proof of Nyoni’s bold vision as a filmmaker.

5. Castration Movie Anthology ii. The Best of Both Worlds

Louise Weard’s ongoing underground anthology epic, Castration Movie, finally screened in Toronto this year. Its first volume, released last year, along with a smaller premiere screening of the second. In a way, this entry covers both, but The Best of Both Worlds on its own would have been enough. At five hours long, and deliberately punishing in every way—from its rough MiniDV photography, to its even rougher content—this is filmmaking unlike anything anyone else is doing. A trans manifesto of a sort, containing within it what one has to imagine is every troubled thought that’s ever entered Weard’s mind, experiencing Castration Movie was a true breath of fresh air. For all the trouble the maintream industry has had, independent film has become an even greater struggle. But here, made on a budget of approximately nothing, was one of the most daring things I’d ever seen onscreen, the collective product of a community of likeminded people, sharing their lack of resources to create a new kind of movie for a new kind of world.

4. Eephus

Eephus is also a product of a collective, Omnes Films, co-founded by Ham on Rye director Tyler Taormina. More filmmakers coming together with scant resources to produce small films that speak to the smaller things that make up the meat of living. In Eephus, an old community baseball diamond is set to be demolished and replaced by a public school. The past making way for a productive future. But in that moment of transition is mourning. As the regular crew of mostly middle-aged players finish out their seemingly endless final game, the diamond becomes a microcosm of fraying social relations, the detritus of progress’s forward march. What future is there without it, the film poses? Truly.

3. Caught by the Tides

Assembled mostly out of footage and outtakes from Jia Zhangke’s prior films, Unknown Pleasures, Still Life, and Ash Is Purest White, the Chinese director crafted something quite extraordinary. Caught by the Tides is ostensibly the story of a couple separated by the movements of history and a rapidly changing China. It is also a document of that changing China. And what’s more, it is a document of the dislocation fundamental to the progress of time. When the film finally arrives in the present, it’s a revelation. Just another moment in history that instantly becomes the past the moment it’s captured. How beautiful a thought, with so much left to come.

2. One Battle After Another

I’m not sure much more needs to be said about One Battle After Another, but it’s incredible what Paul Thomas Anderson managed to do. A rip-roaring piece of Hollywood entertainment, that unveils endless depth across multiple viewings, and whose thornier elements only add to its power. Anderson’s first film in decades set in what is ostensibly the present, that deals with the history of radicalism, while keeping one eye very squarely on the next generation. It’s like a gift.

1. 28 Years Later

No film in 2025 surprised me more than Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Years Later, the long anticipated sequel to their original, genre defining classic. I could never guess at the visual astonishment they’d conjure up, or the post-apocalyptic world they’d create, or the unbelievable well of emotions they’d tap into. I wrote about 28 Years Later at length for the newsletter, and the time since has only seen my estimation for the film grow and grow. Amid what looks like a collapsing world, Boyle and Garland invented a fallen one in which history, culture, myth, memory, grief become the bedrock for a new kind of hope, built on openness and humanity. Remember, you must die. Remember, you must love.

Somewhere in the thrumming sound of ‘80s synths lies a heartbeat. It was, and still is, the sound of the future. Experiments in electronic music date back as early as the late 19th century, and like much that grew out of the peak of the industrial age, it represented what in many ways is still the bleeding edge. A plain expression of human mastery over nature, to harness and supersede the bounds of the physical world for artistic means. Cinema grew out of the same stew of Belle Époque invention, chemically capturing light on celluloid strips and birthing whole new realms of art.

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I remember the first time I watched Forbidden Planet, alone in my room, the big old CRT across from my bed. The electronic score knocked me out. It had never occurred to me that such music was being produced in 1956, never mind used so boldly, as though part of the film’s tapestry of sci-fi sound effects rather than anything resembling a symphonic score.

Louis and Bebe Barron’s music for Forbidden Planet was a watershed in cinema and sound. It drew from their work in the avant-garde space earlier in the ‘50s, scoring short films like Ian Hugo’s “Bells of Atlantis,” in which the bleeping and blooping of their cybernetics circuits portended a new sound to accompany a new cinema.

A few years later, Dutch composers Tom Dissevelt and Kid Baltan were out there dropping beats, pushing electronic music closer and closer to the pop music space, anticipating the likes of Kraftwerk by more than a decade.

Coming out of the Second World War, the future was something more than a dream. As American culture began cloaking itself in the prudish image of suburban pleasantries, exporting “the good life” around the world, visions of technological salvation and a new way of being took hold of the public imagination. There’s a relatively straight line between Harry Revel’s theremin-infused experiments on 1947’s “Music Out of the Moon” album, and the audacious imagining of humanity’s next millennium in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

So much promise, and then the ‘80s, during which the culmination of capitalist theory begat a more base futurism embodied in consumption and personal branding. It’s the world we’re still living in, stuck as we are in perpetuations of pasts we long for, cycling through fashion to recapture whatever forward-looking spirit we feel lacking. If Fukuyama’s End of History failed to emerge from the revolutions that marked the transition out of the ‘80s, his analysis perhaps better captured the pervasive sense in the post-Cold War decades that some fundamental yearning has died out, subsumed into inhuman dynamics of buying and selling. To strive in this era is to demand, not the future, but purchasing power, or, better yet, brand power. The cover of a Wheaties box.

In Marty Supreme, Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser as a young man out of time. His striving is instantly recognizable as modern, but he lives in the 1950s. Bridging the gap is a score by Daniel Lopatin that draws from the ‘80s synth sound, along with a suite of ‘80s needle drops whose anachronisms define the character and the film. Marty’s brash, assholish, narcissism might have been off-putting, but for the heartbeat mirrored in his musical accompaniment, which signals something eminently relatable. What he wants is a place in a future. He wants to be the future. Out of the shadow of the Holocaust, and in the depths of mid-century, urban American poverty, Marty is after something totally new, some undiscovered country where his freedom feels all his own, unaccountable to the forces keeping him grounded. When the lyrics of Public Image Ltd.’s “The Order of Death” blast through the soundtrack—“This is what you want/This is what you get”—it is as though the movie is speaking back to him: “The future is coming, but it doesn’t belong to you.”

“The Order of Death” was originally meant to soundtrack the 1983 Harvey Keitel film Copkiller, in which PiL lead singer John Lydon also stars. If The Sex Pistols helped take rock music down to gritty basics, Johnny Rotten formed PiL to inject more experimental flavour into his punk stylings. It was the New Wave, the evolution of punk’s simple cynicism into the embrace of further horizons. The song contains the tension of that evolution, equally foreboding and exciting. It still sounds fresh. It still sounds like the future.

Marty Supreme ends on a very different synth-laden ‘80s track, though. “Welcome to your life,” are the first lyrics of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants To Rule The World,” one of the great singles of the era, and one whose themes are almost too perfectly in conversation with Josh Safdie’s film. Its sound, too, recapitulates Marty’s journey, in which experimentation coalesces into its opposite. The strange modulations of the Barrons’ work gives way to lush, easy listening. It’s expansive, and comforting, and sentimental, even as its lyrics lay bare the corrupt influence of power driving society. As those synths begin to play and Marty stares into the eyes of his newborn son, reality sets in. No more striving for the future; it’s already arrived.

Peter Hujar took this extraordinary photo of Susan Sontag. In the frame is nothing. A wall, a bed draped over by a felted coverlet, and Sontag. She lies back, her corduroy turtleneck stretching its lines out over her body, her arms back, hands under her head. On her face is a blank sort of expression, but not really blank, and not really neutral. There is work behind her eyes—not unexpected for a great thinker—staring off to some middle distance. I’ve long loved that photo. It captures some ravishing essence in Sontag, a romantic ideal of beauty and intellectualism in the simplest of form. The emerging gray streaks in her hair add texture, accentuating the photograph’s spare but lived reality. Perfectly posed; pure nature.

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In the spirit of Hujar’s work, director Ira Sachs has crafted a stunning new portrait of the photographer. Peter Hujar’s Day is based on the book by Linda Rosenkrantz, in which she publishes the transcript of an interview she conducted with her friend. It had originally been intended as a wider project. She would interview her artist friends, in detail, about everything they did the day prior. Hujar was the first of these interviews, which would have been collected in a book. The interviews mostly never happened, the book came to nothing, and the tape was lost. But a transcript was found, the opening titles of the film inform us.

From that transcript, Sachs reconstructs the interview for the screen, with Ben Whishaw playing Hujar, and Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz. Along with the title cards providing key context, the film opens with a nod to its own artifice. Reconstruction is, in fact, a form of construction, and Peter Hujar’s Day exists in the tension. A man recounting the day before; recorded onto tape; translated into transcription; written out as dialogue in a script, interpreted and performed by actors; staged, filmed, and assembled. A copy of a copy of a copy, and a game of artistic broken telephone, where the interpretation becomes additive.

Hujar’s ghost haunts Peter Hujar’s Day. He died in from AIDS in 1987, age 53. He left behind his photos and his friendships, the entry point for an attempt at understanding. Rosenkrantz’s idea, to capture in text the daily doings of her cohort, was premised on the notion that some truth might resolve itself in the process. That more, perhaps, might be gleaned from a person considering the mundanity of their daily actions. On the day in question, in a New York City apartment in 1974, Hujar reflects on his adventure heading out to photograph Allen Ginsberg. If the day was special, it was only defined by that. But he digs further, recalling his entire day, morning to night, including his call with Sontag, his hours in the darkroom, his odd lack of appetite throughout, all of it. Slowly, slowly, a picture emerges of a man naturally concerned with the finer details of things, often living in his own head, offering whole narratives of thought about the situations he encounters. He’s a man of incredible observation and articulation, no doubt the source of his photography’s depth.

The real interview was done in a little over an hour, with Hujar and Rosenkrantz just sitting at a table. Sachs does not adhere to fact, only the words in the transcript. In a series of scenes and tableaus, he has the pair traverse every corner of the apartment they shot in, done up in great ‘70s style. As they shift locations, the day shifts, too. An hourlong interview stretches across a whole day, as the light in the apartment changes, and the characters grow more tired and more open. As it goes, the film becomes more mannered, more open to its own artifice. The performances, at first attempting something like facsimile, morph into more expressive interpretations of character. Late in the film, Hujar describes getting up in the middle of the night, awoken by two prostitutes talking loudly outside his window. He describes looking out to the street below to watch them. A tossed off sort of aside in the transcript, but here it is the heart of the film. Something Hujar connected with, and in that connection preserved a moment and the anonymous people in it, transported through time to a cinema screen fifty years on.

It’s cinema and art as dialogue with the past, and with the people who occupied it. When tears stream down Rebecca Hall’s face at the end of the film, nothing in the transcript would suggest such emotion, yet these emotions are true nonetheless. Reflecting the relationship between Rosenkrantz and Hujar, and between Sachs and his subjects, and Hall and hers. It’s elegiac, and expansive. The form of the film, with its carefully orchestrated scenes, resemble aspects of Hujar’s work, adding colour and new texture, all of it invented. Even the accents are invented, Sachs having cast two Brits to barely impersonate two Americans. The historical record of a moment in time and place becomes an imaginative space for empathy and human feeling. An astonishing culmination of Rosenkrantz’s initial concept.

Hey there, friends. It’s been a while. Since TIFF, in fact. This was not intentional. I have several unpublished essays and reviews sitting in my drafts folder, none of which I was able to complete. I’ve been busy with work, so that’s a part of it, but not all of it. For example, I got stuck on a long piece I was writing a few weeks back, tangentially about One Battle After Another, but actually about the YouTube videos of art restoration I’m addicted to. The idea was clear in my mind, but it slipped away the more I wrote. Other writers can relate, I’m sure. So I put it aside, hoping the idea would coalesce once more, but it never did. So I moved on to the next, and the next, and the next, and the result is this: a post in which I describe not having written.

A word on those art restoration videos: There are a couple channels about this, but the one I stumbled on, first through TikTok, was Baumgartner Restoration. Their page has dozens and dozens of videos by this guy, Julian Baumgartner, a very calm, amiable guy who slowly, slowly, takes viewers through the process of painstakingly fixing, cleaning, and retouching old paintings. If you enjoyed the scenes of art restoration in Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, this is a perfect YouTube channel for you. It’s also a very ASMR-friendly channel, which I’m sure is the real source of its popularity (nearly 2 million subs!). Here’s a characteristic example.

Prepare to learn a lot about adhesives, solvents, and washi kozo paper.

In that essay I was preparing, I drew a connection between the set-by-step patience involved in art restoration and the “ocean waves, ocean waves” philosophy Sensei Sergio espouses in One Battle After Another. I doubt much more needs to be explained about that connection, which is perhaps why I wasn’t able to finish writing. But here I am, trying once again to blog, so… ocean waves, ocean waves.

While I’ve been annoyed with myself for not having published anything here, getting more real work of late provided ample distraction. The influx came after months and months and months of little to no work, and the process of that has felt a little like coming back from the dead. Revivified, but also feeling tenuous, like maybe none of this is supposed to be real. I keep waiting for the floor to fall out, on work, on journalism, maybe on the world. Good times, personally, but stressful for that very reason, and the stress isn’t exactly conducive to more personal, less motivated writing like the kind I publish here.

Yet I feel a pull toward it. I was rewatching Tenet the other day, as I often do, and somewhere around the fourth or fifth conversation in the film about the nature of action in a predetermined reality, I felt an urge to find my way back to blogging. Sometimes, you do things because they are good to do, and right. For me, for the people who do enjoy reading my ramblings for whatever reason, and for the sake of powering forward.

Lately, I’ve been attending TIFF Cinematheque’s big Mikio Naruse retrospective. Nowhere near a complete retrospective, TIFF has nonetheless worked with The Japan Foundation to secure a selection of 35mm prints of a fair number of his films. I’d previously only seen a couple of his films. Repast screened at the Nitrate Picture Show in 2022, and the next year, I saw the silent drama Apart from You at the Toronto Silent Film Festival, which was preceded by the short, Flunky, Work Hard!

The films TIFF has been screening are post-war, and they’ve been hitting me extra hard at the moment. Each one is a dive into Japanese domestic life, making melodrama out of pervasive social dynamics, sort of like a Japanese Sirk, though radically different in style. But just as Douglas Sirk tapped into some underlying reality in the psychology of the post-WWII American self-image, Naruse locates the psychological distress of the society that lost the war, refracted through personal relationships, all while the future marches on and the country begins its transformation into semi-westernized modernity. These are depressing films. Bleak. Suicidally so. Yet I’ve been finding them a comfort.

Naruse’s films are about people finding their way back to some sense of normal order and good living in the wake of total catastrophe. The tenets of society no longer hold the way they used to—how can they, given Japan’s conduct leading to the war and their defeat?—and human beings are left to pick up the pieces. Many cannot. Many stay steadfast in their desire to maintain the old order they knew, at least within their own narrow vantage. Others characters are still more lost than that, the foundations of their world shaken, and in the rubble there is nothing left but drudgery. Yet even this, Naruse’s films suggest, is a kind of living. It may never get better, but time continues on anyway, and that means endless opportunity for rebirth. Bleak films that somehow make the world feel richer, more beautiful, more worth living in.

So here I am, writing. Because the world is bleak, which makes finding our way back to living all the more fulfilling.

I might have liked to once against skip the final day of the festival, in truth. To have that one day before the start of the new workweek to simply rest up. But one film called me: Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada, which I was unable to slot in any other day, but was determined to see. I went down to the Scotiabank rush line way too early for it, just to make sure I’d be first in line, and also because I didn’t mind chilling outside, reading. If I wasn’t going to have rest, at least I could get a chapter or two further into Middlemarch, which I did! I also got to chat with friends while in line, which was really fun, and finally, at the very last minute—the film had already just started, in fact—I got in to Rose of Nevada.

It was great. Despite what appeared on the surface to be something more mainstream than his usual fare, thanks to having stars like George MacKay and Callum Turner, Jenkin has not lost an ounce of the enigmatic style that pervaded his previous films, Bait and Enys Man. The film has a clearer narrative to hold onto, involving time travelling fishing boats and dislocated personalities, but as you can imaging, those are narratives that allow for plenty of elliptical, avant-garde style, and Jenkin pushes that style far. His penchant for lush, rough looking 16mm photography is here in spades, as is his incredible control of mood, which carries the film beautifully, even when whatever’s going on is a total mystery. He also carefully builds an emotional landscape across the film, ending at a place that is both clever and moving, even though if you asked me to explain what had happened, I would likely come up short. It was an excellent close to a TIFF 2025, a year I have very mixed feelings about.

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I thought about following last year’s example, and using this wrap-up to talk about my general of experience of the festival—overall good, with some great films amid an uninspiring lineup, and some even better times with friends—and give stats on my viewing—31 screenings total!—but that seemed unimportant in the face of yesterday deplorable events at the 2025 TIFF Awards Ceremony. Some good came out of that ceremony, including my friend Sophy winning the Best Canadian Discovery Award for her magnificent Blue Heron, and films like Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and Hamnet, both of which I loved, winning prizes as well. In the middle of it all, though, Barry Avrich’s film, The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, took the People’s Choice Documentary Award.

I have not seen The Road Between Us—alternately known around town as “the Barry Avrich thing” or “the October 7 movie”—so I genuinely cannot comment on its merits as a film or its actual content. I do know that its story, about a former Israeli general driving down into the heart of the violence during that day’s massacre in order to save his family, raised eyebrows from me the moment I understood it was about Noam Tibon. Critical of Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his conduct running the current assault on Gaza, Tibon is nonetheless a man who, in the early 2000s, served as a commander in occupied Hebron, where soldiers regularly committed crimes against Palestinians under his watch. Perhaps evolved since then—having been literally assigned to investigate criminal treatment of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers by a commission in 2014—Tibon’s public statements on the current war have mostly avoided acknowledging the humanity of Palestinians, if he even acknowledges Palestinians at all. His singular focus on Netanyahu, the fate of the Israeli hostages taken on October 7, and the way the war has torn Israeli society apart is at best a perfect example of the solipsism of Israeli liberals, whose appeals to peace are entirely self-serving, with little actual humanity at their core. Would that the Palestinians could disappear in a puff of smoke, then at least none of this would be a problem, they imagine.

But again, I have not seen the film, which for all I know might be perfectly inoffensive (to a reasonable person) as a document about a family going through a mass atrocity. I would like to make something clear: I do not have any theoretical problem with this film, or most any film really, being screened at TIFF. What I have a problem with is how its screening and eventual award win came about, and what it says about the disgusting lack of values on display from both TIFF and CEO Cameron Bailey specifically.

An important thing to stipulate here is that The Road Between Us was never actually officially announced for TIFF originally. It was not included in the festival’s initial TIFF Docs lineup. That’s because it was never actually selected by the programming team. In fact, though Avrich submitted the film for consideration, the programmers declined to include it. No reason has been given for that rejection, but literally thousands of films are rejected by TIFF each year, and the idea of a local, not particularly respected filmmaker having his film miss out on the fest is hardly unusual. But, by Bailey’s own admission, Avrich, a former TIFF board member, went around the programming team, directly to the CEO, to appeal for reconsideration.

“In the context of over 9,000 submissions this year, it just didn’t make the cut,” Bailey told The Globe and Mail last week. “I then heard that Barry wanted another look at it from us, and we arranged another screening. I think there’s real merit in the story being seen, and I made the decision to include the film in the festival.”

One might reasonably ask Bailey, how many filmmakers who are not former board members of TIFF would have been able to get such reconsideration? And furthermore, why was it that with a subject so politically charged, Bailey took it upon himself to supersede the decisions of his own programming staff? (I know for a fact that multiple programmers were angry to have been put in this position, made to look like antisemites for denying the movie a slot.)

So Bailey went over their heads and invited the film to screen at TIFF. But once again, it was not officially announced. Instead, the team behind the doc “leaked” a trailer for the film, with indications that it was playing TIFF. The ground was seeded for the con to come. Weeks later, Avrich went public, claiming that TIFF had disinvited his film, implying that it was due to the film’s controversial subject. This was the Toronto International Film Festival censoring Jews on the subject of the October 7 massacre, and the backlash was huge. TIFF pushed back on the claims, explaining that there had simply been issues surrounding security arrangements and rights clearances that still needed to be addressed, which led to even more backlash from people who falsely understood that to mean the filmmakers needed to license footage from Hamas.

Anybody who knows TIFF well, including some of its inner workings, knows this was never the truth. TIFF may care theoretically about rights clearances, but plenty of films play with dodgy rights claims. The important thing is that, legally, the filmmakers can vouch for their material, filling out paperwork to take ownership over any potential issues around that. By Bailey’s vague explanation, Avrich and his team failed to provide the proper assurances. People I spoke to in the know told me he had refused to submit key paperwork that pretty much every other filmmaker at the fest must fill out in order to be screened. This is where things start stinking to high heaven. Here was a filmmaker, who went outside the normal channels, using his nepotistic connections to get his film accepted in the first place, refusing to cooperate on basic legal, bureaucratic filings to get his film shown. Rather than simply working properly with TIFF, he drummed up a public campaign against the festival, giving his film an unearned spotlight and generating mass controversy in all directions. Carnival barker, con man shit.

Prominent donors revolted against TIFF, and I heard from some that the Government of Ontario threatened to pull its support for the festival if the film wasn’t screened. I even heard rumours of a meeting in which Bailey was sat in a room with some of Toronto’s wealthy elite to force him into screening the film, though no confirmation there. So Bailey had invited a film against the objections of his staff, only to have the makers of that film create a situation where the festival was existentially threatened and painted as an antisemitic institution. I did not attend the screening of the film, but a video shared by critic Radheyan Simonpillai during the moderated discussion after the film gave an indication of just how vile an audience the film and its surrounding controversy attracted:

When moderator Lisa LaFlamme dared to bring up the over 64,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza, the crowd booed her. This is what TIFF had allowed its space for artistic expression and shared humanity to become.

Along with the screening itself, supporters of the film and Israel took to social media to drive thousands of votes for the film for the festival’s People’s Choice awards, brazenly astroturfing a victory that any reasonable organization would have stepped in to stop. Instead, on the last day of TIFF, Cameron Bailey got onstage to hand Barry Avrich an award.

"Besides Cameron, who is fantastic, I want to thank the incredible staff at TIFF,” said producer Mark Selby, accepting the prize. “I hope all the filmmakers of this festival feel as supported as Barry and I did through this whole process." The irony of this statement, after all that had gone on, is sickening. A spit in the face at Bailey, other filmmakers at the festival (and those rejected, too), and TIFFgoers alike. A total farce, in which claims of victimhood and accusations of antisemitism were used to help whitewash an organized project in support of genocide and ethnic cleansing. That Bailey would simply stand there and take it is shameful.

“I regret that, and it’s something that I know caused a lot of pain and hurt in the Jewish community in particular, and I apologize for that,” Bailey told The Globe and Mail, when asked about the film’s supposed disinvitation. I don’t know which Jewish community Bailey is talking about—except perhaps those I know who were lied to in the media by the craven filmmakers behind this documentary—but I am Jewish, and I would like an apology for having to attend a festival run by spineless people who roll over for such crass, inhuman displays ostensibly in my name. Never have I felt so personally disrespected by TIFF, as both a Jew and a human being. The inability or unwillingness to stand up to Zionist bullying, at a time when the government of Israel is conducting a genocide against Palestinians, is unconscionable. It put me, personally, in the position of having to calm down friends and family who worried I was attending an antisemitic, censorious festival. It made me have to walk by as people waving flags of the country my parents were born in sickeningly protested outside Roy Thomson Hall, advocating the continued slaughter of Palesintians.

To allow this film, given all that, to go home with an astroturfed People’s Choice prize is the lowest moment in the festival’s history, as far as I can tell. It’s a stain that will not easily be washed away.

So the festival is just about over, and there are basically no press screenings left, and I don’t have any tickets to public screenings, and the ones I’d like to see are sold out. Enter: rush lines. I spent much of my Saturday standing in the long rush line outside the Scotiabank Theatre. A hellish notion for some, I’m sure, but standing hours and hours in line comes with some nice benefits. Mainly, being outside on a nice day, and also meeting and talking to other people in line. Sometimes you see those people ago, more often not, but either way, it’s such a nice form of connection. Usually it starts with talking about what you’ve all seen at the festival so far, the highlights and all that. If you’re in line long enough, the conversation shifts to learning where people come from, what they do for a living, what other hobbies and interests they have. If TIFF is “The People’s Festival,” then standing in line is one of the areas that’s most true.

I’ve also gotten quite good at rushing movies over the years. I tend to have a keen sense for both what will have seats open, and how far back in the line I can be before the wait is unlikely to pay off. On Saturday, my original plan was to attempt rushing three films in a row, but I realized coming out of the first film that the line was already too long for Sirāt—and too full of people who wouldn’t get into Sentimental Value, and thus would be happy to get into Sirāt as a consolation prize—so, not worth it. I went with an alternate plan.

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For the first film of the day, though, I was finally able to catch Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a hilarious, intense, hilariously intense movie starring Rose Byrne as a mother and a therapist absolutely losing her shit under the stress of it all, and the fact that having a kid to begin with may have been a mistake in her case. The camera is close up on Byrne’s face almost the entire time, and in a nice conceit, the child is essentially never seen on camera. She’s always been a great actress, but Byrne leans in so incredibly hard on this one. It’s a performance if you’ve ever seen one, and a great one of its kind. Both too much, and perfectly subtle where it needs to be. The increasing twitch under Byrne’s eye as the film goes on is one of the best pieces of technical acting I’ve seen all festival. She’s supported by some great co-stars, including an impressively deft turn from Conan O’Brien—my hero!—and the year’s big rapper-turned-actor surprise, A$AP Rocky. Comparisons to Uncut Gems make sense, given Bronstein’s association with the Safdies (Josh has a producing credit on this one) and the funny-intense style, though If I Had Legs goes for something very different in the end, and it’s a total blast. Dark, of course. But a dark blast.

After getting out of the film, I made the decision to skip Sirāt, but luckily I had the best possible backup plan available.

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and it even got an IMAX re-release a couple weeks back, which I attended and which was awesome as hell. But it’s Jaws, I can watch Jaws over and over and over, and it’s always the best shit ever. So how could I not take the opportunity to see one of TIFF’s screenings of the film on 35mm. In fact, I’ve seen Jaws a couple times in theatres before, but never on film. What a god damn joy. A couple weeks ago, I had a somewhat viral tweet about the movie. “Film school should just be people strapped to the Clockwork Orange chair,” I wrote, “forced to watch Jaws over and over and over until they understand how a real movie works.” I stand by that comment wholeheartedly, and don’t have much else to add.

After Jaws it was back to the Scotiabank rush line for a long wait with friends and new faces to get into one of my other most-anticipated films of the festival.

The thing about German director Christian Petzold is that I love everything he does. I had already been a fan of his, from films like Phoenix and Barbara. A while back, though, the TIFF Cinemetheque did a comprehensive retrospective of his work, including films he’d made for television decades ago now, which are almost impossible to find, but were screened on gorgeous 35mm prints. What I discovered was that I loved every single one. That’s not to say they’re all masterpieces, though he’s made a couple of those, certainly. Rather, I discovered that I am so deeply on Petzold’s wavelength, that even his most minor work totally delights me. He’s a European art house filmmaker with a strong political eye, and deeply influenced by Hitchcock. Kind of a perfect combo. My ideal filmmaker, in a way. That every film is in some ways a remake of Vertigo is just beautiful. More filmmakers should be remaking Vertigo at every opportunity.

Miroirs No. 3 is yet another of Petzold’s Vertigo riffs, and one most at the festival have dutifully called “minor.” Minor my balls! Well, already. It is actually a pretty minor film for Petzold. An 86-minute picture starring Paula Beer as a woman who gets into a car accident with her boyfriend, who is killed, and ends up staying with an older woman who lives in a house nearby the crash site. Soon, she finds herself increasingly embedded in this woman’s life, each of them living a kind of fantasy detached from the sadder aspects of their actual realities. The film never pops off in any extreme way, but there’s so much pleasure to be had in watching the dynamics between the film’s central characters, and how the plot’s Hitchcockian aspects will eventually reveal themselves. Like I said, my ideal filmmaker making my ideal sort of film. Plus, it features an incredible use of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons’s song “The Night.”

After the movie, I hung out at the Town Crier with my good friend Mark Asch, talking shop and having a few drinks (and some French onion soup!), before heading off home to bed to rest up for my final day of TIFF 2025.

The back half of TIFF is a pleasant experience. Most press and industry have left town, Festival Street is a distant memory, and being after Labour Day, most people are at work during the day. Morning screenings in particular, though they do often fill up on that second Friday, come with a lot less stress. The streets are less crowded, and the halls of the Scotiabank are emptier. I like it. It’s the time in the festival when, generally speaking, the real work is done, and it all comes back to a question of what I feel like seeing at any given time.

It’s also the part of the festival that feels most like things are over, which means I end up having less patience for seeing films I might not be into. My focus on these days tends to be films that I either couldn’t make it to during the first few days, or had heard buzz about through the festival, giving me a heads-up about something I might like. There’s value in trying out smaller movies that nobody’s talking about, and I have in the past had great experiences with those, discovering cool new movies that may never come my way again. Just as often, though, what I get from those is a middling film dressed up in art movie trappings for festival audiences. Not exactly inspiring. Easier, then, to stick with what I’m quite sure I’ll like and just enjoy those last few days.

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Waking up on Friday, I decided to finally hit up a screening of Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks, her second feature, the follow-up to I Like Movies, a charming debut that has found a real audience over the last couple of years. I liked I Like Movies, which admirably hinged its coming-of-age story on a protagonist who is, at least at times, a real jerk to the people around him. At the end of the film, the way he is not quite let off the hook for his poor treatment of his best friend, struck me as a bold, honest choice for a semi-autobiographical crowd-pleaser. Chandler’s new film pulls the same trick, but with even more deftness. Set in Montreal in 2011, the film follows a young music writer, Grace, who moves from Toronto in order to immerse herself in the Montreal scene while writing a 33 1/3 book about Alanis Morissette. A 20s coming-of-age movie. Mile End Kicks is open about the struggles of being that age and wanting to take on the world, while also running away from more difficult realities, and plunging oneself into a series of bad decisions. Grace is less of an outright asshole than Lawrence in I Like Movies, but the layers of her character allow for a more complex rendering of the same idea: that amid a storm of insecurity, a kind of narcissism takes hold. That Chandler is able to get that across in a fairly raw fashion, while still making a film that’s this charming, funny, and all-around enjoyable, is impressive. There’s a Hollywood version of this movie that sands off the rougher edges and is much worse for it. Instead, what we get is a movie with all the satisfactions of a certain strip of Hollywood storytelling, but a far more honest core.

After getting out of Mile End Kicks at the Scotiabank, I made my way down to the Lightbox to stand in a rush line for Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams. I hadn’t seen Bentley’s previous film, Jockey, though I’ve been meaning to. I also have yet to see Sing Sing, which he co-wrote with Greg Kewdar, who also shares screenplay credit on this new film. After seeing Train Dreams, I really must correct that. This is a beautiful, beautiful film. Based on the novella by Denis Johnson—another major blind spot for me—the film tells the story of a railroad worker and logger working in the Pacific Northwest during the very early decades of the twentieth century, spending months away from home, away from his wife and baby girl. With a wonderful sense of patience and beauty in nature, Train Dreams allows the weight of history—American, natural, global, cosmic—to sit on the shoulders of its protagonist, played by Joel Edgerton. This sense of import, and often doom, is contrasted with a remarkably intimate approach to character. The palpable vulnerability of Edgerton’s Robert Grainier, the depths of his emotional life, are incredible to see in a period film like this, and that extends to all the characters. They feel real. Not real because the costuming and dialogue are accurate, but real because they are written and performed to remind the audience that people 100 years ago were no different from us. They loved like us, and cried like us, and felt depression, and alienation, and pain, and aching longing.

Edgerton is incredible in the film, as are a slew of supporting turns from actors like William H. Macy and Kerry Condon. It looks absolutely gorgeous, just soaking up that mountainous forest landscape. But more than anything, Train Dreams is alive with the feeling of continuity, in both history and people. It’s a film about loss and struggle, but also “the newness of the experience,” those things in life that pull us forward, both into the future, and into a better place personally. Or at least a more peaceful place.

Ater Train Dreams, I tried out another film, and while not a bad film by any stretch, I was feeling like myday at TIFF was over, and my patience was wearing thin watching something I’d likely forget about a couple days later. Better close things out on Train Dreams, so about 20 minutes into the next one, I walked out, and went off to Grange Park to read a bit before heading to a non-TIFF movie event.

Up at the Paradise on Bloor, Drag Me to the Movies’ Weird Alice hosted the Toronto book launch for Will Sloan’s Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA, a critical study of the quote-unquote Worst Director of All Time. Ed Wood was not the worst director of all time, not by a long shot, but more than that, Will makes the case for understanding him as an artist whose work reflected his life in meaningful ways that lift his films to a genuine sort of greatness, despite their shoddy construction. None of his films is a better example than Glen or Glenda, which Will programmed at the Fox not too long ago, but which I was happy to see again. Not least because it was also an opportunity to pick up a copy of Will’s book—and get it signed! y’know, for the investment, as Will said during the introduction—which I’d missed the window on for an early delivery pre-order.

Book in hand, I hopped on a bike down to a friend’s place, where a kegger was happening. Like with an actual keg of beer. Like we were 19 again. It was a great time, and a great close to a pretty chill day at the Toronto International Film Festival.

It’s time we had a conversation about TIFF’s pre-show this year. Long a source of mockery, around the festival this year, I’ve heard many people say that they wish we could go back to previous year’s pre-show ad rolls. Bring us that Buglari ad with Anne Hathaway and Zendaya! The pre-show at the 2025 fest is significantly less flashy, a sign of TIFF’s loss of fancy major financial backers, but it’s also disappointed in terms of actual content. In particular, the Rogers ads for the People’s Choice vote are atrocious, and the volunteer bumper is depressingly revealing.

First, those Rogers ads. One is set on a shoot for some kind of Hallmark Christmas movie, while the other takes place on a slasher movie set. In both cases, one of the actors obliviously defends the dreck they’re starring in, while the other expresses frustration, explaining that the festival audience wants subtlety, and nuance, and challenge, like in the work Catherine Breillat or Noah Baumbach—”What’s a Baumbach?” asks the fool, at the festival that failed to program the director’s latest. I hate these ads. Hate them. The ads aren’t funny, but worse than that is their condescension. They are condescending in the extreme, perpetuating the notion that there is some clear divide between art film’s and mindless entertainment. A silly idea in practice, considering the number of bad movies TIFF inevitably programs every year. Not even blaming them for that necessarily, considering any festival that shows 200 to 300 films per year will have plenty of duds, but still, where is the self-awareness?

The condescension and lack of self-awareness in the Rogers People’s Choice ads also reflect how out of their creators are with modern cinephilia. While many—maybe even most—in the audience do hold to the old heuristic of the movie and the “film,” talk to anyone a bit younger and more plugged in, and you’ll discover that not only is such a distinction rarer and rarer, there is in fact a celebration of a kind of quality trash. Whenever that slasher guy starts complaining about the cheesy clichés of the film he’s in, including how “stupid” it is to hide in the closet, my eyes roll right back into my skull. Never mind that the closet stuff in Halloween, the film this is parodying, is incredible, the fact that something’s become a cliché doesn’t mean it can’t work as part of your film, and the new generation of Letterboxd logging movie buffs tend to get this. There’s art in craft, and art in showing people a good time, and even art in leaning into the simple pleasures of genre when done right. Hell, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a Hallmark Christmas movie. It’s not like anybody watching them thinks they’re quality cinema. They just scratch an itch. My mom loves them the same way I love Downton Abbey and The Morning Show, or how others love Vanderpump Rules.

“Let people like things,” is a played out plea, but there’s value in allowing people to form taste from a broad range of art. It’s a deeper, more exciting way to appreciate the art, and leads to amazing discoveries about the meaning of the word “good.” Tonight, Will Sloan will be hosting the Toronto launch of his new book, “Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA,” about the iconic “Worst Director of All Time,” alongside a screening of Wood’s now-classic Glen or Glenda, a patently terrible film in terms of pure craft that is nonetheless fun, entertaining, gripping, emotional, and a far more powerful film about the queer and trans experience than many such examples at TIFF over the years. Modern cinephilia has gotten us to a place where we can understand the truth of such an assessment, but the people behind those Rogers ads—and perhaps the people at TIFF who participated, if any did—have no concept of this, because they have no proximity to current film culture. A pretty terrible place to be for a major film festival.

At least the blame there can mostly be shouldered by Rogers, one of Canada’s worst companies. What to make, then, of the TIFF volunteer bumper? TIFFty! Less outright offensive, this short and admittedly cute enough little ad highlighting the contribution of TIFF hundreds of annual volunteers manages to reflect serious problems at the heart of the festival organization. In past years, for as cheesy as the volunteer bumper might have been, it was always very clearly celebratory of those fine free labourers. This year, though, with the focus on TIFF’s 50th year, the bumper actually becomes just another ad for TIFF, diverting attention from the volunteers starring in it, and finally reifying the notion that some vague idea of “celebrity” is what makes the festival tick. Celebrities are a fun part of TIFF, and it’s wonderful that TIFF has made it 50 years, but when the bumper ends, and the card comes up thanking the volunteers, only to disappear a couple seconds later, before most in the audience have realized it’s time to clap… That’s just disrespectful. And for what? To engage in crass self-promotion? I guess that really is the TIFF way in 2025. Dispiriting.

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On Thursday, I started early once again, though not too early. I’d thought to attend a screening of Lucía Aleñar Iglesias’s film Forastera, which looks quite good, but 9 am was just too early. 9:30, though, wasn’t as daunting, so I made my way to the Scotiabank to check out Cal McMau’s debut feature, Wasteman, a prison drama starring David Jonsson and Tom Blyth. Jonsson, who is quickly emerging as one of the best actors of his generation, plays Taylor, a meek sort of guy who’s been in prison for 13 years on a manslaughter conviction, and is soon about to be released. All he wants is to get out and meet his son, who he last saw as a baby. In his last week locked up, Taylor gets a new cellmate, Blyth’s charming and erratic Dee, who, by dint of his own attempts to establish cred at his new home behind bars, ropes Taylor into events that would threaten his release, and his life. I realized watching Wasteman that I couldn’t think of a prison drama I haven’t enjoyed. There’s something about the location and the genre that just works every time at some base level. The fact that the characters are locked up together provides so much built-in tension, and that’s on top of dealing with complicated matters of morality, the law, and the justice system. (Fuck you, Roger’s People’s Choice ads!)

Wasteman is not necessarily the best the prison drama has ever had to offer, but that’s a high bar. Still, it’s a very good film. Deftly and humanely directed, and with two knockout performances at its centre. Blyth, who I really only knew from that last Hunger Games prequel, proves himself a great match for Jonsson. It’s like watching the process of two stars being born before your eyes. The film is tense and satisfying, and it intelligently builds its plot around more than just the usual genre trappings of prison gangs and a need to be free. There’s an economic component to it all, with the film delving into how economies of material goods and status within the prison hierarchy work themselves out, particularly in a system stretched to a breaking point, where violence is allowed to rule. If a bit sensationalized in its depiction, Wasteman nonetheless exposes the cruelty of a prison system that refuses to address the safety and wellbeing of the prisoners themselves. Great viewing in a theatre, I’ll admit, I particularly look forward to the film hitting streaming and finding an audience who just love to kick back and watch a good genre movie featuring great performances.

Continuing the theme of embracing the simple pleasures of genre, I decided to skip another art film in favour of some Hong Kong action. Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious, is among this year’s Midnight Madness selections, and it’s a great Midnight Madness movie. I know this, because even at the midday P&I screening I attended, the audience was hooting and hollering and cheering throughout. It was like a midnight audience, right there in Scotia Cinema 5. Tanigaki, who was choreographer on the great Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, brings an Indonesian style MMA brutality to the much more fun and spirited Hong Kong style, and it all meshes wonderfully. The story of two guys chasing down missing children kidnapped and trafficked by gangs, it’s largely an excuse for fun, funny, and appropriately bloody martial arts. I was especially taken with how much the choreography used gravity, and the way the performers use controlled falls as an offensive tactic. It gave every fight a comedic sensibility, which despite all the brutality, felt closer to an old Jackie Chan movie than I’ve seen from a martial arts movie in years.

I spent much of the rest of the day milling about. I took time to finish the draft of my final assignment during the festival, then mostly hung around, before finally joining the rush line for an evening screening of the new documentary Cover-Up, by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, about the legendary journalist Seymour Hersh. It’s a great documentary about a prickly, important figure. The guy who broke the My Lai massacre, among many other consequential stories about government and military malfeasance. It’s a carefully plotted film, taking the audience into the actual process of assembling a story like My Lai, though by the time it gets to the end, there’s a depressing realization: for all the exposure and truth-telling, things have only gotten worse and the truth is only harder to suss out. That was also the takeaway from the Q&A, which featured both directors, and Hersh himself. What a thing to be in the presence of a guy like Hersh, who bares real history on his shoulders. It was an excellent, engaging, funny Q&A, and after the film I got to briefly tell Poitras how meaningful her film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is to me. What a fantastic way to end a day at the Toronto International Film Festival, which, for all my complaints about things like ads or the operations of the festival, always manages to be one of the great highlights of my year.

Minutes before the lits dimmed at my first screening of the sixth day at TIFF 2025, I saw reports that Charlie Kirk had been shot at a live event in Utah. When the screening was over and the lights came up, he’d been confirmed killed. I don’t need to use the space of a film festival blog update to get into the many fucked up facets of that. Suffice it to say, Kirk’s cosmically deserved fate is nonetheless a terrifying indication of where things are heading as the U.S. and other parts of the world descend into fascist authoritarianism. The increasing salience of political violence is, in simple terms, is really bad. Just so fucking bad. Welcome to the rotting core of modern society.

Having stayed out extremely late, I wasn’t about to attend any early morning screenings. Instead, I let myself sleep in a bit, and then attended to more work I’d piled up, finished two more assigned reviews that will be published soon. It’s why my first screening of the day was only at 3 pm. I’m actually all out of assignments (though I still have one left to file), so in some senses, my festival is already over as a matter of work obligation. Couple that with a less inspiring lineup than some years, and I’m halfway treating it all as over. Which isn’t to say I will stop seeing TIFF movies. There are still more I’d like to get to if I can, but I’m treating it much more like I would outside the festival. There are always movies I want to see being screened in Toronto, often multiple on the same day, and often conflicting. It’s like a year-round festival here, but I don’t sweat it much, and I’m not sweating the rest of TIFF. I’ll see what I see, if I can see it, and if not, no huge loss.

I can’t say the Kirk assassination cast much of a pall over my sixth day at the festival—I have no sympathy for him, and to the extent that the repercussions might drive me mad, that’s only becoming clear now, in the day after, as figures like Ezra Klein attempt to make the righteous case against political violence by sanctifying a man who was, in fact, a monstrous human being on every level. Looking back over the day, though, it all fit within what was an odd, unexpected, and often politically charged experience of the movies I was seeing.

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That first screening of the day was John Early’s Maddie’s Secret, which had been on my radar, but became one of the most buzzed about films of the fest, at least in my circles. Cool comedy people doing a riff on Lifetime movies and Douglas Sirk dramas, done with a dose of John Waters-y camp but also a surprising seriousness, that just sounds great to me. And it was. In the film, Early, dressed in drag, plays a woman washing dishes at a recipe video content operation. She is a talented cook in her own right, and when she finally gets a taste of success, becoming an on-camera personality, it dredges up her long battle with bulimia, eventually sending her to the hospital. Early begins the film in a register close to spoof, with perfectly cheesy dialogue, hilarious music cues, and a visual style that mixes soft cable TV with occasionally beautiful lighting in absurdly funny fashion.

What’s special about Maddie’s Secret, though, is how straight it ultimately plays everything. Though the first few minutes mine some comedy from the image of Early in drag, his character is not a put-on. Maddie is never treated as a joke. Her story, and the difficult experiences she goes through are serious and treated as such, even as plenty of comedy is found in the absurd details around her ordeal. It’s a neat tonal balancing trick, and one that shifts in interesting ways over the course of the film. Not an easy thing to do by any stretch, and risky, too, given how drag is understood in the current political climate, and how easy it is to treat predominantly women’s issues, like disordered eating, as pure frivolity. There’s plenty of fun frivolousness in Maddie’s Secret, but it is not at all a frivolous film. In the end, it’s a powerful one, and certainly a highlight of the festival.

Not exactly a highlight is Olivier Assayas’s new film, The Wizard of the Kremlin, which essentially tells the story of post-Cold War Russia and the rise of Putin through the ‘90s to the mid-‘10s. I’d already heard mixed-to-negative things about the film, which stars Paul Dano as the fictional Vadim Baranov, a media and political manipulator who becomes central in the reshaping of the Russian Federation into the authoritarian nightmare it is now. Lude Law plays Putin, and despite not remotely attempting an accent, he is done up to look so much like Putin that it works. What doesn’t work is the film, which is disappointing by any normal standards, but especially so for Assayas, whose Carlos is one of the best political dramas of the current century.

Playing out like a turgid Wikipedia entry only makes its central character being entirely fiction feel like a pointless, and perhaps historically distorting affair. Most of all, though, it’s a boring trudge through three decades of Russian politics that had me wishing I was watching an Adam Curtis documentary instead. Evidently, the guy next to me felt similarly. I’d noticed through the screening that he was losing focus, but at first I chalked it up to him falling asleep. Understandable. But then, during the scene in which Putin is selected to lead the government and an altered clip of the ceremony began to play, that guy got animated. First, he did a Nazi salute, though it was clear to me he was doing it in jest, as a jab at Putin. Except he didn’t stop there. He began muttering, and then talking, and then yelling as he stood up to leave the row. He continued causing a disturbance as he slowly left the theatre, railing against the film. I wasn’t 100 percent clear on the content of all his ramblings, but I gathered that he was anti-Putin and felt that the film was nothing more than a limp reaction to a violent dictator. He was yelling about how Putin was going to win the war, and win everything in the end, and y’know, Nazi salute aside, I sympathized.

Coming out of The Wizard of the Kremlin, I needed food, so I made my first jaunt down to Ravi Soups of the festival. If you’re a real TIFF-head, you know Ravi Soups, and even if you’re not, you should know Ravi Soups. Anyway, I went there, and there was this older guy happily chatting it up with the workers at the restaurant while he was ordered. I understood quickly that this man was a producer, and was actually encouraging one of the workers to pitch movie ideas. What I didn’t realize until I got to talking with him, sitting down together, was that this wasn’t any random small-time producer. This was David Permut, producer of Face/Off! Of course, he’s produced much more than just Face/Off, and he regaled me with stories from his career, including how he got the legendary Richard Pryor: Live in Concert—turns out Pryor needed the money.

In an amazing example bit of serendipity, while telling me about his new film, Sian Heder’s biopic about the iconic disability rights activist Judy Heumann, we discovered that another older man sitting across from us had actually worked and protested with Heumann in the ‘70s. These are the kinds of interactions that make a festival like TIFF a special experience.

I ended my day by hitting up my second Midnight Madness film of the festival, Todd Rohal’s Fuck My Son!, which I will readily admit I got a ticket to knowing nothing except the title. How could I not see a movie called Fuck My Son! with a midnight audience? That was the right call, in that there is no way the film would have been enjoyable outside that raucous environment. It wasn’t enjoyable as is, though the vibes at the Royal Alex were fun enough. The movie is far grosser than the title suggests, but somehow not actually adventurous enough, and actually kind of a slog by the end. Though I’ll admit, this kind of thing just isn’t for me. I prefer a more honestly vile spirit in my exploitation cinema, if you’re gonna go there. The world is shitty enough, so if you’re going to dive in, make it count.

After totally crashing the day before, I made a big decision on the sixth day of TIFF. I was skipping my morning movie, and all my planned movies, save one. Instead of heading out to see about The Smashing Machine, I slept in a little, got up feeling fresher than I had in days, and got to work on writing that had been piling up. I finalized a piece written prior to the festival, then continued first draft of a TIFF review, before continuing work on another. Later in the morning I went down to John St. to meet Malgosia Turzanska, the costume designer of Hamnet, to talk about her work on the film for a piece that will come out later in the fall. It was a wonderful conversation. There are few things I enjoy more in my cinephilia than peppering crew members with questions about how they do their jobs. Back home, I finished that review and got started on the next before having to get to the one movie. It was all a great, productive start to a day that would only get better.

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I have watched friends’ films before, and it’s always an exciting experience, but those have often been friends I know in a relatively casual way. This was different. I have known Sophy Romvari for about a decade now, and over that period, we have become real friends, good ones. It also meant years of watching as she struggled to get her first feature off the ground, one she knew she had to make, against the odds of a film production system in Canada that sometimes creates as many barriers to making movies as supporting them. When funding finally came through and the film started falling into place, all of Sophy’s friends, myself very much include, felt so much joy. This great filmmaker—whose shorts had already displayed a vision that’s one of one—and a great friend and great human being, was going to make her dream come true. What could be more exciting?

Some time before she went off to shoot the film—with a bit of prodding from myself—Sophy sent me a copy of her nearly finished script to solicit notes. I remember vividly the experience of reading that draft, how it read so cleanly and clearly, how its structural conceits presented themselves in such straightforward manner, and how bracingly honest it was. But it was still just a script. The potential for something. I was not Sophy, and I could not actually envision how what I’d read on the page would actually work onscreen. She went off to shoot it, and by all accounts it was an incredible, joyful experience for all involved, which was the first inkling that she might have made something special. A year later, finally getting to see it at last at its Toronto premiere, “special” feels like an understatement.

Blue Heron is a semi-autobiographical film based on Sophy’s childhood experience, watching with only rudimentary understanding as her family struggled with her troubled eldest brother. It’s a story Sophy has made the subject of her work before, specifically in her short Still Processing, a bracing piece of work that blends documentary and narrative storytelling to expose the wounds of terrible loss. In Blue Heron, the story focuses in and expands, working through memories of that period in her life, and reaching right into them to wrestle with events that anyone must hope were not simply inevitable, though now unalterable.

Take it all with a grain of salt, if you like, when I say that Blue Heron is one of the best debut features in years. I would be less confident in my opinion if I hadn’t been in a theatre full of people, many of whom don’t know Sophy, but who were equally wrecked by the end. I had wondered how her script would work onscreen, but it turns out she just needed to film it. Whatever gap existed between page and screen was filled by an assuredness and confidence in the story she was telling and how. I watch a lot of movies, including a lot of great debuts, but believe me, it’s rare to see one whose precision feels so natural, as though there was no distinction between the filmmaker’s vision, voice, and camera. It is a holistic expression, formed out of careful thought paired with pure intuition, and not a hint of calculation.

A devastating work of empathic understanding, Blue Heron, creates in its style and structure a unique language for processing memory. Sophy discovers a pliability in nostalgia—“the pain from an old wound,” as Don Draper once said—that opens space for literal interrogation and communion. Working with cinematographer Maya Bankovic, she develops a sun soaked picture of a family in distress, where warm surfaces become a subject of study to unearth buried truths. The camera’s roving movements, and impeccable slow zooms give the film a necessary distance, an observational approach matched by Fabelmans-like fictionalization that allows space for consideration of every frame, and every emotion contained therein.

When the film’s style begins to shift, and morph, and evolve, those emotions suddenly burst through. Quietly, but piercingly. Kurt Walker’s careful editing condenses novels worth of story and feeling into the simplest images. A sequence near the end, which, according to Sophy, only inadvertently recalls a similar one in 2001: A Space Odyssey, brings Blue Heron to a startling crescendo so powerful I felt my body convulsing while tears streamed down my face. It’s one thing to know your friend is extremely talented; it’s another to witness that talent do something so extraordinary.

After the film, which I’d attended with my mom and my roommate, we went for dinner at Bar Hop—gotta love those dollar oysters!—and what started as a conversation about Sophy and the film, led into discussions about ourselves, and our families, and others we’ve known over the years with similarly deep, old wounds. Sophy’s particular empathy for her parents, which serves as the film’s true core, is also a profound gesture to the audience. It welcomes personal association, not merely to trauma and grief, but how that trauma and grief are shared between loved ones with remarkable difficulty. The unending process of connecting with ourselves, our histories, our joys and pains, and the people around us manifests itself in Blue Heron as an offering. There is light to be found in sitting in the dark with friends and strangers, experiencing so much tragic beauty together, and then having to reckon with it together, too.

Leaving dinner, I made my way to the Blue Heron afterparty, where nobody could stop talking about the amazing film we’d seen, showering Sophy and her collaborators with endless compliments. We talked and talked and talked, and as the night wore on, the party ended, and those of us left moved on to the next party of the night and the conversation only continued. I got to speak at length with Iringó Réti, who plays the stand-in for Sophy’s mother in the film so beautifully, and who couldn’t contain her awe that she was given the opportunity to be a part of such a great work of art. It reminded me why I love film so much. The very nature of its collaboration creates endless variables, alternate universes where everything goes wrong, and that’s often what happens. When it all goes right, though, and a filmmaker is able to marshal great resources, talent, and collective dedication toward a clear vision of something singular, something new, seeing it spool out onto a big screen is literally the best thing in the world. That I can also say I’m proud of my friend is icing on the cake.

It happens every year, though if I time it right, it only happens right as TIFF is ending. Sometimes that good outcome is not in the cards, and the crash comes earlier. After attending the afterparty for Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers, I went home and had an unfortunately restless night, getting only a few short hours of sleep before having to wake up and attack the new day. I could tell, right then in the morning, that it was going to be a tough one.

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My first film of the day was Chloe Zhao’s new feature, Hamnet, an adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell’s fictional account of William Shakespeare’s marriage to Agnes and the death of their son Hamnet. I’d been looking forward to the film, which stars Paul Mescal as Shakespeare and Jessie as Agnes, though not without trepidation. Though I loved Zhao’s first two films, particularly her sophomore effort The Rider, I was put off by the muddled Best Picture-winner Nomadland, and her jaunt into the MCU with Eternals was about as dire as it gets. It was an open question, whether Zhao really had it as a filmmaker with a point-of-view, or if she simply had a style bolstered by the semi-documentary realism of her first two movies, relying on real-life characters playing themselves to achieve a resonance perhaps otherwise unwarranted by the filmmaking itself. After watching Hamnet, I am willing to say that Zhao does, indeed, have it.

Beginning with an account of how William and Agnes first met, the film follows them through their eventual marriage and the births of their three children—first a daughter, then and twin boy and girl. Sticking to a conceit established by O’Farrell’s novel, Shakespeare remains for most of the film unidentified as the great bard. He works on his poetry, but soon into the marriage he is off to London to find work. With only occasional glimpses of his life in London, we mostly stick with Agnes, her husband returning between seasons of his growing theatre company to attend to his family. It is made clear at the start, in a title card, that this will be the story of the death of Hamnet and the making of Hamlet, so when the plague arrives to take Shakespeare’s son, it comes after half a film’s worth of quiet foreboding. When it comes, though, Zhao discovers a way to depict his crossing over in a manner so profound, I suddenly found myself physically shaken. The tears started to flow, and as the film drew out the story of a family living in the wake of the worst tragedy, those tears did not stop. For what must have been about an hour, I went through what can only be described as an ordeal.

I was not alone. All through the theatre, the sounds of tears and sniffles emanated. When it was over, the film having reached an incredible crescendo of emotion, I could feel the collective catharsis in the room. Looking over to my right, one friend’s face was puffy and drenched. To my left, another friend had his face in his hands, openly sobbing. It brought to mind that scene in Midsommar, you know, with the collective wailing. To get into how Zhao gets the audience there is not necessary. See for yourself when the film is released later this year, and maybe we’ll talk about it in more detail then. Suffice it to say, as an experience, it was a film like nothing else I’ve seen so far at the festival, and perhaps nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s not merely that the film made me cry. Lots of films make me cry. Adam Sandler’s Click made me cry like a baby. Rather, Zhao achieves what appeared to me a fresh way to understand mortality, cinematically speaking, and how we process it. More than just a film about grief, it is about what it means to be connected to the world and to people, and even as I type these words and images from the film flood back into my mind, I struggle to stop the tears from flowing.

Taking some time to let my body collect itself after Hamnet, I eventually made my way to the Lightbox to see one of my more anticipated films of the festival, Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary feature, Nuestra Tierra, also called Landmarks in English. Unfortunately, this is when the crash happened. I was awake for the first five minutes or so of the film, but soon my eyes started to shut involuntarily. Rather than a simple, acceptable couple minutes of dozing off, when I was finally able to open my eyes fully, the film was already halfway done. Attempting for a moment to piece together what was happening, I realized it was for naught, so I got up and left. A loss, but such cinematic casualties are sometimes part of the festival game.

Still not well-rested by any stretch, I was at least alive enough to meet up with another friend and colleague who I’ve known online for years. Lunch at the Town Crier, a TIFF staple, was a wonderful way to spend the early afternoon, chitchatting away about movies, our careers, life, all that good stuff.

After some hemming and hawing over what film to see next, I settled on Kunsang Kyirong’s 100 Sunset. Set within a Tibetan immigrant community living in a Toronto apartment building, Kyirong’s is a quiet study of community relations through the eyes of Kunsel, an introverted young woman whose voyeuristic fascinations begin to have ripple effects throughout her quite isolated community. Spoken mostly in Tibetan, with English heard in pointed moments, the film almost traps the viewer within the spaces Kunsel finds herself in. As a character, she is distant, and the film’s overall distancing effect sometimes threatens to leave it feeling cold, but there’s such specificity in its rendering of a certain kind of life in the city that these potential pitfalls are overcome in the end. More depressive than cold, 100 Sunset makes for a unique portrait of the Toronto experience from a perspective rarely if ever seen.

After the film, I made my way down King Street to the Mubi Notebook party to hang out with more friends, once again talking the night away about films, the festival, politics, what have you.

As the night wore on, my exhaustion set in further, but I still had one more film to attend, and I wasn’t going to miss it. Director Park Chan-wook was in town for the premiere of his new film No Other Choice, one of the toasts of Cannes earlier this year. I don’t love every Park film, but I love Park, and I quite loved No Other Choice, too. Managing not to fall asleep, I watched with delight as the Korean icon crafted a hilarious romp out of the dark story of a man laid off from the paper factory he worked at for decades, who makes a plan to kill the top candidates for another paper company job he’s applying to. As you can imagine, things get way out of hand. It’s another in a great lineage of Korean anti-capitalist cinema, and though typically bloated for Park, it’s also typically sharp in every aspect of humour, performance, violence, and satire. Its inevitable “what the fuck was this all for?” ending is appropriately searing, and it gets there with enough cool swagger—the fades in this movie, my god—to remind you why Park is such a legend.

From there, it was to bed. Thank god.

In yesterday’s TIFF dispatch, I failed to include the end of my day, which involved getting together with friends at Mark Asch’s great annual tradition: Magical Taste of China. The Uygur restaurant is one of the best in Chinatown, and the only reason all of this is worth mentioning is because, well, it’s a fucking fantastic place to eat (provided you like spicy food) and if you’re in the city, do check it out. Now that I am mentioning it, though, one of the great things about getting together with friends (and meeting new ones) at a festival is it’s where the movies actually come to life. Good or bad, differences of opinion, we’re all there out of the same love for the art, so the discussions are rich. A conversation about The Testament of Ann Lee, for example, clarified a lot of my own feelings about it, making the film itself more enriching. What’s the point of culture, after all, if it’s not shared?

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I got home at a reasonable hour, and thus slept a reasonable amount of time, feeling quite refreshed for Day Four and my first film of the day, Derek Cianfrance’s new film Roofman, starring Channing Tatum as the Roofman, a real-life criminal who first robbed dozens of McDonald’s locations, get sent to prison, then escaped and ended up camping out inside a Toys"R"Us. As the film tells it, during his time there, he managed to get himself into a church group and romance a woman there, played by the wonderful Kirsten Dunst, all while stealing product from the store to sell off for cash. The wrinkle is that for all his criminality, the Roofman tries to be a nice guy to everyone he meets, including the victims of his burglaries, going so far as to give one guy the jacket off his back so he won’t be too cold locked in a freezer while waiting for the cops to arrive.

Roofman is a good film. A charming one. The kind people are often tempted to say they don’t make anymore, though that’s not entirely accurate. The most baffling thing about this film is simply that Derek Cianfrance, director of Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, has found himself in 2025 making a film so safe. There’s nothing wrong with a safe film. Roofman might’ve used at least some hint of surprise, but the solid filmmaking and great performances from Tatum and Dunst carry it through. More than that, there’s real earnestness in Cianfrance’s approach, if perhaps a little too thematically explicit by the end. He spent a long time communicating with the real-life subject of the story from prison, and the contradictions of a natural liar and criminal who nonetheless genuinely wants to be seen as a good person by those he encounters make for a good story.

From one real-life crime film, I made my way to the next, heading over to the Princess of Wales for Gus Van Sant’s first film in seven years, Dead Man’s Wire. Set in 1977, the film is a very Dog Day Afternoon-esque thriller about Tony Kiritsis, a disgruntled man who rigged a wire and shotgun around the neck of a mortgage company owner’s son, taking him hostage. Kiritsis had bought a plot of land, hoping to lease it out to a grocery store, only to discover that the people who’d given him the mortgage were going behind his back to dissuade leasers in order to take over ownership of the land at a lesser price. The hostage-taking was an attempt at justice, but also to put on a public show and become a folk hero. The little guy screwed by the wealthy capitalist, like the company’s owner, played by Dog Day’s own Al Pacino in a walk-on part.

Not close to as great as Dog Day Afternoon—an impossible feat—the film nonetheless has a cool energy about it. The script, by Austin Kolodney is alternately exciting, moving, and very funny. Van Sant directs with a clean assuredness, but adds the spark of recreated archival footage using old cameras, adding the point-of-view of the media coverage itself. Bill Skarsgård is excellent as the twitchy, sympathetic, and clearly out of his mind Kiritsis. He also gets to bounce off Dacre Montgomery, playing his hostage, Richard Hall, who fully inhabits a man with a more complicated place in the story, emotionally speaking, than you’d expect. It also helps the film, frankly, that it carries unexpected relevance in light of Luigi Mangione’s assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Another act of righteous violence, successfully staged for maximum folk hero appeal. The film, not unlike Mangione’s act, leaves open the question of righteousness attached to such acts of violence against the elites keeping the lower classes down.

After the movie, I went home for a bit, momentarily catching up with my roommate, who has also been seeing films at the festival, before heading off to a party for The Secret Agent. It was another great opportunity to see friends, put faces to some online names, and meet a couple new ones. Plus, seated at the next table over was the great director Lucrecia Martel, so that was fucking cool.

A few drinks in me, it was back to the Princess of Wales for Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Christophers, his second or third film this year, depending on how you do your accounting. Another collaboration with writer Ed Solomon, The Christophers stars Ian McKellen as an aging painter whose terrible children have hired an art restorer and forger, played by Michaela Coel, to go work for him while secretly “completely” his promised third series of paintings in an decades-long project dubbed The Christophers, which they have already pre-sold for millions. I am a Soderbergh guy. I’m there for him, I’m in the tank, I’m just inclined to like whatever it is he’s up to. Sometimes that means films that feel more like experiments than proper, solid films, but I usually like those, too (Presence being a great recent example). This one, though, surprised me. Bowled me over, I should say.

Solomon’s script, first off, abounds with energy and wit. Dialogue flies fast and cleverly, while deftly tackling issues of aging, the work of making art, and the notion of personal expression as cultural legacy. None of this would work as well as it does without Soderbergh’s fleet directing, which leans into the theatricality of the script without ever letting it feel like a filmed play. Even more central to the film’s greatness are its central performances from McKellen and Coel. One of our great living actors, McKellen has not been this good onscreen in years. It’s a performance that courageously leans into his age, frail, but with fire inside. Opposite him, Coel is more reserved, but equally great as a woman whose broken artistic spirit unexpectedly mirrors the older artist. The game of their interactions across the film, apparently originally intended to play more like Patricia Highsmith, is endlessly fun, and by the end is moving enough to have brought a few tears to my eyes. It is another of the festival’s highlights.

From there, I went to the afterparty for The Christophers, again meeting friends old and new and having a great time basking in the glow of a great movie. TIFF is real good sometimes.

It was nice, finally having some proper sleep. Not as long as I’d have liked, but enough to have me ready for an important day at the festival. I only attended three screenings—yes, I understand this might sound like a lot to a normal person, but film festivals are not for normal people—but I also had an interview to do. Interviews are an exciting, stressful proposition, especially at a festival, where you can sense the life draining out of which ever talent seated opposite you. You hope your questions will yield great answers, but also that the person you’re talking to will genuinely appreciate the effort and the conversation. There’s nothing worse than the feeling you’re wasting someone’s time.

Like I said, I was well (enough) rested and feeling, for the first time in the fest, properly ready to tackle the day. That gave me a palpable pep in my step. Breezing on down University Ave. on my bike, headed to the TIFF Lightbox, I was feeling happy. You know that energy you get from being assuredly prepared? It sort of seeps into your bones, and you feel invincible. Not literally, but as a matter of personal mentality. Attack the day! Anyway, that was how I was feeling, heading over to the longest line I’d experienced at this year’s festival so far.

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I was down at the Lightbox to see one of my more anticipated films of the festival, Mona Fastvold’s new feature The Testament of Ann Lee, her follow-up to 2020’s The World to Come, and her most recent collaboration with husband Brady Corbet, with whom she co-wrote The Brutalist. The pair also co-wrote this new film, and the two clearly share an artistic and intellectual sensibility, though Fastvold’s approach as a director is in many ways quite distinct. Though similarly brash and self-consciously grand, her work has a sensuality about it that you don’t get from Corbet’s cleaner, more austere style. No surprise that the kaleidoscopic sex scene near the end of The Brutalist was actually directed second-unit by Fastvold.

The Testament of Ann Lee, unlike The Brutalist is about an actual, real historical figure. Ann Lee was one of the founding members of the Shakers in America, the Christian offshoot of Quakerism that leaned into physical religious fervour. The Shaking Quakers, they were called, for all their shaking and dancing. Lee brought strict celibacy to the equation, and despite how dreary mass abstinence might sound, the group’s devotion to God, their ecstatic gatherings, their communal living and dedication to labour and refinement, and the rejection of sex attracted some small but impressive numbers of followers throughout the 19th century. This film begins in the 18th century, with Lee as a child, and follows her story all the way to her death at 48. Amanda Seyfried stars as Lee, delivering a truly outstanding performance, anchoring her conversion and journey to leadership in an emotional reality that makes it all seem so understandable. The appeal is clear, and made even more clear by the film’s musical sequences—yes, the film is at points a musical—with Celia Rowlson-Hall’s stunning choreography and Daniel Blumberg’s music creating a feeling of real exaltation.

I will surely have more to say about the film down the road, once it snags distribution and a release, but suffice it to say, I thought it was great. Though, I will admit, not unlike The Brutalist, Fastvold’s film just happened to hit a few areas of real interest of mine; in this case, primarily the exploration of the new faiths of America that took hold in New York’s Burned-Over District. The Mormons also came out of that stew. Here, Fastvold attempts to give Lee similar biographical treatment to any number of prophets—and Jesus himself—on screen. I suspect, and in fact know, that many will be underwhelmed by the film’s straightforwardness in this regard, but I think that misses what the film is really doing. It is, at its core, an exploration of exaltation, and finding that feeling in a world falling apart, both through a rejection of the ungodly, but also an embrace of the world as a godly creation manifest through the human spirit. I am not a religious person, and I have no interest in celibacy as a practice, but I don’t think Fastvold is, either. Rather, this is a film about establishing a life with like-minded people to do holy work hand-in-hand, that is to say: creating a better world.

After getting out of Ann Lee, a made my way over to the Elevation offices for my interview, which was a wonderful 30 minutes with The Secret Agent star Wagner Moura—yes, he is that handsome and charming in person, and also an excellent interview. You’ll be able to read that later in the year, when the film comes out, but for now I’ll say that it was a real pleasure talking to Moura about Brazil, its politics, its history, and bringing that to life onscreen for generations only now reckoning with the country’s dictatorial past.

I got out of there, and rushed back to the Lightbox to take in the second of three Wavelengths shorts programmes—as it turns out, I cannot make the third, most anticipated one on Sunday due to another scheduled interview. I missed the introduction, so I really wasn’t sure what I was about to encounter, though I will admit I was ultimately disappointed with the selection. The clear highlights were Mark Jenkins’ very funny “I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash,” in which he narrates Super 8 footage captured on his travels as a filmmaker, Kaiwen Ren’s very short film “Aftertide,” and Maryam Tafakory’s “Daria’s Night Flowers.” The latter film is an impressive assemblage of dozens of clips from various Iranian films over the last several decades, cut together to accompany the narration of a story about an Iranian woman’s terrible abuse.

I had plenty of time to kill after the Wavelengths programme, so I headed home to tackle edits on a piece drafted prior to TIFF. After getting down with that, I had to go see a guy about waking up a dead man. Down at the Princess of Wales, Rian Johnson was premiering his third Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, which places my favourite recent addition to the detective canon into yet another new style and tone. I started my day with a film about religion, and here again was a film about religion, with Blanc solving the mystery of a very Trump-like Catholic priest killed in a locked-room mystery situation. Most people will only get to see the film in December, or late November at the earliest, if a theatre nearby plays it, so I won’t get too far into things. That said, the cast assembled here is excellent. Along with Craig, the film stars Josh O’Connor—the real lead of the movie, both in screen time and character work—Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church. Like I said, an excellent cast.

Moreover, Johnson does some incredibly ballsy things with the very meta inclusion of classic detective fiction as reference points for characters in the story. John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man being the main one, but with heaps of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and others. It’s easy enough to make references, but Johnson layers these references in so deeply that he risks falling flat by comparison. Instead, he effectively builds expectations around those old mysteries into something new and clever. And that’s not even getting to what ends up being quite a moving story by the end, dealing with the meaning of faith, even when literal faith in God is absent. Faith in people and the world, more like, and the ability of that faith to transform people and make the world better. A fitting end to a day that started with a story about Ann Lee and the shakers.

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So, I headed into Day Two of TIFF on very little sleep. Three hours or so, never mind that it was the same story two nights in a row. I can’t remember ever starting the festival so tired, and as a result, I made some changes to my plans. I’d wanted to get up and attend the P&I screening of Olivier Assayass’s new film, The Wizard of the Kremlin, but the thought of a 150-minute movie at 8:30 in the morning… Daunting. And the fact that early word was pretty negative? Yeah. So, I rested a bit more—though I was already up—taking my time to do some work and collect myself.

Last year, when I spend a few months in Thailand, in Phuket, I stayed for three nights at a nearby temple in the mountains. Anyone who knows me will know I am in no way a spiritual person, let alone religious. I’d also never meditated before, not properly at least. But for several days, I got up each morning at around 3:30 for a 4 a.m. meditation session, spending much of the rest of the day on my own in a small cabin with a simple mat for a bed and not much else except some books. There was the food ritual in the morning, where locals brought offerings up the mountain to share in a meal with the monks, and some general upkeep work to help out with during the day, but for much of the rest of the time it was pleasant, quiet seclusion. Then, at night, there would be another, longer meditation session.

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I can’t say I came close to mastering the art, but I was able to reach some level of meditative state given the environment, my inability to communicate with just about anyone there in English, and a simple focus on my slow breathing. I may not believe in Buddhism, but the benefits of meditation in simply calming my naturally anxious state even slightly were clear. Since then, I’ve tried multiple times to get into a good enough rhythm for meditation, but haven’t found it, and I’m not disciplined enough, I suppose, to persist in trying consistently. Sometimes, though, movies do the trick.

I had a couple of options, having decided to skip The Wizard of the Kremlin. In the end, I landed on Pete Ohs’s Erupcja, most notable for being one of the films at the festival starring Charli XCX. It also had another, even more base appeal: the movie is only 70 minutes long. It’s not the shortest 70 minutes, I’ll say that. A very light-touch, somewhat French New Wave-influenced film about the end of multiple intersecting relationships in Warsaw, it is the sort of inoffensive international picture that I had a lot of tolerance for, while also admitting it’s not exactly good, and I likely won’t remember it exists in a few years. For those wondering, Charli acquits herself well as an actress. She carries a chunk of the film, and does so well, with enough care of craft to sell the emotional reality of the character, and the rest backed up by her natural charisma. Not a movie star, but a star.

The film centres primarily on a little love triangle between Charli’s character, Bethany, and her boyfriend, Rob, who has brought her to Warsaw, the city she claimed was the most romantic she’d been to, in order to propose, and Nel, a local woman working at a flower shop with whom Bethany has had a long tumultuous kind of relationship. There’s a simplicity in how these characters and relationships are drawn. You know where things are going right away—Rob’s overbearing affection masks unattended but nonetheless clear fears that he’s about to lose his love. As the three characters’ interests begin to intermingle and lead to the end of something, we come to learn that Bethany and Nel have a longstanding, shared superstition. Every time they meet, you see, a volcano erupts. And this signals that they will break up with their partners. It’s a cute setup, and it works well enough, but the film doesn’t ever lift itself beyond the setup. What it reaches for is serenity, a peace in the idea that love sometimes ends, and that’s okay. I agree, but there’s a lack of tension in the approach, and an overall slightness that leaves a nagging feeling that the film needed more. Not a bad movie, but as I said, not especially good either.

What I’ll say to its credit, though—or mine—is that I felt good about my decision to make Erupcja my first film of the day. It was a relatively relaxed movie, with a nice spirit about it, and it was short. I came out of a so-so movie feeling good.

Hanging around the festival area, I chatted up a storm with friends, by which I mean, a group of us spend a couple hours lodging complaints about everything from TIFF’s organization, to the problem of arts funding in Canada, to a dissection of director Ali Abbasi’s sometimes generative evilness (no, I cannot explain how we got to that one.)

I then made my way back to the Scotiabank Theatre to see Rhayne Vermette’s second feature, Levers. Her debut, St. Anne, ranks among the best, most exciting films of what has felt in some moments like a new wave of great, independent Canadian cinema. Vermette’s work is decidedly experimental. Hailing from Manitoba, the Métis filmmaker has used 16mm film to explore local communities in abstracted terms. I had imagined that with her second film, she’d go in an even more narrative direction than she had in her debut. That was not the case at all. To the extent that I understood what was going on in Levers, it was that this small town was cast, seemingly by magic, under a spell of perpetual darkness. Other than that, I experienced the film largely as a succession of gorgeous images that feel as though they are about to slip into an abyss of black. It became, unintentionally, something like a meditative experience. My breathing settled as the mysterious sights and sounds washed over me, the beauty, for all my lack of understanding, reaching my soul. I came out baffled, but entranced by Vermette’s ability to affect a mood and in love with those images.

From there, it was off to Wavelengths 1, the first of TIFF’s experimental shorts programmes this year. It featured the wonderful “Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon,” the 2016 film by the late Tomonari Nishikawa, along with Viktoria Schmid’s “Rojo Žalia Blau,” Sohrab Hura’s “Disappeared,” Jorge Caballero and Camilo Restrepo’s “09/05/1982,” Chan Hau Chun’s “Map of Traces,” and Vadim Kostrov’s “En Traversée.” The selections fit together well stylistically, and continued my calm, meditative streak for Day Two. Among them, two were most notable. “Rojo Žalia Blau” takes a series of shots of nature, overlapping images over one another, with their colour shifted, creating what at first looked almost like an anaglyph 3D effect, but soon looked more like images split through a prism into rainbows. Gorgeous and fascinating to contemplate. “Disappeared,” features a long, ominous, incredibly digitally degraded shot of a tent in a forest. We watch it for a while, until things begin to happen, though not much really does. It’s the film’s final moments, a punchline of sorts, that pulls everything into focus, including the film’s intentions, and it’s both funny and unnerving.

I should also say some words about “09/05/1982,” a short about political unrest in Mexico at that time, which at the very end reveals itself to have been crafted out of images and videos generated using AI. Some will categorically reject this, because AI, but I don’t quite take the view of the technology, despite my extreme skepticism of its value, and even worse fears about its effects. Particularly in the space of experimental cinema, I think there is a place for exploring how AI functions within an artistic space, if it functions at all. This is a film that directly asks that question, but using it to depict once very real, dire political circumstances. That its too smooth surfaces cannot actually capture in meaningful detail how those circumstances looked and felt seems a part of the intention, but ultimately glib, which is maybe the true natural state of so-called generative LLMs. Not exactly the stuff of good art.

Despite all that induced meditation, I desperately needed a nap. So I went home, took a solid 45, attended to some work, before running out again to see Alexandre Koberidze’s new feature Dry Leaf. I had not seen the Georgian filmmaker’s previous work, but had heard sky-high praise for this one, so I went in excited, and knowing absolutely nothing about it, except that it was apparently shot on low-quality digital cameras. That would be underselling how shitty the digital imaging is here. Blown up onto a big screen, it was a blurry, blocky mess, lacking in any ability to resolve fine—or even less than fine—detail. It tells the story of Irakli, a man whose daughter, a photographer, has essentially run away while working on a project to photograph villages around the country and their football fields.

Irakli heads out on the road with a literal phantom friend—as in, we see him having conversations with a person who is not there, but whose voice we hear—to retrace his daughter’s journey across the country, stopping everywhere with a football field or stadium, asking locals if they’ve seen his daughter. Over the course of three hours, we watch this process play out, slowly and without real incident. Locations seem to bleed into each other, and as my mind naturally wandered, I’d sometimes lose track why Irakli was in any given place at any given time, before remembering that it doesn’t really matter. Goalposts, fields, mountains, trees, cows—lots of cows—dogs, kids, old men and women. These are the sights that make up Dry Leaf, which becomes a portrait of a beautiful landscape and decaying old society of village life. The terrible digital imaging is nonetheless beautifully composed, and often hints at the theoretical beauty that might be had, were the cameras better. Very quickly, though, these hints are subsumed into the images themselves, which start to feel painterly. I found myself sinking in, once again getting to a meditative place as the smeary sights of a beautiful countryside led the way. A late sequence at a car wash is arresting in its visual abstraction. It all culminates in an impossibly simple and moving ending. It is, so far, the film of the festival.

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Every year, it’s a bit of a game. What will your first movie be? TIFF likes to pile things up in those first few days, to the particular ire of those who’ve missed Cannes titles. A bunch of good movies, all scheduled for press and industry screenings at the same time, often with only two other equally difficult to plan public screenings. So you make choice. This year, for example, I might have liked to have checked out Lav Diaz’s Magellan, or Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but instead I went with Joachim Trier’s awaited Worst Person in the World follow-up, Sentimental Value.

Heading out into the pouring rain, umbrella in hand, I walked my relatively short walk from home to the Scotiabank Theatre, passed through the increasingly absurd security and bag check, and made my way up to the theatre, which was full, but not too full about 20 or 30 minutes before show time. In fact, it never completely filled up, which seemed odd, until I remember that the film played Cannes, has had advanced screenings in numerous cities including Toronto. Of course, I also bumped into friends, like filmmaker Christopher Redmond, who I met earlier this year at Filmspotting Fest in Chicago. I cannot stress how much catching up with friends and hanging out is the best part of TIFF or any other festival. Though, don’t get it twisted. Seeing movies is great, too, even if it comes with the associated stresses of crafting a schedule and then changing and changing and changing on the fly.

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I’d settled on Sentimental Value to start my festival, and was glad to have. I’ve been on Trier’s emo Norwegian wavelength for a long time—even interviewed him once at the fest, for his least known, least loved, and least talked-about film—but Worst Person in the World struck a particular chord with me several years ago thanks to its particularly keen insight into the millennial condition. The kind only a Gen Xer could produce. That film became a big deal, so naturally Trier’s next movie was going to involve a levelling up, production-wise. Here that’s most evident in the heavy hitters among the cast. Not only bringing back Worst Person star Renate Reinsve, but adding in Stellan Skargård and Elle Fanning. The film, which is about the testy relationship between a prickly (see: pretentious jerk) filmmaker and his estranged daughters, is intelligent and rich in novelistic detail. It also made me cry, the good tears, which is honestly a great way to get the festival going.

After catching up with yet more friends following the first screening of the day, I made my way back into the Scotiabank for a screening of Raoul Peck’s new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5. I’m slated to interview Peck about the film, which quite resembles his acclaimed I Am Not Your Negro, about the writer James Baldwin. This new essay film is, of course, about George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984. It features voice-over narration from Damian Lewis, reading the words of Orwell himself, mostly drawn from his essays and diaries written on the island of Jura, off Scotland, during the final years of his life. The film stretches back to Orwell’s childhood and later position with the British colonial police in India, and it uses plenty of clips from various adaptations of the author’s work, but the meat of the film is found in the juxtaposition of Orwell’s forceful anti-totalitarianism of old with footage of the situation around the world, from the U.S. to Gaza to Ukraine to Myanmar. It’s a blunt piece of work, and sometimes lacking in finesse, but as a demonstration of Orwell’s words and ideas, and their increedible relevance, it very much does the job.

The Secret Agent was among my more anticipated films of the festival, partly for the director, Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius, Bacurau), but also the star and the subject. Wagner Moura as a guy hiding out with his kid while hitmen come after him under the oppressive political situation of 1977 Brazil? Sign me up! What I didn’t expect was how this film would actually play. That is, rather than crackling thriller, The Secret Agent is a patient, almost picaresque lens on the colourful but scary and depressing situation for those on the wrong side of a brutal government. I was especially taken with how the film slowly builds its world and characters, so that when shit finally does hit the fan near the end, it carries a weight well beyond the normal excitement of an action film. I cried at the end of this one, too. Those good tears.

I was assigned to review The Eyes of Ghana, Canadian director Ben Proudfoot’s documentary about the cinematographic witness to a revolution, so I made my way down to the TIFF Lightbox, through their impossibly packed lobby, up to the theatre, and was greeted by Ghanaian drummers on-stage, playing away. More movies at the festival should welcome audiences this way. Hell, even movies outside the festival. Then there was the recorded video introduction from the Obamas, Barack and Michelle, who once led The Free World, and now produce shiny looking documentaries. The Eyes of Ghana is particularly shiny, to match the spirit of its central character, the cameraman Chris Hesse, who became the personal cinematographer for Kwame Nkrumah, the revolutionary leader who brought the former Gold Coast out from under British colonial rule. Now in his 90s, Hesse is aiming to digitize and restore the collection of films he recorded of that exciting and tumultuous period. It’s a documentary about the power of cinema as a political force, though it’s held back by key aspects, leaving it intriguing, but lacking in the depth and complexity that could have made it into an essential text.

When the TIFF 2025 lineup was announced, one of the few screenings I knew I had to attend was Midnight Madness opening night selection, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. But being at midnight, and having just seen four movies in a row, the idea of starting my festival with a six-movie day felt unconscionable. So I traded in a ticket for Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks, which I will get to at a later screening, and went home to rest. I rested, though did not nap as I had hoped, and then went to hang out for a bit at Embassy in Kensington Market, where my friend Lydia Ogwang was doing one of her regular DJ sets—if you’re from Toronto, keep an eye out! Again, more catch-up. From there I biked down to the Royal Alexandra, watched as Mayor Olivia Chow and Robin Hood: Men in Tights star Cary Elwes walked by me in the theatre, and took my seat for what promised to be a riotous screening.

Boy, did it deliver. It’s the most Toronto movie I’ve ever seen, and specifically, the most millennial Toronto film ever made. It’s an amazing time travel movie, too. And I won’t spoil anything, but it’s also the best Mission: Impossible movie of the year. I spent half the movie just thinking to myself, How the fuuuuuuck?! Oh, and laughing to the point of tears. That, too. A great way to end Day One.

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Staring down the barrel at another year of TIFF is nerve-wracking and daunting. Exciting, but stressful. Making my long journey—five minutes by bicycle!—to Phae Tavern for the annual pre-TIFF Toronto Film Critics Association party, I did wonder to myself whether I’d made things a bigger pain for myself by not having planned out my festival schedule. Even Day One remained a mystery to me, except for the Midnight Madness opening night premiere of Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, and I’d pretty well decided Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value would be my first of the fest. These two fixed points came in handy as friends and people I met at the party, one after another, asked what films I’d be seeing. Of course, I asked them the very same question. How better to figure out my own plans than jump on whatever bandwagon I could find?

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I skipped the TFCA party last year in order to attend Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky’s now annual unofficial festival kickoff, Midnight Dankness. This year, it seemed sensible to attend both. After all, the TFCA party is a great little mixer, populated mostly by film critics, and a few local filmmakers. A few years back, I chatted with Sarah Polley, for example, who was about to premiere Women Talking, and whose films Take This Waltz and Stories We Tell are two all-time favourites. I didn’t embarrass myself mentioning that, though I did tell Polley earlier this year when I interviewed her via Zoom for an article about her hilarious episode of The Studio—read it at GQ! There were no Oscar-nominees at the party this year, from what I could tell.

Of course, I was mostly there to catch up with friends, both local and international, and that I did aplenty, munching on hors d'oeuvres of Thai food all the while. Most of the chatter was about film schedules and how none of us had really made one. Some of it was the usual complaining about TIFF as an organization—the winnowing of the Wavelengths avant-garde programme was a particularly hot topic for complaints, and the subject of an excellent, important piece by Mark Peranson in the Globe and Mail earlier this week. In the end, though, TIFF is pretty great as a festival to attend, particularly for someone who lives mere minutes away from all the venues. The city spaces I frequent are suddenly abuzz and there are so many fun people to meet. And the movies, too. All those movies.

After spending a fair amount of time at the TFCA party, long enough to notice attendees dwindling down to about a handful of talkative stragglers, I decided to head over to the Royal for Midnight Dankness. I knew I had missed the first part of that programme, Charles Roxburgh and Matt Farley’s no doubt uproarious new no-budget feature Evil Puddle. No matter, I’d make it in time for the second feature, a 20th anniversary screening of the surrealist Japanese anthology comedy Funky Forest: The First Contact, which I ashamedly had not heard of, but whose cult status was instantly understandable from the wonderfully absurd opening scene. Things only got more absurd as it went, with humour as random as a Tim & Eric sketch, but also much more strangers. The introduction of weird alien-y creatures in later segments of the film—150 minutes with a very funny, short intermission, by the way—pushes everything even more into the realm of “weirdest, funniest shit you’ve ever seen.”

In between the two features, Kuplowsky once again programmed a remixed movie, this time the Wachowskis-produced V for Vendetta, chopped up and screwed into a piece called Ctrl-V. These trippy recuts are fun to zone out to, though not entirely my thing. I got more excited when Peter told me they’re done by the same mysterious guy who does The Elephant Graveyard channel on YouTube, which regular readers here will know I only recently discovered. (His videos on Joe Rogan are fantastic!) No, Peter does not know the guy’s identity.

Much as I was enjoying Funky Forest, I was feeling quite tired, and after the film ended, I hopped on my bike and raced home, desperate for sleep. Friends, countrymen… I did not fall asleep until about 3 am. Now, four hours later, writing this newsletter update, I’m quote-unquote awake and ready to quote-unquote tackle the festival. I’ve also managed to look at my schedule, finally. Because of how front-loaded TIFF tends to be, particularly with press and industry screenings, it’s gonna be a very busy and long day despite my previously stated goal of taking it easier this year. I will take it easier! Just not on Day One, apparently. And maybe not Day Two either. Or Day Three. Fuck me!

So I’ll get out of bed and shower and spruce up and find a way to not look half dead as I head out for a day that will stretch from a 9 am screening of Sentimental Value to the wee hours of morning after what will surely be a riotous screening of Nirvanna at midnight. Check back in tomorrow to find out how the films were, or to see if I survived. I make no promises.

Oh good, it’s raining.

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Welcome to the latest Friday newsletter. It’s Sunday, but Sunday is better than Friday anyway, so let’s roll with it. It’s been a busy few weeks, and now the busyness is about to ramp up as I head into TIFF. I’ve got a few assignments already, and I’m hoping to nab a few more, but I’m still constructing my schedule—by which I mean I looked at it for five minutes, my head started to hurt, and I walked away—and figuring out what to prioritize.

I’ve been thinking through how I want to do TIFF coverage for the newsletter this year. I already know I won’t be going as nuts as last year, when I saw something north of 40 screenings over nine days, writing about all of them. I still plan to write about everything, but few things. A bit more focused. So I’ll be less tired. Though I’m sure I’ll still be plenty tired. So it goes at a film festival.

For a bit there, I toyed with the idea of making my TIFF dispatches for paid subscribers only, but I’ve decided not to do that. I’d like the festival blogs to be open and accessible to all. I may look for extra content to include, perhaps, as a locked-off section at the bottom of posts, you know, to incentivize all you beautiful moochers to spring for a paid sub. We shall see.

In the meantime, you can look forward to following along with all my TIFF updates when the festival kicks off later this week. My first dispatch will be up Thursday morning with a report from Peter Kuplowsky’s annual pre-festival starter screening, Midnight Dankness. Expect a new update every morning throughout the festival, with a nice little wrap-up at the end.

In case you missed it the other day, I wrote a new post for the newsletter inspired by videos I watched by the YouTuber The Elephant Graveyard, who has developed a compelling theoretical framework for understanding the state of comedy and the world. It’s a theory about guys who want to be new guys.

I ran with the theory, linking it to Alex Russell’s great new movie Lurker, as well as Adam Friedland’s difficult and emotional interview with US congressman Ritchie Torres.

Reading, Watching, Listening

So here’s what I’ve been consuming recently.

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It’d been gnawing at me for a good while now, this feeling that there’s something going on with guys that I thought I recognized but couldn’t quite name. I couldn’t put a label on it, and I didn’t even know how to understand it. Calling it a breakdown of the social order is broad and alarming and true, but also not explanatory. You see, the thing I’ve been feeling, sensing, is that guys—a lot of guys at least, too many—have forgotten how to be human beings. Mensches, you know? This basic tenet of society, that at some level we are in it together because we recognize in each other a common humanity, it’s evaporated. I wonder if it was ever there in the first place, but I do feel it has developed over my lifetime, and especially over the last decade or so. The trouble is, I don’t understand it. I get all the stuff about modern technology, atomization, the widening wealth gap, etc. But it seems to me, there’s some other damage. Something not explained entirely by external macro forces. Something intrinsic to guys—a lot of guys at least, too many.

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This week, I got turned on to the work of a mysterious Canadian YouTuber called The Elephant Graveyard. Marc Maron mentioned his videos in a podcast appearance, citing it during a conversation about the anti-woke comedy cadre led by Joe Rogan. Maron’s a guy with taste, I thought, and if he’s saying fucking YouTube videos are worth watching, they’re probably worth watching. And they’re worth watching. There are two key ones: “How Comedy Became a Dystopian Imperial Hell World,” a.k.a. “Comedy Czar”; and the recently released “How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult,” a.k.a. “Comedy Jonestown.”

First, it must be said: this guy, Mr. Graveyard, ol’ EG, he hates Joe Rogan. Loathes him. He speaks about Joe Rogan and the whole Austin scene in apocalyptic terms. What’s interesting, though, is that he sees the scene for what it is. In fact, he gets what’s going on, and he lays it out.

In “Comedy Czar”, Mr. G tells the story of Joe Rogan, a guy with a dad-sized hole in his heart, who wanted to be another kind of guy so bad that he turned to comedy, and even though he was bad at it, but he created an alternate reality for himself where he was that different, better kind of guy, and he believed in it so hard that he did, for all intents and purposes, become a whole new kind of guy. Except the problem with living in some fake reality is the bubble can be burst, and Joe will be revealed as just the same old guy he used to be, so he has pillars that hold up this reality where he’s a new guy, and that requires guys to uphold the pillars. Yes, guys. Guys who’ll take your abuse and laugh at your jokes and tell you you’re great and that you’re the best guy they know, and you’re rich and successful, and these guys, they want to be new guys, too, new guys like you, new guys who also have a dad hole to fill. So everyone congregates, and Joe becomes the Comedy Czar, the ruler over this empire of new guys. And that’s why comedy is shit now.

This is a summary of the video’s argument, using its own terminology and rhetorical repetition. It’s a video about guys wanting to be new guys. Such a straightforward idea, and universally understandable. Here it was, the explanation.

“Comedy Jonestown” takes these ideas further, about new guys, but about how those new guys became part of a project to literally destroy the world. The major wrinkle Mr. G adds here is the idea of getting the hell out of here, which is actually what all these new guys wanted to do before they drank the Kool-Aid, when they were just guys with dad-sized holes. These videos, taken together, clarify the nature of what’s going on right now, between people. Between guys.

In our neoliberal hellscape, where individuality has been sapped of its freedom-giving quality and rendered a matter of personal branding in a global marketplace of guys and goods, there’s also nothing to latch onto, socially speaking. This is bad on all kinds of levels, including our inability to meaningfully communicate (see: Eddington). It’s also bad on the specific level of guys with dad-sized holes. Those dad-sized holes, they’re just not going to fill themselves, but that’s where Rogan and his gang of podcasting guys come in. These guys, they’ve all successfully become new guys, just look at them! This is what you want to be if you’re just some guy with a dad-sized hole.

The insight here is not the funny application of the word “guys.” It’s the dynamic identified, in which the transactional nature of so many modern relationships has incentivized these sorts of destructive personality transformations. And it’s not the transformation that’s troubling, but the new realities that must be created and upheld in order to sustain the fiction. It’s all these guys with dad-sized holes who just want to get the hell out of here and become new guys, so they join the cult, where there’s a whole different reality. And that reality is detached from real reality. It’s a hyperreality. These guys are so powerful, and their appeal has given them political weight, which has been exploited by propagandists who help construct the new reality in the direction that suits them. It’s literally destroying the world as we speak.

Last night, I went to an advance screening of the new movie Lurker, the debut feature from writer-director Alex Russell. It’s about a young guy who meets a pop star on-the-rise at the clothing boutique he works at. The young guy sort of weasels his way into the pop star’s posse, and you start to understand there’s a lot more going on here. A thriller about the relationship between celebrity and fan in an online world defined by parasocial exploitation. It’s a really good, smart, well-made film that’s funny and insightful and doesn’t get too big for its britches. And it delivers. In good part thanks to some excellent performances, particularly the one from the Lurker himself, Théodore Pellerin. Québec’s own! I had already seen Lurker, months ago, on a screener link. I was excited to see it again, properly, in a theatre. It played very well. Better even than the first time, especially getting to enjoy it with a theatre actually laughing at the film’s dark humour.

Seeing it a second time, after having watched Mr. G’s videos, I found my mind fixated on his theory of new guys. Here you’ve got this creepy guy, raised by his grandmother—hello, dad-sized hole!—who wants to be a new guy so bad that he intrudes into the life of this other guy who’s got his own dad and mom-sized holes, who’s already managed to create a new reality and become a new guy. He’s got his own cult of supporters, his posse, who he subtly and not-so-subtly manipulates in order to maintain the pillars of his new reality, lest it all collapse on him. In fact, there’s an MLM quality about it all, with all these new guys competing against each other for power in the hierarchy of guys in the fake reality they’ve created. The only hope they have in the end is to partner up in the maintenance of the new reality, and then they can be new guys forever. Fuck real reality, and the world.

And that’s what’s going on. It’s all the tech and all the economics and all of that stuff, but it’s also the dad-sized holes and that give guys the desire to get the hell out of here and become a new guy. It’s a deranging condition, perfectly ripe, and vulnerable to exploitation. It’s an inhuman condition, literally, in that it forgoes one’s own humanity and denies the humanity of others by departing from reality. Who a person actually is in their soul doesn’t matter, because if it did, becoming a new guy wouldn’t be possible. So it’s evil, too. And it succeeds more and more, the more that evil is spread. The more people buy into the idea that becoming a new kind of guy will solve their problems, fill that dad-sized hole, the more reality tilts in that antisocial direction. Even those of us who see through the fake reality must contend with it. Must live in it.

Yesterday, I also watched the new episode of The Adam Friedland Show, with guest Ritchie Torres, the congressman from the Bronx, and one of the loudest pro-Israel voices on the Democratic side. It takes about 40 minutes into the episode before they get to the topic, but when they do, what happens is remarkable. Friedland, once the co-host of the Cumtown podcast, whose whole schtick is doing irony-poisoned and hilarious interviews with a range of guests, drops the irony and through visible nervousness attempts to reach Torres as a human being. He tries to understand what it was that inspired such devotion to Israel from this openly gay black Puerto Rican guy who grew up in the Bronx projects. Friendland, who is Jewish and grew up partly in South Africa and lived briefly in Israel as a teenager, then tries to relate to Torres what it’s been like for him as a Jewish person to watch as a country that has the Jewish star, the Magen David, on its flag commits genocide ostensibly in his name.

It’s a painful appeal that Friedland makes, and I know it all too well. There’s debate to be had about various contentious facts of the situation, or theories about how best to end things and forge a better future. But that becomes a distraction from the core issue.

“I’m telling you as a Jew right now that we are receiving a lot more hate because of what the people with the flag that has a Jewish star on it are doing to other people right now,” Friedland says. “I’m telling you, as a Jewish person … how painful it is for us to say, and it hurts my stomach to say this—and you’re gonna say ‘I disagree, I disagree’—that this is a genocide. And that hurts to say that a Jew could do that. It hurts because we grew up with learning about what hatred is. We grew up learning about this. And the same year the state of Israel was established, 1948, the world saw the Holocuast, and they established standards for what a genocide is. It was the same year. And the world said this shouldn’t be a thing that happens.”

To this, Friedland is met with snark from Torres, who cannot allow himself to recognize the display of pure humanity in front of him.

Still, Friedland persists in the human appeal. He describes what it means to have a father born in 1951, just a few years after people were coming out of concentratin camps looking like skeletons, if they survived at all. “It terrified us,” he says, explaining that this was all wrapped up in his Zionist education as a child, teaching him he had to defend Israel. Then he describes having lived there. “I lived there, and I went to a settlement at the end of my year there, and I looked down the hill at a Palestinian village and I saw how they lived, and I turned back and I looked at the settlement and saw how they lived. And people live in a world where they're demeaned and dehumanized and surveiled constantly by people—and this isn't in Gaza—by people in SWAT team outfits with semi-automatic weapons. And that's what the world is seeing.”

He continues, getting only more emotional, “Me saying this to you right now will hurt people in my own family, okay. Because this is a very important thing to us. And the fact that I still fucking care about being Jewish is embarrassing. I should just be a guy [ed. note: there it is]. But this feels like a stain on our history, and it feels like it's changed what being Jewish is. Because what being Jewish is isn't Israel. Judaism has existed for 4,000 years. This is a country for 75 years. You know, it is one of the oldest monotheistic religions. Anti-semitism is one of the oldest forms of hatred. People in my life are going to be mad at me about this, but I'm saying this because I am Jewish.”

All this, and again he’s met by ugly inhumanity from Torres, who treats the whole thing like a gotcha interview rather than an opportunity to hear from someone who lives the experience of being torn between community, and history, and the horrible reality he can’t ignore. But you see, Torres isn’t operating in the same reality. He’s constructed his own reality. He’s another guy, one of those guys with a dad-sized hole, who grew up in a terrible situation and found a way to get himself the hell out of there and construct a new reality where he could be a new guy. And that new reality made him vulnerable, and he got taken advantage of by the Israel lobby, who flew him out on a Disneyland vacation to Israel for his first ever trip overseas. Israel was, in some senses, the reality he got himself away to. It’s one of his pillars. To watch it fall would be to watch his reality crumble and his new guy personality die. He’s not even comfortable with questions about his quite inspiring coming out story, which Friedland unsuccessfully tries to get him to open up about earlier in the interview. He can’t own that part of himself because that’s the guy he used to be, not the new guy he is now. His humanity can’t be allowed to show. Of course he can’t recognize the humanity in Friedland, or the humanity in Palestinians for that matter. There is no space for humanity in the fake reality of the new guy. Hello, fascism.