European Film Award-winning actress and singer Joanna Kulig (Cold War, Ida, Fatherland, The Eddy) has boarded The Tuners as executive producer, marking her first executive producer credit. Directed by Paweł Chorzępa and produced by International Emmy Award winner Joanna Chorzępa (Pianoforte), the documentary short heads into the awards race with three Oscar-qualifying festival awards, an international festival run, and a forthcoming mid-November release on The New York Times Op-Docs. Upcoming screenings include the Warsaw Film Festival, Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, St. Louis International Film Festival, and DocsMX.

When I was a kid, I loved Chariots of Fire. I was obsessed with its surprise Best Picture Oscar win, those running costumes and the score. That Vangelis score. For Ian Charleson, the star of the film, that score that everyone loved would haunt him like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Apropos of our story, to say the least. “Hamlet just walked off the stage.” That’s how Elsinore begins, when Daniel Day-Lewis rather infamously left the 1989 National Theatre production… in the middle of performing onstage, storming off to his dressing room never to return.

On episode 176 of the Director Watch Podcast, co-hosts Ryan McQuade and Jay Ledbetter discuss the next film in their Edward Yang series, Mahjong (1996). Welcome back to Director Watch! On this Awards Watch podcast, the boys attempt to breakdown, analyze, and ultimately, get inside the mind of some of cinema’s greatest auteurs. In doing so, they will look at their filmographies, explore what drives them artistically and what makes their decision making process so fascinating. Add in a few silly tangents and a fun game at the end of the episode and you’ve got yourself a podcast we truly hope you love.

Josephine is about a child witnessing a sexual assault. Writer/director Beth de Araújo’s newest film, which won the Dramatic Grand Jury and Audience prizes at Sundance does not shy away from how awful that sounds. The attack is shot with quite brutal clarity and occurs in the first ten minutes of the film. De Araújo does not mince words or images with this sophomore feature, one that is all the more arresting because it rests almost entirely on the shoulders of Mason Reeves, a now 10-year-old girl who was 7 years old at the start of the San Francisco-based shoot.

DOC NYC, the festival for documentaries, will have its 17th edition in-person November 11-19 at IFC Center, SVA Theatre, and Village East by Angelika and continuing online through November 29, and today announced its Main Slate lineup. Opening the festival on November 11 at SVA Theatre will be the U.S. premiere of Èlia Gasull Balada and Matteo Norzi’s The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs, about 75-year-old Indigenous artist Sara Flores, who emerges from the Peruvian Amazon into the global contemporary art scene. Closing the festival on Nov. 19, also at SVA Theatre, will be the U.S.

How do you navigate learning someone you loved isn’t quite who you knew? It’s a question deeply ingrained into contemporary life at a time when technology has enabled the sudden surfacing of long-buried secrets and unfathomable truths about public figures and relatives alike. It’s the very same question at the core of Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster, where musician Lucy (Léa Seydoux) finds her life upended by a shocking revelation about her husband Phillip (Laurence Rupp). Kreutzer and Seydoux attended the Gentle Monster Spotlight screening at the Mill Valley Film Festival, where Seydoux received the MVFF Fearless Performance Award and Kreutzer received the Mind The Gap Director Award.

Miami Dade College's (MDC) renowned Miami Film Festival (MFF) today unveiled the lineup for its 13th Miami Film Festival GEMS, the Festival's fall midseason event taking place from October 29-November 5, 2026. GEMS will open with A24's The Debut from writer-director Jesse Eisenberg and close with A24's Club Kid from writer-director and star Jordan Firstman. The Festival will open on Thursday, October 29 with A24's The Debut, written and directed by two-time Academy Award nominee Jesse Eisenberg. Julianne Moore stars as Mona Friedman, a shy, unassuming housewife who is cast in a bit part at a small community theater and becomes a zealous method actor, ready to wage war on the show's domineering director (Paul Giamatti) to protect the artistic integrity of her role.

Casting Society (CSA) today announced the television, theater, commercials, short film and short form series nominees for the 42nd Artios Awards, which honor the contribution of casting professionals in these categories. Splitting television categories not just between drama and comedy but also first season and pilots, the comedy nominees include Abbott Elementary, Hacks, I Love LA, and Margo's Got Money Troubles while drama includes Slow Horses, The Gilded Age, The Pitt, Heated Rivalry and Pluribus. It should be noted that CSA is a membership-based organization for awards, which is why you won't find Emmy-winning casting directors Allison Jones and Emily Buntyn for…

On October 5th, the day Luca Guadagnino’s new film Artificial was set to premiere at the New York Film Festival, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (dis)graced the cover of Vanity Fair. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Altman is seen overlooking the Pacific Coast, gazing out into the future he’s helped shorten. It didn’t just seem like divine timing on Altman’s part or a promotional opportunity for the film, but a frightening reminder of who actually wields the power to shape how we think and feel about the future of technology. Originally, with a Bezos-backed $40 million dollar budget, Amazon MGM Studios was set to release Guadagnino’s spiky, satirical look at Silicon Valley, only for the distributor to drop the film just days after Amazon signed a $50 billion deal with OpenAI.

When The Social Network debuted in cinemas sixteen years ago, it was a different landscape in regards to the public perception of social media. The foundation had been established, and it was undoubtedly popular, but the true insidious nature of how impactful it would be for the culture at large had not yet been felt. It’s why a movie with the premise about the founding of Facebook was met with mockery at first glance. The surprise of that film was how it focused its lens towards tragic figures, filled with greed and hubris, creating and destroying valued relationships all in the pursuit of personal power.

For many in America, there has been a shift over the course of the last decade, where educators have become less open to teach things to students that can be seen as controversial, radical, and properly sourced; where books are being banned for their content, curriculums are picked over with a fine tooth comb, and teachers are retiring because of these changes, and this isn’t even including the fact that organized religion is being thrown down the throats of families that don’t necessarily practice any type of faith. In Cristian Mungiu’s…

For over thirty years, James Gray has pried open the heart of the American Dream and the people who live and die by it. His ninth feature, Paper Tiger, is his most direct confrontation of the rot at the heart of the nation. Set in 1980s New York, Gray follows Irwin and Hester Pearl (Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson), working class parents trying to steer their kids to greater success than either of them had. Like a charming whirlwind busting down their door, Irwin’s brother Gary (Adam Driver) comes to their front door with a proposition, with strings attached to the Russian mafia, lucrative enough to change their lives and dangerous enough to end it.

Rachel Morrison, after becoming the first woman ever nominated for Best Cinematography at the Oscars for her work on Dee Rees’s 2017 film Mudbound, has transitioned into a new role behind the camera as a director. After her 2024 feature debut, the true-story sports drama The Fire Inside from a Barry Jenkins script about Claressa Shields’s road to the Olympics, Morrison’s newest film, Love of Your Life, centers around romance and the emotional highs and lows it can bring us. Julia Cox wrote the script and Margaret Qualley takes on the lead role of Maya, a young nurse working in Boston who begins a long-term romance with Charlie (Gabriel Basso) before tragedy strikes and alters her life forever.

On episode 365 of The AwardsWatch Podcast, Executive Editor Ryan McQuade is joined by AwardsWatch Associate TV Editor Karen Peterson to review the latest film from director Alejandro González Iñárritu, Digger. You can listen to The AwardsWatch Podcast wherever you stream podcasts, from iTunes, iHeartRadio, Soundcloud, Stitcher, Spotify, Audible, Amazon Music and more. You can also listen on the AW YouTube page. This podcast runs 1h26m. We will be back next week with a recap of the 64th New York Film Festival and a review of the latest film from Aaron Sorkin, The Social Reckoning. Till then, let’s get into it. Music: “Modern Fashion” from AShamaleuvmusic (intro), “B-3” from BoxCat Games Nameless: The Hackers RPG Soundtrack (outro).

The prestigious New York Film Festival marks its 64th edition this year, bringing together the best films of the year so far that have been collected from previous domestic and international festivals so the locals (and the selective few who fly in) can explore what cinema has to offer over the course of three long weeks at Lincoln Center, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. While not known for debuting many premieres over the course of previous iterations of NYFF, this year’s slate is loaded with some of the highest anticipated titles yet to be seen, spanning various genres, both big and small, from some of the most exciting voices in modern cinema.

Iranian actor Pegah Ahangarani turns director in Rehearsals for a Revolution, an upcoming documentary about life in Iran in the last 50 years that is making its way around the festival circuit this fall. Told in five chapters, each focused on an influential person in Pegah’s life and on a pivotal moment in Iran’s recent history, the documentary effectively blends Pegah’s biography with Iran to create a powerful image of the ghosts that have haunted that country for the last five decades. Back in 1978, before Ahangarani was even born, her father Jamshid was a relatively successful filmmaker in monarchical Iran.

October is the start of the horror movie season, the time where physical media lovers pull their favorite scary movies off the shelf and rewatch even bloody, gory, frightening moment over and over again for 31 days. For the start of this Halloween month, the physical media have a few horror, thriller classics making their way to the shelves, as three titles get their releases on 4K. First up is Little Shop of Horrors from Warner Bros, the horror-musical comedy from the visionary mind of director Frank Oz. Meek flower shop assistant Seymour (Rick Moranis) pines for co-worker Audrey (Ellen Greene).

On episode 175 of the Director Watch Podcast, co-hosts Ryan McQuade and Jay Ledbetter discuss the next film in their Edward Yang series, A Confucian Confusion (1994). Welcome back to Director Watch! On this AwardsWatch podcast, the boys attempt to breakdown, analyze, and ultimately, get inside the mind of some of cinema’s greatest auteurs. In doing so, they will look at their filmographies, explore what drives them artistically and what makes their decision making process so fascinating. Add in a few silly tangents and a fun game at the end of the episode and you’ve got yourself a podcast we truly hope you love.

Today, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 24-31) unveiled its 2026 lineup and panel programming, featuring more than 160 films across Gala and Signature Screenings, Special Presentations, Professional and Student Competition films, and curated series. This year's festival opens Saturday, October 24, with Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment's A Talent for Murder, features A24's The Debut as its Centerpiece Gala Presentation on Tuesday, October 27, and closes Saturday, October 31, with Searchlight Pictures' Wild Horse Nine. The 24-film Gala and Signature Screenings slate also includes Behemoth!, Clarissa…

Wild Horse Nine writer/director Martin McDonagh in a post-screening Q&A with stars Mariana Di Girolamo, Parker Posey and Sam Rockwell (Tommy Lau Photography) Wild Horse Nine opened the 49th Mill Valley Film Festival on Thursday night, with Director Martin McDonagh, Casting Director Sarah Finn, and cast members Sam Rockwell, Mariana Di Girolamo, and Parker Posey in attendance. The team introduced the film at the Sequoia Cinema screenings before doing a live post-screening Q&A at the Smith Rafael Theatre in San Rafael. Rockwell will be receiving an MVFF Tribute Program on October 2 at the Smith Rafael Theatre that honors his career and performance in…

John Steinbeck’s magnum opus, “East of Eden,” might just be the Great American Novel. That’s by no means a controversial statement to make, but it’s the only way to convey just how one might feel after living in his 600-page saga. The vivid characters and the economy of Steinbeck’s writing, with single sentences containing multitudes, grab hold of you and don’t let go. But what, specifically, about “East of Eden” has reverberated since the novel was first published in 1952? By connecting the stories of two families (the Trasks and the Hamiltons) with the biblical stories of “Adam and Eve” and “Cain and Abel,” “East of Eden” makes the characters feel centuries-old and inescapable, yet teeming with possibility.

The Middleburg Film Festival announced additional programming today for its 14th edition which will run October 15-18, 2026 including Academy Award-winning filmmaker Siân Heder’s Being Heumann which has been set as the Festival’s Closing Film. Heder’s follow-up to her Best Picture Oscar winner CODA, tells the true story of pioneering disability rights activist Judy Heumann and the historic 1977 Section 504 protest, when hundreds of disabled activists occupied a federal building in San Francisco.

Today, in partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, SFFILM announced it will present the prestigious Sloan Science in Cinema Prize to Academy Award-winning filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s sci-fi hit movie Project Hail Mary. The Sloan Science in Cinema Prize celebrates the compelling depiction of scientific themes or characters in a narrative feature film and is accompanied by a $20,000 cash prize. The special screening and event will take place at the Premier Theater at One Letterman on Wednesday, October 28 at 6:30 pm. Anne Lai, SFFILM's Executive Director, explained how support from the Sloan Foundation inspires audiences to understand how intimately science and technology influence our lives, both real and imagined.

Over the past two years alone, the three film adaptations of Colleen Hoover’s wildly popular novels have grossed nearly $500 million at the box office, creating a new kind of reliable IP. The characters often have comically unique names (Diem and Ledger in Reminders of Him come to mind) and face dramas that make soap-opera storylines feel realistic, but the escapism in Hoover’s stories has a stronghold over her audience. The film adaptations have similarly found their niche, as It Ends With Us, Regretting You, and Reminders of Him…

The S.W.A.T. team was out in full force recently to celebrate a show that seems to have nine lives. Since its 2017 debut, the Shemar Moore-led drama has survived cancellation, earned an unexpected eighth season and, after ending its CBS run, found a new home for its next chapter on STARZ, with S.W.A.T. Exiles. Moore is back as Daniel “Hondo” Harrelson, the Los Angeles S.W.A.T. leader he played for eight seasons. In S.W.A.T. Exiles, Hondo’s next assignment puts him in charge of a young team still learning how to work together.

The American Film Institute (AFI) today announced the complete lineup for AFI FEST 2026 presented by Canva, taking place in Hollywood from October 21 to 25. Joining the already announced titles are include Lee Chang-dong’s Venice Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize winner Possible Love; Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden, starring Cannes Best Actress winners Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto; Werner Herzog’s latest Bucking Fastard, starring Kate Mara and Rooney Mara; Andrew Haigh's A Long Winter, starring Fred Hechinger, Kit Connor, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Caitríona Balfe; Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert's…

Early in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest film, Digger, our protagonist, Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), describes the origin story of his unusual name. With an exaggerated Texas twang and a storyteller’s bravado, he points to a golden shovel on the mantel and shares that his grandfather was a fellow oilman who (you guessed it) made their family fortune digging for oil. It’s a comical, if not on-the-nose, detail in Iñárritu’s script that’s befitting of the style of theatrical storytelling he’s aiming for, and yet, it highlights the film’s primary issue. Like other entries in Iñárritu’s filmography (

Netflix has released the first full trailer for the award-winning Spanish hit La Bola Negra, starring starring Guitarricadelafuente, Miguel Bernardeau, Carlos González, Milo Quifes, Lola Dueñas, Julio Torres, Oscar winner Penélope Cruz, and 8-time Academy Award nominee Glenn Close. La Bola Negra is a bold tapestry spanning nearly a century of Spanish history as it tells the story of three generations of men whose lives are intimately connected through desire, pain, and love in from directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi. La Bola Negra won Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival, and the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, the first non-English language film to do so in 15 years.

The Queen of Pop remained on her throne tonight as Madonna walked away from the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards with the most wins for any artist, taking seven trophies, the most in a single night in her career and her first VMA wins since 1999. Madonna famously, or infamously, performed "Like a Virgin" at the very first VMAs in 1984 and even remarked her speech when she won Artist of the Year that most people in the audience probably weren't even born yet.

On episode 174 of the Director Watch Podcast, co-hosts Ryan McQuade and Jay Ledbetter are joined by Awards Watch contributor Trace Sauveur and film critic Jesse Nussman to discuss the next film in their Edward Yang series, A Brighter Summer Day (1991). Welcome back to Director Watch! On this AwardsWatch podcast, the boys attempt to breakdown, analyze, and ultimately, get inside the mind of some of cinema’s greatest auteurs. In doing so, they will look at their filmographies, explore what drives them artistically and what makes their decision making process so fascinating.

Today, the American Film Institute (AFI) announced I Play Rocky and Ray Gunn will complete the Red Carpet Premieres section at this year’s AFI FEST presented by Canva. All Red Carpet Premieres will take place at the historic TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California. AFI also announced that 14th, Ashes, Behemoth!, Bitter Christmas, Bunker, Clarissa, Elsinore, Josephine, The Man I Love, Mouse, Tangles and Wild Horse Nine will be featured in the Special Screenings section. Festival passes, which include the opportunity to access tickets to the Red Carpet Premieres, are available now at 

Today, the American Film Institute (AFI) announced that Academy Award-winning filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller will serve as the Guest Artistic Directors for AFI FEST 2026 presented by Canva. This year’s Guest Artistic Directors Program will include “An Evening with Lord and Miller” which will include a Q&A with the directors followed by a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Saturday, October 24. Additionally, they have curated a selection of films that inspired their work on their most recent hit Project Hail Mary…

After its inaugural year as a new category last season, diving into who will be nominated this year gives us just one example of how the casting branch thought about what makes a nominee and a winner in this new Oscar field. How much did it help us and how much did it make things even harder to predict? Let's work our way backwards a bit. Cassandra Kulukundis won the award for One Battle After Another (and gave an hilarious speech teasing director Paul Thomas Anderson before he started winning his multiple Oscars that night) in what, for some, was seen as a bit of an upset.

Today, SFFILM announced the next special event of its fall film season: Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid. The talk of the Cannes Film Festival, Club Kid was acquired by A24 after a heated battle from multiple studios following its premiere. SFFILM will present the film on a 35mm print on Monday, November 2, at 7:00 pm at The Castro Theatre, with Firstman appearing in person for a post-screening conversation about the film.

Peter Berg’s The Mosquito Bowl will have its World Premiere at the 40th edition of AFI FEST presented by Canva on Thursday, October 22 at the TCL Chinese Theater. Directed and co-written by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon), the film follows four top college football stars — John McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine), Bob Bauman (Bill Skarsgård), Tony Butkovich (Ray Nicholson)and David Schreiner (Tom Francis) — who set fame aside to enlist in the Marines. Eager to serve, they are immediately pulled out of their idealistic youth and into the violent realities of World War II.

On episode 364 of the Awards Watch podcast, Executive Editor Ryan McQuade, Editor-In-Chief Erik Anderson and Associate Editor Sophia Ciminello break down the winners and losers of the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals, which films rise and fall in the Oscar race, and offer a preview of some of the big titles headed to the New York Film Festival.

Few series this decade have served as better social medicine than HBO’s How To with John Wilson. Targeting topics the average viewer has only thought of in passing, Wilson’s series highlighted an essential truth to life in a time when any straining thought can feel two prompts away from fixing: we have never known so much, and we have never comprehended so little. Level-headed yet unafraid to ponder, non-judgemental and self-aware, Wilson’s style transcends its YouTube docuseries concept because of how formally attuned it is to his personality. He’s fully unpreoccupied by his most direct, awkward sensibilities, allowing him to reflect the honesty and humanity of his subjects.

It all starts with the script. Whether it's an original idea borne from personal experience, a fascinating human story or an adaptation of classic literature, it all begins here. This year's crop of screenplays offers everything imaginable, pulling from real life stories of actors, activists and miscreants to newcomers and previous Oscar winners alike. While tracking closely to Best Picture and Best Director, as we're in a consistent trend of filmmakers writing or co-writing their features, this is also where the screenwriting branch sets itself apart a bit. If they love a directors screenplays, like Mike Leigh, it almost feels like a safe bet to have them in (although this year for Leigh feels on the cusp for some).

On episode 363 of The Awards Watch Podcast, Executive Editor Ryan McQuade is joined by Editor-In-Chief Erik Anderson and contributor Griffin Schiller to review the latest film from director Zach Cregger, Resident Evil (2026). You can listen to The AwardsWatch Podcast wherever you stream podcasts, from iTunes, iHeartRadio, Soundcloud, Stitcher, Spotify, Audible, Amazon Music and more. You can also listen on the AW YouTube page. This podcast runs 1h8m. We will be back later this week with an awards temperature check post Venice/Telluride/TIFF and a preview of the 2026 New York Film Festival. Till then, let’s get into it. Music: “Modern Fashion” from AShamaleuvmusic (intro), “B-3” from BoxCat Games Nameless: The Hackers RPG Soundtrack (outro).

When Jane Austen was first writing her debut novel, “Sense and Sensibility,” she penned it under the working title “Elinor and Marianne.” Like her best works, the book is an incisive look at marriage as an economic proposition, but, perhaps most importantly, it’s a tale of two sisters and how differently they approach love. There certainly isn’t a shortage of film and television adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, so when it was announced that Georgia Oakley (

La Bola Negra (Netflix) Elsinore (Focus Features) La Bola Negra, the sweeping epic directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, has won the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival's People's Choice Award. The film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this summer and won Los Javis the Best Director award, spans 85 years beginning with the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s to 2017 and details a triptych of stories surrounding closeted gay solidiers, the lost final work of Federico García Lorca and a modern day search of gay and trans history once thought buried forever.

Léa Seydoux, Jordan Firstman, Daniel Pemberton, Jack O’Connell, Nadia Stacey Among Honorees The Middleburg Film Festival announced today an initial lineup and select honorees and special guests for its 14th edition, set to run October 15-18, 2026. Launching the four-day festival on Thursday, October 15 is A24’s The Debut, written and directed by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg (“A Real Pain”), who will attend with Academy Award winner Julianne Moore for a post-screening Q&A.

Carly Rae Jepsen gets blissfully weird with synth-pop psychedelia on the sprawling, lovestruck Day and Night. Carly Rae Jepsen simply loves to sing about the moment when wanting somebody becomes absolutely unbearable. From handing a near-stranger her number on “Call Me Maybe” to asking a lover to run away with her on (you guessed it) “Run Away With Me,” Jepsen has built an entire career out of treating a crush like it could reroute your entire life, long before Olivia Rodrigo would nearly perfect the form in her own 2026 album.

The supporting categories have always been the spot for multiple nominees from the same film making the cut but this year, with the new Academy rule allowing a single person to be nominated more than once in the same category, has opened up an entirely new line of prediction thinking and in its inaugural year we have more than one chance to see that happen, but will voters go for it? Penélope Cruz is the best bet this season, with top tier performances in both The Invite from earlier this summer and…

While Matt Damon has held the course as one of the few Best Actor contenders with frontrunner status and the fortitude to maintain it, the fall festivals have revealed the likes of Andrew Scott (Elsinore) and John Malkovich (Wild Horse Nine) to play their siren songs to take that crown. Sundance gave us John Turturro in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, angling for his first (!!) career nomination and Cannes hosted a wealth of possibilities with dual Best Actor winners in Coward's Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, plus Guitarricadelafuente in…

On episode 173 of the Director Watch Podcast, co-hosts Ryan McQuade and Jay Ledbetter discuss the next film in their Edward Yang series, The Terrorizers (1986). Welcome back to Director Watch! On this AwardsWatch podcast, the boys attempt to breakdown, analyze, and ultimately, get inside the mind of some of cinema’s greatest auteurs. In doing so, they will look at their filmographies, explore what drives them artistically and what makes their decision making process so fascinating. Add in a few silly tangents and a fun game at the end of the episode and you’ve got yourself a podcast we truly hope you love.

We're doing something a little different at Awards Watch with Oscar predictions. Very different, actually. If you've been an AW follower for a while, you might remember in the earlier days where it wasn't just me doing the predicting, I had a group, The Gold Rush Gang, along for the ride. After several years of lone wolfing the site's Oscar predictions, I'm bringing the team back together.

While the 51st edition of the Toronto International Film Festival may not have the big, buzzy world-premiere titles of its competing festivals this year — something like Godzilla Minus Zero at the New York Film Festival or the grand slam of Telluride, which surprise-premiered You Can See Everything — you shouldn’t rule the festival out. Across the 250+ films premiering at TIFF this year, there are plenty of new discoveries in its program selections, with films lying in wait to find their audience.

The Old Bailey Court is the heart of the British legal system, hosting trials since Medieval times. In these hallowed halls lined with paintings and busts of old, white, conservatively dressed men, Tessa Ensler (Cynthia Erivo) sticks out like a sore thumb: Short, female, black. To her, the other people in the Court are thoroughbreds–the best around, bred for his milieu–while she is not, despite being in the same place.