TIFF 2025: Hamlet, Rose du Nevada, no other choice | Festivals and awards

The first two days of Tiff are often dominated by films that have played other holidays. This year’s harvest included projections of cane tubes like “it was only an accident”, “Sirat”, “the secret agent” and “sentimental value”, but there were also films that made the jump through the pond faster, including the last of Park Chan-Wook, a winding science fiction riff on the drama of cooking, and another of one of the most client stories.

There is a reason why we continue to tell the story of “Hamlet.” It is such a rich text that it allows interpretation via new parameters, periods of time and even language and intrigue. The director Aneil Karia keeps the first, but brings notable changes to the latter in his riff on the classic tale, transporting action to the South Asian community in London to the present day. Developer Hamlet In less than two hours, it is a difficult challenge that Kaira cannot overcome, giving in particular a short discount to the Arc d’Ophelia and modifying key events in the deadly results. He also shoots his film with the intensity made –so much Trembling pocket camera photos – so as to distract what really works on the project: expressive eyes of Ahmed rice.

The basic beats are the same. The star nominated at the Oscars of “Sound of Metal” plays Hamlet, who returns home to the news of his father’s death to find his mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha) must be married to his uncle Claudius (art Malik). After a night of clubbing, a misty hamlet stumbles in the street to see his father’s ghost, whom he follows on a roof to hear the horrible truth: he was murdered. Hamlet triggers the well -known series of events, the play designed to exhibit Claudius redesigned as an intense dance number which is one of the strengths of the film.

To say that Hmed is the reason to see “Hamlet” would be an understatement. At the beginning, his close vocal choices married to his practical sole feel exaggerated, but it must be remembered that Hamlet becomes mad with sorrow and rage. Ahmed looks at this interpretation, sometimes feeling as if it were really disturbed, a living thread compared to relatively moderate performance. Only Ophelia by Morfydd Clark draws from a similar vein, although it has been reduced by theme in this story because the accent remains almost only on the long journey of Hamlet’s soul. Ophelia, forgotten again. (Polonius, Laertes and Claudius do not do much better, but Chaddha does a lot with the little left of Gertrude.)

As good as Hmed, Clark makes distracting visual choices that make the appreciation of his work a chore. Everything is turned on a grainy digital video, giving it a ugly look that is not suitable for themes or equipment. It becomes an effort to appreciate what Ahmed does, something that seems to be infinitely more powerful on the stage. When I talk about my love for the bard, my children think it looks like homework. The 2025 “Hamlet” is ultimately like work too.

Another film which requires an intense commitment to the public but which finally succeeds much more in achieving its objectives is the real goodker “Rose du Nevada”, The last of the singular Mark Jenkin (“Enys Men”). It is not every day that you see a film that reminds you of the work of Mike Leigh and David Lynch at the same time, but there are not many films like this wife of a film, which sometimes resembles a document of people on the verge of poverty in a fishing village at a distance from Cornwall before becoming something very different. From the start, Jenkin uses a disturbing visual language, turning his film in a 16 mm grainy appearance report, full of images and concentrating for an excessive quantity of time on the details of the world, from the pouring rain to the water from running to the branches that blow with the rusty shell of a boat.

The boat in question is named the Rose of Nevada, and it almost seems to appear from nowhere in the port. A character says something about it again, and you have the impression that it will not be an ordinary history of fishermen. In the village, we meet the father Nick (George Mackay) and Liam (Callum Turner). When Nick’s ceiling collapses in the rain, he must leave his wife and child aboard the Nevada rose, joined by Liam and a mysterious captain who never seems to leave the ship. They leave and come back with transport. It’s just that they come back three decades earlier.

Yes, “Rose of Nevada” is a riff “Back to the future” where Nick and Liam mainly enter the place of two men who have disappeared on the rose there is a generation. Liam agrees with that, replacing her unique lifestyle with a woman and a child. Nick loses his people and fights to come back. Mackay and Turner are excellent in a very light film on dialogue, the first transmitting a fear

But the film belongs to Jenkin, who constantly experiences sound and imagery. The film is an auditory assault on the waves that crash against the rose with the grid of its hull with the action of fishing. It has a rhythm, often literally with a metronomic sound that plays for minutes, which becomes more and more fascinating. It’s like nothing that I saw this year or the latter. I’m not sure everything is added, but I will not forget it.

I will also roll the phenomenal of Park Chan-Wook “No other choice” in my brain for a while. It is fascinating to realize that this could be a minor work of Park (although my initial comment that it is less true every time I think of what it does) and that it is one of the main films of the year. The director of “Oldboy”, “The Handmaidé” and “Decision to leave” is simply talented. This adaptation of a novel by Donald Westlake looks like a most disposable film in Park, a black comedy on the dangers of capitalism, but it ends with a few scenes that force you to rethink what it has been, and that perhaps the most angry film of Park from the world of revenge, a comment not only on fragile masculinity, but a business world that gets rid of its people.

The really fantastic lee byung-hun-the famous in the United States for “Squid Game” but also incredible in “Joint Security Area”, “The Good, The Weird”, “I saw the Devil” and much more-gives the best performance of his career and one of my favorites of the year as Man-Soo, a successful veteran of the paper industry. When the film opens in such a brilliant scene that it plays almost like the parody of a happy family in an advertisement, you have everything. Two children, two Golden Retrievers, a perfect house, an excellent work and a wonderful wife (her Ye-Jin). A few moments later, he was dismissed.

Before knowing it, the Americans have reduced it, the house is on the market, dogs are taken care of by relatives, and they must even cancel Netflix. He tries to return to his industry by obtaining a job in a company called Moon Paper, but he realizes that there could be more qualified candidates who are also struggling on this horrible labor market. What is the best way to make sure you get the concert? Eliminate competition. Literally.

Even the title of “no other choice” is intelligent, reflected several times, because companies speak for people without spin when they dismiss someone, but also what you are trying to leave a potential employer. Lee throws himself into the role, in a way in a way by playing the truth of the situation of you and by physically jumping into the clumsy visual that Park sometimes uses.

In collaboration with the director of photography Kim Woo-Hyung, Park again made one of the most captivating films visually of the year. He just knows where to put a camera, how to move it, when cut – you know, these things that feel shorter in the era when the films are made for algorithms. I’m going to write much more about “no other choice” once it is not in the middle of a chaotic festival, because it looks like a film that needs its own space, a magic trick in which you are so captivated by what it does with its left hand that you do not expect yourself to Wallope with its right hook.