The Christophers

The great Ian McKellen and I May Destroy You’s Michaela Coel make a brilliant pairing in Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh’s incisively witty chamber comedy about art, commerce, and avarice.

This incisively witty chamber comedy from Oscar winner and Festival fixture Steven Soderbergh ushers us into a tangled web of art, commerce, and long-brewing resentments. Written by Men in Black scenarist Ed Solomon and featuring an acerbic turn from the great Ian McKellen, The Christophers is one of Soderbergh’s most delicious entertainments in years.

Having all but given up her own art practice, thirtysomething Lori (I May Destroy You’s Michaela Coel) divides her time between freelance art restoration and working the window of a food truck. Her fortunes promise to change, however, when she’s approached by the estranged heirs (Jessica Gunning and James Corden) of renowned painter Julian Sklar (McKellen) with a tantalizing proposition: Lori is to apprehend a series of long-abandoned paintings from Sklar’s London home, complete the paintings using her masterful imitation skills, and receive a third of the profits from the sale of the paintings following the old man’s imminent death. Lori accepts the gig, infiltrating Sklar’s home under the pretense of becoming his new assistant, but the ruse quickly goes awry in a series of titillating twists and shifting allegiances.

McKellen’s embodiment of the crotchety, self-absorbed, has-been art star is a masterclass in go-for-broke brilliance, but it’s Coel as the reluctant forger who steals the show. Cagey, cool, and unwilling to ingratiate, Lori’s conflicted motives are beautifully contained in Coel’s comedic deadpan. The Christophers emerges as a dazzling duet between these actors, both unafraid of delving into deviousness to reveal thorny truths about artistic integrity.

Cameron Bailey, TIFF

Blue Heron

Within a re-creation of childhood joys lies a more troubling story of a family’s growing crisis in Sophy Romvari’s affecting and intelligent feature debut.

Formally inventive and emotionally impactful, Sophy Romvari’s feature debut more than fulfills the potential the Toronto-based filmmaker displayed in her acclaimed series of short films.

Like many of those predecessors, Blue Heron is acutely personal. The graceful opening scenes depict a period of transition for a Hungarian-Canadian family of six as they adapt to a new home on Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. Seen from the perspective of the youngest daughter Sasha (Eylul Guven), events range from the comfortably quotidian — family beach days and park outings, summer afternoon fun with trampolines and garden hoses — to those that take on a darker cast as the extent of the issues concerning one family member become clear. In sequences set years later, we witness an effort to grapple with this difficult past.

While expanding on ideas and themes introduced in Still Processing (TIFF ’20) — one of several films by the director to premiere in Short Cuts at the Festival — Romvari pushes further when it comes to matters of both content and form.

Fascinating and moving as a meditation on grief, memory, and love, Blue Heron sees the filmmaker blur the borders between fiction and documentary in ways that aren’t soon forgotten, thereby confirming Romvari’s status as one of Canada’s most exceptional emerging filmmakers.

Jason Anderson, TIFF

Tuner 

A piano tuner with ultra-sensitive hearing discovers his rare talent for cracking safes in this thriller starring Leo Woodall, Dustin Hoffman, and Havana Rose Liu.

Having acutely sensitive hearing is both a blessing and a curse for Niki White as played by Leo Woodall in Daniel Roher’s first narrative feature. Though his auditory condition ended a promising musical career, it’s been a boon for his job as a piano tuner. Together with his genial mentor Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), he spends his days travelling back and forth across New York, tending to instruments that require his special skills. These duties also compel the typically taciturn Niki to come out of his protective shell and interact with such people as Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a music composition student with whom he feels a spark. But when shady individuals discover that Niki’s talents could be just as useful on locked safes as they are on old Steinways, events take a dangerous turn, one that adds the thrills of watching a heist flick to a film that’s already remarkably fleet-footed as a drama and a romance.

Indeed, Tuner marks a confident shift toward narrative filmmaking for Roher, whose previous efforts include the documentaries Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, which opened the Festival in 2019, and Navalny, for which the director won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film in 2023.

Written by Roher and Robert Ramsey, the whip-smart script also serves as a convincing demonstration of Woodall’s leading-man mettle. The chemistry he develops with Liu becomes one of the film’s great pleasures, as do the equally terrific turns by the cast’s screen veterans, with Hoffman, Tovah Feldshuh, and Jean Reno all helping ensure Roher’s thriller maintains its perfect pitch.

Jason Anderson, TIFF

Escape From New York

In a dystopian future where crime has spiraled out of control, Manhattan Island has been transformed into a maximum-security prison. When the President of the United States crashes inside the walled city after Air Force One is hijacked, the government turns to former war hero and convicted criminal Snake Plissken. With only 24 hours to rescue the President, Snake must navigate the lawless streets of New York and survive the city’s most dangerous inhabitants in John Carpenter’s iconic science fiction thriller.

Dinner In America

An unlikely friendship sparks between Simon, a rebellious drifter with ties to the punk scene, and Patty, an awkward but fiercely passionate young woman obsessed with music. As the two outsiders navigate family pressures, personal struggles, and their own search for belonging, they discover an unexpected connection that inspires them to embrace who they truly are. Funny, heartfelt, and unapologetically original, Dinner in America is a wildly entertaining punk-rock romance that celebrates individuality and finding your people.

Hundred of Beavers

After losing everything, an applejack salesman named Jean Kayak sets out on a quest to survive the wilderness and reinvent himself as North America’s greatest fur trapper. Along the way, he encounters a world filled with mischievous animals, eccentric characters, and increasingly absurd challenges. Blending silent-era slapstick with inventive visual comedy, Hundreds of Beavers is a wildly original adventure that has become one of the most acclaimed cult comedies of recent years.

Sentimental Value

Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve lead an incomparable cast in Joachim Trier’s moving drama about a director’s bid to revive his career and repair his family’s broken bonds.

With its extraordinary performances and wealth of insight as the story of a family struggling to face its rocky history and confronting the price of living for one’s art, Joachim Trier’s new feature represents another high watermark for the Norwegian director.

The winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes festival, Sentimental Value portrays the myriad repercussions of a once-great filmmaker’s effort to recapture his past glory. A man who’s always prioritized his work, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) is long estranged from his daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve), a gifted stage actress, and the more grounded Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), now immersed in family life years after performing in one of her father’s most revered movies. He finds a surprising source of support after a Hollywood star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), discovers his films at a festival retrospective. As preparation for Gustav’s new movie begins with Rachel in the role that Nora had rejected, the uniquely personal nature of his script — based on a tragedy that took place in the house that remains central to the Borgs’ lives — draws the family members together again in ways they could not predict.

As nuanced as it is empathetic, Trier’s screenplay with long-time collaborator Eskil Vogt brings the best out of the formidable duo of Skarsgård and Reinsve. It also elicits comparably exquisite turns by Fanning and from Lilleaas, who deserves the same kind of attention that Reinsve earned for Trier’s 2021 hit The Worst Person In The World.

Jason Anderson, TIFF

Eleanor The Great

Oscar nominee June Squibb stars in Scarlett Johansson’s thoughtful, provocative, and very funny feature directorial debut, about a nonagenarian who passes herself off as a Holocaust survivor.

Thoughtful, provocative, and funny, Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut is an affecting character study about storytelling as a means of understanding who we are and the perils of appropriation. Showcasing the singular charisma of 95-year-old Oscar nominee June Squibb, Eleanor the Great reminds us that it’s never too late to get yourself into a whole lot of trouble.

After the death of her best friend and long-time roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar), Eleanor (Squibb) leaves her Florida home for New York City, where she moves in with her daughter Lisa (Jessica Hecht) and grandson Max (Will Price). During a visit to the Manhattan Jewish Community Center, Eleanor stumbles her way into a support group for Holocaust survivors and, joining their circle, begins to tell her own story. Except, unbeknownst to everyone listening, it isn’t Eleanor’s story — it’s Bessie’s.

The story snares the attention of journalism student Nina (Erin Kellyman), who wants to feature Eleanor in an article. Never one to turn away attention, Eleanor begins to forge a close bond with Nina. But how long will it take before that bond is shattered by the truth?

Written by Tory Kamen, Eleanor the Great takes on the weightiest of subjects with the lightest of touches. Compulsively chatty, ultra-opinionated, and lacking in boundaries, Eleanor is a fascinating heroine and an absolute hoot. Drawing upon her wide-ranging experience as an actor, Johansson focuses her gaze on the intricacies of Squibb’s performance, which exudes a complexity rarely afforded to elderly characters, and keeps us laughing, even through the most uncomfortable of confrontations.

The Secret Agent

Winner of multiple prizes at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, TIFF veteran Kleber Mendonça Filho’s sly, genre-bending political thriller stars Wagner Moura as Marcelo, a technology expert on the lam and seeking refuge in the Brazilian city of Recife in 1977.

Brazilian filmmaker and TIFF veteran Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers one of the year’s greatest films with The Secret Agent, a sly, genre-bending political thriller starring Wagner Moura in a brilliant performance as Marcelo, a technology researcher on the lam in 1977 during Brazil’s notorious military dictatorship.

The film begins with Marcelo headed to the northern city of Recife — the filmmaker’s oft-portrayed hometown — seeking asylum and to be closer to his young son. Arriving during the raucous celebrations of Carnival, Marcelo is welcomed by a colourful community of political refugees, yet an insidious atmosphere of surveillance, paranoia, and danger encircles him. Mendonça Filho spotlights corruption everywhere, from the sleazy local police chief and his ruthless deputies to the director of the state identification archives where Marcelo is simultaneously working, hiding, and searching for his mother’s official ID card.

Told in three parts and toggling between multiple timelines, The Secret Agent reveals its plot in a puzzle-play of intrigue and information that reflects the ways in which truth is often concealed and memory contradicted under oppressive regimes.

The film functions as a précis for the authoritarian playbook. Yet, it is also a thrilling and pleasurable neo-noir steeped in Mendonça Filho’s love for and knowledge of cinema, with film references including Jaws. The film was shot with Panavision anamorphic lenses and vintage camera equipment, replicating the visual style of the 1970s.

Winner of multiple awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and driven by a grim, hypnotic tension, The Secret Agent is essential viewing.

Andréa Picard, TIFF