TIFF 2026 · Volume 4 of 4
The last 10 films of my TIFF 2026 coverage, ending with Everest: The Other Side, the final film I saw at the festival.
Seen Sept. 16 · Royal Alexandra Theatre
The Liberation
Director: Guy Nattiv
Starring: Carrie Coon, Lily James, Bella Ramsey, Odessa Young, Tracy Letts, Jaime Ray Newman
In the early 1980s, a Holocaust survivor who has spent decades doing what her family needs leaves her husband and daughters for a commune that promises a life with purpose.
Rita Cooper has spent decades surviving and doing what her family needs. Then, in the early 1980s, she leaves her husband and daughters for Harmonia, a commune promising a life with purpose. Carrie Coon plays Rita, a Holocaust survivor whose decision is devastating from the family’s side and painfully understandable from hers. That tension kept me on the edge of my seat.
Director Guy Nattiv drew on his own grandmother’s story, and he gives Rita’s need for something beyond her roles as wife and mother its due. He also lets us see what happens when she stops filling those roles without warning. Harmonia’s leader, Ricki, knows how to make belonging sound like a solution to everything. I could see why Rita wanted to believe her, even while I wanted to grab Rita by the shoulders and ask her to call home.
Coon is so good at showing what Rita keeps locked away that the smallest change in her face feels enormous. She doesn’t ask us to excuse the abandonment, and she never plays Rita like a joke for falling under Ricki’s spell. Lily James makes Ricki warm enough to draw people close and calculating enough to make me dread it. Bella Ramsey, Odessa Young, and Tracy Letts help us feel the mess Rita leaves behind.
The film needs all of them, because this story would be easier if one side were simply right. And yes, there is naked dancing around a fire. I was waiting for the scene, too. Even there, though, the spectacle matters less than watching Rita try on a version of herself her family has never met.
At the Q&A, Coon talked about the expectations we accept around marriage, parenting, and work. Rita stops accepting them, but her freedom comes at a cost that other people have to pay. The film is at its best when it lets that contradiction sit there. I was frustrated with Rita, sympathetic to her, and furious about what Ricki was selling, sometimes within the same scene. Days later, I’m still thinking about Coon’s performance. She finds a way to make Rita’s choices hurt without asking us to turn away from her. I hope she’s in the awards conversation this year. And if you ever have a chance to see Coon speak about her work, take it.
Bleecker Street opens the film in limited release in November, then wider on January 8.
Seen Sept. 17 · TIFF Lightbox
Being Heumann
Director: Siân Heder
Starring: Ruth Madeley, Madeline Delp, Mark Ruffalo, Dylan O’Brien, Rob Delaney, Daniel Durant, Roberta Colindrez, Antwan Tolliver, Jon Beavers, Ray Fisher, Will Brill
Disability rights activist Judy Heumann helps lead the 1977 Section 504 sit-in, when protesters occupied a federal office in San Francisco for nearly a month to demand that protections already on the books be enforced.
Opening night at TIFF came with a story built to bring down the house. Being Heumann follows Judy Heumann, the disability rights activist who helped force the United States to live up to its own promises. Ruth Madeley plays Judy, and the film centers on the 1977 Section 504 sit-in. Protesters occupied a federal office in San Francisco for nearly a month, demanding that disability protections already on the books actually be enforced. It’s a remarkable standoff, and director Siân Heder understands that the long days matter as much as the big speeches. People have to eat, sleep, disagree, and find ways to keep going.
Madeley gives Judy the force to hold them together, even when the film around her is trying a little too hard to make every moment an occasion.
Madeley is terrific when she gets to argue, strategize, or simply sit with the exhaustion of a protest that refuses to end. I believed in Judy most when she was doing something rather than explaining what she’d done. That’s why I wanted more of her life outside the sit-in. The film jumps around, starts a few threads it doesn’t finish, and leaves her childhood mostly to speeches about it. Judy wrote the memoir behind the film and helped produce it, which makes those missing years even more surprising.
I could see what the movie wanted me to feel, and often I did. But I kept noticing the familiar beats of a prestige biography when I wanted to know the woman who made these people trust her enough to stay.
The film never tells us that Judy Heumann died in 2023. I wish it had, because knowing we’ve lost her changes the way those final moments land. Heder also seems torn between telling Judy’s whole life story and making a film about the movement she helped lead. Either could have been wonderful. This version reaches for both and sometimes rushes past the details that would make them connect. Still, Madeley takes the roof off whenever the film lets her, and the sit-in remains a powerful reminder of how hard people had to fight for rights that should never have been in question.
Toronto named it runner-up for the People’s Choice Award. I didn’t love it quite that much, but I’m glad the room met Judy.
Apple opens it in theaters November 6.
Seen Sept. 17 · Roy Thomson Hall
Up Against It
Director: Trudie Styler
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Forest Whitaker, Úrsula Corberó, Eva Birthistle, Arinzé Kene, Eden Hamilton
When a fourteen-year-old’s leukemia returns, her oncologist suggests a donor sibling, which would mean her divorced parents having another baby together.
Rose is fourteen, angry at her mother, and devoted to the father whose choices helped break up their family. Then her childhood leukemia returns and her oncologist suggests a donor sibling, which would mean her divorced parents having another baby together. That’s a premise with enough emotional and ethical knots for a whole film. Rose’s parents, Álvaro and Saffron, have both moved on, and their new partners seem better at caring for her than either of them.
Trudie Styler gives Antonio Banderas and Eva Birthistle plenty to fight about, while Eden Hamilton has to hold the story together as Rose. I was ready for the family chaos. I just kept waiting for somebody to stop and ask what it would mean for the child they were proposing to conceive.
The movie raises that question and hurries away from it. Instead, it bounces between parental fights, new relationships, hospital scenes, and jokes that rarely land. Úrsula Corberó and Arinzé Kene, playing the new partners, come off as the most considerate adults in Rose’s life. That could have been a sharp observation about the family she was born into and the one that has formed around her but the film doesn’t stay with it long enough.
Styler said she spent years developing the script, and I could almost feel the different versions of it competing for space. A serious drama and a broad family comedy keep taking turns at the wheel. Neither gets far before the other grabs it back, leaving Rose stuck between them.
Hamilton has a lovely singing voice, and a new song written for the film gives her a chance to use it. I wish the rest of Rose’s story had been allowed to build as naturally. She swings from despair to a wisecrack so quickly that I couldn’t tell what she was feeling. Her parents have also kept secrets that seem unlikely to survive years of hospital visits. The dialogue gets clunky, the performances vary wildly, and an extended musical finale wears out its welcome.
Dante Spinotti’s cinematography and Colleen Atwood’s costumes give the film plenty to look at, and once in a while a scene finds real tenderness. I wanted more of those moments. A girl facing a relapse and a family this tangled don’t need extra complications. They need a film willing to sit with the ones already there.
Seen Sept. 17 · TIFF Lightbox
Gail
Director: Michael Maxxis
Starring: Gail E. Lichtman
Gail Lichtman, a Bronx MTA worker who has seen Our Lady Peace more than a hundred times since 1995 and proudly calls herself a groupie, follows the band on its thirtieth anniversary tour.
Gail Lichtman lives in the Bronx, works for the MTA, and has followed Our Lady Peace since 1995. She’s been to more than a hundred shows, and she’ll correct you if you call her a fan. “Groupie” is her word, and she means it. She even has lyrics from OLP’s “Hope” tattooed on her arm. At every backstage meeting, she asks the band to play it; they never do. I knew some of their songs without knowing their name, which turned out to be a lovely way into Michael Maxxis’s documentary. We meet the band through the woman who keeps showing up for them, year after year.
What does that kind of devotion give her? What does it ask of her? Gail is funny and open enough that I wanted to hear her answer for herself.
Maxxis follows Gail during the band’s thirtieth anniversary tour, but the first half hour spends more time at her apartment and her job than onstage. She lives alone, with no family nearby, and can strike up a conversation anywhere. Somehow even a flu shot at an ordinary clinic becomes an entertaining scene because Gail is in it. About fifteen minutes in, she tells us exactly how she feels about her place in the band’s life. I appreciated that Maxxis let her say it early instead of saving it for a tidy emotional reveal.
Nothing in the second half quite matches that moment, though. I wanted to hear her return to those feelings after more time on the road, when the easy warmth of being welcomed backstage had worn off.
For a while, I worried about what Gail was giving to this relationship and what she got back. Her feelings for one band member are especially easy to see. Then the Q&A added something that changed how I watched: the band had asked for this documentary about her. They didn’t want another film about themselves. Gail is the reason the cameras are there.
She can be prickly and overly familiar, and I did sometimes wonder whether she’d mistaken access for closeness. But I’m seeing a few edited encounters, not thirty years of friendship. Maxxis could have pushed all of that into a harsher story about isolation and fandom. He stays curious about Gail instead, and lets her be funny, difficult, generous, and entirely herself. I’m glad he did.
Seen Sept. 18 · TIFF Lightbox
Trees Are Watching
Director: Bahman Ghobadi
Starring: Eva Green, Murat Yildirim
Returning to her hometown of Mardin with her deaf daughter, a woman is haunted by memories of sisters she knew as a child, whose old home sits beside two ominous trees in a landscape scarred by deforestation.
I had high hopes for this slow-burn horror. Bahman Ghobadi has never made a genre picture before, Martin Scorsese recently came on board as an executive producer, and Eva Green is always an intriguing choice for anything that refuses to follow the expected path.
Darya (Eva Green) returns to her hometown of Mardin with her deaf daughter and finds herself haunted by memories of sisters she knew as a child. Their old family home sits beside a landscape scarred by deforestation, with two ominous trees standing where the sisters once lived.
Ghobadi builds a creepy mythology around trees, curses and old debts coming back to collect. There’s a genuinely strange movie hiding in here, and some of the imagery is terrific.
The film also deserves credit for what it pulled off behind the scenes. Financing problems forced production across two different time periods, and you can occasionally see that strain in the actors’ faces.
My bigger problem is the pacing. Ghobadi takes so long getting to the point that important information sometimes gets buried in throwaway dialogue or visuals that don’t quite make logical sense.
There’s also a strange disconnect between the spoken dialogue and the subtitles. It starts subtly, but near the end, an entire sentence changes the meaning of the next scene.
Green keeps the movie alive. Her performance gets increasingly frantic as Darya loses her grip, and she throws herself into the escalating nightmare. She needs every ounce of that energy once the film reaches its patience testing final act.
And then there are the endings…all five of them. A scene will land on what feels like the perfect final note. The score swells. Then the movie keeps going. The first ending worked for me. Each one after that felt less complete.
The final opponent is a good example of the problem. I won’t spoil it, because the idea behind it is genuinely unsettling. The execution, though, is clumsy enough that it becomes silly instead of scary.
Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky called this the unofficial 11th Midnight Madness movie. I understand why. I also understand why he kept it out of the section. That audience would have had opinions about the final act.
Trees Are Watching has enough imagination to make me wish it had trusted its strangest ideas more and its pacing less.
Seen Sept. 18 · Royal Alexandra Theatre
Carrie (2026)
Director: Mike Flanagan (first two episodes screened)
Starring: Summer H. Howell, Samantha Sloyan, Siena Agudong, Alison Thornton, Joel Oulette, Josie Totah, Arthur Conti, Thalia Dudek, Amber Midthunder, Matthew Lillard
Mike Flanagan reimagines Stephen King’s 1974 novel as a series about an open-hearted teenager who wants to connect, a controlling mother, and powers she barely understands.
Carrie White has had her day in the sun already. A few times, actually.
So when Amazon announced another version of Stephen King’s 1974 novel, I wondered why we needed it. Then I heard Mike Flanagan was behind it and that question mostly disappeared.
Flanagan directed both episodes of the two-episode premiere, and this Carrie isn’t the one we know. King has endorsed the changes, and Flanagan is clearly interested in what this story can become when you give its characters more room to breathe.
Summer H. Howell was chosen from 1,400 candidates, and you can see why. Her Carrie is more open-hearted than the versions before her. She wants to connect. Every rejection registers on her face, which makes watching her become Carrie that much harder.
Howell plays beautifully against Samantha Sloyan’s Margaret White. This Margaret feels less like a traditional religious zealot and more like a sovereign citizen. Her control comes wrapped in the language of rights, refusal and distrust rather than scripture alone.
Sloyan has been part of Flanagan’s unofficial repertory company for years, but this is a much larger role. The first two episodes suggest she’s going to get plenty of room to make it her own.
And yes, the FLAmily is here. Most of the familiar Flanagan faces have turned up already, with a few notable absences that may or may not change as the series continues.
The biggest surprise is how much emotional space Flanagan gives Carrie herself. He’s not rushing toward the moments everyone remembers. He’s letting us understand the girl before we watch what happens to her.
These first two episodes introduce Carrie, tease powers she barely understands and start twisting a story we thought we had memorized.
Episode 2 has a scene between Howell and Tim Bagley that may send you looking for a Kleenex. It’s the clearest reminder of what Flanagan does so well. He understands that horror and compassion don’t cancel each other out. They make each other hit harder.
That’s what makes this version feel worthwhile. Flanagan isn’t simply remaking the locker room, the prom or the pig’s blood. He’s digging around the spaces between those familiar moments and asking what else was happening inside Carrie while we weren’t looking. Two episodes isn’t enough to know where all of this is headed. But for now, I’m very interested in finding out.
Seen Sept. 18 · Royal Alexandra Theatre
HALF
Director: Samjad
Starring: Ranjith Sajeev, Aiswarya Raj, Amala Paul, Abbas, Sreekanth Murali
Ambushed and left for dead in the Rajasthan desert, twins with one human parent and one vampire parent recover after dark and go hunting for the marauders who attacked them.
THIS. MOVIE. WAS. NUTS! In a good way.
I was sleepy heading into HALF. Then Samjad’s movie started, and that was the end of that.
It’s a vampire neo-Western that isn’t really a vampire movie or a neo-Western. It just wears the mood and look of both while doing something completely its own. The press materials call it a “gory martial arts curry western,” which is one of the rare descriptions that actually undersells the movie.
Ethan and his non-verbal twin sister Ivy are crossing the Rajasthan desert when they’re ambushed and left for dead by marauders that feel inspired by the Mad Max series. Unfortunately for the people who attacked them, the twins have a human and vampire parent.
They recover after dark. Then they go hunting.
Very Tri Yulisman choreographed the action, and if you’ve seen The Raid 2, you already know what kind of trouble everyone is in.
The premiere audience absolutely lost it. The gore is relentless, the kills are inventive, and the first major one the twins pull off is a genuine jaw-dropper. The score hits just as hard, pushing the action instead of politely sitting underneath it.
Ranjith Sajeev and Aiswarya Raj carry the movie, and they do a startling amount of the stunt work themselves. There’s a leap from one moving car to another that I would have bet money was a double.
Sajeev has the looks, moves and screen presence for a blockbuster franchise. Raj is just as good, and the sign language between Ivy and Ethan gives their relationship a nice specificity. I only wish the movie explained why Ivy doesn’t speak.
My biggest complaint is that some of the threads don’t quite line up. There aren’t many rules here, which is part of the fun, but a few loose ends stay loose. The funny thing is that the twins being vampires turns out to be the least interesting thing about them.
I also wish the marketing hadn’t given away quite so much. The movie tells us exactly what’s coming with Ethan and Ivy, when discovering that in the moment would have been one of the year’s great surprises.
Still, this is absolutely a bring-your-friends movie. The Midnight Madness crowd ate it up and was already asking the producer during the Q&A for a second helping.
Ninety-seven minutes with no brakes and blood everywhere, featuring two leads who can actually throw down. I was wide awake by the end.
Seen Sept. 19 · TIFF Lightbox
Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend
Director: Yan Lanouette Turgeon
Starring: Rémi Goulet, Rosalie Bonenfant, Patrice Robitaille, Anick Lemay, Luc Picard
Gilles Villeneuve, a piano tuner’s son from Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu with no money or connections, races snowmobiles and a homemade Mustang on his way to a Formula One seat at the 1977 British Grand Prix.
Gilles Villeneuve came out of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu as a piano tuner’s son, no money and no connections, chasing a sport built for rich men. He raced snowmobiles, then a homemade 1967 Mustang at drag strips. He married Joann in 1970 and had two kids while the sport’s top tier stayed sealed off. He kept going anyway, and the 1977 British Grand Prix finally put him in a Formula One car.
TIFF gave that story its closing night slot. This year’s festival leaned hard on Canadian athletes. Maybe this is an American thing, but I took a ticket hoping for a dad movie in the Ford v Ferrari register. What Yan Lanouette Turgeon delivers is paint-by-numbers, and the storytelling is turgid. Daniel Roby, who co-wrote it, left the director’s chair in 2024 and perhaps he would have handled the material with more flair.
Most of the race scenes feel flat. They lack the dynamic camerawork that separates F1, Days of Thunder and Le Mans from everything else in the garage. The racing should have been the easy part. Think about what sits unused. A kid on a snowmobile in a Quebec winter. A homemade Mustang at a drag strip. Then machines that cost more than his hometown.
The scenes off the track don’t spark either, because the film skips the milestones that would give them one. One moment Gilles is having a good first date with Joann. The next, he’s her husband, coming home to a double-wide where she’s minding their young son.
The goal all along is Ferrari, and getting there drives the whole film. Gilles impresses Enzo Ferrari, they shake hands in 1977, and Turgeon calls that a finish line. It isn’t. The rest of a very full life goes by fast, in text, like a footnote. That’s a critical error. It assumes every person in the room arrived already knowing how the story goes, and plenty of us didn’t.
Remi Goulet looks the part in flashes but never fully owns it, so the people around him land harder. Patrice Robitaille walks off with the film as Gilles’s father. Because ours was noted as a “work-in-progress” print, I’ll hold my final review until the film releases in November.
Seen Sept. 19 · TIFF Lightbox
Crystal Lake
Director: Michael Lennox (first two episodes)
Starring: Linda Cardellini, William Catlett, Devin Kessler, Cameron Scoggins, Gwendolyn Sundstrom
Set in the early seventies, this Friday the 13th prequel series shows how Pamela Voorhees became the woman lurking in the woods around Camp Crystal Lake, and how Jason became Jason.
Before Camp Crystal Lake earned its reputation, it was just a place where kids swam and counselors made terrible decisions. Pamela Voorhees works in the kitchen to stay close to Jason, but the staff leave the children alone at the water. We know where that goes. Crystal Lake wants to show us what happened next: how Pamela became the woman lurking in those woods, and how Jason became, well, Jason. After two of eight episodes, I’m wondering how much of that I actually want explained. Pamela killed two counselors in 1958 and got away with it. By the time she met a machete on Friday the 13th in 1979, she’d had decades to become a campfire nightmare. Can a prequel make her scarier once it invites us inside her head?
TIFF screened the first two episodes in its Primetime programme, so I’m holding off on a rating. Showrunner Brad Caleb Kane and original developer Bryan Fuller shift the action to the early seventies, which makes the old timeline wobble like a dock with a loose plank. They also bring back people you’ll recognize if you’ve spent enough summers at this camp. Ralph is here before anyone calls him Crazy Ralph. So are Barry and Claudette, the counselors whose date ended badly in the original film’s opening. Michael Lennox directs both episodes, and the title sequences should give longtime fans a kick. The first hour even returns to the New Jersey campground and town used for the 1980 film. Seeing those places again gave me the biggest jolt of affection so far.
There’s gore right out of the gate, with practical work and visual effects putting on a decent show. But neither episode made me want to stay up and watch the next one.
The performances get shakier in the second hour, just as the series slows down to unpack everyone’s feelings. I kept wanting to nudge it back toward the lake. Linda Cardellini gives Pamela plenty of bite, even when the writing hands her an extreme self-help seminar to attend. Naturally, the leader makes the mistake of challenging her. You can guess how warmly Pam takes that. I’m not against spending more time with her; I just hope the show leaves room for the nasty, ridiculous fun that made me love this series. All eight episodes arrive October 15.
Ask me again after I’ve seen the rest.
Seen Sept. 20 · Scotiabank IMAX
Everest: The Other Side
Directors: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin
Starring: Jim Morrison & Hilaree Nelson
Ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson set out to climb the direct North Face of Everest and ski down the near-vertical Hornbein Couloir, a descent nobody has ever completed.
This was the last film I saw at TIFF 2026, and it’s a tough one. I’d suggest going in blind because all I knew walking in was the title and that it was playing in IMAX. It comes from Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the Oscar winners behind Free Solo and now former spouses. Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson set out to climb the direct North Face of Everest, then ski down through the near vertical Hornbein Couloir. Thousands of people have summited from the southeast ridge in Nepal. Five have done it from the North Face, and nobody has ever skied the couloir. The last person who tried the descent disappeared.
There’s an almost shockingly sad story of grief unfolding over these 115 minutes. It’s beautifully shot, as their work always is. The IMAX presentation is gripping. It doesn’t make you feel like you’re standing alongside these ski mountaineers so much as hovering above them, a spectral observer. The moderator called it their most audacious film yet, and I’d agree. It’s as nerve-jangling as any Hollywood thriller, with a couple of turns even those movies couldn’t pull off.
Morrison and Nelson made names for themselves separately before they found each other. Both came out of earlier marriages, and both were nearing fifty. It settles into something fine whenever it just watches them work.
It’s also self-indulgent. The directors insert themselves into the picture, and the culprit is mainly Chin, who joins the team traveling toward the summit. Any scene with Chin present suddenly felt different from the ones around it, and I mean any scene. There are moments when he feels performative, like he’s leading with his director’s hat instead of his heart. Whenever he’s offscreen, the emotional weight comes back.
I’m being cagey to avoid spoiling the discovery. Setbacks pile up, and the YETI and The North Face placement turns comical. The In Memoriam credit lands ninety seconds into the crawl, after a good chunk of the audience has gone. There’s a tremendous film buried in here. I wish the filmmaking trusted that story enough to stay out of its way.
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