Recap: Toronto International Film Festival 2026

The 2026 Toronto International Film Festival boasted an array of films in a variety of genres, filling movie houses around the theatre district in downtown Toronto. Competition is fierce to get tickets to the films you want to see and glimpse the stars promoting them. These are the films our own Koom Kankesan checked out at this year’s festival:

1. The Man I Love directed by Ira Sachs tells the story of a vibrant young singer/performer called Jimmy (Rami Malek) living with AIDS in 1980s New York. He’s just recovered from a brutal hospitalization and is rehearsing for a play. The film doesn’t focus on the illness so much as the relations between the group of friends and acquaintances around Jimmy. The film is told in atmospheric touches and encounters, there’s a lot of singing, and the only thing resembling a central plot is a downstairs neighbour’s hunger for Jimmy. He lives with Dennis (Tom Sturridge), who patiently cares for Jimmy as tension ensues with the neighbour. Most conversations in the film are about Jimmy, who lived quite a wild life and might be paying for it now. Sachs, Sturridge, and Malek were all on stage to promote the film. I was particularly interested in seeing what Malek was like as he tends to play fairly unique or odd characters on screen. He was humble, down to Earth, and very youthful.

2. Phoolan directed by Richie Mehta. This dynamic and action-soaked biopic depicts a siege on an Indian village by a force of two thousand men. Their intention: to capture or kill Phoolan Devi (otherwise known as ‘The Bandit Queen’), who might still have been a teenager during the raid depicted in this film. The film jumps to flashbacks inserted during breaks in the action of the raid. Through them, we learn Devi was married off when she was eleven, repeatedly raped and sexually abused by many men, and expressed her anger against the corrupt landowner and family oppressing the poorer villagers around her. She later joined a band of rebels who act in a Robin Hood fashion. Devi was originally kidnapped by the rebels (paid to do so by the landowner), but they ended up taking her into their band; her ferocity making her a natural leader. She leads them not only to steal money from rich landowners, but to kill and maim them. The film mentions rape constantly. People bark and insult each other very often. It’s heavy-handed and not an easy watch — not character-based so much as drama- and violence-based. It’s very noisy. The visuals are strong and the action and brutality keep the film moving. Mehta was there to discuss the film, as were many of the cast and crew.

3. Musk directed by Alex Gibney. Perhaps the most obvious and yet most fascinating film in the festival. Obvious, because who doesn’t generally know about it subject? Fascinating, because when the trajectories of his life and influence are brought to bear in one work, it can be startling. Made by HBO Films (with Ronan Farrow as one of the producers), this documentary charts the rise and rule of Musk as he moves through his tech companies, wives, sires an incredible number of children, then pivots toward the hard right during COVID. Gibney made the documentary Going Clear, relaying what happens behind the scenes of Scientology, so it will come as no surprise that this film (perhaps timed to come out ahead of the November midterm elections) criticizes Musk’s practices — especially his realignment of the government supervision of his own companies during the DOGE period. A memorable line from the film goes something like “Musk had the money to keep Trump in power while Trump had the power to keep Musk in money.” The film uses Musk’s early fascination with video games to structure the doc as if Musk is progressing through his life as an interactive video game. The conceit works. The film also highlights Musk’s belief that we might be living in a simulation. Finally, since Musk would not be deigned to be interviewed, the filmmakers create an AI avatar, feeding it everything Musk has said publicly, and get it to speak as Musk. This is thankfully done sparingly because the avatar, unlike Grok unhinged, does not say anything particularly unexpected. Gibney was not present for my screening.

4. Rogue Trooper directed by Duncan Jones. This film adapts the long running sci-fi war serial from the British weekly comic 2000 AD (the same source that brought us Judge Dredd). Black & white art by Dave Gibbons surrounds the opening credits and it is very striking. During the Q&A after the film, Jones said the storyline they adapted is from War Machine by Gibbons. Jones said he approached 2000 AD about adapting the work about 25 years ago while he was still in film school. Eventually, he and his long time producer, Stuart Fenegan, began working on it as both a live motion capture project and VFX. It ended up taking four years instead of the original two-and-a-half they projected. The whole film feels and looks very much like watching a video game, as do its numerous action sequences. Many actors have lent their voices to the project. The ones I recognize are Diane Morgan, Sean Bean, Jermaine Clement, Matt Berry, and Asa Butterfield. Jones talked about the triangle of quality, speed, and cost; speed being the one he sacrificed. The film has not yet found a distributor.

5. Carrie by Mike Flanagan. The last screening I attended: the first two episodes of the new take on Stephen King‘s Carrie. Flanagan was not present for this screening. King’s angst-ridden story has been updated for modern times, set in a suburban school with metal detectors, lockdown drills, and bullying that spreads its toxicity onto the Internet. These two installments weren’t bad, fleshing out the supporting characters and the lives of people in the town, while also inventing new ones. The scenes and dialogue are fine for TV, but don’t stand out as particularly original or fresh. The general portrait of young women in high school, the disaffection of teachers, the weirdness of Carrie’s (Summer H. Howell) reclusive upbringing all seem like they hearken to an older time. The surface dressing has been changed — Carrie’s parents are moulded by far right podcasts for example — but the series has no true insight into schools today. The dialogue feels too TV-esque, but then again, that problem also existed within high school movies proliferating during the ’80s: artificiality. Brian de Palma‘s version of Carrie (which is much less enlightened than Flanagan’s work) steamrolls forward on a wave of angst, anxiety, and social terror. Though Carrie ends up causing a lot of destruction, King’s particular gift for creating pathos through angst radiates throughout the earlier film. Flanagan’s work dallies too much, exploring secondary characters’ backstories. It tempers the angst, making this feel like any other premium middle class drama. Howell is very strong as a newer, more sympathetic, and optimistically fresh-faced version of the title role. I was particularly touched by the performance of Tim Bagley as a guidance councillor who brings a beautiful kindness and good nature to his delivery and scenes.