Toronto

Venice, Telluride and Toronto have wrapped, and the New York Film Festival is winding down. Ovations have been meticulously timed. Existential crises have been parsed, not including the trauma induced by Tom Cruise’s “Digger,” which prudently skipped the festivals to delay, if only for a couple of weeks, the poisonous word of mouth from seeping out. (It’s still well worth seeing.)

And there have been, of course, prizes, including a Netflix movie, the Spanish maximalist melodrama “La Bola Negra,” winning Toronto’s People’s Choice Award. That’s a first for the streamer, which means we will again be asking the question: Can a Netflix film finally win the best picture Oscar?

If you’ve seen “The Odyssey,” you probably know the answer to that question. But with more than five months (!) until the 99th Academy Awards, it’s a bit early for ironclad guarantees, even if it feels like it would take the winds of Poseidon to blow “The Odyssey’s” best picture campaign off course.

But it’s not too soon to roll out a first set of Oscar power rankings for best picture. With apologies to “Obsession,” “Fjord,” “Possible Love,” “You Can See Everything,” “Elsinore,” and whatever other movies you love (or look forward to loving), let’s start counting.

10. ‘Tender Loving Care’

(Joseph Lynn / Thin Man Films / Bleecker Street)

Because of ongoing health issues, Mike Leigh has said that this warm and wrenching drama will be his last movie. If so, it’d be quite the capper to a career that has netted him seven Oscar nominations, five for his screenplays and two for direction. Yes, only one of his movies, “Secrets & Lies,” has been nominated for best picture. But “Tender Loving Care,” centered on two social service workers navigating the fraying social safety net and, in one case, anxiety about aging parents, possesses a bracing humanity full of compassion and urgency. It’s also quite funny. And it boasts a great cast, including newly minted Emmy winner Kate O’Flynn, as charming here as she is on “Widow’s Bay.” Leigh has more than earned a final curtain call with this one.

9. ‘Club Kid’

Jordan Firstman’s sincere, funny and genuinely moving debut feature has him playing a queer New York underground party promoter blindsided by the arrival of the 10-year-old son previously unknown to him. You could take issue with the uncomplicated perfection of the child, who has exquisite taste in music (Cocteau Twins, really?) and barely a trace of trauma despite the harrowing event that landed him in New York. But “Club Kid” is so assured and heartwarming that you can’t muster the energy to object. There’s probably going to be one feel-good movie nominated, and if it’s between this and “I Play Rocky,” I’ll cast my lot with the one that doesn’t rely so heavily on re-creating the familiar.

8. ‘All of a Sudden’

This 196-minute movie unfolds at, let’s just say, a leisurely pace, and includes a near-20-minute scene in which a character lays out the flaws of late-stage capitalism using a whiteboard. And it’s riveting. Or at least engaging. It’s certainly audacious, this drama about a hardworking director of a Parisian nursing home and the way a chance friendship changes her life. The Oscars’ best picture field now routinely includes two international movies, and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s dreamlike meditation on mortality and human connection feels like a sure bet to make the cut. Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared the best actress prize at Cannes and merit attention from Oscar voters as well.

7. ‘The Debut’

Spoiler alert: One awards-season shoo-in is Julianne Moore winning every lead actress prize for her bravura work in this delightful Jesse Eisenberg comedy. Moore plays Mona, a meek, thoroughly unseen wife and mother who impulsively decides to audition for a community theater musical despite having no experience. The movie earned a huge response at its Telluride premiere, though there were some quibbles about the surprising, surreal turns the story takes. C’mon. Isn’t that precisely what we want from a film? With Moore, co-star Paul Giamatti, Eisenberg’s screenplay and original song (Eisenberg wrote several numbers for the film’s fictional musical) assured spots, a best picture nod feels undeniable.

6. ‘The Invite’

(Atsushi Nishijima / A24)

Olivia Wilde’s dinner-party dramedy boasts a killer quartet — Wilde and Seth Rogen as longtime marrieds nursing resentments, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton playing their upstairs neighbors — and expert direction from Wilde, who navigates the movie’s tonal shifts with authority. It’s wickedly funny and unsentimental and pulls off a bittersweet ending that’s ambiguous enough to keep you talking long after the film ends. One of the year’s most satisfying pleasures.

5. ‘Project Hail Mary’

(Jonathan Olley / Amazon MGM Studios)

Speaking of endings, how many did “Project Hail Mary” have? Two? Three? I lost count. And it doesn’t matter. This was the upbeat end-of-the-world movie that audiences needed at a time when the possibility of human extinction feels uncomfortably real. In a year full of Spielberg knockoffs (and an uneven movie from the man himself), this will be the one left standing.

4. ‘Wild Horse Nine’

(Diego Araya Corvalan / Searchlight Pictures)

Martin McDonagh’s melancholy irreverence plays well with Oscar voters. His last two movies, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” earned best picture nominations and a combined 16 nods. “Wild Horse Nine,” a biting buddy dramedy about two mismatched CIA assassins (John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell), should continue the filmmaker’s success and may even catapult Malkovich to a long-overdue Oscar. At the very least, it gave him his best role in decades.

3. ‘La Bola Negra’

The filmmakers, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, are talented and charismatic, former romantic partners who still work together because that’s how Europeans roll. Los Javis (they even have a fun nickname) won the directing prize at Cannes, the first of several festivals that their movie conquered, culminating in that audience award at Toronto. With its three interconnected stories that follow queer men through nearly a century of Spanish history, “La Bola Negra” has an epic feel and emotional payoff that could carry it far. Netflix is all in, opening it in select theaters Oct. 16 and giving it an exclusive 46-day theatrical window, the longest it has afforded any movie. We’ll see if that puts it into the cultural conversation in a way that has eluded other Netflix contenders.

2. ‘Dune: Part Three’

Can Denis Villeneuve’s third and final “Dune” movie, which hasn’t screened widely for press, take the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy path to a best picture victory? If there’s resistance to giving Christopher Nolan back-to-back best picture winners, the greatest threat might come from a movie occupying the same lane, an auteur-driven epic lauded by critics and embraced by audiences. The second (and superior) “Dune” won just two Oscars, compared to the six taken by 2021’s “Dune: Part One.” Perhaps voters were playing the long game.

1. ‘The Odyssey’

(Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures)

Maybe you saw it when it opened in July, contributing to its $1.75-billion box office. Maybe you’re still trying to see it in Imax 70 mm, the way God (i.e., Christopher Nolan) intended. Maybe you agree with translator Emily Wilson, who thinks Nolan’s movie “lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth” and that its writing is “abysmal.” Whichever side you’re on, “The Odyssey” is probably going to sweep through the Oscars, owing to its craft and thrilling showmanship, its stellar acting and that moment when Odysseus’ dog recognizes his long-absent master and wags his tail before heading off to Elysian Fields.

TORONTO — An actor from last year’s Toronto International Film Festival has been turning heads around town this week: Inde Navarrette, whose “Obsession” went from a modest 2025 Midnight Madness slot to a box office behemoth.

But if you had to pick this year’s Navarrette, who would it be? Among the breakout names of TIFF 2026 is unquestionably Rosalind Eleazar, the London-born 38-year-old star of “Misty Green,” the first film written and directed by Chris Rock since 2014’s “Top Five” and among the most notable world premieres at this year’s festival.

Misty is a Hollywood survivor who was never able to make the most of her own success, winning an Emmy a few years back but now losing the apartment she has been living in because the widow of the man she was cheating with wants it back. With her bad attitude and personal problems, Misty has burned many bridges along the way. There’s a chance she could be cast in a remake of “Dreamgirls” that would turn everything around for her, but Misty’s brother, Jay (Daniel Kaluuya, in his first major screen role since 2022’s “Nope”), was recently released from a mental facility and needs monitoring.

Though there are comedic moments along the way, “Misty Green” is very much a character study, as well as an unsparring examination of the systemic pressures on Black women in Hollywood — one executive interrupts Misty’s audition to ask if she is “mixed.” She does herself no favors, frequently self-sabotaging and getting in her own way.

“Being an actor is hard,” Eleazar said in an interview at The Times’ photo and video studio in Toronto on Sunday with a sense of well-earned candor. “I could totally relate to Misty’s journey and the setbacks and the constant picking yourself back up after multiple rejections and just going again. And trying not to have armor because as an actor you want to keep yourself open and you don’t want to harden too much. But it can be easy to harden yourself to an industry that can be unforgiving.”

Though “Misty Green” is Eleazar’s first lead in a film, she has had a steadily building career. She is probably most familiar to American audiences from her role as an MI5 agent on the Apple TV series “Slow Horses.” But soon she will likely be known for the explosive announcement that is “Misty Green.” The film will go on to play at the New York Film Festival and the London Film Festival and be released by distributor A24 on Oct. 9.

“It can be easy to harden yourself to an industry that can be unforgiving,” Eleazar says.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

After her movie’s TIFF world premiere in a coveted Saturday night slot at Roy Thompson Hall, Eleazar was included among those celebrated at the annual TIFF Tribute Awards, a fundraising gala put on by the festival. She was recognized alongside such actors as Helen Mirren, Penélope Cruz and Isabelle Huppert, whom she called “extraordinary company.”

“I grew up watching them and admired their work,” Eleazar says earlier in the day. “It’s just such an honor to be considered amongst heavyweights like that. Dame Helen Mirren. Crikey.”

With a warm smile she adds, “Just went very British.”

In accepting the prize, Eleazar recalled how when she came to Toronto for the premiere of her first feature film, 2019’s “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” she stepped away from a party to call her mother at 4 a.m. London time. Not wanting to make that same mistake again, she made sure her mother was there with her in Toronto for this year’s Sunday gala, sitting at a table with Eleazar’s husband, the actor and producer Gabriele Lo Giudice.

Eleazar performs two songs in the film, a heartbreakingly vulnerable cabaret version of Radiohead’s “Creep” and a stripped-down, tender reading of “One Night Only” from “Dreamgirls.” (Eleazar does not consider herself a singer and took vocal lessons before shooting.) Then, in a scene in which Misty demands she be allowed to finish an audition, she flashes into someone else in a bit of pure craft that leaves those in the room astonished.

It was important that Misty be seen as someone who is in fact immensely talented, who may even be worth all the bother and strife that she brings along with her.

“I think we’ve seen movies before where the character isn’t talented and it’s about the hustle and the dream of making it in Hollywood,” says Eleazar. “But I think it’s really interesting seeing someone that cannot get out of their own way — someone that is railing against the industry and is fighting Hollywood, fighting herself, fighting the people around her. It becomes quite a universal subject. It is about our industry but it’s also just about someone who is trying to escape herself.”

Despite Misty’s obvious talents, acting simply may not be the best career for her anymore; it strains her emotional and mental health and enables her substance abuse. Over the course of her own career, Eleazar has at times had to check in with herself to make sure she was heading down the right path.

“There are definitely times that I’ve questioned it,” she says. “For me it does really feed my soul and therefore, at my low points, I’ve managed better. But it can be really heavy. And maybe I shouldn’t but I feel like I’m pretty happy being an actor.”

Chris Rock and Rosalind Eleazar in the movie “Misty Green.”

(A24)

To land the role, after a few meetings with Rock over Zoom, Eleazar flew herself from London to Los Angeles so she could read in the room. As it happened, it made for an intense few days: First she had a chemistry read with Ralph Fiennes in the U.K. for a stage role (she would appear opposite Fiennes in “Small Hotel” in 2025) and then immediately flew to L.A. to read with Rock.

“What a mad, amazing three days,” she recalls. Similarly, Eleazar would be ending her whirlwind few days in Toronto by heading to Los Angeles to be with the “Slow Horses” team for the Emmys on Monday.

In introducing her tribute on Sunday night, Rock recalled when Eleazar auditioned for the part.

“The room just changed,” he said. “She was funny, she was dangerous, she was moving and completely in command. Misty Green is a woman whose life is coming apart. Rosalind never played her as a victim. She made you see the intelligence, the appetite and the fight underneath all the chaos. The audition was supposed to help me decide who to play Misty, but halfway through, the decision had already been made.”

“It becomes quite a universal subject,” Eleazar says of Chris Rock’s latest movie. “It is about our industry but it’s also just about someone who is trying to escape herself.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

There is something poetic about the fact that playing a mid-career actress struggling to land her next job may be the very thing that brings Eleazar wider recognition.

“It’s kind of meta, isn’t it?” she says with a laugh. “Look, I’m so happy that people are responding to the film and my performance. That really is the cherry on top because for me — I know it sounds rather cheesy — but I literally felt like I won once I did that film. I had such a great time exploring who she was and working with Chris and Daniel and Adam [Driver] and that cast. So everything else is just so lovely.”

In accepting her own tribute award on Sunday, Helen Mirren went off-script from her prepared remarks to say how moved she had been by Eleazar’s earlier speech, adding, “It’s exciting to see the generations coming up, especially women.”

As Rock succinctly added in his speech, “Misty Green wishes she could be Rosalind Eleazar.”

Regardless of what happens with “Misty Green” commercially or throughout awards season, Eleazar will continue tending her steady climb. Production will begin soon on season 7 of “Slow Horses” and Eleazar is currently shooting a film role that she isn’t yet allowed to talk about.

But Misty and the experience of bringing her to life on the screen will remain transformative.

“It almost reminded me of like a Shakespearean character in a way,” Eleazar says. “She’s so self-destructive and flawed and contradictory and at times it’s hard to get onside with her. We see it a lot of the time with male roles and I’d love to see it more with female roles — these really complex and messy characters.”

TORONTO — Greetings from the Great White North, where the Toronto International Film Festival rolls to the end of its first weekend.

As packed as our viewing schedules have been, Amy Nicholson notices something lacking at this year’s festival: big Hollywood. In her first critical dispatch, she sees no “Frankenstein” or “Wake Up Dead Man” in the lineup.

Toronto has even resorted to rebooking the under-the-radar smash “Obsession,” the little movie that grew from a 2025 midnight TIFF launch into a global phenomenon.

Director Curry Barker and star Inde Navarrette delighted festgoers who lined up around the block to watch a special conversation.

There’s still plenty of time left. Amy is finding indies to like. Some of her early recommendations are here.

Our portrait studio is heating up

Cynthia Erivo of the film “Prima Facie,” photographed in the Los Angeles Times Studio at RBC House during the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Cynthia Erivo stunned us in our studio space, looking fierce in a dark ensemble and scary nails. We also saw the likes of the luminous Laura Linney and the dapper Korean cast of “Possible Love.” Click through for more celebrity photos and daily surprises.

And do we have video interviews? Do we.

Sarah Paulson, Naomi Watts, and director Cody Fern discuss their new film, “Closing Night.” Chase Infiniti of “One Battle After Another,” Jason Isaacs and more talk “The Julia Set.”

And only minutes after they won the grand jury prize at Venice, we were speaking to the cast of “Possible Love.”

What are we watching tonight?

‘Club Kid’

Jordan Firstman, center, in the movie “Club Kid.”

(A24)

It takes thermonuclear moxie to write, direct and star in your debut feature — and cast yourself as the cad. No wonder Jordan Firstman‘s uproarious dramedy “Club Kid” blew away expectations at Cannes and has landed in Toronto ready to shake up awards season.

Firstman plays Peter, an aging New York City party promoter whose scene-y shindigs and subsequent hangovers are starting to feel old.

Enter Arlo (a self-possessed Reggie Absolom) the 9-year-old kid he never knew he had and never fathomed he would have, given that women aren’t his thing (except for that one drug-fueled night with a British girl he barely remembers).

You may think you know where the story is headed and you aren’t entirely wrong, but the route there is a riot. — Amy Nicholson

‘Alpha Gang’

A scene from the movie “Alpha Gang.”

(TIFF)

The latest from filmmaking siblings Nathan and David Zellner rolls into Toronto after having just had its world premiere at Telluride.

Their oddball sensibilities and elastic imagination means that you never quite know what to expect from one of their films and this is no exception: a wholly unpredictable story of an alien invasion told from the aliens’ point-of-view that is inscrutably absurd and touched by a startling romantic fatalism.

Two alien cadres, having assumed the looks of 1950s biker gang members, bicker and fight with one another even as they largely overlook their common enemy, the humans.

The cast is likewise a preposterous mash-up of performers you would not wholly expect to see together, including Cate Blanchett, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Léa Seydoux, Riley Keough, Chris Pine, Dave Bautista and others, making the film’s very existence seem like something dropped from outer space. — Mark Olsen

‘The Spiral’

A scene from the movie “The Spiral.”

(TIFF)

Italian horror is my happy place and this is where I’ll be tonight at midnight, sopping up what many early viewers have already described as stylish and vicious.

Director Paolo Strippoli’s domestic drama got sharp reviews out of Venice; it sounds like a cross between a Bava film and “Parasite.” I’ll investigate. — Joshua Rothkopf

For 10 days, the center of the cinematic universe is the Toronto International Film Festival, whose closest geographical landmark is currently a ludicrous controversy.

“Welcome to TIFF and welcome to the beautiful shore of — say it with me — Lake Ontario,” festival CEO Cameron Bailey said on opening night as he introduced “Being Heumann,” director Sian Heder’s crowd-pleasing follow-up to her best picture Oscar-winner “CODA.”

The crowd said it back. Google Maps, however, insists that the festival is actually a 15-minute stroll to Lake America. I’ve yet to hear a single person call it that without an eyeroll.

What’s in a name? Last year in the spirit of patriotism, my favorite Toronto coffee shop taped over the menu listing for its Americano to re-dub it a Canadiano. This fall, the sign has returned to Americano. Taking a pause from politics, I ordered a flat white.

Yet, the festival’s programmers seem to be decentralizing their attention-hogging neighbors to the south. Typically, TIFF is a launch pad for awards contenders. But there are fewer high profile Hollywood filmmakers this year than usual — which was also the case in Cannes. Perhaps these international festivals are testing their own waters to see if they’re obliged to invite Americans to their party.

Instead, the Toronto line-up boasts pointed films about fascism. On its surface, Michaël R. Roskam’s “Le Faux Soir” is a procedural account of how a network of rebels in occupied Belgium published its own parody issue of a pro-Nazi newspaper on the 25th anniversary of Armistice Day in 1943. Most of the script’s energy goes to talking about typesetting and rotary press flongs, but right before the end credits roll, “Le Faux Soir” blurts out its timeliness about combating Le Fox News with comedy. Metaphorically alluding to the satirical newspaper “The Onion,” the narrator says that to pull off this operation, the team had to stick together like layers of an onion: “Never forget, onion is strength.”

Plenty of local comedies abound, including “The Stunt Driver” by Michael Dowse (“Goon”), an energetic biopic about Ken “The Mad Canadian” Carter, the ’70s speedster who vowed to vault across the mile-wide river between Ottawa and New York in a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental. The site of Carter’s jump is four hours away from the fest, although at his car’s top speed of 280 mph, you could get there in less than one. Safer just to enjoy Jay Baruchel’s funny and endearing portrait of a reckless risk-taker who hates being called a daredevil as much as he resents Ben Foster’s Evel Knievel attempting to give him some advice. “Canadians are God’s chosen people,” Carter growls defiantly. “The last thing we need is a Yankee doodle dandy telling us how to do our jobs.”

It’s also possible that this year’s lack of big films — unlike 2025’s “Frankenstein,” “The Smashing Machine” and “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” — is just a reflection of the industry’s changing tides. Two of the buzziest guests at this year’s fest have been Inde Navarrette of the micro-budget horror hit “Obsession,” which premiered at last year’s TIFF, and British Columbia-born Hudson Williams of the TV hockey romance “Heated Rivalry.” Twelve months ago, both actors were anonymous Gen Z-ers who could have easily popped into Tim Hortons for a maple-glazed donut without causing a stir. Now they’re stars.

Personally, I’m all for fresh talent. Audiences and critics alike are bored of film executives clinging to the same proven names and proven plots as tightly as worry beads. Yes, I’m hoping to see some Oscar contenders while I’m here and have my fingers crossed for a few movies I’ll be seeing shortly. But for the sake of filmgoing at large, I’d be more thrilled to spot another under-the-radar “Obsession.”

So far, I haven’t found one. However, I have seen ingenuity made for peanuts, like Jenna Cato Bass’ “Future Tense,” a South African sci-fi drama about a travel service that allows the wealthy to blip back to the 1600s to hot tub under the clear skies before the land was ruined by centuries of trash, trade and colonization. Mismatched new couple Tara and Lwando (Kristen Raath and Lawrence Maleka) — she’s white and sunny, he’s Black and snide — take a blistering vacation that their relationship might not survive.

The script gets screwy in the last act, but Bass proves she can pull off a bold time travel premise using only tastefully bland décor, gorgeous nature footage and a couple of menacing brutes with guns. As a bonus, Raath, her lead, has the spunk, charm and smile of Karen Allen, giving a breakout performance that’s such a delight that you could almost swear the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” ingenue had leapt back four decades to star in the film.

An image from “Voices,” a musical drama set in the 1960s.

(TIFF)

While we’re talking about pivotal moments in personal histories, nine years ago Deanté Gray was a rookie wide receiver for the Houston Texans. He tore his ACL in practice and, after muscling through that disappointment, is now a first-time feature director with “Voices,” a lean and loud musical-thriller about thwarted dreams. Set in one tatty motel room in 1967 Detroit, “Voices” is a vicious flick about rising two soul acts hellbent on getting on stage that night to impress Motown Records’ Barry Gordy.

Technically, only the Harmony Brothers, Bubbles and Melvin (Joe Maye and Jamal R. Averett), are booked to play the gig. But a fame-hungry bellboy, Jordan (Francis C. Edemobi), and his cousin Derrick (Ezekiel Ajeigbe) hatch an impulsive, half-baked plan to perform in their rivals’ place. Egged on by Derrick’s ambitious girlfriend Mia (Raél Ba), who’s angling to be the duo’s opening act, this bad idea crescendos with a half-dozen original songs — and a body count.

The sound design of “Voices” is raw and the rumored $50,000 budget so strapped that minor period piece inconsistencies like cheap plastic trash cans sneak into the frame. Who cares? Sam Buckner III and Charlie T. Savage’s smart and surprising screenplay is crowded with scenes that let its cast shine. Someone — ideally, several people — in here will wind up getting their own major break.

Admittedly, I’m biased. Morbid musicals are one of my favorite micro-genres, from “Little Shop of Horrors” and “All That Jazz” to “A Star Is Born” and “Cabaret.” (If you haven’t seen Steve Martin’s 1981 Depression-era hoofer “Pennies From Heaven,” do that this week.)

Add Theo Rhys’ “Stuffed” to that list. Jodie Comer (“Killing Eve”) plays a goth taxidermist; Harry Melling (“Pillion”) is a lonely man terrified of dying, buried and forgotten. Can she convince the sad sack to kill himself now to become a piece of her permanent collection?

The plot alone gives you the shivers, nodding to predatory internet meet-ups and that volatile mix of victimization and egomania that causes people to hurt themselves and/or others. Dark as the story is, though, co-writer Joss Holden-Rea’s tunes are stunners with limber melodies and creatively off-kilter lyrics. “My past is still before me,” Melling belts, picturing himself proudly mounted in a velvet suit and bronze plaque.

“Stuffed” isn’t for everyone. But my fellow sickos are going to love this bleak and lovely tragicomedy once it sets sail from these shores (whatever they’re called by then) to a theater near you.