Illustration by Franz Lang.

“Stop trying to make ‘TIFFty’ happen,” gripes a festival volunteer in a spot played before every film at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. “It’s not going to happen.” It is indeed the 50th edition of the event originally called the Festival of Festivals, which featured a notably tighter lineup in 1976 (127 selected films; in 2025 there are 291, including TV episodes), and now not just named but also trademarked as TIFF. Of those 291, there are most assuredly great movies to be found, as well as good times to be had—this is, after all, one of the world’s largest and most important events centered on celebrating cinema of different kinds and from different places. But whether or not one embraces the portmanteau of “TIFFty,” the anniversary reminder lands awkwardly, given the general critical consensus that in recent years the festival has offered depreciating returns in its overly broad lineup, putting inordinate emphasis on premiere status, red-carpet neediness, and the emblematic shrinking of its most cinema-forward, artist-friendly section, Wavelengths.

Add to this atmosphere the dizzying sequence of initial rejection, back-door programming, late-stage removal, and subsequent return to the program of a film by TIFF donor and former board member Barry Avrich. Whether his documentary about a retired Israeli general rescuing his family from a kibbutz near the Gaza border on October 7 was good or not, Zionist propaganda or not, and whether these qualities were reasons to program it or not, quickly became less the issue as the institutional imbroglio continued. Festival CEO Cameron Bailey admitted that, among 9,000 film submissions this year, the film initially didn’t make the cut, but he was personally asked to revisit the assessment. The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue(all films 2025 unless otherwise noted) went on to win the People’s Choice Documentary Award. As it only had one public screening, and voting only requires the entry of an email address, with no confirmation that a voter has attended a screening or seen the film at all, the win calls into question the accuracy of the festival’s method of tabulating its audience prizes, which have long been considered awards-season prognosticators.

As the festival went on, the intentional cringe factor of the “TIFFty” gag increasingly took on a tone of desperation. The anniversary reminder should be taken as an inspiration to revisit the “festival of festivals” approach, where with a more limited selection the perspective of the curation can be more clear, its choices weighted with intentionality and risk, and audiences can experience a focused encounter with the year’s cinema. Until that longed for but unlikely future, critics as well as the public will have to continue floundering their way through TIFF’s mishmash program with the knowledge that there is always much of value to see, but lord, do you need to work to find it.

With Hasan in Gaza(Kamal Aljafari, 2025).

Even in the face of regular marginalization, the Wavelengths section models what should be the festival’s overall programming approach. Programmed by Andréa Picard and Jesse Cummings, it is one of the few parts of TIFF that has a distinct curatorial sensibility; its selections offer a specific way of looking at cinema, and of looking at the world through cinema. This lends each movie, short or long, a real sense of importance: This is not just another film among many; there’s something at stake. The section’s features included essential new movies by Lav Diaz, Kahlil Joseph, and Alexandre Koberidze, all of which take bold, exciting forms. Yet among these formidable works, Kamal Aljafari’s exceptionally humble With Hasan in Gaza was the most monumental. A documentary of the director driving around Gaza in a futile search for a friend he met in prison, the footage was shot on MiniDV in 2001 during the Second Intifada and only presented now with its original, in-camera edits, effectively an artifact from another time. (A few onscreen texts and music cues act as contemporary punctuation.) While Aljafari is literally searching, the film’s form is too, appearing unfinished and unrefined. With Hasan in Gazacommunicates a direct experience of filmmaking; the camera feels embodied, like a living being. (This effect is also achieved by Sky Hopinka’s latest, Powwow People, an immersive documentary about Indigenous American song and dance.) The gap in knowledge between 2001 and the present is sometimes unbearable: What happened to these buildings? Where are these kids now? Killed by Israel, or still living resiliently under occupation and amidst war? We at times seem to have the lingering, awestruck point of view of a time traveler. The weaving of everyday banality in between gunshots and mortar rounds becomes increasingly haunting, and even the most unremarkable image or moment seems suddenly precious and fragile, as what is being filmed may be no more. To some degree, this is true of all moving images of a certain age: Cinema can record and reanimate worlds and people who have passed. It is Aljafari’s fiercely intentional act of reviving this specific footage of another Gaza, a lost Gaza, that gives it a raw poignancy.

Dry Leaf(Alexandre Koberidze, 2025).

Alexandre Koberidze’s third feature, Dry Leaf, is also about a quest by car whose purpose becomes subsumed by the world around it. Only, that world is not a besieged region on the cusp of ruin, but rather the countryside of Georgia and its voluptuous, open sense of mystery. It begins with a father (played by David Koberidze, the director’s own father) searching for his adult daughter, who has vanished while working on a photo project, leaving only a cryptic note. But as the film stretches towards its three-hour length, that search feels increasingly immaterial in the face of the world’s beauty. Shot on an old Sony Ericsson W595 cameraphone—as was Koberidze’s first feature, Let the Summer Never Come Again(2017)—the cinematography dances between abstraction and recognition, the roads and landscapes rendered in low-resolution pixels, pulsing and macro-blocking like blood pressure behind your eyes. Is it the land that’s alive or the image itself? Where Aljafari revives his footage to commemorate and mourn, Koberidze is after something less piercing and more atmospheric. Gentle and entrancing to the point of being soporific, its aim—unless I’m missing some more specific implication of touring rural soccer pitches across the country—is an almost total immersion of the eyes and ears (the score by the director’s brother, Giorgi, is luminous). The father feels no urgency or fear, and therefore neither should we: The premise for him and for us is but an excuse to wander, let go, and be receptive to the enchantment of the surroundings. While lacking the surprising diversions and slender but charming fabular storytelling of his previous feature, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?(2021), the golden-hued, chill-vibed, and unpretentious Dry Leaf confirms Koberidze as an essential artist making a different, and peculiarly special, kind of feel-good movie.

The Furious(Kenji Tanigaki, 2025).

Another father-daughter quest at the festival could have fit into Wavelengths but certainly didn’t feel good—in fact, it frequently hurt. The Furious, directed by Kenji Tanigaki, the master choreographer behind the action of such films as SPL 2: A Time For Consequences(2015) and Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In(2024), is nominally about a father (an awe-inspiring Xie Miao) tracking down his kidnapped daughter and fighting a gang of human traffickers, but this threadbare dramatic premise, like that of Dry Leaf, is the minimal narrative the film needs to provide nearly two brutal hours of bone-breaking, body-torquing martial-arts frenzy. It requires a singular commitment into a certain kind of cinematic pleasure—in this case, the thrill of physical prowess and movement, a flow state of clever ideas, variations, and combinations of violently interacting spaces and bodies—that could be tedious for some, or enthralling for others. If we watch this film almost entirely for pleasures other than dramatic storytelling, is this not what would normally be deemed experimental? It is in fact programmed in the Midnight Madness section, but that placement suggests there could be more crossover between such audiences than is usually assumed.

Rojo Žalia Blau(Viktoria Schmid, 2025).

The Wavelengths shorts programs—a highlight for many returning and visiting guests that form a kind of community inside the larger festival crowd—also provided a bounty of pleasure, including new gems by Basma al-Sharif, Björn Kämmerer, and Blake Williams, as well as a touching revival tribute to section regular Tomonari Nishikawa, who died suddenly early this year. A particular standout was the quietly beautiful Rojo Žalia Blau, filmed by Viktoria Schmid in forests in Spain, Lithuania, and her native Austria. Each shot is made of three exposures of the same composition, taken in turn with red, green, and blue color filters. When combined, the subtle variations of color, which differ depending on the light, shadows, and movement of the shot, gives the resulting image a remarkable quiver. Each image contains three separate moments of time captured and superimposed, and each color, layered. Sometimes the differences between the different layers are so subtle we seem to be seeing a single moment of time in the forest; at others, movement results in a separation of the constitutive colors, and time splinters—a quantum moment of simultaneous existence. My favorite shot: a mostly monochrome image of snowy ground with a pine needle sticking out, its thin black shadow split into three delicate strips of color, making something opaque suddenly prismatic.

As in Dry Leaf, the affinity of Schmid’s imagery to painting was very strong. Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers (the second premiere this year from the indefatigable director) is about a once-great painter, but the art itself is not the film’s subject. Instead, it is the collision between the old artist (played with richly cantankerous verve by Ian McKellen) and his young assistant (Michaela Coel), who has secretly been hired by the painter’s heirs to find unfinished paintings and forge their completion. It’s also a collision between actors, reveling in the combative, charismatic chemistry between the motormouth bite of McKellen and the more watchful and predatory Coel. After this year’s excellent but icy-cool spy film Black Bag, it’s particularly delightful to see Soderbergh take on a two-hander and deliver something warmed with charm.

Maddie’s Secret(John Early, 2025).

Another film suffused by charm was also the biggest surprise at the festival: comedian John Early’s feature directorial debut, the comic melodrama Maddie’s Secret, in which the writer-director stars as the titular, sweetly innocent food lover whose rising career as a recipe developer is interrupted by a relapse of bulimia. Not exactly a natural source for comedy, one might think, but confidently using the storytelling and aesthetics of movie-of-the-week TV programs and touching on the work of such self-aware social ironists as Douglas Sirk, Paul Verhoeven, and Todd Haynes, Early has made something not just successful but also unique. It exhibits an earnest tenderness toward its characters and their very serious problems, and yet embraces every available opportunity to be satiric, playful, and a touch absurd with aspects of modern content creation, professional rivalry, food culture, and even eating disorders and psychiatric hospitalization. Heartwarming yet constantly tweaking the social and cultural norms surrounding Maddie’s rise, fall, and rise again, it’s a movie as clever as it is genuine, and may well be the year’s most promising debut.

This snapshot is intended to gather emblematic examples of the range that TIFF embodies at its best: trenchant documentaries, auteur visions and artist films, transcendent genre movies, strong new work by major directors, and debuts that point to cinema’s future. Put like this, it all seems so simple, yet the dilution and distractions across the program fail to ensure such an experience for most audiences. The escalating trajectory of modern cultural production—the multiplying volume of media that audiences have to navigate in their day-to-day lives, let alone their demarcated leisure time—is not something to mimic but to counteract. This cultural overproduction ironically provides the solution to make a truly celebratory TIFF happen: Put the art at the forefront and make every choice count, and soon what is presented will only be what is essential.

Keep reading our fall festival coverage.