TIFF 2025: Canadian pride booms and Rian Johnson’s knives are out (again)

TORONTO — The Toronto International Film Festival is hailing its 50th anniversary and I’ve never seen the place more patriotic. On my first morning, I looked up at a coffee shop menu and saw a sticker of a Canadian flag pasted over my habitual order, an Americano.

“A Canadiano, please?” I asked the barista, hoping my guess was correct. He nodded and rang me up. After that first sip, I was awake enough to check the receipt. It said “Canadiano” too.

“In Canada, our identity, our sovereignty, has come under threat,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said on TIFF’s opening night. Carney, inaugurated in March, was onstage at the Princess of Wales theater to introduce the premiere of “John Candy: I Like Me,” a documentary by Colin Hanks about the comedy legend who went to high school just six miles away. Candy was a star on the football squad and the drama club before “SCTV” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” made him famous worldwide.

Carney’s affectionate salute to the local hero had one line that tickled the crowd — “As Uncle Buck said,” the PM intoned with tongue-in-cheek gravitas — and pointed political jabs that got people clapping. He lauded the movie scenes that showcased Candy’s “humor, humanity and humility” and the ones where his lovable characters would snap. Cautioned Carney, “Don’t push a Canadian too far.”

People seem to be snapping all over the festival. Half the films I’ve seen have been about guys gone wild, like Tyler Labine’s vile turn in Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s “Egghead Republic,” a sly satire about a “Vice”-esque CEO in the pre-woke early aughts who drags his abused underlings on a quest to find radioactive centaurs. (Yes, really.) Bizarre, man-eating monsters — aliens? devils? — also roam the slums of ’90s Medellín in “Barrio Triste,” a found footage period piece by the music video director STILLZ that’s like “Cloverfield” if the video camera was controlled by a a gang of teenage bandits who film a whole lot of nothing with occasional spurts of freakish violence. It’s produced by Harmony Korine and it definitely feels like it. My theater seemed to have as many walkouts as it did fans.

“Good Boy,” by Jan Komasa, has an arresting star turn by Anson Boon as a ruffian who gets chained up in a rich family’s cellar until he agrees to behave. It made a great double-feature with Nadia Latif’s “The Man in My Basement,” which flips the power dynamic by having Willem Dafoe’s manipulative millionaire pay a cash-strapped Corey Hawkins to keep him locked somewhere no one will find him. When Dafoe confesses his sins, they’re so grisly your jaw will drop; he’s frightening even when Hawkins is holding the keys. Latif has so many thoughts about retribution and forgiveness that I’m unconvinced that her movie needed ghosts, too. But the veteran theater director has made a wickedly good debut.

Filmmaker Claire Denis has been fascinated by male aggression for decades. Her 1999 masterpiece “Beau Travail” reworked “Billy Budd” in a military training camp in Djibouti, and her latest, “The Fence,” returns to Africa for another macho showdown that takes place on a construction site where a man’s life is worth roughly $200. One dark night, the foreman (Matt Dillon) and his crude protégé (Tom Blyth) are incensed to find a stranger (Isaach de Bankolé) outside the barbed wire who politely but firmly refuses to leave until they hand over his brother’s corpse. The allegory is a tad thick: Humanity rots inside the gates, dignity stands tall outside. Anyone other than Denis completists (and there are a lot of them) should watch only for Mia McKenna-Bruce as Dillon’s young bride, a British city girl whose naive romanticism is evident in the wardrobe of stiletto sandals and red lace lingerie she’s packed for this harsh honeymoon. She’s a cupcake of a thing and you just want to rescue her from all this testosterone.

One centerpiece of this year’s TIFF is its pair of dueling Hamlets: Aneil Karia’s “Hamlet,” which plops its moody scion (Riz Ahmed), pentameter and all, in present-day England, and Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet,” an imaginary biography of William Shakespeare and his wife (Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley) that takes a stab at the family angst that might have inspired him to pen his guilt-ridden tragedy. I’d pit the two against each other, but I wasn’t a fan of either. The first felt too cold and couldn’t hack how to modernize Morfydd Clark’s Ophelia; the second started strong but got soggy with its repetitive weeping and gnashing. As Hamlet would say, “it touches us not.”

Given “Hamnet’s” pedigree, it’ll stick around through awards season. Zhao won over the Roy Thompson Theater by sheparding the audience through a somatic breathing exercise, as she did last week at Telluride. “Feel the ground underneath your feet, the city of Toronto holding you safe and sound,” she said. At least I liked her kooky sincerity, as well as a supporting performance by 12-year-old Jacobi Jupe as Shakespeare’s fictional son. Besides the early scenes of Mescal and Buckley falling in witchy, filthy, steamy love, the best sequence is when Zhao imagines witnessing the play’s debut at the Globe Theatre with a riveting lead and an enraptured crowd. Kudos to Joe Alwyn who managed to get himself cast in both movies as Laertes in Karia’s “Hamlet” and Shakespeare’s brother-in-law in “Hamnet.”

Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the movie “Fuze.”

(Anton / TIFF)

Meanwhile, the garrote-taut “Fuze” by David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”), is a high stakes thriller about a British explosives expert (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) tasked to defuse a World War II bomb that’s been disinterred in a crowded London block. When the police chief (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) evacuates the neighborhood, a fiendishly clever gang of thieves headed by Theo James and Sam Worthington seize the opportunity to rob a bank vault. That’s the set-up, but the script shifts so fast from one betrayal to the next that all you can do is hang on.

Likewise, I barely want to say a thing about the twists in “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig’s third (and best) Benoit Blanc puzzle. My one teaser is that Josh O’Connor (“Challengers”) plays a parish priest who gives this clever franchise something I hadn’t realized it needed: soul. Blood will be shed. Possibly even a tear.

Potsy Ponciroli’s “Motor City,” a brutal blood-pumper set in 1970s Detroit, has a great conceit: such an exaggeration of strong-and-silent machismo that the movie only has five lines of dialogue. No one has to explain a thing — you’ve seen this plot a hundred times. The preening villain (Ben Foster), the disgraced sweetheart (Shailene Woodley), and the vengeful hero (Alan Ritchson of TV’s “Reacher”) are archetypes that date back further than D.W. Griffith. Detroit’s own Jack White of the White Stripes has a playful cameo and selected the needledrops from Bill Withers, Fleetwood Mac and Donna Summer that shoulder the emotions. It’s a slender exercise with too much slow motion and a ridiculous ending. Even so, you can scarcely take your eyes off the screen.

On King Street, where many of TIFF’s screenings are held, a promoter in a full-body moose costume advertised National Canadian Film Day, an annual April event where theaters open their doors for free showings of Canadian-made movies. This spring’s lineup included Matthew Rankin’s surreal Manitoba-set comedy “Universal Language,” which won the Best Canadian Discovery award at last year’s TIFF. I’m a champion of the film, and so, too, I reckon is the cineaste I saw inside the Lightbox theater wearing a souvenir T-shirt who’d scratched out the “Toronto” with black marker to scrawl, “Winnipeg.”

I love punkish, low-fi pride. There were heaps of it at the boisterous midnight premiere of local comics Matt Johnson (“BlackBerry”) and Jay McCarrol’s marvelously scruffy “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” which stars the longtime collaborators as aspiring rock stars who have been trying to land a gig at Toronto’s Rivoli theater for nearly 18 years. Johnson and McCarrol have kept up the joke since they launched their “Nirvanna the Band” web series in 2007. Today, they’re a little older and no wiser — thank goodness.

“The movie you’re about to see was paid for almost entirely by the Canadian government,” said Johnson with contagious glee, adding that German audiences have also been shocked to witness the city’s rampant jaywalking.

The mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, was seated two rows ahead of me looking sleek in a one-shoulder gown. I couldn’t tell what was going through her mind when she watched Johnson and McCarrol try to get the Rivoli’s attention by parachuting off the top of the nearby CN Tower, once the tallest building in the world until Dubai bested it with the Burj Khalifa. Frankly, I was too busy gasping. But after the movie, Johnson apologized to her from the stage.

“Are we in trouble?” he asked. The crowd was too rowdy to hear the mayor’s response. Luckily, I could. Chow cupped a hand around her mouth and shouted, “We love you!”