TIFF 2025: The best (Tuner!), weirdest (an industry on edge!) and worst (Ticketmaster!) film festival moments | Canada Voices

Best wish-fulfilment

Every year I wait to have that “TIFF experience” at a film, and on Tuesday I had two. I had high hopes for Tuner, the narrative feature debut of Daniel Roher, who’s been making things happen for himself since attending the Etobicoke School of the Arts. Hopes exceeded. It’s the kind of smart, sexy, character-driven romantic caper I despaired I’d never see again. I had no particular hopes for Train Dreams, but I was blown away. How did they get this miracle of a film, about the exquisite beauty of ordinary life, made in our cynical age? I’m so grateful I get to carry it inside me forever.

Johanna Schneller

Best double bill

Richard Linklater is a director I would follow anywhere, so I was thrilled to get to talk with him about his two TIFF films. Nouvelle Vague is about Jean-Luc Godard when he was at the beginning of everything. Blue Moon is about lyricist Lorenz Hart at the end. Linklater, in the glorious middle, was as warm and insightful as I’d imagined. Sometimes meeting your heroes works out. At his Nouvelle Vague after-party, I saw him in animated conversation with Atom Egoyan, and that made perfect sense too.

Johanna Schneller

Strangest anniversary

I’m not sure what kind of TIFF 50 hoopla I was expecting, but I never found it. This year felt more like a 51st birthday, where you’re sweeping up confetti and having a quieter time. Film is struggling, and so is the festival. Collectively we must fight to keep it all alive. It’s still my favourite week of the year.

Johanna Schneller

Best cry

Festival-goers had no shortage of cathartic outlets this year to let the tears flow. Inside Roy Thomson Hall on Sunday, audible weeping echoed throughout the aisles during the Canadian premiere of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, which focuses on the death of William and Agnes Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son. I was left a sob-drenched mess after watching the Tuesday premiere of Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, which follows one early 20th-century logger (Joel Edgerton) in the Pacific Northwest as he navigates various trials and tribulations. Five out of five tissues.

Barry Hertz

Worst ticketing system

However deep TIFF may be into its arrangement with Ticketmaster, someone inside the Lightbox needs to tear the contract up ASAP. Not only was the festival’s ticket-management site prone to locking users out at arbitrary intervals, but customers could also use Ticketmaster’s exchange program to resell their purchases for astronomical amounts (some festival-goers reported seeing prices as high as $595 for a single admission). Unless that includes a personal dinner cooked by Guillermo del Toro, it’s not worth it. And even then!

Barry Hertz

Best lineup

TIFF audiences seem to be developing an almost British talent for polite queuing. More than 400 lined up for the early morning press and industry screening of Hamnet, snaking around the Scotiabank Theatre on to John Street, where they were all corralled by one efficient volunteer. She directed every newcomer to the back – yes, all the way down there – while fielding questions from puzzled passersby wondering what all these people were lining up for. Less polite: A few people who didn’t get a seat tried to sneak into the screening by pretending they had just slipped out to the washroom and were coming back in.

Kate Taylor

Best love-in

Postscreening Q&As at TIFF tend to toe-kissing from overawed fans, but there was some extra, and mutual, love in the air as Oscar-winning director Alejandro Amenábar took the mic. Perhaps it was because his film – and its cast – were so darn sexy. The Captive turns a biopic about a young Miguel de Cervantes (an irresistible Julio Peña Fernández) into a cross-cultural gay romance. Amenábar announced that this was the best screening he had ever experienced, Italian star Alessandro Borghi (who plays a seductive Algerian lord with kohl-rimmed eyes) beamed at the audience as he described actors as mere instruments of the narrative, and programmer Diana Cadavid concluded it was the best Q&A ever.

Kate Taylor

Most sweet-and-sour interview

I interviewed producer Ryan Reynolds and director Colin Hanks for their documentary John Candy: I Like Me. Conspicuously dressed in a Canadiana lumberjack shirt, the tanned Reynolds did most of the talking, occasionally mentioning Candy. One nugget gleaned from the sit-down was that Candy’s son, Christopher, hated the name of the documentary because his father did not, in fact, like himself. Too bad they didn’t scrap it – I Like Me would be a dandy title for a film about Reynolds.

Brad Wheeler

Best jailhouse rock

His feature film Elvis left critics confused and divided in 2022, but director Baz Luhrmann redeems himself with his documentary EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert. Focusing on Presley’s Las Vegas residency, from 1969 and into the 1970s, Luhrmann uses eye-popping live footage and Elvis himself as the narrator. Electric and intimate, the film immediately becomes one of the top rock docs ever made. EPiC has leapt the building.

Brad Wheeler

Best semi-reunion

In my interview with Victor Garber for You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution…, the actor remembered the buzz surrounding the musical when it was staged in 1972 at the Royal Alexandra Theatre: “People were lining up to get in.” History repeated itself when a line of TIFF ticket holders snaked around the block 43 years later for the doc’s world premiere at the same venue. After the screening, some of the old Godspell cast (Garber, Eugene Levy, music director Paul Shaffer) reassembled, while Andrea Martin, Martin Short, Jayne Eastwood and others joined virtually on a screen above the stage. It was a disjointed conversation, with the reunited stars telling inside jokes that were incomprehensible to anyone but themselves. You really did have to be there.

Brad Wheeler