Schmear's Definitive TIFF 2024 Rankings

19 movies watched. How do they stack up?

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TIFF 2024 had everything: films from auteurs like Pedro Almodóvar, Luca Guadagnino, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa; Nicole Kidman having a torrid affair with an intern; a wild robot; a brutalist; and Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon singing in an apocalyptic musical.

Where do all of these films stack up?

Read on for Schmear’s definitive TIFF 2024 rankings:

(No spoilers)

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19. The Last Showgirl

What it’s about: A veteran showgirl faces an uncertain future when her show closes after 30 years.

Misery actually hates company. The Last Showgirl is a bleak slice of trauma—a gender-swapped, poverty-porn version of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. It’s Pam Anderson instead of Mickey Rourke, and while she’s up for the challenge—and the real-life echoes regarding expiration dates for female performers are unfair—The Last Showgirl says nothing further and fails to do so while also being shoddily shot, with too many scenes of Anderson blearily wandering around Vegas. Dave Bautista shows sensitive acting chops, but even at a mere 85 minutes, I was waiting for this to end.

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18. The Piano Lesson

What it’s about: The Charles family grapples with legacy as they decide the fate of their heirloom piano.

Despite its noble intentions and effortful performances, The Piano Lesson falls short of capturing the stage play’s magic. Malcolm Washington's direction, while competent, can't overcome the clunky pacing and tonal inconsistencies. John David Washington’s performance feels overly forced, while Danielle Deadwyler aims too obviously for Oscar territory. The film’s ghostly elements feel awkward, and the drama lacks the tension it needs. This pales in comparison to recent August Wilson film adaptations (Fences, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), leaving a sense of missed opportunity.

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17. Heretic

What it’s about: Two young women of faith play a deadly game of cat and mouse with a strange man.

Heretic hooks you with a killer logline—two Mormon missionaries fall into the clutches of a man with far more sinister designs—but quickly devolves into an exercise in self-satisfied cleverness. Hugh Grant shines as Mr. Reed, a smooth-talking religion buff who relishes tearing apart their beliefs, while Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East play the fire-and-ice missionaries caught in his intellectual trap. A mid-film monologue about Monopoly and Mormonism, set to The Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe,” sums up both the film’s charm and its downfall: quirky, meme-bait material that feels hollow and insufferably smug. While Beck & Woods’ intricate plotting will have its fans, the relentless cleverness left me disengaged, more irritated than intrigued.

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16. The End

What it’s about: A Golden Age-style musical about the last surviving human family.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End feels like an indulgent misfire, a post-apocalyptic musical that demands far more buy-in than it earns. Trapped in a bunker with unlikable characters, enduring patter songs that fall flat, and a bloated 148-minute runtime, the film exhausts rather than engages. Despite a strong cast—Michael Shannon, chilling as the patriarch, Tilda Swinton, uptight as the mother, and George MacKay, impressively earnest as the son—their commitment can't save a project that feels like it’s circling the same themes without deepening them. The film’s art-house pretension, coupled with its snail-paced narrative, only amplifies its claustrophobia, leaving my audience more interested in how much time was left than the story’s resolution.

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15. Eden

What it’s about: A group leaves society behind to forge new lives on the harsh Galapagos landscape.

Ron Howard's Eden is an old-fashioned survival drama set in the Galapagos Islands, where three groups struggle for power in a fragile ecosystem. With strong performances from a star-studded cast—Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Sydney Sweeney, and Ana de Armas—Howard crafts a unique, if uneven, tale of envy, murder, and Darwinian survival. De Armas shines as a campy, scene-stealing baroness, while Sweeney surprises with an emotionally grounded performance. Though the plot can feel choppy and the philosophical musings detract from the tension, Howard proves he can still deliver thrilling moments. Despite overstaying its welcome, Eden is bound to capture viewers' attention when it hits Prime Video, much like his Hillbilly Elegy did on Netflix this summer.

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14. Saturday Night

What it’s about: Discover what happened behind the scenes during the 90 minutes leading up to the first Saturday Night Live broadcast in 1975.