An Unfiltered 2026 Fall Film Festival Preview
This week, I will fly on an airplane from New York City to Toronto to attend the Toronto International Film Festival, which will be my 13th in Toronto. My first was in 2011, which is, somehow, 15 years ago now. It is an extremely well run film festival staffed with very friendly people.
When I worked at Huffington Post, my editor used to tell me, "The company pays for you to go to a film festival,¹ in exchange you have to write a festival preview." These, to this day, are my least favorite things to write. I'm sure you've read them. Maybe you've read mine? Usually they consist of telling the reader how fun film festivals are to attend² followed by a list of movies the writer has not seen yet, with a brief description of why that movie sounds appealing. I find these very difficult to write because it's basically having to find a way to say, "it sounds interesting," ten different ways. This is how I feel this year about I Play Rocky. I have no idea if a movie about the making of Rocky will be good or bad, but, "it sounds interesting."
¹Unfortunately, The Hard Pass does not pay my way to a film festival.
²They certainly can be. But it's like any event where things should be fun, but things can go wrong and you leave sad. I have certainly left film festivals feeling sad.
I've always wanted to come up with a way to really let a reader know what it's like to go to a film festival as press, beyond the surface level that kind of paints them as a movie utopia, filled with smiling attendees, discovering the magic of the movies. In reality they can be fun. But, also, they can be hard – for a bunch of reasons you may not even have thought about. And, out of nowhere, truly crazy things can happen.
With a piece like this, I always feel like I can be a little more, let's say ... forthcoming when things are behind a paywall. Perhaps this is a false sense of security. But if you are not a paid subscriber, I will leave you here by telling you that I will have some reviews coming over the next couple weeks from the festival. (If you do want to become a paid subscriber, that would certainly help in terms of paying for this trip.)
If you are a paid subscriber ... okay, let's tell some stories...
(The Hard Pass only exists because of paying subscribers and I do need to have posts just for them. If you decide to become a paying subscriber today, there is plenty left to this story, plus a lot more like the story I was told about Tom Cruise that is now my favorite Tom Cruise story, approaching Philip Seymour Hoffman to ask him about Along Came Polly, and the time Larry King called me a "freak" and asked if I was "a nerd.")
