January 10, 2026

Welcome to the TFCA weekly, a round-up of reviews and coverage by members of the Toronto Film Critics Association.

In Release this Week

The Choral (dir. Nicholas Hytner)

“The Choral is a beautifully made film with a great cast and impeccable credentials, a collaboration between writer Alan Bennett and director Nicholas Hytner, as were The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. Alas, it’s a bit dull,” admits Liz Braun at Original Cin. “The characters do not feel fully three dimensional and nobody’s fate is particularly moving. The storytelling moves uneasily between drama and comedy. It is all very understated. Understated is usually a good thing. Not so much here.”

“If the film about forming and survival of a choral (choir) during WWI sounds boring or uneventful, this film, The Choral, written by often collaborators Alan Bennett and directed by Nicholas Hytner (The  Madness of King  George), serves to prove otherwise,” says Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “The importance of music is clearly established at the start of the film, through the more elderly population.  Music transcends everything, including war.  The choral master worked in Germany for several years and therefore faced prejudice against his hiring for the task.”

“There’s plenty of fine singing, however, and lovely glimpses of the town’s rural beauty. When the great Simon Russell Beale appears as Elgar, the film looks like it might go some place interesting, but he’s gone almost as soon as he appears,” adds Glenn Sumi at Go Ahead Sumi. “What we’re left with is a slight, predictable, innocuous film that is studiously inoffensive. Even its most amusing scene, in which a soldier returning from the front lines with one arm entreats his former girlfriend to give him a hand job, is tastefully done. This film desperately needs more friction.”

“As the story develops, it becomes clear that Bennett is examining a society that is slowly rupturing. Most of the working-class lads are still willing to sing in the choir and go to war but they’re also smart enough to make jokes about the upper classes and the Church that is repressing them,” notes Marc Glassman at Classical FM. “One of the young men falls in love with Mary (Amara Okereke), a beautiful Black girl, still a rarity in British towns at the time, while another woman, Bella (Emma Fairn), abandons her wait for her lost soldier and embarks on an affair with another lad in the choir. When Emma’s former lover Clyde (Jacob Durman) unexpectedly  shows up, alive but with an amputated arm, sparks fly—especially because the injured lad has a much better voice for the lead part than Alderman Duxbury. It being England, somehow, he is accommodated, although with a bit of drama.”

“Predictable and staid to a fault, Hytner’s film is a sleepy tour through all the kind of wartime clichés that you can imagine, and a few that you possibly did not even previously consider,” yawns Barry hertz at The Globe and Mail. “I’ll give the director and his regular screenwriting partner Alan Bennett a bonus point for inserting the most unlikely of first-base sex scenes. Not even Fiennes, who appears to be pushing against the sheer rote-ness of the material at every turn, seems to be enjoying himself.”

The Chronology of Water (dir. Kristen Stewart)

“The film mirrors the memoir’s style, with memories and experiences overlapping like waves—showing life as fragmented yet connected. Water (especially her life as a swimmer) functions as a powerful motif for escape, transformation, and emotional depth throughout the film,” observes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “But director Stewart’s artsy style can be overpowering at times, to the point that one wonders what all the fuss is about.  Yet, one has to give Stewart credit for trying.”

Father Mother Sister Brother (dir. Jim Jarmusch)

“Jarmusch has structured his tales around conversations that lead to false assumptions. In ‘Father,’ we realize that the Waits character isn’t telling his children anything about what is going on in his life. They assume he’s broke and lonely while he’s actually making money—somehow—and has friends and lovers. In the even sadder ‘Mother,’ Charlotte Rampling’s pretentious novelist has a yearly tea party with her daughters in Dublin, a city they all inhabit,” says Marc Glassman at Classical FM. “They truly have nothing to say to each other, but all insist on keeping up a pretense of civility. And in the much more affecting ‘Sister Brother,’ it’s obvious that the twins really never understood their parents who seem to have lived out an outré existence in Paris while lacking the finances to actually do anything significant in their lives.”

“The three stories are all equally interesting, but the last one the least engaging for the one reason that the actors are less proficient as the stars that perform in the first two stories like [Tom] Waits and Adam Driver in the first and Cate Blanchett,” says Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “The decision to have the stories set in different cities around the world is an excellent one, giving the film variation and change.”

Homegrown (dir. Michael Premo)

“Homegrown is a very timely, disturbing and unforgettable documentary that captures key candid moments of the insurrection on Capitol Hill,” says Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “A definite must-see for Trump supporters to see how they are perceived.”

The Mother and the Bear (dir. Johnny Ma)

“Johnny Ma seems to have found a spiritual home there with his latest, The Mother and the Bear. The Chinese-born Canadian filmmaker made his previous two features — Old Stone and To Live, To Sing, both excellent — in China, but he has relocated for this one and fully leans into the Manitoba city’s oddness,” writes Chris Knight at Original Cin. “He films sidewalk snow shovelling as though it were an Olympic sport (maybe it should be!) and uses the offbeat folk song ‘Wonderful Winnipeg’ in the opening. It was also employed as the theme for Maddin’s My Winnipeg, but since Guy himself makes a cameo in Ma’s movie, I’m guessing he was fine with the homage.”

“Even before Ma’s film settles into its quirky comedic rhythms, The Mother and the Bear represents a dual set of departures for its director,” writes Barry Hertz at The Globe and Mail. “While the Chinese-Canadian filmmaker has previously trained his rather unrelenting eye on serious-minded narratives, including the 2016 thriller Old Stone and 2020’s opera-set melodrama To Live, to Sing, the material of The Mother and the Bear is defiantly buoyant. But more than that, Ma has managed to make a proudly Winnipeg-first film without having ever lived in the Gateway to the West before filming there.”

“Despite the common theme the film has with Montreal, ma belle, the themes of a meddling mother, a mother visiting Canada for the first time, and matchmaking are not new ideas,” notes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “The audience can also find it difficult to sympathize with a bumbling, meddling mother who does harm, like destroy another relationship, and lie her way around. Director Ma’s film is a quiet, pleasant one, but nothing fresh is0one display and watching the film plod along is a rather boring experience.”

People We Meet on Vacation (dir. Brett Haley)

“In People We Meet on Vacation, the jokes are not funny and the jokes that Poppy cracks are more annoying to both Alex and the audience,” writes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “And the film is already too predictable anyway.”

Primate (dir. Johannes Roberts)

“What Primate ultimately becomes is a delivery system for some genuinely jaw-dropping bursts of violence seen in mainstream horror,” writes Thom Ernst at Original Cin. “When Ben the chimp is front and centre, the film crackles with danger. When he isn’t, it stalls in familiar teen-drama territory, weighed down by romantic frictions and the sort of friends whose primary function is to be loudly expendable. Kotsur’s role, meanwhile, seems largely confined to intermittent adult supervision and calmly dispensing exposition.”

“The film succeeds in satisfying action-horror fans with formulaic action set pieces and a standard storyline, complete with an ending that is ripe for a sequel,” adds Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “Primate is essentially an expensive Hollywood B-movie with the terrorizing beast being a chimp with a severe case of rabies.  Whether a rabid monkey is able to go through the lengths shown in the film at terrorising its human victims, or whether the monkey has sufficient strength, is immaterial, so long as jump scares abound and audiences are on the edge of their seats.”

Rosemead (dir. Eric Lin)

“Solid performances by the two leads; Liu is phenomenal, in a role removed from what we expect, and Shou is outstanding as a lost soul,” observes Anne Brodie at What She Said. “It’s hard to take but advocates for mental health, based on a true story. It took Liu seven years to get the film made.”

“For all its deeply compassionate intentions and the bruising performances by Liu and Shou, Rosemead feels not just raw but unfulfilled,” notes Liam Lacey at Original Cin. “It doesn’t help that several of the secondary performances are stilted and the script, spiraling over a few weeks, suggests the mechanics of an after-school special, checking various sociological boxes — school, medicine, law enforcement — without the relief of either remedy or catharsis.”

File Under Miscellaneous

At The Globe and Mail, Barry Hertz forecasts 2026 and it looks pretty bleak. “The word I keep coming back to when I start thinking about the next era of the industry is ‘devaluation.’ The back catalogue of Warner Bros. Discovery is an opportunity to exploit intellectual property, not a canon to be treasured and protected,” writes Hertz. “The essential bulwark of the theatrical window (meaning the amount of time it takes for a film to go from theatrical exclusivity to the home entertainment market) is an annoying impediment to pumping up streaming subscriptions, so those companies can make more movies that disappear into the algorithmic vortex, never to be seen or talked about again. Movies are not movies, but ‘content.’ Audiences are not to be respected and served, but prevented from becoming part of subscriber ‘churn.’ The Academy Awards are going to be on YouTube in a few short years, for crying out loud.”

TV Talk/Series Stuff

At What She Said, Anne Brodie recommends Murdoch in the Saddle to escape the snow: “It’s 1910 and Murdoch Mysteries takes us on a brief train ride to Calgary, where Det. Murdoch and Inspector Brackenreid are to attend the first ever Calgary Stampede, known then simply as The Stampede.” There’s also the tenth season of Shetland to keep you busy: “crupulously well knit and played out in under an hour makes for classic, engaging mystery, set against the brutal beauty of the island. It’s atmospheric magic and that signature score that gets under your skin. A superior series.”