TIFF Report III: "Elsinore," "Bitter Christmas," "Being Heumann," "Alpha Gang"

“Elsinore” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) – The Andrew Scott Appreciation Society grew significantly in this country with the actor’s turn as the Hot Priest in 2018’s “Fleabag” and it has only grown since with films like “All of Us Strangers” and “Blue Moon” and shows like “Ripley” and “His Dark Materials.” “Elsinore” at last gives Scott the big, gnarly, passionate role he’s to date steered clear of: Ian Charleson, the Scottish actor who was best known for 1981’s “Chariots of Fire” but who in 1989 performed a critically acclaimed “Hamlet” at London’s National Theatre before dying seven weeks later of AIDS-related causes. (Charleson’s was the first show business death in the U.K. openly that was attributed to AIDS and it did much to change public attitudes toward the disease.)

Simon Stone’s film, from Stephen Beresford’s deft, complex script, is a paean to acting and actors, to the stage and the tightly-bound community behind the stage, but the close focus on Charleson – the progression of his symptoms and his tenacious determination to finish the run – gives Scott a huge range of emotions to work with. He responds with an extraordinarily powerful performance, in part because it’s leavened with a rich vein of humor but primarily because both Charleson and the man playing him connect the dots between Shakespeare’s meditation on life and death and an actor’s fierce embrace of life in the face of death. With Olivia Colman as the pathbreaking HIV clinician Dr. Margaret Johnson, wishing her patient would stop all this nonsense and stay in bed, and David Dawson as pioneering queer filmmaker Derek Jarman, bitterly faulting Charleson for remaining in the closet during his final days while Jarman was dying as publicly and as angrily as he could. The premiere audience at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre was soggy with tears by the end – there’s a scene with Charleson’s stolid father (the great Peter Mullan) coming unglued in a carpark that pretty much wrecked me – and if the three-minute standing ovation at the end was brief by Venice or Cannes standards, it was downright hedonistic for Canada. If you’re the type who keeps tabs on Oscar odds, Scott just vaulted to even money in the Best Actor race. (US theatrical release in December)

“Being Heumann” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐) – Another inspirational true-life drama – TIFF is traditionally full of them, and this was the opening night selection – Sîan Heder’s biopic of the late disability rights activist Judy Heumann focuses on the 28-day takeover of the San Francisco offices of the US Health, Education and Welfare department in 1977 by Heumann and her fellow protesters in the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities. If you’ve seen the 2020 documentary “Crip Camp” – which you should, because it’s very good – you know the story, but Heder mines the events and the personalities for maximum audience feel-good, abetted by lead actress Ruth Madely (who was born with spina bifida and is known to British viewers from “Dr. Who”) and a cast of disabled actors (Madeline Delp, Charlie Rush-Reese, Antwan Tolliver and Andrew Pilkington are standouts).

The aim of the protest was to force HEW Secretary Joseph Califano (Mark Ruffalo, enjoying himself as the movie’s designated villain) to sign Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, ending discrimination and mandating accessibilities (like sidewalk ramps and closed captions) we now take for granted. It was the late 1970s and the protesters were counterculture even for the counterculture; the sit-in was deadly serious, but it was also a raucous party, complete with a sex tent and a lot of weed. Director Heder, who worked with Heumann before the legendary activist’s death in 2023, was last seen with the 2021 Best Picture winner “Coda,” and “Being Heumann” is similarly built out of storytelling tropes that will seem hackneyed and formulaic or comfortable and time-tested depending on how you like your inspiration served up. One of my friends here hated it, I liked it (for the performances, mostly) and Toronto audiences loved it. You’ll get a chance to make up your own mind when the film opens theatrically on November 14; until then, check out “Crip Camp.”

“Bitter Christmas” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) At 75, Pedro Almodóvar continues his run of quiet late-life treasures with this Pirandellian sigh of a movie. It’s about Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a filmmaker in 2004 working on a new screenplay while juggling friends, a lover and unresolved grief over the death of her mother. It’s also about a gay filmmaker (Leonardo Sbaraglia) in 2026 writing the screenplay of the film we’re watching while juggling friends, a lover and unresolved grief over the death of his mother. It’s about the artistic necessity and unforgivable sin of using one’s friends and lovers as grist for creativity, borrowing their traumas to bring fictional characters to life. It’s about a movie that’s writing itself as we watch it.

This being Almodóvar, it’s also about ravishing colors and swooning music and beautiful women of melodrama who used to be the heroines of his movies and are now, with all frankness, variations on himself. Although perhaps not: At the end of this discursive/recursive puzzle box, the pieces snap satisfyingly together as the filmmaker understands who the story is finally, actually about. And it ain’t him. A fair amount of folks are dismissing this as Minor Pedro, and for much of its running it seems to be, entertainingly so. But I see a master at dusk, spinning the expanding, empathetic tales he knows will be his last.

“Alpha Gang” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) – Probably the purest blast of movie pleasure I had at TIFF 2026. The Zellner brothers, Nathan and David, are known for taking oddball concepts and building entire cinematic worlds out of them (see “Sasquatch Sunset,” a nature doc about a family of Bigfeet), but this future midnight movie staple is one of their most exuberantly bizarre. And what a cast! Léa Seydoux, Dave Bautista, Riley Keough, Lily-Rose Depp, Chris Pine, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Doona Bae (of cult-film “Linda Linda Linda” fame) play the biker-aliens of the title, arriving on Earth for purposes of conquest but finding themselves increasingly distracted by the pesky emotions of the human bodies they’ve beamed into. Cate Blanchett figures in here, too, as a space villain with an eye-patch and a random spiv accent. Shot in various Eastern European countries on monuments left over from the Soviet era and featuring a knock-out soundtrack of forgotten girl-group and doo-wop classics – soundtrack compilation, please – this plays like a laboratory-grown fusion of “The Wild One,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “The Dirty Dozen.” The actors, classy names all, throw themselves into the silliness with an enthusiasm that’s infectious and not a little alarming, and the result is a fully-realized work of WTF. “Alpha Gang” definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of spiked punch, but I had a ball, and you have to admire the Zellners’ awe-inspiring commitment to the bit.

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