The Toronto International Film Festival is in full swing from September 4-14 with celebrities and films flooding downtown. The transition from the mountains to the big city is jarring, but it’s a festival packed full of film fans and a program chocked full of premieres.
Starting this weekend and into early next week I’ll be scrambling from theater to theater to catch as many as possible. Quick reactions below and on bluesky (@josh-c / @thesunbreak), with longer reviews to follow.
Tuner
Canadian Premiere
Amid festivals clogged with so many films with “prestige” ambitions, it’s a thrillingly welcome jolt when a really fun movie executes on a clever concept and is impeccably entertaining from top to bottom. Making the jump from pulse-pounding documentary filmmaking to small-stakes crime romance, Daniel Roher does exactly that with a film that just moves from the jump.
It helps that he has the infinite charms of Dustin Hoffman in his toolkit as an easygoing owner of a venerable door-to-door piano tuning operation. Holding his own alongside the living legend is Leo Woodall, hitting all the right notes as his pseudo-nephew and hardscrabble assistant whose hyperacute hearing and perfect pitch make him especially suited to the gig. Less superpower than curse, he plays the character Woodall embodies a character prevented from fulfilling his musical gifts as one struggling to make it through a life in a protective shell of constant ear protection. The action takes an eventful swerve when his hyperacute hearing gets him into the far more lucrative side-gig of after-hours safecracking.
One of the most purely enjoyable movies I’ve seen in weeks and as unlikely a follow-up to Oscar-winning Navalny as I could have imagined. Roher balances the vibes of a great hang, introduces a sweet little romance, and develops the emotional stakes while juggling an increasingly dangerous criminal enterprise. It might not swinging for the Oscars, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this one had a shot at the People’s Choice.
Nuestra Tierra
North American Premiere
Conversely, Lucrecia Martel makes the leap from narrative to documentary with Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks), a wide-angle investigation of over a century of land rights in Argentina.
Despite the crime being captured on film, questions nevertheless spiral outward like ripples through time from a legal case adjudicating the murder of an indigenous leader. Direct and reconstructed testimony within the courtroom spurs arguments among witnesses for the prosecution and defense about a confrontation involving ongoing disputes over land rights. The legal wrangling — or at least Martel’s interest in it — quickly gives way to elliptical narratives from surviving family members. Mesmerizing drone footage captures the vast expanse of the land in question. Elders of the Chuschagasta community relate personal histories from memory and old photographs, detailing a legacy of colonialism and a re-discovery of indigenous identitIes and rights buried in centuries of confounding paperwork.
Sound of Falling
North American Premiere
Mascha Schilinski takes a riverside farm as an ever-evolving stage for a spectral peek through the keyholes of history and the strange morbid lives of death-obsessed German girlhood. Told like a series of ghost stories with shifting perspectives of time, camera angles, and voiceovers, it finds eerie resonances echo across four generations of women who reckon with the crushing weights of their respective times. Like life the images and storytelling here are beautiful, confounding, and frustrating in equal measure. I’m sure I can’t untangle the threads, but the feeling is that despite the changes in the world, the song remains the same. It just goes on and on like this forever.