When you have children of different ages, finding stuff to watch together can be a big challenge. Both of my kids - aged 10 and 12 - have a budding interest in horror, and there's not a lot of scary stuff that's appropriate for all of us. That's why I was pleasantly surprised while watching Dust Bunny on day 6 of the Toront oInternational Film Festival (TIFF).
Frankenstein is one of those stories that's been retold countless times. And yet, Guillermo del Toro has managed to make a version that not only feels true to Mary Shelley's original, but is also imbued with the trademarks the director is known for. Maybe that shouldn't be too surprising - when presenting the film at its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, del Toro explained that he has been thinking about Frankenstein since he was seven years old, but it wasn't until he became a father that he truly understood how to tell the version of the story he wanted to. Well, all that time paid off.
Over the weekend, as the music industry celebrated talent at the MTV VMAs and the fashion world has been gearing up for NYFW, some of Hollywood's finest flew to Canada to attend the Toronto International Film Festival, including Natalie Portman, Jodie Foster, and Cillian Murphy. While several attendees tore it up on the red carpet, it was Sydney Sweeney's bustier numbers (yes, plural) that now live in my mind rent-free.
By that he meant that Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Benoit Blanc mystery, would harken back to the origins of the whodunit, and in particular the gothic vibes of Edgar Allan Poe. And now that I've seen it, I have to say that Johnson pulled it off: the new movie has a darker and more spiritual feel than its predecessors, and yet it's still distinctly Knives Out, which is to say twisting and hilarious. I gasped a few times, as did the rest of audience, at the many reveals.
At my second day at TIFF 2025, the longest line I saw wasn't for a movie: it was for the Criterion Closet. The space is housed in a van so that it could make it up to Toronto, and honestly, it felt a little wrong to see the outside of it after watching everyone from Michael Cera to Hideo Kojima spend time in its cramped interior digging through Blu-Rays.