TIFF 2026 exposed festival’s stellar cinematic taste, and worst institutional instincts

TIFF 2026 exposed festival’s stellar cinematic taste, and worst institutional instincts BARRY HERTZ PUBLISHED 1 HOUR AGO Open this photo in gallery: Penelope Cruz prior to the red carpet for La Bola Negra during the Toronto International Film Festival, on Sept. 15. The festival closed out its 51st edition by awarding Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s movie its People’s Choice Award. KEITO NEWMAN/THE CANADIAN PRESS COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER Listen to this article Learn more about audio Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. Halfway into the new historical drama La Bola Negra, which follows three generations of gay Spanish men as they wrestle with devastation and desire, Penélope Cruz shows up for 10 minutes and brings the house down. Playing a 1930s showgirl who bewitches a troupe of soldiers during the Spanish Civil War, the actress delivers a quick but enduring jolt of energy to Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s feature – a movie that, while beautiful in its aesthetics and epic in its construction, mostly feels distended and reaching for a profundity just beyond its grasp. It is that defining tension of La Bola Negra – a wannabe showstopper in which you can see its seams stretch and fray as it struggles to please its eager crowd – that was top of mind Sunday as the Toronto International Film Festival closed out its 51st edition by awarding Calvo and Ambrossi’s movie its coveted People’s Choice Award. Like the film that it was honouring, this year’s TIFF seemed, from a distance, to be a rather gorgeous, glamorous and highly ambitious affair. But upon closer inspection, TIFF 2026 also felt as if it was using a handful of exhilarating moments of Cruz-like potency to paper over many larger, structural fissures and fault lines. We can start with La Bola Negra’s own curious path from Cannes to the People’s Choice Award, a seeming moment of triumph that was offset by confusion when it was announced, just seconds before, that the British drama Elsinore had won the International People’s Choice Award. TIFF 2026: The best (The Debut!), worst (smelly cinemas!) and weirdest (Trudeau?) film festival moments Last year, TIFF organizers introduced a new “international” version of the PCA, in which audiences vote for the best festival film produced outside of Canada and the United States. Theoretically, this allows TIFF to spotlight foreign titles that might otherwise be overshadowed by the winner of the “real” PCA, which has long…