I think it's safe to say that more films drew our interest at the 36th Toronto International Film Festival than have any of the previous four years we've attended. I can recall late night rounds of elimination between myself and other writers resulting in all involved throwing up their hands; it felt like no cinephile could possibly see everything they wanted to in the 10-day allotment. Hype like that never lasts—not everyone we expect good work from will actually deliver it—but I think most would agree that the general quality of films at the festival this year, the ratio of disappointments to met or exceeded expectations, was especially high. We've gathered together our thoughts on some of these highlights (and a few lowlights), offering short-take first impressions on films that will surely be assessed and reassessed many times over the coming weeks, months, and in some worthy cases, even years. Sam C. Mac

Any film that soundtracks Otis-on-uppers soul belter Lee Moses has me at the jump. But Bertrand Bonello's "House of Tolerance" is so much more than the sum of its intentionally jarring '60s soul deep cuts: Set at the turn of the 20th century—perched precariously at the precipice of modernism and luxuriating in a high-end Parisian brothel—it is a quasi-Rivettian take on Hou Hisao-hsien's "Flowers of Shanghai," its decisively drawn characters refracting two centuries of change and stagnation through the desires of men and the agency of women. SCM

Eighties chintz defines Nicolas Winding Refn's "Drive" as much as does its ultra-violence and self-conscious cool, evening out the tone of this bit of precision-crafted, artfully informed genre filmmaking. But the thing's so empty, which is also kind of the point—the slick surfaces reflect the same polished anonymity present in Ryan Gosling's cipher of a performance. For sleek L.A. pulp as much informed by Tarantino as the existential machismo of Michael Mann, you could do worse, but Winding Refn's new make won't endure quite like the originals. SCM

While her first two films oozed grit, at once high-stakes and low-key, Andrea Arnold’s latest evinces her evolution as a visual artist. Lighting indoor scenes primarily by candlelight, Arnold relishes the gothic moods of the novel, beautifully contrasting a certain claustrophobic gloom with the vibrancy of the natural world, capturing countless striking images of the English moors. If her film suffers from the nonprofessional actors, particularly the lack of dynamism from a hulking Heathcliff, she makes up for it with her arrival as a master of aesthetics. Luke Gorham

If meant to be a character study of a disturbed mind, then writer/director Jeff Nichols’s fatally literal-minded depiction of schizophrenia-as-apocalypse comes off as not that much different from Ron Howard’s far more offensively simplistic treatment of the same in "A Beautiful Mind." This follow-up to Nichols’s very fine debut, "Shotgun Stories," certainly has its virtues: an acute sense of place and character detail plus a commanding lead performance from Michael Shannon. But this ought to have been far more devastating than it is. Kenji Fujishima

Condensing the allotted time for scripting from the four-year period which produced debut "Reprise” to a few disciplined months, Joachim Trier's second feature, marked by tighter focus and deeper feeling, is an altogether leaner work. A character-intensive drama unfolding over a single day, ‘Oslo’ finds a junkie in the throes of self-evaluation, toeing oblivion. Call it Anatomy of Self-Destruction: it's "Reprise" formally deconstructed and rethought, with yet another complex performance from Trier's gifted go-to lead, Anders Danielsen Lie. SCM

Within the confines of writer/director Sean Durkin's cold and clinically atmospheric film, Elizabeth Olsen gives a deceptively simple performance. All quiet, sullen glances, she seems to physically contract throughout, taking up as little space within the frame as possible. This is a potent visual metaphor for the loss of identity she’s endured; the film subtly reveals her initial attraction to communal living, suggesting what lead Olsen to the leader of a dangerous cult (John Hawkes). The tragedy here is that of a person who ultimately belongs nowhere. Daniel Gorman

In what has to be the strangest ever adaptation of Greek literature, Guy Maddin’s riff on “The Odyssey” is also a haunted house narrative transposed onto a '30s-era gangster picture. What’s fascinating here is that “Keyhole” plays a lot like a 180 degree thesis of the spatial semiotics of “Brand Upon the Brain!” While ‘Brand’ is interested in the way we haunt our environs, “Keyhole” looks at the way our surroundings can haunt us and change the perceptions of our present. What’s less fascinating here, though not fatally, are the characters. LG

Instead of his usual grandly abstracted action setpieces, Johnnie To’s latest features an interlocking narrative centered around one fateful day when Hong Kong’s stock markets plummeted on fears of Greece defaulting on its debt. To may not be working within his usual gangster milieu, but he remains obsessed as ever with ethical codes; he uncovers all sorts of desperate double-dealings among characters who yearn for something greater, who find their moral compasses tested by economic pressures. It’s different for To, but no less compelling. KF

Oren Moverman's sturdy, character-rich drama "The Messengers" flagged as it entered its messy, indulgent final stretch. Moverman's similarly sturdy "Rampart," on the other hand, excels right as its third act begins, indulging in messiness as a means to cap its character's dramatic downfall. While the controlled, somber tone of 'Messengers' made any breakaway seem like a misstep, "Rampart" revels in tonal fissures as they ripple through the life of its bad-cop protagonist. One commonality between the two films: Woody Harrelson is magnetic. SCM

Todd Solondz has seen a major decline in the past decade, and “Dark Horse” settles nicely into that pattern as his worst yet. The seriously stunted manchild at the fore of Solondz’s woefully unfunny comedy of arrested development plays like an even more pathetic and less sympathetic sibling of the “Step Brothers” brood. The fantasy sequences are severely mishandled, shrouding an already feeble narrative with unwelcome fuzziness. Simply put, if adults like main character Jordan do exist, then they, like this film, do so without compassion from me. LG

With “Crazy Horse” (as with “La danse - le ballet de l’Opéra de Paris”), Frederick Wiseman turns his keenly insightful eye away from issues of social consciousness, toward those of artistic accomplishment. Capturing the creation of a new show at the titular French club, Wiseman’s latest is frustratingly fractured. He is interested in both the beauty of the women and the art they are creating, and captures both in countless striking sequences. However, his considerable attention to the behind-the-scenes creators, noble though it may be, fails to fully captivate. LG

Adapting her own graphic novel for debut film “Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi (with co-director Vincent Paronnaud) proved her mettle as both a visual talent and insightful purveyor of emotional turmoil. The duo’s second film, “Chicken With Plums,” lacks political and historical context, and that guiding light is sorely missed. ‘Plums’ settles for an attempt at “Amelie”-esque whimsy, ambling numbly through its bland narrative before delivering an unearned and emotionally flat climax. It would be style over substance if its style wasn’t so plainly derivative. LG

What worked so brilliantly in Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Dogtooth,” specifically its wholesale commitment to coal-black comedy and context-free immersion into a twisted fantasy world of depraved child-rearing, is precisely what the director's follow-up is lacking. Once more, Lanthimos hurls us into a world void of rationality, populated by varying degrees of unstable characters. But “Alps” is only sporadically funny, even less insightful, never shocking, and ends up playing like a poorly observed and lazily executed redux of the director’s previous work. LG

Two enigmatic figures haunt a rural European village in Bruno Dumont's minimalist stunner "Outside Satan," in some sense a continuation of last year's "Hadewijch." If the doe-eyed protagonist of that film translated religious devotion into the behaviors of a jilted lover, the goth of "Outside Satan" is just as possessed by a figure who may represent Death Incarnate. Sparser in plot than "Hadewijch"—Dumont's finest to date—'Satan' likewise builds toward a decidedly Bressonian catharsis, transcending spirituality in a gesture of humanism. SCM

Being most familiar with Faust through the Randy Newman musical, I can't tell you how close Alexander Sokurov's film hews to any literary source. I've heard it's not close at all; I imagine the scene in which a hunchbacked Satan-approximate defecates in a church comes straight from this idiosyncratic auteur. Whatever the inspiration, "Faust" is among Sokurov's most accessible films: every shot is dense with activity, and the narrative works out to a morbid adaptation of "A Christmas Carol" with Sokurov's "Russian Ark" as the formal template. SCM

Engagingly literary, both thematically and structurally, Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s debut is rife with metaphor yet careful to avoid didacticism. Both Kafka-esque in its peculiar absurdities (the bureaucratic announcements that echo on empty streets) and Orwellian in its cautionary societal critiques, “Carré blanc” creates its eerie solitude through shots of wan hallways, dilapidated highrises and detached bouts of violence. It may seem relatively minor, but it’s pitch-perfect tone and nifty sci-fi stylings make for a memorable dystopian genre flick. LG

The blood-on-the-brain psyche of John Bunting, one of Australia's most notorious serial killers, is the subject of Justin Kurzel’s debut, a film strikingly similar to last year’s “Animal Kingdom” as another Australian study of erupting psychosis and its effects on the familial construct. The first hour stokes our anxious expectations, cultivating suspense on the strength of Daniel Henshall’s eerily low-key performance. But as the repetitious brutality turns banal, the film exhausts its dread and collapses under an inflated runtime and ineffective payoff. LG

Philippe Garrel trades Paris in black-and-white for Rome in full-blown color, but "That Summer" can’t quite escape a “once more around the block” feel to it; the veteran French filmmaker fails to find a fresh and engaging angle to his usual obsession with the perplexing nature of love and romance. Still, Garrel's mingling of swooning romanticism and intellectual detachment exerts a certain fascination, as does Willy Kurant’s lovely widescreen color cinematography, leaving an imprint long after the plot and characters have faded from memory. KF

Sure to draw comparisons to “Precious,” Dee Rees’s “Pariah” likewise fixes its eye on a marginalized teen clawing her way out of unfortunate circumstances. The crux deals with the infrequently explored topic of inner city black homosexuality; yet, rather than dealing in overwrought platitudes of urban oppression, Rees utilizes her taboo-of-choice as a catalyst to explore several characters affected by her protagonist’s sexuality. With fantastic performances, subtle insights and a gritty feel, Rees delivers one of the best characters and films of the year. LG

From its mumblecore-with-an-accent beginnings to its "The Descent"-in-a-sewer climax, "Kill List" rarely rises above the bar of an occasionally stylish thriller, moving very very slowly from domestic discord to hit man ultra-violence. This is the second film from blue-collar Brit Ben Wheatley, and in its tasteless finale it takes the filmmaker from merely inoffensively mundane (kitchen-sink debut "Down Terrace") to downright vile. Wheatley isn't necessarily a bad filmmaker, but the sick joke this one works out to insinuates his own perverse pleasure. SCM

"Himizu" is another volatile look at love and faith in a mad world from "Love Exposure" director Sion Sono. Amidst the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last March, Sono pits a younger generation against their callous elders; at its best, "Himizu" suggests how the violence of one generation manifests itself in the younger. The film wades into increasingly grim waters, but Sono finds hope, by the end, in a phrase previously uttered in a more whimsical context, now a rallying cry for a nation traumatized by disaster. KF

A romance that slowly and subtly evolves into an anti-romance, “Like Crazy” delivers a gut punch of authentic emotion built around its two fantastic performances. Skewing youthful, Drake Doremus’s Sundance hit nonetheless strikes universally in its examination of real love destabilized by untoward circumstance. This isn’t a film about unrequited love, falling out of love or even disproportionate love—it’s simpler and stronger. It’s about love's glory and its vulnerability, and about how things can fall apart just as they're coming together. LG

A recently disbarred female lawyer in Iran, with a husband exiled from the country for his activities as an investigative journalist, embarks on a difficult quest to flee her country; the effect of watching her progress is akin to watching an ever-tightening noose, waiting for the right moment to wrap itself around her neck. Though Mohammed Rasoulof’s latest trades the surreal allegorical poetry of his remarkable "The White Meadows" for stark realism, "Good Bye" is no less damning in exposing the indignities of life in the repressive middle East. KF

Subversive of the genre its title bears to mind, Nacho Vigalando’s “Extraterrestrial” is set in the immediate aftermath of an alien invasion (to which neither character nor audience is privy), as two hungover twenty-somethings decide to fight against…moral obligation. Amidst a global crisis, the two attempt to hide the affair from an infatuated neighbor and a boyfriend more concerned with heroics than being cuckolded, never once fearing or even paying much mind to the invaders. Slight? Sure, but with just the right combination of farce and wit. LG

Recalling his herculean performance in Ken Loach’s “My Name Is Joe,” Peter Mullan once more delivers a performance of furious intensity as Joseph, a man struggling to hold onto any emotion but anger. Crossing paths with Hannah (Olivia Colman), a meek woman of faith whose life may not be as cushy as it appears, Joseph struggles to find a role in her life. A brutal film of bitter truths, Paddy Considine’s “Tyrannosaur” succeeds in exploring the difficulties of broken lives and new beginnings through the devastating performances of Mullan and Colman. LG

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Feature by:
InRO Staff