I first saw Roofman at TIFF 2025, deep into a week when most of us were running on caffeine and pure cinephilia. By that point, every film felt like a mirror of human exhaustion: stories of despair, trauma, and apocalypse. Then Roofman arrived. Based on the real-life story of Jeffrey Manchester, a man who committed a series of audacious robberies while trying to reclaim his life, this small, beating-heart story broke through the noise. It was the most refreshing thing I saw all festival—a tender, funny, and quietly devastating reminder of what it means to be human.
What begins as a playful working-class caper slowly reveals itself as something far more profound. It’s a film about childhood, family, and the desire to want more for yourself, even when the world tells you not to. Directed with warmth and compassion by Derek Cianfrance, Roofman feels like the gentlest surprise: a crime story wrapped around a love story, wrapped around a reckoning with the capitalist systems that keep the best of us stuck on the ground.
Channing Tatum gives the performance of his career, and not in the loud, awards-bait way. It’s a quiet, internal, beautifully restrained turn that radiates optimism even when the world closes in on him. Tatum has always had an instinctive understanding of vulnerability, and here that openness becomes the entire point. His character might be a criminal, but he’s also a child at heart. Someone who never quite learned how to live outside of survival. The film treats him with empathy, not judgment, and Tatum brings a kind of soulful naiveté that makes every small gesture matter. He’s the boy in the man’s body that the movie keeps circling back to: a person caught between the nostalgia of childhood and the reality of adulthood.
Kirsten Dunst, as his love interest, gives a performance so grounded and emotional that it cuts right through you. She has that rare ability to make heartbreak look ordinary, like it’s something she’s carried for years. Her scenes with Tatum are electric from the first moment they meet. You believe instantly in their connection; it feels written in another life. The church sequence, in particular, might be one of the most moving scenes of the year: a quiet communion between two people who know they’re doomed but choose to love anyway. Dunst’s restraint makes it all the more powerful.
Cianfrance has always been obsessed with love and ruin—Blue Valentine (2010), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012)—and Roofman fits beautifully into that lineage while feeling like his warmest, most hopeful work. His camera lingers rather than cuts, letting silence and eye contact do the heavy lifting. The framing often feels claustrophobic, as if the walls of capitalism and circumstance are physically closing in on these characters. Yet, within that tension, there’s tenderness in a glance, a shared joke, or a moment of music on the radio.
The production design is immaculate. The film’s extended sequences inside a Toys “R” Us are so beautifully rendered that they might make you cry. Every shelf, every fluorescent light, every childhood toy feels pulled straight from the late 90s and early 2000s, an era of innocence, nostalgia, and commercial fantasy. That environment becomes the emotional core of the film: the place where imagination meets exploitation, where dreams are sold in plastic packaging. You can almost smell the carpet and hear the tiny speakers humming a Top 40 hit from another lifetime.
But what’s most striking about Roofman is how it handles its true crime foundation with grace. Cianfrance finds the humor and heartbreak in the same breath. It’s a movie where you laugh and then immediately want to cry, a story that understands comedy and tragedy as two sides of the same fragile human coin. While the events themselves are true—Jeffrey Manchester’s robberies and time in hiding provide the framework—the film’s focus is on the human experience rather than the sensationalism of crime. It’s a rare version of true crime that treats its subjects with empathy, showing their struggles and small victories without casting judgment. The script never leans too hard in one direction; it allows space for contradiction, for joy, for longing. It’s the kind of film that leaves you feeling both comforted and gutted, the cinematic equivalent of a warm hug that lingers long after it’s over.
There’s also a sharp undercurrent of social commentary. Beneath the romance and nostalgia lies a pointed critique of America’s failed systems of labor and rehabilitation, and how difficult it is to rebuild your life once you’ve fallen through the cracks. Yet Roofman never becomes didactic. It lets those ideas breathe through the characters’ lived experiences, through their yearning for something better. It’s a film about freedom. Not the grand, cinematic kind, but the small, everyday freedoms that mean everything when you’ve been denied them: being loved, being forgiven, being seen.
Cianfrance directs like a man looking back at his own childhood and trying to make peace with it. Every frame feels personal, as if drawn from memory. That’s what makes Roofman so powerful: it’s nostalgic without being sentimental, emotional without being manipulative. It invites you to remember how it felt to dream as a kid and to wonder what happened to that feeling as an adult.
By the time the credits rolled at TIFF, the room was hushed. Not out of shock, but out of recognition. Everyone in that theater seemed to be holding onto the same lump in their throat. It’s rare to find a film that makes you want to call your mom right after, not because it reminded you of her specifically, but because it reminded you of love itself—of how fragile and miraculous it is to keep caring in a world that teaches you to harden.
Roofman is a movie about growing older but not necessarily growing up, about finding grace in imperfection and warmth in struggle. It’s a true story that emphasizes humanity over sensationalism, showing how people navigate love, family, and survival in ways that are heartbreakingly real and triumphantly human. It’s the kind of film that stays with you because it sees you, not as a consumer or a critic, but as a person trying to make sense of it all.
Review Courtesy of Jake Fittipaldi
Image Credit to Paramount Pictures via TIFF