TIFF ’25: What to See at This Year’s Fest, Sept. 12

By Jim Slotek, Liz Braun, Thom Ernst, Karen Gordon, Kim Hughes, John Kirk, Chris Knight, Liam Lacey, and Bonnie Laufer

Could it be we are in the final stretch of the 50th annual Toronto International Film Festival? With just three more days of screenings to go, gluttonous cinephiles better get cracking. We will continue posting capsule reviews until the festival closes Sunday.

Train Dreams

Dust Bunny (Midnight Madness)

Fri, Sept. 12, 12:15 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 1.

This macabre modern fairytale is just like falling into the best children’s book ever — enough dark magic, Freudian family weirdness, violent punishment and preternatural events to make a Grimm Brother proud. Little Aurora (Sophie Sloan) is 10 and plagued by a monster under her bed. Luckily, she witnesses a neighbour slay a dragon late one night, so she hires that neighbour (Mads Mikkelsen) to kill the thing lurking under her floorboards. Like most adults, the neighbourhood assassin does not believe in monsters under the bed, but he soon comes to value Aurora’s point of view. Writer-director Bryan Fuller makes his feature debut with a funny, frightening, fantastical creation. Visually, Dust Bunny is enchanting, whether the moment is dark or light. Watching it feels like wandering around in a 10-year-old girl’s imagination after a Rossetti/William Morris collision of some sort. Delightful. Don’t bring the kids. LB

Eagles of the Republic (Centrepiece)

Fri, Sept. 12, 6:30 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 1; Sat, Sept. 13, 5:45 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 4; Sun, Sept. 14, 9 am, Scotiabank Theatre 11.

Swedish Egyptian writer-director Tarik Saleh’s Eagles of the Republic is the kind of entertaining but serious political thriller you wish they still made in Hollywood. The drama follows a middle-aged Egyptian movie star George Fahmy (Fares Fares), a kind of goofily handsome character you could easily see played by Steve Carell. Fahmy is known as “the Pharaoh of the Screen,” recognized everywhere from his series of glossy action films, though he is now past his prime. Still a compulsive womanizer, he is dating an actress half his age, who he sometimes pretends is his son’s friend when they are out in public. But the film’s mood turns darker when Fahmy is approached by a shadowy government official who insists the actor must play President El-Sisi in a propaganda film about the president’s military career. While Fahmy’s new government contacts yield some benefits (a neighbour’s son gets sprung from jail), they also lead to dangerous liaison with a general’s sophisticated foreign-educated wife among among other increased moral and artistic compromises. In the film’s sinister third act, Fahmy discovers he’s only a small player in a far scarier scenario than he imagined. LL

Easy’s Waltz (Special Presentations)

Fri, Sept 12, 3:45 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 3; Sun, Sept. 14, 8:40 am, Scotiabank Theatre 2.

Easy's Waltz, written and directed by Nic Pizzolatto — creator of the TV’s True Detective — reunites him with Vince Vaughn, who starred in season two of the hit series. Vaughn takes the lead as Easy, a down-on-his-luck Las Vegas crooner who is offered a shot at the big time by an older, well-respected Vegas hot-shot played by Al Pacino. Easy really wants this comeback but faces challenges from his own self-destructive habits and the schemes of his reckless younger brother. Vaughn plays the role with pathos and charm, actually singing every song here, while Pacino is spot-on as Mickey, a man who can make dreams come true but should never be double-crossed. The film boasts a stellar supporting cast including Simon Rex, Kate Mara, Shania Twain, Cobie Smulders and of course, that famous Vegas strip. BL

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (Special Presentations)

Fri, Sept. 12, 7:30 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 12; Sun, Sept. 14, 2:15 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 12.

Elvis Presley was a breathtakingly handsome, funny, witty, and charismatic man and an electrifying live performer. D’uh, right? Except so much of that has been co-opted by the fat, drugged-out, karate-kicking caricature Elvis that has wedged itself into the collective consciousness since his premature death in 1977, age 42. With EPiC, Baz Luhrmann — the director who gifted us with Austin Butler as Elvis in his 2022 biopic — rights that pervasive wrong with a documentary crafted primarily with footage from Presley’s smash Las Vegas run from 1969 to 1977, over which he performed some 1,100 shows — sometimes three a day — at the absolute height of his game. A sort-of concert film stitched together with previously unseen performance reels, rehearsals, and press conferences, EPiC might be the film that lets subsequent generations know why Presley was dubbed “The King.” Because, holy shit, he was. KH

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Special Presentations)

Fri, Sept. 12, 8:30 pm, Royal Alexandra Theatre; Sat, Sept. 13, 12 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 11.

Rose Byrne is up to the harrowing task as an effectively single mom (dad’s a Navy officer, always away) with a chronically sick child, in a movie that might as well be called Diary of a Mad Caregiver. Constantly having to attend to a feeding tube and at war with her daughter’s doctors, she is also overworked as a psychiatrist, who is forced to prevail upon an uncaring colleague (Conan O’Brien) for therapy herself. Then her roof literally caves in, putting the movie in full spiral. There are glimmers of grim comedy in this cascade of personal disasters. Eventually, though, the grim entirely takes over. JS

Poetic License (Special Presentations)

Fri, Sept. 12, 9:30 pm, Visa Screening Room at the Princess of Wales Theatre; Sun, Sept. 14, 12 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 1.

Poetic Licence is a campus-based romantic comedy about friendship, belonging, self-discovery, and the inevitability of life’s quick pace. Directed by Maude Apatow — eldest child of Judd Apatow (credited as producer) and Leslie Mann (who stars) — the film is rich in character and carried by a generous spirit. Mann plays Liz, who regards her teenage daughter as her closest confidant, feels ill at ease among her husband’s academic peers, and is unsettled in their new university-town home. Seeking connection, she audits a poetry class where she strikes up an unlikely friendship with two affable students (Cooper Hoffman and Andrew Barth Feldman). Liz’s presence stirs unexpected feelings in both young men, giving rise to a gentle, funny, and quietly cautionary tale of intimacy and boundaries. Warmly told, affectionate in tone, and engaging in style, Poetic License is as much about family as it is about romance. One could write it all off as nepotism, but the results speak for themselves. Poetic License is a winner. TE

The Christophers (Special Presentations)

Fri, Sept. 12, 9 am, TIFF Lightbox 1; Sat, Sept. 13, 9 pm, TIFF Lightbox 1.

The realistic bent of American drama misses out on something the British still excel at: the sheer fun of watching well-trained performers perform, utilizing the full resources of speech, gesture, and timing to play with our attention. For those who love to see actors acting, Steven Soderbergh’s latest is a treat, hitching the director’s penchant for con artist tales to a talky drama brilliantly pairing two English actors of different generations and backgrounds. There’s Sir Ian McKellan as once-famous octogenarian art star Julian Sklar, and Michaela Coel (the writer-director and star of I May Destroy You) as a Lori Butler, art restorer. Lori poses as his new hired assistant, but in reality, has been approached by Julian’s greedy heirs (James Corden and Jessica Gunning) to find and finish by forgery a lucrative painting series called “The Christophers,” named after a onetime lover in Julian’s life. Writer Ed Solomon (No Sudden Move) has created a script that evokes a stage play (think Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth), featuring a psychological duel between the hyper-verbal, vain Julian and the quiet but deceptively layered Lori, who, as played by Coel, reveals volumes in the small twitches of her sculptural face before letting loose with dazzlingly precise responses to Julian’s provocations. LL

The Napa Boys (Midnight Madness)

Fri, Sept. 12, 11:59 pm, Royal Alexander Theatre; Sat, Sept. 13, 10 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 3; Sun, Sept. 14. 7 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 9.

The Napa Boys is the kind of film summed up by the phrase, “If you know, you know.” I didn’t. I went in uninitiated and came out feeling like I’d just been hazed. Did I get Napa Boys? Not by a long shot. Was I meant to? Probably. But that hardly matters. This is filmmaking by cult allegiance and fanboy fervour, steeped in humour that doesn’t second-guess any opportunity to offend and push the envelope of good taste. It’s unapologetic anarchy and perhaps a bit inaccessible, and yet I can see its appeal to a certain, marginal group. Napa Boys is frat-boy comedy at its… well, at its most recent. And let’s just leave it at that. TE

The Secret Agent

The Secret Agent (Special Presentations)

Fri, Sept. 12, 12 pm, Scotiabank Theatre 6.

A year on from one of 2024’s best films — Walter Salles’ sombre political drama I’m Still Here, about the brutal Brazilian dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985 — Kleber Mendonça Filho (Neighbouring Sounds, Acquarius, Bacurau) returns to the same blighted era with one of this year’s best films so far, blending suspense, nostalgia for the era, and absurdist humour. The visual panache of The Secret Agent is signalled in the opening sequence as the driver of a yellow Volkswagen bug (Narco’s Wagner Moura) arrives at a rural gas station near the city of Recife during carnival time, where a man’s corpse lies under cardboard.

Shot in wide-screen Panavision anamorphic lens, the image deliberately evokes a classic Western with the arrival of a stranger in a corrupt town. The driver of the Volkswagen is a college professor heading to his hometown where he takes shelter in in an apartment building of fellow “refugees” before picking up his young son in the hopes of fleeing the country. What follows is a kind of time-jumping, multi-strand shaggy dog story stretching to 160 minutes, told in three chapters, including one following a pair of hitmen after the professor, and contemporary archivists transcribing audio tapes, recovering the stories of people erased by the dictatorship. LL

Train Dreams (Special Presentations)

Fri, Sept. 12, 12:45pm, TIFF Lightbox 4.

Train Dreams is a gut-punch of a film that will leave you thinking about it for days. Director Clint Bentley's adaptation of Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella is a poignant character study set in the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century. Joel Edgerton stars as logger Robert Grainier, working to develop the railroad across the U.S. That causes him to spend a lot of time away from his wife (Felicity Jones) and daughter. He's a man of simple means and has a hard time accepting his place in a fast-changing world. While Edgerton's performance is subtle, emotional, and impactful what truly stands out is the breathtaking and immersive cinematography. It's a contemplative story that many will relate to. Train Dreams is sad but hopeful and explores resilience, solitude, and interconnectedness through the depiction of man's relationship with nature and the people who touched his life. Memorable supporting performances come from Kerry Condon and William H. Macy. The film hits select theatres Nov. 7 and streams on Netflix Nov. 21. BL