Hello! I’m Esther Zuckerman, a movie critic for Pursuits. I just spent the past week up north at the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs through Sunday and is the midway point of the busy season for premieres of movies that hope to win an Oscar.

The marathon kicks off in August with the Venice International Film Festival, which overlaps with Telluride over Labor Day weekend. It’s after that the industry descends on Canada, which plays host to some films that have already made their debut overseas or in Colorado, as well as at world premieres.

Toronto is the most accessible of all these festivals. Venice features glamour on boats and Telluride is a clubby affair high in the mountains, but Toronto feels as if it’s really for the city where it takes place. As such, its most prestigious award is the People’s Choice, which usually indicates that the Oscars will like a film. In the past it’s gone to American Fiction, Jojo Rabbit and Green Book.

The splashiest films to come to Toronto sight unseen included the new Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man, and Christy, a boxing drama starring the much discussed Sydney Sweeney.

I was able to view 34 films in the lineup—not including the selections that had already screened at Cannes. (That festival is more about international art house titles.) Next up is the New York Film Festival, where I’ll catch up on some titles that played in Venice and Telluride but skipped Toronto including Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite and the biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.

Here are some superlatives to guide your own future viewing after a whirlwind trip to TIFF.

Toronto International Film Festival 2025 Must-Watch List

Best Takedown of Capitalism (and Men): No Other Choice

Source: TIFF

The competition to get into the press screening of Park Chan-wook’s latest was fierce in Toronto, with lines snaking around the Scotiabank Theatre Toronto—and for good reason. The South Korean master of Oldboy and The Handmaiden fame has returned with a spectacular and wildly funny fable about the brutality of the job market and the lengths desperate men will go to to hang on to their pride.

Distributed by Neon and based on the novel The Ax by Donald E. Westlake, No Other Choice stars Lee Byung-hun (Front Man in the Squid Game series) as Man-su, a manager at a paper company—a former “Pulp Man of the Year”—who’s surprised when his job is cut. In the months that follow, he struggles to find work, ultimately plunging his family into financial despair and him into a desperate plan: He will kill his fellow job seekers.

Man-su is ultimately bumbling in his bloodlust, leading to grim hilarity, but Park infuses the film with beauty in his compositions. And as funny as No Other Choice often is, you’ll leave heartbroken over the state of the male gender—even the victims are driven by their fragile ego—as well as the state of man at large. We’re all at the mercy of corporations who don’t give a damn and will take the world down with the individual.

Best Reason to Convert to Shakerism: The Testament of Ann Lee

Source: TIFF

No other movie in this fall season has struck me quite like Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee. It’s the story of the title character, played by Amanda Seyfried, the religious leader and self-appointed prophet who established the Shakers in America in the late 1700s. But Fastvold’s portrait is no simple biopic as one might expect from the team behind The Brutalist, including her partner and co-writer Brady Corbet, who directed that Oscar-winner, and composer Daniel Blumberg, who has adapted Shaker spirituals into haunting songs.

Not that The Testament of Ann Lee is exactly a musical. The music is a natural expression of Ann’s worship, and it’s ecstatic. As the film traces how Lee came to understand her faith—embracing celibacy as a way of being closer to God—and recruit her followers, Fastvold stages exhilarating sequences of worship turning the “shaking” these parishioners practiced into exuberant dance captured by her roaming camera. Through Seyfried’s committed, spectacular performance, you understand how devotion itself can be orgasmic.

Best Excuse to Give Sydney Sweeney an Oscar Nomination: Christy

Source: TIFF

Sweeney has become a cultural lightning rod thanks to her racy American Eagle jeans ad. But at TIFF, the attention came back to where it belongs: her talent as an actress. In Christy (out Nov. 7) the Euphoria star plays boxer Christy Salters Martin, a pioneer in the sport in the 1990s who was also brutally abused by her coach and husband.

Sweeney bulked up to mimic Martin’s physique, but her performance goes beyond the physical. She shows how Martin’s outward strength masks an inner pain as a gay woman who remained in the closet so she could succeed. The film, directed by David Michôd (Animal Kingdom), is alternately rousing and grim, and puts Sweeney in the Oscar conversation.

Best Excuse to Give The Rock an Oscar Nomination: The Smashing Machine

Source: TIFF

Benny Safdie’s film about MMA fighter Mark Kerr is not what you would expect. It’s not a galvanizing sports drama, but instead a slice of life about an athlete learning to lose. In that way, it offers Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, playing Kerr, an opportunity to show raw, often quiet emotion rather than bombast.

This marks Safdie’s first solo feature—his other work, like the nerve-wracking Uncut Gems, was with his brother Josh. But unlike Gems or Good Time, both also distributed by A24, The Smashing Machine, based on a 2002 HBO documentary, doesn’t go for anxiety but rather pathos. Johnson is incredibly impressive, showing Kerr as a man who used his good nature to mask his addiction. In theaters Oct. 3.

Most Likely to Make You Cry: Hamnet

Source: TIFF

Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel should come with a warning: It will make you sob. It’s a tale of grief that invents the backstory of Hamlet by retelling the romance between William Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley).

With her roots in independent cinema (the award juggernaut Nomadland and, before that, The Rider), Zhao has explored the vistas of the American West. Here she trades that for the distinct earthiness of the English countryside as we meet Buckley’s almost wild Agnes, who gives a part of herself to William, a tutor.

It’s no spoiler to say that the movie hinges on the death of the title character, Agnes and Will’s young son, but it’s how Zhao and her actors interpret the ways in which this horrible blow can affect the soul that devastates the viewers. Hamnet (out in limited release Nov. 27 from Focus Features) puts Zhao once again at the forefront of the awards conversation and a likely contender for best director. (Buckley looks like a shoo-in for best actress.)

Most Likely to Make You Gasp: Bad Apples

Source: Pulse Films/TIFF

This title, a TIFF world premiere that has yet to find a distributor, was a dark surprise. I had no idea what to expect going into Jonatan Etzler’s English-language debut starring Saoirse Ronan, but it had me howling and covering my mouth in shock.

The film features Ronan as Maria, an overwhelmed schoolteacher who’s having specific trouble dealing with a violent problem child, Danny (Eddie Waller). After Danny pushes a classmate down the stairs, Maria goes to seek him out, and then things get really nutty. Ultimately, Bad Apples is a parable about the lengths to which we’ll go to protect our skin and what good teaching actually means. It’s a diabolical little thing.

Best Argument for Nepotism: Poetic License

Source: TIFF

One of the most delightful experiences I had at TIFF was watching Poetic License, the directorial debut of Maude Apatow, daughter of Judd and Leslie Mann. Apatow is best known for her role on Euphoria, where she plays Lexi, whose theatrical ambitions yielded the “is this f—ing play about us” meme. But she’s also got a sturdy hand behind the camera in this sweet film about two college seniors (Andrew Barth Feldman and Cooper Hoffman) who become infatuated with the mom (Mann) auditing their poetry seminar. Apatow has the good sense to lean into the charming performances of Feldman (No Hard Feelings) and Hoffman (Licorice Pizza, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman), who are just dynamite every time they are on screen.

Best Josh O’Connor: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Source: Netflix/TIFF

The main selling point of the latest in Rian Johnson’s routinely enjoyable Knives Out franchise is that it’s an absolute showcase for Josh O’Connor, who also has three other movies due out this fall (Kelly Reichardt’s excellent The Mastermind, period romance The History of Sound and Sundance favorite Rebuilding.)

Yes, Daniel Craig is there as the droll Southern detective Benoit Blanc, but O’Connor is without a doubt the lead of this gothic tale of murder at a small upstate New York parish. His character, Father Jud Duplenticy, is a former boxer with a rough-and-tumble side who’s also so earnest you can’t help but want to protect him. It’s a brilliant balancing act. Plus, Johnson serves up another delectable mystery, which this time wrestles with deep questions of faith. In theaters Nov. 26; Dec. 12 on Netflix.

Best Reminder of the Importance of Journalism: Cover-Up

Source: The New York Times/TIFF

Laura Poitras, the documentarian behind Citizenfour (about whistleblower Edward Snowden) and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (artist Nan Goldin), is back, this time collaborating with Mark Obenhaus on a portrait of legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

Hersh is a prickly figure, who, right off the bat, tells Poitras and Obenhaus that he barely trusts them, and the directors highlight both his doggedness and his failings. But mostly Cover-Up is an overwhelming reminder of what Hersh uncovered in print, from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib torture, and why we need people like him questioning everything. It has yet to find a distributor.

Most Shattering Experience: The Voice of Hind Rajab

Source: TIFF

The Voice of Hind Rajab arrived at TIFF after a standing ovation at Venice that lasted more than 20 minutes, and once you see it, you understand why. (And I hope this one finds a distributor, which last year’s searing, award-winning Israel-Palestine doc No Other Land didn’t.)

Oscar-nominated Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania takes a hybrid documentary and drama approach to explain what unfolded on Jan. 29, 2024, when workers at Palestine Red Crescent Society call center were on the phone for hours with a young girl trapped in a car in Gaza with the bodies of her dead family members. Ben Hania uses the real audio of Hind, alongside actors playing the humanitarians trying desperately to get her aid, but hindered by the Israeli military and layers of red tape. The combination of styles can at times be disorienting, but it’s a viscerally upsetting depiction of innocent life lost.

Illustration by Cheng Peng

More to read about festival season

The Battle to Make One Battle After Another
The cast of the latest Paul Thomas Anderson movie, including Leonardo DiCaprio, talk about the politically charged film. Even though it wasn’t at TIFF, everyone was talking about it. 

Canadian pride booms, dual Hamlets duel, and Rian Johnson’s knives are out (again) at a 50th TIFF.
One of my favorite fellow critics, Amy Nicholson, takes stock of the TIFF offerings.

Film Festival Matchmaking: Where Some of This Year’s Hottest Titles Could End Up, Including Bad Apples, Christy and Dead Man’s Wire.
Some of the big titles are seeking distribution. IndieWire speculates about what studios might buy.

How Dwayne Johnson Transformed Into The Smashing Machine: “I Found It So Scary”
The Rock is making an Oscar push.

Charli XCX May Have What It Takes to Be a Movie Star After All
Brat Summer herself was on the scene.

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Photographer: Photo illustration by 731 Getty Images (4), Alamy (1)

My TIFF kicked off with a party thrown by Netflix to celebrate a movie that wasn’t even playing at the festival. What movie would that be? KPop Demon Hunters, the sensation that the streamer is hoping will gain traction in the animated feature and original song categories at the Oscars. The bash featured karaoke with some of the singing voices of the characters. So I would suggest taking a moment to listen to Max Chakin and Stacey Vanek Smith discuss with Sam Sanders on the latest Everybody’s Business podcast whether the KPop juggernaut is killing Hollywood—or saving it.

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