Sophy Romvari’s “Blue Heron” has been one of the breakout critical darlings of the fest circuit, premiering at Locarno to raves before traveling to TIFF for more of the same. At first, her debut feature feels a bit familiar, a memory piece about a troubled brother that the one remembering couldn’t save, but Romvari pivots halfway through into something more ambitious and emotionally devastating. Her film becomes a document of frustration as much as trauma, a reflection of the limitations of memory, filmmaking, and art to deal with the messy nature of human beings. It’s a major film, one of the best of 2025, and an announcement of the deep talent of its writer/director.Romvari opens her film with a family of six moving to a new home in Vancouver. At first, it’s a little difficult to pick out from where the drama will emerge as we maintain the POV of one of the daughters, Sasha, overhearing difficult conversations between mom and dad, many of them about her older brother Jeremy. He lies on the front porch doing nothing; he wanders away from a family day the beach, terrifying everyone by his disappearance; he gets on the roof of the new home. His erratic behavior becomes harder and harder to predict, understand, or control.The version of “Blue Heron” that’s merely a memory piece about a woman remembering her troubled brother—and how much that relationship forged and defined her family—would be powerful enough. In this first half, Romvari proves herself a striking visual artist, working with the spectacular cinematographer Maya Bankovic to film scenes of troubled domesticity from the distance of a child or even an observer outside the family. The camera peers through trees or windows, never quite framing the image like a melodrama would, but shaping the pain of this family through the lens of memory.“Blue Heron” then jumps forward to an adult Sasha, a filmmaker who wants to make a movie about her brother. Blending documentary filmmaking into the drama, Romvari’s vision gains remarkable emotional momentum. It becomes about the function of art, and how artists burn the images that have haunted them onto celluloid. The lines blur between non-fiction and fiction, finding more truth in the latter through the process. Romvari intertwines them again in final scenes that echo with so much truth that I felt them in my heart. I didn’t see the reportedly devastating “Hamnet” yet, but this is easily the most moving film of the dozens I saw at TIFF. Maybe even the entire year.A very different coming-of-age story unfolds in Siyou Tan’s effective “Amoeba,” a tale of youthful rebellion that the director reportedly thinks she’ll probably never be able to play in Singapore. The draw of this “girl gang” movie is the girls themselves, a wonderfully charming quartet, well-directed by Tan to feel both specific and relatable at the same time. In particular, Ranice Tay feels like a potential star, someone who is so instantly charming that it’s easy to root for her to find a way to express herself in a part of the world where that’s not really allowed.She plays Choo Xin Yu, a 16-year-old who enrolls in an all-girls school in Singapore, a place with ridiculous restrictions on what the students and say or do. Even chewing gum is against the rules. She finds three quick friends who share her growing sense of rebellion, filming themselves acting out on campus and at home. She also happens to think she’s being haunted, allowing for more video hijinks, and the sense that these young women are being impacted by forces they cannot see or control.“Girl gang” movies set in parts of the world where girls aren’t allowed to be girls can often feel like melodrama or even exploitation, but “Amoeba” avoids these traps by staying true to its protagonists. It’s a subtly playful film, a movie that’s both about the individual and the community, and how it can be difficult for anyone, especially a teenager, to find a way to balance the two.Finally, there’s Tasha Hubbard’s well-intentioned but flat “Meadowlarks,” a movie with an important subject about which more people should know, but you’d be better off watching a documentary than this Hallmark Movie level melodrama.In fact, Hubbard adapts her documentary “Birth of a Family” to tell the story of four siblings who were separated during “The Sixties Scoop” a half-century ago, reunited for a week in Banff. In the ‘60s, the Canadian government kidnapped Indigenous children from their homes, creating fractures through the entire community. Imagine how the trauma from that would be reflected in the dynamic between four people who understand it more than an outsider possibly could.The great Michael Greyeyes does his best to deepen shallow dialogue, but Hubbard too often gives her characters things to say that sound like screenwriting instead of actual people. It’s one of those dramas in which everyone says what they think, what they want, and what they’ve been through with the eloquence of a TV movie writer instead of the fumbling stammering of a real person. It’s telling that all four protagonists sound so similar, mouthpieces of a writer who worked from theme instead of character. She’s made a film that teaches about an important chapter in Canadian history without truthfully showing us its impact.