The 7 best, buzziest and most beautiful films at TIFF 2025

With 50 years at present below its belt ammunition — and something of a bring back to spring after COVID-19 years and workers' strikes — the Toronto International Film Festival was full of buzzy films this time around.

Whether you had to miss the festival or simply struggled to get tickets for the 291 films on offer, here's a list of some of our favourite titles.

From The Master to Midsommar, there's no shortage of martyr movies or (literal) cult classics. Something about a charismatic religious leader guiding their group to ruin or revelation continues to endlessly satisfy. But while Amanda Seyfried's The Testament of Ann Lee does follow the eponymous leader of the Shaker movement, the movie is anything but typical.

Equal parts odd and esoteric, the film charts Lee's path from bereaved mother to founder of an anti-sex Christian sect, following along as it gains a foothold in Europe, before relocating to the U.S. During the Revolutionary War. Never exalting or denigrating of its central figure, Ann Lee is instead a hallucinatory sort of experience; made by the creators of The Brutalist, it is also unerringly beautiful.

Oh, and did we mention it's a musical?

Chloé Zhao's heartbreaking, tear-jerking, chest-beating tale of woe and sorrow is everything that early critical reports have dubbed it. Charting the death of William Shakespeare's 11-year-old son, Zhao's follow-up to Nomadland (2020) accomplishes a stunning array of feats while sticking to her delicate, ethereal style.

The performances here are impressive, too, with Paul Mescal as the playwright, a best actress-worthy showing by Jessie Buckley as the grief-stricken mother Agnes Shakespeare, and the titular Hamnet played by young Jacobi Jupe, who's show-stopping enough to warrant a nomination of his own. This film is one to watch as awards season gets underway.

If you like Studio Ghibli, you're going to like Arco, which is that increasingly rare and beautiful thing: hand-drawn animation with a story more interesting than a dog about to be neutered. Falling right down the middle between being actually for kids versus for their usually bored parents, the story that French illustrator Ugo Bienvenu tells is as important as it is potentially confusing. 

In Arco, we follow the preteen character of the same name: a child from a far future where humans live on platforms in the clouds, far above a flooded Earth. After stealing a time-travel device, he accidentally finds himself in the year 2075: a relative halcyon time with robots, forests and — most importantly — a little girl who wants to help him get him home.

Outside of the time-travelling narrative, Arco is primarily a story of hope and warning. And gifted with the voice talents of Natalie Portman, Will Ferrell, Mark Ruffalo and more in its new English dub, there's more than enough there to hope for a solid reception in North America.

Brendan Fraser may have started his Brenaissance with The Whale. But he's solidifying it with Rental Family.

Taking the actually real Japanese industry of the same name, Philip (Fraser) is an actor. Not in TV shows or movies, but in real life. Hired by a company to improve the lives of the sad and lonely, he plays a "sad American" at a local man's fake funeral. Then, he plays the doting journalist, pretending to take down the life story of a man fading away into dementia. And, most egregiously, he plays the father of a fatherless little girl — to whom, by her mother's instructions, he must pretend he is really her biological father.

As anyone who's seen Mulan knows, the only good that can come from lying about your true self is the occasional show tune. Though drippingly schmaltzy and at times a little too tongue-in-cheek for its own good, Rental Family is so heartwarming it's impossible not to forgive the occasional overindulgence.  

On paper, The Christophers sounds like a different movie than it is. It is a story of backstabbing, fraud, criticism — of both the personal and art varieties — and celebrity. But in practice, its superpower is actually in its unambitious simplicity — along with Ian McKellen channelling Jack Sparrow.

McKellen stars as a bitter, out-of-work and out-of-practice painter and Michaela Coel as the art restorer hired by his children to recreate his work and pass it off as genuine. This Steven Soderbergh-directed flick has a simple message: Every artist wants to be great, but getting there doesn't feel all that great. Because whether your closet is full of masterpieces or of nothing, the problem is the same. If you don't have anything to work toward, what's the point?

If we're to listen to The Christophers, the solution is just as simple. Pick up the brush, loser. The canvas is waiting.

A dark horse favourite of many critics at this year's fest, Blue Heron is an affecting and delightfully convoluted rumination on memory. And it, along with its stellar child lead Eylul Guven, just so happens to be Canadian. 

Filmed on her native Vancouver Island, writer and director Sophy Romvari mines her own past: the story of an older brother diagnosed, then undiagnosed, with oppositional defiance disorder. Whatever the cause, as Romvari exposes in a topsy-turvy narrative that ties and unties the past with the present, his behaviour shapes and nearly destroys the rest of their lives.

It is an altogether gorgeous and deftly told narrative. And along with Chandler Levack's incisively unique Mile End Kicks and Matt Johnson's hilariously subversive Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, it is among a host of films finally showing off a decidedly and identifiably Canadian viewpoint. 

The Love That Remains is something of a puzzle. It purports to be about a marriage on the rocks, and the kids floundering behind. But what Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Pálmason (Godland; A White, White Day) actually comes up with is a little bit harder to unpack. 

Starring Pálmason's real-life children, The Love That Remains resists interpretation at every turn. That's even as some of the most beautiful cinematography of the year plays out — framing everything from ghost knights to giant chicken attacks.

But for all its oddities, there is a truthful heart to this film. It's about ending relationships and the natural entropy of life — about how your bravery or cowardice in the face of intimacy will define you through everything; about how being there for people means more than just being there. And, somehow, about bow-and-arrow safety. 

Senior Writer

---

---