While The A.V. Club will be running plenty of high-profile reviews from Toronto International Film Festival 2025—including Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein,Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, the Charli XCX-starring Erupcja, and Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident—it wouldn’t be a film festival if there weren’t also dozens of smaller, easily missed films skirting around the edges. Some of these are better seen with a healthy hit of that festival atmosphere, but others are just waiting for someone to champion their greatness.
So, ahead of the 50th edition of the international fest and its 200 feature film selections, we watched a ton of films from all over the world and pared down our indie picks to a select few that passed muster. The following films are from filmmakers both renowned (Agnieszka Holland) and debut (Sophy Romvari), from other disciplines (Bryan Fuller) and from foundational voices of their nations’ cinemas (Annemarie Jacir). But all of their movies are worth checking out, and hopefully, easier to get a ticket to than some of the bigger names. And if you’re not going to the fest, just put these movies on your watchlist for later in the year.
The best film I saw ahead of this year’s TIFF was Sophy Romvari’s delicate, engrossing portrait of a Hungarian-Canadian family dealing with their new life and their angry teenager (Edik Beddoes). Romvari’s short films have been featured on Mubi and the Criterion Channel, but her feature debut should be her stunning step onto a much bigger stage. Blue Heron allows Romvari to time travel between the late ’90s, with its shrine-like computer room, hefty camcorders, and Chia Pet infomercials, and the present, exposing the sepia memories of childhood to the colder light of adulthood. Romvari and cinematographer Maya Bankovic’s tight frames, alternatingly intimate and claustrophobic, dense and close and warm, box this relatable story up like it’s being revisited in the back of someone’s mind. The bright colors and hazy sunlight of the ’90s, where a young family’s children run through the sprinklers and weather their eldest brother’s escalating tantrums, fade as the film leaps into its second half. Amy Zimmer’s character is able to wander back a few decades to speak with the family’s parents (Ádám Tompa, Iringó Réti), pushing the grounded drama somewhere between therapy exercise and exorcism. It’s a relitigation of the past, and the perspective one had while living it, performed with the regret and understanding that sadly only comes with time.
Dust Bunny
You probably already know if you’re in the bag for this one or not based solely on the premise: Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies) makes his feature debut with the tale of a professional killer (Mads Mikkelsen) hired to take out the monster living under his young neighbor’s (Sophie Sloan) bed. Is it wacky and stylish and silly? Is it a power-clash of tones? Is it filled with outfits that make you want to pause and dissect their composition? And does it become frightfully twee before its ending fails to satisfy? Yes to all of the above, which should come as no surprise to anyone lured by Fuller’s recognizable brand. Even to those less inclined towards Fuller’s boldness, Mikkelsen is a hilarious draw—a running gag of him being unable to pronounce his client’s name (“Aurora”) is just one of the broader highlights of his performance. The sprawling story, which expands its warped Roald Dahl fairy tale into something closer to John Wick‘s mythology, packs a lot of big ideas in, considering this is a movie about a giant killer dust bunny, but it’s a consistently cheesy, zany affair with a little kid’s imagination. It also makes the case that Mikkelsen, Sigourney Weaver, and David Dastmalchian should be in a Wes Anderson movie.
Franz
After making a searingly realistic condemnation of a modern refugee crisis with last year’s Green Border, filmmaker Agnieszka Holland is allowing herself to loosen up. She taps into obsessive oddball Franz Kafka (Idan Weiss) with a stylized biopic in the vein of the anarchic, anachronistic period work of Derek Jarman. (Though it is sadly unlike the Franz Kafka Rock Opera in Home Movies.) Warping history and interpretation, past and present, into its understanding of the writer, Franz sometimes mocks the conventions of its often worshipful genre and sometimes dives in with unashamed audacity. Kafka’s contentious relationships with women, his peers, and his father directly impact his writing, and Weiss’ frail physicality only makes his inner world more vibrant and his monetized legacy more absurd. Jittery and temporally unmoored, Franz is as uncomfortable, amusing, and vulnerable as some of Kafka’s best work.
Karmadonna
Aleksandar Radivojević, one of the writers of A Serbian Film, makes his directorial debut with a film where a pregnant woman (Jelena Djokić) and her unborn child are held hostage over the phone by a vicious, vengeful Buddha. No, really, there’s a godlike force calling, and it turns out that karmic retribution is a telecommunicable force. Imagine a mobile version of Phone Booth where the Devil—who keeps describing himself as a content creator—is on the other end of the line and keeps telling you to kill people. It all spirals into an expansive, society-damning provocation, filled with juicy violence and doofy slapstick. The silly midnight movie isn’t as stuffed with taboos as Radivojević’s edgelord claim to fame, which makes it far easier to watch and enjoy, and it’s shot with an inspired, cartoonish paranoia.
Miroirs No. 3
A new drama from German filmmaker Christian Petzold (Afire, Phoenix), Miroirs No. 3 injects his frequent muse Paula Beer into a Misery-like situation of cozy recovery haunted by eeriness. After a shocking car crash leaves pianist Laura (Beer) stranded and injured, she’s nursed by the local woman (Barbara Auer) who found her after the accident. Of course there’s something a bit off under the surface of this good Samaritan, and Laura sinks into the film’s lived-in loss like a slow-moving mammoth succumbing to a tar pit. Expanding its story to encompass the woman’s husband and grown son, Miroirs No. 3 coats its small-scale tragedy in realistic emotional debris: Avoidance, obsession, transference. But these heavy ideas rest easily atop the bright and quiet countryside film—an aesthetic that reflects the title, which takes its name from Maurice Ravel’s drifting, lilting, piece of melancholy piano music, “A Boat On The Ocean.”
Palestine 36
Palestinian writer-director Annemarie Jacir goes big with her historical epic Palestine 36, which captures the ground-level political climate leading up to the Great Palestinian Revolt against the British administration in 1936. Separating its narrative between a young man (Karim Daoud Anaya) drawn between his villages and the British-dominated power centers, a revolutionary (Saleh Bakri) forged in real-time, and the various townspeople (an ensemble including Hiam Abbass) weathering the tumult, the handsome and heavy-handed drama tracks how the problems of the past persist as the problems of the present. It’s hard not to be moved by the film’s striking resonance, whether that’s found in the West’s culpability, in the drama of collaborators and opportunists, or in the underlying economic motivations driving disaster. Jacir’s biggest film yet might not be her most powerful, but it’s a capable and involving period piece, told from the perspectives that make it most compelling.
Retreat
A brassy feature debut from filmmaker Ted Evans, Retreat sets its social thrills in an isolated Deaf community whose ideas of self-governance and identity reclamation mask the unseemly practical decisions that allow for these ideals to flourish. Led by the enthralling Sophie Stone as the cultish community’s leader and James Joseph Boyle as the young man who was the first to be raised in the utopian compound, the Deaf ensemble and filmmaker put together an exciting film with a different sensory vocabulary than most of its genre peers. Without shouting, without overlapping dialogue—escalated through gazes and British Sign Language and mouthed words—the pervasive tension emphasizes how brittle and fragile this separatist community is. In establishing this, Retreat offers up a gripping, specific vision of isolation, whether it’s something chosen, or something you’re born into.
The Tale Of Silyan
Oscar-nominatedHoneylandfilmmaker Tamara Kotevska dives back into hyper-specific North Macedonian documentary, blending mythology and agriculture protests to weave a beautiful story of unlikely friendship and universal struggle. But there’s nothing rote about The Tale Of Silyan, which mirrors a folk tale about a disobedient farmer’s son who gets turned into a stork with the reality of a grandfatherly farmer, left behind by a family seeking more stable finances, who pours his nurturing instincts into a stork with a broken wing. Full of inspired details and vivid colors that would fit into any animated rendition of this narrative—ranging from ramshackle stork nests atop telephone poles to protest-filled streets littered with intentionally smashed produce—The Tale Of Silyan finds sweet purpose in every frame.
A Useful Ghost
After loving the Sundance movie where a woman “swaps bodies” with a chair, it pleases me to no end that I also love the TIFF movie where a woman’s ghost haunts a vacuum cleaner in order to reconnect with her husband. Absurd inanimate object cinema is having a moment. In A Useful Ghost, that moment is due to filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, who blends Quentin Dupieux’s surrealism, Julio Torres’ sense of humor, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s emotional supernaturalism into a hilarious and affecting Thai dream world. As March (Wisarut Himmarat) gets closer to his wife/appliance Nat (Davika Hoorne), the relationship between the living and those beyond becomes a more serious concern for those in power, all contained within a shell narrative between the owner of another possessed vacuum and the ghostly, sexy repairman who’s come to help…or seduce him. It’s a campfire story woven through with weirdness, dipping in and out of silliness, with deadpanned things to say about how we treat the dead. That Boonbunchachoke wields so many tones so deftly is impressive; that he finds such depth in such a wild sketch-comedy premise is astounding.
