What's happening at TIFF: Musical comedy 'The Debut' dazzles and 'I Play
Rocky' scores a knockout
[September 14, 2026]
By JAKE COYLE
TORONTO (AP) — The 51st Toronto International Film Festival is underway,
with steady parades of premieres running like traffic jams through
downtown Toronto. Here are glimpses of what's happening on the ground,
and what festivalgoers are talking about.
‘The Debut’ dazzles in its debut
It takes a certain amount of gumption to declare an arch comedy about a
housewife turned community musical theater actor “autobiographical,” but
that's exactly what writer-director Jesse Eisenberg said Sunday about
his festival smash hit “The Debut.”
Eisenberg premiered “The Debut,” starring Julianne Moore and Paul
Giamatti, at TIFF, shortly after it first screened at the Telluride Film
Festival in Colorado. But the movie's first showing before a big, packed
theater could hardly have gone better, confirming “The Debut” as a major
awards contender.
In it, Moore plays Mona Friedman, a shy New Jersey mom who, after an
actor drops out, lands a small role in a production of “Nosy Neighbors”
— a fictional musical Eisenberg conjured, complete with songs, for the
film. Despite no apparent talent and with Giamatti playing her intensely
controlling director, she quickly becomes enamored with acting —
similar, Eisenberg said, to how his thespian awakening happened as a
nervous, timid young man.
“I felt invisible and I hated everything. And then I started community
theater. This movie takes place five minutes from my house in 1990,”
Eisenberg said. “Then what happened was I took it so serious and I took
it so far that I kind of ruined my whole life.”
“So it's an autobiographical movie but told through you,” Eisenberg
said, turning to Moore. “Because I wrote this for her, and only her.”
“The Debut,” which A24 will release in December, has a comic, surreal
pitch that one audience member, in the post-screening Q&A, wondered if
it took some of its tone from Christopher Guest's 1996 mocumentary
“Waiting for Guffman,” about a local musical production in Missouri.
But Eisenberg said he was striving for something more earnest. Even the
fake musical of the film, for which Eisenberg wrote seven original
songs, the filmmaker said was his favorite kind of play, regardless of
how cheesy.
Moore, whose performance manages to be both wildly over-the-top and
sincere, said Mona is just “a regular woman.”
“But she finds meaning in community for the first time in her life, and
that to me was so, so moving,” Moore said. “She's us, she's me, she's
Paul, she's Jesse. We're the people who kind of wandered in and found a
path into our lives by trying out for a play.”
‘I Play Rocky’ scores a knockout
Eight years after “Green Book” took the Toronto International Film
Festival by storm, Peter Farrelly may have done it again.
Farrelly’s “I Play Rocky,” a boisterous tale about the making of
Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky,” was an immediate crowd-pleasing hit
Saturday night at TIFF. Its raucous reception at the Princess of Wales
Theatre suggested Farrelly may have again thrown a dark horse contender
into the Oscar race.
At the least, “I Play Rocky” is sure to be a top contender for TIFF’s
top prize, the People’s Choice Award, given how enthusiastic the
festival crowd jumped to its feet to applaud the movie. In 2018,
Farrelly's “Green Book” picked up that festival-goer-voted award on its
way to winning best picture at the Academy Awards.
“I read this script and I thought it was the greatest script I’d ever
read,” Farrelly said of Peter Gamble’s screenplay in a brief Q&A
following the screening.
“I Play Rocky” chronicles Stallone’s quixotic journey to write and star
in his 1976 breakthrough film. In Farrelly’s telling, it’s a comic
underdog story and an affectionate ode to moviemaking — the kind of tale
Hollywood tends to love. Some of its best supporting performances are
P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell as producers Irwin Winkler and Robert
Chartoff, and Tracy Letts as a composite studio chief.
But Anthony Ippolito, who plays Stallone, drew the warmest cheers
Saturday for a role the 27-year-old Long Island native had dearly
sought. The actor, who played Al Pacino in the Paramount+ series “The
Offer,” sent in audition tapes of himself performing scenes in his
grandmother's basement before Farrelly had even begun the casting
search.
“I looked at it and the search was over,” Farrelly said. “That’s the
guy. We didn’t have to go any further.”
Amazon MGM will release “I Play Rocky” in theaters Nov. 6.
'Obsession’ returns from whence it came
A year after Curry Barker first premiered “Obsession” at TIFF, the
filmmaker and his star, Inde Navarrette, returned for a victory lap.
In the midnight section of last year's festival, “Obsession” first hit
audiences, quickly prompting a bidding war. Focus Features landed the
$750,000 indie horror film for about $15 million in what would become
one of the most lucrative festival acquisitions ever. This year,
“Obsession” grossed $512 million worldwide.
“What a difference a year makes!” said Peter Kuplowsky, TIFF Midnight
Madness programmer.
Their return was partly strategic. Focus is now gearing up for an awards
season campaign for “Obsession,” running the film in many categories,
including best picture and best actress for 25-year-old Navarrette.
“Everything changed for me. I am now in rooms that I could not even
imagine,” Navarrette said. “I’m now pitching my own projects and am
hopefully able to produce and direct my own stuff. It’s been really,
really exciting because I love cinema and I love filmmaking and being a
part of Midnight Madness last year lit that fire for me.”
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Julianne Moore poses on the red carpet for the film "The Debut"
during the Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, on
Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026. (Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press via AP)
Barker, 26, and Navarrette spoke in a staged talk at the Metro Toronto
Convention Centre, not far from the theater where “Obsession” debuted.
In the year since, Barker said he has realized that his movie now
belongs to audiences.
“It starts to feel like it’s not mine anymore,” Barker said. “It’s not
mine anymore.”
Film festivals wonder where the major studios are
A running question through film festivals this year has been: Where are
the major movie studio movies?
The first pang of unease came when Warner Bros. last September skipped
all the fall festivals and instead launched Paul Thomas Anderson's “One
Battle After Another” right into theaters — even premiering it while
TIFF was going on. You could hardly question a strategy that paid off
with a best-picture win at the Oscars.
The major studios generally don't produce the kinds of movies that
launch at fall festivals anymore. And for the few adult-driven,
non-franchise studio movies that get made, the downside of a festival —
unpredictable critic response; an inconvenient release date — has
sometimes meant festivals aren't worth the risk. Just ask the producers
of “Joker: Folie ŕ Deux,” which was immediately slammed at its Venice
Film Festival launch in 2024.
“I hope the studios will come back,” Cannes Film Festival director
Thierry Frémaux said on the eve of a Cannes that lacked any major
Hollywood film.
This fall, Warner Bros.' anticipated “Digger,” directed by Alejandro G.
Ińárritu and starring Tom Cruise, is bypassing festivals. But it's not
the only big title to do so. Also missing in action are Sony's “The
Social Reckoning,” Aaron Sorkin's Facebook follow-up to “The Social
Network,” and Netflix's “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth,”
from David Fincher and Brad Pitt.
At the same time, the potential attention-grabbing showcase of a
festival has rarely had more obvious upside. A small, surprise screening
at the Telluride Film Festival of A24's “You Can See Everything,” Nathan
Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's documentary on Theranos founder Elizabeth
Holmes, was enough to make it one of the most buzzed-about movies of the
year.
TIFF has traditionally been home to the kind of populist, midbudget
movie that Hollywood now seldom produces. To make up for that absence,
the festival has increasingly programmed movies up for sale, in the
hopes of luring studios to acquire something that pops with Toronto
audiences. This year, the festival officially launched a movie market.
Companies like Netflix, Apple, Amazon MGM, Neon, A24 and Mubi tend to be
the dominant players at festivals — so it can depend where you're
looking and how you define “major studio.” On Thursday night, the top
brass of Warner Bros. was at TIFF, too. Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy,
co-chairs and chief executives of the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group,
attended. They were on hand to trumpet the studio's new specialty label,
Clockwork.
Clockwork's first release will be “Ti Amo!” from Sean Baker. Few
filmmakers can better attest to the power of film festivals than Baker.
Last year, his “Anora” went from Palme d'Or winner at Cannes to
best-picture winner at the Academy Awards.
A crowd-pleasing follow-up to ‘CODA’
Opening night at TIFF belonged to Siân Heder's “Being Heumann,” a
true-story drama about the disability rights pioneer Judy Heumann and
the 1977 sit-in that sparked the movement leading to the Americans with
Disabilities Act.
Like Heder's last film, the best picture-winning “CODA,” Heder made
“Being Heumann” with an ensemble you don't usually see on screen. Actors
with disabilities play many of the major roles, including Ruth Madeley,
who stars as Heumann.
The film, which Apple will release in November, makes a powerful case
not just for a seminal moment in disability rights history but for casts
that authentically reflect underrepresented communities.
A taxidermy musical, with Jodie Comer and Harry Melling
As the saying goes, the best way to start a film festival is with a
taxidermy musical.
One of the first premieres this year was “Stuffed,” and it's sure to
remain one of the most peculiar, macabre and oddly sweet entries of the
festival. Theo Rhys’ debut feature, the opener of TIFF's Discovery
section, stars Jodie Comer as Araminta, a reclusive taxidermist. Her
long-held dream of stuffing a human is answered when a lonely man named
Bernie (Harry Melling), who works in a sandwich factory, steps forward
to volunteer. Araminta, a little like the inverse of Dr. Frankenstein,
promises death but a strange kind of frozen-in-time immortality.
It's a tribute to this quirkily gothic tale and its extraordinary leads
that it's also quite a tender romance. “Stuffed” would pair remarkably
well with Harry Lighton’s not-so-different “Pillion,” from earlier this
year, also starring Melling as a timid soul looking for obliteration, or
love. Melling remains a singular screen presence, and it continues to be
fascinating to see what kind of situations he gets himself into.
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