TIFF 2024: all the latest movie reviews from Toronto

Nobody shines quite like TV aerobics star Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), but when her sexist boss fires her on her 50th birthday, she spirals into an existential darkness that feels like death.

All she wants is for the world to see how powerful she still feels inside, which is why she doesn’t think twice about injecting a mysterious cosmetic drug known simply as “The Substance.” And while The Substance gives her exactly what she wants, it comes with some deliciously nightmarish, Cronenbergian side effects that will speak to the Malignant lovers out there.

An attempt to turn the story of the Swiss folk hero into a historical epic, which ends up quite bland. There’s a lot of build-up to the moment — you know the one, where Tell (Claes Bang) shoots an apple off his son’s head — but once that’s over so, too, is the film’s momentum. Despite being a movie filled with blood and dirt, it’s all too clean, adhering to a strict formula of daring heroes, cartoonish villains, rousing speeches, and battles that, like the arrow hitting the apple, are never in doubt.

It’s nice to think the G7’s septet of world leaders would be able to commit to a plan of action in response to a mysterious global crisis.

But in Bleecker Street’s surreal black comedy Rumours, German Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett) and her fellow heads of state are too busy losing their minds to get anything done as their summit is besieged by… horny monsters. The ghouls might actually just be protesters — you’re never meant to know for certain.

But you are meant to spot the kernels of reality baked into this batshit story.

Space trucker Andriy (Volodymyr Kravchuk) spends his days hauling nuclear waste from Earth to Jupiter’s moon Callisto, enjoying the solitude by listening to records and playing chess with a joke-obsessed robot. But a disaster, possibly a world war, destroys the Earth while he’s flying — making that solitude a lot more permanent.

So when Andriy hears a voice message from somewhere near Saturn, he clings to it with a ferocious intensity. The film laughs its way through tragedy with plenty of dry humor, but ultimately ends on a beautiful and hopeful moment.