It’s only Day Three and we already have so many movies in the bag that it’s starting to get difficult to keep them straight. But your intrepid cinema adventurers moved through those darkened theatres a few more times today to bring you the full TIFF experience, along with a couple of surprises. And welcome, BBP veteran Jeromme to our coverage today! Warning: this might be the last day of words making sense before the flickering screens and lack of sleep start to really mess with our brains and things start to get a little, ahem, ruff.
Karen Shute
Today I checked a couple of my top picks off the list and I’m feeling pretty vindicated. Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother was exactly what I was hoping for with its balance of crushing violence and emotional depth. What I was not expecting was for the dialogue to be as funny as it was. I missed a few quips because audience laughter drowned it out, which is all the more reason to see it again soon. Suck it Marvel!
The Stunt Driver felt like a love letter to a bygone era where you could see death defying feats on Primetime TV, and safety regulations were mere suggestions. If you are a Canadian of a certain age, you probably have a picture of your dad that looks nearly identical to Ken Carter. Wild hair, dart hanging out of the side of his mouth, holding you casually in one arm in a way that would make your current chiropractor shudder. In the Q&A (which I will be posting later this week) Jay baruchel mentioned that he wanted to play Ken Carter because he reminded him of the type of men he grew up around, who can’t be around anymore because of the “particular cultural intake that they were exposed to, and the eras that they came up in”. Brusk, over confident, and always ready to “make some breakfast” with an arrogant American rival. The inclusion of footage from the NFB documentary “The Devil At Your Heels” makes this a loving time capsule and a tribute to a man who made hating Evel Knievel his entire personality.
Now for the biggest event of the day, I got to meet Air Bud of [Sachin’s most anticipated film of 2027] Air Bud Returns who showed up the the box office to pick up his festival pass. I can confirm that he is the goodest boy.
Jeromme Graham
It’s finally my turn to appear in Biff Bam Pop’s TIFF daily recaps. Given how my screening schedule worked out, this was my first day of the festival. And I went big, starting with Always Lalisa, the glossy pop doc following BLACKPINK’s charismatic singer-rapper LISA from her childhood in Thailand through K-pop stardom and into her increasingly ambitious push as a solo global artist. Director Sue Kim brings an insider’s familiarity to the machinery of K-pop. We see LISA navigate BLACKPINK, Coachella, the launch of her own label, and her expansion into acting with a role in The White Lotus.
For diehard K-pop fans, this will be right up your alley. For everyone else, Always Lalisa is pretty much your standard-issue pop star documentary. Childhood dreams, relentless training, career milestones and cliché inspirational perseverance, all wrapped in a very slick and expensive bow. Always Lalisa never quite digs deep enough beneath the superstar image to become essential viewing. As far as music docs go, this is no Truth or Dare. It’s all surface, all the time.
Sachin Hingoo
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
I started the day with a press screening of Bassam Tariq’s Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother and folks, this is the best thing I’ve seen at TIFF so far this year. Mahershala Ali plays a single father who moonlights as a hitman, trying to walk the dangerous tightrope that both of those commitments bring with them while also balancing his and his children’s standings as devout Muslims. Emotionally-charged and loaded with tension, there’s some fantastic John Wick-esque action and the surprise of John Cho as one of 2026’s best villains. This is an unmissable spectacle that absolutely pops on a big screen and will resonate with you long after it’s over. I was joking with some friends that – and consider that this is me saying this as someone for whom Blade 2 is a perfect, no-notes movie – having this movie makes it worth not being able to get Ali in Blade. I would never openly advocate for someone to jump into the murky waters of the Marvel machine, but if Bassam Tariq made a Blade movie with Ali I would be so seated that theatre staff would have to contact the authorities to extract me.
In a pretty hard tonal shift, I checked out Kris Rey’s Trash Mountain and it was exactly the earnest, charmingly witty, and deeply affecting film that I need in the middle of the Festival. Caleb Hearon’s Gavin is so layered and honest while finding the humour in even the darkest situations. Backing him up and expertly matching him line for line is an incredible supporting cast consisting of Zooey Deschaniel as his sister Abbi, Jackie Weaver as his overly-dramatic grandmother Helen, and Jaboukie Young-White as an effortlessly-sweet Grindr date that threatens to become something more while luring Gavin back to a hometown from which he can’t wait to escape. Everyone’s performances work beautifully together here. For a movie that’s, on the surface, about the different ways we process loss and grief, Trash Mountain is also a movie that’s broadly about things, and explores the way that our collection of physical both defines us and fails to define us as people and our relationships to our family and friends after we’re gone. It also presents the intriguing idea that while hoarding is often thought of as a loss of control over one’s life, it can also be seen as a way of exercising that same control and building a safe space of things around us.
While Trash Mountain got me thinking about possessions, I remembered that I stopped into the new Cinema Cellar in the heart of the Festival Village to check out their selection of Criterion titles the other day, and picked up the Godzilla Showa Era boxed set that I’ve been eyeing for a while but the shipping to Canada has always kept me from clicking all the way through to checkout on the website. Cinema Cellar is a cute, cozy little space in a converted townhouse and really feels like it’s been crafted with a love of cinema. To pull things back to Trash Mountain, I would hope that what this item says about me specifically is that there’s nothing I love more in cinema than a scaly monster and his friends/enemies absolutely cooking the fuck out of Tokyo while suplexing each other into the ruins.
It was onto the world premiere of Kyu Bock Youm’s debut feature, Long Long Night. The animation in this is truly stunning and perfectly backs up a story that will wrench you in every direction, while being unafraid to break your whole heart. Adapted from Korean author Ru Ri’s award-winning story about a rhino, himself separated from his family and raised by elephants, who befriends and adopts a penguin who compels him to travel the desert looking for the ocean, is about chosen families and the impact of human intervention on nature and wildlife. The central, touching story got me right in the feels for every moment and the animation style makes some of the darker moments almost a little too real. Overall, though, an absolutely remarkable debut from Youm, who also has the honour of bringing the first Korean animated project to play TIFF since Yeon Sang-ho’s The Fake in 2013 (which could not possibly be more different in every way from Long Long Night, I assure you).
What a day and another rollercoaster of emotions, experiences, and a couple of celebrity sightings, both in theatres and out of them. See you tomorrow for our next installment, pals!
The 51st edition of the Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 10-20, 2026. Ticket and lineup information can be found at the TIFF website, and stay tuned to Biff Bam Pop for all of our coverage all week!
