Time for another break from those TIFF and NYFF reviews. Cláudio Alves and Eurocheese have appointed themselves juries to choose the best of the Toronto fest. From Casting to Picture, let's go!
How many prizes can Eurocheese give to LA BOLA NEGRA? To quote a 22-year-old comedy classic, "the limits does not exist."
CLÁUDIO: Hello again, my friend. I guess it's time for the second round of these. Or third, if we count that gargantuan Best Actress conversation that spanned from Oscar frontrunner Julianne Moore to such underrated international thespians as Rejane Faria. And speaking of acting, why don't we start the next part of our jury-of-two journey with the category AMPAS hosted for the first time last season?
BEST CASTING
First up, casting legend Nina Gold deserves praise for the miracles she does for Tender Loving Care and Clarissa. The former is full of small, one-scene roles that need to jump off the screen and feel as lived-in as our main quartet. Somehow, she got it right every single time, be they Leigh regulars, British theater and TV vets, or newcomers like Kaedon Skerritt. In the Nigerian Mrs. Dalloway adaptation, the main cast is more sprawling, and casting different versions of the same characters adds another layer of difficulty. Somehow, she aces it, sometimes by not insisting on superficial similarities between performers but by getting the right energy for the role at two such distinct phases of their lives that they might as well be different people altogether...
Coralie Amédéo mixes Japanese and French thespians, theater people and movie stars, professional and non-professional performers throughout All of a Sudden, yet there's never any friction between the ensemble. They all flow beautifully together. Sudam CK does a similar feat in Elephants in the Fog, though leaning a tad more into Neorealist casting practices, perhaps in a search for authenticity and the right depiction of a very specific milieu. Indeed, I feel similarly about the queer solace found within a religious society in Marie Madeleine, the New York nightlife in Club Kid, or how I Am Mario only works if its central piece of casting - the titular Mario - can pull it off, and heavens knows he does. A round of applause to Oustin León and whoever found him, along with a strong supporting cast, especially the women playing this pregnant trans man's extended family.
I also admire the intersected senses of family and community invoked through Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!'s casting decisions, including the grand gamble of bringing YOU, a performer with distinct, focus-pulling energy, to such a peripheral part. Somehow, it works. I wish I could find a casting director credit for whoever did that work in Gabriel Martins' On Behalf of My Son. Despite how much that drama is built around Rejane Faria's tour de force, it doesn't function as drama or social mural without a strong supporting cast painting its canvas with complicated humanity across boundaries of class, gender, religion, and more. Similarly, as strong as Moore is in The Debut, the movie benefits immensely from Douglas Aibel's canny choices in the smaller roles. Eldar Isgandarov needs to become a star!
It's hard to believe that THE DREAMED ADVENTURE's leading lady was a non-professional unknown before being cast in the project. It's a casting miracle, movie magic in its purest form!
Speaking of stars, there was never any other possibility for this honor than the person who found Yana Radeva. A middle-aged newcomer, she moves through Grisebach's The Dreamed Adventure like a seasoned pro, with the gravitas of a legend and the lightness of one who knows their screen presence so intimately that they can calibrate it to deliver universes of meaning with very little demonstration. Also, the film is like a hang-out epic, built out of scenes of folks just puttering about their day, getting drunk and messy through long nights, a vast tapestry of Bulgarian identities, archetypes and subverted expectations. An Oscar is not enough. Casting director Margarita Kudrina deserves a Nobel Prize or something even grander.
EUROCHEESE: Some of the greatest sprawling casts of the year are definitely among your callouts, including Tender Loving Care, Clarissa and All of a Sudden, no doubt three of the strongest ensembles I'll see in 2026. Let me give Eldar Isgandarov his due - he has a handful of perfect line readings in both of his TIFF films, where he is joined by a number of other standouts: Halle Bailey's cautious optimism and musical talents, plus the spot-on casting of Bernadette Peters as a theater diva, stand out in The Debut, while Reggie Absolom's cooler-than-his-age budding DJ, Kirby Howell-Baptiste's chaos agent and Saturn Risin9's queen of the party all bring memorable moments to Club Kid. As far as larger casts standing out at the festival, I'd also add Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother to the mix - every new character introduced felt like they were exactly what the script ordered. The foursome at the center of Possible Love are also a pretty perfect quartet.
There's no way I was going to avoid La Bola Negra, where every part feels perfectly matched to its cast. I could have spent hours more in each of these eras, learning more about their worlds. I have another choice for my winner, though - the biggest casting feat of the year was following Judy Heumann's wishes in the casting of Being Heumann. By seeking out a cast that represented the communities involved in her fight for national recognition, the film honors real-life struggles. My TIFF screening was filled with audience members representing the community, and they were called out when they gave a huge cheer during the Q&A. Now that we have a Casting Oscar, it's important that it be more than just a co-sign of Best Picture - unique casting challenges should be called out and rewarded.
Enthusiasm for the film's message is what earned it recognition in the Audience Award runner-up status, and while it wasn't one of my favorite films of the year, I applaud the work done in this category as well as its cast of actors. I would have liked more in-depth looks into many of their stories, but they all did an excellent job with their material.
BEST SOUND
Utilizing their sound departments to create memorable effects, many of the genres typically found in awards conversations for Best Sound could be found at TIFF. Musicals like Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! and The Debut played on themes of entering the mind of their leading actresses, and while both had strong transitions, neither stood out as particularly revolutionary work. The action sequences of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother and the dizzying jumps backed by roaring presses in Ink were certainly notable. The use of microphones during crucial shots in The Beloved heightened the tension between Javier Bardem's director and his cast, and the muffled sounds during the sequences after the assault in Prima Facie deepened the audience's experience of Erivo's internal monologue. I considered Club Kid as a possible winner here - the way the pounding house music throughout can signal anything from a relaxing welcome to a nightmarish hellscape is handled wisely. Ultimately, though, this came down to the two gay-themed war films.
Los Javis weren't the only ones queering up the battlefields of history. Dhont's COWARD is also up to some mischief and recontextualizing, all with a superb sound design.
While I was impressed by both musical and gunfire-heavy sequences in La Bola Negra, the first-person perspective heading into battle in Coward brought the viewer into the intensity of situations where lives are constantly being lost all around our central character, personifying the mental stress bearing down on him and making each decision he makes that much more critical. I hope the movie finds some recognition this awards season.
CLÁUDIO: ou specified a lot of great work, some of which would make my honorable mentions. I'd also give a shout-out to the immersive natural soundscape of Double Freedom, the different quality of silences across class divides and memory in Clarissa, the sheer warmth and inviting quality that Once Upon a Time in Harlem conjures from its footage and re-mixed archives, Djinn Wedding's atmosphere of dread in and out of its Wuthering Heights-like abode. Also, the Grand Guignol excess The Spiral so often indulges in, especially for the crescendo of its Biblical storm, ever-growing in the background of its framing device.
In the end, it came down to three possibilities. First, the wacky inventiveness of Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney, as it remixes a politician's televised legacy into a multimedia hallucination. Then, the comical background intrusions that pollute Everything Else is Noise's attempted interview cum chamber concert. Finally, we have Growth of the Soil's spectrum of sonic registers, from the heights of all-envolving naturalism to better situate us in its mountainous milieu to a more Expressionistic exaggeration that leads into the characters' inner lives, fears, anxieties. The way a baby crying in the far background gets swallowed by the corrupted quiet of the woods, the roar of cracking ice as a titan announcing tragedy, are probably enough to make me choose the Norwegian historical epic over the Canadian doc and the Mexican comedy. There's just something I'll never forget about those noises in Growth of the Soil.
Next, I thought we could tackle two categories often bound in the minds of effects-obssessed cinephiles. However, I know you're not sure if you'll have candidates for them. In that case, this may stay as my little couplet in the middle of a broader conversation.
BEST MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLING and BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
For the makeup and hairstyling side of things, it's all about the divide and potential overlaps between glamour and degradation. For example, I love how haggard The Unknown has all its main characters' looks as they find themselves in bodies not their own, or how The Debut gets immense comedic points out of the extremes of actorly exhaustion cum grotesquerie it's willing to put Julianne Moore through. Diary of a Mad Old Man does excellent work rendering Lily Franky as a non-normative body in living decay, in stark contrast with Fan Bingbing's sweaty femme-fatale allure. I was surprised by how much La Bola Negra got out of Guitarricadelafuente's desperate Marcel wave across the indicencies of war, or Penélope Cruz' Dietrich-esque eyebrows as her propagandist showgirl. I would give kudos for Stuffed's taxidermized mania, but Jodie Comer's wig was overacting.
In THE DIFFICULT BRIDE, cosmetic perfection is more disturbing than any monstrous sight.
Alas, it all comes down to horror. The Spiral loses points for its fatsuits, but I adored the gore and Jasmine Trinca's theatrically unconvincing old age cosmetics. My winner, however, has to be The Difficult Bride, where subtle skin conditions become the focus of an obsessive camera. Yet no fantastical rash is more unnerving than the bridal perfection of a ghost whose idealized traditional femininity becomes the greatest monster of all for the film's troubled protagonist.
Visual Effects are all about the deluge of The Spiral and the demented stylizations of Matthew Rankin's latest, Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney in all its Guy Maddin-esque glory. Fjord has its avalanches and Jesus walks, Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? gets a lot of mileage out of war atrocities that both look fake and far too visceral for comfort, while Everytime blows its effects budget to great effect on one memorable sunset, suspended in time and digital dreams. But my winner was always going to be Hope, which technically preceded TIFF but is still counted among the Midnight Madness program, so I'll be allowing it here. I don't care about photorealism like some Cannes-attending grumps seem to, and, if anything, I think the PS2 quality of some of the stuff we see adds to the film's charm. Give me effects with personality and character over the perfectly credible textures of a Hollywood studio's rendering farm, with no soul behind the CGI gloss.
What say you, Eurocheese? Anything to add on your end, or do you really want to skip Makeup and Visual Effects? If so, you know what's next on the list.
EUROCHEESE: Lord knows I have thrown enough praise at La Bola Negra and The Debut - great callouts. Let's jump into one of our biggest categories.
BEST ACTOR
I spent the entire festival changing my mind on who deserved this recognition most. Mahershala Ali kicked things off, and these awards are showing me how much respect I had for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother across the board. This is one of his strongest performances to date, though, and the strongest selling point of the film as a whole. His character is doing his best to hold his children's lives together, causing the thin boundary he set between his work as an assassin and his personal life to tear wide open. He is carrying every betrayal of his own beliefs on his face, and we feel his anguish.
All three leads of the different timelines in La Bola Negra delivered strong work. Guitarricadelafuente particularly stood out for his soldier who, after escaping with his life early in the film, must decide what he is willing to risk to connect with a captured "enemy" soldier. In Coward, Valentin Campagne shines as the playful leader of a theater troupe who falls for our main character, shifting between curiosity and doubt about the future. I'm glad he received recognition at Cannes, and hope we will see more of him in the future.
Is John Malkovich our Best Actor Oscar frontrunner for WILD HORSE NINE?
Two veteran actors arguably showed their best work to date at the festival. John Turturro showed panache in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York as a down-on-his-luck old con who lands on a score larger than he can handle. The film exists as a showcase for the actor, giving him a number of Oscar clips as he begins to realize the walls are closing in. Then there's John Malkovich in Wild Horse Nine, whose cadence is a perfect match for Martin McDonagh's dialogue - and I'm saying that as a compliment, though I'm not typically a McDonagh fan. His jokes consistently land as intended, and he also brings a touch of jaded anger to the role that fits his CIA agent's cynicism. We'll no doubt be hearing about this role for the rest of the season, and he does a wonderful job.
Then, to my surprise, I was very impressed with Jordan Firstman's performance in Club Kid. I'm not familiar with Firstman's work, but what starts as a lighthearted comedy moves into a genuine connection with his son, and a slow realization that the choices he's made over the years built a life he enjoyed, but one that will no longer help him reach what he wants most. Later in the film, as he finds himself forced into one adult decision after another, he shows the pains and joys of growing into the person he wants to become. I was surprised how moved I was by this film, largely because of what he brings to the screen.
It turns out TIFF saved the best for last, though. My final screening of the fest was Elsinore, and I am so excited for Andrew Scott's season of awards love. Given where we know the story is heading, his performance is full of life, hanging on to what he has left while he can. It's been far too long since an openly gay actor was nominated for playing a gay character on screen, and I believe Scott will break that curse this year at the Oscars.
CLÁUDIO: I'll try not to repeat mentions too much, so here's a hearty co-sign to Ali and Firstman, who surprised me both in his directing chops and how fantastic he was in the lead of his own passion project. Writing-wise, I have my issues with Club Kid, but that's another matter altogether. Similarly, though I despise Wild Horse Nine's script, I think Malkovich and Rockwell do good work as the leads. I'd single out Carlos González from La Bola Negra's three main stars, but I'm with you on Campagne's excellence in Coward, which far outshines his more reactive co-lead and co-winner of the Cannes Best Actor prize.
Anyway, let's give a round of applause to the leading men who rise to the occasion even when their films don't meet them on the same level of excellence. Folks like Bradley Fiomona Dembeasset's "a star is born" tour de force in the Un Certain Regard prizewinner Congo Boy, Joshua Griffin's committed turn in Masc, Rodney Hicks' titanic work for Tsukamoto's Vietnam War movie Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, Oustin Léon's heartfelt character study in I Am Mario, Harry Melling's musical exhuberance and romantic surrender to Stuffed's madness, Son Suk-ku's plunge into misanthropy for Bedford Park, and Channing Tatum's portrait of imperfect fatherhood put at the center of an impossible situation in Josephine.
If you only know Lily Franky from his Kore-eda collaborations, prepare to be shocked speechless by what he's up to in DIARY OF A MAD OLD MAN.
Near the finish line, Javier Bardem's directorial duties clash with his parental responsibilities to great effect in The Beloved, and Paul Jesson's graceful reckoning with an aged mind and body's decline in Tender Loving Care took my breath away. The same goes for Lily Franky's no-holds-barred take on a perverted old man's sexual misadventures with his daughter-in-law after half his body is left useless by a stroke in Diary of a Mad Old Man. Hwang Jung-min also does tremendous things with body language in Hope, balancing classic slapstick with a realist action hero's grit, yet always slightly awkward and decidedly unheroic.
At last, my winner is a different Korean thespian. Sul Kyung-gu doesn't quite soar above his masterclass turn in Lee Chang-dong's Oasis, but there's something special about how much he gets out of his laid-off factory worker's depression in Possible Love. It builds up beneath the surface, all throughout the movie, until it finally explodes in an interview setting that's more like a self-evisceration, the man reduced to an open wound, oozing pain, flesh, and fluid. It's so raw it feels wrong to keep watching. One senses the need to look away.
Many of these performers were helped by stupendous scripts, so that shall be our next category, with no division between adapted and original.
BEST SCREENPLAY
With that in mind, let me give Mike Leigh his flowers for the miraculous tightrope exercise in tonal balance that Tender Loving Care turns out to be, before striking an urgent, final note that's more like a scream than anything you'll see in a horror movie this year. And while Leonardo Sbaraglia wasn't in my Best Actor runners-up, Almodóvar's script for Bitter Christmas is a formidable bit of self-critique, almost deliberately minor and all the better for it.
I've written a lot already about the merits of Clarissa, La Gradiva and The Dreamed Adventure, so I'll leave it at that, though you should know they were high on my considerations. So were Pereda's odd vision of comedy in Everything Else Is Noise and Schanelec's bizarre take on melodrama in My Wife Cries.
In the end, it came down to Harari's The Unknown, one of the smartest films I've ever seen about notions of personhood and rape, and how we create the "I" through a mixture of autonomy over one's physical form, a personal perspective on the world, and the ability to enact self-possession. And, of course, my winner... Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Léa Le Dimna's script for All of a Sudden, best film of the year, a rare Rivettian delight that provided me hope in a hopeless world.
EUROCHEESE: Tender Loving Care, Clarissa and All of a Sudden would be among my top choices as well. Lee Chang-dong and Jungmi Oh also did an excellent job with the dialogue in scenes from Possible Love - the actors may be doing heavy lifting on their end, but the amount each character is willing to reveal feeds into the uncomfortable dynamics in so many scenes. I'd like to once again highlight Paul Mayhew-Archer for Onwards and Sideways - what easily could have been a lighthearted love story takes on far darker material, creating compelling surprises and bringing us into the realities of handling the disease. La Bola Negra's structure alone deserves praise, but I ultimately think it's more of a feat of directing. Jesse Eisenberg's buoyant, surprising story has so many brilliant one-liners and came very close to being my top choice.
Let's hope TANGLES isn't forgotten in the upcoming awards season.
In the end, though, Tangles had the screenplay that hit me the hardest emotionally, and it feels only right to highlight it here. Sarah Leavitt's graphic novel, brought to life along with Trev Renney and director Leah Nelson, gives an honest depiction of family, life choices and losses we will all experience. I hope the Oscars find room in the animated race, if nothing else, for this gem.
BEST DIRECTOR
The trio of auteurs near the top of my list need to start this discussion - Mike Leigh, giving Tender Loving Care's potential perfect swan song in a career filled with stories about what we owe to each other. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose intensely personal storytelling in All of a Sudden allows him the space to bring us long-form discussions that feel like escapes to a kinder, more deeply felt existence. And Lee Chang-dong, showing us some of the sharper edges of empathy in Possible Love, but still allowing us to peek into the everyday struggles of his characters. These are top-tier works from truly brilliant minds, and I will not be surprised if they move even higher on my list over the years. The Debut is a notable step up for Jesse Eisenberg, who I hope continues to surprise us with his future projects, and I'm pleased with the growth from Lukas Dhont in Coward. Jordan Firstman has also joined my list of names to watch after seeing Club Kid.
You knew it was coming, though - I was enamored with Los Javis' work in La Bola Negra, which will no doubt be one of my favorite films of this decade. The level of confidence to take on such an epic scope is not only impressive, it's announcing a significant talent that I hope we see return for future Oscar races. I already can't wait to see what they do next.
CLÁUDIO: You do love those Spaniards a whole lot. Alas, my picks for Best Directing at TIFF stray away from such queer delights. Instead, I'd like to give a shout-out to Lisandro Alonso's brilliant revisiting of his earlier, career-defining La Libertad. The Esiri brothers had already dazzled me in Eyimofe, but Clarissa puts them on the map as some of the greatest directors working today, their sensual yet shrewd observations all the more valuable for how intoxicating they let themselves be, persuading spectators through an inviting allure. Angela Schanelec keeps besting herself with each new project, and My Wife Cries should have probably earned her a Golden Berlin Bear. A Silver Bear for Best Direction at the very least. There's also the matter of Valeska Grisebach, whose The Dreamed Adventure sneaks up on you, slowly revealing its genius and only letting you see the absolute mastery at play once you're exiting the theater and find yourself reflecting on the journey she just took you on for nearly three hours into the Bulgarian countryside.
When it's all said and done, my choice came down to three iconoclasts in their own right. There's Mariano Llinás, whose association with El Pampero Cine has produced some of the most oddly delightful pieces of cinema of the past decade, including his latest five-hour documentary magnum opus, The Life of Jorge Luis Borges. Then, you have Marine Atlan with her La Gradiva, pulling inspiration from a myriad of influences, both cinematic - the Nouvelle Vague, Visconti, a hint of Guadagnino - and not - Lampedusa, Pompeii's artifacts, the Vatican's walking women that give the film its title. And despite all this, there's never a hint of derivation in her vision of suspended adolescence, preserved in cinema as eternal ghosts, the same way the people consumed by Vesuvius have had their last moments forever preserved in molten rock molds of their burned bodies.
With EVERYTIME, Wollner made a film where the impossible feels possible, the potential of cinema to transgress reality laid bare.
Finally, my pick for Best Director goes to Sandra Wollner, whose Everytime is like nothing else out there. By the time that last act came along, I was left staring, slack-jawed, at the screen, completely at the mercy of a directorial vision that took me by surprise as no other film at TIFF managed to do. Also, that inciting incident, that perfect long take, is the sort of thing that might give a formalist like myself either an orgasm or a serious case of Stendhal Syndrome.
All this brings us to our final category.
BEST PICTURE
Initially, we talked about doing a top ten, but since I'm still making my way through my inescapable screener pile, I felt a top three was a more cautious, conservative alternative. Feel free to present your full tenner, my friend, but I'll restrict myself to some Olympic podium-style nonsense. In that spirit, my bronze medal goes to Marine Atlan's La Gradiva, for her exquisite understanding of youth, of adolescent melancholy, of history and how it shapes us, how it promises a place in the world it can't always deliver. Silver is Mike Leigh's color, for his tenderly, lovingly, and very carefully made Tender Loving Care. If this is to be his final film, it's one hell of a statement to close out a career that will forever be remembered for its cinematic greatness and humanistic valor. And, of course, gold goes to Ryusuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden, which gave me hope at my most hopeless and remains my favorite world premiere of 2026 as a whole.
EUROCHEESE: Terrific choices, and I can't wait to catch up on Everytime and La Gradiva at AFI Fest. I only saw 28 films at the festival, but I highly recommend everyone see these films before completing their year-end favorites list:
10. Onwards and Sideways
09. Elsinore
08. Possible Love
07. Tender Loving Care
06. Coward
05. All of a Sudden
04. Club Kid
03. Tangles
02. The Debut
01. La Bola Negra
Please come back for our final wrap-up, as Cláudio and I throw in a few fun categories to call out our highlights and lowlights of the fest!
In the third and last of this Jury of Two series, we’ll be taking our cues from the Film Bitch Awards with categories like Best Sexpot, but also crown some sillier honors like Funniest Prop and crown the Oscar villain coming out of the festival. Please leave your suggestions for what other categories we should award. Sound off in the comments.