By Nicholas Porteous

Clarissa takes the premise of Mrs. Dalloway and moves the action to Nigeria, where our lead plans a reunion of meaningful players from her past. As day turns to evening, the ensemble reflects on their youth, regrets, and (very occasionally) fond memories. This mountain of history culminates in a party where every glance is worth a thousand words.

Clarissa is an extended character study and tone poem. Though it offers volumes of plot and interwoven flashbacks, the movie is really a framework to explore the elder cast’s melancholic state of mind in their adulthoods. It’s a bit stagnant by design, and although it’s a long film, like a good reunion with an old friend, it never overstays its welcome.

The formidable ensemble includes Sophie Okonedo as present-day Clarissa, David Oyelowo as her not-quite-lover Peter, and Niki Amuka-Bird as rabble-rouser Sally. Their young counterparts–India Ria Amarteifio, Toheeb Jimoh, and Ayo Edebiri–absolutely light up the screen, building an unspeakable tension in their past. I’m not sure if you’re ready for Edebiri in particular. I certainly wasn’t. It’s her best performance since her breakout in The Bear, and a true outlier from the meek, comic characters she typically plays. Here, she brings a sharp, mischievous and seductive energy to every scene. She cannot be pinned down, and it’s impossible to predict what she’ll say next. Edebiri’s transformation is a wonderful surprise–and her performance alone makes Clarissa worth checking out–but in a richly textured world of pain and intimate personal reflection, it’s one reason among many.

Clarissa screens at TIFF ’26:

Fri. Sept 11 at 2:45 PM at The Princess of Wales Theatre

Sat. Sept 12 at 12:00 PM at Scotiabank Theatre Toronto

tiff ’26 officially has begun! Here are some sightings from the day, including:

•Jodie Comer at tiff for Stuffed

•Harry Melling at tiff for Stuffed

•Ziwe and Mark Vins at Variety and YouTube Creator Premieres

•Sebastian Stan at tiff with Fjord (Photos by Ryan Emberley, at RBC House)

Rogers just announced via @Rogers on Instagram an exciting fan opportunity to win tickets to the world premiere of Always Lalisa. See details below.

The location will be announced at 8 a.m. ET

Rogers Always Lalisa Ticket Giveaway:

•Rogers is giving away 80 pairs of tickets to the world premiere of Always Lalisa
•Tickets will be given away on a first-come first-served basis to Rogers customers
•To score tickets, fans are asked to come dressed in their favourite K-Pop inspired look, whether it’s a concert t-shirt, merchandise, lightsticks, or their own K-Pop style
•Location will be revealed tomorrow morning via @Rogers Instagram

Rogers™/MC

By Amanda Gilmore

In the Heart of the South follows Yura Ivalu (Anna Lambe), the latest darling of the Toronto art world, whose virtual reality piece about the Residential School System has skyrocketed her to fame. Her popularity has led to the opportunity to develop a film. She decides to write a feature about a traumatic moment in her youth when she and her friend Sesi (Zorga Qaunaq) were lost in the Arctic. But when Sesi mysteriously re-enters Yura’s life, Yura’s polished demeanour in this polite society begins to show cracks.

Nyla Innuksuk’s latest catapults its audience into the Toronto art scene that’s often stuffed with white buyers collecting pieces of art as a form of performative allyship. We watch as Yura listens to white collectors speak about how moved they are by her work. She’s always composed and appreciative. However, when Sesi arrives, we begin to realize that Yura might not be exactly who she appears.

Sesi is the opposite of Yura. She questions nearly every person in Yura’s world and doesn’t shy away from stating uncomfortable truths. That’s precisely why so many people in the art world find her refreshing. She isn’t playing into the privileged’s game that many have before. In doing so, Yura, who’s played that game for years, sees Sesi as a threat to replace or expose her and take away all she has accomplished.

Innuksuk and co-writer Ryan Cavan have crafted a thrilling feature about the decisions we make and the tales we tell, both good and bad, to advance in our careers. Lambe and Qaunaq give outstanding performances as women confronting their past and realizing the frailty of human perception.

In the Heart of the South screens at TIFF ’26:

Thurs. Sept 10 @ 9 PM at TIFF Lightbox

Sat. Sept 12 @ 9:15 PM at Scotiabank Theatre Toronto

Fri. Sept 18 @ 9 PM at Scotiabank Theatre Toronto

IN THE HEART OF THE SOUTH
World Premiere: September 10, 2026
TIFF Lightbox. Today we get a new Clip!

Directed by Nyla Innuksuk
Starring Anna Lambe, Zorga Qaunaq

Yura (Anna Lambe), an ambitious Inuk multi-media artist, starts to spirals out of control when an estranged childhood friend Sesi (Zorga Qaunaq) resurfaces, forcing Yura to confront the trauma she’s built her career on—and the identity she’s constructed to escape it.

By Amanda Gilmore

The Unknown is a hypnotizing body-swap film soaked in existential dread.

After taking a mysterious pill at a party, photographer David (Niels Schneider) locks eyes and hooks up with a woman he vaguely recognizes, an Actor named Eva (Léa Seydoux). The next morning, he awakens in the woman’s body. When David finds his original body, he learns that this isn’t a traditional body-swap. Instead, a young, terrified woman named Malia (Lilith Grasmug) is now housed in David’s body. The two team up in search of answers and solutions to find their way back to their original flesh.

The body-swap premise has been done and dusted…but not the way The Unknown has. Filmmaker Arthur Harari (co-writer of Anatomy of a Fall) pulls audiences into this mystifying story of souls learning to navigate new bodies. The cinematography and absorbing score create a claustrophobic feeling that mirrors David and Malia’s entrapment in their foreign bodies. 

It’s really the performances that navigate this labyrinthine tale. Seydoux is extraordinary as a man discovering life in a female body. He begins to fear when a man creepily advances on him. In a midway plot twist, the full ability of the female body is explored. It’s something that will grip some but may lose others. Then there’s the unrecognizable Schneider who stuns as a 20-year-old girl stuck inside a grown man’s body.

Even though we never fully get the answer as to how this all happened (was it the pill or a supernatural entity?), this is a worthy existential journey of discovering how attached our souls are to our bodies.

The Unknown screens at TIFF ’26:

Tues. Sept 15 @ 3:15 PM at TIFF Lightbox

Thur. Sept 17 @ 7 PM at Scotiabank Theatre Toronto

By Nicholas Porteous

Mihai and Lisbet (Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve) uproot their family of seven from Romania and move to Norway. At first, the community welcomes them with open arms–but it’s not long before a quiet tension gives way to a life-altering ordeal. And much like those semi-regular avalanches just outside the town, the family is expected to stay cool in the face of almost-certain disaster. Fjord is this year’s Palme d’Or winner, and its many strengths are obvious. It’s a gripping Drama featuring a delicate-yet-powerful ensemble. The conceit is ambiguous in the best and worst way. It will force most viewers—myself included—to question their boundaries and sit in the discomfort of where and how to draw the line.

Which boundaries? Which lines?? Fjord is a tough film to truly discuss without spoiling its slowly unspooling yarn of twists and turns. Broadly speaking, it’s a cousin of Anatomy of a Fall and The Hunt. There’s a trial, our perspective is deliberately incomplete, but it’s clear that the system cannot reckon with the minutiae of whatever’s going on inside this family. Nothing is black and white, and forcing them into a box feels very far from justice. Also, much like its fellow recent Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall, Fjord‘s tone is deeply restrained. No violin-laden montages, no slow-mo muted revelations. Just raw, naturalistic drama. It’s a necessary restraint, mirroring the detached spectre of the trial itself, and the thoughtful, tense performances from Stan and Reinsve.

Fjord presents a human conundrum that defies easy judgement, and it casts a long shadow that has kept me pondering its profound predicament, days after the credits rolled.

Fjord screens at TIFF ’26:

Thurs. Sept 10 at 9:30 PM at The Princess of Wales

Fri. Sept 11 at 4:15 PM at Scotiabank Theatre

By Amanda Gilmore

Rémi St-Michel’s latest proves how easy it is for a teen to get swept away in a life of crime.

We follow 15-year-old Félix (Félix Munger) who, like everyone else, just wants to belong. On the night of his birthday, he walks into a store in the suburbs of Quebec City pretending to rob the place. This prank leads to him meeting Dave (David Beaudoin), an aspiring gangster. Dave makes Félix feel like he belongs and quickly convinces the young man to join him on his bank robbery heist. However, this one heist takes Félix on an unexpected direction into the criminal underbelly of the city.

Toy Gun Bandit opens with a “This is almost a true story” title card. And we can easily understand why. All we need to do is turn on the news,  and we’ll hear about a teenage criminal. St-Michel has crafted a film that takes us beyond the headlines. This isn’t the darkest story of a young criminal, if it was none of us would watch. St-Michel and Munger allow us to watch as Félix’s youthful innocence gets manipulated. Therefore, allowing us to still see him as the hero we want saved.

Everything about Toy Gun Bandit feels authentic: from the cinematography to the fact that the primary characters share the same names as their performers. At the forefront are the performances. Munger is outstanding as this young man trying to find his way in and out of the criminal world. Beaudoin is impactful as this self-centred and often sloppy gangster. Then there’s the unrecognizable Sara Montpetit, who gives an indelible performance as Sara, a drug addict being forced into these robberies.

Toy Gun Bandit screens at TIFF ’26:

Thur. Sept 10 @ 2:45 PM at TIFF Lightbox

Tues. Sept 15 @ 9 PM at Scotiabank Theatre Toronto

By Nicholas Porteous

Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira), a French nursing home director struggling to implement a new system of care for her patients, serendipitously finds her way into an experimental theatre performance written and directed by Mari (Tao Okamoto), a Japanese playwright with stage four cancer. They forge a one-of-a-kind connection built on their unique backgrounds and personal struggles. This is Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, a cinematic experience that defies easy classification–building its thesis slowly and steadily over 196 minutes to a stirring and full-hearted crescendo of humanity.

All of a Sudden is at its best when Marie-Lou and Mari are finding their soulful connection in real time, before our eyes. Efira and Okamoto are magnetic screen presences because of their transcendent affinity for one another–to the point that I lost track of All of a Sudden‘s immense runtime. The film is equal parts concerned with the intellectual and unspoken ways we can better care for each other, individually and as a collective–blurring the line between our interior and exterior worlds. When the movie intermittently widens its scope beyond our two leads and becomes more about the ensemble of the nursing home and the organizational processes that must be shifted to better serve its residents, its slow pace becomes more apparent. Sometimes All of a Sudden feels less like a drama and more like an empathic manifesto. It makes for a beautiful statement, but not always a conventionally satisfying production. If you’re not familiar with Hamaguchi’s languid style, you should know going in: he’s leaving you a lot of room to contemplate the movie’s meaning on your own, as he fades from one movement to the next.

If you like your narratives slow and your catharsis earned, All of a Sudden offers a deeply rewarding look into the lives of two unlikely kindred spirits, and a glance at the kind of society we might foster with real understanding and passion for the needs of those around us. It’s a much needed, healing vision here in 2026.

All of a Sudden screens at TIFF ’26:

Mon. Sept 14 at 12:30 PM at TIFF Lightbox

Sat. Sept 19 at 2:15 PM at Scotiabank Theatre Toronto

And here we have it! tiff ’26 eve. We always hit the ground running and are sharind some day zero sightings. We can’t wait to see what the Festival brings us!

•Filmmaker Rebecca Hartt at tiff for Documentary, RAPINOE.

•Filmmaker Amma Asante at tiff for the Platform Jury

•Filmmaker Miwa Nishikawa at tiff for CHILDREN UNTOLD.

•Legendary Gary Oldman at tiff for VISIONARIES, part of tiff: The Market

•Mel C. (Sporty Spice) in town on tour. Her film GIRL GROUP premieres at tiff.

(Photo/video credit: Mr. Will Wong)