#TIFF2025: That's a wrap! | Flaw in the Iris

I’m back in Halifax, gearing up for #AIFF2025 and trying to come to terms with what I’ve seen at the Toronto International Film Festival 2025, the 50th Edition. Not as many features as I’d hoped, but still a wonderful time swaddled in cinema. Here’s my list of what I saw, from the ones I most appreciated to the least.

Hamnet, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Blue Moon, The Voice of Hind Rajab, Sk+te’kmujue’katik (At the Place of Ghosts), & Sons, Winter of the Crow, A Private Life, The Christophers, John Candy: I Like Me, Wizard Of The Kremlin, Fuze, The Last Viking, Palestine 36, Frankenstein, Aki, Motor City, Ballad of a Small Player

For all of my reviews from the past week, click here, and follow Flaw_In_The_Iris on Instagram for my first impressions in the hours following the screenings.

It’s always interesting to see how other films collect the buzz, and where they add screenings — that suggests a lot of interest. Wake Up Dead Man got at least a couple more, as did a historical musical called The Testament of Ann Lee, from The Brutalist co-creator, Mona Fastvold.

I was also hearing good things about Train Dreams, with Joel Edgerton, and Sydney Sweeney in the boxing/domestic abuse drama, Christy, and the Norwegian film Sentimental Value, which I’m looking forward to seeing at AIFF on Monday. As the festival winds down some pictures are earning more attention, like Tuner and No Other Choice. Other high profile entries, like The Smashing Machine , Sacrifice, and Couture, the Angelina Jolie fashion drama, got mixed receptions.

TIFF is a lot. A friend attended the festival and had a completely different experience than I did, saw a totally different selection of movies, which can happen due to the sheer number of them. The first Saturday and Sunday are particularly intense as you enter each screening room crammed full of people and then step out of the cinemas onto streets filled with even more people, but every year I’ve made it to Toronto for the festival it’s always been worth it.

The mobile Criterion Closet was there this year and while I chose not to stand in line for hours to get my three minutes in the closet, it brought a fun vibe to the street along with Guillermo Del Toro, who dropped by the media van on Sunday.

There’s a lot of things TIFF does well, but there are things they could do better.

I’m less concerned about whether a Canadian film always opens the festival (as they once did), or whether more prestigious films open at Venice or Telluride. TIFF has carved out a huge event that is the official start of the awards season, partly due to the People’s Choice Award for the most popular screenings that serves as a harbinger for Oscar glory (even though it didn’t last year), and partly due to the sheer volume of movies and attendant filmmakers and celebrities. They do this well, and both the industry and the audiences know it.

What they could do is schedule the Press and Industry screenings where the most popular films, especially in the first four days, don’t conflict with each other. They could improve the bathrooms in the Lightbox, offering better accessibility and more options, which I don’t think have been upgraded since it opened.

They could actually enforce their rules about cellphone use and piracy. All it would take is a flashlight, shone in the face of offenders — shame the fuckers. At the premiere screening of Motor City a patron pulled out their phone three times to record the screen, and nobody seemed bothered by it. Twice I had to ask people to put away their phones during screenings, and it is amazing to me how unapologetic these people are. One shrugged and said, “This is for work.” I said, “This is a cinema — if you gotta work, don’t go to the MOVIES!” It’s been a problem every year I’ve been at the festival, in both press and public screenings.

I enjoy some of the ads in advance of screenings, though the Cineplex “Tiffty” ad was cute the first time, horribly grating the next nine. Why didn’t they hire an actual celebrity to be in the last bit?

TIFF audiences like to participate with the ads. They should bring back Anne Hathaway and Zendaya in Bulgari from the past couple of years, which prompted a lot of clapping along with the music. The Varda ad provided a bit of that this year, but they could be more imaginative and get people really engaged.