Train Dreams
Logging is one of the world's most dangerous jobs. It is probably safe to say, it was worse at the beginning of the 20th century as the USA created one of the most elaborate and remote railroad networks at speed.
I am here for the cinematography as much as the storytelling in Clint Bently’s Train Dreams, which features Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones (coming off her wonderful turn in last year’s spectacular The Brutalist) and William H. Macy, in a frontier character study set during a time where everything in the was changing through engineering and technology. This one is giving off Days of Heaven vibes. -Kurt
Honey Bunch
Madeline Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli made a huge impression with their debut rape-revenge film Violation, and it seems they’re exploring the traumatic effects of memory again, in Honey Bunch. Stylized as 70s gothic sci fi, and with a stacked cast that includes Grace Glowicki, Ben Petrie, Jason Isaacs, Kate Dickie, and Julian Richings, it sounds like a puzzle film worthy of attention. -Shelagh
The Furious
I have it on good authority that Kenji Tanigaki’s action flick The Furious is going to blow the roof off the place when it premieres in the Midnight Madness program.
Whose authority?
Why, my own.
What?
During last year’s festival, I was invited by the film’s executive producers to be a ringer during their sales showcase. Come in, act enthusiastic about what you’re seeing, and hopefully, the distributors in the house during the showcase will pick up on your energy.
Folks, I did not have to do much.
Everyone at the sales showcase was hooting and hollering at what we saw on screen that day. The three action sequences we were shown were some good old-fashioned rumbles in tight and open spaces, on the ground and in the air. This is what happens when you get a stunt veteran like Tanigaki behind the camera.
Add to the mix action stars and fan favourites like Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian from Midnight Madness alumni, The Raid, with the rising star Brian Le and child actor turned action threat, Miao Xie, the fighting talent in this film is off the charts. The Furious will be a legit old-school action spectacle that fans of the Golden Age of HK cinema will lose their shit over. -Mack
Sirât
Perhaps the wildest and most experimental film to come out of Cannes in 2025, Oliver Laxe's desert rave vibes with a missing persons quest in this arthouse metaphysical journey through the remotest part of Morocco.
When our own Martin Kudlac caught it at Locarno in July, he said, "Sirât offers a possible answer to what might emerge from crossing Mad Max with Andrei Tarkovsky. Yet Laxe’s latest work extends well beyond such an aesthetic exercise. It is an apocalyptic and dystopian film rendered in an implicitly lyrical register, at times verging on the trance-like." -Kurt
The Last Viking
When Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen (Adams Apples) gets his roster of players together, particularly Mads Mikkelsen & Nikolaj Lie Kass, for another round of vulgar hilarity, it is must-see madness. Two brothers reunite after one gets out of a long run in prison for bank robbery. The other brother knows where the money is, and thinks he is John Lennon.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Beyond another oddball coif on Mikkelsen (See Green Butchers, or Men & Chicken) I expect unsettlingly violence out of nowhere, surprise plotting and character silliness, with somehow, a bit of heart as Jensen does what he does best. As with all the auteur's work, this is a must see. -Kurt
Dust Bunny
I am often nostalgic for the golden coming-of-age in the 1980s I had with darker children’s films, and so any film that combines the whimsical with the macabre appeals to me.
Dust Bunny is the solo feature debut of Bryan Fuller, who is best known for the short-lived but excellent television series Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me.
Mads Mikkelsen as a remorseful hit man? Check. A precocious little girl who wants to hire him to get rid of the monster under her bed? Check. A ‘cozy horror’ entry to the Midnight Madness programme. -Shelagh
100 Sunset
There’s nothing more satisfying at TIFF or any other festival than uncovering a hidden gem.
This is a stunning debut feature from writer/director Kunsang Kyirong. Her expert command of cinematic elements creates an addictively dense film that is at once portrait of a close-knit diasporic community, tale of newfound friendship, and noirish mystery teeming with desire and deceit.
Richly textured, each frame packed with meaning and emotion, its sinister mood yet playful style is actually enhanced by her use of non-actors – they seem to effortlessly inhabit their roles. That is just one facet of this film’s haunting impact. -Barbara
Hen
Hungarian wunderkind György Pálfi, who unleashed Taxidermia, arguably the most bizarre film ever made, on the world in 2006, tells the tale of a chicken, from the POV of a chicken, using extreme cinematography and sound design. What might seem gimmicky (8 chickens were used for the protagonist), will very likely cross over into ecstatic empathy, as Pálfi once again explores the foibles of human cruelty through an unconventional lens. -Kurt
Mile End Kicks
If you are a cinephile and have not seen Chandler Levack’s razor-sharp and poignant debut I Like Movies, get on that. You’ll know it’s the beginning of a beautiful relationship with a terrific new voice in Canadian cinema.
Levack has a knack for characters who are at once lovable and exacerbating, full of dreams and angst, hope and fear. It’s the reason I’m excited for her sophomore film, Mile End Kicks.
The story of a young woman making her way in the male-centric world of cultural journalism in 2010s Montréal, I consider it part of my historical education in the life of the city I have called home for the past seven years.
-Shelagh
The Tale of Sylian
It has been six years since the Honeyland was released. That documentary about an elderly beekeeper and her adult daughter in rural Macedonia who must contend with rowdy new neighbours, played out like a self-contained Shakespearean tragedy, and was visually stunning to boot.
Tamara Kotevska returns with The Tale of Sylian another film of agrarian turmoil, in which a man nurses a stork back to health, while his livelihood crumbles around him. If past is prologue, the viewer will start wondering whether Kotevska is making a documentary, or if she found the perfect script and filmed it as such. This is her gift as a filmmaker. -Kurt
Bad Apples
After the German masterpiece that is The Teacher’s Lounge, I am always keeping an eye open for sharp looks at the social and etiquette war that happens in the modern classroom. In Bad Apples, Saoirse Ronan is a teacher who has to navigate bullying and expectations in a wealthy British private school, to achieve harmony or justice, or both, or neither. Expect savagery. -Kurt
Copper
After catching the Mexican-Canadian meta-surrealist comedy Fauna at the 2020 edition of TIFF, I became an instant fan of director Nicolás Pereda. Following the minor head-scratcher that was last years Lázaro de noche, he returns with his repertoire of Pereda Players, for the experience of a Mexican miner, struggling with health and family, who discovers a corpse on the side of the road, but runs up against suspicion and skepticism about his involvement.
Pereda has a penchant for how perspective and memory alter everything, and lead to social awkwardness and his own unique flavour of cringe. -Kurt
The Wizard of the Kremlin
Like Steven Soderbergh, French director and cinema experimentalist, Olivier Assayas is nothing if not prolific and unpredictable. From his meta-take on remakes casting Maggie Cheung as Irma Vep, to epic length biopics on Che and Carlos (The Jackal), and a ghost story around liminal luxury spaces in Paris (Personal Shopper), Assayas has been a fountain of abundance on international cinema scene for decades.
Here he gives a fictional account of Russia’s First Deputy Chief Vladislav Surkov, across the late 20th century and early 21st century as the Soviet Union collapsed into kleptocracy.
Paul Dano, Jude Law, and Alicia Vikander essay Russians across the decades, while the always versatile Jeffrey Wright is the journalist in the framing story. -Kurt
Normal
Team Wick (John Wick), and British genre surrealist Ben Wheatley (High Rise, Kill List Free Fire) collaborate with Bob Odenkirk (Nobody, Better Call Saul, Mr. Show) for an aw-shucks maximalist action picture involving an entire midwestern community, along with the Yakuza, trying to ‘shoot the sheriff’ after a botched bank robbery.
Somehow this might be the most, ahem, normal entry (pitched as Fargo meets Hot Fuzz) in this years Midnight Madness program, which is saying something. But Wheatley can delivery deadpan mayhem with a certain gusto. Expect someone to be hit by a car in spectacular fashion. -Kurt
Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband)
Best known for 2001’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, which won the 2001 Camera d’Or and was voted Canada’s Best Film of All Time by the TIFF Film Critic Poll in 2015, his latest is peak Kunuk.
One of the pioneers of Indigenous cinema and, having directed five feature films and over 40 documentaries all in Inuktitut, it’s thrilling to see how Kunuk deftly mixes film traditions and styles into this ancient story (set in 2000 BCE) of two lovers separated by cruel fate.
His style is often detailed oriented and almost observational, (in the best way) yet his vision is vast – taking in all the glories of his Artic setting as he incorporates age old fundamental storytelling elements. When supernatural forces are summoned into the story, the film really kicks in, taking off into a deliciously suspenseful action adventure that is both familiar and refreshing.
A must see even if you haven’t experienced the overwhelming impact of one of award-winning Canadian Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk’s films. -Barbara
Obsession
YouTuber and sketch comedian Curry Baker (“that’s a bad idea”) makes his feature film debut about the dangers of romantic and sexual fantasy.
When a friend-zone’d man gets the girl of his dreams through supernatural intervention, things go off the rails in an ever escalating scenario of ‘careful what you wish for!’
New blood at Midnight Madness is the secret sauce of Midnight Madness. -Kurt
Mārama
Having grown up in an anglophile household, where every period costume drama was a must-watch on Masterpiece Theatre, I dove into gothic horror as soon as I discovered it. It’s great to see how the genre has been adopted by those examining histories of racism and colonialism, as seems to be with Taratoa Stappard’s feature debut, Mārama.
A young Māori woman trapped in an isolated country home looking for secrets of the dark past sounds like exactly the fresh take on gothic horror that we need. -Shelagh
Steal Away
There’s a reason we still turn to fairy tales: something about the format speaks top us on a primitive level, that part of our DNA that waits for tales told at bedtime or around campfires that are both fantastical and dangerous. Canadian filmmaker Clement Virgo (Brother, Lie with Me) seems to be taking a dive into young love that crosses boundaries, looking to how fairy tales used to be, filled with sensuality and danger, with a healthy dose of the contemporary speculative. -Shelagh
Levers
Her debut feature Ste. Anne was a haunting documentary of her home; now, Manitoban filmmaker and artist Rhayne Vermette returns with another strange tale.
In Levers, a town will be plunged into darkness for 24 hours. An intriguing premise to say the least, a temporary apocalypse that could perhaps be an early sign of a dying earth, a changing community, or a shift into another reality.
Vermette’s use of 16mm increases the fever dream-like atmosphere of her cinema, something that should lend itself well to a film of the experimental speculative. -Shelagh
Sentimental Value
I loved Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier’s follow-up to The Worst Person in the World and predict that it will be even more successful with both critics and audiences.
In his Screen Anarchy review of the film from the 2025 Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Martin Kudlac captures the film’s dazzling complexity:
“Sentimental Value is slower, more diffuse, and more architectural in form than The Worst Person in the World, adopting a labyrinthine structure to explore the layering of emotion over time, across roles and generations within a family history. It also functions as a quiet homage to art, as both an existential necessity and a thinly veiled therapy.”
Renate Reinsve stars in this one as well, along with Stellan Skarsgård. I wouldn’t be surprised if both of their performances come up often in the upcoming awards season. -Barbara
Blue Heron
Based in part on Romvari’s own childhood, the film focuses on an eight-year-old girl and her family, recent Hungarian immigrants to Canada in the 1990’s, in which the older son begins exhibiting behavioural problems.
Acclaimed filmmaker Sophy Romvari is well known to Canadian and world audiences, thanks to the success of her short films, featured on The Criterion Channel for a time.
Based in personal experiences, she employs minimalism in a manner that is able to convey volumes about her subject. This allows for a certain universality which is gripping. She has tended to explore the richness of memories, a quality that is fundamental to cinema itself.
With such a proven gift for expressing the ineffable, she’s more than ready to make what’s certain to be an unforgettable feature film debut. -Barbara
Cover Up
The camera loves Seymour Hersh. At 88 years old, Hersh is one of the key players in American print journalism of the last 70 years, Hersh has been involved in many of the big American scandals, from Watergate, to the MK-Ultra CIA drug experiments, to the state-sanctioned military torture at Abu Ghraib Prison. He has a small, but memorable on-camera role in Errol Morris’ Wormwood, which is equal parts frustrating, magnetic and savagely funny in its self awareness and ethical clarity.
Am I excited for a full Fog of War style interview doc Hersh at the centre, from Citizen Four Director Laura Poitras, and PBS producer Mark Oberhaus? You bet your bottom dollar. -Kurt
The Secret Agent
The film that might be the surprise hit of this festival, it’s got everything this movie goer needs.
Written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, and winner of multiple awards already, it’s a genre bending neo noir political thriller that features a brilliant performance by Wagner Moura as a technology expert on the run. He seeks refuge in Recife, Brazil as he also tries to reconnect with his son.
Set in 1977 during the carnival season, it’s an atmosphere where anything goes and the film gleefully embodies the wild atmosphere of the celebrations. Mendonça Filho took great pains to recreate the look of a film from this era using vintage equipment to realize his vision (which is mesmerising!), and interweaves cinematic references as vast as gangster films, monster movies and, not surprisingly for that time, Jaws, all while recreating the realities of living under a repressive regime. -Barbara
ScreenAnarchy, in a way, was birthed at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) over 20 years ago. 
