TIFF 2025: Wasteman, Winter of the Crow, Charlie Harper | Festivals and awards

Interesting men and women dominate this unusual dispatch, the one that brings together films that have almost nothing in common on paper, itself a testimony of the variety of styles that can be found during a festival as wide as Tiff.

The best of the three is the intense and ruthless “Wasteman”, “ Another proof shows in the event that David Jonsson is one of the most remarkable actors of his generation. From “industry” to “Rye Lane” to “Alien: Romulus” to this burning performance, he has become someone you don’t want to miss, no matter the project. The film around him sometimes wobbles up a relatively simple story, but this simplicity allows Jonsson and the Co-Star Tom Blyth to do a lot of work in the confined space of this intense prison drama.

Director Cal McMau, working from a script by Hunter Andrews & Eoin Doran, opens his film with a piece of tone violence while we see a prison beat through what looks like a telephone recording from another detainee. The guys who run the United Kingdom’s prison that this film will never leave will not have a kind to be double cross, and they brutally beat a man, ending the attack by slamming a television on his head. This means that Taylor (Jonsson) will need a new cell comrade, who is in the form of WE (Blyth, having a year hell with “summits” of Sundance and the “fence” of Claire Denis, also in Tiff). Taylor has survived this place without law by disappearing, quietly making favors for powerful players while he gets caught with drugs. Dee threatens that reality at the wrong time when Taylor learns that he can obtain early parole, perhaps even reconnecting with the son he has never known. For the first time in years, perhaps never, Taylor allows himself to hope, and Jonsson is simply phenomenal to transmit the arc of a man who sees a light of light after having lived so long in the dark.

Blyth knows how to play the extrovert at the introvert of Jonsson, going widely with his socio -speaking character. Even if Dee became friends with Taylor, even helping him to connect with his son, Bly sells the kind of guy who has no allies that he will not sell to advance his interests. This “Wasteman” arrives at a place where Taylor’s new ally becomes his greatest obstacle to a normal life again is a bit predictable, but there is a spark that the film wins of these two young performers who have never turned off.

Speaking of great performers, we are not talking about the way Lesley Manville is one of our best working actresses. Of course, she obtained an Oscar nomination for “Phantom Thread”, but she is one of those artists who is literally never bad, and quite often brilliant, even in a small part as in the Drama Apple TV + from last year “Notice of non-responsibility”. She is simply spectacular in Kasia Adamik “Raven winter”, Driving us in this Kafka trip to the dark heart of a country in violent disorders. It is an unusual film which is sometimes frustrating in his narration – he really sags on time – but Manville holds it together to the superb photo, which is one of my favorites of the year.

Manville embodies Dr. Joan Andrews, a clinical psychologist who was invited to present his controversial research to a group of students from the University of Warsaw in December 1981. Historians will know what a tumultuous time it was in the country of solidarity, and Andrews find themselves in a wave of Martial law designed to reduce the solidarity movement. Before she knows it, and without her luggage, she is blocked in a completely dark, icy isolated Warsaw. She finds herself allied with an activist named Alina (a very good Zofia Wichłacz) and a witness to a murder, which she documents with her practical Polaroid camera. Suddenly, Dr. Andrews is not only on the run; She has something that could shape the history of the world.

Working freely with a news from the Nobel Prize winner, Olgarczuk Olgarczuk, Adamik has designed a Polish black – a film that recalls the work of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock in his representation of the international intrigue and the adventures of an intrepid foreigner who falls there. The cinematography of Tomasz Naumiuk is so dark that it sometimes looks turned through the gauze, but the approach works. You feel the cold in a place where lighting a light could alert the authorities for your presence. I liked most of what “Winter of the Crow” was doing, despite this above -mentioned gap, then the wonderful Tom Burke (“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga”) presented itself for a really memorable scene as a British ambassador, and I was hung on for good.

I have never been hung on the easy “Charlie Harper”, ” A film that recalls the first Tiff of last year “We Live in Time” in his chronological game in a genre (romantic drama) which generally does not entertain him. While I felt that the film rose above its structure through the power of its performers, I spoke to a certain number of people who hated the very construction of the film. Now I know what they feel. Although I am not sure that “Charlie Harper” would have traditionally worked better, in terms of structure or ratios of non -fluctuating appearance.

“I know how it started. I know how it ends. When I think of the environment, everything is blurred, “said Harper (Emilia Jones, much better in HBO’s current” task “). It is only many lines of “Charlie Harper” that draws attention to how he describes what you are looking at. There is another about the power of nostalgia that is said twice, just in case you have missed it. Charlie (Nick Robinson) and Harper had a five-year relationship which included a move to New Orleans, his ascent as a chef there and his fight with alcoholism. All of this is superficial, high and stockings that highlight the scriptwriter’s channels using these two performers as melodramatic puppets. He is so soaked in pretension that the relationships of changing aspect for the different scrambled eras of their relationship are simply added to this crushed and overdioid air.

Favorite songs, night reading nights, each conversation soaked in self -importance – a little “Charlie Harper” feels as disorderly as human memory. The concept of the capacity that we are able to blur memories in the formative relationships of our life (especially in our immature twenty years) is intelligent. However, writing had to work from the character, no cliché, and even Jones, who is always solid, is lost in the cogs of this plot machine. She will move on to something else and the first filmmakers will certainly do it too; There is an ambition here that I am curious to see in a follow -up project. And everyone will come back to this film like Charlie and Harper come back to their relationship: as a learning experience.