KEY POINTS:
If you only went to the movies for 10 days every year, there would probably be no better time or place than the Toronto International Film Festival.
Even if it's never going to supplant Cannes for prestige or Venice for romance, Toronto boasts a bigger, more eclectic programme (more than 250 features), more stars and an enviable reputation for efficiency. It's handily established as the launching pad for Hollywood's Oscar contenders and offers North Americans their first look at the cream from Berlin and Cannes.
A resurgent Venice undoubtedly stole some of TIFF's thunder this year, but Shekhar Kapur and Cate Blanchett seemed determined to make up the shortfall with the sturm und drang of Elizabeth: The Golden Age, the follow-up to their 1998 triumph. This upmarket sequel picks up the story in 1585. Samantha Morton's Mary, Queen of Scots is conspiring with Rhys Ifans' dodgy Jesuit, while the Virgin Queen flirts with brazen Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), who single-handedly sails a fire-ship into the heart of the Armada. It's Elizabeth for dummies, in other words, yet it may do well, even if Atonement seems a likelier bet come awards season.
There was little escape from the shadow of September 11 in other British and American movies. Nick Broomfield's documentary-style feature Battle for Haditha takes the bull by the horns, offering a more emotionally direct take on a US military atrocity than Brian De Palma's subversive Redacted, while Sarah Gavron provides a sympathetic account of immigrant experience in Britain before and after 9/11 in her adaptation of Monica Ali's Brick Lane.
Irishmen Neil Jordan and Terry George toy with an eye for an eye in two handsomely acted but strangely bloodless American pictures, The Brave One and Reservation Road. In the first, Jodie Foster cleans up the streets of New York with a .45 and the tacit support of homicide detective Terrence Howard. In the second, Joaquin Phoenix is a liberal New England professor obsessed with tracking down the hit-and-run driver who killed his son - by miserable coincidence his own lawyer (Mark Ruffalo).
Even Nothing is Private, a prickly, taboo-challenging movie about teenage sexuality from Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under), puts an Arab-American girl at the centre of the story, with the first Gulf War looming large in the background. Another immigrant story, this time in a more hard-boiled vein, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, is a gripping if surprisingly conventional thriller set in the underworld of London's Russian mafia. The Canadian director cast a Danish-American (Viggo Mortensen), a Frenchman (Vincent Cassel) and a German (Armin Mueller-Stahl) as Russians, with Naomi Watts as the English nurse who stumbles across incriminating evidence. A minor film by Cronenberg's standards, Eastern Promises did provide the festival's most talked-about scene, a brutal nude knife fight in a bathhouse.
For my money, the moment when Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) sees the light in Sean Penn's marvellous true-life odyssey, Into the Wild is the revelation of the festival.
Observer
