As the first year after the Toronto International Film Festival (colloquially known as tiff, in all lower case) turned 50, the 2026 edition feels like a more low-profile year for the festival. A back to basics, nuts & bolts, and perhaps most pleasurably, a discovery year. This is not a silver lining, this is a feature.
North America's biggest film festival, by both media profile and international visitors, has always served many functions. It courts Hollywood, being the first stepping stone on the road to the Oscars. It offers a sampling of the titles and awards winners of other festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Locarno, and Venice, the latter of which tiff overlaps with for a few days, where filmmakers and actors often board a plane from Italian red carpet to Canadian red carpet.
Mainly, however, the festival has offered a broad sampling of global cinema, world premieres from highbrow to lowbrow to flat out experimental, for Toronto audiences during what is generally the nicest weather week of the year. A good week for a big, expensive, party.
Here at ScreenAnarchy, we take in what we can in the quite-over-packed 11 days. Our eyes and ears are typically on guard for the weird and wilder parts of the festival. (Secretly, between you and I, the best film at tiff every year probably hides in the often overlooked Wavelengths sidebar of tiff.) We remain committed to our unofficial motto, "From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse" in such matters.
Below is a gallery of a few of the titles at this years festival we are excited to see, and thought worth highlighting. We hope you get excited for them as well. Browse through and see what you might have missed, or perhaps not even considered in this year's "Festival of Festivals."
Barbara Goslawski and Ankit Jhunjhunwala
contributed to this story.
River
Joshua Giuliano's debut film is a solid candidate to be this year's Obsession in terms of a genre break out. A survival horror with a dash of slasher, in which three siblings find themselves adrift on the eponymous river, stalked by a tall and dark stranger without a face.
River is the opening of the Midnight Madness side bar, the programme in which most of us in these parts have a deep, abiding love for seeing these films with a huge audience of often over a thousand people, at the stroke of midnight. -Kurt
Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney
With the highly acclaimed Universal Language, Matthew Rankin proved that he could shake up any genre or social milieu he chooses to work in, so it is exciting to watch him flex his artistic muscles as he returns to his more experimental collage-media roots in this latest work.
A scathing satire of recent Canadian history and politics (akin to his bonkers and surreal The Twentieth Century), his target is that 1980s charm offensive that walked like a man, Canada’s eighteenth Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
Rankin’s genre-bending approach eventually carries a wider no-holds-barred global message about the sheer nonsense that passes for political intrigue, including current rhetoric from the White House administration of Canada's southern neighbours. -Barbara
Fjord
This year's Palme D'Or winner, from Romanian maestro Christian Mungiu, is a taut, button-pushing, culture-war smashing drama that somehow manages to evoke the kind of audience confrontation of Ruben Östlund's Triangle of Sadness and The Square, and it manages to do this without either the satire or the humour, while mixing in the language barrier and interpretive memory of Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall. In short: Fjord is kind of a 21st century balancing act miracle.
A mixed Romanian-Norwegian family (the parents here are played very low-key by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve) moves to rural Norway and is quickly persecuted for their conservative religious beliefs, with all the weight that Norwegian progressive attitudes and weaponized bureaucracy can muster. Be prepared to get your back up, or question where your sympathies lie, as Mungiu plays with any and all expectations of storytelling here. -Kurt
Union Town
Master documentarian Barbara Kopple completes a trilogy she began with the Oscar winning documentaries Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) and American Dream (1990).
Deeply invested in presenting raw, empathic stories of the unsung workers who toil to keep the American economy running, here she profiles three crucial labour battles as they unfold in New York City, involving workers from UPS, Amazon, and deliveristas for DoorDash and GrubHub. Hired as independent contractors by the enormously powerful companies that rule the delivery business, they are connected by their complete lack of rights.
Tightly constructed with a careful weave of interviews and profiles, her expert command of the vérité style invites the audience to experience these struggles. Kopple categorically leaves no doubt that the power divide is real, and it is getting bigger.
-Barbara
Anchors Aweigh
For those who have never had the specific pleasure of a Matt Barats film or performance, Anchors Aweigh is the dead pan auteur's coming out party. Specializing in a kind of cringey self-reflective hyperbolic-personal essay format, here he plays a loser who, after getting rejected by his much younger and more successful girlfriend, rents a small sailboat and descends into a deep spiral of narcissistic hell.
We have covered some of his previous work in Cash Cow, as well as the Reveries trilogy here at Screen Anarchy, and are excited that the comedian's profile has the opportunity to get much bigger. -Kurt
Life of Jorge Luis Borges
Would we make time to watch a 5 and a half hour biography on Argentine writer, labyrinthine thinker, and "poet of the paradox" during an already intensely busy festival? You bet we would.
Director Mariano Llinás is no stranger to exceptionally long cinema runtimes -- his 2018 film La Flor was a marathon 13 hours -- so this one is a sprint by comparison.
Self-described as “an attempt to narrate Borges' biography through objects and places,” it is not going to be a surprise when this one strides the fuzzy borders between reality, fiction, history and dreams. -Kurt
Marie Madeleine
This modern biblical parable follows the budding friendship between bohemian brothel worker Marie Madeleine, and Joseph, the repressed evangelical son of a strict preacher whose new church sits directly across the street.
As writer, producer, director and star, Haitian filmmaker Gessica Géné, announces herself as someone to watch. She sets up an intoxicating assessment of the clashing realities of her characters: The mystical beliefs of the women who ease the real-life dreariness of the poverty around them versus the almost literal austerity of human existence as dictated by the scriptures.
Set in Jacmel Haiti, Géné crafts a uniquely modern battle between good and evil. -Barbara
Trees Are Watching
Kurdish folk horror? Sign us up.
Tiff puts some trigger warnings in their catalogue literature, and for this film, the following: Explicit violence. Accident trauma. Bullying. Mature themes. Again, sign us up.
Iranian-Kurd new wave auteur Bahman Ghobadi offers a film anchored with mainly child actors, and, interestingly, Casino Royale, Penny Dreadful and Womb star, Eva Green. Not since Charisma (Kカリスマ) or The Happening will trees be more ominous. -Kurt
Wild Horse Nine
Director Martin McDonagh has a thing for pairs of men dealing with shit while in very specific places: Be it two gangsters in hiding In Bruges or two pals on the outs in The Banshees of Inisherin. Here he has Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich as CIA agents on Easter Island.
Do we need say more? Well, Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey, and Tom Waits are in here too, and it is set in the early 1970s, just before the coup in Chile that overthrew Salvador Allende.
And the reviews out of Venice are positively glowing. -Kurt
The Face of Horror
Returning to the big screen after the sparkling 16mm eye candy of The Love Witch, Anna Biller looks to offer an ode to Hammer Horror, 35mm Technicolor, and Japan's most famous ghost story (Yotsuya Kaidan). We truly live in a truly global age of cinema transposition and reinvention, as much as Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa traded with John Ford. -Kurt
Everytime
The loss of a teenage child can be a truly traumatizing experience for a parent. Yet, Austrian filmmaker Sandra Wollner finds stunning, transcendent beauty in this tale of catharsis, forgiveness and reconciliation.
Awash with stunning cinematic craft, Wollner brings together a grieving mother, sister and boyfriend on a searching, grasping odyssey where the concept of time itself seems upended. This cinematic triumph won the Un Certain Regard Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival and is Germany's entry for Best International Film at the Oscars. - Ankit
Bucking Fastard
Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog is showing zero signs of slowing down. After the release of his zoological documentary Ghost Elephants earlier this year, where he trekked with South African preservationist Steve Boyes though the Angolan wilderness, he still managed to find time to make a fictional feature film with major Hollywood stars.
Kate and Rooney Mara play sisters with a connected mind. They speak in unison, as one. They also fall in love with the same man (Orlando Bloom). Before you can say Dead Ringers we have ourself a Herzog-ian court room drama. It seems like anything can happen here, but note that this is based on a true story. Yet this filmmaker always strives for the 'ecstatic truth.' -Kurt
Tender Loving Care
It is bittersweet that this is Mike Leigh's last film before his announced retirement. His principal director of photography, Dick Pope, passed away in 2024.
But one more charming and emotional gift from the master filmmaker of the British ordinary class, should not be taken lightly. Featuring none of his higher-profile collaborators (although I do see the great Peter Wight and Kate O'Flynn in the main cast), I expect this to be an intimate affair, but really, that is what Leigh does best. Resilience, compassion, poignancy -- the world could use more of this right now. -Kurt
Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo
So is the Bad Lieutenant franchise an actual franchise? Abel Ferrara, Werner Herzog, and now Takashi Miike have all made one. None of them are related in any 'universe' way, although, I suppose they are all related in a universal way.
It just does not feel like tiff without a Miike film somewhere in the mix, and I am glad the prolific Japanese maestro of horror, gore, and psychological terror is back. Here he is operating in a kind of blend of his more recent 'stately senior' register, as well as his earlier gonzo style. We are here for it, whatever it may be. -Kurt
Nobody’s Violence
Veteran Canadian avant garde filmmaker Denis Côté once stated that he measures success by the number of walk outs. In Nobody’s Violence, he reteams with actress Larissa Corriveau, and once again enlists fellow director Vincent Biron as cinematographer to craft a genre-shattering, surreal investigation of a futuristic euthanasia enterprise.
The brilliance here lies in Corriveau’s mostly silent performance as a mysterious woman who acts as an angel of mercy for the terminally ill. The simplicity of this plot grants the director and his DP the opportunity to fashion a densely textured, moody world that twists from science fiction to character study to Buñuel-ian satire, with a hint of romance. -Barbara
Alpha Gang
The Zellner Brothers do not make 'normal' movies. They are their own genre, from the Fargo meets Japan "what if" cautionary tale, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, to their wordless Sasquatch Sunset, which documented in a fly on the wall style 'natural' family, with Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough in Bigfoot suits.
They return here (Keough along for another ride) with Dave Bautista and Léa Seydoux, as a beach-head alien invasion that goes awry, due to something like empathy, joy, and of course, dancing.
Oh, and the eponymous gang are clad in vintage American leather biker attire, straight out of The Wild One. Expect weirdness, but also, it is always fun to vibe with the Zellners' odd sense of storytelling and character. -Kurt
The City Of The Living
The (entirely unmotivated) killing of 23-year-old Luca Varani shocked Italy in 2016. It became the subject of several podcasts, documentaries and news programs.
Ten years later, Italian director Edoardo Gabbriellini presents his extraordinary subversion of the true crime genre, focusing not on the perpetrators and the trial, but on Luca himself, crafting a luminous, gripping coming-of-age tale that sadly ends in tragedy. The City of the Living premiered in the Orzionti (Horizons) program at the Venice Film Festival and is making its international premiere in Toronto. -Ankit
Minotaur
The other big Cannes prize-winner this year, Minotaur, has master filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev returning with a new film after nearly a decade's hiatus. Zvyagintsev interrogates Russia in the same way 1990s era Zhang Yimou interrogated China, but perhaps with the smidgen of sensibility of a Michael Haneke.
Zvyagintsev has spent several years in exile of his homeland, in part for, or in spite of winning awards all over the world for these complex and critical works, that also happen to be beautifully shot. The Return and Leviathan are nearly undisputed master works of modern cinema.
Minotaur sees a high-powered executive's meticulously-controlled existence unravel due to a series of professional crises, Russia invading Ukraine, and marital betrayal, all of which push him towards his breaking point. -Kurt
Elsinore
Biographical dramas do not have the best reputations (at least with critics) but this one sounds promising. The concept alone suggests a built-in layered approach. Andrew Scott tackles the role of a lifetime playing an actor who performs the role of his lifetime.
He stars as Scottish actor Ian Charleson (1949–1990), best known for his performance in the iconic film Chariots of Fire. When he was dying of AIDS, he insisted on playing Hamlet on stage; a pinnacle for many actors.
While Scott’s task is to depict scenes from the actor’s entire career, what is of particular interest is how the film addresses the bitter irony that arises from Charleson’s final act: an insistence on acting in this play that famously stares death in the face. -Barbara
Everything Else Is Noise
Mexican-Canadian filmmaker Nicolás Pereda makes a film every year. Small dramas with a very sly sense of humour around social graces, always featuring the same troupe of actors. After discovering his unique style of movie-making with the absolute masterpiece Fauna, I have returned to his work ever since.
While nothing since that 2020 film has quite reached that level for me, I have never lost my curiosity to keep engaging with his work. If there is no Hong Sang-Soo film at TIFF this year, and this is not, then Pereda's work can easily step up and step in to fill the void.
Note I didn't mention the plot or the story. That is not how this works with this particular filmmaker, the devil is in the details. -Kurt
The Unknown
Academy Award-winner Arthur Harari is perhaps best known for his partner, Justine Triet, whose Palme d'Or winner Anatomy of a Fall, with star Sandra Hüller, was a breakout success. But he is a great director in his own right; his last film, Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle, was an ambitious undertaking, filmed entirely in Japanese.
He returns with his Cannes Competition entry, also centering on a European superstar in an adaptation of his graphic novel of the same name. Lea Seydoux stars in a drama of vertiginous, Lynchian shifts in identity and the enigma of the self itself. -Ankit
Light Pillar
"A lonely caretaker, a dying film studio, and a seductive virtual world collide in Xu Zao’s formally daring animated debut feature: a melancholic, visionary parable about cinema, technology, alienation, and the fragile promise of renewal."
That's a big promise from the tiff catalogue. But here is the 'formally daring' part of the film. The so-called "real world" elements of the film are animated, and the virtual-reality parts are shot live-action. After the spectacular success of Toei's Cherry and Virgin this year, we are certainly curious if China can pull this off as well. -Kurt
All Of A Sudden
A three-hour wordy art film sounds intimidating. This one will transform your view of how we experience time, and the unexpected people that fate throws in our path.
In his latest work, Drive My Car director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi continues his meditations on the complex bonds that develop between those of different backgrounds. Shot largely in French, All Of A Sudden centres around a lengthy dialogue between the newly-appointed director of a Parisian elderly-care facility, and a Japanese theatre director living with terminal cancer. It is a hopeful expression about mutual connections.
Individuals who may not speak the same language or may not even be able find ways to communicate the depths of they are. We can still find ways to share experiences that are at once similar, though not wholly familiar, to our own. -Barbara
The Diary of a Chambermaid
An unlikely double bill with Barbara Kopple's Union Town, Romanian art-house darling Radu Jude reworks Octave Mirbeau's late 19th century novel, into a modern day globalist "slave"-labour story in Paris.
Knowing that this is a Jude joint, there will be meta, there will be chaos, there will be both subtle and savage satire. This should be a good one. -Kurt
Gentle Monster
Austrian writer-director Marie Kreutzer turns real-life horror into piercing cinema with Gentle Monster. Kreutzer discovered after the making of her last film, Corsage, with Vicky Kriepes, that her leading man, Florian Teichtmeister, was a pedophile in possession of inappropriate underage material.
She casts Léa Seydoux as a classical pianist who discovers, one day, that her husband has a hidden second life when the police show up at her door. Seydoux received raves for what many called the career-best work in her storied career. We will be watching to see Seydoux navigate choppy waters with overwhelming humanity, as only she can. -Ankit
The Surgeon
Michelle Yeoh is a doctor forced to perform surgery at gunpoint for a mobster (Martin Freeman). She fights back. Scalpel violence will very likely ensue. C'mon, drop all the serious festival la-te-da, and let us have an Oscar-winning actress (who happens to also excel in wuxia films) go crazy with the cheese-whiz.
I am surprised this one is not in the Midnight section, but every now and again, you have got to let some of the silly stuff sneak into the regular festival programming. -Kurt
HALF
More Indian cinema in the Midnight Madness section, please!
A hybrid modern vampire-Western-gorefest from director Samjad and The Raid 2's choreographer, Very Tri Yulisman, this one aims to be a high octane crowdpleaser, and will most assuredly bring down the roof of the Royal Alexander Theatre after 12:01am.
From Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky (although personally I hear it read in my mind in Uma Thurman's voice): "A rousing cavalcade of guts and gore, set to the eclectic Malayalam soundtrack of the lead character's cellphone playlist and the percussive pummeling of fists." -Kurt
Growth Of The Soil
The Nobel Prize in Literature is rarely awarded for a single work, as it usually rewards a writer's entire oeuvre. Norwegian Laureate Knut Hamsun is an exception, as he won it for his celebrated novel The Growth of the Soil. Who better than the Norwegians themselves to bring this work of national importance to the big screen in an epic manner?
Norwegian cinema has seen a resurgence on the world stage, mainly due to the works of Joachim Trier, who received Academy Award nominations for The Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value. His star from the prior film, Herbert Nordrum, leads Growth of the Soil, which is world-premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival. -Ankit
The Last Photograph
Zack Snyder's fabled passion project finally becomes a reality in this special world premiere event at the Toronto International Film Festival. Conceived nearly 20 years ago in the wake of 300's monumental success, The Last Photograph was meant to be Snyder's war film, written by 300 scribe Kurt Johnstad.
The project was prestigious enough to have Christian Bale and Sean Penn attached at one point. Twenty years later, Snyder's fortunes have evolved, and The Last Photograph comes to us as an independent film, without distributors and with two untested stars in the lead roles, Stuart Martin and Fra Fee.
I will be eager to see if Snyder can again reveal any of the flashes of greatness he has shown in the past. -Ankit
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