TIFF 51: “Tangles” packs a personal punch, wrestling with Alzheimer’s through animation

by Eurocheese

One of the top reasons to attend festivals is to find surprises, films that far exceed expectations and become unforeseen favorites. I had no plans to write up Leah Nelson's Tangles, though I knew it was getting good reviews. When I stumbled out of the theater, unable to keep tears from streaming down my face, I knew it deserved a reaction here at The Film Experience. This animated gem is not only for those who have been impacted by Alzheimer's directly, but for anyone who has loved ones aging into their final years, when we begin the difficult process of learning how to say goodbye...

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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: “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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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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TIFF 51: Full of sorrow and fury, “Elephants in the Fog” is a queer gem from Nepal

by Cláudio Alves

It starts at night, opening credits fading in and out over an abstract blackness that slowly gives way to something more discernible. Strange sounds seep from the dark, a cry that might be animal or human song. Gradually, it becomes some ritualistic beckoning for an elephant, somewhere in the forest. “Come to me,” a voice shouts into the nothing; lights slash across the empty screen, and a search party begins to make itself known in the frame. Such an opening could insinuate a film enmeshed in ancient mysteries to the point of alienation, removed from modernity and led by tradition into a magical place where the concerns of so-called “real life” matter little before the demands of ancient rite, folklore, and myth. 

But then it cuts to morning, and Elephants in the Fog suggests a narrative, thematic, and cinematic space that not only avoids these assumed extremes but also refutes the traditional vs modern binary this review’s first paragraph might have suggested. In the light of dawn, we meet our protagonist, Pirati, the matriarch of a Nepalese Kinnar community formed by those whom old tradition might recognize as a third-gendered other and less tradition-bound folk might call transgender, queer…

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