By Original-Cin Staff

The Toronto International Film Festival is 50. That’s quite an achievement, as anyone who has survived to 50 can attest.

Despite strikes, a pandemic, and a major sponsor flip — and that’s just in the last few years — TIFF has continued to thrive, bringing films from around the world to the city for an action-packed 10 days of irresistible thrills.

Over the course of the Festival, which runs from September 4 through 10, Original-Cin writers will deliver capsule reviews of dozens of features, documentaries, and shorts, offering insights on best bets and best avoids. We will also showcase talent interviews and other goodies we hope you find informative and fun.

To launch, here’s a roundup of the movies each of us is stoked to see. Now as always though, we offer this list with the caveat that taking chances on films with intriguing titles — or simply titles you can successfully nab tickets to — can bring outsize rewards.

After all, you don’t get to see a Macedonia stork documentary by an Oscar-nominated director or a British/American chamber comedy about art, commerce, and avarice every day.

Jim Slotek

Hamnet (Gala Presentations)

I am just finishing the novel by Maggie O’Farrell about the literally plagued home life of Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), married to Agnes (Jessie Buckley) who’s reputed to be the daughter of a wood sprite. The last movie I’d read before I saw it was Killers of the Flower Moon. And if she does it justice, I can foresee award season possibilities in Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of this one.

Frankenstein (Special Presentations)

The longstanding hot-take about Mary Shelley’s novel is that Dr. Frankenstein himself (Oscar Isaac) is the monster, and the sewn-together creature is his victim. At the very least, I look forward to Guillermo del Toro’s version where the creature has his say (as he does in the book). One of the most anticipated films at this year’s TIFF.

No Other Choice (Gala Presentations)

Years ago, Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy shook me to the core, particularly the middle film Oldboy. Here he is said to be darkly tackling ruthless office politics. Canada’s Don McKellar is one of the scriptwriters of this film, adapted from the horrific Donald Westlake novel The Ax. A change of course, perhaps, but I’ll follow the filmmaker anywhere.

Liz Braun

Nuremberg (Gala Presentations)

An historical drama about the Nuremberg trials — the whole world was watching — is promising to start with, and this film delves into the psychological relationship between Nazi honcho Hermann Goering and the American psychiatrist Dr. Douglas Kelley. Kelley’s role was to evaluate the Nazi war criminals to see if they were competent to stand trial. He was also hoping to gain some insight into the nature of evil. Um, hello. James Vanderbilt wrote and directed; heavy-hitters Russell Crowe (as Goering) and Rami Malek (as Kelley) are the leads. The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed Michael Shannon and Richard E. Grant are also in the cast — a very good sign.

Roofman (Gala Presentations)

Two words: Derek Cianfrance. The director (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) will not disappoint an audience. It’s also nice to think Channing Tatum has been cast in something worthy of his acting talent as he plays a good-natured bad guy hiding out in a toy store. The cast includes Kirsten Dunst, Peter Dinklage, Ben Mendelsohn and LaKeith Stanfield, so this should be excellent.

Tuner (Special Presentations)

Tuner is an energetic heist caper about a piano tuner with the kind of heightened hearing that works for safe-cracking, too. Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman star, and Tovah Feldshuh and Jean Reno are also in the cast. Tuner is local filmmaker Daniel Roher’s first narrative feature. Roher hit it out of the park with his first film, the documentary Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson & The Band, the film that opened TIFF in 2019. On his second go, with Navalny, Roher hit it out of the park again, this time across Lake Ontario and all the way to L.A., winning an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2023. So, Tuner — kind of a must-see. Not sure where the baseball metaphor came from, though.

Thom Ernst

No Other Choice (Gala Presentations)

Based on Donald E. Westlake’s novel The Ax, Park Chan-wook and Toronto’s Don McKellar deliver a razor-sharp satire about an out-of-work exec who decides the best way to land a job is to eliminate the competition — permanently. The story first hit screens in 2005, though that version somehow slipped right past me. In today’s climate of layoffs, contract gigs, and cutthroat interviews, No Other Choice feels uncomfortably timely. And with A.I. now edging into the job market, even murder might not guarantee you a callback.

Karmadonna (Midnight Madness)

I may live to regret this. Karmadonna is a delicious title to say, and even better to hear — but how nice can a film really be when it arrives courtesy of Aleksandar Radivojević, the co-writer of A Serbian Film, one of the most reviled and notorious provocations to creep its way onto cinema screens? This time Radivojević steps into the director’s chair with the story of a pregnant woman who receives instructions from God, by phone, to carry out His murderous plans. Is this dark fun or just plain dark? Hard to say. Which is exactly why it rockets to the top of my must-see list.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Special Presentations)

In what could become a franchise as prolific as James Bond or as persistent as Hercule Poirot, Wake Up Dead Man marks the third entry in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series. Daniel Craig once again slides into character as Benoit Blanc, the cunning, unassuming detective whose Southern drawl underscores his brilliant analytical mind. Mila Kunis and Jeremy Renner join an all-star cast of suspects and corpses, in a mystery the TIFF guide teases as having the gothic flourishes of Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. A twice-popular choice with TIFF audiences, and with six screenings for Wake Up Dead Man on the ’25 schedule, it seems TIFF is expecting this year to be no different.

Karen Gordon

It Was Just an Accident (Special Presentations)

This year’s festival has so many movies I want to see that I’ve had to make peace with the idea that I can’t see them all. But there are priorities. Two of my favourite directors have films at this year’s TIFF, both won major awards at Cannes last spring. Iranian Jafar Panahi, one of the world’s best directors and storytellers, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this title, a deceptively easygoing film about morality, revenge, and living with the scars. And…

Sentimental Value (Special Presentations)

Norway’s Joachim Trier has a knack for understanding the psychological complexities of characters navigating familiar dilemmas of modern life. This film boasts a fantastic cast, including Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning, and Trier’s muse, the wonderful Renate Reinsve.

The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue (TIFF Docs)

I’m looking forward to seeing Toronto director Barry Avrich’s documentary about Israeli Noam Tibon, who drove into the hell of the attack on October 7, 2023 to rescue his son and his son’s family.

Kim Hughes

Ballad of a Small Player (Special Presentations)

The contemporary novelist Lawrence Osborne appears to have landed on cinematic radar with John Michael McDonagh adapting 2012’s The Forgiven in 2021 and now, Edward Berger (Conclave, All Quiet on the Western Front) tackling Osborne’s shattering 2014 story about troubled British man who finds himself in Macao with a heap of ill-gotten money, a gambling problem, and messy past he very likely can’t outrun. Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton star, and judging by the hair-raising trailer, Osborne’s striking juxtaposition of a grim story against a phantasmagoric city is very much intact.

Retreat (Discovery)

There have been films dealing with Deaf issues and featuring Deaf actors previously, notably CODA and Children of a Lesser God. But Retreat, billed as the world’s first Deaf thriller, also features a Deaf cast and crew, including writer-director Ted Evans, marking a significant step forward for people with disabilities working in film. Plus, it’s rumoured to be excellent.

Left-Handed Girl (Centrepiece)

Though I am aching to see Chloe Zhao’s hotly tipped Hamnet, I am also intrigued by the solo debut of filmmaker Shih-Ching Tsou that was co-written, produced, and edited by her longtime creative partner, Sean Baker (Anora, The Florida Project) about a single mother and her two daughters struggling to find footing in current-day Taipei.

John Kirk

Frankenstein (Special Presentations)

Guillermo del Toro is who I want to be if I ever grow up. Here, del Toro uses his vast repertoire of monster knowledge and flair for horror to bring Mary Shelley’s gothic classic to vibrant and electrifying life. Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein is a performance that can’t be missed and Jacob Elordi as the Monster allows del Toro to show us his boundless imagination as we sit at the feet of the master, spellbound once more.

Nuremberg (Gala Presentations)

Wrestling with the enormous scale of human atrocity and the concept that even the worst accused deserve a fair trial, this film promises a poignant and soul-wrenching test of the definition of true evil. Can evil be even fairly tried? It also promises a test of Russell Crowe’s charisma to portray evil in a way that may cause even the deepest idealogues to question their principles.

Glenrothan (Gala Presentations)

Brian Cox is a force of nature when it comes to family drama and with his directorial debut, he brings his storytelling to a new level. Its setting in the Scottish Highlands in a distinguished whisky distillery is an ideal place for this viewer to immerse himself in. Cox is a performer with the uncanny air of distinction combined with easygoing charm. This film promises to see him at his finest.

Chris Knight

Hamnet (Gala Presentations)

Chloe Zhao won the People’s Choice Award in 2020 for Nomadland and then (as so often happens) went on to Oscar glory. Subsequently, she made Eternals, a bloated Marvel epic. Well, she’s back in her wheelhouse now with a much smaller film about playwright William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), dealing with the death of a child. To thine own self be true, Chloe!

Eternal Return (Special Presentations)

I’m a sucker for movies about romance or time travel — put them together and I’ll cross time and space to see them. Writer-director Yaniv Raz’s Eternal Return would seem to be such a beast, pairing a grieving woman (Naomi Scott) with a cartographer (Kit Harrington), and his friend (Simon Callow) who have figured out how to slice through the years in search of past love. I may end up sobbing uncontrollably, but I wouldn’t miss this for the world.

New Years Rev (Centrepiece)

I’m already set to see Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie, Matt Johnson’s latest, when it opens the Midnight Madness program tonight (September 4). But if there was ever a film that sounded like it had Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie the Energy, it’s Lee Kirk’s homage to 1990s music and road movies, in which a musical trio has hopes of opening for Green Day at their New Year’s concert. Rock on, dudes!

Liam Lacey

Hen (Platform)

I’ve seen one wildly original film by Hungarian director György Pálfi, the dialogue-free, experimental film, Hukkle (Hiccup) involving humans and animals doing disturbing things in a Hungarian village. In general, I’m biased toward films with non-human protagonists (Au hansard Balthazar, Babe, Wall-E, EO) so I’m sure I wont’ be disappointed with Palfi’s latest. The title character, played by eight different chickens, escapes from an industrial farm to raise her chicks. And if Hen doesn’t work out, there’s Silent Friend, another film by another Hungarian director, Ildikó Enyedi, starring a tree that observes humans, including Lea Séydoux and Tony Leung.

The Wizard of the Kremlin (Special Presentations)

I’m intrigued to see what Olivier Assayas (Carlos, Clouds of Sils Maria) will do with his adaptation of Giuliano da Empoli’s bestselling 2022 French novel of the same name, widely hailed in France as a guide to understanding Vladimir Putin and the Russian regime’s myth-making chaos machine. The novel is presented as an extended interview with Vadim Baranov, a former avant-garde theatre and reality-show producer turned the “new Rasputin” of Putin’s regime, a character based on the real-life political strategist, Vladislav Surko. Assayas chose to make his film in English, with Paul Dano as Baranov, Alicia Vikander as Baranov’s former lover, Jeffrey Wright as his American interviewer and Jude Law as Putin, a.k.a. “the tsar.” Reviews from the Venice Film Festival were mixed but I’m keen to see for myself.

The Christophers (Special Presentations)

I’m loyal to director Steven Soderbergh, who rarely does a dull thing with a genre movie, and excited to see the interaction between Sir Ian McKellan as an aging artist and Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You) as an art forger who poses as his assistant. Much will depend on the quality of script by Ed Solomon (Men in Black, the Bill and Ted comedies) and just how broad the performances are going to be by the two actors playing the painter’s estranged heirs, Jennifer Gunning (The Outlaws, Baby Reindeer) and James Corden.

Bonnie Laufer

Eleanor the Great (Gala Presentations)

We all know that Scarlett Johansson has proven herself in front of the camera, but I am truly excited to see how she handles her directorial debut. The film stars the wonderful 95-year-old Oscar nominee June Squibb (yes, 95!) as a woman who passes herself off as a Holocaust survivor. No doubt this one will cue the waterworks, but I am confident that in the hands of the aforementioned ladies, the film will be sensitive to the subject matter and will give us a few much-needed laughs.

You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution… (Special Presentations)

Last year, one of the films I was most anticipating was Saturday Night, so I sense a theme here. This year TIFF audiences are being treated to this documentary which takes us back to the origins of Eugene Levy and Martin Short’s lifelong friendship, and how an amazingly talented group of actors united to bring Toronto audiences a live performance of Godspell in 1972. They remain friends to this day.

The Testament of Ann Lee (Special Presentations)

Amanda Seyfried is back, and I am ecstatic that we finally get to witness her talents in this new historical musical drama. Here, she plays Ann Lee, the 18th-century leader of the Shakers. The film is directed by Mona Fastvold and co-written by Brady Corbet, the team behind last year's powerhouse, The Brutalist. Can’t wait!

Films We Can’t Wait to See at TIFF ‘25

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