Mike D'Angelo - TIFF 2026: Day Three

As I anticipated, today was on the meh side. Couldn’t score a public ticket for Clarissa (Fortnight, NYFF) or Iron Boy (Un Certain Regard), so I wound up investigating a couple less-than-appetizing TIFF premieres, both of which exceeded my low expectations only in that I was intrigued enough initially that I stayed until the end.

Faith (Paul Andrew Williams, UK): 48

Wasn’t familiar with Erin Doherty (apparently well-known to some from The Crown) and dug her spiky vulnerability as a single mum working in an insanely photogenic candy factory. (Williams takes full advantage for the opening credits sequence.) Solid little meet-cute with a stranger in town (James McAvoy) feeding her answers during a pub-quiz break, and it soon becomes apparent that there’s something very strange about this gentleman, who just for example gently counsels the woman’s teen babysitter (who we’ve previously seen about to steal money from her employer’s cash stash) to think hard about what she’s done, something he shouldn’t possibly be cognizant of. One very silly possibility did occur to me, and alas that’s exactly what transpires; if I remind you that the movie’s called Faith, and inform you (potential SPOILER follows, though you can find it on IMDb) that McAvoy’s mysteriously all-knowing, endlessly supportive character is named Michael, perhaps you can guess what we see when he removes his shirt toward the end. Though the gist had long since become clear by that point. Well acted by the leads, and not completely un-touching, but sappy as all hell.

The Julia Set (Niki Byrne, USA): likewise 48

Hey, did you know that gifted young women should assert themselves rather than diminish their talent in an ill-advised effort to prop up mediocre and/or psychologically abusive men? If not, The Julia Set will tell you again and again and again and again until you want to scream. Chase Infiniti might not have been the best choice for its self-effacing math genius, if only because she totes in so much badass baggage from One Battle After Another; here, one’s required to believe that Julia, having just joined the elite study group taught by Nina Hoss’ women-can-be-sexist-too martinet, would covertly pass a Good Will Hunting-style miracle proof to her boyfriend (who claims it as his own work) rather than present it herself. Good though she is, Infiniti has a hard time shrinking that much. Jason Isaacs goes ham on a couple of overwritten yet still fun scenes in which the boyfriend’s celebrated father can barely conceal his contempt for everyone else in the room (on Earth, possibly), and it takes a while for Byrne’s script to really start clonking viewers on the head with its message. By the end, though, my audience was laughing in shocked horror at nearly everything Julia’s asshole boyfriend says, so cartoonishly insensitive and unjustifiably entitled does he become.

Fjord (Cristian Mungiu, Denmark/France/Norway/Romania/Sweden): 53

I’m perhaps more receptive than many to the devil’s-advocate approach. Would rather watch Oleanna (onstage) than The Assistant or similar depictions of harassment so clear-cut that there’s nothing to chew on, merely violations to disapprove of. So it doesn’t inherently bother me that Fjord depicts Norway as a progressive nanny-state nightmare from which blameless persecuted Christians must flee. (Stop drooling, Victor.) Mungiu stacks the deck so damn heavily, though. Downplaying the family’s evangelical nature—they seem quite ordinary “in repose,” so to speak, with atypical behavior emerging primarily via court testimony—is arguably defensible, given that strictures like “no contemporary music” would have been established long before the film begins (though the kids making new friends in another country offers endless opportunities for natural exposition, all of which Mungiu ignores). But when Child Protection starts arguing that they can’t return children to a house where they’ll be taught that e.g. homosexuality is sinful…I mean, even if that’s happened, it’s way too blunt to be dramatically useful. And the corporal punishment angle seems to me far less legitimately thorny than, say, Christian Science’s wholesale rejection of medicine, or even just recent widespread vaccination skepticism. There were paths to make this a first-rate provocation; Mungiu chose another.

¡Viva Carmen! (Sébastien Laudenbach, France): 51

My first time seeing Laudenbach’s animation style on the big screen, which was a treat. But his latest runs significantly longer than The Girl Without Hands and Chicken for Linda! (neither of which even hit 80 minutes; this one’s 90), and it pivots off of Carmen without using much of Bizet’s music, concocting a meta-narrative in which a couple of characters who I don’t believe are in the opera learn (via someone’s poorly shoehorned psychic reading) that José will stab Carmen at the bullfight, and subsequently spend the entire movie trying to alter her sad fate, like a time traveler who wants to prevent JFK’s assassination. Because they’re not time travelers, this concept never really catches fire, and while Laudenbach’s bright colors and simple lines remain beguiling, I started growing restless long before the end credits. At its best early on, when it’s entirely divorced from the source; everyone in a Seville tavern pulls out enormous kitchen knives upon hearing that So-and-So has been spotted at the outskirts of town, pounding them into tabletops while insisting that they will receive satisfaction this time, and the reveal that So-and-So is a professional knife sharpener got a big laugh from me.