Let’s be honest: It was not a good year for the Canadian film industry.
Even if Donald Trump’s (bizarre, nearly unenforceable) threat to slap tariffs on any movies “produced by foreign lands” hasn’t yet come to pass, our domestic screen sector has endured one battle after another.
The Heritage Department, which oversees everything from Telefilm to the Canada Media Fund, has become a revolving door of ministers with dubious intentions and expertise.
The grand promises of the Online Streaming Act, which was designed to funnel money from U.S. streaming giants into Canadian productions, seem ever further away. The success of Bell Media’s Crave, the country’s largest Canadian-owned streamer and a key financier for so many homegrown filmmakers, might face a reckoning thanks to Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.
And the Canadian Screen Awards, whose sole purpose is to celebrate homegrown talent, this year decided to give 75 per cent of its top film acting prizes to American and European performers (new rules were instituted a few months ago, which will prevent such a situation going forward).
But the movies that have managed to come out of such a bruised and battered industry? Well, they’ve been exceptionally strong – and that’s whether or not they were made with stars, with money, with any chance of global reach. In typical Canadian-film fashion, some of the titles below have already come and gone from the big screen, or won’t make the leap from the 2025 festival circuit to general release for a few more months. Which is all the more reason to put them on your radar now.
10. Wrong Husband & Levers (tie)
Theresia Kappianaq, left, and Lea Panimera in Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband).Supplied
A scene from Levers.Supplied
Creating brand new worlds from the ground up isn’t easy, even more so considering the typically paltry resources of the Canadian film industry, yet veteran Zacharis Kunuk and relative upstart Rhayne Vermette have done just that in their wildly ambitious and experimental features. In Uiksaringitara (Wrong Husband), Kunuk conjures an ancient fable set in the ice and snow of Nunavut that is beautifully strange. Meanwhile, Manitoba’s Vermette constructs an apocalyptic reality in Levers that is both terrifying and tender, its inhabitants forced to reckon with a world in which the sun goes missing. (Wrong Husband opens in Hamilton, Jan. 2 and Dawson City, Yukon, Jan. 18; Levers release date is TBD)
9. Mile End Kicks & Middle Life (tie)
Barbie Ferreira in Mile End Kicks.HO/The Canadian Press
A scene from Middle Life.Supplied
Two very different romcoms that each prove Canadians might be able to revive the big-screen genre (which has otherwise been swallowed up by straight-to-streaming pap), Chandler Levack’s Mile End Kicks and Pavan Moondi’s features would also make a fine date-night double bill. Or maybe they’re fit for an evening destined for a break-up? After winning over audiences around the world with her feature directorial debut I Like Movies in 2022, Levack returned with this deeply personal, delightfully shaggy Montreal-set rom-com about learning to fall out of love with the worst kind of men. Meanwhile, Moondi’s peppy tale has two aces up its sleeve: the real-life couple (and July Talk bandmates) Leah Fay Goldstein and Peter Dreimanis, who play platonic friends pushed into emotionally complex territory. (Release dates for both films TBD)
8. The Cost of Heaven
There is a late-game twist of the knife in Mathieu Denis’s pressure-cooker drama that doesn’t quite pass the smell test, even if it was inspired by a real-life Montreal crime. But even with that misstep, it is hard to shake the sense that, while watching The Cost of Heaven, the very ground underneath your feet is shifting. As the film traces the many, many bad financial decisions of a family man (Samir Guesmi, channelling both Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems and Jeremy Strong in Succession), Denis pushes his audience to consider that we may all just be one poor investment away from chaos. (Release date TBD)
7. Boxcutter
A scene from Boxcutter.Supplied
It is easy to call Reza Dahya’s Boxcutter a love letter to Toronto. But in its chronicling of a city deep in the throes of gentrification – redeveloping so quickly that it feels as if whole communities are being transferred from residents in one income-tax bracket to another within the blink of an eye – Dahya’s film about an aspiring rapper frantically searching high and low for his stolen laptop is more a deeply resigned lament. Take care of yourself and your block, before it’s all gone for good. (Streaming on Crave)
6. Measures for a Funeral
Deragh Campbell in Measures for A Funeral.Supplied
After Sofia Bohdanowicz spent the past decade building up an entire cinematic universe around the dogged pursuits of academic Audrey Benac – a character who’s been at the centre of four of the director’s films, always played by close collaborator Deragh Campbell – the director has crafted a coda of multitudes to her star creation, as ambitiously tremulous as it is quietly enigmatic. This scholarly detective story is haunting dive into obsession that feels symphonic. (On-demand starting Jan. 23)
5. Dead Lover
A scene from Dead Lover.Supplied
Some films are designed to watch, others to experience. That latter category is where Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie’s wonderfully nutty ultra-low-budget “camp phantasmagoria” fits in, the real-life couple inhabiting multiple roles on- and off-screen to deliver a truly unforgettable comic nightmare about an amorous 17th-century gravedigger. Either lament, or be thankful, that you missed the film’s TIFF premiere that came complete with scratch-and-sniff cards. (Release date TBD)
4. Who By Fire
A scene from Who by Fire.Supplied
Too many years after delivering his impeccably atmospheric 2018 drama Genesis, Philip Lesage returns with outsized ambition and a sharply defined sense of pacing with this epic-length coming-of-age drama. Following the reunion of two filmmaking families in rural Quebec, as viewed from the perspective of one of the clan’s teenage sons, Who By Fire was barely released in theatres outside of Quebec, but rightly praised by almost everyone who caught it. This is carefully calibrated, high-wire drama that should, in a perfect Canada (and world), make Lesage a household name. (Streaming on Crave)
3. Blue Heron
A scene from Blue Heron.Supplied
Your reaction to Sophy Romvari’s feature directorial debut, which follows a Hungarian-Canadian family in the late ‘90s as they struggle with the erratic behaviour of eldest son Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), might depend on how you view the film’s formally inventive third act. Personally, I found it to be a daring and magnificent upending of convention, turning what might’ve been a respectably stoic drama into something profound. Which in turn makes Romvari one of the most exciting Canadian voices to watch in some time. (Releasing in early 2026)
2. The Shrouds
Vincent Cassel, left, in The Shrouds.Sophie Giraud/Supplied
An enormously thoughtful, patient and frequently funny dissection of memory, sex and the expiration date that we are all staring down, The Shrouds lands as something of a grand syllabus of David Cronenberg Studies. Inside the story of a businessman (Vincent Cassel, made up to resemble the spitting, albeit French, image of his director) who has invented a new kind of mourning technology, there are big, squishy allusions to Crimes of the Future, Crash, Dead Ringers, Videodrome. And on and on, deeper and deeper, as if The Shrouds is intended as Cronenberg’s last will and testament. Let’s surely hope not. (Streaming on Crave and Criterion Channel)
1. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
A scene from Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.HO/The Canadian Press
I’ve likely pushed loyal readers past the breaking point when it comes to my devotion to Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s time-travel buddy comedy. So I’ll just leave it at this: Watch the funniest film in ages with someone you love. (In theatres Feb. 13)