The Toronto Int’l Film Festival destroyed itself when it began to go wokey–wokey in ‘19 or thereabouts, and then it was further crippled by Covid. I for one was happy to see TIFF gradually slide down the slope…good!

For the last four or five years TIFF has been a shadow of its former self, and everyone kind of despises it for having become a festival of second–tier, sloppy–seconds, Venice–and–Telluride–rejected or leftover attractions.

Initial TIFF 2025 rundown:

Nicholas Hytner’s The Choral

Agnieszka Holland’s Franz

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet

Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound

Paul Greengrass’ The Lost Bus

Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life

HIKARI’s Rental Family

Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman

Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s She Has No Name

Clement Virgo’s Steal Away

Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Galas (in alphabetical order):

The Choral | Nicholas Hytner | UK

World Premiere | Gala Presentation: Homebound | Neeraj Ghaywan | India

North American Premiere | Gala Presentation: Hamlet | Chloé Zhao | UK

Canadian Premiere | Gala Presentation: A Private Life | Rebecca Zlotowski | France

North American Premiere | Gala Presentation: Roofman | Derek Cianfrance | USA

World Premiere | Gala Presentation: She Has No Name | Peter Ho-Sun Chan | China

North American Premiere | Gala Presentation: Special Presentations (in alphabetical order):

Franz | Agnieszka Holland | Czech Republic/Germany/Poland

World Premiere | Special Presentation: The Lost Bus | Paul Greengrass | USA

World Premiere | Special Presentation: Rental Family | HIKARI | USA/Japan

World Premiere | Special Presentation: Steal Away | Clement Virgo | Canada/Belgium

World Premiere | Special Presentation: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery | Rian Johnson | USA

World Premiere | Special Presentation: The 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, presented by Rogers, runs September 4–14, 2025.

The full Festival schedule will be released on tiff.net on Tuesday, August 12.

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I’ve somehow missed a pair of three–month–old quotes from Marty Supreme dp Darius Khondry, one in which he said that he and director Josh Safdie have “pushed the negative to increase the grain” (i.e. an apparent assurance of an Egyptian grainstorm), and another in which he divulged that Marty Supreme contains “140 different characters”

14 characters means a film will be fairly verbose, but 140? A film with 25 characters means it’ll be a lot like Robert Altman’s Nashville (which has 25 characters) and 50 characters would be Nashville on Adderall. Double that and you’d have Nashville injected with “hoo-hoo!” Daffy Duck serum. Bump that up to 140 and you’d be going beepity-beep-beep and whoa-baby “hoodily-hoo-hoo!” and homina-homina-homina start to finish.

We all know that Josh Safdie is a human pogo stick on speed to begin with, and so what Khondji has conveyed should strike cold fear into the hearts of cineastes everywhere.

This plus a likely prospect of Timothee Chalamet and his 139 costars inhaling and re-inhaling hundreds of billions of Egyptian mosquitoes into their lungs between lines, and I’m scared…genuinely terrified of this film. I’m certainly exhausted just thinking about it.

I thought the whole MAGA belief system was that they didn’t care about Trump being a sociopath and a morally derelict scalawag…that they accepted him as the bully-boy taker and user that he’s always been…so why is the right so cranked up about the Epstein files?

Scott Galloway: “It’s so intellectually or morally inconsistent. If Jeffrey Epstein had invited a bunch of migrant workers to his island, we would have nuked it. But as long as it was just pedophiles? This notion that we’re shocked that a man found liable of sexual abuse, which is rape…that this man [Trump] might be on a list compiled by a powerful man [Epstein] inviting people down to an island with underage women? That’s supposed to be a big shocker? Trump could not be acting more guilty.”

Good Sex Wiki synopsis: 40 year old couples therapist Ally (Natalie Portman), after spending a decade in failed relationships, reluctantly dips back into the New York dating scene.

Costarring Mark Ruffalo, Tucker Pillsbury, Meg Ryan, Rashida Jones and Tramell Tillman. Directed and written by Lena Dunham. Due for Neflix streaming sometime next year.

@alonainthecity Lena is a director of a new Netflix movie “Good Sex” starring Natalie, Rashida, Mark Ruffalo, Meg Ryan and others #natalieportman #natalieportmanedit #natalieportmanlove #padmeamidala #rashidajones #rashidajonesedit #lenadunham #lenadunhamisagenius #blackswan #starwars #celebrity #movieset #setlife #nycblogger ♬ original sound – AlonaInTheCity

This, in my view, is Martin Scorsese‘s best short-burst performance since his psychotically jealous husband-slash-voyeur in Taxi Driver (’76). Which we’re not allowed to mention these days because of the ugly racist current.

What happens between Marty and Seth Rogen in The Studio is lightweight and surface-skimmy, of course, but at the same time…well, it has something because it alludes, at least, to betrayal and soullessness.

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The only Primetime Emmy nominations that accelerated my blood today were the 13 noms for The Pitt, and particularly a Best Drama Series nom for the show itself as well as a Best Actor in a Drama nom for Noah Wyle, who also exec produces.

I loved the opening episode of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg‘s The Studio (especially Martin Scorsese‘s cameo performance as himself) as well as “The Oner”, but I lost interest after the obsequious, one-note Ron Howard episode.

I think it’s a totally sick and disgusting joke that the most recently aired The White Lotus season (#3), which was horribly written and utterly devoid of dramatic tension, has been nominated for anything.

I’m down with The Penguin as far as it goes, but I’m also sick to death of Severance, Hacks, The Bear and The Last of Us being nominated for anything, much less winning this or that trophy…get outta my life.

Variety‘s Naman Ramachandran (7.15.25): “Gregg Wallace‘s co-host John Torode has been fired from BBC‘s MasterChef following an investigation that substantiated an allegation [that] he used racist language in the workplace.”

I’ve read that some of Torode’s offending utterances were overheard back in ’18, but maybe there’s more to it.

So what did Torode say exactly? One presumes he wasn’t vulgar or stupid enough to use flagrantly racist language or epithets, but I’d love to know what his verbal offenses actually were.

They were probably remarks that skirted the line between familiar, no-big-deal racial shorthand (i.e., referring to a light-skinned African American as cappuccino or cafe au lait, let’s say) and casual conversation, but who knows?

I would never dream today of saying “spade cat” (it’s a ’60s and ’70s street term), but I was all but burned at the stake a couple of years ago for insisting that back in the day and in the realm of the street “spade cat” was a term of respect. It alluded to a POC who was hip and Zen-cool and subterranean and perhaps even “experienced” in the Jimi Hendrix sense of that term.

Another term I wouldn’t dare verbalize today is “bloods,” but this was also a term of cultural acknowledgment and respect. It certainly wasn’t informed by racist spite. It refers to a close familial fraternity among POCs…trust, recognition, shared heritage, history. Someone told me it came from a phrase in Sly Stone‘s “A Family Affair,” to wit: “blood’s thicker than the mud.”

When you consider some of the ugly racist terminology heard in M.A.S.H., the first two Godfather flicks, Karel Reisz‘s Who’ll Stop The Rain (“hold it there, tamale pie”), Mississippi Burning, several Quentin Tarantino films and even HBO’s The Sopranos, “spade cat” and “bloods” (not that anyone would be dumb enough to use them in any workplace) are decidedly vanilla. But they’d still get you fired.

We all understand that POCs are never admonished or whacked for using terms that belittle or diminish whites (“whitey”, “Wonderbread”, “whitebread”, “honky mofo”, “preppy cracker”, “trailer trash”, “yokel”) — it only works the other way around.

This poster for Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River (‘52) shows “Julia” Adams (better known as Creature From The Black Lagoon’s Julie Adams) with a Native American arrow lodged in her upper right chest…above the breast, next to right armpit).

This amounts to a blatant theft of a scene in Red River (‘48) in which Joanne Dru is arrow-shot in almost the exact same spot. Not cool!

If I’d been directing the arrow would’ve pierced Adams’ left collarbone area.

I don’t know when this Robert Redford interview was taped, but he was still very movie-star handsome so let’s figure the mid ’80s. Sometime around The Natural. A good five years before Indecent Proposal, let’s say. Something like that.

I really miss the company of confident, easygoing, good-looking, classic-era movie stars.

Redford: “We had so much fun doing [Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid]…the most fun I’ve ever had making any film. I remember the experience of it coming out, and I remember being surprised by the kind of success it had. I wasn’t prepared for that at all. I think it had to do with more than just ‘guys running out of time’. It had to do wih a certain kind of bonding and a certain kind of connection…a real friendship.”

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Last night I watched three or four Twilight Zone episodes from the very first season (early fall 1959 to early ’60). The standout was “Perchance to Dream“, which was basically about Richard Conte grappling with a fear of death and a particular fear of suffering a heart attack during a creepy dream.

The episode first aired on November 27, 1959. Three weeks later Conte, who was nudging 50 at the time, began playing another heart attack victim in the original Ocean’s 11. His character was electrician Tony Bergdorf, who drops dead on the Las Vegas Strip tarmac right after the New Year’s Eve heist goes down.

For the viewing public those heart attacks played like a one-two punch, and impressionistically they stuck. Conte lived, worked and prospered for another 15 years after Ocean’s 11, but he was always the heart-attack guy. And then he keeled over from a real-life heart attack on 4.3.75. He died on 4.15.75 — tax day.

Career-wise, Conte’s richest and luckiest period was the early to late 1940s — Guadalcanal Diary, The Purple Heart, A Bell for Adano, A Walk in the Sun, 13 Rue Madeleine, Call Northside 777, Cry of the City.

Paul McCartney‘s version of “My One and Only Love“, a song that dates back to 1947, is from Kisses on the Bottom, a 2012 album I’ve never even listened to.

The below version of “Bluebird” (during a ’74 Wings concert) is a better-sounding performance than the initially recorded version that appeared on Band on the Run (’73).

Every film maven knows tall, dark and reptilian Steve Cochran, who played Virginia Mayo’s extra-marital boyfriend in William Wyler‘s The Best Years of Our Lives (‘46) as well as Mayo’s extra-marital gangster lover (“Big Ed”) in Raoul Walsh‘s White Heat (‘49).

Known for playing casual attitude bad guys on-screen, Cochran’s inside-the-industry rep was that of an insatiable party hound…booze, broads, fast cars, private planes and inevitably “scoring” with his female costars. The town gradually formed an opinion that Cochran was much more into cooze and trim than than investing in the basics of a solid film career (devotion to acting, playing his political cards right, trying to be cast in prestige projects). In the late ’40s and ’50s Cochran was almost the Bob Crane of his time.

Fewer know about Cochran’s abrupt and curious death aboard his sailing yacht Rogue. It happened in mid-June of ‘65, somewhere off the coast of southern Mexico or perhaps Guatemala, when Cochran was 48. If you know the story of his sudden demise and especially the grisly aftermath, it’s hard not to imagine someone (perhaps Michel Franco?) making a dark twisted film about it. The Cochran saga could be a perfect vehicle for a feminist director making a standard-issue “all men are pigs” movie.

There’s something simultaneously chilling, existentially creepy and almost perversely “funny” about Cochran, who, in his late ’40s and ’50s heyday, surely dipped his wick as much as Errol Flynn or Charlie Chaplin or George Roundy or any other hardcore poon hound…there’s something simultaneously wicked and darkly funny (in a pathetic, lampoonish sort of way) about Cochran hiring three young Mexican girls to accompany him on a cruise to Guatemala in order to (heh-heh) research a film (Captain O’Flynn), and the ship being hit by a heavy storm and one of the masts being damaged, and the Cochran suddenly falling ill with an infected lung and wham, he’s dead two days later.

But the three girls don’t know how to sail and the Rogue is a long way from the coast, and so they’re stuck with Cochran’s stinky, decaying corpse — getting smellier and smellier as it bloats and turns black — for ten days until a fishing ship happens by.

The poor women had no choice but to tough it out. If they’d thrown Cochran’s body overboard and let the fish eat him, the authorities would’ve accused them of murder.

Here’s a pretty good Cochran piece by SFGate‘s Andrew Chamings, dated 10.24.22: