TIFF 2025: The 10 Best Movies Coming Soon From the Toronto Film Festival

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Sentimental Value, R (in theaters Nov. 7)

My favorite movie from Toronto, and of 2025 so far, is this rich, brilliantly acted, Oscar-bound contemporary Norwegian family drama. Sentimental Value gives the audience a sense that they’ve lived an entire life in the span of a single movie. When their mother dies, Nora (a deeply moving Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) cope with the return of their once-famous film director father, Gustav (a slyly complex Stellan Skarsgård). It turns out the big, beautiful house that harbors all their memories remains in the name of the father who abandoned them as children. One way or another, the women have to contemplate their daddy issues. In a volcanic scene, Nora, an actress, has a full-on panic attack before making her stage entrance. Brilliant but damaged, she rebuffs her father, who wants her for the lead in his late-life autobiographical masterpiece. Instead, he casts Hollywood star Rachel (Elle Fanning), but it’s clear that this is the role Nora was meant to play, and must do so to reconcile past and present, daughters and father — and accept herself in all her contradictions. 

⭐⭐⭐⭐ ☆ Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, PG-13 (in theaters Nov. 26)

The band gets back together as Daniel Craig returns for the franchise’s third outing as Benoit Blanc, the dapper detective inspired by Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. A cut above its 2022 predecessor, Glass Onion, the gothic plot, while darker, maintains its comic edge. This entertaining whodunit revolves around the sudden death of Monsignor Micks (Josh Brolin, 57) in his own church. Who’s responsible? The full-to-bursting cast includes Glenn Close, 78, Jeremy Renner, 54, Kerry Washington, Mila Kunis, Josh O’Connor and Andrew Scott.  

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Secret Agent, Unrated (in theaters Nov. 26)

Wagner Moura, best known for brilliantly playing the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in TV’s Narcos, is a force of nature as tech expert Marcelo, on the run from the Brazilian military regime during Carnival season at the height of the disco era. There’s a price on Marcelo’s head in this vibrant, colorful, shocking political thriller. It takes unexpected turns while pulling a curtain back on a nation where free speech and individual rights are sacrificed to a despotic government in cahoots with the police. A just world would put Moura on the short list for the best actor Oscar, but at least it seems certain that, if chosen by Brazil, the film will become a best foreign language Oscar nominee, following the success of last year’s entry I’m Still Here.   

⭐⭐⭐⭐ ☆ The Eyes of Ghana, Unrated (in theaters Nov. 26)

The Eyes of Ghana takes an intimate, cinematic approach to the rise (and devastating fall) of Kwame Nkrumah, the prime minister who led the West African country from its 1957 independence until a coup forced him from power in 1966. Produced for Netflix by Michelle and Barack Obama (61 and 64, respectively), this fascinating documentary puts vibrant cameraman Chris Hesse, 93, at its center. Hesse was constantly at Nkrumah’s side once the American-educated leader decided to harness the power of film to tell his nation’s story. Hesse, the film’s heart and soul, is an idealistic, African-trained cinematographer and teacher. Some of his 1950s and ’60s films are spliced into the narrative, but the coup that felled Nkrumah made bonfires to destroy Ghanaian films, books and records. In a miraculous twist, Hesse discovered that the films are not entirely lost; he campaigned to restore 500 hours of film negatives preserved in British vaults.  

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Last Viking, Unrated

You may think you know Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen from his roles as Bond villain Le Chiffre or TV’s Hannibal the sophisticated cannibal. But he has also starred in a string of outrageously peculiar ensemble comedies opposite Nikolaj Lie Kaas, 52. The latest film featuring the duo, The Last Viking, starts as a caper movie about a bank robber, Anker (Kaas), who leaves the loot with his traumatized younger brother Manfred (Mikkelsen) right before being incarcerated. Freed years later, Anker tries to recover the cash stash Manfred buried, but first he has to unlock the key to his little brother’s trauma — and recover his own memories. A series of hilarious misadventures and slapstick comedy sequences ensue, but they’re steeped in conflicted fraternal emotions, questions of identity and the iffy concept of normalcy. It’s a journey down a resonant rabbit hole with Mikkelsen, hilariously permed, fearlessly silly, emotionally complex and endlessly endearing.     

⭐⭐⭐⭐ ☆ Fuze, Unrated

Sometimes an audience just wants to watch things explode. In this taut, contemporary thriller, the suspenseful plot emerges on two tracks. In one, a military bomb squad, led by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in coordination with metro police’s Gugu Mbatha-Raw, attempts to defuse an unexploded World War II–era bomb uncovered on a London construction site. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, a team of professional thieves, led by Theo James and Sam Worthington, burrow beneath a bank. Their evil scheme is to conduct a heist under cover of the bomb crisis. In this dual-action thriller, which comes to a unified explosive conclusion, the tension ratchets up and the stars are bigger than life, while bullets and shrapnel ricochet. Fuze may not be on the Oscar track, but it’s an enjoyable, ticking-clock caper about karma, explosives, friendship and betrayal. 

⭐⭐⭐⭐ ☆ Unidentified, Unrated

Police procedurals, whether they’re Agatha Christie or Nordic Noir, rely on narrative tension as they reveal a panoramic view of a society and culture. That’s what makes this film from Saudi Arabia so fascinating. It’s about a grieving young mother (a magnetic Mila Al Zahrani) in a low-level secretarial police job. When a teenager’s corpse turns up in the desert, she steps out of her comfort zone, and that of her sexist bosses’, to investigate. While the hunt to solve the murder drives the plot, the movie lifts the veil on daily life as a privileged Saudi woman with little control over her own destiny.