TIFF 2025
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The Sommelier’s Amulet: Nick Corirossi and Armen Weitzman on The Napa Boys
“The Napa Boys—you’ve always known them, and they’re back.” It’s the kind of premise you could imagine only a very tired person nodding along with, but the way The Napa Boys—the new comedy from comedians Nick Corirossi and Armen Weitzman, the former directing and both serving as co-writers—went from this vague concept to a wide release with Magnolia Pictures somewhat beggars belief. “I don’t know if [Magnolia] lost a bet…” Weitzman laughs in our interview. The most concise description of The Napa Boys might run something like “Sideways 4: Beta House,” with all the various and contradictory associations—Fox Searchlight dramedies, […]
by Dylan Adamson on Feb 27, 2026 -
TIFF 2025: The Christophers, I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash, Rose of Nevada
Steven Soderbergh’s films routinely fixate on money—who has it, who doesn’t, what (illegally) acquiring it says about personal status and national identity within global capitalism. So, it’s mildly surprising he hasn’t set a film in the contemporary art world prior to The Christophers, though previous works deployed visual art for character definition (Laura San Giacomo’s character in sex, lies, and videotape is a painter) or as a plot engine (the Imperial Coronation egg as Ocean’s Twelve’s MacGuffin). In his latest two-hander, artmaking serves as a dramatic foundation for extended badinage about creative expression as an imperfect vehicle for immortality. The […]
by Vikram Murthi on Sep 19, 2025 -
“Grief in a Beautiful Place”: Lucía Aleñar Iglesias on Her TIFF World Premiere Forastera
The carefree, meandering pace of summertime suddenly takes the form of a depressive stupor in Forastera, the feature debut from Los Angeles-based, Spanish-born writer-director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias. During an annual vacation to visit their maternal grandparents in Mallorca, Cata (Zoe Stein) and Eva (Martina García) engage in typical teenage shenanigans: they aimlessly ride bikes along the coast, go to beach bonfire parties and flirt with the boys they encounter there. Basically, all is as it should be—at least until the day that Cata discovers her grandmother’s unresponsive body. The girls’ mother Pepe (Núria Prims) arrives in order to help with […]
by Natalia Keogan on Sep 19, 2025 -
TIFF(ty) 2025: The Fence, To the Victory!
In the 1999 mini-series Storm of the Century, a malevolent stranger (played by noted Canadian Colm Feore) shows up outside Stephen King’s longtime fictional community of Castle Rock and repeatedly says “Give me what I want and I’ll go away”—but he doesn’t tell anyone what he actually wants, instead telepathically manipulating people into suicide and other grisly events until finally unveiling his ask. Obviously this made a big impression on me when I was 13, but I’m told the series was in fact terrible, which isn’t hard to believe, and it’s definitely not what should have been coming to mind […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 15, 2025 -
TIFF 2025: Wake Up Dead Man, The Wizard of the Kremlin
The lights went down precisely at 6 pm, the designated starting hour for Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, and people began murmuring in pleasant surprise: at premium TIFF screenings where a starry cast is the main attraction, kick-off time is understood to be more of a loose suggestion than an actuality you can make plans around. Director of Programming and Platform Lead Robyn Citizen briskly thanked the sponsors and brought out Johnson; he worked the room and had his intro done in 2.5 minutes. (Rian Johnson is a wise man.) The sponsor bumpers started at 6:05; “A TIFF miracle!” […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 12, 2025 -
TIFF 2025: Mare’s Nest, Blue Moon (Songs about Decline and Obsolescence)
Narratives of decline and obsolescence, frequently as a consequence of unforced errors made by the wealthy and unaccountable (the latter adjective redundant when paired with the former), are going to be a big theme this fall. The global political situation is self-evident; zooming down to the media tier, rumors of imminent firings and general bloodletting are swirling. (Wait for those quarterly reports to come in at the top of October and let the pain begin.) Zooming way down to the relatively parochial level of “one specific film festival,” TIFF was once a global powerhouse and automatic stop for the year’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 5, 2025 -
“The Question of Whether Ukraine Will Exist at All”: Valentyn Vasyanovych on TIFF 2025 Premiere To the Victory!
When Valentyn Vasyanovych shot The Tribe (2014) by Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi, he was a cinematographer and emerging director. Shortly after, he developed an impressive oeuvre of his own beginning with Black Level (2017), a dialogue-free film about a wedding photographer in a midlife crisis. Similarly to The Tribe, Vasyanovych was exploring a novel cinematic language within a new wartime reality, establishing a formal strategy consisting of a strictly static camera and deep focus, extended mise-en-scène and minimal editing through which his films can be recognized. Two subsequent fiction features brought him international acclaim, whose frighteningly prescient narratives helped him attain the […]
by Sonya Vseliubska on Sep 4, 2025
