September 16, 2024

Was 2024 a return to form for the Toronto International Film Festival? Our members were busy, busy, busy catching screenings and writing reviews weeks before audiences flocked to TIFF to see the stars. Ask any critic for a TIFF recommendation, and they didn’t just give one quick response: they enthusiastically offered a list.

Movie-wise, TIFF had an excess of strong titles with most of the top Cannes contenders—notably Anora, Emilia Pérez, and Universal Language—confirming they had staying power after making their jump across the pond to Toronto. Few of the world premieres ranked among the standouts, however, as the TFCA’s annual critics’ poll saw only three TIFF debuts land as “best of the fest” picks: Life of Chuck, The Gesuidouz, and Bring Them Down.

The TFCA invited all members to submit their picks for the best films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. 11 films scored “best of the fest” picks based on what screened—or didn’t screen—at Toronto.

Here are the TFCA members’ picks for the best films at TIFF 2024

Anne Brodie: Universal Language – Everyday conversation is heightened by the film’s distinctly original dialogue, set pieces and oddities. Prepare for the passing parade, a donkey swaddled in gaudy robes, being led through the blizzard, a walking, lit Christmas tree, a thieving turkey, and tourists hoping to see Winnipeg’s interesting tourist traps. They include Louis Riel’s grave at the convergence of two busy highways, a briefcase left for decades on a city bench, a memorial to the 1953 parking incident at the Centennial Parking Pavilion and fast-food restaurants. Along the way people cry their hearts out; Kleenex is big business. Throughout, the sound of howling winter winds acts as an uncomfortable score. While we shiver we laugh and ponder, awestruck, the leaping imagination of this wonderful piece.

Honourable mention: Mistress Dispeller

Alicia Fletcher: Anora – A Charles Perrault fairy tale set amidst Coney Island and the neon-hued, sequined sweatboxes that make up Brooklyn’s strip joints, Sean Baker’s Anora is a pulsating dopamine hit. Anointed with the Palme d’Or and instantly sparking debate surrounding its depiction of sex work, Anora stood out to me not only as the best of the fest, but a beacon of where cinema could go amidst the doom and gloom of the industry.

Marketed as a “love story,” it’s at is best when definitively aromantic, with its stripper screwball Cinderella story resonating less because of any fantastical social-climbing aspirations, and more because you believe in its titular character’s economic plight (after all, Cinderella was a bit of a gold-digger). Mikey Madison is a wonder—her thick Brooklyn accent and choreographed acrobatics putting her on par with the best of screwball heroines (think Barbara Stanwyck, Carole Lombard, Judy Holliday). Anora knows what it is and doesn’t mince words. While the final shots of the film seem to have perturbed some, for me, the film’s denouement rings very true to the emotional core that drives Anora—even in its most anarchic zaniness.

Honorable mention: Emilia Pérez for gifting us Karla Sofia Gascón’s performance and making Sicario into a musical.

Marc Glassman: Piece by Piece – It’s hard to believe that a “LEGO doc” could be the best film at TIFF but Piece by Piece is truly that sort of aesthetic success. Combining brilliant animation with a strong narrative structure, Morgan Neville’s creative collaboration with Pharrell Williams captures the growth of an endlessly imaginative performer, composer and producer. We not only hear his music as it has evolved over decades, we see the world as he remembers it—over the distances of time and place. The documentary form is showing itself to being adaptable with hybridity becoming the name of the game. Piece by Piece raises the bar one more time in a manner that is challenging and delightful.

Jason Gorber: Life of Chuck – No TIFF world premiere approached the excellence of this absolute stunner from Mike Flanagan. The adaptation of Stephen King’s novella is joyful, musical, insightful, and deeply moving, a perfect blend of all these elements into a film that’s both artistic and a crowd pleaser. One of the most deserving People’s Choice winners in years, and one that I picked out for the prize on day two of the fest.

Karen Gordon: Anora – Writer/director Sean Baker is a reliably terrific storyteller. Anora is dramatic, a little dangerous, surprisingly funny and heartbreaking all at the same time. He has an impeccable eye for casting, so I’d put my money on Mikey Madison showing up at awards time, but it’s an Oscar calibre cast.

Runners-up: Saturday Night, The Last Republican

Barry Hertz: The Brutalist – They might not build statues of critics, but maybe we should start erecting a monument to Brady Corbet, director of the most ambitious and challenging film of the festival season. A decades-spanning look at the American culture of corruption told through the cracked lens of European endurance, Corbet’s film is about so much more than just one visionary architect and his survival instincts. Measured up against any other TIFF title, and there is simply no competition when it comes to scale, scope and style.

Rachel Ho: Bring Them Down – Cold, uncaring and unapologetically so, Christopher Andrews’ fable-like tale about two families engaged in a war over livestock unravels deep seeded guilt and grief. Barry Keoghan, Christopher Abbott, and Nora-Jane Noone deliver Andrews’ script with devastating heartache and unassuming wit. Every now and then a movie comes along that hits just the right note off darkness for me, Bring Them Down shot me with it right in the chest.

Peter Howell: Conclave – Ralph Fiennes commands attention — and major Oscar buzz — as a Vatican dean of cardinals forced to play detective in Edward Berger’s masterful political thriller, set during a papal election. Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) expertly adapts to the screen the novel by Robert Harris, who specializes in backstage intrigue. Fiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence, fighting doubts about his church but not his faith, combines humility with Colombo-style intuition as he navigates warring progressive and conservative forces seeking to succeed a pope who died suddenly and suspiciously. Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini and Lucian Msamati help round out a divine cast.

Brian D. Johnson: Emilia Pérez –To call it a semi-musical thriller about a Mexican drug lord who ditches his family, fakes his own death, and undergoes transitional surgery to affirm his identity as woman—and that’s just the premise—doesn’t begin to describe this film, which is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.  French director Jacques Audiard doesn’t just pull it off. He’s done something quite miraculous. Emilia Pérez doesn’t work like a musical. The music creates a liminal space, where the transition from spoken to sung dialogue is at times imperceptible  As melodies emerge, they don’t launch the drama into operatic flights of fancy so much as take the characters into greater depths or psychological realism. And even without knowing the language, in the bevelled clarity of the lyrics, I found myself hearing the film in Spanish through the simple beat of the subtitles. There are dance sequences that pulse with the thrum of history, and sustained stretches of pure narrative where I forgot I was watching a musical. That a film this original, audacious and revolutionary—artistically and politically—can also be a crowd pleaser is uncanny. It’s as if Audiard has split some kind of cinematic atom. And the actors! The film’s female ensemble won Best Actress in Cannes. The Oscars don’t do that. But expect nominations for Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón, who may become the first trans actress to win an Academy Award.

Honourable mentions: Conclave, We Live in Time, Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, Saturday Night, Rumours, Flow

Chris Knight: U Are the Universe – Just breeze past director Pavlo Ostrikov’s hokey sci-fi setup, a future in which piloted spaceships take nuclear waste to Jupiter’s moon Callisto because — why, exactly? — and strap in for a fantastic, emotional story that looks at love, loss, and loneliness on a cosmic scale. Andriy (Volodymyr Kravchuk) is on his third trip to Callisto — a four-year round trip — when Earth explodes, leaving him with just the ship’s computer for company. But then a message arrives from the female pilot (Alexia Depicker) of another far-flung vessel, forcing this lone wolf to forge a connection with what might be the only other human alive. Shades of TV’s Red Dwarf and Duncan Jones’ Moon (the computer looks a lot like the one in his movie) infuse this deeply human story. Interplanetary space may be cold, but U Are the Universe has a warm beating heart.

Pat Mullen: Emilia Pérez – A star is born in Karla Sofía Gascón, who steals the show in this exhilarating narco musical by French maestro Jacques Audiard. Gascón plays the titular character who finds a new lease on life after transitioning and escaping her past as a violent drug lord. The actor boldly plays the character on both sides of the transition, doing so with chameleon-like adaptability while singing to boot. This incredibly brave performance explores her character’s duality as well as her own. As Emilia, though, Gascón carries herself with similar authority as the former kingpin draws upon her past life to inform her present one. This performance is groundbreaking and you can feel it. It’s also simply a lively, vivacious, and fully lived-in performance that ranks atop the best turns by any actor this year.

Honourable mentions: Mistress Dispeller, Conclave, No Other Land, Patrice: The Movie, Piece by Piece, Flow, All We Imagine as Light, Really Happy Someday, The Last Republican

“Unofficial” honourable mention: Maria

Andrew Parker: The Gesuidouz – Since I’m sure plenty of people will be – rightfully – singing the praises of high profile selections like Anora, Universal Language, Conclave, We Live in Time, and All We Imagine as Light (any of which could take this slot on my list of TIFF’s best), I’m going to use this chance to highlight the smaller film that wowed me the most and that I would love to see again: Japanese filmmaker Kenichi Ugana’s The Gesuidouz. This irreverent Midnight Madness selection tells the surreally hilarious and uniquely heartwarming tale of a splatter movie obsessed punk band – fronted by a morose, but enthusiastic young woman who believes she’ll become a part of the fabled “27 club” by her birthday in one year’s time – that’s trying to make a go of things despite being terrible at pretty much everything they attempt. After being evicted and forced out of the big city, they luck into a job (and unusually steady gig) working on farmland tended to by a kindly, foul mouthed old woman. The Gesuidouz is exactly the kind of thing I hope to discover at a film festival: something new, original, and outside the box. Reminiscent at times of Aki Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America, this is a hilariously charming film with a lot to say about artistic perseverance, building to a disarmingly moving and subtle finale. I choose it as my best of the festival not only because of its comedic greatness and emotional maturity, but also with hopes that some distributor will stumble across it, see the same great qualities, and bring it back to the larger worldwide cult audience it rightfully deserves. Sure, there were better films at the festival destined for awards greatness, but few left the same unshakable impression that I saw something truly special.

Gilbert Seah: Disclaimer – Who would ever imagine that a Primetime series would be the best thing at TIFF?  The festival managed to get the full seven episodes at the last minute to ‘wow’ audiences with the most exciting and suspenseful psychological thriller that makes compulsive watching from start to end, all six hours of it. Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen), receives lewd photos of his wife (Cate Blanchett) from a man (Kevin Kline) whose son drowned while saving Robert’s son. The man wants retribution as the drowned son apparently had an affair with Robert’s wife. Excellent career-best performances all around from Kline, Blanchett and, surprisingly, Cohen in dead serious mode.  A few reminders of Cuarón’s genius as in the drowning scene that is reminiscent of a seaside segment in Roma and the way he comfortably switches the drama among the characters so effortlessly. I don’t normally review series, but Disclaimer was so compelling that I stayed for all six hours, skipping my next planned film. A definite MUST-SEE!

Kate Taylor: Universal Language – What if, instead of the English, the Persians had colonized Manitoba alongside the French? In Matthew Rankin’s fanciful fable, Universal Language, the citizens of Winnipeg speak Farsi and enroll their kids in French immersion. This whimsical film satirizes Canadian linguistic politics inside a distinctively Iranian tale as it follows two sisters attempting to free a frozen banknote from an icy sidewalk so that they can buy a classmate new glasses. With deft irony, that story intersects with one about a man from Montreal coming home to see his mother, a poignant metaphor for the immigrant’s confused identities. Both pointed and charming – for me, a real coup de coeur.

Dave Voigt: REDACTED – To put it simply, my favourite film from this edition of the Toronto International Film Festival is the one that outside political forces (who actually haven’t SEEN the film) decide you shouldn’t be able see. REDACTED deserved an audience, it deserved to be seen, agreed with or disagreed with like any other piece of cinema that already went through the vetting process of getting funded and ultimately approved to play at a film festival. While I can appreciate the emotions involved with the subject matter, the myriad of social, public safety and even political issues at play in what led to the ultimate “pausing” (or at least attempted censorship of this film and its screenings which will now take place this coming Tuesday at TIFF Lightbox), it doesn’t mean it was right. Canada cannot be a country where we don’t share or tell uncomfortable stories; over the course of our history we’ve done too much of that already, let’s be a country where we have some hard discussions about world issues and let REDACTED be seen.

Honourable Mentions: Anora, Emilia Pérez

Rachel West: Conclave – Edward Berger’s Conclave may not only be the best of the festival, it may be the best film of the year. After his Oscar-winning epic All Quiet on the Western Front, Berger takes an intimate yet equally grand look at the selection of a new pope. As tense as any thriller with enough twists to keep viewers on the edge of the dialogue-laden drama, Ralph Fiennes is utterly superb as he leads an excellent ensemble that includes Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucien Msamati, Isabella Rossellini, and Sergio Castellitto. Engrossing, relevant, and exciting, no other film at TIFF comes close to Conclave‘s perfection.

Honourable mentions: Shepherds, The Room Next Door, Bring Them Down, The Return, Mistress Dispeller