Canada's Top Ten

Canada's Top Ten is an annual honour, compiled by the Toronto International Film Festival to identify and promote the year's best Canadian films.^[1] The list was first introduced in 2001 as an initiative to help publicize Canadian films.^[1] Normally announced in December each year, the 2024 list was not announced until early January 2025.^[2]

The list is determined by tabulating votes from film festival programmers and film critics across Canada.^[3] Films must have premiered, either in general theatrical release or on the film festival circuit, within the calendar year; although TIFF organizes the vote, films do not have to have been screened specifically at TIFF to be eligible.

Originally, only a single list of 10 films was released. Although both short and feature films were eligible, the list was dominated primarily by feature films. Accordingly, in 2007 TIFF expanded the program, instituting separate Top Ten lists for feature films and short films.^[4] However, both lists remain inclusive of both narrative fiction and documentary films.

In a 2022 article, Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail praised the program as a diverse overview of the creative risk-taking in Canadian cinema, and a worthwhile contrast to the limited scope of conventional commercial film distribution.^[5] Conversely, in 2025, Pat Mullen of Point of View criticized the program for seemingly ignoring documentary films, with only one feature and two short documentaries highlighted in that year's list.^[6]