Anything worth doing with one’s life requires careful study followed by a lunging leap into the unknown, and so it is with starting a family. Lauren Miller Rogen’s Babies (B+) is a funny, tender and remarkably truthful examination of the practical and emotional chaos surrounding bringing children into the world. Anna Kendrick and Seth Rogen play a couple uncertain about parenthood who receive an unexpected trial run when a newly divorced friend (Kate Berlant) moves in with her young daughter in tow. Kendrick has rarely been better, locating both the humor and genuine anxiety in a woman confronting a choice for which no amount of preparation can fully suffice. Always a joy, Issa Rae is another standout as an artistic business partner and mother of a growing brood who is striving to juggle it all. Miller Rogen’s observations are consistently spot-on, even when delivered through interior monologues that should feel artificial but somehow work beautifully. Both uproarious and poignant, Babies understands becoming a parent means accepting the biggest decisions sometimes arrive long before certainty does.
Zach Cregger streamlines his comic sensibilities and horror-thriller skills in Resident Evil (B), an effective 2026 reboot that becomes a bloody good chase adventure. Drawing on the survival-horror video-game franchise and its ill-fated Raccoon City, the story barrels through snowstorms, forests, a farm, a tunnel and a high-rise with the full-throated grandeur of a delirious amusement-park attraction. Austin Abrams makes an ideal Everyman as a medical courier thrust into a desperate fight for survival against bloodthirsty mutated creatures. Much of the humor comes from his continually wry observations to himself, along with recurring gags about his spectacularly poor command of guns and the surprising difficulty of shooting through a padlock. Cregger keeps the action moving while delivering squirm-inducing creature effects, gross-out surprises, mild scares and copious splatter. The movie has little interest in mythology or subtext, but its stripped-down simplicity proves part of the appeal. As an exuberantly gruesome thrill ride, Resident Evil hits its targets far more often than its hapless hero does.
Escaping into the performing arts proves a winning formula for everyone involved in Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut (A-), a warm, wildly funny crowd-pleaser that fortifies the gifted auteur’s reputation as a formidable writer/director/actor while gifting Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti career-best showcases. Moore throws herself into the role of a kindly New Jersey housewife who auditions for a historic theater’s production of a fictional musical and lands a featured supporting role, only to fall increasingly under the spell of both the stage and its strong-willed director, played with comic ferocity by Giamatti. Musical-theater royalty Halle Bailey, Colton Ryan, Bonnie Milligan, Lilli Cooper and Bernadette Peters fill out the stacked ensemble, lending delicious authenticity to the film’s show-within-a-show world. Eisenberg is wise about the intoxicating effects of an artistic calling, and watching Moore’s heroine gain confidence as she tries on a new “mask” is as exhilarating as her escalating battles with Giamatti are hilarious. It’s rather astonishing how far she’ll go to get into character, and as she begins floating free of her former obligations, the film makes it difficult to blame her for choosing the glow of the ghostlight over the bleak rut she occupied before. Eisenberg even pens the musical’s songs, including Moore’s terrific 11 o’clock number, “This City May Have Chewed Me Up (But It Hasn’t Spit Me Out)” within a gloriously half-sketched fever-dream fantasia. Theater devotees will especially feel seen, and the movie’s larger celebration of rediscovering purpose and possibility should play far beyond the footlights. The Debut is a hoot with a heart and one of the year’s best.
Beyond its significance as a historic production, Hosam Abu Dan’s Thirteen in Gaza (B+) is an intensely moving one. A widower (the quietly wonderful Feras Al Masri) and his teenage daughter (a superb Mary Ziyara) struggle to maintain the rhythms of ordinary life inside a Gaza refugee camp, their relationship providing an intimate lens on adolescence, grief and moral choices under extraordinary circumstances. Ghassan Salem is also powerful as an industrious and morally dubious power broker who may hold the keys to lifting the surviving family out of poverty. Ziyara is pitch-perfect as the titular adolescent, fiercely trying to retain her dignity and discover who she is on the cusp of womanhood. Abu Dan and his Gaza-based crew focus their camera on humanity rather than destruction and survival rather than despair, as a father strives to protect his daughter amid the deprivations of prolonged conflict. Simple acts of securing food, water and basic supplies take on profound resonance when played out against the reality of a displacement camp. Most powerfully, the film refuses to define its characters by their suffering, finding pride, resourcefulness and familial love amid circumstances that threaten these values. In celebrating that humanity, the film becomes both a tribute to people enduring intolerable conditions and a haunting challenge to a world that has failed to adequately protect its most vulnerable.
It’s hard to argue Director Werner Herzog isn’t being true to the themes defining his peculiar brand of cinema: obsessive characters chasing impossible dreams, hostile natural landscapes and a persistent blurring of truth and fiction. Herzog’s Bucking Fastard (C+) checks all three boxes and still qualifies as a double head-scratcher. Real-life sisters Kate Mara and Rooney Mara, both extremely game for an unusual assignment, play twins who speak, move and even dream in unison while pursuing their eccentric conception of love and belonging. Their extraordinary bond inspires fascination as their shared obsessions range from an unrequited love affair with Orlando Bloom to the seemingly impossible task of digging a tunnel through a countryside mountain. Herzog finds strange beauty and flashes of humor in their singular existence, and the Maras commit so completely that the sisters never become mere caricatures. Yet for all the film’s intriguing eccentricity, it remains frustratingly opaque about what motivates these women, why their obsessions consume them or what Herzog ultimately wants us to understand about their extraordinary bond. Bucking Fastard is unquestionably an original curiosity, but being fascinated by its characters isn’t quite the same as being invested in them.
Leah Nelson’s black-and-white hand-drawn animated feature Tangles (A-), adapted from Sarah Leavitt’s graphic-novel memoir, is as funny and dramatically affecting as a traditional narrative film, while cleverly using illustration in motion to make memories bend, disappear and spring playfully to life. A young queer San Francisco artist and magazine staffer in the 1990s returns to her East Coast family as her mother’s Alzheimer’s progresses, forcing everyone to reckon with a woman gradually losing pieces of herself. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Abbi Jacobson are excellent as mother and daughter, with especially tender moments paralleling childhood scenes with their echoes years later. The mother who once dressed, comforted and cared for her little girl increasingly needs tending herself, creating a poignant reversal as familiar gestures of maternal love pass from one generation to the other. Nelson never lets Alzheimer’s reduce this heroic mom to her disease, preserving her humor and personality even as memory slips away. The movie finds abundant fun in its protagonist’s burgeoning love life and cross-country juggling of romance, work and family, while airplane announcements provide hilarious interludes like a sassy Greek chorus for a life perpetually in transit. With Bryan Cranston, Beanie Feldstein and Seth Rogen rounding out the voice cast, Tangles transforms the pathos of Alzheimer’s and caregiving into something inventive, funny and deeply moving: a stunning tribute to a mother and the daughter learning how to mother her in return.
Charged objects in movies — a lost ark, a Maltese falcon, a rock hammer in Shawshank Prison — can provide cinematic catalysts or consequences, and Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo’s La Bola Negra (A) uses a manuscript passed among men to reveal multitudes. Three gay lives unfold across different periods of Spanish history, with contemporary Carlos González and figures from the past connected by words that survive their authors and become an inheritance of courage. Inspired by Federico García Lorca, the film flows beautifully through time, capturing pain, shame, desire and persecution while asking what one generation can leave behind to help the next survive. Music star Guitarricadelafuente is a revelation as a young man with a military role discovering both sexual awakening and the courage to embrace it, playing beautifully opposite a winning Miguel Bernardeau, while Milo Quifes brings quieter but affecting power to his role. Familiar movie stars Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close shine in small appearances without distracting from the less familiar faces at the film’s heart. Ambrossi and Calvo mount the story on a sweeping scale, yet its grandest idea is remarkably intimate: passing stories forward can remind people who feel isolated that they were never truly alone. Poetry, art and cinema become more than cultural artifacts here; they are lifelines capable of crossing decades, preserving identity and even saving lives. La Bola Negra is a gorgeous love letter to all three — and a masterpiece revealed at fall festivals including TIFF and playing theatres before streaming on Netflix.
Danny Boyle’s Ink (B-) makes creating sensational journalism look a wee bit too sensational. Jack O’Connell stars as Larry Lamb, the editor recruited by Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) in 1969 to reinvent a struggling British newspaper, turning tabloid The Sun into a populist must-read and helping rewrite the rules of the news business. Boyle attacks the story with locomotive speed, tilted angles and razzle-dazzle flourishes that make the newsroom revolution great fun to watch, but Ink never delivers the Wolf of Wall Street or Boogie Nights-style reckoning its men behaving badly deserve. Viewers familiar with media history will recognize an origin story for many of the excesses that have come to define the modern news landscape, but the film could be considerably clearer about the consequences of what its characters unleash. The extremely charismatic O’Connell and always reliable Pearce are both compelling, yet the dramatic weight between Lamb and Murdoch is often sidelined, robbing their relationship of some potentially combustible central tension. Claire Foy is terrific as a composite character intended to provide another perspective, but even she isn’t given enough leverage to become the foil the story needs. Ink has great style and seemingly honorable intentions as both history lesson and cautionary tale, but in all that breathless headline-making, Boyle buries his own lead.
There are worse places to be contained than a designer home where a gorgeous pair of acclaimed actors rhapsodizes about the complexities of contemporary life. Florian Zeller’s Bunker (B) pairs Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem in a topical allegory about whether we as a society are engaging with an unsettling world or simply retreating from it. Bardem plays an increasingly paranoid star architect contemplating a lucrative assignment to construct a survival bunker for a tech billionaire, a morally compromised project that strains his marriage and exposes anxieties about wealth, power and isolation. Some of Zeller’s symbolism feels strikingly prescient; just as often, it lands squarely on the nose. Yet there’s an added layer of intrigue in watching a real-life couple navigate the film’s marital power struggles, much as there was with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut. Cruz and Bardem know exactly how to push and pull against each other, turning domestic arguments into intellectual and emotional sparring. When Bunker threatens to bury itself beneath its own metaphors, its stars keep digging out something compelling. It’s an awesome power play by a genuine power
They don’t make ’em like this anymore and perhaps for good reason, but there are fun, fetishistic thrills in Anna Biller’s The Face of Horror (B-), a silly beauty premiering as part of TIFF’s Midnight Madness series. Jonah Hauer-King is credible and frequently funny as a charismatic medieval bloke behaving very badly, and Kristine Froseth is fierce and amusing as the vengeful ghost of the wife he betrayed. This Kabuki-inspired tale of female revenge transposes a classic Japanese ghost story to medieval England, centering on a beautiful farmer’s daughter whose performatively chivalrous knight husband is actually a toxic serial killer. Biller’s Technicolor-style palette is a wonder to behold, particularly the painterly red blood splashed across its brightly illuminated imagery. Deep-focus 35mm photography, beautiful gowns and storybook compositions make nearly every frame look both lavish and knowingly artificial. The often ridiculous plot plays like Robin Hood: Men in Tights trapped inside a Dario Argento nightmare, with retrograde humor mischievously reframed for modern audiences. Campy eyeball atrocities, decomposing corpses and other gross-out delights should keep a midnight crowd well fed. The colors are so vibrant you can almost smell them, which, given what is onscreen, may not entirely be a compliment.
Louis Clichy’s French animated film Le Corset (The Iron Boy) (B) turns an anxiety-ridden farm boy’s physical and emotional confinement into a simple, sentimental fantasy. Featuring the voices of Gary Clichy, Rod Paradot, Brune Moulin, Alexandre Astier and Jean-Pascal Zadi, the story follows a child who begins collapsing without warning, must wear a rigid iron brace and discovers music, friendship and new possibilities beyond his farmland origins. The lively, hand-drawn watercolor animation is at once artistic and accessible, with whimsical flights of fancy rendered in blue and yellow hues that invite viewers to flex their imaginations and fill in the details. It is heartfelt, engaging and relatable enough to enchant both children and adults. The limited facial detail, however, creates a slight emotional distance from characters whose feelings should land with even greater force. French-speaking viewers may also find it easier to let the delicate imagery wash over them than audiences dividing their attention between pale sketches and lightly colored subtitles. Even with those barriers, Le Corset wears its tenderness proudly and proves there is considerable strength beneath its steely exterior.
Despite its vital message about the systemic bias confronting women who report sexual assault, director Susanna White’s adaptation of Prima Facie (D) is misbegotten in nearly every dramatic respect. Cynthia Erivo plays a formidable London defense barrister forced to confront the very tactics she once employed after a colleague played by Daniel Ings assaults her, but the typically commanding performer rarely materializes into a persuasive central presence. White establishes neither the workplace, courtroom nor domestic worlds with enough specificity or realism to make the protagonist’s ordeal feel fully lived-in. The underwritten supporting characters register primarily as devices to advance the thesis, while the absence of authentic relationships or convincing chemistry leaves even the most consequential encounters dramatically inert. A story built around the collision between intellectual certainty and devastating personal experience should crackle with tension, yet the film repeatedly states its ideas without finding compelling ways to dramatize them. Even its courtroom passages rarely muster more intrigue than a routine weekly television procedural.
