Stay Through the Credits

Toronto kicked off its festival this year with a film that sent us straight into the archives, a dramatization of the 1977 disability rights sit in that most people never learned about in school. In this episode we dig into Siân Heder's long awaited return five years after CODA, why casting disabled actors as disabled characters completely changes how this story lands emotionally, and how Mark Ruffalo's bureaucrat becomes the film's most uncomfortable mirror for modern liberal hesitation. We also talk about the film's unexpected alliance with the Black Panthers, the 28 day occupation that still stands as the longest in American history, and why a movie about a decades old law somehow feels more urgent than half the new releases at this festival.

Our second stop at Toronto this year is the one nobody warned us about, a taxidermy musical starring Jodie Comer and Harry Melling that somehow made us tear up. We talk about how a film this weird earns real emotion, why the music leans sincere instead of ironic, and how two actors fully committing to a deeply strange premise turns it into one of the more unexpected highlights of the festival so far.

We kick off our Toronto International Film Festival coverage with the first film on our list, Mike Leigh's Tender Loving Care. In this episode we talk about why this might be Leigh's final film, how it compares to his earlier work like Another Year and Hard Truths, and why a movie about tea, gossip and social workers ends up hitting so much harder than expected. We dig into the performances, especially a career defining turn from Kate O'Flynn, and unpack that gut punch of a final scene that has us still thinking days later.

We wrap up our Venice Film Festival coverage with Edoardo De Angelis's exhausting Christmas Eve family drama "The Fire Within You," centered on one of the most relentlessly monstrous mothers we've seen on screen this year. We talk through Vanessa Scalera's thankless, one-note role, the film's numbingly predictable structure, and why this felt like a rough note to end our Venice run on before heading to Toronto.

Ellen Burstyn plays a recently widowed woman chasing a runaway pigeon across the country in Kornél Mundruczó's gentle, safe "Place to Be." We talk through Burstyn's effortless screen presence, Taika Waititi's surprisingly grounded turn opposite her, and why the film pulls its punches right when it should be taking real risks.

Ilya Khrzhanovsky's infamous, decades-in-the-making "DAU" finally arrives in Venice, a sprawling biopic of physicist Lev Landau built from a real-life recreation of Soviet-era life. We talk through the production's wild, controversial history, the film's staggering scope and craftsmanship, and whether this genuinely singular cinematic experiment lives up to its own legend.

Alba Rohrwacher plays a new HR manager slowly losing herself to corporate life in Stéphane Brizé's "A Good Little Soldier." We talk through Vincent Lindon's deliciously smug CEO, the film's familiar but occasionally sharp anti-corporate satire, and whether Carla's quiet moral awakening actually amounts to anything by the end.

Casey Affleck's genre-bending "Company" hides its vampire premise behind three interconnected period stories spanning decades. We talk through the film's striking visuals, its overwrought philosophical dialogue, and whether Atticus Affleck's demanding feature debut can carry the weight the film puts on him.

Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem play a couple whose marriage starts cracking under the weight of a neighbor dispute and a tempting offer from a tech billionaire in Florian Zeller's "Bunker." We talk through the film's electric central performances, its heavy-handed symbolism, and why its late pivot into thriller territory doesn't quite land.

Alex Gibney's nearly four-hour documentary "Musk" pieces together the full arc of Elon Musk, from awkward Zip2 founder to self-mythologizing tech titan reshaping the federal government. We talk through the film's most damning revelations, from Tesla's self-driving fraud to his belief in simulation theory, and why Gibney's real achievement is finally connecting all the dots into one coherent, unsettling portrait.