Making the cut are movies starring Helen Mirren, Jodie Comer, Laura Linney, Rhys Ifans, Erin Doherty and James McAvoy and other, far less known titles Helen Mirren, Laura Linney, Rhys Ifans, Erin Doherty and James McAvoy star in three of the biggest U.K. titles world premiering at Toronto and making Variety’s 2026 selection of 20 International Titles to Track at this year’s Toronto.Jodie Comer sings (very creditably Variety suggests), in a fourth U.K. package, gothic rom-com “Stuffed” as romance takes unpredictable turns at Toronto. As in 2025, multiple more Platform titles, 42% made up of movies from female directors, could have made the selection. It focuses on new titles, hence what otherwise would be startling omissions such as “Jim Queen,” or Spain’s Cannes main competition trio.
The list is by no means definitive. But what it does point up is the presence this year of new and noteworthy voices, such as Scotland’s Tom Nicoll and Ireland’s David Turpin. Some of the films may feature in the Oscars race.
The Platform selection of Gabriel Martins’ “On Behalf of My Son,” as Variety notes, consolidates its status as the biggest international hope this year from a Brazilian director. The selection films will certainly deliver surprises. Given the abundance of international movies at Toronto meriting attention, it would prefer to be accused of bad mathematics than bad taste.
Featuring Éanna Hardwicke, Jack Wolfe, Jessica Reynolds, Rupert Everett and Christina Hendricks, tenderly scored and shot with many scenes of seeming dreamlike revery, a mystery which soon becomes deeper charting the phantasmagoric emotional landscape and aftermath of the AIDs crisis. Sold by Mister Smith Entertainment. JH “Angh,” (Theja Rio, Winter Hymns Films, Undercover Squirrel, India, Platform)Theja Rio expands his 2021 short into a feature centered on Anghba, a Nagaland chief presiding over an empty village in the 1960s – his people gone, his wife failing, his son unable to speak.
A missionary, played by Douglas Henshall, arrives with gifts and promises that pressure everything Anghba has spent his life protecting. Rio cast the film with Nagaland locals who had never acted before, shooting on 16mm. It’s the London-based writer-director’s feature debut, produced with Nancy Nisa Beso and Bernardo Angeletti, and the only Indian film in this year’s Platform lineup – a section whose winner now heads straight into Oscar’s international feature race.
NR “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo,” (Miike Takashi, OLM, Nippon TV, Pressman Film, Recorded Picture Company, TF1 Films, U.S., U.K., Japan, France, Special Presentations)Miike Takashi takes the wheel on the third entry in the “Bad Lieutenant” lineage, following Abel Ferrara’s 1992 original and Werner Herzog’s New Orleans reboot, and makes it entirely his own. Shun Oguri plays a gambling-addicted Tokyo cop dragged into a joint investigation with an FBI agent over a missing politician’s daughter (Lily James), while a former yakuza figure out for revenge works an angle neither sees coming. It’s a setup built for Miike’s tangled plotting and gonzo violence.
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