April 25, 2025

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 Accountant 2 (dir. Gavin O’Connor)

“At least it’s often far more pleasant than an audit.” – Barry Hertz, The Globe and Mail

“Don’t get me started on depreciation.” – Chris Knight, The National Post

Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie (dir. David Bushell)

“Director David Bushell accesses wonderful archival footage and follows them together and alone, sniping at each other, describing their decades long bond and telling their unique stories of their upbringing, Tommy in Calgary, AB, Cheech in LA’s notoriusly tough South Central where he witnessed three murders by the time he was seven,” says Anne Brodie at What She Said. “He’s overcome his impovershed roots, he’s eloquent and happy; at one point he moved to Canada to avoid the draft and begin a new life as a potter (his beloved hobby). He worked at a ski resort! Tommy discovered a hot new singer, a child named Michael Jackson just as the Supremes discovered him. Lots to marvel at here, and if it feels dated, well, it doesn’t matter. It’s revealing and funny and reminds us that voices of protest and comedy are helpful these days.”

Havoc (dir. Gareth Evans)

At The Globe and Mail, Barry Hertz says the film “rivals The Raid 2 in terms of body count while upping the star power thanks to maniacally committed performances from Tom Hardy and Timothy Olyphant” and chats with director Gareth Evans. “We had some really good squibs going off, but I always lean on Andi Novianto, who has been my VFX guy since I started in this industry. There’s nobody better at doing blood and debris and bullet hits like him,” says Evans.

“Tom Hardy (Mad Max, The Bikeriders), arguably the only action hero actor who can act is the best thing about the new (actually the film has set on the shelf in limbo since almost the Pandemic) action film Havoc,” notes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto.

“Action specialist Evans exerts similar magnetism in his two best films, The Raid: Redemption and The Raid 2. Favouring long fluid takes, hand-held cameras and an almost cartoonish collision of characters, he immerses viewers in the brutality and choreography of fight scenes that owe a heavy debt to the kinetic creativity of Hong Kong directors John Woo and Ringo Lam,” writes Peter Howell at the Toronto Star. “Yet Havoc seems more like a facsimile of past glories rather than anything new and fresh. Filmed in Cardiff — Welsh filmmaker Evans didn’t have to travel far from home — it’s paced to a throbbing score, features scarlet-saturated cinematography and is set in a grimy unnamed American metropolis that looks like a simulacrum of New York City. It’s just like a place you’d see in a video game.

The Island Between Tides (dir. Austin Andrews and Andrew Holmes)

“It’s truly amazing to run into a story that you can’t believe actually hasn’t been told yet,” says Dave Voigt on In the Seats with in a conversation with writer/directors Austin Andrews and Andrew Holmes. “Wildly considered to be the lost J.M. Barrie story and one that Alfred Hitchcock desperately tried to adapt for the big screen, The Island Between Tides is the kind of genre cinema that evokes memories of films like The Innocents and even Hitchcock’s Rebecca (not the crappy Netflix version).”

“It’s a crepuscular creepy tale, pitched as a supernatural thriller and ghost story but, thanks to a dose of time loops and other temporal anomalies, is a science-fiction drama as well,” notes Chris Knight at Original Cin. “Paloma Kwiatkowski stars as Lily, troubled young mother to infant Jared. Years earlier, on a wilderness camping trip with her parents and sister Zinnia (played as an adult by Camille Sullivan), little Lily vanished for several days, reappearing none the worse for wear, and apparently unaware that she’d been gone for more than an hour.”

The Legend of Ochi (dir. Isaiah Saxon)

“When clips for The Legend of Ochi were first released, a contingent of way-too-online movie fans rushed to decry what they assumed to be the work of Artificial Intelligence, so smooth and clean were Saxon’s images. Certainly no low-budget film could offer such fantastical creations, right? But AI hasn’t touched a single frame of Saxon’s largely handcrafted visuals, which he spent years and untold amounts of sweat equity developing and fine-tuning. Some of us, it seems, are just too eager to expect the worst,” admits Barry Hertz at The Globe and Mail. “Then again, if you were to feed the screenplays from a handful of ’80s children’s classics into the maw of ChatGPT, well, who’s to say what kind of Legend of Ochi might be born.” Hertz also chats with director Saxon about that online brouhaha: “‘It’s quite disheartening as to what the median film literacy is out there,’ says Saxon, who has confirmed that his film is AI-free, created instead with a mixture of puppetry, animatronics, practical special effects and digital VFX.”

On Swift Horses (dir. Daniel Minahan)

“Australian actor Jacob Elordi’s current heartthrob status will bring folks in to see Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses. And boy, do we get to see a lot of him,” advises Anne Brodie at What She Said. “Events and emotions take a toll, and plans go awry – many a slip twixt cup and lip. And oddly, a lone horse has befriended Julius a key element. This dense three hander is operatic at times and works on the principle that nothing is certain, especially where the heart is concerned.

“Australian actor Elordi — who played Elvis Presley in Priscilla, a preppie in Saltburn, and a younger version of Richard Gere in Oh, Canada — seems to be cornering the sexually ambiguous, hot indie guy film market. Edgar-Jones, meanwhile — best known for her terrific work as the bright misfit Irish school girl in the TV adaption of Sally Rooney’s Normal People — has a more internalized performance, while consistently looking as chic as Audrey Hepburn at a photoshoot,” says Liam Lacey at Original Cin. “On Swift Horses is best admired as a visual tone poem to the era, not so much a realistic story. The conceit of casting characters who seem too splendid for their surroundings evokes the movie melodramas of the fifties, the time of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.”

“A polite and well-intentioned heartbreaker that cannot quite convey the heightened emotions roiling its sexually frustrated characters, On Swift Horses kicks an awful lot of dust in your eye,” says Barry Hertz at The Globe and Mail. “Minahan’s film lacks an inner fire – it drips with dispassion. Given the novel’s searing themes and the prestige of the film’s cast, On Swift Horses should gallop straight into your heart. Instead, it limps along, the sunset forever looming in the distance.”

The Shrouds (dir. David Cronenberg 🇨🇦)

“[B]eneath its playful maze of a plot there are sombre reflections on love and death that feel quietly confessional and as intimate as anything in the director’s body of work,” says Brian D. Johnson at Zoomer in an interview that sees Cronenberg get extremely personal. “So he’s not me,” Cronenberg tells Johnson of his lead, Karsh. “But I wouldn’t have understood these things Karsh is going through if I hadn’t experienced most of them myself. Very straightforward things like wanting to get into the box with Carolyn when she was being buried because I couldn’t bear to be separated from her. Other things that Karsh says and does are things that I have said and done. But there’s a limit to that. You want the characters to take over and become alive and do and say things that surprise you.”

“Both Becca and her sister are played by Diane Kruger, who is easily The Shrouds’s MVP, charged with embodying the many variants of painful longing Cronenberg seeks to invoke,” notes José Teodoro at Bloodvine. “If, despite its goofier elements, The Shrouds moves you, as it does me, a lot of credit must be given to Kruger, whose subtle dynamics perfectly align with the film’s emotional core, while eschewing histrionics. The difficulty of apprehending Cronenberg’s delicate tone is, in fact, perfectly encapsulated in the contrast between Kruger and Cassel, a gifted actor, but ill-cast here, whose blunt line readings fall increasingly flat as the film gets weirder.”

At Original Cin, Liam Lacey speaks with David Cronenberg about death, grief, and online conspiracy theories. “You can’t get away from it. I mean, there’s something in the air. I was thinking of a line by the character of Terry, played by Diane Kruger, who says to Karsh, ‘So that’s your grief strategy?’ Part of it is paranoia and guilt,” says Cronenberg. “People say, ‘I should have done something. Something was going on with that doctor. He wasn’t paying enough attention. Was the medication wrong? We should have gone to that clinic in Texas.’ Maybe you have regrets and if you can feel that you have penetrated the veil of death and dying is to say, ‘I know what’s really going on.’ That’s what gives you power. Anybody who is a conspiracy theorist feels that they have some special knowledge, some control. That can be very cathartic and soothing for somebody who’s trying to deal with death.”

“An enormously thoughtful, patient and frequently funny dissection of memory, sex and the expiration date that we are all staring down, The Shrouds lands as something of a grand syllabus of Cronenberg Studies,” says Barry Hertz at The Globe and Mail. “Take Cassel – collaborating with the director here for a third time after supporting roles in Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method – who is clearly stylized as a Cronenberg doppelganger (with the same high shock of white hair and black-on-black attire) who even lives in the same part of midtown Toronto (this might be the only film in history to shout-out United Bakers Dairy Restaurant and Cedarvale Park). But Karsh is also reckoning with the same deeply personal issues the filmmaker himself faced after the death of his wife, Carolyn, in 2017.”

“If this were anything but a David Cronenberg film, the situation might seem laughable or at least implausible. But Cronenberg has a knack for seeing the future; his 1977 film Rabid anticipated stem cell therapy,” observes Peter Howell at the Toronto Star. “And the point he’s making with The Shrouds is one he and other grieving people would understand all too well: they’d do anything to see a lost loved one again, even if only through a peeping screen that seems ghoulish to others.”

Until Dawn (dir. David F. Sandberg)

“This familiar concept, jokingly referred to by a character as being ‘like that one movie,’ is a trope seen in films like Happy Death Day and The Final Girls,” writes Rachel West at the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. “Even that joke in Blair Butler and Gary Duberman’s script sounds familiar. It presents a Groundhog Day-esque nightmare where daily alterations lead to both significant and minor repercussions. The on-screen deaths are a mix of horrific and humorous, varying in their creativity to elicit both shock and laughter. With some time loops more brisk than others, Until Dawn doesn’t let the horrors linger, at times to its detriment. Giving some of these visions breathing room before the cycle repeats would have kicked the tension up a much-needed notch.”

“Until Dawn is a gleeful reimaging of the classic slasher film, modifying the tropes enough to turn the familiar into something fresh. It’s a comedy, of sorts, self-aware to the point of being meta. And it delivers kills that are sometimes horrifying, sometimes shocking, sometimes brutal, and, in ways unexpected, sometimes hilarious,” shares Thom Ernst at Original Cin. “Until Dawn offers a best-of-the-horror-genre hit list:  Insanely attractive twentysomethings set up for the slaughter, eerie buildings, dark basements, creepy gas station attendants (Peter Stormare), cryptic warnings, stormy nights, no cell phone service, lots of jump scares and a stoic, unstoppable masked killer.  The movie combines traditions, tropes, and horror film lore to deliver a savagely original slasher film. It becomes an understatement to say that not all is as it seems.”

“Director Sandberg relies on one too many jump scares, which make many of the audience around me at the promo screening jump out of their seats,” says Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “The horror special effects work well, especially the exploding bodies in one sequence of the film.  The horror story also lacks an evil villain, though Dr. Hill (Peter Stormare) manages a few scares.”

A Festival of Festival Coverage: Hot Docs Returns

At the Toronto Star, Peter Howell previews Hot Docs and offers ten picks for the festival, including Always: “Through striking black-and-white and colour cinematography, the film captures both the lyrical beauty and hard realities of Gong’s world: cooking over a smoky campfire, tending livestock and enduring loneliness and loss. The poetic words of Gong and his classmates, with themes that include desolation and keeping secrets, are set against state propaganda broadcasts, the agonies of farming — swine flu rages — and the wisdom of elders concerning life and fate. Described as ‘a letter to childhood,’ the film is tender, honest and unforgettable, evoking a powerful sense of innocence lost.”

At Original Cin, Liz Braun, Thom Ernst, Kim Hughes, Liam Lacey, and Jim Slotek offer capsule reviews of 28 films and counting across not one but two festival previews.

At Original Cin, Jim Slotek chats with Maxim Derevianko, director of Ai Weiwei’s Turnadot: “So, we had a documentary that was to be about the creative process of Ai Weiwei and this opera. And not even two weeks into production, COVID arrived. And the theatre had to close, everything disappeared. Theatres, cinemas, museums, everything that was about art was supposed to shut down,” says Derevianko. “And that’s what changed in this movie. It was no longer about the creative process of Ai Weiwei. It was about, why are we doing art, and why do we need it? Just as human beings, why do we express ourselves this way?”

At Classical FM, Marc Glassman previews the festival: “Documentaries aren’t usually so exciting, nor are their festivals, but Hot Docs’ fate looms large in the city. Over the past 30 years, Hot Docs has become a harbinger of springtime, when Toronto emerges from its deep wintry slumber, awakening to this city’s possibilities as clothes are tossed off and our exuberant high spirits reassert themselves.”

At POV Magazine, Susan G. Cole profiles producer Justine Pimlott, whose Parade: Queer Acts of Love and Resistance opened the festival: “One thing you can count on about Pimlott: she goes for it. While she was at the film board she heard word of Cynthia Scott’s project that became The Company of Strangers, a brilliant feature about a group of diverse women who become stranded when their tour bus breaks down. She went to Scott and said, basically, that she’d do anything the director required in order to participate and learn. Scott suggested she record the auditions for the film, many of which involved improvisation,” writes Cole. “The experience sowed the seeds of Pimlott’s career and values as a filmmaker. She learned about the audition process and the value of diversity, representation, intersectionality and, even though she was there as a novice sound technician, casting.”

At POV Magazine, Pat Mullen previews Hot Docs and asks where the festival stands after a rocky year. “Perhaps a bigger question remains for Hot Docs’ future relating to its stature in the festival ecosystem. Jump back to 2019, and Hot Docs really had top-tier status with the calibre of films, range of celebrities (who drive sales and media attention), and industry power. It struggled coming out of the pandemic, though, in part due to the shifting landscape and hierarchy of festivals with Sundance coming out swinging as the A-game doc fest and SXSW stepping up as a hot stop. The latter was awkwardly glaring last year with the number of Canadian films that premiered in Austin, Texas before a stop at Hot Docs. And the number of films from last year’s Tribeca festival is concerning,” says Mullen. “If 2025 marks a recovery year for Hot Docs, it can therefore piggyback on the tried and tested hits from festivals like Sundance to fill the rooms and connect with audiences. Sure-fire crowd-pleasers include films like Ryan White’s Come See Me in the Good Light—my favourite doc of the year so far in a runway for its portrait of two poets facing a cancer diagnosis together.” Mullen also has an interview with Saints and Warriors director Patrick Shannon about a doc that’s among the homegrown highlights.

(And pick up a copy of POV at the Hot Docs registration desk to read articles including Susan G. Cole’s cover story and contributions from members Marc Glassman, Liam Lacey, Courtney Small, Jason Gorber, Pat Mullen, and Telefilm Canada Emerging Critic Award winner Alexander Mooney!)

TV Talk/Series Stuff

At The Globe and Mail, Barry Hertz checks out the new season of Andor: “Spread across 12 hour-long episodes, the new season of Andor represents a steep drop-off for Cassian and company. Small problems from the first season – the hefty amount of time it takes to set up conflict, a proliferation of side characters who are neither compelling nor narratively important – become distressingly big and insurmountable obstacles this time around,” writes Hertz. He also chats with the stars about wars and not talking politics.

At Queer Horror Movies, Joe Lipsett says the slow build is one of Andor’s strengths: “Gilroy is extremely patient when it comes to laying this season’s foundation. This deliberate pace works better for certain storylines than others: Cassian getting stranding between the rebel factions is pedantic and repetitive, especially if we don’t see these characters return later in the season. On the flip side, the political intrigue mixed into Mon Mothma’s wedding festivities is exciting, even if it feels like the early stages of something much larger. Patience is key in these first three episodes.”

At What She Said, Anne Brodie binges gets fashion advice in Wear Whatever the F You Want: “Simple psychology, encouragement and endless choices from the wardrobe racks and then family and friends’ reactions,” while This Hour Has 22 Minutes brings a light touch to election coverage.

At Original Cin, Liam Lacey breaks down the documentary Butterfly in the Maze of Human Trafficking: “Such a complex topic calls for a documentary that provides broad clarity, an empirically based perspective, grounded in sociology and criminology research. There are qualified Canadian academics who study human trafficking, including Wilfred Laurier University’s Katrin Roots …who has studied and written critically about the social and legal meaning of ‘human trafficking’ in the Canadian context.”