May 23, 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

Air Force Elite: Thunderbirds (dir. Matt Wilcox)

“Despite its flaws, the doc provides solid insight into the risk and training of the individuals, gaining one’s respect, undoubtedly for bravery, coverage, and dedication,” says Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto.

Bad Shabbos (dir. Daniel Robbins)

“There’s an understated level of comedic precision in Bad Shabbos that is hard to ignore as the comedy always feels earned and genuine with the likes of David Paymer, Kyra Sedgwick and believe it or not Method Man stealing the entire show. It’s not a telegraphed or overt funny, it’s a smart and honest kind fun which feels like it is pulled directly from the veins of the New York comedy gods that came before this story,” says Dave Voigt on In the Seats with…, who interviews director Daniel Robbins.

“Get their solutions based, understanding doorman Cliff ‘Method Man’ Smith in a standout performance that is the heart and muscle of the film,” advises Anne Brodie at What She Said. “He says he’ll do anything for the family and concocts a plan, but just as they are about to carry it out, Meg’s no-nonsense, culturally WASP parents Beth (Catherine Curtin) and John (John Bedford Lloyd) arrive for dinner. From here on in Bad Shabbos becomes a sly brew of stealth, bold decisions so bizarre and funny they would be unbelievable except for Cliff the doorman whose sheer brilliance mimics a runaway train. It opens corny and silly, quickly becomes edgy and the third act – wow!”

“The new Jewish comedy/drama Bad Shabbos follows a Jewish family experiencing a bad Shabbos,” explains Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “The film plays like one of the too familiar Hollywood dysfunctional family gatherings, such as Thanksgiving or Christmas, so do not expect anything new, except maybe humour on the Jewish tradition.”

Fear Street: Prom Queen (dir. Matt Palmer)

“Should you be of the Gen X, Millennial or Xennial generation, Prom Queen will feel like a great throwback to the movies of your youth,” writes Rachel West at That Shelf. “The ones you thought showed you exactly what you high school would be like. It was hard not to be disappointed that there were far fewer dance-offs in reality than what movies of the time made us believe, so it’s a delight to catch one awkwardly epic one here between prom queens. It’s perfectly cringe-worthy, with all involved making Elaine Benes look like Baryshnikov.”

“The film also pays homage most of all to Mean Girls and the story pushes the point to the limit,” notes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “Even the parents of the meanest girl are just as mean to poor Lori, who has to endure all their belittling. The film also works well as a whodunit, with the audience curious as to the identity of the killer. The film moves on with a plot twist even after the killer’s identity is revealed. The film is good old, violent and dirty fun, especially for teens, as most of the adults in the film are depicted as grown idiots.”

“Fear Street: Prom Queen tells a tightly packed, unencumbered story in the same fashion of the 1980s B-grade slashers it’s trying to emulate,” says Andrew Parker at The Gate. “This isn’t high art, but as late night snack viewing or slumber party fare, it’s satisfying sugar rush cinema.”

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (dir. Laura Piani)

“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life follows Agathe (Camille Rutherford) a bookseller in Paris’ tony Shakespeare & Co. who wants to write a book, inspired by her lifelong love of the works of Jane Austen. And not just any book. She determines to write one that will connect her with Austen for all time,” writes Anne Brodie at What She Said. “An improbable, head spinning parade of events that aren’t quite set due to a lack of cohesion and it’s not funny despite being a romcom.  Still, it’s nice to think Jane Austen rides again.”

“The biggest problem here is the script. Piani wants us to meet the characters, notably Agathe, and then reveal things about them as the story unfolds. It’s a time-honoured storytelling technique, but unfortunately, she’s left too much of the connective tissue out. We all know we’re watching a rom-com and therefore we pretty much know what to expect, but even still, relationships are not fully explored, and we’re asked to make too many frustrating leaps,” says Karen Gordon at Original Cin. “On the other hand, Piani has a knack for atmosphere and tone. The film has a lovely, homey warmth that evokes a quieter place and time: a country life, a gracious mansion, time away from the manic world with its expectations that force us into routines and exhaust us, so that we don’t feel like we have the time and space to get above them, to clear our minds to feel for what is truly important to us.”

“What could’ve gone a few extra miles instead gives the viewer a bare minimum, and while the least Jane Austen Wrecked My Life has to offer is still adequate, there’s a frustration that sets in by the end, knowing that this could’ve been more than simple matinee fodder,” adds Andrew Parker at The Gate.

“Laura Piani has made a lovely entry into the field of romantic comedies,” says Marc Glassman at Classical FM. “Probably the most interesting element in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is that the film is played out bilingually, with all the main characters being able to converse in French and English. The standout performance in a fine ensemble is, appropriately, Camille Rutherford—in real life, the daughter of a British father and French mother—who morphs from a badly dressed bookseller into a beautiful young writer who has to decide the trajectory of her life over the course of the film. Like Austen and her genre, Piani’s film is worth embracing.”

Lilo & Stitch (dir. Dean Fleischer Camp)

“The live action remake of Disney’s 2002 animated classic Lilo & Stitch earns its place alongside the likes of Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella and the underrated Christopher Robin as one of the very best repurposings of existing Mouse House IP,” notes Andrew Parker at The Gate.

“If you know the original, there’s little in the way of surprises here. Stitch, designed as a walking weapon of mass destruction, escapes a galactic tribunal and arrives on Earth, where he hopes to avoid capture by using Lilo as a human shield. Of course, the kid’s heartfelt feelings about family (or ‘ohana in Hawaiian) eventually convince Stitch that it’s better to belong than to destroy,” says Chris Knight at Original Cin. “My biggest complaint is that the movie imagines you can revive someone with a car battery if the defibrillator fails to do its job, but I’m here to say that the 12 volts under the hood are no match for professional life-saving equipment. I can’t find much else to fault about the film, except that it didn’t need remaking in the first place.”

“The combined animation live-action film is more catered to the kids who should have no problem enjoying the film,” adds Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “For the older folk, the film tends to be quite a bore, with childish jokes, an unimaginative and silly plot and a lack of adult humour.”

“Regarded in a vacuum, 2025’s Lilo & Stitch is fine, and likely to entertain the littles,” advises Jackson Weaver at CBC. “But compared to a stimulating, genre-defining, all-ages masterpiece from two decades ago, it’s nothing but demoralizing. Where once we could expect to move forward with our movies, Lilo & Stitch shows we’d rather just make them brighter and dumber.”

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (dir. Christopher McQuarrie)

“But as with all the M:I movies, it’s the journey rather than the destination that matters, and this one doesn’t disappoint. Although I have to say it doesn’t quite match the summer-popcorn insanity of the last one,” writes Chris Knight at the National Post. “This one has an extended sequence of Cruise infiltrating the sunken Russian submarine, which decides to slowly roll over on the ocean bed like a restless sleeper, causing missiles and torpedoes to rattle around inside the hull like so much uncooked spaghetti. There’s also the bit promised by the posters – Gabriel and Ethan fighting in the sky, the latter clinging to the wing of an upside-down yellow biplane.”

“Not to put too fine a point on this or anything, but Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is an interminable slog,” admits Liz Braun at Original Cin. “It feels mean-spirited in the extreme to criticize this film, given that it’s one of the great hopes of the summer season and given that Mr. Cruise singlehandedly resurrected movie theatres with Top Gun: Maverick a few years ago. Nonetheless, Final Reckoning is a dud…What follows are a couple of terrific set pieces, one a tense, complicated underwater mission undertaken in the cold and dark, and the other a daredevil aerial battle, but it all comes too late for much audience emotional investment.”

“As the odds mount and the set pieces grow ever more vertiginous (especially a late-film dogfight between biplanes over South Africa, the film’s best action sequence), we’re left to wonder not whether Hunt will save the world — always sprinting toward danger, like a suicidal marathoner — but whether he might finally outrun the franchise itself, as the film’s promotional hype insists,” notes Peter Howell at the Toronto Star. “But even if there’s nothing in the bravado and bafflegab of M:I 8 that looks or sounds remotely logical, there’s no doubt Cruise and his mates had a great time making it.”

“It gets even more clunky and confusing as this movie insists on interconnecting the plots of all eight movies, interweaving everything from the first movie’s release date to every time Hunt has tried to sacrifice himself for the world’s sins,” says Jackson Weaver at CBC. “And it’s here that the myth-making between Hunt and Cruise becomes a bit blurred. Because as more scenes of past movies are interspliced with more and more characters telling Hunt how he is the only one with the power to save every single soul on Earth, it becomes harder to ignore the case Cruise seems to be making for himself.”

“The script emphasizes how each task is almost impossible to complete, but nevertheless, Hunt succeeds in all his endeavours,” notes Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “It is remarkable to see Cruise as Hunt gets his entire wetsuit ripped off his body, except his specially designed underwear that stays on his body during the underwater segment, where he grabs a torpedo to take him halfway up to the surface.”

“Eventually, the film fulfills its implicit contract with the audience by putting its star through two stand-out action set pieces, each of which is in fact reworking stunts from previous franchise entries, only with a renewed and frankly insane sense of spectacle,” notes Barry Hertz at The Globe and Mail. “The first has Cruise diving to the bottom of the Pacific, where a grounded Russian submarine hides a valuable MacGuffin in its steel belly… The heart-racing scene reportedly caused the star to briefly lose his sight, while also breathing in his own carbon dioxide – the kind of life-threatening daredevilry that transforms mere onscreen action into a kind of deranged cinematic poetry.”

“The franchise, unfortunately, does not go out with a bang. Dead Reckoning – Part 1 tees up a grand finale for Ethan Hunt, but Mission: Impossible duffs its final swing. The film just gets bogged down in techno babble as everyone tries to explain the villainous ‘Entity,’ which already feels dated, as if the A.I. fearmongering of the screenplay doesn’t actually understand artificial intelligence,” says Pat Mullen at That Shelf in a ranked list of all the M:I movies. “When Final Reckoning finally gets going, it delivers some pretty spectacular action.”

Mongrels (dir. Jerome Yoo 🇨🇦)

“This feature debut from writer/director Jerome Yoo has nuance beyond it’s years as it allows us to engage with this story on a genuine and truly humanistic level which only helps the emotion come through as some great performances and evocative use of the BC wilderness make this genuinely hard to look away from,” says Dave Voigt on In the Seats with… Voigt also chats with Yoo about making his feature debut.

Restless (dir. Jed Hart)

“The film is extremely interesting and astute; if you’ve had a bad neighbour, you can relate.  If you’ve been a bad neighbour, shame on you,” notes Anne Brodie at What She Said.

The Surrender (dir. Julia Max)

“The mother and daughter’s troubled dynamics play well, and the two actresses, Minifie and Burton, are both excellent, and they are a total hoot to watch.  One can definitely observe how well the humour plays without it becoming silly,” says Gilbert Seah at Afro Toronto. “The film’s humour turns into gory violence in the second half, with director Max upping the ante in her scary tale with segments too gruesome to watch.”

A Festival of Festival Coverage

At the Toronto Star, Peter Howell picks the best films of the Cannes Film Festival with Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value roughly atop the list: “Renate Reinsve and Elle Fanning are like two sides of a golden coin in Joachim Trier’s tangled family drama, in which a celebrated filmmaker (Stellan Skarsgård) tries to use his art to reconnect with the family he abandoned long ago. When his daughter (Reinsve), a stage actress, turns down a role in the film she deems too close for comfort, it’s taken up by an American star (Fanning), who doesn’t realize the doppelgänger dynamics she’s getting into. Fantastic performances across the board — especially by Reinsve and Fanning — and a keen sense of the meaning of the title make this film a bittersweet pleasure to watch. It’s also a grand reunion for Trier and Reinsve, who wowed Cannes with The Worst Person in the World in 2021.” He also reports on the red carpet style restrictions and the field of Canadian content at this year’s festival.

At The Globe and Mail, Barry Hertz reports on the business side of the film industry and speaks with insiders about navigating Trump tariffs. “People need to act as if there is no American market – as if we are not friends any more. We need to rely on our own friends, our own markets,” French executive Romaine Bessi tells Hertz. “People say, okay, it’s important for countries to have our own army, our own weapons, to be able to resist and not rely on the U.S. any more. And it’s the same with culture.” And “People panicked about the tariffs for about two minutes,” U.S. producer Marc Iserlis adds. “Here, nobody’s really discussing it.” Hertz also has dispatches on the festival’s star-studded divisiveness, Spike Lee’s coup, a nouvelle Godard, and an interview with Eugene Jarecki on his Assange doc.

At Toronto Franco, Gilbert Seah offers capsule reviews for several films at Cannes.

At Original Cin, Liam Lacey previews the 35th anniversary of Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival. Highlights include a Toronto encore of Really Happy Someday by Jay Scott Prize winner J. Stevens: “The film was shot over months as Lalama was actually transitioning, and we watch and hear his physical and vocal changes as Z studies with a vocal coach, changes romantic partners, and claws his way back musically.  There’s an unexpected echo of Eminen’s hip-hop musical, 8 Mile here (and not just from Z’s short-cropped hair and tank tops). It’s a parable about fighting through life struggles to find musical authenticity.”

At POV Magazine, Pat Mullen chats with Inside Out executive director Elie Chivi and learns how the festival celebrates its 35th year amid an increasingly hostile climate for LGBTQ+ rights. “It is actively impacting us right now,” Chivi admits. “From a financial perspective, we’ve lost between $150,000 and $175,000 in sponsorship…Cuts to DEI are real, especially if you’re a company that is based in the States, but also the economic uncertainty and the overall turmoil does cause people to not want to spend as much money on marketing or sponsorships, especially in the arts. It becomes one of the first things that people cut.”

TV Talk/Series Stuff

On In the Seats with…, Dave Voigt chats with Dangerous Games: Roblox and the Metaverse Exposed director Ann Shin and Metaverse activist Alex about their documentary that explores efforts to combat child predators in cyberspace.

At What She Said, Anne Brodie caps off Grosse Point Garden Society: “The series and characters aim for sophistication but instead find poseurs (get a load of the contest judge) because in the end its soap, baby, soap.” For somewhat lighter viewing, there’s Sarah Silverman’s latest standup act, PostMortem: “It’s a gritty hour and a few minutes, so the faint of heart need not tune in.”

At The Gate, Andrew Parker heeds Sirens’ call: “In terms of pacing, execution, and tone, Sirens implodes just as it should be exploding with tension. By about halfway through the third of its five instalments, the wheels start shaking, and by the end, Sirens is a sputtering mess skidding past the finish line on bare rims that are sparking and bursting into flames.” He also checks out the doc about Pee-Wee Herman: “Pee-Wee as Himself explains a lot about its subject, and although it’s only as comprehensive as Reubens was willing to let it be, Wolf has created something expansive and balanced.”