One of the common narrative tropes that turned up at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival were films centered around con artists and heists.
Tuner (2025)
I likened Tuner to last year’s Relay: a relatively straightforward film about an exceptional character that gets in over their head.
Here that character is Niki (Leo Woodall), a quiet young man who works with an eccentric piano tuner named Harry (Dustin Hoffman, having a blast in a glorified cameo). What’s unique about Niki is that he suffers from incredibly sensitive hearing that requires him to constantly wear earplugs.
His condition is perfect for tuning pianos and, as he will come to discover, also safecracking. The latter is a skill Niki realizes he has when Harry, who is suffering from slow-onset dementia, locks his hearing aids in the family safe.
The safecracking becomes invaluable, however, when Niki runs afoul of a group of thieves who are robbing a rich client after hours. Niki manages to escape solely because he plays along and has an ear that can help.
When Harry falls gravely ill and the medical bills pile up, however, Nicky goes to work with the robbers. In short time, things quickly get out of hand.
It helps that Woodall (who does not suffer from his character’s affliction) is such a warm, likeable guy. Niki is a regular guy who does his job and keeps his head down (sometimes literally: he often has to wear noise cancelling headphones just to survive the sounds of New York City).
Of course there’s also a girl, Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu, charming but slightly underused). Niki meets the aspiring composer when he fixes her school’s piano and they develop a slow, tentative romance at exactly the wrong time for both of them (he’s cracking safes regularly; she has a high stakes public recital/exam coming up that will, naturally, coincide with a key theft).
If you think you know how writer/director Daniel Roher‘s film will all turn out, you’re probably right, but that doesn’t make Tuner any less enjoyable. This is the kind of film that’s destined to drop on a streaming service without any fanfare, but it’s also a really solid crowd pleaser that deserves to find an appreciative audience.
Bottom Line: Tuner is an enjoyable heist film with solid character work and a delightful romantic subplot. Some of the violence near the end goes a little harder than expected, which temporarily threatens to derail the film’s lightness, but at its heart you know Tuner will stick the landing and give the characters the end they need/deserve.
Sometimes, as an audience, that’s exactly what you’re looking for from a film. 4/5
Carolina Caroline (2025)
The title character in Carolina Caroline is in a similar, but different position to Tuner. After witnessing a con man Oliver (Kyle Gallner) pull a fast one on her convenience store boss, small town girl Caroline (Samara Weaving) falls for the seductive lure of travelling and grifting with him.
Dinner in America director Adam Carter Rehmeier makes a meal of highlighting their cross country crime spree, which escalates from small scale to full-blown bank heists as Caroline gets a taste for the thrill and the danger.
While there are obvious nods to 1970s “lovers on the run” films in Tom Dean‘s script, particularly the muscle car that Gallner’s character drives, Carolina Caroline is much much more than a homage to films of the past. Considering how it plays within the subgenre, it slyly subverts narrative expectations around trust and betrayal; focusing instead on the love story at the center (spoiler alert: there’s no double cross, which feels refreshing considering Oliver’s trust issues and the fact that Caroline is always the robber while he drives the getaway car).
The film works as well as it does in large part because of Gallner and Weaving’s respective performances. The pair have great onscreen chemistry and manage to elevate their slightly shallow characterizations above stereotypes.
It helps that the production feels slick and moves quickly (Rehmeier is particularly adapt at the art of the montage). One notable stand-out features Gallner showing Caroline how to pull off a simple con involving miscounted change while a second bank showing Caroline holding up banks highlights how well-suited Caroline is for criminal life…until a rogue encounter makes her question her morals.
Much of this feels very familiar, which is why the two lead performances are so instrumental to the film’s success. Character actor Jon Gries gets a few vital scenes as Caroline’s bewildered father who gets left behind, while Kyra Sedgwick nearly steals the movie in a showy, but vital sequence late in the film. Her exchange with Caroline plays out exactly as anticipated, but because everything is firing on all cylinders, it works.
That’s the take-away for the film in general: a romantic bank-robbing film featuring a pair of dynamite lead performances, strong direction, and a familiar, but well-executed narrative that knows its strengths. In terms of solid return on investment, you can do far worse than Carolina Caroline. 4/5
Fuze (2025)
The heist is only half of the story in Fuze, British director David McKenzie‘s film about a WWII bomb that’s discovered in a construction site in the middle of London. Immediately several groups, including the police, organized by Chief Superintendent Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and an Army unit, led by Major Will Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), leap into action to cordon off the area and evacuate individuals within the blast zone.
There’s a third party in the mix, as well: a group of thieves, including Karalis (Theo James) and X (Sam Worthington), are using the crisis to covertly drill into a local bank. Initially this plays like mere coincidence, but all too quickly it is revealed that the thieves appear to have intel – both about the bomb and which safe deposit boxes to target – which confirms that Fuze is much more than a simple “bomb in the city” film.
What follows is a thrill-a-minute action heist film that doubles and triples back on itself. There’s a great deal of excitement in trying to keep abreast of writer Ben Hopkins‘ plot machinations as characters reveal hidden complexities and secret relationships. To be clear: how everyone is connected is arguably less interesting than how everything plays out and who comes out on top, as evidenced by the film’s shrugworthy denouement which reveals where and how several characters originally met.
Aside from the (occasionally overly) twisty plot, it’s fun to see everyone let their hair down. Taylor-Johnson is believable as a rule-driven Army grunt, while Gugu is capable as the observant and assertive communications centre leader. The film’s secret MVP, however, is James, who has been having plenty of fun in crime texts of late, principally on the Guy Ritchie Netflix series The Gentlemen.
Fuze isn’t interested in being comedic or deep. It is principally an action/heist film and, in that capacity, it’s wildly successful. If you’re looking for a movie whose sole purpose is to keep audiences on the edge of their seats, this is one for you. 4/5
Little Lorraine (2025)
This “based on a true story” crime film is set in the small town of Little Lorraine, Nova Scotia in the early 80s when cocaine was a lucrative illegal import.
The film opens with a devastating coal mine explosion that claims the lives of ten men, and puts many others out of work. Cash strapped family man Jimmy (Stephen Amell) is encouraged by his wife Emma (Auden Thorton) to take up his shady uncle Huey (Stephen McHattie)’s offer to work on a lobster boat. He reluctantly agrees, bringing along friends Jake (Steve Lund) and Tommy (Joshua Close), though it quickly becomes clear that the men are in over their heads when Colombian law enforcement agent Agent Lozano (singer J Balvin) arrives in town to crack down on the international drug smuggling ring.
Little Lorraine has plenty to offer, including a compelling real life story and a great cast (Rhys Darby plays one of the smugglers, comedian Matt Walsh is an overwhelmed police officer, and Sean Astin has a small role as a priest). The issue is director Andy Hines (who co-writes with Adam Baldwin) struggles with consistency when it comes to character motivations, as well as tone.
Jimmy, Tommy and Jake all grapple with the ethics and morality of their criminal activity, but they unravel in ways that too often feel plot-driven. In some moments Jimmy seems entirely lucid about how he will push back against his manipulative uncle, but in the next scene he’s a complete loose canon whose sobriety is wavering.
Tonally the film also wobbles when it comes to balancing its (slight moments of) comedy, often involving Lozano’s inability to blend in among the locals (Balvin does a fine job in his acting debut, but the character frequently feels like he’s in a different film). And the less said about the inconsistency of the accents, the better (Amell and Lund never nail it down and often sound like they’re from completely different geographical areas than other characters)
Still, the film has an uniquely Canadian vibe about it. It also tackles regional and historical specificities that often go unremarked upon, such as issues of job security in an economically depressed small town and the pittance offered to unemployed miners to support relocating when the work dries up (issues that still feel relevant).
In terms of direction, Hines does a solid job on his first feature, including one particularly showy uninterrupted take when Jimmy goes to bed and the walls of a coffin rise up around him as it floats away in the ocean. Little cinematic touches like this stand out in a film that highlights the drab beauty of a small maritime town where money is in short supply.
Little Lorraine is arguably the least successful of the four con artists/heist films I saw at TIFF, but it’s still a decent film with a great cast and an intriguing premise. 3/5
Tuner, Fuze, Carolina Caroline and Little Lorraine all played at TIFF 2025. None of the films currently have a release date.