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TIFF 2026: The latest movie reviews from Toronto
If you want an idea of what’s next in film, the Toronto International Film Festival is a good place to start. Every year TIFF features a huge range of features from around the world, and often some of them go on to be huge hits or awards contenders; the 2025 edition, for instance, included the likes of both Hamnet and Obsession.
Covering a sprawling festival like TIFF solo is next to impossible, so I do my best to see as much as I can, and then write about everything with bite-sized reviews published each day. For 2026, that means exciting upcoming films like Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, and a gigantic Elon Musk documentary, and even a few streaming series, like Crystal Lake and Carrie.
You can keep up with my thoughts on everything I watch right here.
It makes sense that Musk is a long film. The latest from Alex Gibney, who has previously directed documentaries about Theranos and Steve Jobs, is an impressively thorough retelling of the story of Elon Musk, from his early days as a dot-com millionaire to “taking a wood chipper” to vital US government departments. In order to understand Musk’s rise to power, you need to know the whole story. Musk tells it compellingly and convincingly, but doesn’t offer much in the way of revelations if you’re aware of Musk’s catastrophic influence on the world. For everyone else, a demanding runtime just shy of four hours might prove too much of a barrier to being convinced.
The film opens with shots of space and a voiceover of Musk detailing some of his sci-fi ambitions. From there, it’s a fairly chronological narrative of how we got to this point. The first section of the film reveals how Musk’s mythology was built, while also steadily seeding doubts that he’s the Tony Stark–style tycoon that many believe him to be. It starts off with the basic details, like when Musk was ousted as CEO from PayPal or how he convinced the world he founded Tesla, a company that existed before he was involved. The film juxtaposes his many bombastic claims about autonomous vehicles with visceral footage of a deadly crash involving a Tesla on autopilot. It drops in poignant interviews, like when former MAGA influencer Ashley St Clair, mother to one of Musk’s many children, declares in a terrified voice: “Elon is a nuke.”
Marvel’s mishandling of its Blade reboot will likely go down as one of the studio’s biggest mistakes. There was a great actor in place to play the vampire hunter (Mahershala Ali), and a promising director set to take over the reins (Bassam Tariq). In retrospect, though, the disappointing demise of Blade might not be such a bad thing, because Tariq and Ali have collaborated on something much more interesting than a superhero reboot: the powerful hitman thriller Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.
That was one of five movies I was able to cram into a very hectic third day at the Toronto International Film Festival (you can see my previous reports here and here), and it was one of those days that drives home why events like TIFF can be so special. Each film I saw was drastically different from the last — there was everything from a drama about drifting cars to a throwback horror flick based on a famous Japanese ghost story — which was a great reminder that there are still plenty of new ideas left in the world of film.
Due to a scheduling mishap, I was only able to check out two movies on my second day at the Toronto International Film Festival — but I did manage to get an early look at and some fascinating details on one of my most anticipated films this year.
Even if you don’t know the name Laika, you probably know the studio’s work; it’s the animation house behind stop-motion hits like ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings. Over the years Laika’s films have steadily gotten more impressive on both a technical and artistic level. Which brings us to the incredible-looking Wildwood, hitting theaters next month. If you’re unfamil