The Debut<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\nJesse Eisenberg\u2019s witty satire of a local community theater production feels like it was engineered at a musical lab at the Eugene O\u2019Neill Center, but the appeal of The Debut extends beyond the theater set. The spotlight is on Julianne Moore as Mona, a housewife who feels invisible to her family until she finds community at a local production of a (fictional) old musical, Nosy Neighbors. But the newcomer to the stage requires a lot of work, and it\u2019s up to her impresario and director Jerry (Paul Giamatti) to help her reach her full potential\u2014if she doesn\u2019t lose the plot first. The matchup of Moore and Giamatti is an absolute thrill to watch as they push each other\u2019s character further and further into absurdity. With Bernadette Peters\u2019 blessing and a song, The Debut is the kind of light and funny grown-up comedy that harkens back to another era, the kind of sophisticated fare that would have played for at least a year or more at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Everytime\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Winner of the \u200b\u200bUn Certain Regard Prize at this year\u2019s Cannes Film Festival, Sandra Wollner\u2019s devastating meditation on grief and memory begins at the end of a teenage girl\u2019s life after tragedy strikes. Her mother and sister are left grieving her loss when the girl\u2019s boyfriend reenters their lives and breaks open the fragile wounds they\u2019ve tried to heal separately. The movie doesn\u2019t just stop at the heartbreak of loss, but continues walking in its characters\u2019 grief, tipping into surrealism and the fantastical in ways that feel both grounded yet dreamy. This film\u2019s beguiling presence and swoony imagery, often following its characters into nature to soften the blow death has dealt this family, have haunted me since I saw it. Despite its bleak premise, I already want to revisit it, just to think about Everytime longer; although I know in my heart of hearts, I won\u2019t logically understand it any better, I just want to sit in the emotional portrait Wollner\u2019s created to process the unthinkable.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Stuffed\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Horror fans with a love of Sweeney Todd rejoice: There\u2019s a taxidermy musical that\u2019s scurried from the gutters of off-Broadway theater and taken residence in a cartoonishly sour-looking industrial town that would look at home in the world of A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Theo Rhys\u2019 unhinged horror romance Stuffed follows Araminta (Jodi Comer), a taxidermist with a wild dream of stuffing a willing human subject. She finds such a man in Bernie (Harry Melling), a lonely cog in a factory. In preparation for this ghoulish experiment, the unlikely couple find love, then question whether or not to move ahead with their morbid plans. Despite the gross body horror and taxidermied creatures, Stuffed is weirdly sweet, in a Romeo And Juliet meets Frankenstein kind of way. Comer is both Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett as Araminta, a wild card if there was ever one, while Melling doubles down on his Pillion pleasing skills, playing a character who\u2019s giving himself up if it means he will be remembered. My screening had the most walkouts of any TIFF movies I saw this year, but I was entirely charmed by Comer and Melling\u2019s performances and singing in Rhys\u2019 unforgettable debut.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Elsinore<\/p>\n
I was so close to making it through TIFF without crying during a movie, but Andrew Scott had me (and many of my seatmates) silently wiping away tears over his virtuoso performance in Elsinore. Scott plays actor Ian Charleson, the Chariots Of Fire star who can\u2019t shake off his award-winning glory for more work, until Daniel Day-Lewis storms off a production of Hamlet in England\u2019s National Theater. Charleson, fighting against AIDS complications, takes the part despite the risks, to put on one last performance. Surrounded by exceptional co-stars like Olivia Colman as a determined AIDS specialist and Billie Piper as Charleson\u2019s best friend, Scott gives a showstopping performance as he wrestles with the play\u2019s themes of death and the toll performing takes on body. Scott\u2019s ability to embody both the physical and emotional pain of reaching for one last dream before the grave is so remarkable I looked past Simon Stone\u2019s questionable directing choices, like using handheld cameras at sensitive times and employing montages that detract from the strength of Scott\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n
I Play Rocky<\/p>\n
\ufeff<\/p>\n
I\u2019m just as surprised as you are to see a Peter Farrelly film anywhere near a best-of list after the abomination that is Green Book<\/a>. Thankfully, he\u2019s turned a corner with this scrappy crowdpleaser about one of the best underdog stories in Hollywood history. I Play Rocky recounts the success story of Sylvester Stallone (Anthony Ippolito), a struggling actor who once starred in cheap pornos and Roger Corman movies before slipping his script for Rocky under the door at a production office. The producing team loves his story, but can\u2019t make Stallone drop his demand to play Rocky, so they make the concessions needed to risk it all on a complete unknown. The rest, as they say, is Hollywood history. At times, I Play Rocky borders dangerously on Bohemian Rhapsody-levels of biopic cheese, but Ippolito channels both Stallone\u2019s indistinguishable speech and his unmatched bravado that it\u2019s thrillingly entertaining. Hollywood loves movies mythologizing its magic, and I Play Rocky plays like a valentine to the down-and-out dreamers who want nothing more than to make movies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 2026 Toronto International Film Festival has come to a close, the glitzy parties moving on to their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":904341,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75],"class_list":["post-904340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=904340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/904341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}