TIFF 2026 ROUNDUP: A MOTOWN SCHEME, TIME TRAVEL WITH A TWIST, AND MAD LOVE FOR DARLENE LOVE

Voices, Future Tense, and Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been each arrive with a pretty irresistible hook: a group of young singers trying to steal their shot at Motown, a couple whose time-travel vacation turns into an argument about history, and a music legend finally getting to tell her own story.

And the results are just as varied as the films. Here’s what worked, what didn’t, and what stuck with me.

Voices

Detroit, 1967. Jordan is a motel bellhop with a good voice, big dreams, and the deeply irritating problem of not being the person who’s been invited to perform in front of Motown founder Berry Gordy. That opportunity belongs to the Harmony Brothers, a rising soul duo staying at Jordan’s motel. Then circumstance suddenly leaves their coveted slot vulnerable, and Jordan and his cousin Derrick make the sort of decision that sounds almost reasonable only when you’re young, desperate, talented, and approximately thirty seconds away from ruining your entire life: why not take their place?

Derrick’s girlfriend Mia, who has ambitions of her own, gets pulled into the scheme, and a plan to steal one big break quickly becomes much darker than impersonating another act onstage.

The pleasure of Voices is watching a terrible idea acquire new terrible ideas at an alarming rate.

Everyone wants something badly enough to make the next compromise, tell the next lie, move the next moral line just a few inches over and then look around shocked when they can no longer remember where the line started. The Motown setting gives all that desperation an extra sting because you understand exactly why these characters are willing to go a little feral for one chance in the room. They aren’t chasing vague celebrity; they’re standing close enough to the dream to practically hear it through the wall.

And Voices keeps finding dark humor in that proximity. One minute you’re watching young artists scramble toward the future they think they deserve, the next you’re realizing this situation has escalated well beyond anything a catchy song can fix. It’s scrappy, nasty, funny, and refreshingly willing to let ambition look less like an inspirational poster and more like a disease everybody in the room has caught.

Future Tense

Future Tense begins with a proposition that’s both absurd and immediately believable: in a climate-ravaged near future, rich people have figured out how to time-travel, so naturally they use it for tourism.

Tara and Lwando, a new interracial couple from Cape Town, win the chance to travel back to 1647, before centuries of colonization and environmental destruction transform the land around them. Tara approaches the trip as an extraordinary getaway. Lwando looks at untouched precolonial South Africa and sees something else entirely: an opportunity. When he begins considering whether the past could—and should—be changed, their romantic vacation becomes an argument about history with stakes considerably higher than deciding where to have dinner.

The smartest thing about Future Tense is that all the time-travel machinery eventually leads to a very recognizable relationship problem: two people discover that the thing separating them isn’t whether they love each other but whether they experience the same world in remotely the same way. Tara can look at the past and see escape. Lwando looks at it and sees everything that was taken. Suddenly their little couple disagreements are sitting next to colonialism, race, climate collapse, privilege, and the extremely loaded question of whether you’d erase the present if you had the chance.

That could become unbearably Important very quickly, but the film is at its best when those huge ideas remain annoyingly personal—when history isn’t a lecture but the third person on their vacation. The final stretch piles on more than the story quite needs, and some of its cleanest provocations get muddied once the time-travel logic starts demanding attention. But for most of the ride, Future Tense is prickly, funny, uncomfortable sci-fi with a wonderfully petty question hiding underneath its enormous one: what happens when your boyfriend decides to rewrite civilization and you really just wanted a vacation?

Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been

If you know Darlene Love at all, there’s a decent chance you knew her voice before you knew her name, which is more or less the problem. Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been traces her from singing in a Los Angeles church choir to becoming one of the defining voices of the 1960s, including years spent recording lead and background vocals that weren’t always released under her own name. Most famously, that’s Love singing lead on “He’s a Rebel,” even though the record was credited to The Crystals.

Her complicated relationship with producer Phil Spector runs through much of the story, alongside the personal upheavals, career detours, Broadway and film work, and eventual recognition that followed. Cher, Dionne Warwick, Bruce Springsteen, David Letterman, and plenty of other famous admirers turn up to make the case for her greatness, though by about ten minutes in, you really don’t need convincing.

Watching it is equal parts delightful and infuriating. Every time another instantly recognizable song comes on, there’s a fresh little jolt of wait, THAT was Darlene Love too?, followed almost immediately by annoyance over how often the industry found ways to use her voice without giving her the credit that should’ve come with it. But what keeps the documentary from becoming a two-hour grievance session is Love herself. She’s funny, candid, and remarkably uninterested in presenting her life as one long tragedy inflicted upon her. Even when she’s talking about Spector, relationships that went badly, or some genuinely painful personal chapters, there’s a sense that she knows exactly what was taken from her without letting those losses become the only story worth telling.

That makes I Know Where I’ve Been feel less like a rescue mission for an overlooked artist than a very overdue victory lap. Darlene Love already knows how good she was. The rest of us are simply catching up.