This was my third year of #BGWatTIFF (Black Girl Watching at the Toronto International Film Festival), my favorite fest of all the fests! I don’t know if it’s just Toronto in early fall, which is the perfect, crisp weather, or that my schedule is usually jam packed morning to night with fantastic films from all over the world, but TIFF makes me feel so hopeful about cinema. (ICYMI, watch Colman Domingo’s powerful TIFF panel on how he and the filmmakers of Sing, Sing crafted a fee structure that paid everyone the exact same rate and gave every person who made the film possible, from the PA’s to the number one guy Domingo a financial stake in the film’s success. It was my favorite experience of TIFF, even above the films!) Here’s my dispatch from the fest.
A note: I of course saw Mahershala Ali’s Your, Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, which comes out this Friday, Sept. 28, so I will have a separate review of that film this week. The other is David Oyelowo’s Clarissa, the Lagos-set adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which comes out in December, so I’ll hold my review of that film til closer to the release date. Stay tuned!
All That She Wants
My girl Annie Murphy (of Schitt’s Creek and Kevin Can F*ck Himself fame) stars in a much-deserved rom-com. Set in Toronto, All That She Wants features Murphy as Emma an “aging” dancer at age 39(!!) who falls in like with a younger man, a grad student that she later discovers she used to babysit. After a tumultuous relationship that stole her twenties, she’s determined not to stunt the young man’s growth over a silly one-night stand, but their unexpected connection drives him to convince her that she can have everything she wants in life—and he can help. It’s also a sister story, with Girls star Zosia Mamet as Emma’s younger, married sister as Emma’s main support system and a mother-daughter story, with Christine Baranski (y’all know her from The Good Wife but I know her from The War, iykyk!) playing the overbearing mother whose judgment Emma fears. It’s sweet, it’s funny, it’s a Christmas romance that’s actually romantic. And with all such fare, I think of the Christmas romance connoisseur—my mother—and ask myself, would she like this? For All That She Wants, I think the answer is a resounding yes. Once this film actually gets distribution (fingers crossed!), I’ll report back on her thoughts. Hopefully it winds up on Netflix in time for the holidays.
Elsinore
This is my favorite film from TIFF, by a mile! Andrew Scott (perhaps best known as Hot Priest from Fleabag) is a marvel in this surprisingly hilarious drama based on the true story of award-winning actor Ian Charleson. In 1989, famous thespian Daniel Day Lewis walked off stage in the first five minutes of his starring role in Hamlet, leaving Charleson this dream role: to play Hamlet at the National Theatre in London. But just as he is offered the opportunity of a lifetime, he receives what was then a death sentence, an AIDS diagnosis. (Please note: this film is a period piece; Thanks to medical advancements in science and vaccines, many people live long, healthy lives with HIV today.)
As Hamlet famously wrestles with life and death — “To be, or not to be? That is the question!”— so does Charleson, fighting to live long enough to see his dream through against the advice of his doctor (played by another Fleabag favorite, Olivia Colman). What is life, or living, he asks, if you can’t do the thing you love? Charleson’s fight for quality over quantity of life will resonate with any artist watching their industry crumble around them who still chooses art anyway. It’s a reminder that there is a power and a purpose in the crafting of art that our tech overlords and AI slop makers couldn’t even fathom. Yes, this film is for the artists, but it’s also much more specific. Like last year’s tear-jerker Hamnet, Elsinore drives home how timeless, ageless and perfect the story of Hamlet really is. Whether a grieving mother in the 1600s or a beloved actor fighting through the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, or anyone in film/TV today as our cowardly politicians collude with billionaires to merge studios and destroy what’s left of our industry—the story of Hamlet continues to speak to the moment. (Mainly, “conscience does make cowards of us all.”)
Scott gives his best performance to date, and I hope Elsinore drives more people to Charleson’s story, to Hamlet, and to the refuge of the arts in general.
Elsinore will be in theaters on November 20 just in time for the holidays.
Paid subscribers can download Hamlet below, and you should!!
Future Tense
This was the most challenging film for me at the festival. I began my watch intrigued by the premise: Cape Town, South Africa in a near-future hellscape where the wealthy (mostly white people) can time-travel back to the past and vacation in a time before colonialism fucked everything up. A young Black South African man tells his white Afrikaner situationship that he won a trip to the past in a lottery and invites her along for what should be a one-night romantic getaway. Tensions arise when the couple discover that a Black South African man and an Afrikaner woman might have different desires for what a trip to the past should entail. The film plays with time throughout, jumping backwards and forwards from the couple’s first date into their future. There’s a beautiful moment where an Indigenous person laments what colonization stole and why the fight continues. And as someone whose first novel Book of Addis: Cradled Embers wrestles with this same idea of going back to the past in order to have a better future for people oppressed in the present, I was willing to let a rushed third act slide. It’s the attempt of the Black man to wrestle—even at the risk of failure—that I enjoyed. That was back when I thought a Black South African man wrote and directed the film, though.
After watching, I found out that it was written and directed by a white South African woman. That complicates my original feelings about the film. In retrospect, it feels like a practice in colonialism rather than liberation for a white South African woman to be exploring the experience of what someone whose oppression she benefits from, inserting herself inside of a Black oppressed man’s psyche and asking but what about meeeeeee? if you get your freedom, what will that mean for meeeeeee? And now I’m just retroactively annoyed at all the times the story shifts from being about the Black man’s search for liberation to how dangerous and threatening it feels for the white woman and what her role in all this should be.
There’s a moment where the Black man is explaining about Africans’ understanding of time as only the past and present, circular, without future. It feels like this concept would’ve been more central to the film and the filmmaking if a Black South African who had a more intimate understanding of that cultural and scientific belief had written and directed a time-travel film on this topic. There were many little moments like that one, germs of ideas that in other hands could’ve really been fleshed out. I wish white filmmakers would do their own wrestling with what a lust for dominating and controlling the entire planet has stolen from them too. Where humans thrived for tens of thousands of years, in harmony and balance with all life, it took white supremacist, capitalist, colonial patriarchy a couple of centuries to utterly destroy the entire planet beyond repair. Go wrestle with that, and let Black people tell our own stories. In the end, the Black man’s failures, isolation and lack of community as opposed to the white woman’s abundance of community and hopeful future awaiting her feel like a violent lack of imagination. But, consider the source.
Future Tense doesn’t yet have distribution.
Neverman
What happens to queer activists who manage to live to old age? Neverman ponders this question through trans woman activist Lucia (Justin Vivian Bond) who lost her wife and daughter years ago over her decision to continue dangerously advocating for trans and queer lives after the daughter was born. Now at the end of her life and estranged from her daughter, the activist can’t even fight for herself, as she’s forced into a nursing home that does not affirm her gender as her Alzheimer’s worsens. It’s incredibly tragic with a confusing ending. But Bond and her younger counterpart Eva Everett Irving are fantastic as Lucia in the past and present, as the story weaves throughout her memories and her reality. There’s a fantastic transition in the opening of the film that I’ll never forget.
There’s also a nude sex scene between an old trans and queer couple and I’ve never seen anything like that on screen—not Nicole Kidman and some young guy in Babygirl, but two old people together. And trans and queer? Never. So I’d call Neverman revolutionary for that alone. It is quieter in its intentions about finding life joy, love, sex and meaning, even at the end, even when you can’t remember yourself. Neverman doesn’t curl all the way over in the end; I would’ve liked to have seen more of the conflict between why a cisgender queer mother felt less inclined to continue the activism that connected her to a trans woman activist in the first place only to leave Lucia to fight on alone. But it’s worth a watch, if only to spark thought about how we treat our queer elders and what we owe them.
Neverman does not yet have distribution.
Prima Facie
This Cynthia Erivo film was a real let down. Named after the legal term that means “on its face” — i.e., something obvious/apparent, something sufficient to be considered a fact in court— Prima Facie follows Erivo as Tessa, a high-powered defense attorney in London who successfully defends male rapists, reaming their female victims on the stand with satisfaction. When the tables turn and she becomes a victim of a rapist, all of the tactics she once deployed for her clients are used on her. “He is a bastard defense attorney,” she says of her rapist at the police station. “And so am I.” That’s about as introspective as Tessa gets. But I don’t buy her naiveté.
At several points after the rape, she repeats: “I used to believe in the law,” which is why she became a barrister, and also, presumably, why she defended men accused of rape. She taught her protégé that it didn’t matter whether her clients were guilty or innocent, that it was for the legal system to decide. So every time a woman cried after Tessa’s cross-examination (a Black woman, at that, in the opening case of the film), and every time a man cheered smugly and thanked her when he got acquitted, it never once occurred to her that the law wasn’t working as designed, protecting abusers and traumatizing victims who dare come forward, prima facie? I don’t buy it. And because she never wrestles with her earlier “belief” in the law and her actual complicity in the legal system that failed her, her big speech condemning the legal system falls flat. You’re an agent of that system, boo. What’s good for the goose aint good for the gander?
A frustrating watch. But there was one moment when I cheered; Erivo wears horrid Tyler Perry wigs throughout the film—sometimes with that barrister’s white powdered wig on top. After a pivotal scene, Tessa’s mother throws the worst of the soggy mops into the trash, and for a shining moment, there is peace.
Oddly enough, the film reminded me of Zendaya’s The Drama, a thought experiment in search of a movie: wouldn’t it be ironic if the rape defense attorney became a victim? Which is fine and usually how movie ideas start. But they need more flesh to become real. Prima Facie just doesn’t have enough meat on the bones. It also reminded me of my ire for Promising Young Woman, in that it’s intent on punishing women complicit in patriarchy while letting the male perps walk free. Sure, get the complicit people, but can we also get the main guys?? For once?? In a made-up, imaginary movie??
Trigger warning for a rape scene; I never think those are necessary, but perhaps because the rapist isn’t a stranger jumping out of the bushes, but a man that Tessa is dating, there is value in seeing how most rapes happen—someone you know who intentionally skates the line of plausible deniability.
Sony Pictures bought distribution rights and it will premiere in the UK in November.
The Julia Set
Well, I’d watch The Julia Set again before I ever watched One Battle After Another, so this college drama is a step up for its star Chase Infiniti. Still, it’s a low bar. In the film, Infinity plays a Black girl math genius named Julia who learned to shrink herself at home due to the survivor’s guilt she feels for her brother having Down’s Syndrome. When her nepo baby teaching assistant recognizes her talents and invites her into an elite math group at the school, she’ll have to confront her willingness to shrink in order to soar. Infiniti proves once again to be a very capable, very natural actress; I never see her trying to be Julia, though the character’s immature, naive choices are maddening, it is clear that Infiniti’s Julia believes in them.
Chloe Bailey plays her best friend-hype woman, which only works because both actresses are Black women; it could’ve gotten very problematic very quickly otherwise. Though Bailey could’ve used a few more takes earlier in the film, she eases into the role about midway through and becomes a delight. I can’t say the same for the movie itself. The Julia Set means well; writer-director Niki Byrne wants to explore the rare topic of female genius (and the complicating intersections of race and relationship status within it). And Alex Dillard is a scene-stealer in the role of Julia’s brother. But at times the drama feels both underwritten and cartoonishly overdone.
Julia would truly have to hate herself to endure what she does, and youthful naiveté is just not enough of an excuse for the lack of character development in the script. Who hasn’t been a bright-eyed, genius freshman dating a deeply insecure, abusive older student? There’s lore behind those choices and finding that right balance between surprising but ultimately inevitable behavior is missing. I hate to say it, since I know this is Julia’s core trauma, but I wish she would shrink again and that the story could be about her far more interesting and funny brother.
The Julia Set does not yet have distribution, but with a stacked cast including Nina Hoss (wasted!) and Gillian Anderson (double wasted!!), I’m sure that’s coming soon. In the meantime, watch Nina Hoss in a better movie, one of my 2025 favorites, Hedda, on Prime Video instead.
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives
Nollywood has come a long way over the years, so if you’ve been sleeping on the largest production of films outside of Hollywood, stop that! The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives has a budget, great actors, and beautiful cinematography while staying culturally true to its soapy roots. It feels like an oral history of a family, a microcosm of Lagos and the ways patriarchy destroys women and girls and hurts men and boys too. Based on the popular novel of the same name, Daniel Oriahi’s film was a hit at TIFF, with the premiere screening met with riotous applause and plenty of laughs while navigating some seriously traumatic circumstances. Come for the feminist exploration of women and girls in a polygamous household. Stay for a total deconstruction of toxic masculinity, with book-ending scenes of a father teaching his son how to be a man, and how not to be one.
TW for violence against women and girls, in all its forms.
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives will be in theaters in Nigeria on December 4. Hopefully it will get US/UK distribution soon.
Voices
What profits a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? If any film sums up how nasty and cutthroat you must be to succeed in the entertainment industry, it’s Voices. A stunning musical debut from director Deanté Gray, Voices follows Jordan, a young Black man in 1967 Detroit who is determined to be a famous singer. Just as he’s fired from his bellhop job at a Black motel for focusing more on music than the job, still in uniform, he gets a fated chance to assist a music manager with his bags who’s just checked in. The manager further hires Jordan to assist his rising-star act The Harmony Brothers for the day, as they prepare for a big performance that night for Motown Records. When an accident ensues, Jordan starts plotting how he might perform in their place and win his own contract with Motown. Moving between black and white and color picture, using film dissolves as transitions between reality and Jordan’s fantasies—or perhaps his harrowing future—Gray and his writers Sam Buckner III and Charlie T. Savage tell a thrilling, frustrating and compelling story about longing for fame as the root of all evil.
Voices doesn’t yet have distribution, but fingers crossed for this fascinating film.
Ziwe: Wanda Sykes & Hasan Piker
I don’t watch Ziwe’s YouTube show You’d Be an Iconic Guest in the wild. The gotcha journalism with controversial figures is not really my kind of comedy. And once disgraced, fraudulent congressman George Santos gagged her on her own platform (“What can we do to get you to go away?” she asked him. “Stop booking me for gigs,” he responded. “But you can’t. Because people want the content.”) I’ve not seen the value in the format. But, the first day of TIFF was slow and watching two unseen episodes followed by a rooftop party seemed like a good way to ease into the fest.
The first ep. was with Wanda Sykes, my fellow HU alumna, who also coincidentally gave the commencement speech at my high school graduation. She’s hilarious on the HBO show The Other Two, but I don’t really watch anything else she’s in. Ziwe’s barbs were about Wanda being married to a white woman and having two white children, therefore being the only Black person in her house. “I take care of white people. You got me!” Wanda says.
The second episode is with Hasan Piker. Beyond knowing that Hasan Piker was the right-wing’s latest leftists boogeyman, I knew nothing about the man. I follow Black leftist politics and none of them have needed to cite Piker for anything so he was not on my radar. Apparently he is a white nepo baby who recycles Black and brown leftist politics without citation, so naturally he has become a huge success. I’m not sure he understood the format of the show, he was not a match for Ziwe. But he definitely humiliated liberal hack Symone Sanders on her own platform by saying basic things Black leftists have said for generations that Sanders pretended to have never heard before, so I guess that’s something.
*****Paid subscribers can watch the uncomfortable video Q&A with Ziwe being interviewed by an unprepared Variety reporter from TIFF here:
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
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