TIFF 51: Best Actress Watch – “Being Heumann” and “Onwards and Sideways”

by Eurocheese

Ruth Madeley might be a new Best Actress contender for her work in BEING HEUMANN.

Coming into the fall festivals, no category has been a larger question mark in the Oscar race than The Film Experience’s highest honor – Best Actress. Aside from a couple of clear frontrunners (see my comments on The Debut), there appears to be room for a number of new challengers to find their way into the race. How likely are some of the pictures debuting at Toronto to factor in? If these two world premieres are any indication, the race is heating up. There’s Being Heumann, starring a heroic Ruth Madeley, and Onwards and Sideways, with the lovely Laura Linney…

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TIFF 51: “A Long Winter” leads Andrew Haigh up the Rocky Mountains

by Cláudio Alves

The human figure against the grandeur of the natural world has obsessed visual artists for centuries, if not millennia. In A Long Winter, his latest film and follow-up to the highly popular All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh follows the footsteps of those that came before him and delivers what can only be described as an exercise in landscape cinema. It’s perhaps his work where shot composition and the blocking of actors have most to say. At the same time, the text barely raises its voice above a whisper, whether it is to flesh out character or spell out theme, to engage or entrance or alienate the viewer sitting before the coldness of a big screen overcome by frost. 

Depending on the sort of film lover you are, this will either make A Long Winter a slog as hard to go through as the unforgiveness of its titular season, or it’ll have you breathe a sigh of relief that the Andrew Haigh of Lean On Pete has, at last, made his return after nearly a decade in absentia…

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TIFF 51: “The Difficult Bride” takes body horror to the bridal salon

by Cláudio Alves

Women are often called difficult when they’re just standing up for themselves, refusing mistreatment, expressing anxiety openly and unmasked. When it comes to the matter of weddings and the cottage industry built around them, we can even point to the term "bridezilla," which came to be as a way to mock some of these so-called difficult women whose transgressions are often nothing of the sort. In Rubaiyat Hossain’s The Difficult Bride, Zai both fits and doesn’t fit the descriptor the film’s title imposes on her. After all, she’s a bright young woman marrying the man she loves and continuing her studies in the hopes of a golden future ahead. This Bangladeshi drama is quite forthcoming about how many of her inevitable issues arise from social pressures, and how her self-image collapses in slow motion as gendered expectations demand.

That being said, she is haunted by visions of wild beasts encroaching upon her, as well as a mysterious figure, perchance a monster from the beyond or the product of a fractured mind falling apart. So, “complicated” might be more generous monicker than “difficult.” Regardless, she’s certainly something outside the norm, a cursed bride out of South Asian horror tradition, slipping into madness and pulling the film along with her…

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TIFF 51: “The Debut” Explodes off the screen and into the Oscar race!

by Eurocheese

In Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut, heltered housewife Mona Friedman (Julianne Moore) is the only person who applies for a small role in her local community theater musical other than perennial starlet Serena Cherry (a lovely cameo from Bernadette Peters). When the diva drops out for a better part in Annie Get Your Gun, the grouchy director, Jerry (Paul Giamatti), is forced to cast Mona, much to his chagrin. The film’s trailer suggests a straightforward premise, and the audience assumes we know where it is headed. When Jerry decides to push Mona to test her limits to draw a better performance out of her, though, he breaks something in her. And then, the film is off to the races...

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Venice: Elisa's Jury of One

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice...

[EDITOR'S NOTE: this was written shortly before the awards were handed so these are Elisa's feelings rather than comments on the winners.]

May el-Toukhy's WOMAN UNKNOWN won the Golden Lion but will it receive the same honor from Elisa's Jury of One?

Overall Festival Impressions

What a year to remember 2026 was for the oldest film festival in the world: arguably the best edition I have witnessed since I first attended with a press pass ten years ago, and the first in a very long time in which (helped by a particularly weak Cannes selection) Alberto Barbera was finally able to surpass Venice's natural competitor. In terms of overall cinematic quality, Venice eventually surpassed Cannes after years of trying to do so...

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