Toronto’s Lining Up

TIFF 2025’s twenty-one galas include the opening night film, Colin Hanks’s John Candy: I Like Me, and the closing night selection, Anne Émond’s Peak Everything. When Émond’s sixth feature premiered at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, the Hollywood Reporter’s Leslie Felperin called it “a relatable, if somewhat uneven, dark rom-com that suits these uncertain times.” An anxiety-ridden kennel owner is drawn to a technical support line worker he’s met over the phone, and “Émond’s script deftly contrives a third act that’s hopeful but still flecked with genuine despair.”

Toronto will host a fiftieth-anniversary screening of Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay, which the BBC’s Sudha G. Tilak suggests is “arguably the most iconic Hindi film ever made.” When the fully restored, three-hour-plus director’s cut premiered at Il Cinema Ritrovato last month, Beatrice Loayza, writing for Film Comment, noted that the “Bollywood megahit” ran “for five uninterrupted years in theaters in Mumbai following its initial release. This spaghetti-western musical epic [features] mustache-twirling baddies, bromantic harmonica serenades, smoldering dynamite fuses, and extravagantly bloody shootouts Quentin Tarantino wishes he could rival.”

Jeremy Irons and Hiam Abbass lead the international cast of Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, the story behind the farmer-led Great Palestinian Revolt against British colonial rule that lasted from 1936 through 1939, years in which Jewish immigrants fleeing an increasingly fascist Europe began establishing settlements in the country. Jacir says she aims to tell the sweeping tale “in a way that is intimate, personal, and raw.”

François Civil stars in Arnaud Desplechin’s Two Pianos as Mathias, a virtuoso pianist who returns to his home in Lyon after several years spent in Asia. While preparing to perform again, Mathias happens upon a child who could be his double, and the experience leads him to his childhood sweetheart. Desplechin’s cast includes Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Charlotte Rampling, and Hippolyte Girardot.

Brian Cox is making his directorial debut with Glenrothan, starring Alan Cumming as a man returning to Scotland after thirty-five years away to make amends with his brother (Cox). In David Mackenzie’s Fuze, chaos reigns when an unexploded bomb dropped during the Second World War is discovered in the center of London.

There will be lighter fare, too, of course. Comedies in the program include Aziz Ansari’s Good Fortune with Keanu Reeves and Seth Rogan, Bobby Farrelly’s Driver’s Ed with Kumail Nanjiani and Molly Shannon, and David Freyne’s Eternity, a rom-com set in the afterlife starring Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, Callum Turner, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

While a good handful of this year’s Special Presentations premiered in Cannes—including the winner of the Palme d’Or, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident—and a few will arrive in Toronto fresh from Venice, the program will also offer thirty-one world premieres. Sacrifice, Romain Gavras’s follow-up to Athena (2022), blends comedy and action to tell the story of a cultish group who kidnaps three people to sacrifice for the sake of humanity’s survival. Led by Anya Taylor-Joy, the cast includes Chris Evans, Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Ambika Mod, Sam Richardson, Charli XCX, John Malkovich, and Jeremy O. Harris.

Previously unheard interviews and unused footage from two concert movies shot in the 1970s have been pulled out of vaults and restored for Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan), The Ugly tracks a man’s search for answers when the remains of his mother are discovered. She went missing forty years ago.

Alba Rohrwacher and Elio Germano star in Isabel Coixet’s Three Goodbyes as a couple who split and then separately try to cope with the unforeseen consequences. Three women cross paths in Paris during Fashion Week in Couture, directed by Alice Winocour (Mustang) and starring Angelina Jolie, Ella Rumpf, Louis Garrel, and making her feature film debut, model Anyier Anei.

Saoirse Ronan stars as a teacher in Jonatan Etzler’s satirical comedy Bad Apples, and Sydney Sweeney plays professional boxer Christy Martin in David Michôd’s Christy. Vince Vaughn and Al Pacino headline True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto’s Easy’s Waltz as a singer and his mentor. And in James McAvoy’s directorial debut, California Schemin’, two Scots masquerade as American rappers in order to land a record deal—based on a true story, by the way.

Filmmakers Carlos Marqués-Marcet and Chloé Robichaud and actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste make up the jury for the tenth-anniversary edition of Platform, Toronto’s only competitive section. Nine world premieres are lined up along with Pauline Loquès’s Nino. When Nino premiered at Critics’s Week in Cannes, Théodore Pellerin won the Rising Star Award for his performance as a shy man diagnosed with throat cancer on the eve of his twenty-ninth birthday.

The program will open with Steve, which sees Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, and director Tim Mielants team up again after last year’s Small Things Like These premiered in Berlin and Watson won a Silver Bear for her supporting performance. In Steve, Murphy plays a teacher trying to keep his head together as the reform school he’s in charge of is threatened with closure.

Valentyn Vasyanovych (Atlantis, Reflection) stars in and directs To the Victory!, the story of a Ukrainian film director who finds himself out of work and out of touch with his family once the war has ended. Kasia Adamik directs Lesley Manville in Winter of the Crow, in which an academic visits Warsaw just as martial law is declared in 1981. György Pálfi’s Hen is actually a story told from the point of view of a chicken who escapes her farm and attempts to start a family in a restaurant courtyard.

Nearly two dozen first and second features will see their world premieres in the Discovery program. Comedian John Early has made his first feature with frequent collaborators Kate Berlant, Vanessa Bayer, and Conner O’Malley. In Maddie’s Secret, the program’s opening film, a content creator for the Food Network tries to squelch her dark past in order to maintain her on-screen persona.

In Joscha Bongard’s Babystar, Luca (Maja Bons), the sixteen-year-old daughter of a pair of influencers, has grown up as the center of attention both online and off. But her world is turned inside out when her parents announce their intention to have a second child. Eva Thomas’s 2023 short Redlights picked up a few awards, and now she’s turned it into a feature, Nika & Madison, starring Ellyn Jade and Star Slade as Indigenous women who flee their reservation after a violent encounter with a cop.

Corey Hawkins and Willem Dafoe star in The Man in My Basement, Nadia Latif’s adaptation of Walter Mosley’s 2004 novel. Hawkins plays a man down on his luck and about to lose his ancestral home in Sag Harbor when he’s approached by a mysterious man (Dafoe) who wants to rent his basement. He’ll pay a thousand dollars a day for sixty-five days. The only condition: “Tell no one of our arrangement.”

This year’s Midnight Madness will open with what Variety’s Peter Debruge called “far and away the wildest film” at SXSW back in March. Directed by Matt Johnson (BlackBerry) and cowritten with Jay McCarrol, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is rooted in a web series that became a Viceland show, and now, a feature. The premise has been a constant for seventeen years.

Johnson and McCarrol star as versions of themselves, two guys who will do anything to land a gig at Rivoli, a club in Toronto. Each of their days begins with a new plan, and as they head out to execute it, they’re followed by a documentary crew while they enlist, as Christian Zilko puts it at IndieWire, “unknowing actors in a format that might be described as Nathan for You meets This Is Spinal Tap.”

The closing night selection is Grace Glowicki’s comedic horror movie about a gravedigger who attempts to resurrect her deceased boyfriend. “Hyper-stylized, archly written in a hilarious camp tone (when it’s not being achingly sincere), and floridly performed,” writes Mel Valentin at ScreenAnarchy, “Dead Lover practically begs for unconditional entry in the cult film canon.”

Seven world premieres are lined up for Midnight Madness, including Ben Wheatley’s Normal, starring Bob Odenkirk as Ulysses, a sort of interim sheriff in a sleepy town. After a bank is robbed, Ulysses discovers that the town actually harbors a vast underground criminal network. Henry Winkler plays the mayor of Normal. Todd Rohal (The Guatemalan Handshake, The Catechism Cataclysm) has recently found steady work in television, but he’s back with his first feature in ten years. Fuck My Son! stars Tipper Newton, Steve Little, and Robert Longstreet.