Toronto. Cleaning up.

Ok, let's wrap this up. Throughout the Toronto International Film Festival, I'd occasionally come across a comment or two worth noting on a film that would not eventually get matched up with enough further commentary to warrant a full-blown entry.

Some of those notes, then, by section:

Canada First!:

• "I need to come up with a new phrase for comedies like Just Buried," writes Scott Weinberg. "Something like 'not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, but certainly amiable, clever and diverting enough to warrant some attention.'"

• Young People Fucking: "Since the movie isn't really explicit (no genitalia was hurt in the making of this film), it feels closer to the work of Joe Swanberg than to Shortbus," writes Eric Kohn at indieWIRE. Monica Bartyzel in Cinematical: "What is refreshing about the movie is that while it uses some slapstick gags, the writing and performances deliver it with class and restraint."

Contemporary World Cinema:

• "Yes, it's slow, and yes it features a fair amount of Christian symbolism (starting with the title), but anyone who saw The Return had to expect both of those things," writes J Robert Parks of The Banishment. "Of course, for me those aspects are part of why I like the movie, but even viewers turned off by them have to admit the movie is undeniably beautiful; director Andrei Zvyagintsev and cinematographer Mikhail Krichman create painterly compositions of exquisite elegance and use natural light in spectacular ways. I've seen a lot of beautiful movies at the festival so far but none that has so consistently knocked me out. And like his admitted influence Tarkovsky, Zvyagintsev focuses on elemental visual motifs, which reinforce his spiritual themes."

• "A film that I found extremely moving was Jacques Nolot's Avant que j'oublie (Before I Forget), the story of an aging gay hustler and his search for meaning in his own life when his lover (and sugar daddy) passes away," writes Tom Hall. For DVD Verdict's Jesse Ataide, this is a "film more fascinating to ponder after the fact than while actually watching," but he "walked out of the screening not liking it much, but my feelings have become much more favorable in the days that have since passed."

• "Sarah Gavron's Brick Lane is a subtle and beautifully acted adaptation of of Monica Ali's novel about a Bangladeshi woman living in an arranged marriage in the Muslim community in London," writes Matthew Curtis. "A worthy (if familiar) immigrant drama of cultural disapproval and forbidden love."

• "Far and away the best film I saw at Toronto this year was Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitsky's The Counterfeiters, a fact-based drama about a Jewish crook who's forced by the Nazis to make fake foreign currency designed to destroy the Allies' economies," blogs the LA Weekly's Ella Taylor. "[T]he movie blows a fresh wind through Holocaust cinema, which needs it badly."

• Gone With the Woman is "a clever, incredibly deadpan sex comedy with flashes of incredible visual style. While it never overcomes some core weaknesses enough to truly excel as a whole there are some devastatingly funny - and accurate - moments to be found," writes Todd Brown at Twitch.

• J Robert Parks on Hur Jin-ho's Happiness: "[T]he story hits its marks, and even a bit of narrative vindictiveness feels like it could've come out of the 50s. And when the two lead actors are as good and as appealing as these, you can't help but fall in love with them. There might not be a better feeling at the movies."

• "I've gotten in the habit of describing Saverio Costanzo's In Memory of Myself as a genre film, a suspense thriller in which the central, driving mystery is faith," writes Darren Hughes. "This is "a film I like more than it might 'deserve,'" writes J Robert Parks. "Those uninterested in films about spirituality probably won't enjoy it, but it held my attention."

• "Jar City is a thriller focusing on genetic propensities in Iceland, an island of 300,000 that has a limited gene pool," writes Howard Feinstein, who talks with director Baltasar Kormakur for Filmmaker. He "tells me that Americans have expressed interest in remake rights and in him as a director. 'They want me to do horror!' he says with a mix of surprise and disgust. 'But in my film the crimes are motivated! I'm lucky I produce my own films. Most foreigners go to the US, make some crap, and go back home.' For now, he is happy on his farm in Northern Iceland." And "beautiful camerawork and lush, operatic music glides over the gorgeous Icelandic landscape," notes James Israel. Earlier: David D'Arcy.

• "Just Like Home is the first bad film I've seen at the festival," writes J Robert Parks (and this was on his fifth day). "Not that it's terrible, but Lone Scherfig's follow-up to Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is pointless, not terribly funny, and spends much of its time pandering to its audience."

• "The key to [Mutum's] success, I think, is [Sandra] Kogut's camera, which never escapes the subjective perspective of her protagonist, a ten-year-old boy who struggles to make sense of the adult world around him," writes Darren Hughes.

• "The Pope's Toilet is a drama from Uruguay that starts out promisingly but loses steam in its last act," writes J Robert Parks. "The story didn't do much for me... But I loved the portrait of this community."

• "Like a fast-paced and more furious Cavite (which previously would have been hard to imagine), [Brillante] Mendoza's breathless account of desperate lives in the mean streets of Manila is a pummeling and visceral experience intensified by his decision to film most of [Slingshot] with a standard lens in the middle of the action - never is the spectator allowed to step outside the mayhem and evaluate the drama from a distance," writes Doug Cummings. "It's a highly impressive technical exercise, yet at heart offers a penetrating glimpse into lives lived on instinct, predation, and reaction alone, whose complicated loyalties and person to person networks teem beneath empty political posturing and massive outpourings of religious sentiment."

• "Son of Rambow is a film literally years in the making, a film [Garth] Jennings simply refused to give up on despite years of being denied financing, a film that surely represents who Jennings is much, much better than did Hitchhiker's and, thus, is a film that marks Jennings as simply an enormous talent blessed equally with the visual whimsy of a Michel Gondry and the earnest heart tugging of the Millions-era Danny Boyle," writes Todd Brown. "The man is a technical whiz who employs his wizardry in the service of humanity, someone who managed the difficult task of growing up without losing any of the wonder of childhood. Yes, I flat out love this film." On the other hand: "Put succinctly, this one tested my gag reflex," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

• "[I]t wasn't until the 90s that [Allan] Moyle hit his stride, directing two music-laden, teen cult classics - my beloved Pump Up the Volume and the goofy yet lovable Empire Records," recalls Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical. "Weirdsville is more stylish... and definitely darker." And: "Strained, to say the least, but unexpectedly amusing in places, and very Canadian," finds the Boston Globe's Ty Burr.

• "Wolfsbergen is not a happy film, but I found the characters compelling," writes J Robert Parks. "The final sequence snuck up on me, which I always enjoy." And: "[H]ad Leopold given each character the same time and careful attention, all could have been interesting enough to carry a film on their own, I think," writes Darren Hughes. "Instead, some are barely fleshed out at all, and I found myself becoming increasingly curious about the people who were too often left off screen."

Discovery:

• "In Blind, the first narrative feature from Tamar Van Den Dop, a fairy tale romance plays out between a blind, frustrated young man Ruben (Joren Seldeslachts) and his viciously scarred mentor, Marie (Halina Reijn)," writes Eric Kohn at indieWIRE. "It's a simple and engaging premise, but it follows a practically sedated pace without a single unexpected development." And: "Van den Dop has created a truly sensual film: one that explores sound, smell and touch vividly, even within a medium that is primarily visual," writes Aaron Dobbs.

• "Shivaji Chandrabhushan's debut feature Frozen paints in black and white the stark landscape of sparsely populated Ladakh," writes Gautaman Bhaskaran at the Lumière Reader. "Extremely arty," but it "works all right."

• "Set amid the wheat-filled farm country of Australia in the late 1960's, September (directed by first timer Peter Carstairs with impressive competence) follows two teenage friends of different ethnicities whose class differences and varying interests threaten to ruin their relationship," writes Eric Kohn at indieWIRE. Part of what "saves the movie from becoming too lost in its own beauty stems from the strength of the two young leads."

• "I was shocked to learn that Rodrigo Pla's Mexican film La Zona garnered the FIPRESCI (international critics) prize," Howard Feinstein at Filmmaker. "After a fabulous opening shot in which a crane carries the camera from a trashy trailer in poor man's land over a security wall into a wealthy, restricted residential community, the film rings false (and rather commercial for a critics prize)."

Galas:

• "Set in the volatile and lawless city of Shanghai in the 30s, Blood Brothers is an impressive technical debut from Alexi Tan which explores themes of brotherhood, greed, love and betrayal," writes Mack at Twitch. "So why does trying to put your finger on what doesn't work in Blood Brothers hurt? It hurts because I want applaud this debut effort of Tan. It hurts because I appreciate the talent in front of the lens as well. But there was always this little nagging thought in the back of my head while I was watching Blood Brothers. I've seen this movie before."

• "One of the best films of the year, Days of Darkness takes what could be a difficult and tedious subject - getting old - and makes if poignant and gripping by filtering it all through the prism of one man's declining years as a sexual being," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical. "French-Canadian actor Marc Labreche plays Jean-Marc, a Walter Mitty sort with thick, coke-bottle glasses and a mousy speaking voice, who has a mundane office-cubicle existence, helping injured people file claims against the state in what seems to be a near-futuristic, independent state of Quebec."

• Rendition is "well-meaning, liberal-minded, and of serious intent, but completely devoid of nuance," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. Premiere's Glenn Kenny: "My frustration with this picture can be summed up by noting that this movie believes its audience is smart enough to put together the fact that one of its several parallel storylines is actually contiguous rather than parallel with the others, but dumb enough to buy the notion that there's an actual country named 'North Africa' on that continent."

Masters:

• Four Women: "Adoor Gopalakrishnan is a highly lauded Indian filmmaker, but he only has a single DVD available in the US; on the basis of his newest film, I consider that a loss for North American film culture," writes Doug Cummings. "In what I believe is the film's sole use of a zoom lens, a woman nobly states, 'You have to hold yourself as a pillar holds a house,' which could easily serve as the empowering and compassionate theme of this elegant and memorable film."

• "I can't help but think of Glory to the Filmmaker! as a weird, overly self-aware version of Mel Brooks meets The Three Stooges packaged within a Sullivan's Travels story and framework," offers Aaron Dobbs. "Yes, the snake has truly swallowed its own tail here and while it seems a nicely seasoned dish in the early going somewhere around the mid point it starts to tickle the back of the throat and it gets a little hard not to gag," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "It's really time to move on now."

• "Buddhadeb Dasgupta is one of the last among India's fast vanishing tribe of art filmmakers," writes Gautaman Bhaskaran at the Lumière Reader. "The Voyeurs is a critique of the modern surveillance system that makes a mockery of individual privacy."

Real to Reel:

• "Body of War, directed by docu-doyenne Ellen Spiro and [Phil] Donahue, intercuts the 2002 war debate with the postwar life of Tomas Young, a soldier who was paralyzed with a shattered spine within a week of arriving in Iraq," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "The contrast of the Congress' surrender to political dictates and Young's heroism, in Iraq and back home, makes this superb documentary almost unbearably moving - as pathetic as it is inspiring." And Donahue's on ReelerTV.

• Callas Assoluta is "a highly conventional documentary portrait of the great American soprano Maria Callas [that] has moments of absolutely searing beauty, almost always when we hear the great woman singing," writes Tom Hall.

• "[D]espite its best intentions, [Darfur Now] plays more like an activist recruitment tape that one would show to wealthy potential donors than a detailed telling of the story of Darfur," writes Tom Hall.

• The Dictator Hunter "focuses on a human rights lawyer seeking to bring the Chadian dictator Hissène Habré to justice after his exile in Senegal," writes Tom Hall. "While an impassioned look at the almost hopeless process of trying to bring a former head of state to justice, the film also focuses rather narrowly on the personal life and dilemmas of its subject, the human rights lawyer Reed Brody." Earlier: David D'Arcy.

• "Dinner with the President is structured around a liberal elite couple (the directors Sabiha Sumar and Sachithanandam Sathananthan) in Pakistan who interview President Musharraf over dinner and then on a different day over tea," writes J Robert Parks. "Far better are the scenes when the directors travel through Pakistan, interviewing various people about their ideas of democracy and the current state of the nation."

• Brian Brooks and Peter Knegt talk with Arthur Dong about Hollywood Chinese, which sure enough, "tells the overwhelming story of over a hundred years of Chinese representation in Hollywood." And: "It's something of a scattershot documentary that tries to be too many things while not being enough of any one thing," writes Mike White. "At the heart of the film is The Curse of Quon Gwon by Marion Wong, a 'lost' film directed by a Chinese American woman in 1917.... It feels as though Hollywood Chinese came about as an afterthought around which to hang items around The Curse of Quon Gwon like so much tinsel in a Christmas tree - it's pretty to look at but there's not a lot of substance."

• "'I think my entire life has been leading up to this film,' said Parvez Sharma, director of the documentary, A Jihad For Love, which is produced by Sandi DuBowski (director of Trembling Before G-d, which told the stories of Jewish Orthodox gays), and playing to sold out screenings and standing ovations here in Toronto," reports Peter Knegt for indieWIRE. "Jihad details the five-year project Sharma undertook exploring the lives of Muslim homosexuals in Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, South Africa and beyond."

• "I saw [Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema] in Telluride and picked up a lot of history, hearing the tales of his life among filmmakers: immersing himself in cinema alongside Godard and Truffaut at Langlois's Cinematheque Française, taking Fritz Lang to see Deep Throat, trying to keep John Ford sober and awake on a press junket to Paris," recalls Criterion's Peter Becker. "He has been relentless in promoting the filmmakers he believes in, from Abbas Kiarostami to Clint Eastwood to Hou Hsiao-hsien, and, for their part, they credit him with opening the door to the recognition they deserved."

• "Doug Pray's Surfwise is a sun-drenched portrait of the nine children (eight boys and one girl) and two parents that make up the Paskowitz family," writes Tom Hall. "Living in an RV on the beach and surfing their the days away in the golden sun of the 1970's, the family ends up fractured and scarred by their collective experience.... [T]he film stood out as one of the best in the festival, a sort of Crazy Love as a family's social experiment gone awry." And indieWIRE's Brian Brooks talks with Pray.

• Terror's Advocate "is almost paralyzingly thorough in the wealth of information it presents and the various documents employed to tell the greater narrative," writes Ali at Cutting Room Reviews. "Present-day interviews with [Jacques] Vergès and other key personalities, archival and secret government footage, photographs, audio clips, phone interviews, and newspaper clippings... With all these valuable sources in his arsenal, [Barbet] Schroeder is able to transcend the kind of dull history lesson lecturing most films like these fall back on. However, the fact remains that there are five potential films contained within this beast of a project." And: "Schroeder for his part only covers the biographical highlights, forsaking an in depth look at Vergès's cases in favor of his personality and history," writes Tom Hall. "So, we never see him defending the butchering dictators of Africa or Slobodan Milosevic or even discussing their cases.... Pay attention, or you'll miss something, and you won't want to miss anything." Earlier: David D'Arcy's interview with Schroeder.

Special Presentations:

• "It's really stunning that it is none other than David Auburn, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his universally hailed Proof, at the helm of this mess," writes Jesse Ataide, reviewing The Girl in the Park at DVD Verdict. "Actually, the film isn't bad so much as painfully average." But Cinematical's Ryan Stewart finds it "succeeds as drama because of above-average performances all around and the steady hand of first-time director David Auburn." What's more, he's expecting an "Oscar nod" for Sigourney Weaver.

• "Along with collaborators Adam Vollick and Adam Samuels, [Daniel] Lanois has set out to chronicle a year or so of his professional life explaining his ideas and philosophies along the way," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "The result is Here Is What Is, a fascinating look at an enormous artistic talent and his creative process."

• "In Bloom is structurally uneven at times, and definitely not as profound in its revelations as it wants to be, but with strong acting and a strong visual palette, it's a success," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical. "Director Vadim Perelman's second directorial feature, following 2003's House of Sand and Fog, is a similarly funsy romp," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "As affecting as [Evan Rachel] Wood and [Eva] Amurri make the movie's central relationship, the movie itself is overstated and overwrought.... I read that [Perelman's] in line to helm the Angelina Jolie-starring adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. Perfect."

• "[Sergei] Bodrov's [Mongol] aims to take us through the life of a legend, the legendary emperor Genghis Khan, from the age of nine until the battle that would cement his position in history," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "But while the trailers and clips released thus far have portrayed the picture as revolving around the Khan's military conquests Bodrov is actually not particularly interested in these matters. Though a number of battle sequences are included Mongol is not much interested in how the great man rose to power, in the battles and tactics, but rather in how he became strong enough to do so."

• "Hans Weingartner's Reclaim Your Brain is the latest work from the director of the superior The Edukators," writes Matthew Curtis. "Starting out strong with a bold look at a coked-out, reality TV superstar producer who happens to be a total asshole, the film goes completely off the rails when his personality changes after a woman tries to kill him with her car."

• The Savages: "As in [Slums of Beverly Hills], [Tamara] Jenkins defines her characters well and has a knack for observational humor, but here the tone is more muted and sad, and she refuses to tack smiley-faces onto a tough, possibly lose-lose situation," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Welcome back, Tamara. Now please don't take nine years between movies again."

• "Jiang Wen weaves four stories together with Chinese culture and personal passion over a period of twenty years," writes Mack at Twitch. "You would be hard pressed to find films that weave such a rich and visual tapestry as The Sun Also Rises." And: "Differing from other Chinese historical dramas, it's not as concerned with documenting what life was like as it is in exploring the role of memories and fantasies in our personal lives," writes J Robert Parks. "And the finale is a breathtaking series of fantastic images that brings the story back to where we started. I couldn't begin to tell you what it all means, but I had a marvelous time."

• Brad Furman's The Take has "got a passably compelling story, a half-decent screenplay, some nifty touches from a young director ... and a lead performance by John Leguizamo that's really quite excellent," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical.

• "The directing debut of Helen Hunt gets a passing grade, barely - the story she's telling is as old as the hills, but Then She Found Me is still executed with style," writes Ryan Stewart. "Sometimes charming, occasionally funny, it never draws attention to itself as the work of a director with training wheels on."

• "Anxiety over cinema's imminent death has caused many of the world's best directors to indulge in depressing nostalgia, paying tribute to outdoor communal movie nights or once-vibrant single-screen palaces that have since gone to seed," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "As with all anthology movies, To Each His Own Cinema is a mixed bag, though the repetition of these death-of-cinema shorts turned me against it overall." Michael Sicinski reviews (and grades) each and every one of the shorts.

Sprockets Family Zone:

• "A number of questions spring to mind while watching Philippe Calderon's kid-friendly docu-fable, but they're all variations on one: How the hell did he pull this off?" asks Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Le Citadelle Assiégée (or, in English, 'The Besieged Fortress') uses miniature cameras to get inside a massive termite colony on an African savannah, observing the rituals of this mini-civilization and then seeing what happens when the colony is threatened by fire, rain, falling tree branches, and an encroaching army of driver ants."

• "A lovely fable in which a young boy afraid of the dark discovers that once everyone is asleep, the land of Nocturna comes to life in order to control the night - everything from the sound of crickets to that messy bedhead is intricately orchestrated," writes Aaron Dobbs.

Vanguard:

• Les Chansons d'Amour: "And it is a joy, from the cute songs and sudden bursts of comedy to the profound and affecting sadness of one lover mourning the death of another while finding the strength to go on," blogs Sean Axmaker for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

• "Remember how depressing Danny Boyle's Trainspotting gets near the end?" asks Mike White. "The dead baby, AIDS, addition. Imagine a movie that starts with that dark tone and goes on from there and you're thinking of a film similar to Ex Drummer." And: "Transgressive, vulgar, violent, and sexually sexually explicit, [Koen] Mortier's debut also showcases a supremely raw sense of style while preserving and oddly tragic and poetic heart," counters Todd Brown at Twitch. "Yes, boys and girls, we have just been introduced to a fierce and uncompromising new talent." Online listening: Todd talks with Mortier.

• "Yes, as the title suggests, Jessica Yu's latest film is about ping pong," writes Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical. "No, it is not a documentary.... It's a simple comedy about growing up and getting serious. It's also a refreshing reversal from the usual comedic fare - a lone Asian American beacon of laughs in a sea that usually has only spots of color." She also talks with Yu and with co-writer and star Jimmy Tsai. "[T]heir script runs the full course of social issues facing the Asian-American community; cultural identity, stereotypes, ambition and courses in life," writes Mack at Twitch. "While that could have been heavy-handed instead the script goes for lots of laughs and simply entertains from beginning to end."

• "Céline Sciamma's Naissance des pieuvres (Water Lillies), although I much prefer the literal translation 'The Birth of the Octopuses,' was picked up by Koch Lorber and Red Envelope at Cannes and was one of the highlights of the festival for me," writes Tom Hall. "At once funny and troubled, the film is a note-perfect examination of teenage desire, a genre that is so common these days that to be able to praise the film is no small feat in and of itself."

Visions:

• "I enjoy finding films like Encarnacion at TIFF - small character pieces that get the details right." And Darren Hughes finds that the "strength of the film... is Silvia Perez's performance." A "genuinely touching and interesting film about female empowerment and following one's own path," finds Aaron Dobbs.

• J Robert Parks on Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Ploy: "Not bad but not very good either." And: "Pen-ek's narrative - as it were - continuously fluctuates between a real and fantasy state, and throughout the film, he leaves us uncertain as to which is which," writes Aaron Dobbs. "Ultimately, the film is an exploration of one couple's relationship; one in which the participants seemed to have forgotten what it really means to love about and care for each other."

• "It is great to see a triumphant return to form with The Tracey Fragments," writes Kurt Halfyard at Twitch. "Here [Bruce Macdonald's] signature raw style is married to upstart technical innovations of the like often seen in things like mobile-phone-made experiments or the splitting of the screen into a comic-panel aesthetic. Casting Ellen Page (the fiery young Canadian actress making her mark in a growingly diverse body of work from X-Men, Hard Candy and Juno) as the titular character achieves the right balance of energy and emotion to elevate the film from being written off as piece of technical gimmickry."

Posted by dwhudson at October 9, 2007 12:40 AM