I’m not gonna lie, we’re halfway through the Festival and we’ve already consumed so much cinema that A24 is thinking of licensing the cerebral fluids leaking out of our ears. But Day Five brought us some big laughs, some big voices, some big surprises, and some even bigger kills from our posts at TIFF 2026. So let’s get into it!
Karen Shute
I saw 4 films yesterday and my brain is pudding so here are my quick Coles Notes (remember them?) on what I saw yesterday.
While I wouldn’t call Matt Barats’ Anchors Away a “dime piece” I must admit I did laugh harder while watching it than at any other film at the Festival this year.
Banjong Pisanthanakun’s Inherit was an absolute delight! I don’t want to give away any of the film’s many surprises, but Davika Hoorne’s incredible performance as a kind of sexy Aunt Gladys is well worth the price of admission.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I expected Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo to be a bit crazier given Takashi Miike’s oeuvre, but it was an enjoyable and serviceable corrupt cop tale that maybe needed a little more bite.
Swapping the siege thriller vibes of Green Room (2015)’s punk riffs for EDM beats, Nick Kozakis’ Kick On is a savage and brutal classic Midnight Madness entry that’s sure to scratch that itch for the old ultra-violence.
Jeromme Graham
Yesterday at TIFF was one of those days that reminded me exactly why I love music documentaries. If you’re anything like me, you probably grew up hearing Darlene Love’s unmistakable big voice every Christmas and watching her perform “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on Late Night with David Letterman. But Love’s contributions to music extend way beyond that holiday classic. The Oscar-winning 20 Feet From Stardom helped begin the long-overdue process of giving legendary background singers their flowers, and Barry Avrich’s latest music documentary Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been puts Love herself front and centre.
Does Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been reinvent the music-documentary wheel? Honestly, no. But it doesn’t need to. There’s an unmistakable sense of joy and resilience running through the film, largely thanks to Love herself. Now in her eighties, she remains an absolute force, and Avrich does a wonderful job capturing her effervescent personality in sit-down interviews with the rock legend.
Friends, fans, and peers, including Bruce Springsteen (who also sent his love at the premiere via a note read by Avrich), Cher, Dionne Warwick, Andra Day, and David Letterman, help tell the story, while archival footage and performances bring her incredible career back to life. And then, because TIFF loves to make you sob, Love herself took the stage after a brief Q&A to perform “I Know Where I’ve Been” from Hairspray. Seeing an artist who spent so much of her career fighting to be seen finally command that room was pretty damn special.
Then I hightailed it over to Voices, Deanté Gray’s 1960s-set musical thriller, which takes place almost entirely inside a Detroit motel room. We already covered Voices in Day Two; see Sachin’s expert take on it here. For me, the real marvel here is the filmmaking and the music. Voices was made on a shoestring budget, yet Gray and his collaborators somehow squeeze an enormous amount of ambition, atmosphere and music into an incredibly contained setting. I guess you could say it’s a testament to what filmmakers can accomplish when they have more imagination than money. At least, that’s the big takeaway I kept coming back to. Pro tip: You’ll have these songs stuck in your head for a while.
Sanjay Rajput
In Sung Kang’s Drifter, Kang eschews bombastic over the top car stunts and plays out more like a contemplative character study of a lost soul finding his place in the world. It’s an unabashed love letter to the car community but Kang paces it in such a way that allows all the characters to get meaningful screentime and arcs. He embraces a “show don’t tell” ethos with minimal dialogue but the cast emotes so well physically that the emotions permeate every frame.
Sachin Hingoo
In Paolo Strippoli’s The Spiral – a movie that could be called Obsession 2: Faustian Boogaloo – a desperate but well-off mother named Anna (Jasmine Trinca) makes a series of increasingly devastating bargains with a demonic figure (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) which tears her family apart. True to its name, this domino-effect of concessions and consequences quickly spirals out of control over the course of seven years. Strippoli structures the film in chapters, each named after one of the family members, and tells such a compelling tale with the killer performances by Trinca and Tedeschi that it’s right up there with Rod Serling’s best work on The Twilight Zone for me. Especially Tedeschi, whose gleefully mischievous and deceitful villain is the most riveting part of a movie full of riveting characters, makes The Spiral a deliciously tense experience. Skewering the wealthy, the fixation on material success, and the (ahem) obsession with aesthetics at once, Strippoli has crafted a cautionary tale here that’s wrapped in a gorgeous and heartbreaking thriller.
I might not have caught Midnight selection Anchors Aweigh by alt-comedian Matt Barats at midnight itself, but the film provided a non-stop barrage of laughs, bolstered by Barats’ impeccable and iconic comedic timing and delivery in the middle of the day that was just what I needed. It may not be a “complete” movie in the traditional sense and plays a bit like observational comedy in the vein of How To With John Wilson but s’all good. Despite its unconventional structure, Anchors Aweigh is an effective watch that’s even more terrific with an audience to laugh along with.
Used to be, a movie like Banjong Pisanthanakun’s Inherit – filled as it is with horrific violence and stunning but mind-melting effects – would be the exclusive territory of the Midnight Madness programme. However, TIFF has seen to it that a film about an older woman desperately trying to reclaim and retain her youth is a perfect fit for the Centrepiece programme instead. Davika Hoorne portrays Grandma Woranart’s demonic, corrupting, destabilizing presence in a way that completely upends the “psycho biddy” horror trope (see also: Aunt Gladys in Weapons) in the scariest movie of TIFF so far, and perhaps the most relentlessly frightening movie I’ve seen at the Festival in years. This Thai import is the kind of film I would probably only get a chance to see at a festival like this and should be rooted out by any horror fan and championed because, like projects like Julian and Voices this year, it feels like every person involved (especially, in my opinion, Pisanthanakun and Hoorne) should be recognized and given the freedom to make whatever they want to make next.
When I first heard that Takashi Miike, prolific Japanese director of extreme films like Audition (1999) and TIFF mainstay, was directing the third entry in the Bad Lieutenant crime drama series that started with the Abel Ferrera-directed 1992 film Bad Lieutenant that starred Harvey Keitel and was followed up with Werner Herzog’s 2009 film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans starring Nic Cage, I was only a little surprised. This is barely a series of movies as one doesn’t have much to do with any of the others except being about a Lieutenant that is pretty Bad, after all, and the three directors don’t really have much in common with one other either. I think you can broadly say that all three films are chaotic and uneven in their own unique ways, and Miike definitely brings a Japanese flair to this one, set in Tokyo. Shun Oguri as the titular Lieutenant staggers his way through some insane setups and is somehow funny in his depraved engagement in gambling and meth, and Lily James is certainly making some choices (including one of the worst American accents I’ve heard this year) as an FBI agent hunting down a US politician’s daughter (WWE’s Liv Morgan). The whole thing is a wild, enjoyable, action-packed ride that lacks polish and basic coherence, but is somehow not worse off for it. It’s my third-favourite Bad Lieutenant and a big step down from Herzog’s entry and even Ferrara’s, but I’d still watch this one again.
Another Midnight pick, Nick Kozakis’ Kick On, absolutely whipped my ass as well. It’s a claustrophobic survival-thriller that takes place in a single apartment, starting off like Doug Liman’s Go (1999) and almost imperceptibly morphing into Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (2014), Kick On delivers some of the most visceral, violent, unpredictable and tension-filled moments of the Festival. A non-stop true Midnight film that literally rips from end to end, it introduces us to a frankly terrifying and unpredictable villain in the form of Nikolai Nikolaeff’s Ray who gives me high-key (and keyed-up) vibes of one of my favourite villains, Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth from Blue Velvet. There’s a bit of a heavy-handed and ultimately tertiary message about loyalty here, and Ray’s definitely got some daddy issues with his ice cold and lethally efficient mobster father, but this is one of those “subtext is for cowards” movies where the surface level violence and kills are the whole appeal. And Kozakis never lets you rest for a moment as the tension escalates and bodies and betrayals pile up. This is another one you’ll want to catch with some friends, and make sure you’ve got the stomachs for the violence while you’re at it.
This was a pretty full day, so the next few updates might be a little late as our minds and bodies recover from the onslaught of emotions and extremity we consumed today. But rest assured that your team will be back on the ground for the back half of TIFF 2026! See you soon!
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!
