As the Toronto Film Festival neared its end, I agreed to participate in a roundtable discussion about the festival's highs and lows, organized by Eye Weekly critics Jason Anderson and Adam Nayman (the latter an occasional L.A. Weekly contributor) and also featuring Variety critic Robert Koehler and Cinema Scope magazine editors Mark Peranson and Andrew Tracy. The ensuing, six-part podcast will, I suspect, do little to abate people's innate suspicions that film critics are a bunch of obscurantist blowhards in love with the sound of their own voices, but so be it. Nobody's putting a gun to your head and making you watch.

Having always thought fondly of Richard Linklater's underseen and underrated 1920s bank-heist comedy The Newton Boys, I've been eager to see the versatile, Austin-based director take another stab at directing a period film. Unfortunately, after catching up with Linklater's Me and Orson Welles here in Toronto, I wish he hadn't. Based on a 2005 young adult novel by Robert Kaplow, this is one of those whimsical historical films in which we see some storied event — in this case, Welles' landmark, 1937 staging of Julius Caesar — through the eyes of a minor background player. As Stephen Sondheim so memorably put it in his Pacific Overtures, "Without someone in a tree/Nothing happened here."

In Me and Orson Welles, that eyewitness to history is an eager-beaver high-school student named Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), who fast-talks his way into Welles' Mercury Theatre company and lands a bit part in Caesar as Lucius, the lute-playing servant boy who sings Brutus (played by Welles in the famous production) a gentle lullaby early on in Act IV. Naturally, the backstage drama at the Mercury rivals the Shakespearean text, as Welles (played with spot-on mimicry, but ultimately little nuance by British newcomer Christian McKay) postpones opening night, revises wildly on the spot, burns bridges and betrays friendships, all while somehow making everyone feel privileged to bask in his titanic genius. Those scenes are amusing up to a point, but given Linklater's considerable gifts as a keen observer of human behavior, they're curiously void of any real insight into Welles' creative process, a life in the theater, or anything else the movie thinks it's about. After a while, it starts to feel like we're watching a bunch of gesticulating lookalikes in a Broadway waxworks.

Still, better that than the hopelessly dopey, charmless flirtation between Richard and Welles' pert, upwardly mobile assistant (played in an atypically arch, fussy performance by Claire Danes). Together, they have all the romantic chemistry of two embalmed corpses, while Efron in particular is so markedly unconvincing as a Noel Coward-reading, Cole Porter-quoting bon vivant that Justin Timberlake would have been eminently preferable. The play's the thing here, with Linklater's climactic, lovingly detailed depiction of Caesar's opening night somewhat — but not nearly enough — redeeming what we've had to sit through to get there. I didn't go into Me and Orson Welles expecting another All About Eve exactly, but the folly of Linklater's film is that it make you think more kindly uponShakespeare in Love.

Suffering may be the great, undying subject of cinema, but at any film festival worth its salt, the escalating volume of calamity, catastrophe and apocalypse means that the conscientious (or congenitally miserabilist) critic risks drowning in pain porn. Stumbling from divorce to rape to abuse to endless variations on the art of killing, it’s easy to grow addicted, then numbed into insensitivity. Resolving to go against that grain this year, I took myself off to an early screening of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. After the travesty of Vera Drake, which is predicated on the charming notion that the British working classes speak in grunts and swill tea all day, I was ready for light relief and intrigued by the idea of a movie that takes optimism as its subject and isn’t The Sound of Music. As an equal fan of Leigh’s bleak early television work and his delightful Life is Sweet and Topsy-Turvy, I had High Hopes for his new film. But despite the elfin charm of Sally Hawkins, who plays an elementary schoolteacher with a sunny outlook that repels all adversity, Happy-Go-Lucky struck me as another form of condescension to the lower orders, only in primary colors. I’ll have more to say about this simple-minded pap (redeemed only by Eddie Marsan’s blistering performance as a driving instructor with anger-management issues) when it opens next month. For now, I can only roll my eyes at Hawkins’ giggling young thing, attired in circus reds and blues to emphasize her innate happiness, and so brimming over with loving kindness that she wanders down alleys in iffy quarters of North London after dark, looking for homeless guys to empathize with.

So, back to suffering. After interviewing the suavely self-possessed Ari Folman, director of Waltz with Bashir, the extraordinary animated documentary about post-traumatic stress disorder among Israeli veterans of the 1982 war with Lebanon, I sat through 135 minutes of Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone’s dramatic portrait of the notorious Italian mafia organization Neapolitan Camorra, among whose many business ventures, we learn, is the rebuilding of the Twin Towers. Focusing on the ancillary figures who, willingly or not, prop up the mafia’s activities, the movie shows to devastating effect — and with much arch referencing of the Godfather trilogy — how vulnerable children get caught up in the seductive violence and ruthlessly destroyed by the network’s hardened henchmen. If only the director were a little less excited himself by the brutality he depicts.

The same might be said for the excellent Danish picture Flame & Citron, but I’d make a case for the brashness of this elegantly skilled, fact-based drama about internal tensions within the Scandinavian resistance movement World War II. Focusing on two brash assassins — one who loves killing, the other who makes a mess of everything else — responsible for executing Danish collaborators with the Nazis, director Ole Christian Madsen complicates the heroic honor codes of movies about the “good war.” Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 masterpiece Army of Shadows is an obvious influence, but Flame & Citron is the film that the horribly over-rated Black Book might have been, had Paul Verhoeven not indulged himself in the shlock reversal of sensitive Nazis and treacherous partisans.

Obsessed though I am with the two World Wars, half an hour was all I could stand of Paul Schrader’s Adam Resurrected. Clumsily adapted from a novel by the fine Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk, the movie stars Jeff Goldblum as a German former cabaret clown driven mad by his concentration camp brutalization at the hands of, who else, Willem Dafoe. When Goldblum went down on all fours and barked like a dog — an important development in the novel that Schrader manages to make ridiculous — I made my escape to Tony Manero, a study of blood-curdling ruthlessness in Chile during the Pinochet era. Directed with grungy finesse by Pablo Larrain, the movie features a brilliantly chilling performance by Alfredo Castro as an aging Santiago lumpenprole obsessed with winning a John Travolta lookalike contest. The depravity of this exceptionally good film, though hardly exploited, is so disabling that had it been the last film I saw at Toronto, I’d have had to shoot myself.

Luckily on my last morning I dragged myself out of bed for an early screening of Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale, which at 150 minutes would be an indulgence in almost any other hands. Craftily hijacking the sob stories of the home-for-the-holidays domestic drama — from cancer to sibling rivalry to lost love — Desplechin turns them into a wonderfully fractured, endlessly self-renewing prose poem on the mysteries of family life. In its quarrelsome, logorrheic way, A Christmas Tale achieves a giddy happiness that, when it’s over, makes you want to slope off somewhere quiet to continue savoring its delights. So I did, all alone with my cappuccino and biscotti, and almost missed my plane.

On the same day that IFC Films announced it had acquired the North American distribution right to Steven Soderbergh's Che, the Toronto Film Festival unveiled half of another ambitious, long-in-the-works, two-part bio-pic — this one based on the life of legendary French bank robber and jailhouse memoirist Jacques Mesrine. Shot over eight months, on three continents, at a reported cost of $80 million, the two films were originally set to be directed by Oscar-nominee Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune) with actor Benoît Magimel in the leading role, before a series of pre-production debacles — including a widely reported 2004 head-butting incident between producer Thomas Langmann and Magimel's agent — caused French distribution giant UGC to back away from financing the project. After the dust settled, the films recommenced with Vincent Cassel as Mesrine and Jean-François Richet (who helmed the American remake of Assault on Precinct 13) in the director's chair. (Schroeder and Magimel, meanwhile, headed off to Japan to make the thriller Inju, the Best in the Shadow, also screening in Toronto.)

Following its world premiere here, the first Mesrine movie, The Death Instinct, will open in French cinemas on October 22, followed one month later by the concluding chapter, Public Enemy Number One. Already, there are rumors that the two halves will be edited down into one “international version” for consumption by the rest of the world. That's not exactly a bad idea. While it isn't quite as d.o.a. as some other starry, high-profile premieres at Toronto this year, The Death Instinct turns out to be a surprisingly paint-by-bullets gangster movie that relates Mesrine's exploits in enervating, one-thing-after-another fashion. First this happened (Mesrine serves in the French army during the Algerian War). And then this (Mesrine is taken under the wing of an older, wiser gagster played by Gérard Depardieu). And then that (Mesrine lands in jail, briefly flirts with an ordinary civilian life, picks up his pistol once more).

Richet is a more-than-competent craftsman who occasionally indulges in some nifty, Brian De Palma-esque bits of split-screen trickery. Mostly, though, The Death Instinct is a series of glittering surface effects in search of the psychological or sociological hook that might have turned the movie into the French Scarface or Bonnie and Clyde, which is what it so clearly aims to be. Fast sports cars whiz by. Various beautiful women fling themselves at Mesrine, usually with disastrous consequences. And the exotic backgrounds cycle through like a neighbor's vacation slide show: Here we are on the beach in Spain in 1960. Here we are laying low in Montreal in 1968. Here we are getting arrested by American cops in the Arizona desert in 1969. At once all too much and not enough, Richet's film is so crammed with incident that it feels like we're watching Mesrine's life in fast-forward, and yet the incidents themselves are so tedious and repetitive that a good 45 minutes of the movie could easily have been left on the cutting-room floor.

The Death Instinct opens with a disclaimer stating that any film based on true incidents must necessarily take a certain authorial perspective on those facts, and thus “to each his own point of view.” Would that this were the case here. Instead, viewers unfamiliar with Mesrine's story are likely to spend most of Richet's movie wondering why such a racist, misogynistic tyrant has remained an enduring icon of French popular culture (inspiring songs, posters, T-shirts, et al.) for the last 40 years. The only figure who pops from this flattened panorama is Orchestra Seats ingenue Cécile De France as Mesrine's partner in life and crime, Jeanne Schneider — a dark, sultry femme fatale who seems dangerous even before she coolly picks up a shotgun and helps Mesrine take down a crowded casino. A movie all about her — now, there would be something to see.

Although not a bio-pic per se, the self-reflexive action comedy JCVD derives its title from the initials of its leading man, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and features the 47-year-old action star playing more or less himself in a screwily entertaining farce concocted by French director Mabrouk El Mechri. I first heard about this movie when it screened in the market at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where it earned enthusiastic praise from several discerning colleagues. Now I've caught up with it here in Toronto, and, simply put, it's a blast. Floundering in direct-to-video obscurity and stuck in a messy divorce proceeding, Van Damme walks into a Belgian post office and right into a robbery-in-progress engineered by a trio of incompetent hoods, who proceed to make it look as if the actor himself is the criminal mastermind. A media circus soon ensues. Dog Day Afternoon this isn't, but Mechri keeps things jaunty and energetic, with lots of deft potshots at the vagaries of fame and success. (After bad-mouthing John Woo for failing to cast Van Damme in any films after Hard Target, one of the robbers concedes, “On the other hand, when you see Windtalkers, there's a justice.”) And Van Damme is a pleasure to watch — funny and light on his feet, at once playing it straight and winking at the audience — particularly in a third-act, direct-to-camera, autobiographical monologue that should silence all those who thought that the Muscles From Brussels was all bulk and no brains. Don't get me wrong: Mickey Rourke doesn't have to worry about any competition here when Oscar time rolls around. But JCVD may well be the most pure fun to be had in a Toronto movie theater this festival year.

Given the box-office fortunes of most Iraq-themed movies that haven't been directed by Michael Moore, I'm not sure if more than 10 people will want to see Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, about a cadre of U.S. Army bomb experts patrolling the streets of Baghdad. That, however, will be the audience's loss. Bigelow's film may not be, in formal terms, as radical and innovative a work as Brian De Palma's Redacted, but it's nevertheless a unique and worthy addition to the canon of cinematic texts about the Iraq campaign — the first, I think, that really tries to understand what motivates the men (and in Bigelow's army, there are only men) who join a volunteer military in times of war. It also happens to be a first-class piece of visceral action moviemaking.

Written by former Village Voice columnist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with just such a bomb squad, The Hurt Locker has already been praised by some here in Toronto (and last week in Venice) as an apolitical war movie devoid of preachy message-mongering. But what Bigelow and Boal don't do is considerably less important than what they do: namely, they give us soldier characters who are neither small-town rubes, do-gooder boy scouts, hyper-aggressive adrenaline junkies, poetry-quoting intellectuals or any other easily reducible war-movie “types.” What's more, they allow them to show very real fears. Even the most potentially cliché character, the newly arrived staff sergeant (Jeremy Renner) who saunters in trailing clouds of macho bluster, turns out to be anything but, emerging as a psychologically complex man of war who sublimated his own battlefield anxieties into a kind of dangerous addiction. It's a stunning performance in a movie that frequently rattles the senses.

Bigelow, whose best films (Near Dark, Point Break, Strange Days) have always married an astute psychological dimension to a genre-movie framework, films the day-in, day-out routine of the soldiers with terrific intensity and attention to detail, whether they're defusing a rat's nest of IEDs in a narrow Baghdad alley or aiding a party of British army subcontractors caught in a desert ambush. Together with the masterful British cinematographer (who shot United 93 and many Ken Loach films) and the editor Chris Innis, she orchestrates several suspense sequences of the sort that can bring audiences to the edges of their seats, but which never feel cheap or exploitative, because Bigelow mines the natural tension from a situation rather than plastering on the kind of contrivances that can only be thought up in a Hollywood war room.

The Hurt Locker saves its most inspired strokes for last, when Renner returns home after his tour of duty and Bigelow, in a 10-minute sequence of pure cinema, creates a more palpable sense of the disorientation experienced by many a combat vet suddenly extracted from the war zone than Stop-Loss managed in its entirety. Finally, as Toronto hits the half-way mark, here is another movie worth getting excited about.

Ordinarily I am not, to put it mildly, a film festival party animal — too much blond beauty, air kissing, horrid background music, and “Hello, congratulations, oh sorry, I thought you were the mother of...“ But I do haul out the basic black and minimalist jewelry for the annual Sony Pictures Classics dinner at Toronto. It’s loose, it’s fun, you don’t have to yell, there’s steak and lobster where normally only rubber chicken rules, and given the company’s film slate you stand a more than even chance of being seated next to someone interesting who’s unwinding and relaxed.

Last year, I ate with the cast and crew of the Israeli film The Band’s Visit, whose star, Ronit Elkabetz, proved to be both a sparkling kibbitzer and genuinely interested in whomever she’s sitting next to. This year I lucked out again and found myself seated between director Wong Kar Wai, who’s promoting the new and improved version of his 1994 period action drama Ashes of Time, and his producer Norman Wang, formerly a New York publicist beloved of egg-headed film critics, now happily relocated in Hong Kong, where he works with Wong and buys lots of lovely jewelry, most of which he was wearing. Contrary to the inscrutably cool image created by his omnipresent sunglasses, Wong is open, friendly, drily funny and serenely accepting of the adulation that came his way within and between courses, much of it from Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker, a gifted raconteur of great and silly movie moments who also read from his Blackberry the list of the books Sarah Palin allegedly tried to ban, among which is My Friend Flicka. (Horse porn?)

A radiant Jonathan Demme (there with Rachel Getting Married, of which more in these pages very soon), who rushed up in an Indian shirt, pumped the director’s hand and generally came on like a film student who couldn’t believe his luck at pressing the flesh of a master. The serene Wong actually removed his shades to inspect the menu, and chose the seafood risotto. At the next table one of the enchantingly uncool Dardenne brothers (Lorna’s Silence) chomped improbably on a cigar, and Atom Egoyan (Adoration) showed me a phone pic of his handsome teenaged son Arshile going cross-eyed. That’s all the gossip you get from me — I’m interested, but clueless.

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler won't screen publicly here in Toronto until Sunday evening, and won't be shown to the press until Monday afternoon. (In its latest concession to Hollywood, the festival has this year decided to hold press screenings for many high-profile movies only after those films' first public screenings — an obvious effort to forestall potentially damaging reviews.) But I had the chance to see Aronofsky's film earlier this summer during the selection screenings for the New York Film Festival (where it will be the closing-night gala on October 12) and again last week in L.A., in a finished version that included the original song Bruce Springsteen has written for the end credits. And, now that The Wrestler has taken the Golden Lion for best film at the just-concluded Venice Film Festival, it seems fair game for discussion, so here goes.

I'd begin by saying that The Wrestler is the best wrestling movie in memory, but what, really, is the competition: Hulk Hogan in 1989's No Holds Barred? Besides, Aronofsky's film is no more just about wrestling than There Will Be Blood (the last American movie about which I felt this much enthusiasm) was a user's guide to oil drilling. Or, on second thought, maybe The Wrestler is all about wrestling — provided you take that to mean both the sport itself as well as what goes on outside the colored ropes, when the conquering hero returns to his dressing room and begins to grapple with those slippery questions of identity, self-worth and mortality that weigh heavy upon all men's souls.

The man in this particular equation is Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a pro wrestler two decades on from his title-card days, now playing for fanboy crowds in banquet halls and school auditoriums for barely enough money to pay his trailer-park rent. A hulking mass of steroidal muscle and frosted hair extensions, his body a palimpsest of scars from a lifetime of folding chairs to the back and plate-glass windows to the skull, The Ram seems to sense that his days are numbered even before a near-fatal heart attack lands him in the ER. But what, at the end of the day, is a wrestler without his ring? Does he, perchance, cease to exist?

The Wrestler is Randy Robinson's odyssey to get to the bottom of that nagging dilemma, as he tries to patch things up with his estranged teenage daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and turns on the charm for a world-weary stripper (an excellent Marisa Tomei) who wonders if she too has squandered her last hope for a normal-type life. And then there's the supermarket deli counter — the one where Robinson finds himself sidelined after his heart surgery. It's there that Aronofsky stages one of the movie's truly brilliant scenes, as The Ram suits up in apron and hair net to meet a less-than-adoring public. (“A bit less potato salad, please.” “No, a little bit more.”) Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the soundtrack segues from the whir of industrial fans and refrigerators to the roar of an arena crowd — the one Robinson has never stopped hearing inside his own head. Make no mistake: The Ram is not long for the world of food service.

I could go on — indeed, I've written at length about The Wrestler (which, as of this moment, is still awaiting a U.S. distribution deal) for the new issue of Cinema Scope magazine, the contents of which should go live on the CS website sometime next week. For now, suffice it to say that the movie is a triumph from start to finish, especially for Rourke, but also for Aronofsky, whose career seemed to be drifting uncertainly through the outer reaches of the galaxy after the calamitous bit of new-agey mysticism known as The Fountain. That was a very hard movie to take seriously, where even a snowflake came burdened with several tons of symbolic significance. But none of Aronofsky's first three features — even Requiem for a Dream, of which I thought highly — were less than agonized affairs, in which one felt this undeniably gifted filmmaker straining to wow us with his Kubrickian brilliance. The Wrestler is, by contrast, the most lucid, effortless film Aronofsky has ever made, and also the saddest, the funniest, the most humane.

As for Rourke, he doesn't just play this role — he lives it, moment by moment, to one's consistent astonishment. Those newspaper and magazine clippings that pass by underneath the opening credits, heralding The Ram as the next great thing in pro wrestling? Those could just as soon be the myriad interviews and profiles of Rourke himself that proliferated in the 1980s — starting with his breakout supporting roles in Body Heat, Diner and Rumble Fish and continuing through his tour-de-force as Charles Bukowski's alter-ego in Barfly. In those days, everyone thought this electrifying young actor was certain to be the next Brando. Then, like The Ram, Rourke had his own years in the desert, during which he embarked on a professional boxing career, spent too much time in tanning salons and starring in soft-core sex romps, and finally landed in direct-to-video Siberia. Until, at the start of the decade, Rourke began to re-emerge: stunning as the father of a missing girl in a three-minute scene from Sean Penn's The Pledge and as a transvestite prison inmate in Steve Buscemi's Animal Factory; one of the rogue's gallery in Bob Dylan's Masked and Anonymous; and handily stealing the show as the disfigured vigilante, Marv, in Sin City. Now, at 52, he has given the kind of performance that caps, redefines and reinvents careers, inhabiting a character at the end of his tether with all the lived-in authority of someone who has known what it's like to be there. Once upon a time, Mickey Rourke coulda been a contender for Heavyweight Acting Champion of the World. With The Wrestler, that title is once again his to lose.

The desperation of the Toronto Film Festival to land a high-profile new Canadian film for its annual opening-night gala has rarely been more palpable than in the case of this year's Passchendaele, an expensive exercise in maple-leaf patriotism set before, during and after the titular World War I battle where 16,000 Canadian soldiers perished while trying to win control of a German-occupied Belgian village of little strategic importance. The movie stars and was written and directed by Paul Gross, who's best known on our side of the border as one of the stars of the mid-'90s television series Due South, and whose only previous directing experience was the alleged comedy Men with Brooms (2002), which featured Gross and Naked Gun alum Leslie Nielsen in a celebration of the Canuck sport of curling. A hit on its home turf, Men went directly to DVD in the U.S., where audiences may well have confused it for a movie about zen and the art of janitorial maintenance.

No matter: Gross' directorial debut seems to have been enough to convince him that he was ready to try his hand at a full-fledged, Saving Private Ryan-style combat spectacle, and pretty much right from the start it's obvious that he's bitten off more than he can fit his lips around, let alone chew. This is the sort of war movie where soldiers with nicknames like "Skinner" and "Highway" get tossed about by shrapnel blasts while shouting lines like "You're gonna be OK," "We're gonna get you outta here" and "Mama! Where are you, mama?" And that's just for starters. The hero of this particular tale is an AWOL Sergeant (Gross) recovering from combat shock in a Calgary hospital, who, naturally, falls for the comely charms of the beautiful, fatherless nurse (Caroline Dhavernas) tending to his physical and psychological wounds. Just for good measure, she has a deep, dark family secret, as well as an asthmatic younger brother (Joe Dinicol) who longs to test his manly mettle on the battlefield. How Gross managed not to top things off with a blind old man or a three-legged dog is beyond me, although Gil Bellows does pop up as Gross' one-armed best friend.

The battle scenes that bookend Passchendaele's sudsy romanticism are impressive in terms of scale and the acrobatic ways in which human bodies fly across the screen. But that ultimately amounts to little in a movie where the performers (particularly Gross and Dinicol) are so wooden that they are scarcely distinguishable from the theme-park level period sets and costumes. After about 20 minutes of this, I started hoping that Leslie Nielsen would appear and reveal that Passchendaele was all one big put-on. No such luck.

Bad opening (and closing) night films at the world's major international film festivals are hardly news — so much so that, when I encountered some colleagues on my way to the Passchendaele press screening, more than one wondered aloud why I was even bothering in the first place. So the story might end there: just as Cannes had its Da Vinci Code, so Toronto has its Passchendaele. But Gross' film strikes me as an especially curious case, because it is a film so self-consciously made in the Hollywood idiom, designed to show that Canada can do a war movie as slickly and professionally as its neighbor to the south. And there's the rub: The Canadian "new wave" movies of the 1960s and '70s — those early films by directors like Michel Brault, David Cronenberg, Claude Jutra, Don Shebib and Michael Snow that first gave Canadian cinema a distinctive locus on the world cinema map — were elementally modest, personal films made by artists driven by no greater motive than to tell original stories in their own, unique voices. They were movies made for very little money that managed to be embraced by audiences all around the world, whereas Passchendaele is a movie made for a lot of money that will be lucky to make it to a second weekend in the Great White North.

There are, of course, still bold, original filmmakers at work in Canada — Cronenberg, the Innuit-language director Zacharias Kunuk and Quebec's Robert Lepage among them — but, more and more, the Canadian movies that receive the biggest fuss at Toronto (not just Passchendaele, but such other recent "galas" as Fugitive Pieces and the Martin Short debacle Jiminy Glick in Lalawood) are, simply put, much ado about nothing.

As I write this, word continues to pour in from colleagues and other trusted sources that the 65th Venice Film Festival (August 27-September 6) has been plagued by swarms of mosquitoes and bad movies. Meanwhile, here in Canada, where the curtain goes up later today on the 33rd annual Toronto International Film Festival (September 4-13), festival organizers (and attendees) are understandably hoping for a considerably less pestilent affair. Only time will tell.

In the three decades since its inception, Toronto has grown into one of the largest events of its kind in the world, and also one of the most important — at least if we are to speak of how seriously the festival takes itself, and the credulity it is given by Hollywood, which has increasingly viewed Toronto as the first-round bell of the fall movie season, and the start of the long and winding road towards Oscar gold. Toronto is also, as I have noted in past years, many different things to many different people — a split personality perfectly summed up by the hazy, blurred image of I'm-not-sure-exactly-what that serves as the cover art to this year's official festival catalog. For some in the international press corps, the festival functions as a kind of über-junket for the next few months' worth of studio and mini-major releases — a steady diet of screenings and cattle-call interviews after which John Q. Journalist can happily report back to his editor that he scored an enviable, 15-second Brad Pitt soundbite. Meanwhile, for producers, agents and distributors, Toronto is a runway show at which the latest fashions in independently-made motion pictures parade down the catwalk hoping to snag the interest of potential buyers.

Once upon a time, however, Toronto was merely the Festival of Festivals (as it was called for its first 17 years) — a movie lover's paradise that brought together under one roof the very best in international cinema, from the heart of Hollywood to the margins of the avant-garde. This year, in fact, the festival is dedicated to the memory of one of the guiding lights who helped to shape Toronto's sensibility in those early days: the critic and programmer David Overbey, who worked for the festival from its second year until his death in 1998, during which time he played a major role in introducing such directors as Paul Verhoeven, Edward Yang, John Woo and Charles Burnett to North American audiences. Next week, Toronto will pay tribute to Overbey with three retrospective screenings of films that he championed during his festival tenure: British director Terence Davies' magnificent Trilogy (1984); Indian-Canadian director Deepa Mehta's debut feature, Sam and Me (1990); and Filipino director Lino Brocka's My Own Country (1984), which was the last film from that country to screen in the official competition at Cannes until this past May.

To some extent, Toronto is the same festival now that it was in Overbey's time: among the more than 250 feature-length films that will show here over the next 10 days, one can find high-profile new work by the likes of Spike Lee (Miracle at St. Anna), the Coen Brothers (Burn After Reading) and Richard Linklater (Me and Orson Welles) screening right alongside the latest from experimental filmmakers James Benning (RR) and Jennifer Reeves (When It Was Blue) and intriguing-sounding offerings from new or relatively unknown filmmakers working as far afield as Serbia, Indonesia and Kazakhstan. And yet, glancing over this year's program — the first overseen by the festival's newly appointed co-director, Cameron Bailey — there are certain errors and omissions that suggest the festival may be catering more to its industry clientele than to the constituency that first put the festival on the map and remains its bread and butter: the audience. Somewhere, I have the feeling, David Overbey is glancing down with a skeptical eye.

Consider, for example, the absence from the Toronto program of Argentine director Lucrecia Martel's disorienting thriller The Headless Woman, which this critic was not alone in thinking was one of the best films at Cannes this year. Martel's third feature film is admittedly a divisive affair, but in Cannes even those who didn't care for the movie couldn't seem to stop talking about it. Yet, somehow, Bailey and his team of programmers (including the festival's resident Latin America specialist, Diana Sanchez) didn't deem the movie worthy of inclusion, despite having shown both of Martel's previous features at the festival, and despite finding room in this year's program for 11 other Argentine movies, including Martel's fellow Cannes competitor, the earnest, well-acted and ultimately forgettable women-in-prison drama Lion's Den. Also notably MIA is Night and Day, a typically sui generis outing from South Korean iconoclast Hong Sang-Soo (many of whose seven previous features have played Toronto) that was one of the highlights of this year's Berlin Film Festival; Bullet in the Head, a riveting study in voyeurism from Spanish director Jaime Rosales that will have its North American premiere at next month's New York Film Festival (where, in there interest of full disclosure, both I and The Village Voice's J. Hoberman sit on the selection committee); and Afterschool, a remarkable debut feature by Brazilian-American director Antonio Campos (about the aftermath of the death of two students at an elite, east coast prep school) that is one of the few standout American indies in a year that has seen many foretelling the demise of American indie cinema. Perhaps most disappointing (and surprising) of all is Toronto's snubbing of Melancholia, the latest epic from Filipino director Lav Diaz, whose nine-, 10- and 12-hour epics received their first North American exposure in Toronto, and who is arguably his country's most important filmmaker since Lino Brocka.

Given the chance, I'm sure the Toronto programmers could respond with compelling reasons as to why each and every one of those movies (as well as quite a few others that I don't have time to mention here) didn't make it into the final 250. But to the outside observer, the 2008 Toronto program looks weighted less towards the sort of challenging, boundary-shattering work that can expand an audience's ideas about cinema and more towards starry, distributor-friendly fare like Management, a Jennifer Aniston-Steve Zahn romantic comedy that the festival program notes optimistically liken to Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love, and $5 a Day, a Christopher Walken vehicle from director Nigel Cole, whose “excellent past work” (again per the program notes) includes the elder-porn farce Calendar Girls and the elder-pot-smoking romp Saving Grace. All film festivals, of course, need balance in their programs, but as Toronto 2008 gets underway, there is reason to believe that the scales here may be tipping in an unfortunate direction.