The View from the 2026 Toronto International Festival, Part Two: Musicals, Murder and More

This is the second part of The Reveal’s report from the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. (Here’s part one, in case you missed it.) This entry will cover everything I had a chance to see by the end of day on Tuesday, but keep checking the comments. I’ll be adding capsules of my Wednesday movies throughout the day.

Comedy!

The atmosphere of festivals rarely translates to real-world screenings, but I’d actually be surprised if a scene appearing midway through The Debut doesn’t inspire rounds of thrilled applause no matter where it plays, as it did at its first public screening at TIFF (and, I’m assured, in others as well). In Jesse Eisenberg’s third film as writer and director, Julianne Moore stars as Mona, a quiet, overlooked housewife who’s not really sure what to do with herself now that her kids are old enough to drive. Inspired by happy memories of singing in the choir as a teenager, she auditions for the part of “Miss Danielle,” a supporting character in a community theater production of the dusty musical Nosy Neighbors. It’s a production, like everything the regular players put on, overseen by Jerry (Paul Giamatti), a local theater legend whose demanding ways inspire fear and respect in equal measure from his cast and crew. When she unexpectedly books the part, Mona embarks on a voyage of self-discovery. Absurd, joyful, unmistakably earnest, and filled with catchy/corny original songs (also by Eisenberg), The Debut bears little resemblance to its writer/director’s previous films. It’s hilarious, charming, and, in its own way, a dark, dual portrait of obsession and madness. 

There’s an unshakeable “This could have been an Instagram post” vibe to the combination of picturesque L.A. locations and circular musing that makes up much of Lauren Miller Rogen’s directorial debut, Babies. The director’s real-life husband Seth co-stars opposite Anna Kendrick as, respectively, Aaron and Annie, a happy couple who can’t decide whether they should join all their friends by starting a family. Low energy, aimless, too dependent on voiceover, and overly confident that it gives us any reason to care about its characters, Babies benefits from a star-packed cast that includes everyone from Issa Rae to Kate Berlant and a touching subplot involving David Straithairn as Annie’s father, who’s attempting to find his way back into the world while still caring for a wife with Alzheimer's.

Drama!

All of a Sudden, the latest from Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car, Evil Does Not Exist), has a running time that pushes past the three-hour mark, including a long scene involving a white board and diagrams explaining a flaw at the heart of capitalism, and largely concerns one character’s attempts to introduce a more humane system of care to a living facility for the memory-impaired in Paris. Oh, and there’s a long scene given over to an avant-garde theater production. Wait! Where are you going? It’s also really good, rewarding patience via Hamaguchi’s confident, studied direction and the touching story of a friendship between two women: Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira), the aforementioned assisted living facility director, and Mari (Tao Okamoto), a theater director with whom she forms a deep, instant bond, complicated by Mari’s revelation that she doesn’t have long to live. Efira and Okamoto make long, philosophical conversations feel both intellectually compelling and personal (think Before Sunrise, but without the sexual tension) and the final stretch confirms that, yes, the film needed to be this long and move this slowly to get where Hamaguchi wanted it to go.

Loosely inspired by the final entry of Krystof Kieslowski’s Dekalog (“Thou shalt not covet”), Possible Love, Lee Chang-Dong’s follow-up to Burning, explores the implications of that admonition from several angles via the story of two couples: Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu) are working class and struggling to regain their footing, and dignity, two years after Ho-seok lost his job and subsequently suffered severe injuries participating in a strike ended by a violent police crackdown. Sang-woo (Zo In-sung) comes from tremendous wealth and has enough free time to help out his wife Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) with her documentary filmmaking career. Ye-ji’s latest project, a movie about labor issues, brings the two couples together, creating a complicated dynamic that opens up issues involving class divisions, power imbalances, and the ethics of documentary filmmaking. Deliberately paced and long (though not All of a Sudden long), it’s a slow-fuse movie that builds to a quiet explosion.

Though it’s elegant, emotionally rich, and features some remarkably moving scenes, Bitter Christmas, Pedro Almodóvar’s 24th feature, is filled with the sort of elements that tend to pop up in great directors’ later films, from familiar themes and devices to a self-insert character (more than one, really) to the sort of shagginess that admirers wave away out of love. And then, thrillingly, the director pulls the rug out from under viewers in ways best left undescribed. That’s not the whole show, however. The film leading up this moment offers plenty of intrigue and Almodóvarian pleasures via a story that unfolds across two timelines: In 2004, Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a director of cult movies who now mostly shoots commercials to pay the bills, suffers a series of panic attacks while her devoted boyfriend Beau (Patrick Criado) tends to her and other friends undergo personal crises of their own. In the present, Raul (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a revered, aging director, struggles to finish a screenplay—Elsa’s story, which is revealed as his creation—while preparing to part ways with his longtime assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). As the film progresses, it becomes increasingly clear how much Elsa’s story has been taken from Beau’s life and then, well, honestly, just see it and enjoy all the familiar Almodóvarisms until the film turns them on their head.

One Battle After Another made it pretty obvious but The Julia Set confirms it: Chase Infiniti is a real-deal star. In Niki Byrne’s sophomore feature, Infiniti plays Julia, a super-talented math major who’s enlisted to participate in a challenging competition by Pascal (Christopher Briney), a handsome TA who also has romantic designs on her. Byrne’s solid drama underscores its themes a little too heavily, particularly in its final half, but the combination of Infiniti’s performance, the glimpse of the rarefied world in which she travels, and a supporting cast that includes Jason Isaacs, Carmen Ejogo, Nina Hoss, Chloe Bailey, and Gillian Anderson largely make up for this.

Action!

It would have been hard to predict in 1992, when Abel Ferrara’s original film won acclaim and controversy for its depiction of a New York cop making a desperate attempt to find grace before being swallowed by his own demons, that Bad Lieutenant would become a global franchise. But here we are with Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, the anthology series’ third installment, a follow-up to Werner Herzog’s 2009 companion piece Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. The prolific and sometimes boundary-pushing Takashi Miike takes over the directorial reins while Shun Oguri follows in the footsteps of Harvey Keitel and Nicolas Cage as a morally compromised detective on the heels of first one then a second serial killer—a pursuit threatened by a nasty drug habit and mounting gambling debts. Oguri’s effectively depraved (if less memorably so than his predecessor) and Miike lays on the moody atmosphere, but the moral seriousness that undergirded both Ferrara and Herzog’s films is sorely missed. (Kudos to Lily James for doing her best to play a grizzled, hard-living FBI agent with a heavy Southern accent, but I’m not sure anyone could have made the part believable.) Still, there are some memorably grody touches. You might never think of the word “meatballs” in quite the same way again.

Mystery!

Between 1955 and 1991, Patricia Highsmith wrote five novels that came to be known as “The Ripliad,” nasty tales of murder and deception built around the adventures of the master con artist Tom Ripley. Based on Joanna Murrary-Smith’s play Switzerland, Anton Corbjin’s A Talent for Murder concerns an attempt to write a sixth. Or, more specifically, a longshot attempt to persuade the famously misanthropic Highsmith (played with delicious nastiness by Helen Mirren) to bring Ripley back. Alden Ehrenreich, in a performance that ought to cement a comeback, co-stars as Edward Ridgeway, a lowly editor sent by Highsmith’s New York publisher to the writer’s remote Swiss home to get her to sign a contract for a new book. The film’s never better than in the early scenes in which Edward has to repeatedly fight back from the brink of being kicked out of Highsmith’s house, a battle of wills that’s not as unevenly matched as it first appears. The film disappointingly abandons any attempt to plumb the author’s psyche after a point, but it remains a mean, twisty psychological thriller to the end.

Dramedy!

In what ought to be a breakout role, Rosalind Eleazar (Slow Horses) stars in Misty Green, Chris Rock’s first film as a director in 14 years, as the title character, once a promising young star who won Emmys and appeared on the covers of magazines, now a dweller on the Hollywood fringe thanks to a reputation for difficult behavior and a drug habit that’s caused late nights to take the place of morning auditions. When a pair of crises conspire to force an end to her aimlessness, Misty attempts a comeback but her obvious talent might not be enough to counteract her self-destructive tendencies. At once a character study and a tour of the less-glamorous side of the glamorous life, Misty Green is perceptive and unsparing, never letting Misty off the hook for her bad choices while depicting the ugliness of a no-win business that’s not in the habit of handing out second chances. (That the film seems to have trouble imagining any place for women in Hollywood who haven’t had to make sexual compromises to get ahead is troubling for reasons Rock might not have intended, however.) Eleazar gets space to explore every side of a complicated character and though the film has its uneven patches, she’s magnetic all the way through. 

Music!

With infinite time, I would have loved to have checked out all the music docs that played the fest this year, which included films dedicated to Darlene Love, Neil Peart, and indigenous hip-hop artists. I was only able to squeeze in one, but it’s a good one. Joss Crowley’s Pretenders retells the history of the band of the same name with an intense focus on lead singer Chrissie Hynde’s origins as an Ohio anglophile who followed rock dreams to London and the group’s early years, which brought tremendous success but also tragedy. Hynde serves as a difficult but ultimately revealing interview subject and Crowley somehow draws a coherent narrative out of the many interpersonal conflicts and upheavals in the lead-up to a pair of tremendous losses that almost ended the band.

Cartoon!

The latest winning animated feature from Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon (Wolfwalkers, The Secret of the Kells), Julián adapts Jessica Love’s 2014 storybook in which a boy named Julián (Knyght Darius Jack) spends a summer in Brooklyn with his abuela (Milcania Diaz-Rojas). Julián has to get used to his grandmother’s cooking while she struggles to understand why he’s more interested in joining a group of girls and donning a costume for the Coney Island Mermaid Parade than his father’s old baseball cards. The first film helmed by Cartoon Saloon vet Louise Bagnall, Julián is colorful, sweet, and clear-eyed, vibrantly depicting both Julián’s joy in his passions and the discomfort this creates in some of those around him and his abuela’s pride in their Dominican heritage and the pain she still feels with leaving her old home behind.

That’s not quite a wrap for me at TIFF this year. I’ve got one more day left so, as mentioned above, check the comments throughout the day for thoughts on a few more films, including Danny Boyle’s Ink.