The 51st Toronto Film Festival brings 293 films from 66 countries. Here are 20 movies to watch at TIFF 2026.
The Toronto International Film Festival reaches its 51st edition this September, and Loud and Clear Reviews will be there. TIFF 2026 has stacked up 293 titles from 66 countries across fourteen programmes, running the full distance from awards-season contenders to first features nobody has heard of yet, with a long list of world and North American premieres in the mix. This is also the first year the festival hosts a proper film market at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, which means more deals, more industry in town, and better odds that something screening to a half-empty room in September turns up in theatres by spring. Narrowing all of that down is a losing game, but here are 20 movies to watch at TIFF 2026, ranked alphabetically.
1. Always Lalisa
Gala Presentations
Director: Sue Kim
Country: USA
Pop documentaries tend to arrive pre-negotiated, so the interesting question with Always Lalisa is how much director Sue Kim was allowed to keep. The film covers the year Lisa spent away from BLACKPINK: leaving YG Entertainment, starting her own company, launching a solo career, taking an acting job, and trying to hold onto some version of a private life through it all. Sony Music Vision produced it, which normally signals a glossy authorized product, though Kim’s last film, The Last of the Sea Women, was patient and unsentimental about aging Korean divers who refused to quit. Even if this one plays it safe, the Gala screening should be an event on its own terms. A Lisa premiere in Toronto means a room full of people who’ll be screaming before the lights go down, and that buzzy excitement will be half the experience.
2. Ancestors
Discovery
Director & Writer: David Turpin
Countries: Ireland, UK
David Turpin wrote The Lodgers and The Winter Lake before stepping behind the camera, and for his first film as director he’s staged a séance of sorts in 1980s London. Beau (Éanna Hardwicke, of Normal People) is an Irishman abroad at a point when homosexuality is still illegal back home, and when his friend Tiny disappears, he goes looking. Turpin has described the film as reaching across the border between the past and the next world, suggesting he’s less interested in explaining what happens than in the feeling of asking, and the period detail apparently runs all the way down to Polari, the coded slang that let men talk in the open. Rupert Everett stands in for the older generation here, and casting him in a film about the AIDS crisis calling back its dead carries a weight few actors of his era could bring. Jack Wolfe plays Tiny and co-wrote the original songs with Turpin, with Christina Hendricks surfacing in visions.
3. Babies
Gala Presentations
Director & Writer: Lauren Miller Rogen
Country: USA
Babies is the one on this list we’d bring a friend to. Annie (Anna Kendrick, of Woman of the Hour) and Aaron (Seth Rogen, of The Studio) are trying to decide whether to have kids when a newly divorced friend and her four-year-old move in and start supplying live data. Lauren Miller Rogen wrote and directed, and she’s married to Seth, which lends the casting a wink and probably gave the script some very specific source material. Issa Rae, Dan Stevens, Sharon Stone and Ed Helms fill out the impressive ensemble. Comedies about whether to have children usually arrive already knowing the answer they want. The hope here is for an unpredictable film willing to sit with a couple who might land on a non-traditional answer and be perfectly fine about it.
4. Closing Night
Special Presentations
Director: Cody Fern
Writers: Cody Fern, Devon Bostick
Countries: Australia, Canada
Sarah Paulson has an instinct for the kind of role that gives her fans something to chew on, which is most of why Closing Night is on this list in the first place. She plays Sandra Vale, an actress on the eve of the biggest performance of her career, when her sister April (Naomi Watts) surfaces after thirty years away. Both actors were in Toronto in 2024, Paulson with Hold Your Breath and Watts with The Friend, and yet they’ve never shared a screen, so locking them in a dressing room and letting three decades of silence out is a premise that either sings or falls apart in the first reel. Actor Cody Fern makes his directing debut, co-writing with actor Devon Bostick, and casting Dianne Wiest, Odessa A’zion and Toby Wallace to complete the family. The film was called Mother Courage until fairly recently, which tells you where Fern might be headed with his killer cast.
5. Crystal Lake
Primetime
Showrunner: Brad Caleb Kane
Director: Michael Lennox
Country: USA
This is the first new Friday the 13th material in seventeen years, which by itself makes the upcoming Peacock series Crystal Lake screening its opening episodes one of the bigger tickets at the festival. A24 is producing, a sentence nobody expected to read about a franchise previously guided by Paramount and New Line. Linda Cardellini plays the infamous Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s mother, in the years before she became a punchline in a cable-knit sweater. Bryan Fuller conceived the series and brought in Adrienne King, the final girl of the 1980 original, before he stepped down as showrunner in 2024 and Brad Caleb Kane took over. King is still listed in the credits, which raises questions about how she might link up. The series filmed at Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco and other New Jersey locations where the first movie was made. Aside from the nostalgia factor, where Cardellini takes Pamela is the reason to be in that room.
6. Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been
TIFF Docs
Director: Barry Avrich
Country: Canada
Darlene Love sang lead on “He’s a Rebel” and the credit went to The Crystals, which is the short version of a six-decade career spent doing the work and watching other names go on it. Barry Avrich’s documentary runs that history against the civil rights era, and there’s a lot of career to cover: four Lethal Weapon films as Trish Murtaugh, Motormouth Maybelle on Broadway in Hairspray, and the December ritual of singing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on Letterman every year. Cher, Bruce Springsteen, Dionne Warwick and Steven Van Zandt turn up to testify, with Taraji P. Henson executive producing. 20 Feet from Stardom introduced Love to a lot of people from the back of the stage. Fingers crossed she takes the mic at the premiere.
7. Elsinore
Special Presentations
Director: Simon Stone
Writer: Stephen Beresford
Country: UK
Elsinore is the one we keep circling back to as a potential People’s Choice winner. In 1989, Ian Charleson (Andrew Scott) played Hamlet at the National Theatre while dying of AIDS, and by most accounts he was extraordinary in it. He was dead eight weeks after the run closed, at 40, and his family named the cause publicly at a moment when almost nobody did. Simon Stone directs from a Stephen Beresford script, with Olivia Colman as the doctor treating him. Scott didn’t get his proper flowers for All of Us Strangers in a way that still stings, and he’s yet to get his full due from awards bodies, so a role this exposed is exactly the kind they tend to finally notice. Pair it with Ancestors, which comes at the same decade from the other direction.
8. Everybody Wants to F*ck Me
Special Presentations
Director & Writer: Jonathan Schey
Countries: UK, France
The title has already sold a lot of tickets, and by the sound of it the film more than justifies it. Jonathan Schey’s first feature follows a London man (Taron Egerton, of Black Bird) who has engineered himself into everybody’s ideal, only to discover that being wanted by several women at once plays closer to a horror premise than a fantasy, with Jessica Henwick and Mia McKenna-Bruce among them. LuckyChap and Film4 are behind it, which is a useful signal, given LuckyChap’s record with material that looks like a comedy and turns out to have teeth. A teaser that screened at CinemaCon reportedly stopped the room cold. Comedy thrillers about modern dating usually settle for observation and a musical montage, and this one sounds like it wants considerably more than that.
9. Evil Genius
Gala Presentations
Director: Courteney Cox
Writer: Courtenay Miles
Country: USA
Courteney Cox picked a hell of a case for her second feature as a director. In 2003, a pizza delivery driver walked into a bank in Erie, Pennsylvania with a collar bomb locked around his neck and a scavenger hunt of instructions in his hand, and whether he was victim, participant or both is the part nobody ever settled. Patricia Arquette (Severance) and David Harbour (Stranger Things) lead, with Michael Chernus and Danielle Macdonald among the supporting cast. Courtenay Miles adapted the Netflix docuseries, and Jason Bateman’s Aggregate Films is behind it. Cox has been inside the Scream machine long enough to know how to hold a camera on something ugly without decorating it. The temptation with this case is to explain it, and the film is better off if she doesn’t.
10. Future Tense
Centrepiece
Director & Writer: Jenna Cato Bass
Countries: South Africa, Australia
Nobody else is making the films Jenna Cato Bass keeps turning out. In a Cape Town on the brink of climate collapse, Lwando (Lawrence Maleka) and Tara (Kristen Raath) win a place on a trip back to 1647, to a land still wild and not yet colonised, and the relationship goes under the wheels when he decides to change the course of history and she just wants to keep him. Qondiswa James also stars, with benchfilms and Causeway Films co-producing. Climate, human guilt and South African identity all get fed through the same machine, which is very much how Bass works: she brought Flatland to TIFF in 2019 and Good Madam in 2021, the latter turning a suburban house into a haunting about domestic labour. Nobody uses genre more plainly, or to say harder things with it, and travelling back as a mixed-race couple makes the past its own kind of horror movie. This is the biggest swing she’s taken.
11. How We Stand
Centrepiece
Director & Writer: Marie Clements
Country: Canada
Marie Clements made Bones of Crows, and How We Stand tackles another piece of policy most people were never taught about. In 1950s Oklahoma, a single mother (Cara Jade Myers, of Killers of the Flower Moon) gambles on the Native American Relocation Program and takes her three daughters to Los Angeles, where the promised career and stability prove the opposite. The girls end up in separate foster homes, and their lives split three ways from there, the film finding them again twenty years on as a doctor, an activist trying her hand at acting, and a young woman carrying something she can’t put into words. Amber Midthunder (Prey), Alyssa Wapanatâhk and Isabel DeRoy-Olson play them. Clements, adapting her own play, Tombs of the Vanishing Indian, is Métis and has built a career on the specific mechanics of how policy takes a family apart. She tends to do it without reaching for easy sentiment, though the magic realism and the send-up of Hollywood westerns suggest she isn’t reaching for solemnity either.
12. The Julia Set
Special Presentations
Director & Writer: Niki Byrne
Country: USA
Niki Byrne wrote and directed her first feature, and from the sound of it, she went at academia with a scalpel. Julia (Chase Infiniti) is a gifted mathematician pulled into an elite training squad for the Putnam, the competition that annually convinces a few hundred students they’re not as smart as they’d been told they were. Christopher Briney plays the teaching assistant who recruits her, and Gillian Anderson, Jason Isaacs and Nina Hoss play teachers in the department. Films about academic competition live or die on whether the filmmaker respects the subject or treats it as wallpaper, and putting actors of that caliber in faculty roles suggests Byrne knows which film she’s making. All eyes will be on Infiniti, who is the real draw after making such a splash with her breakout in One Battle After Another.
13. The Liberation
Special Presentations
Director: Guy Nattiv
Country: USA
Guy Nattiv built this one out of his own family. His grandmother Rita survived the Holocaust and died in the United States as a member of a cult, and Nattiv spent years trying to bring her body home. Carrie Coon (The White Lotus) plays Rita, a woman in midlife who meets a magnetic young spiritual leader named Ricki (Lily James, of Pam & Tommy) and is handed a door out of her own life. Bella Ramsey and Odessa Young play her daughters, and Tracy Letts, Coon’s husband offscreen, plays her husband. Nattiv won an Oscar for Skin and made Golda and Tatami, but those were assignments he took on. This is the one with his own name inside it, and Coon is long overdue for a role this size with such huge potential to break out.
14. A Long Winter
Centrepiece
Director: Andrew Haigh
Writers: Andrew Haigh, Colm Tóibín
Countries: Canada, UK
Mike (Fred Hechinger, of The White Lotus) is on the cusp of adulthood when his mother walks into the first blizzard of the season and doesn’t come back. The search stretches from days into weeks while the family edges toward the possibility that she never will. Haigh adapted Colm Tóibín’s short story with Tóibín himself, which makes obvious sense: both build their work out of what people can’t bring themselves to say to each other. Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays Mike’s father with no language for his own grief, Caitríona Balfe is the mother whose absence shapes everything that follows. It was filmed in the Canadian Rockies, where the scale of the country can do the work a stoic man won’t. All of Us Strangers deserved far more than awards voters gave it, and Weekend remains one of the great films about two people talking their way toward honesty. Expect this one to hurt.
15. Magazine
Discovery
Director & Writer: Alexandra Pechman
Country: USA
Magazine is set in New York in 2011, back when a literary magazine internship still felt like a door to the next level rather than a plot joke. Nora (Lily McInerny, of Bonjour Tristesse) arrives from Arizona to fetch coffee and read the slush pile at a tastemaking journal called Platen, and walks into the standard arrangement: gatekeepers, office politics, and desire operating as a currency nobody names out loud. The publisher, Mickey (Jake Lacy, of Carol), offers the only advice that matters, which is that an intern’s real skill is knowing when to leave the party. Alexandra Pechman came up in that world as a writer, and first features made by people describing rooms they actually sat in tend to carry detail you can’t research your way into. Setting it a few years short of #MeToo is the sharp choice, because nobody in the building has the language for it yet. The Discovery category is where Toronto puts the filmmakers you’ll be arguing about in five years, so consider this an early subscription.
16. Misty Green
Gala Presentations
Writer and Director: Chris Rock
Country: USA
Chris Rock hasn’t directed a feature since Top Five in 2014, and this is his first pass at straight drama. Misty (Rosalind Eleazar, of Slow Horses) is a gifted actress whose career stalled, and the film follows her fight for a second act after someone from her past hands her an opening. Rock has A24 behind him and a supporting cast that looks like people who wanted in rather than people who were available: Daniel Kaluuya as her brother, plus Adam Driver, Anna Kendrick, Topher Grace and Anthony Anderson. The preview is excellent, giving Eleazar room to show off an alluring singing voice and doing what every preview should do: leave you wanting more. Eleazar collects a TIFF Tribute Award the same week, which tells you what the festival makes of the performance before anyone outside the building has seen a frame of it.
17. Prima Facie
Gala Presentations
Director: Susanna White
Writer: Suzie Miller
Countries: Australia, UK
Prima Facie was a one-woman play that won Jodie Comer an Olivier and a Tony, so the first thing to note is that it’s strange Comer didn’t continue with the film. Instead, Cynthia Erivo (Wicked) takes on Tessa Ensler, a barrister who climbed out of a working-class background and built a career defending men accused of sexual assault, until she’s assaulted herself and meets the system from the wrong side of the bench. Suzie Miller adapted her own play, and Susanna White directs, with Simon Russell Beale and Noma Dumezweni in support. The play worked because it was one woman alone in a spotlight, so the question is whether opening it up sharpens the argument or spreads it thin. Comer, for the record, has a world premiere of her own here (see number 19), so perhaps we’ll see her in the audience.
18. River
Midnight Madness
Director: Joshua Giuliano
Country: USA
Midnight Madness opens with River, and Joshua Giuliano’s first feature has the cleanest hook in the section. Three estranged siblings take a boat out to scatter their father’s ashes at his favorite spot on the water. The engine dies, there’s no signal, and something without a face comes out of the treeline. Jane Levy (Don’t Breathe) and Jessica Rothe (Happy Death Day) are two of the three, which is a serious amount of accumulated final-girl mileage in one aluminum hull. Slashers built on a family that already can’t stand each other come with an engine installed: the killer only has to wait for them to start talking. Shudder took streaming rights and Independent Film Company took theatres well before any festival audience saw it, and distributors move that early on a genre title only when they think it can go wide. Remember Focus chasing Obsession to a reported $15 million after its Midnight Madness premiere last year? This time the buyers didn’t wait for the screening, or screaming, to start.
19 . Stuffed
Discovery
Director: Theo Rhys
Writers: Theo Rhys, Joss Holden-Rea
Country: USA
Bernie (Harry Melling, of The Pale Blue Eye) is so frightened of being forgotten that he agrees to let a taxidermist, Araminta (Jodie Comer, of The Bikeriders), preserve him after he dies, and then the two of them make the mistake of falling for each other. Oh, and it’s a musical. Theo Rhys expanded it from his 2021 short, which won the Midnight jury and audience prizes at SXSW and earned a BAFTA nomination, with co-writer Joss Holden-Rea supplying the songs. Toronto crowds are generous with musicals, and while Pillion already established that Melling can carry a tune, ears will be up for Comer’s voice. Everything about this points to dark fun, and it opens the Discovery programme.
20. Trees Are Watching
SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS
Director & Writer: Bahman Ghobadi
Country: Turkey
Bahman Ghobadi has spent his career focused on Kurdish lives under pressure, like Turtles Can Fly, and now he’s pivoted to make a horror film. Darya (Eva Green, of Nocebo) returns to Mardin with her deaf daughter to a house ringed by clear-cut land where two trees still stand, planted in memory of a pair of twin sisters. Then, something starts visiting her at night. Green has spent twenty years being the most committed person in whatever strange film she turns up in, and a role built on a woman’s grip on reality coming loose sits squarely in her territory. The recently released trailer promises something spooky and surreal rather than jumpy. Plan around this one: it has a single public screening, so demand is likely to be fierce.
The 51st Toronto Film Festival Film Festival will take place on September 10 – 20, 2026. Take a look at the official 2026 Toronto Film Festival schedule and follow us on our socials for festival updates!