10 Movies We Can't Wait To See At TIFF 2026

Director: Florian Zeller

Starring: Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Stephen Graham, Paul Dano, Patrick Schwarzenegger

Florian Zeller has already proven his knack for turning intimate family dramas into psychological puzzles with The Father and The Son. Now, the Oscar-winning filmmaker takes that sensibility into thriller territory with Bunker, pairing real-life married couple Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz in a story about a marriage being tested by an increasingly unsettling project. After 17 years together, architect Miguel (Bardem) accepts a lucrative commission from a mysterious tech billionaire (Paul Dano) to design a luxury survival bunker for the ultra-wealthy, but as the project takes shape, his wife Sofia (Cruz) begins questioning not only her husband's moral choices, but the foundations of their relationship.

The premise alone makes Bunker one of the festival's more intriguing films, particularly as Zeller uses the couple's growing tension to explore larger anxieties surrounding inequality, ecological collapse and what happens when the people with the most money decide the future is something they can simply buy their way out of. With Bardem and Cruz bringing their real-life chemistry to a marriage under pressure, Bunker arrives at TIFF for its North American premiere.

Director: Jesse Eisenberg

Starring: Julianne Moore, Paul Giamatti, Halle Bailey, Jesse Eisenberg

What happens when a mild-mannered New Jersey housewife gets a small role in a community musical and takes method acting much, much too seriously? Apparently, Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut.

Following his Oscar-winning A Real Pain, Eisenberg returns to the director's chair with a surreal comedy starring Julianne Moore as Mona Friedman, a meek, middle-aged housewife who unexpectedly lands a small role in a local production despite having no previous stage experience. Under the intense guidance of Jerry (Paul Giamatti), the show's domineering director, Mona throws herself into the process and gradually becomes so consumed by her character that the line between performance and reality begins to disappear.

Inspired by Eisenberg's own teenage experiences on the stage, The Debut walks the line between affectionate satire and psychological unraveling, exploring the seductive possibility of becoming someone else and what happens when that transformation begins to eclipse who you were in the first place. Moore is already generating Oscar buzz for the performance, giving the film another reason to pay attention when it arrives at TIFF following its world premiere at Telluride.

Director: Bassam Tariq

Starring: Mahershala Ali, John Cho, Giancarlo Esposito

Of all the premises at TIFF this year, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother may have one of the hardest to forget: Mahershala Ali plays a devout Muslim contract killer who, after the sudden death of his wife, attempts to leave his violent past behind and raise their three children alone.

Ali stars as Latif, a highly disciplined assassin whose carefully ordered existence collapses when he unexpectedly becomes a single father. His plans to abandon his criminal life are quickly complicated by the much less predictable realities of parenthood, including an urgent search for breast milk for his infant daughter, but things become considerably more dangerous when a far-right faith leader (John Cho) and his militia enter the picture and pull Latif back toward the violence he is desperately trying to escape.

It's an unusual collision of genres and ideas, combining kinetic action with a surprisingly intimate story about grief, faith and fatherhood, while giving Ali the kind of morally complicated character he tends to make impossible to look away from. Directed by Bassam Tariq, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother will have its world premiere at TIFF.

Director: Andrew Haigh

Starring: Fred Hechinger, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Caitríona Balfe, Kit Connor

After breaking hearts with All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh returns with another intimate story about family, longing and the things people struggle to say to one another. Adapted from a short story by acclaimed Irish author Colm Tóibín, A Long Winter transports Haigh's emotionally precise filmmaking to the Colorado Rockies in the 1950s, where a family's already isolated existence is shattered by a sudden disappearance.

Fred Hechinger stars as Mike, a young man whose mother (Caitríona Balfe) disappears into the wilderness during a snowstorm, leaving him behind with his father (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and younger brother (Kit Connor). As the search stretches on and hope begins to collide with uncertainty, Mike is forced to confront the growing fractures within his family while simultaneously navigating his emerging sexuality and adulthood. It sounds like particularly fertile territory for Haigh, whose films have repeatedly explored grief, desire, masculinity and the complicated ways people carry loss. A Long Winter will have its Canadian premiere at TIFF.

Director: Lauren Miller Rogen

Starring: Anna Kendrick, Seth Rogen, Issa Rae, Dan Stevens, Kate Berlant

Should you have kids? It's a question plenty of couples spend years answering with some variation of "maybe," which is exactly where Anna Kendrick and Seth Rogen find themselves in Babies, the second feature from director Lauren Miller Rogen.

Eight years after making her directorial debut with Like Father, Miller Rogen returns with a warm ensemble comedy starring Kendrick and Rogen as Annie and Aaron, a happily married couple who have managed to avoid making a definitive decision about parenthood. Their comfortable indecision gets a real-life stress test when their newly divorced friend Eliza (Kate Berlant) moves in with her young daughter, unexpectedly turning the couple into part-time co-parents. Suddenly faced with the chaos, exhaustion and unexpected joy of having a child in their home, Annie and Aaron are forced to reconsider what they actually want their future to look like.

With Issa Rae, Dan Stevens, Sharon Stone, Ed Helms and David Strathairn rounding out the impressive ensemble, Babies sounds less interested in answering whether people should have children than in exploring how relationships, friendships and ideas about family evolve as adulthood refuses to follow the timeline anyone expected. The film will have its world premiere at TIFF.

Director: Siân Heder

Starring: Ruth Madeley, Madeline Delp, Mark Ruffalo, Dylan O'Brien, Rob Delaney, Daniel Durant

In 1977, the U.S. government had little interest in listening to Judy Heumann and a growing coalition of disabled activists fighting for their civil rights. Their response was to make themselves impossible to ignore.

Directed by Siân Heder, Being Heumann brings a pivotal chapter in the disability rights movement to the screen, with Ruth Madeley portraying Heumann as she helps lead a group of activists in taking over a federal building in San Francisco. What begins as an act of frustration becomes the longest occupation of a federal building in American history, as hundreds of protesters refuse to leave until the government agrees to enforce Section 504, a landmark civil rights protection prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities.

With Mark Ruffalo portraying U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph Califano and Dylan O'Brien among the ensemble, Being Heumann turns one of the most consequential protests in American disability rights history into a story about political resistance, community and what can happen when people who have spent years being ignored collectively decide they have had enough. The film has also been given one of TIFF's biggest spotlights: it will officially open the festival on September 10.

Director: Chris Rock

Starring: Rosalind Eleazar, Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya, Anna Kendrick, Chris Rock

Hollywood loves a comeback story, although it isn't always particularly interested in giving its actresses the opportunity to have one. That's the tension at the centre of Chris Rock's Misty Green, a sharp Hollywood drama starring Rosalind Eleazar as an Emmy-winning performer desperately trying to reclaim a career that once seemed destined for much bigger things.

Eleazar plays the titular Misty, whose breakthrough now feels like a distant memory as she struggles to make ends meet in an industry with notoriously little patience for women who have fallen out of favour. With only days to find a new home, Misty is thrown into a chaotic search for work while dealing with a troubled brother (Daniel Kaluuya), a sleazy former colleague (Adam Driver) and a celebrated filmmaker (Rock) who may hold the key to the comeback she has been waiting for.

Featuring Anna Kendrick, Topher Grace and Anthony Anderson alongside its already stacked cast, Misty Green takes aim at the racism, sexism and relentless hustle baked into Hollywood while keeping its focus on one woman attempting to reclaim her place within a system that has already decided to move on without her. The film will have its world premiere at TIFF.

Director: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Starring: Virginie Efira, Tao Okamoto, Kyozo Nagatsuka, Kodai Kurosaki

Few contemporary filmmakers are as interested in the strange, fragile connections between people as Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. From the Oscar-winning Drive My Car to the quietly devastating Evil Does Not Exist, the Japanese filmmaker has built a career around characters attempting to understand one another, often after something has happened that makes understanding feel almost impossible.

His latest, All of a Sudden, continues that fascination by following a group of characters whose lives become unexpectedly intertwined after a sudden, life-altering event. As they grapple with grief, uncertainty and the consequences of choices they can no longer take back, Hamaguchi brings his trademark patience and emotional precision to a story about fate, human connection and the unpredictable ways people can permanently alter one another's lives. For fans of his previous work, that alone makes All of a Sudden, which will debut at TIFF, one to watch.

Director: Peter Farrelly

Starring: Anthony Ippolito, AnnaSophia Robb, P.J. Byrne, Toby Kebbell, Tracy Letts, Jay Duplass, Matt Dillon, Stephan James

Long before Rocky became one of Hollywood's most enduring underdog stories, Sylvester Stallone was living one of his own. Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky goes behind the scenes of the making of the 1976 classic, revisiting the now-legendary story of a struggling actor who wrote a screenplay Hollywood wanted to buy but refused to let go of it unless he could play the title character himself.

Anthony Ippolito steps into Stallone's shoes as the determined young actor who bets everything on his belief that he is the only person who can play Rocky Balboa, even as executives, financial uncertainty and the realities of mounting an independent production threaten to derail the project. Stephan James co-stars as Carl Weathers, with AnnaSophia Robb, Matt Dillon, P.J. Byrne, Toby Kebbell, Tracy Letts and Jay Duplass rounding out an ensemble tasked with recreating the unlikely circumstances behind a movie that would eventually become a cultural institution.

The ending obviously isn't a mystery: Rocky became a box-office phenomenon, won Best Picture and turned Stallone into a star. But that may be precisely what makes I Play Rocky interesting. Farrelly's film isn't really about whether Stallone succeeds; it's about the stubborn belief, enormous gamble and creative risk required before one of Hollywood's most famous success stories could exist at all. I Play Rocky will have its world premiere at TIFF.

Director: Jonathan Schey

Starring: Taron Egerton, Jessica Henwick, Charly Clive, Mia McKenna-Bruce

With a title like Everybody Wants To F* Me, subtlety clearly isn't the goal.

Jonathan Schey's feature directorial debut takes the rituals, insecurities and carefully curated identities of modern dating and pushes them into much darker territory, with Taron Egerton starring alongside Jessica Henwick, Charly Clive and Mia McKenna-Bruce. Set against contemporary London, the dark comedy thriller explores desire, attraction and the versions of ourselves we construct when searching for connection, gradually blurring the boundaries between romance, obsession and danger.

Schey also wrote the screenplay, and while plenty about the film remains deliberately under wraps, that only makes its provocative premise more intriguing. In a festival filled with prestige dramas, historical stories and major awards contenders, Everybody Wants To F* Me sounds like the kind of wild card that could either become one of TIFF's most talked-about discoveries or inspire some very interesting post-screening conversations. Either way, we want to see it. The film will have its world premiere as part of TIFF's Special Presentations program.