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Final call for partners for our RecDek House Venice event in 1 months time. The countdown is on…
A Hollywood fairytale
When I was a kid I used to regularly watch 6 hours of Spiderman cartoons in a row. Not sure which parent allowed such behaviour. But it has meant that Spidey, along with his various enemies, is fully ingrained in my brain. I never though, once considered the live action version would one day become the single biggest box office first week in box office history. $500 million made in 7 days - beating Endgame by a day. Fair play Tom & Zendaya, a real Hollywood fairytale, one that will continue to swing from spidey webbing (?) amongst the skyscrapers of New York City (Glasgow) for weeks to come.
TIFF 2026: Toronto's 51st, and the titles worth queuing for
Toronto rolls out its 51st edition September 10th-20th, and after last year's fireworks, Curry Barker's tiny Obsession selling to Focus for $15M and going on to gross a barely believable $442.6M, the biggest festival acquisition of all time - the stakes for buyers have rarely felt higher. This year even brings a brand-new sales market, TIFF: The Market, running the first week.
Opening night goes to Siân Heder's Being Heumann, her fact-based follow-up to CODA, an Apple Original premiering at Roy Thomson Hall. A crowd-pleaser with awards DNA - fitting, given TIFF's People's Choice prize is the reliable Oscar bellwether (last year's winner, Hamnet; before that, Farrelly's Green Book went the distance).
The premieres are stacked. Anton Corbijn's A Talent for Murder casts Helen Mirren as Ripley author Patricia Highsmith. Peter Farrelly returns with the Stallone biopic I Play Rocky - the same launchpad slot that lit Green Book. John Madden, Cynthia Erivo in a screen Prima Facie, and Korean master Hur Jin-ho's world-premiere The Assassin(s) all feature. There's a strong actors-turned-directors strand too: Chris Rock, Courteney Cox, Rebel Wilson, and Tim Blake Nelson all behind the camera.
Toronto also mops up the year's festival heavyweights for their Canadian bows - Danny Boyle's Ink (fresh from opening Venice) and the Cannes Palme d'Or winner Fjord among them.
A neat bit of trivia for the pub: programmers whittled just 69 special-presentation slots from around 9,000 submissions across 100 countries. And new this year - the non-English Platform Award winner qualifies directly for the Best International Feature Oscar race, giving Toronto real academy clout.
Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut, with Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti, rounds out a slate that looks a lot like the awards conversation for the next six months.
OUR PICK OF THE WEEK
Matt Johnson turns another sharp corner. After BlackBerry and the gonzo Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, (both previous picks of ours!) he delivers this A24 mini-biopic of a young Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa), lifting a couple of early chapters from Kitchen Confidential and building them into a study of how a person gets made.
It opens with a cocky, half-cut Bourdain pitching a novel to a Vassar fellowship committee, certain the grant is his. It isn't. That rejection flings him off to Provincetown chasing a summer crush (Emilia Jones) - but this is no straight romance, the film nimbly sidesteps the "one wild summer" clichés it keeps setting up. The script doesn’t dawdle in the familiar beats; it hands the emotional work to Sessa, who threads a genuinely tricky needle. His Tony lies his way into jobs and beds, yet you're rooting for him throughout - brash and deeply unsure, often in the same breath. He's neither a smug tosser or a lost puppy - and it works!
Most of it unfolds in a Provincetown kitchen that serves whatever came off the boat that day, run by Antonio Banderas' gentle, disciplined chef — quietly among his best recent work. Around them: Stavros Halkias and a swaggering Leo Woodall as the cokey alpha who half-adopts Tony. Two competing blueprints for manhood, laid out without ever underlining themselves.
Michael Bauman shoots it beautifully - you can smell the sea and the fryer at once. Underneath sits the film's whole thesis: you are what you do, not what you dream. Today's meal, not tomorrow's. Lovely, tactile, and quietly wise.
Stay tuned for more news on our Venice event soon.
And we’ll catch you next week.
Ed
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