Imagine you’re hungry, and walk into a buffet. Set before you are dozens upon dozens of steaming dishes, with meals ranging from sloppy-Joe sliders to stir-fried Sichuan noodles to slabs of tiramisu. The variety is impressive. The quality will vary. Your inner gourmet wants to sample as much as possible, with the hope that you leave this vast, overflowing eatery with a varied sense of the best sweet, savory, and especially tasty offerings. Naturally, the glutton in you tries to shove as much of it into your piehole as quickly as possible, before the owners flip the sign on the door to “Closed.”
This is arguably the best metaphor we could come up with after roughly 10 days’ of the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival; we’d try to come up with a more eloquent equivalent, but this film-lover’s version of a food coma we’re in has made us a little woozy. The annual get-together that gathers critics, programmers, celebrities, filmmakers, publicists, and the perpetually cine-curious towards one nation under a maple leaf boasted of having just short of 300 features this year. Add in the shorts programs, the special events, and the extended “an evening with…” chats, and you could easy fill your schedule with options from dawn to midnight. TIFF, as the fest is colloquially known, has always been defined by its abundance. The tagline for the 51st edition could have been: “TIFF 2026: It’s a Lot, Now More Than Ever.”
Somehow, despite the paralyzing amount of options, this year’s festival felt a little… wanting, for lack of a better word. The programming team had stocked the lineups of gala premieres, documentary sidebars, world-cinema showcases, and “Midnight Madness” psychotronica with big names and highly anticipated fall titles, as well as a lot of buzzy best-of entries from Berlin, Cannes, Sundance, and Venice fests. Yet growing pains born out of an attempt to integrate a film market into the already fit-to-burst mix and an overall sense of transitional industry anxiety made the event feel slightly weird, vibes-wise. When you hear the 99th person ask, “Is it me, or does this year feel a little off to you?” — let’s just say the buffet could have used some help in the ingredients department, and may want to revisit some of those old recipes.
Still: Your personal festival is defined by the highlights, and we had our share. There were more than a few good films with absolutely great performances in the center of them that we caught, and at least a trio of movies we fell head over in heels in love with. Those three, along with a handful of other standout titles, are listed below. From a spaghetti Western set in WWII Poland to moving portrait of modern Ukranian teens to a dark buddy comedy set among the giant heads of Rapa Nui, our 10 best of TIFF 2026. (Honorable mentions: Clarissa, The Debut, Edward Said: Between Worlds, Elsinore, Ink, Julián, The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd, Pretenders, Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple, and Sisters.)
-
‘Black Sunflowers’
They ride motorbikes and race cars, dance in dark nightclubs, fall in love, and generally try to navigate the choppy waters of their late teens and early twenties. Then these Ukrainian youths must return to the front to fight Russian troops and/or deal with the aftermath of having witnessed the traumatic effects of combat firsthand. American documentarian James Marcus Harvey embedded himself with a half-dozen or so young adults whose coming-of-age experience has been shaped or scarred by conflict, and emerges with a genuinely moving, humanistic look at life during wartime.
-
‘Everytime’
Image Credit: TIFF Nothing’s shocking, a wise frontman once said. There is a sequence early on in Sandra Wollner’s gutting drama, however, that will leave you gobsmacked, thanks to the extraordinary way that the German filmmaker sets up and frames a tragedy. What’s even more amazing is that her portrait of grief doesn’t even peak at that showstopper; it continues to get better and grow deeper as a teenage boy, a young girl, and her mother travel to a resort on the island of Tenerife as a way of healing their wounds. Wollner’s ability to thread magical realism, mythopoetic surrealism, and good old-fashioned humanistic observation into a truly singular look at picking up the pieces of shattered lives feels like a miracle. There’s truly nothing else like it.
-
‘Krux’
Image Credit: Lukasz Bak/TIFF Easily one of the most impressive debuts in TIFF’s “Discovery” program dedicated to next-gen talent, writer-director Tony Vahl’s first feature drops you into a German village during the last few weeks of WWII. Rumors of Soviet troops fast approaching and a growing sense that the war has been lost cast a pall over those left in this rural hamlet, which causes the local authority figures to declare that mass death is a better option than mass surrender. It’s a damning indictment of what happens when blind ideology trumps sanity, and the notion of nationalism leaves far too much collateral damage in its wake.
-
‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney’
Image Credit: TIFF God bless Canada’s unsung cinematic No. 1 Son Matthew Rankin (The Twentieth Century, Universal Language) for giving us this subversive, snarky look back at the rise of the country’s Progressive Conservative posterboy and 18th Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. It’s not just that he’s ridiculing a divisive figure in the nation’s history, i.e. “the chin who walked liked a man” and helped shove the Land of Maple toward a more mercenary version of right-wing policymaking that seems eerily familiar. It’s the way the cult filmmaker sends up the entire media apparatus around such populist firebrands and the savvy, tongue-in-cheek manner in which he blends groovy 1970s nostalgia, archival footage, and kitschy Canadacana into a hyperventilating fever dream that makes this a true joy to behold. You don’t need to be steeped in the history of Great White Northern politics to recognize a hilarious, angry “fuck you” from the underground when you see it.
-
‘Possible Love’
Image Credit: Netflix It’s tempting to say that the latest from South Korean legend Lee Chang-dong is his masterpiece — though when you have a filmography that includes Peppermint Candy, Secret Sunshine and Burning, there’s a lot of competition for the title. But his tale of a documentarian (Parasite‘s Cho Yeo-jeong) making a movie about a working-class couple (played by Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu) involved in a labor-rights protest is so beautifully observed, so meticulously constructed, and such an emotional timebomb that it feels like a bravura achievement even in a career like his. Commentary about class, activism, trauma, workplace pride, state-sanctioned violence, economic downturns, entitlement, and the exploitive nature of nonfiction filmmaking itself is subtly threaded within a very human story about four people — Hope‘s Zo In-sung rounds out the main cast as the documentarian’s old-money husband — on a collision course. There are layers on top of layers in director Lee’s storytelling, and moments involving unexpected callbacks and camera movements, that suggest a narrative game of three-dimensional chess is being played. Yet it’s also a work that never takes its eyes off the intimate interactions between these two couples, as well as the vast chasm of money and empathy that exist between them. The best film of the festival, hands down.
-
‘Soumsoum, The Night of the Stars’
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (A Screaming Man, Lingui) returns with another fable-like social drama about a young woman (Maïmouna Miawama) cursed — or possibly blessed — with visions of the past, the future, and the spirits of the dead. She slowly bonds with an older woman (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane) who the village elders believe is a witch, and responsible for the deaths of numerous newborns. It’s a deceptively simple tale, albeit one in which the entire concept of who is labeled a social pariah and why is poked and unpacked in Haroun’s usual sublime manner.
-
‘Tender Loving Care’
It’s been suggested that this characteristic take on everyday people dealing with life’s curveballs may, in fact, be Mike Leigh’s final movie. If so, the British filmmaker who’s spent five-plus decades exploring the human experience with grace and grit, and collaborating with actors to fashion characters that feel all too recognizable and real, is going out on a serious high. A social worker (recent Emmy winner Kate O’Flynn) who’s just gone through a break-up movies in with a fellow civil servant and longtime best friend (Alice Bailey Johnson). Meanwhile, the social worker’s elderly parents (Marion Bailey and Paul Jesson) find themselves entering the chapter of their autumn years that finds the winter of mortality closing in. We’ve come to take Leigh’s status as a creator of deeply resonant comedies and tragedies for granted, yet this potential swan song reminds you why he’s so vital, and so genuinely sui generis. The movie earns its title with honors.
-
‘Wild Horse Nine’
Image Credit: Searchlight Pictures Martin McDonagh drops another gloriously profane buddy comedy, casting John Malkovich as a longtime C.I.A. operative and Sam Rockwell as his younger dirty-tricks counterpart on vacation in Rapa Nui. The veteran intelligence-agency spook is contemplating a memoir that would potentially reveal a graveyard’s worth of skeletons in his closet, especially in regards to U.S. involvement in South American unrest. His traveling companion has been tasked with making sure that doesn’t happen. We understand while several fellow TIFF attendees referred to this as “In Bruges relocated to Easter Island,” but McDonagh’s latest take on male bonding, political shenanigans, and the burden of history is anything but a lazy reprise. The playwright-turned-filmmaker is simply using his signature formula to once again poke at the dynamic of volatile men living in perpetually volatile times, and hasn’t lost his penchant for hitting bullseyes. To say that Malkovich was born to play this role may sound like overkill, given that he literally played a legion of John Malkovichs. But if this isn’t a career highlight for the star, we don’t know what is.
-
‘Wild Wild East’
A stranger rides into a small town on a horse, in search of some gold contraband; he’s got to contend with fellow hunters, some morally shady locals, and a corrupt power structure. Did we mention that this doesn’t take place in the 19th century American frontier, but occupied Poland circa 1943? The fact that writer-director Jan Holoubek so deftly transposes the template for a Sergio Corbucci-style spaghetti Western on to a WWII setting would have distinguished this thriller on its own. But then a late-act pivot makes you realize the game the film is really playing, and what seemed like merely a nifty genre hybrid takes on a deeper sense of purpose.
-
‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’
Image Credit: Jaclyn Martinez/Amazon Studios Whether or not you mourned the fact that Mahershala Ali’s potential Blade movie had a stake put through its heart by the Marvel Studios’ powers that be is a matter between you and your god. What we can say is that this kinetic collaboration between the Oscar winner and his would-be collaborator on that MCU entry, director Bassam Tariq, completely makes that project superfluous. Ali’s hero, a devout Muslim and widower named Latif who’s attempting to raise two teens and a newborn on his own, has a history of violence in his past, courtesy of his former job as a professional killer. He’s dragged back into the life when an old boss calls in a favor, which ends up putting Latif in the crosshairs of a local pastor-cum-cult leader (John Cho, fully unhinged and loving it.) Given how flat-out phenomenal this melding of action movie, character study and left-field examination on the power of faith is, the demise of that other film was a blessing in disguise.
