> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://regionfree.net/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # TIFF 2026 finale: DAYS 9 & 10 — Rogue Trooper, Half, The Diary of Mad Old Man & more - URL: https://regionfree.net/tiff-2026-finale-days-9-10-rogue-trooper-half-the-diary-of-mad-old-man-more/ - Published: 2026-09-22T09:57:10.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-22T10:24:15.000Z - Description: Reviews from the Toronto International Film Festival 2026 include: Rogue Trooper, Half, The Diary of a Mad Old Man, and Wild, Wild East. - Author: Joonatan Itkonen - Tags: Festivals, TIFF TIFF 2026 is finally over, and I'm back home after a long flight. Here, at last, are the final films I saw at the festival (save for a few still under embargo). Stay tuned for a wrap-up piece on all the other stuff from the festival as we head into the autumn, with more festivals, big premieres, and a couple of surprise interviews still ahead. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0c/47/0c4798b4-e19d-4d8f-8475-ae0910a66a04/content/images/2026/09/Diary-of-a-Mad-Old-Manl_01.webp) Image credit: Courtesy of TIFF ## The Diary of a Mad Old Man Leave it to Wayne Wang, the wildly surprising filmmaker behind Smoke, Joy Luck Club, and Maid in Manhattan, to bring TIFF to its knees with this shocking but ultimately very tender and unconventional love story. Based on the book by Junichiro Tanizaki, which already caused an uproar in its initial run, Wang's film is an unhurried and challenging portrait of love, lust, and the joy of living against all odds. It tells the story of Utsugi (Lily Franky), an aging kimono maker who suffers a stroke before his 69th birthday. Paralyzed on his left side, Utsugi relies on the help of his sister-in-law, Hana (Youki Kudoh), and daughter-in-law, Satsuko (Fan Bingbing), to survive, much to his chagrin. In his mind, he is as vibrant and sexual as ever, with new perversions reawakening every day as he realizes how quickly his time is running out. But his body can't keep up, and even walking on his own is a challenge. Wang doesn't sensationalize his subjects. He finds gentle humor in even the most tragic situation. After all, what else is there to do? Utsugi might kick himself for not fucking more or with fewer hang-ups, but that's nothing more than a dream now. He might have the sexual value of a ham sandwich, but that doesn't stop the longing. Meanwhile, Satsuko, a Chinese immigrant still learning both the Japanese language and culture, is in an unhappy, abusive marriage and yearns to escape. She cares for Utsugi out of duty, not compassion, at least at first, and his childlike fascination with her is more of an amusement than anything serious. Then, without realizing it, the duo connect. Maybe not out of love or passion, though both are neighbors in this tangled landscape, but of shared kinship in longing and lust. This kind of portrait is extremely difficult to get right. I can't think of many works of art that succeed in it. A single step in the wrong direction, and any tenderness will come off as lecherous. But pull back too much, and you throw sensuality out the window. Wang, who is a master of understated emotion, carefully allows his brave cast to explore this space without judgement or contrived morality. He doesn't judge, and he doesn't guide us to, either. Instead, he presents the relationship with maturity and frankness. It is what it is. Lily Franky and Fan Bingbing are tremendous in their parts. Franky plays Utsugi as a man returning to a childlike state, where his body is no longer his own, even if his mind harbors the regrets and passions of someone with a lifetime of both. Watch how delicately he plays the scene where Utsugi offers to kiss Satsuko's feet. What starts as a kink quickly builds to a tragic declaration of loneliness, where even a distant connection is more than the heart can bear. Bingbing, likewise, gives a heartbreakingly complex and wonderful performance as the lovelorn Satsuko. She adores the attention, even if she treats it like the kind of unquestioning love of a child. Then, as she realizes how much Utsugi means to her, she recoils in fear. But, again, watch how intimate Bingbing's performance is when she finally flirts with Utsugi, or as she drops her guard the first time, revealing just how alone she feels in a world designed to reject outsiders. The Diary of a Mad Old Man is a demanding, mature exploration of love, sexuality, and connection. It is profoundly moving and intensely human. It speaks of great truths we all face, one day or another, even if they're painful to accept. 4/5 stars. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0c/47/0c4798b4-e19d-4d8f-8475-ae0910a66a04/content/images/2026/09/Half_Still_01-4.webp) Image credit: Courtesy of TIFF ## Half True to its name, Half is only partially a successful film. It has a wild premise (a pair of half-vampire siblings fight against a crew of marauders in the desert), compelling leading performances, and some banger needle drops, but it's also far too long and loses steam well before the end. Directed by the filmmaker known by his mononym Samjad, Half is part Curry Western, part revenge story, and part kung-fu epic. It doesn't do any of those genres particularly well, but it hits most tropes well enough that the big picture still delights. I'm partial to any film that stumbles on its own ambition, and Half certainly tries very, very hard. Even when it doesn't work, it is so earnest I wanted to enjoy it more than I did in the moment. For example, at just 96 minutes in length, Half takes at least 20 minutes too long to get to anything interesting. The first act is a bizarre ramble of backstory which the film doesn't need, and the odd relationship between our leads (Ranjith Sajeev & Aiswarya Raj, both fantastic) is never compelling enough to matter. There's also a surprisingly nasty and, at times, unnecessarily sexual overtone to the violence that pulls the feature more into the grimy territory of The Hills Have Eyes and The Day of the Woman rather than the softer genre delights of westerns and kung-fu. Again, I'm inclined to enjoy wild genre mashups, but less so when it involves making light of sexual violence in this way. Once Half settles into the revenge plot, where our vampire siblings roam the wilderness searching for those who did them wrong, it finally gets fun. The setpieces aren't particularly inventive, but there's tremendous pleasure in watching well-choreographed action set to some insanely catchy beats. Raj and Sajeev make for great action stars, and there's a particularly fun rumble set in a kitchen that holds promise of better sequels, should they ever materialize. A good western knows when to enter and when to leave, and while Half stumbles in the first part, it does make a great exit. The final act has very little fat, and goes out right before you start to question how little sense any of it makes. It isn't perfect by any measure, but where else are you going to find a Malayalam-language vampire-kung-fu-western of this calibre? 3/5 stars. ## Wild, Wild East Here's another genre-oddity, one that attempts to blend the delights of Sergio Leone westerns with the bleak failure of humanity that is the Holocaust, and fails in almost every respect. It is formally sumptuous, mixing detective mystery, shootouts, and wonderfully silly anti-heroes with the no-nonsense storytelling of Polish cinema. But as it nears conclusion, director Jan Holoubek takes a hard turn into World War 2 drama that robs the film of its fun, and also makes the suffering of untold millions into a cheap gimmick that comes off as distasteful. It's such a shame, too, as the setup is more than intriguing. We're somewhere in Poland during the height of the war. People know something horrifying is afoot, as families disappear without warning, and Nazi death squads roam the countryside, while news tells of Russian forces arriving from the East. One day, a rider arrives in a small Ghetto, dressed as a Nazi officer, though not behaving like one, looking for a shopkeeper and his family, who once lived there. Nobody's talking, certainly not the corrupt mayor, nor the few stragglers of Nazi officers hiding out from the war. But everyone knows something, and everyone has a motive to hide that knowledge. Holoubek builds the mystery with great care, and the fantastic leading performance from an impossibly charismatic Itay Tiran does a lot to keep the story moving even through the most ludicrous moments. As the hunt escalates, Holoubek borrows from Leone and other masters of the genre, even staging a shootout in a cemetery, and there's a lot to love in how these disparate cultures somehow work together. But then, just as it should wrap up, Wild, Wild East throws an unwanted curveball that is meant as a moral coda, but plays like a cheap emotional gut punch that is thoroughly unearned. It leaves such a sour taste in the mouth that even reframing this as an anti-western doesn't save the picture from itself. Wild, Wild East has great singular moments, but it's also a prime example of how easily a bad third act can ruin a film. 2/5 stars. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0c/47/0c4798b4-e19d-4d8f-8475-ae0910a66a04/content/images/2026/09/its-my-time-03-1.webp) ## It's My Time The second film at TIFF to feature Michelle Yeoh as a savant with a highly specific set of skills, It's My Time couldn't be further from the violent escapades of the Surgeon. In fact, this amiable buddy sports comedy is so harmless and breezy, it's remarkable I even remember it two days after the screening. Like cotton candy, the picture is a lot of sugary fun in the moment, and a lot of empty calories by the end. Which isn't a bad thing, let's be honest. Plenty of films are equally void of texture and are perfectly serviceable. But there's something about It's My Time that doesn't hit the mark, even if it flirts with success. It follows the rulebook for a sports film religiously, hitting every single trope it can find with relish, and rushes for an ending you can see coming a mile away. But it's not like we watch films like this because they're demanding; we watch them because they're unsurprising. If anything, these films are more about *how* they're told than what they're about. In that regard, It's My Time is a perfectly fine addition to the collection. It helps that it's (mostly) based on a true story of an aging woman and her much younger coach, who went on to dominate in competitive Rubik's Cube matches. If the film didn't stress the factuality of this part, I'd have a hard time believing it was a thing. Which probably shouldn't surprise me. After all, there's very little we humans don't compete about. The competition itself is a lot of fun, and the film keeps the pace at such a frantic level that there's rarely any time to question the rules or logic of it all. Yeoh is a delight as the unapologetic hustler with a heart of gold, and she handles even the broadest comedy effortlessly. Who else could bully a ten-year-old at a competition and still come away with our sympathies than her? It's My Time is a fun, fine film that I probably will forget, then remember, and instantly forget again whenever it's brought up. It isn't a classic of the genre, but it doesn't have to be. 3/5 stars. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0c/47/0c4798b4-e19d-4d8f-8475-ae0910a66a04/content/images/2026/09/Rogue_Trooper_Still_05.webp) Image credit: Courtesy of TIFF ## Rogue Trooper I had more fun with Rogue Trooper than all the Avatar films combined. It is an audacious, imaginative, funny, and thrilling action satire that puts other big-budget spectacles to shame. Based on the 2000AD comic of the same name, Rogue Trooper is a tremendously ambitious mix of war film, broad slapstick, satire, and effects-driven melodrama that should never work, yet it does. At every turn, it seems to reinvent itself as something else, effortlessly jumping from Warhammer 40K to a hint of the majesty of the Valerian comics, with vague traces of The League of Gentlemen, yet somehow still feeling like a unified whole. Written and directed by Duncan Jones, who previously made the beloved Moon and the underappreciated Warcraft, Rogue Trooper stars Aneurin Barnard as 19, the titular soldier, a genetically engineered product of a military-industrial complex. He is one of many, as his name might imply, entirely disposable in the grand scheme of things. When he dies, as intended, his personality will be encoded on a biochip, which is then transplanted into another body, indistinguishable from another grunt. Then, on a routine mission behind enemy lines, 19's entire squad is killed. He attempts a rescue, but is only able to salvage the biochips of Gunnar (Jack Lowden), Helm (Daryl McCormack), and Bagman (Reece Shearsmith), whom he deposits in different parts of his smart-gear. Armed, literally, with his squaddies, 19 sets on a journey back to base camp. The wild, sprawling narrative takes perhaps one detour too many, including a few sojourns back home, which are nowhere near as fun as the dramedy between 19 and his friends, but whatever Rogue Trooper lacks in concision, it makes up for in sheer spectacle. Here's a film that starts with the destruction of a mammoth orbital cannon, and only gets more bonkers from there. It's also a visual treat, especially once you lock in on the same wavelength as what Jones is doing here. This is not a big-budget production, and you can tell where it bangs its head against the limitations of both tech and money. But gosh, it's so imaginative and rich with ideas that it doesn't matter. Sure, some of the characters are on the wrong side of the uncanny valley, but you won't find anything this visually striking anywhere else in cinemas this year. Perhaps even the next one, either. Rogue Trooper is also consistently funny, with a biting wit that sharply skewers the war films it emulates. Like Starship Troopers, it teeters on the edge of being so good at its job that some will undoubtedly mistake the jabs as endorsement, but it's clear where Rogue Trooper's allegiances lie. After all, it isn't exactly subtle about its distaste for the machinations of war. Just look at the scene where Jemaine Clement's deliciously evil Mr. Brass explains the logistics of making a profit on endless death. Add in the mix Peter Serafinowicz as a snooty francophone sniper, Matt Berry as a demented scavenger, Hayley Atwell as a future Tumblr-favorite Venus Bluegenes, and endless riffs on Britain's ridiculous chest-beating during the First World War, and you can see why Rogue Trooper fascinates me so. It's a big, classically dumb action movie that is fiendishly clever all at once. There's nothing quite like it out there, and we're so lucky it exists. 5/5 stars.