Ten Performances From TIFF That Deserve Oscar Buzz

The fall film festivals are the unofficial kickoff point for awards season, a time of thrilling possibility for dozens of movies by talented filmmakers and featuring skilled and charismatic actors. And yet, distressingly, this early stage is too often where the lists of possible awards contenders start to get narrowed down. If you’ve heard anyone say that Jessie Buckley is a lock to win the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Hamnet, you’ve borne witness to this narrowing in action. It’s like we wait all year to finally see these movies, and once we do, we can’t wait to throw 70 percent of them in the bin so we can drive everyone crazy talking about the other 30 percent ad nauseam for the next six months.

Now is not the time for narrowing! Now is the time to cast our nets wide and make the case for award worthiness for as many films and performances as we can manage. This past week at the Toronto International Film Festival was the ideal time to cast that wide net; the festival featured holdover films from the Cannes and Sundance festivals, a handful of films that had just recently debuted in Venice or Telluride, and then a roster of TIFF premieres, ranging from Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man to John Early’s Maddie Secret.

And so with all due respect to the Jessie Buckleys and Paul Mescals of Hamnet and the Renate Reinsves of Sentimental Value, I want to spotlight ten performances that aren’t being forecast for Oscar nominations right now. They deserve to be in the conversation and for as many potential audience members to know about them. What good is Oscar season if it doesn’t get the word out about as many interesting movies as possible, after all?

Josh O’Connor in Wake Up Dead Man

Photo: Netflix

Rian Johnson’s Benoit Blanc films have featured standout performances before: Ana de Armas and Chris Evans in Knives Out; Janelle Monáe, Edward Norton, and Kate Hudson in Glass Onion; and, of course, Daniel Craig as Blanc himself. Yet both films only managed to eke out Original Screenplay Oscar nominations, which felt like mere consolation prizes. Historical precedent aside, Josh O’Connor deserves serious consideration as a Best Actor contender. He’s hilariously in over his head as a young priest in the hostile territory of a small-town monsignor and his close-knit cabal of true believers. But that comedic skittishness masks an inner resolve, which O’Connor cannily plays ambiguously: Is he sincere of belief or a potential killer? Both? That O’Connor steals the movie out from under Craig’s delightful bluster is accomplishment enough. But when placed in the context of O’Connor’s recent performances, his versatility ought not be overlooked. That the same actor who communicated infuriating brashness in Challengers and louche swindler energy in La Chimera is able to nail it with a character of such disarming sincerity in Dead Man is worthy of more than just passing notice.

Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon

Photo: Sabrina Lantos/Sony Pictures Classics

As Lorenz Hart — short of stature, fond of drink, bristling with resentment over his professional partner Richard Rodgers’s new success with Oscar Hammerstein on Oklahoma! — Ethan Hawke does not stop talking for 100 minutes. Director Richard Linklater is fond of a verbose protagonist; Hawke and Julie Delpy gabbed through three films’ worth of Before movies, after all. But Hart’s motormouthed, topic-hopping, half-as-self-aware-as-he-thinks-he-is conversations in Blue Moon are on another level. Hawke somehow keeps us on Hart’s side, even as we sympathize with the barkeep who tends to him, the lounge patrons within his earshot, and ultimately Rodgers himself, who Andrew Scott plays with the muscle memory of a man who has endured Hart’s combination of generational talent and highly developed neuroses for years. Scott won a prize for supporting acting at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, and he is great, but this is Hawke’s movie. He plays Hart with a bittersweet sense of eulogy, a man cursed with the awareness that his talent is drowning in a bottle and whose legacy with Rodgers is being threatened by puerile lyrics like “Where the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.”

Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Photo: A24

Somehow, we’ve reached 2025 without Rose Byrne getting an Oscar nomination; not for Bridesmaids or Spy or The Meddler. You could chalk those snubs up to the Academy’s anti-comedy bias, but they’ve got no such excuses this time: Byrne’s brittle, pleading performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the stuff of the year’s best dramatic work.

The audience cannot escape Byrne in the film. Director Mary Bronstein keeps her camera in uncomfortable proximity to Byrne’s Linda, a therapist dealing with her young daughter’s eating disorder, a flooded apartment, and an absent husband whose phone calls always carry a note of judgment that Linda isn’t taking care of things better. Byrne appears to feel how close that camera is, as if we the audience are stressing her out just by watching her. She pairs Linda’s frustration at failing with an increasingly vehement urge to escape, and her face registers how long this battle has been raging inside her.

Maryam Afshari in It Was Just an Accident

Photo: NEON

Performances in foreign-language films have historically had a hard time garnering sufficient support during awards season, even as international filmmakers find more and more headway into the Oscar game. That seems like the trajectory the Palme d’Or–winning It Was Just an Accident is taking, with director Jafar Panahi getting — deservedly — the lion’s share of attention for the film’s blend of emotional rawness and dark comedy. But that kind of intriguing tonal mash-up is exactly why the actors in the film ought not be overlooked, and I want to single out Afshari, who plays a wedding photographer who finds herself caught up in the kidnapping of a suspected Iranian torturer. She blends into the increasingly ragtag ensemble of this ad hoc revenge operation, lending a comedic frankness when needed. But in the film’s final stretch, Panahi calls upon her to access the kind of rage and pain that undergird this story, and she is more than up for the challenge. The next challenge is for award voters to dig a bit deeper themselves, because if this kind of performance were in an English-language drama, she’d be in the Oscar mix for sure.

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Ian McKellen in The Christophers

Photo: Toronto International Film Festival

Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is an unusual film for the director, a near chamber piece featuring Ian McKellen as a painter who has passed from relevance into the realm of filming Cameos from his studio inside his cavernous London townhouse. The veteran actor, whose own distinguished career in theater and dramatic film is often overshadowed by his phenomenal success in franchise IP, feels right at home lamenting an art world gone to ruin and tossing out generation-gap barbs towards Michaela Coel as the art restorer/forger sent to complete an unfinished series of portraits. McKellen’s last Academy Award nomination came nearly 25 years ago, and since then, contemporaries like Christopher Plummer, Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce, and Anthony Hopkins have all been recognized with Oscar nominations and wins. Peter O’Toole got a fare-thee-well Oscar nod for 2006’s Venus, in which he played a past-his-prime actor. Surely someone could put together a career-capper campaign for McKellen in a movie in which he’s legitimately great, right?

Yeom Hye-ran in No Other Choice

Photo: NEON

Park Chan-wook’s dark comedy about unemployment, consumerism, and resentment isn’t afraid to meander. What initially seems to be a satire about corporate downsizing evolves into a kind of scheming caper romp, before downshifting into something that feels more horror-comedy structured. It’s a fine excuse for Park to show off his mastery of tone, while also giving his actors a lot of space to go for big laughs. No one takes their opportunity and runs with it better than Yeom Hye-ran, who plays the wife of a recently laid-off worker at a big corporate paper factory. Introduced as a stereotypical shrewish wife, Yeom plows past any pat characterizations with an energetic, passionate performance, one which requires a surprising degree of physicality. In my screening, her character’s unexpected return to the story late in the film elicited delighted laughter from an appreciative audience.

Joel Edgerton in Train Dreams

Photo: Train Dreams

Shortly after Train Dreams debuted as one of the best-received films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Netflix purchased the rights and folks started anticipating a possible awards push for the fall. A huge part of that push ought to go to Joel Edgerton, who embodies the soft-spoken 1910s logger at the center of the film. Edgerton’s performance style has always tended toward sturdiness, which has often drawn charges of being stiff or dull. But in Train Dreams, that stillness feels observational, taking in a world full of senseless injustice and capricious fate set amid the stunning beauty of the western states. But the actor never falls into passivity either. In his stillness, Edgerton’s Robert Grainier is grappling with the violence of a changing world, and his physical acting carries that struggle. It’s a masterfully subtle work in one of the year’s more breathtaking films.

Noah Jupe in Hamnet

Photo: Focus Features

Justifiably, the skyrocketing praise for the acting in Hamnet is going to stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. They don’t need anyone’s help to get on the awards radar, not as audiences are getting flattened by their devastating depictions of parental grief. But if Hamnet is the awards juggernaut it’s seeming like it might be, there could be room for one more performer on its bandwagon. Noah Jupe, the now-20-year-old young actor from such films as A Quiet Place and HoneyBoy, shows up late in the film, as an actor portraying the title character in Hamlet. Jupe’s casting is itself meaningful, as his younger brother, Jacobi, plays Hamnet in the film. Obviously, there’s a lot of weight put on this play-within-the-film to deliver some kind of catharsis, and while Mescal and Buckley are emoting their asses off from either side of the stage, it’s Jupe who serves as a kind of living conduit, and he plays the part exactly that way — like he’s barely in his body at that moment. It’s a scene people will be talking about all year, and I dearly hope the young man at center stage isn’t lost in it.

Bill Skarsgard in Dead Man’s Wire

Photo: BiM Distribuzione

What an interesting career Bill Skarsgard is building for himself, from the terrifyingly pouty-lipped Pennywise in It to the terrorized lodger in Barbarian to a stylized gangster opposite John Wick. Even when disappearing into Count Orlok in Nosferatu, you can feel him making choices. In Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, Skarsgard does the Dog Day Afternoon thing as a charismatic criminal seeking retribution against a system that has wronged him. Skarsgard plays his real-life vigilante as both righteous and naïve, angry at the corporate greed that has helped wreck his life but almost childlike in his devotion to the radio host (Colman Domingo) who could help get his message out. He’s a live wire, and Skarsgard injects almost as much madcap comedy into the role as he does pathos. Speaking of Dog Day Afternoon, Al Pacino shows up briefly in the film for a tense phone call that feels almost like a benediction to young Skarsgard, an urging to pick up the torch for a new generation.

June Squibb in Eleanor the Great

Photo: Sony Pictures Classic/Everett Collection

Well, now she’s just showing off. After starring in the lead role in a film for the first time in her career last year in Thelma, the 95-year-old Squibb does it again in Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut. Squibb’s Eleanor is an ornery old woman who, after moving to New York City to be close to her aloof daughter and the part of her grandson’s face that is visible from above his phone screen, gets caught up in a lie that she’s a Holocaust survivor. While the plot relies way too much on the main characters — Squibb’s Eleanor and Erin Kellyman’s college student who befriends her — never simply having an honest conversation, Squibb is in full control of her performance. Eleanor is opinionated, lonely, frustrated, and scared, giving Squibb a rich palette from which to paint. That Squibb’s lone Oscar nomination was for a performance in Nebraska that only called upon her to be a fraction as complex as her most recent characters is the kind of frustration that Eleanor would get quite pissed off about.

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