This September, I attended TIFF, my local big-ticket film festival, which I am always really excited to attend. I have attended several TIFF’s, and have written about the films over at Letterboxd. Given the recent inauguration of my blog Commonplace Curiosities, I am excited to share my thoughts on the regrettably few films I managed to catch this year at the festival. Below are my capsule reviews. My taste is all over the place. You may discern that I sometimes favour mean genre fare, or Midnight Madness shenanigans, but I do try to use TIFF to broaden my horizons culturally (what else are our cultural institutions for?) and so my taste might seem a bit scattered. I’m hoping to cover more film festivals in the future for my blog, so keep your eyes peeled on this space.

The Damned (2024)
Directed by Roberto Minervini.

Editing as writing. The actors (largely comprised of enthusiastic civil war re-enactors) improvised all their lines. Very little script was actually written. Actors brought their own horses.

Extraordinarily beautiful cinematography. The performances have a non-actorly element to them, but they are not “polished”. Sometimes feels like they are improv-ing in costume. Your mileage may vary.

Gunshots sound like impending thunder. War is pure terror, when it is not miserable boredom, or slogging though freezing wintry forests.

Ambiguous. The ending is difficult to interpret. I enjoyed the experience of seeing this in the theater but I fear that I am also missing context to understand much of it.

Admittedly, really should have written this when I saw it, but best as I can recall, largely inspired by Trump getting elected. Possibly he smells another civil war coming…

Dead Talents Society (2024)
Directed by John Hsu

Almost certainly one of the funniest entries to Midnight Madness at TIFF that I have ever seen. So many variations of extremely funny riffs on classic Asian horror.

There is a lot of great found family vibes in this as well as sometimes genuinely spooky bits. The actors are clearly having a great time. Taiwanese comedy is extremely madcap and hyper-kinetic. The comedy beats are extremely loud, zany, and chaotic.

Genuinely a lot of fun, surprising amount of gross out splatter comedy, as well as a soulful ending.

If you get the chance, please watch this!

The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos (2024)
Directed by The Agbajowo Collective.

Quite possibly the only film that I can recall seeing directed a film collective. Doesn’t feel like it was directed by “committee.” Very impassioned look at the lives of slum dwellers, and the corrupt bureaucrats whose policies upend their existence.

Definitely wanted to see this as I have had little chance to see much African cinema. This is the most moving and emotionally impactful film that I saw at the festival.

Truly extraordinary and horrifying in equal measure how many Nigerians are affected by forced evictions. The film is a beautiful piece of solidarity art with these communities, and it was monumental to see actual community members recreate their acts of resistance to forced eviction. Many of the actors were not professionals apparently, many of the touts were in fact actual touts for example. The movie’s commitment to realism and truth is immensely commendable. The audience around me was very reactive and appreciative. A wonderful movie-going experience.

Men of War (2024)
Directed by Jen Gatien, Billy Corben

A stranger than fiction real life account of a former Green Beret from Etobicoke who is enlisted to overthrow the government of Venezuela by officials within the Trump administration.

Jordan Goudreau’s tale of epic misfortune is captivating and at times unintentionally(?) hilarious. He has a way with words, particularly when he is in over his head, that sent several members of the audience into peals of laughter. At times, you think, there is no way that this guy really thought that he was going to pull this off, right? But apparently, he really did.

It is immensely entertaining to watch this guy describe his exploits, and this has to be seen to be believed.

The Order (2024)
Directed by Justin Kurzel

Jude Law crushes it as a burnt out special agent risking his life (and others) to put a stop to a white supremacist terrorist organization attempting to violently overthrow the government.

Nicholas Hoult is excellent as the charismatic disaffected white supremacist machismo radical who is a great villainous foil to Jude Law’s self-destructive version of machismo. There is a lot of machismo in this and it’s great.

The night-time photograpy on this is stellar (I think this is a good pun!). The action and heist scenes are phenomenal. This is just a really good time!

It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This
Directed by Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti

A couple buy a run-down fixer-upper in a small town, and find, to their great delight, that it is deeply haunted. Naturally, they set about to make their own (unintentional?) found footage horror film. Of course, things go horribly wrong, as you will probably expect.

Overall, I generally enjoyed this! I’ve read some reviews where the reviewer is clearly annoyed by the couple’s silliness, but for me personally whenever someone walks into a deeply haunted house and says “Herrroooo?” I genuinely crack up. I do not always have sophisticated comedy sensibilities: this level of goofiness is enough to have me in stitches (sometimes)!

Another element of this movie that I found interesting was the auto-fiction elements. Everyone is playing a fictionalized version of their real self. The characters are partners, and friends in real life, but the movie is scripted, there is a plot, there are actors who are not playing a form of their actual identities, etc. I found this pretty interesting and definitely a reason to revisit this film down the line.

There is one unfortunate downside to the film and that is the shaky-cam cinematography. It makes me intensely nauseous! I threw up seeing Cloverfield (possibly for my own birthday? I forget!) in theatres, forever traumatizing some poor Cineplex employee who saw me spewing popcorn and Fruitopia into a garbage bin. I am just now reflecting on the fact that I have not drunk or seen a can of Fruitopia in many years. What happened to them? At any rate, I did not vomit this time, but it was touch and go at times!

I recommend checking this one out if you can get your hands on it!

Little Jaffna (2024)
Directed by Lawrence Valin

A French police officer of Tamil descent goes undercover in a Tamil street gang in Paris who are using their criminal activities to fund the Tamil Tigers back in Sri Lanka. This is at times a really fun and hip crime film, with shades of Donnie Brasco. The sense of camaraderie and purpose that the gang share is compelling and easily sweeps up the audience and the protagonist. It naturally gets darker, with the dark side of the gang and their criminal activities becoming impossible to ignore.

At the Q & A after the screening, one audience member asked about the director chose to depict the conflict, especially given how there are so many different perspectives among the Tamil diaspora about the Sri Lankan civil war and genocide. Lawrence Valin, the director, talked about how he wasn’t trying to preach or necessarily only impart one view on the conflict. According to him, the film takes place in a floating timeline where the conflict was still ongoing in the present day, in order to explore the immediacy of the conflict on their lives. What I found interesting was that the film in many ways feels incredibly sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers, which is interesting since the director is playing the protagonist who is trying to shut down the gang on behalf of the French government. There are moments in the film where it feels like the protagonist is actually serving interests that are opposed to his community, that he has made a deal with the devil to some degree.

I’d love to elaborate more on this but I think I will avoid any further spoilers. Perhaps I will dump some deeper thoughts on Letterboxd (or this blog) in the future.

Thanks for reading about my time at TIFF this year. Hope to catch more films next year!