TIFF 2025 / Diary no. 2

It’s just not that deep. Hedda and Hamnet. B. Safdie and Maude Apatow. Poetry and the rare selfie.

let’s agree to disagree.

Read TIFF Diary no. 1 here.

September 8

7:30 AM - I wake up early to stand on line for Hamnet, the new film from Chloe Zhao whose father is one of the richest people in China. On the way I grab a flat white, which feels like the drink of Toronto, at least this week, and by now the unofficial mascot of my trip. In the cafe lobby stands a full-length mirror, clearly meant for selfies, but I’m too shy to indulge even though I like my outfit: ivory pleats please bermuda shorts that hit my legs at completely the wrong place.

There’s a sealed off and manicured quality about Hamnet that disinterests me. The actors are overacting, but not in a way that makes things fun. Zhao’s used to leaned on non-actors who breathed rough life into her films, but now seems terrified of letting a moment between professionals play unshaped; she corrals Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley (Shakespeare and his wife, she the center of the story) into a kind of grieving rigor mortis where they bellow like cows, not inappropriately, but, a little too insistently. I envision the descriptive captioning would read something like: Cries of anguish. Wracking sobs. More forceful wailing. Again.

Zhao presses down on the sorrow, which is further blown up by Max Richter in the background. It still doesn’t mask the sound of 300 people sniffling, who have the supreme right to weep. I do not deny the tragedy at hand in this story behind the making of Hamlet. But the film seems not to have anything fresh to say about death, or art, or the way the two explain each other. Hamnet is a prestige object that has been buffed and polished to perfection. Which, of course, means everyone else is going to love it.

11:30 AM – Movies with people chained in basements is a thing at TIFF this year, Zach Lee from Ebert observes. Good Boy, by Polish director Jan Komasa is one of them. I come mostly for Jerzy Skolimowski’s production credit and get a solid two star movie. Stephen Graham, who seems to specialize in bizarre paternal duties, kidnaps a miscreant teenage dirtbag and attempts to bring him into the fold of their bizarre family...

2:00 PM - Bless Bestco, the new Chinese grocery around the corner from TIFF HQ thanks to a tip from Vadim. I must confirm the quality of dim sum and the kimbap, which is not bad for supermarket quality. They also have more basic American Chinese hot buffet but I resist so I can eat at [redacted] party later.

7:00 PM - The server at the Italian wine bar asks what kind of vino I want. I say orange, she asks to garnish the rim? or separately? as if I’m going to chase it like tequila.

At a big festival like TIFF I’m reminded there are so many species of critic: awards journalists, trade reporters, Letterboxd diarists—each invested in movies I could hardly care less about. At this party though I’ve found my people. Not that they share the same exactly taste, but share a similar sensibility.

We commiserate that there has been nothing overwhelming, nothing devastating, mostly films suspended in the vague middle. Not even the pleasure of something truly, offensively bad. I know in my heart this is because i’m saving the bulk of my viewing for the new york, next week.

September 9

6:30 AM - I wake earlier than yesterday to catch the new Bennie Safdie movie where Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, more beefed-up than ever, plays an unusually kind man who is not unusually cruel to his girlfriend as happens in many a cinematic biographies of male figures. I’m still waiting for someone to properly unlock Emily Blunt’s talents and maybe with this we’re getting there.

The Smashing Machine repaints large swaths of the sports biopic (subject: Mark Kerr, mma fighter) subduing its inherent melodrama—the rise and fall, the training montages, even the addictions and highs—into something more understated, almost jazzy. What would have been an interlude in another movie, ends up defining the film’s entire aesthetic ethos. Music, synthy harps from Nala Sinephro, but also 90s chart toppers, carry a lot of the weight. I leave the theater with Springsteen looping in my head.

12:30 PM - I watch Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (okay) and remember how hot Oscar Isaac is. So too does the rest of the world.

Kindred spirit Clara and I get coffee from the press center and top it with half-and half since we’re not sociopaths.

3:00 PM - Coffee with Miriam Bale. We compare notes on L.A. vs. New York restaurants and the handsome older actor she interviewed during the festival. Marlowe Granados joins and the three of us talk about what is the ideal level of coddling we want from a man, and Hedda the new movie by Nia DaCosta’s about a brilliantly bored, chaos agent of a woman. At the premiere, DaCosta described Hedda as someone with malignant energy and intrusive thoughts, acting on crude impulses the rest of us suppress.

There may be something more to contemplate given: character’s moral ambiguity, the fact that her former lover is now woman, my unfamiliarity with the source material, and Tessa Thompson’s delectable and deliberately cast-off performance. But I am also tired from the late nights and decide for now the film justifies itself enough with gowns and glamorous hedonism a la Gatsby and Babylon. (It’s much better than both.)

5:00PM - I am told by people I trust that i will like A Poet, by Simón Mesa Soto which is about a forty-something man who lives with his mom who hasn’t written anything good in a decade. It belongs to the lineage of movies about cynical losers with artistic aspirations and a drinking problem who can only make one bad decision after the next. The humor is wry and argumentative, as the protagonist hurls insults, quibbles over aesthetics, and picks fights with anyone who dares to contradict him. Like other characters of his ilk (usually played by Steve Buscemi) he befriends a young girl and tries to help them. Bukowski, name-checked in the film, hovers over the proceedings like a ghostly mentor, and the lead actor’s square hunched posture evokes Billy Bob Thornton (whose Bad Santa is modeled on Bukowski) only adding to the connection.

8:00 PM - I take a leisurely walk to Bar Ardo which smells of bergamot. Rigatoni, my favorite pasta shape, with short rib ragu, and a side of cooked mustard greens, served with an anchovy sauce that reads like mayo with more acid. Even here, in a Sicilian restaurant, we are unmistakably in Canada. A tasting portion (pistachio-crusted branzino; a bites of lamb in demi glace) arrives as a courtesy from the chef and his wife. Everything is lovely.

9:40 - I approach Blue Moon with vague expectations. It is a period piece, and one that I think might easily lull me to sleep.

I am mistaken.

The Linklater movie transports me to velvet rooms, piano jazz, and the urbane dialogue about love and life and work in nyc that has been mostly absent since Woody Allen’s stuff, and which I did not expect to find it in this real-time hangout movie that recounts one evening in the life of famous songwriter and notable alcoholic Lorenz Hart, famously of the Broadway duo Rogers and Hart.

Whether Hawke, continuing to play a gay man, is miscast is the wrong question. He is, simply, Ethan Hawke, regaling you with stories and tossing bon mots over his shoulder for 100 minutes straight. The fakey brown eyes, the sad little combover, the way the camera shrinks him until he looks like a toddler in a high chair—end up working to his advantage, underscoring his character’s estrangement from the crowd, washed up, yet still useful enough for people to exploit. Hart moves between aggressive praise and scathingly sharp judgments of everyone around him, delivered with absolute sincerity. Only Hawke could do that, give us a portrait of someone whose brilliance and exasperation coexist, whose charm and grievance are inseparable. Agreeably superb.

I leave the movie wondering if I should start drinking whisky again, and consider, while my heart breaks, the potential limits of Margaret Qualley’s acting.

September 10

9:15 AM - I wanted to see the Amanda Seyfried musical in 70mm (The Testament of Ann Lee or the Sydney Sweeney boxing movie (Christy), but I end up at Maude Apatow’s directorial debut (Poetic License), which Greta Rainbow told me she liked. It showcases Apatow’s comic instincts and sparkles with scene-stealing performances, first and foremost from Leslie Mann, also Maude’s mom, as a woman who begins auditing a poetry class at the college where her husband teaches. Her husband is played by Method Man, and we’re somehow not supposed to notice.

I find myself curious what life in the Apatow household must be like. Mann, so often typecast as the under-appreciated wife and mother, is given a role here that makes that very condition her entire personality. But Saffron tells me Maude didn’t even write the script, which we decide makes us wonder why she wanted to debut with this film specifically. (We also touch on, importantly, how Licorice Pizza is one of PTA’s most significant films.) Cooper Hoffman, one of God’s gift to humankind, is hypnotically chatty and endlessly watchable.

Overall, the film feels like a comedy from the Crazy Stupid Love era or a a greatest-hits reel of early Judd Apatow—before he crowned himself the auteur of dramedies for personalities on the stand-up-and-sketch-to-Hollywood pipeline. Hoffman and Andrew Barth Feldman have remarkable chemistry. Like A Poet, there’s only a little bit of poetry, but a lot of laughs.

11:45 AM - Every morning on my walk to the Scotiabank, I pass a crowd queued outside an Italian gelateria. Today I decide to see what the fuss is about. The verdict: molto autentico—gelato is good, and the coffee is abominable.

12:15 PM - A group of critics are going to Magical Taste of China but instead I watch Train Dreams, which is not magical at all. It is mercilessly generic, plagued by the Netflix look. I should have gone to lunch.

2:30 PM - I have tickets for the Normal because I desperately want to watch some Great Cinema and I know this movie from Ben Wheatley wherein Bob Odenkirk battles the yakuza is not it.

The Breaking Bad star stepping into action-hero territory one of the more interesting career arcs in Hollywood and I wonder if Bob’s been on Maron’s podcast lately. The film starts a bit pedestrian, then, like a shot of whiskey after midnight, doubles down on the excess, the kind of chaos you hope for in a late-night screening.

5:30 PM - I am worn down by mediocre movies and indulge myself in a shopping break. I make a purchase out of equal parts careful planning and irrational impulsivity. The cab ride to 100% Silk drags on so long that by the time I arrive I feel compelled to buy something, as if a purchase could justify the sunk cost of the ride. But also, sometimes you know well in advance you’re going to buy it. Like you’ve come to an internal decision in small increments, by thinking about it a few minutes a day over time, until it inevitably manifests.

to all my friends who asked, I did not buy this Chelsea Mak dress, but if you have a $500 to spare I’ll send you address.

7:00 PM - My favorite thing to eat outside New York is pho because the city is not exactly known for its Vietnamese food. So: Nang Saigon, recommended by Nick. I order the signature bowl, as big as my face, broth heavy with star anise and cinnamon and beef. Upon a labored excavation I uncover a small thatch of noodles, the ideal amount for someone like me who favors the broth.

I call it an early night and settle in with Ruth by Kate Riley.

I’m running out of time, and clothes, so I plot whether to clear my entire schedule for The Secret Agent or Blue Heron—what I know are sure bets of excellence left on the slate.

For those waiting in suspense and patient enough to scroll to the end: what I actually bought were the Brooke Callahan tie pants.