Vulture is on the ground at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, where we’ll be recapping the best (and worst) films we saw and the crucial early whispers of Oscar buzz.

Channing Tatum’s charming, nimble performance is what everyone is talking about Sunday’s premiere of Roofman, the new film from Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance. Tatum turns up the twinkle in his eye as Jeffrey Manchester, a real-life burglar known as the Roofman, who cut through the ceilings of fast food joints to steal their money, all while being a real sweet guy to the workaday employees he gets the jump on. After escaping from prison, Jeff ends up camping out behind a bike display at a Toys R Us, cleverly hiding in plain sight while (he hopes) the cops get tired of looking for him. Tapping into the store’s video monitors, he finds himself drawn to Kirsten Dunst as a put-upon employee and single mom. Cue the sweet romance built on lies and deceit. Hate when that happens!

The praise for Tatum is justified. His not-quite-sheepish grin and lithe dancer’s body are put to great effect as he traipses through the kiddie-store aisles, charms the prayer-group ladies, and wins over Dunst’s two teenage daughters. But it’s in what he hides behind his charm that Tatum really excels, and it’s where he meets Cianfrance on a level quite familiar to the director. I found it impossible not to connect Roofman and its ne’er-do-well protagonist to The Place Beyond the Pines, Cianfrance’s 2013 unacknowledged masterpiece. That film begins with charismatic bank robber Ryan Gosling in a thrilling motorcycle escape from the cops, and moves through several twists and turns, lurches forward in time, and holds Gosling at its heart as a man doing bad things for good reasons. But while Cianfrance remains enamored of Gosling and his morally compromised antihero, the film never flinches from the ways this man has damaged his family.

That’s the sneaky undercurrent of Roofman — it flows perhaps too subliminally at times, but I do think it’s there. For all of Tatum’s winning charm and his honest desire to provide for a family, Cianfrance keeps peppering in reminders of his original wife and kids who left the picture when he went on the run. His gentleman burglar act falters before long. It’s a morally tricky tale for those with eyes trained on Cianfrance’s knack for good men and bad dads.

Poetic License Has Brought Us the Gen-Z Michael Cera and Jonah Hill

At 1 hour and 57 minutes, Poetic License is the shortest narrative feature directed by an Apatow since the theatrical cut of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. It’s still probably a bit too long. And it still tasks Leslie Mann with playing a middle-aged woman going through a bout of perpetual aimlessness. But where Maude Apatow’s directorial debut succeeds quite well is presenting Cooper Hoffman and Andrew Barth Feldman as Gen-Z Cera and Hill. Collegiate besties Ari (Hoffman) and Sam (Feldman) don’t share the hard-R vulgarity of their Superbad predecessors, but what they lack in edge, they make up for with a performative emotional openness that trips them up constantly as they try to navigate a new friendship with the older woman (Mann) auditing their poetry class.

Taking on classic buddy-comedy attributes, Sam is the together one with a programmatic path toward life as a wealthy but hollow finance twerp, while Ari is the brash, cracked, less-medicated-than-he-should-be bull in a china shop. On paper it could be formulaic, but Feldman, who last impressed film audiences by going shot-for-shot with Jennifer Lawrence in No Hard Feelings, brings a welcome note of ego and even slickness to his character. Hoffman, meanwhile, continues to impress in the considerable shadow of his late father. It’s going to be a while before Cooper is able to perform on screen without the rest of us imagining Philip Seymour Hoffman playing the same role. Rather than try to play against this, though, Cooper has seemingly embraced his father’s ability to speak volumes with a jerk of his head or the click of his tongue. The younger Hoffman is a live wire throughout Poetic License and you can’t take your eyes off of him. Together, he and Feldman have an interplay that feels like it was practiced through years of performing together. They have a natural yin-and-yang chemistry that ought to be capitalized on by comedy directors again and often.

There’s Still No One Doing It Like Ian McKellen

Steven Soderbergh’s return to the Toronto International Film Festival for the first time since 2019’s unfortunate The Laundromat was somewhat overshadowed by the man who was not present. Ian McKellen, star of The Christophers, sent in a video message to the film’s world premiere screening to pass on his regrets that he couldn’t come. The 86-year-old actor said his doctors advised him not to make the transatlantic trip from England, and while he also made sure to mention his impending work on the next Avengers movie, McKellen spoke with a deliberate energy that underlined his age. If this preamble put the audience in a headspace to reflect on the mortality of this legendary performer, The Christophers kept them there. As an aging painter whose legend has begun to fade, McKellen soaks up the moment, commanding Soderbergh’s camera and wringing laugh line after laugh line from Ed Solomon’s script.

Michaela Coel proves to be an ideal sparring partner for McKellen, playing a thwarted artist sent to “restore” (which is to say forge to completion), a famous series of McKellen’s unfinished portraits, the titular Christophers. Coel gets her moments to assert her character, a smooth operator who masks a surprising sentimental streak. But her best work is in reaction to McKellen’s grandiosity. Solomon peppers his story with generational resentments and art-world posturing, while Soderbergh films the interiors of McKellen’s English townhouse like the inner workings of a sarcophagus. But there are no bones made about what this film is: a park-and-bark showcase for McKellen to mesmerize an audience with his spirit, his delivery, his gravitas, and his access to his character’s pain. God willing, we get many more chances to appreciate Ian McKellen on screen, but as a late-career star turn, I doubt we’ll get many better.

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 Channing Tatum charms in a morally tricky tale that leans into Cianfrance’s knack for good men who are bad dads.