Wake Up Dead Man
World Premiere

My god, Josh O’Connor is good at this! 

My fraying wits could be a culprit, but by the time the end rolled on Rian Johnson’s hilariously plotted, elegantly structured mystery was the most moved I’ve felt at all of this year’s TIFF. A ‘s warm embrace in a world of wolves, this third iteration in the Benoit Blanc series represents a major emotional leap while still having the dexterity to take on the current mood (here it’s the idiocy of MAGA and outrage culture). A onetime boxer turned small town priest (Josh O’Connor, impossible to overstate how terrific of a run he’s on) gets wrapped up in a thorny and inexplicable murder of a controversial Monsignor. Like previous Knives Out stories, the story folds like origami on itself and around an outstanding cast working from a hilarious script to reinvent itself into new forms.

Josh Brolin’s the shit-stirring priest who’s driven out all but the most dedicated of his flock. Among them are Andrew Scott as a nut job sci-fi legend who’s preaching to the converted on Substack; Jeremey Renner an alcoholic town doctor; Kerry Washington, the lawyer who got stuck in the town raising an adopted brother who’s failed to catch fire on GOP screaming points; and Cailee Spaeny a cellist who’s resorted to the faith to heal a mystery illness. As the most devoted follower, Glenn Close runs the parish and Thomas Hayden Church is a recovering alcoholic who keeps the grounds (and the faith for the Cubs — the movie includes a 2025 series vs. the Dbacks, part of Netflix’s interest in live sports?). Daniel Craig’s southern detective is nearly absent for the first third, but with O’Connor in the spotlight you barely miss him.

When he shows up, though, the whole thing elevates and locks into form. The ensuing whodunit makes explicit gestures to classic crime fiction (as curated by Oprah), plays with its tropes of grandstanding solutions while also making room for an interrogation of faith and pursuit of grace. It was the hottest ticket of the festival and the movie I was most anxious about missing, by the end it had moved me unexpectedly to the brink of tears. But it was also Day 6 of the festival, so.

It’s a franchise firing on all cylinders and I hope Rian Johnson will keep making these as long as long as Netflix will keep footing the bill for Daniel Craig and a coterie of all-star guests to assemble and and unravel a crime.

PS. If they don’t campaign Glenn Close in supporting and finally win her that Oscar they’re damned fools.

Nouvelle Vague
Canadian Premiere

But of course Richard Linklater made a movie about the making of Breathless into a rangy hangout picture populated by a comically absurd array of bold-faced names (each introduced with a caption on first appearance). Chief among them is Guillame Marbeck who, with a major assist from an iconic pair of sunglasses, is himself convincingly iconoclastic as Jean-Luc Godard as he finally makes his leap from influential film critic to genre-defining film director. Zoey Deutch, a pixie haircut, and a halting French accent as Jean Seberg reads as suitably perplexed (and won over) by his methods as a young woman negotiating the tightrope between movie star and actress. Both of them have great chemistry with Aubry Dullin as Jean-paul Belmondo on the precipice of his own celebrity. There’s great charm in seeing Godard rustle up funding, improvise constantly, and shoot quickly while inventing a new language of cinema. Not super deep, but Linklater’s the perfect guy for gettin the whole gang together and luxuriating in the vibes, which are, admittedly deeply appealing.

Orwell 2+2 = 5
World Premiere

Drawing on writings from the final year of George Orwell’s life spent writing 1984 on the small whiskey-producing island of Jura and fighting tuberculosis in sanitariums, Raoul Peck crafts a tapestry of outrageous prescience from film clips, quotations, and chilling present-day imagery. It’s a form that he mastered with I Am Not Your Negro and the work here as as strong as ever. Multiple films have been made from Orwell’s books (at least five of 1984, several others from Animal Farm). They provide a spine here, especially Michael Radford’s 1984 adaptation, but the most troubling clips are from recent news documenting the global rise of totalitarianism. The film is a call to collective action before the forcefully prophetic warnings of nearly a century ago become elegies as we grow deaf to their chilling accuracy.

Blue Heron
North American Premiere

A filmmaker interrogates events of a tumultuous summer from her childhood on Vancouver Island. As the film opens, a Hungarian-Canadian family moves into a new house. Their dad spends the days working from home on an old Windows 95 computer, leaving mother and kids to explore their new surroundings and pass the long summer days. Something’s clearly off with the quiet oldest brother, a tall, blond, and bespectacled teen who’d stand out among his darker-complected younger siblings even without the unspecified behavioral issues. Using tools of her trade to revisit events from her past, Sophy Romvari constructs affecting layers of artifice to attempt to find truths she was too young to understand at the time. A strong feature filmmaking debut with formal storytelling swings that convey her lingering confusion and grief and community to the audience a glancing sense of empathetic confusion with a part of her past that still haunts her present.

No Other Choice
North American Premiere

A Korean father (Lee Byung-hun) on cloud nine, grilling eel, embracing his wife, children, and pair of golden retrievers on a heady summer day. The meat was a gift from his bosses; so he should’ve seen the bad omen coming. By morning, he’ll learn that his storied quarter-century career as one of the top managers in the paper industry is about to crash hard into the modern world of corporate restructuring. The executives who have “no other choice”, after all, but to give him the axe.

As his unemployed days stretch on and his comfortable life threatens to slip through his fingers, he hatches a bizarre plan to make himself marketable again by eliminating his competition in outlandish fashion. I expected this downsizing commentary to take a turn away from broad theatrical performances much faster, but instead Park Chan-wook digs deeper and deeper into the dark, loamy soil of daffy darkness. Based on an American horror thriller and updated for modern concerns, I wonder if something was lost in translation or if ending a five-film day with two and a half hours of black comedy was a poor choice on my part. As the antics piled on and the desperation intensified, I was anxious for the payoff. It may not have been entirely my cup of tea, but even in my state of exhaustion, I had to appreciate the commitment to the bit.

Poetic License
World Premiere

Leslie Mann is relatably cringe as an adrift mom with no boundaries who unexpectedly befriends two buddies with their own attachment issues when she audits a “confessional poetry” seminar at the small college where her husband has just taken a prestigious job. Almost nothing makes sense in Maude Apatow’s collegiate comedy of small but nevertheless terrible choices, but somehow the first-time director almost makes it work. The major takeaway is that we should be so lucky if Cooper Hoffman and Andrew Barth Feldman — who play the co-dependent best friends with the inherent rapport of a passionate bromance — have a lifetime of buddy comedies in their future. Individually, they’re absolute delights; together, they’re tremendous. I hope we’ll be watching them grow up on screen forever.

Fuze
World Premiere

A good old fashioned “let’s round up the lads for a bomb and rob” thriller just happened to be the absolutely perfect screening that also happened to be playing at exactly the right time to burn a couple stray hours before it was time to catch the very convenient train from downtown Toronto to the airport.

The premise is instantly compelling: a construction crew unearths a 500 pound unexploded bomb from World War Two in the heart of central London and military experts have to disarm it while local authorities clear the neighborhood. This sounds absurd, but it actually happened and pretty recently! While the good people of Edgware Road, including a vibrant Middle Eastern immigrant community, dutifully decamp to Hyde Park, a few ne’er do wells plot a daring heist while the neighborhood’s gone eerily silent. The setup works and plays to the always compelling nature of watching experts ply their trade.

I lost count of the quadruple crosses, triple alliances, and double moves that David Mackenzie throws in the general direction of the telegenic trio of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Theo James, and Sam Worthington. But it’s all highly legible fun and remarkably never confusing in large part because it feels like the people in the movie are also watching the movie along with us, explaining it along the way and helping us to keep pace with all of the twists. Not meaning to damn with faint praise, but the handholding is so integrated into the high-pressure situations that it’s never grating and often gives the welcome sense of keeping up with rapidly unfolding developments. The scale of the filmmaking is modest, accomplishing just enough without a huge budget. With an appealing cast, it’s a very fun ride that’s all gas, no brains that more than satisfies the bomb squad’s “don’t be shit” mantra.