TIFF26′ A Long Winter: Beautifully Made, Dramatically Familiar

Written and directed by Andrew Haigh, A Long Winter follows films such as Weekend (2011), 45 Years (2015), Lean on Pete (2017), and All of Us Strangers (2023), all of which are marked by an interest in intimacy, loneliness, memory, and emotionally fragile relationships. Here, Haigh brings those concerns into a very different setting: a family drama shaped by absence, longing, and the search for someone who is no longer there. Set in the mountains of Colorado and filmed in the Canadian Rockies, the film follows Mike (Fred Hechinger), a young man whose mother disappears during the first blizzard of the season. Her absence gradually forces him to reconsider not only his relationship with his father, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, but also his own place within a family already fractured by distance, frustration, and loss.

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TIFF26′ Short Cuts: Six Brief Encounters with Desire, Motherhood, Absurdity, Violence, and Memory

by Hudson Moura TIFF’s Short Cuts 2026 Programme 01 brings together six films that are very different in tone and form, but…

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TIFF26′ Elsinore: Choosing Life in the Shadow of Death

Simon Stone’s Elsinore begins with material that could easily have produced another sombre biographical drama about the AIDS crisis. Its subject is the Scottish actor Ian Charleson, best remembered internationally for his performance as Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1990 at the age of 40. Shortly before his death, already gravely ill, Charleson undertook one of the most demanding roles in the theatrical repertoire: Hamlet at London’s National Theatre. Rather than allowing illness and death to define its protagonist, however, Elsinore makes an inspired decision. It becomes a film about living, acting, friendship, humour, and the stubborn need to create when time is running out.

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