Documentaries – People’s Choice Award: The Island President, directed by Jon Shenk

Midnight Madness – People’s Choice Award: The Raid, directed by Gareth Evans

Discovery Section – FIPRESCI Prize: Avalon, directed by Axel Petersen

Special Presentations Section – FIPRESCI Prize: The First Man, directed by Gianna Amelio

Best Canadian Feature Film: Monsieur Lazare, directed by Philippe Falardeau

Best Canadian First Feature Film: Edwin Boyd, directed by Nathan Morlando

Best Canadian Short Film: Doubles with Slight Pepper, directed by Ian Harnarine

Violet & Daisy: What a departure for Precious screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher in his directorial debut. Fletcher and his crew sure know how to craft great looking sets and action sequences, but the story of two teenage assassins, played by Saoirse Ronan and Alexis Bledel, is (yawn) Tarantinoesque. It so relies on his speech patterns and joke set-ups, the story’s derivative nature is rather shocking; you’d swear it’s suddenly 1993. Ronan and Bledel make the best of it with their blue-eyed exchanges keeping the pace up, and James Gandolfini, as the hit who seems to anticipate death, bakes the girls cookies and is twice as mysterious as both killers put together. The film does offer an unpopular ending that is sure to make it a tough sell, and, aside from the aesthetic, it’s the best thing V&D has going for it. I do look forward to Fletcher’s next move as a director; I just hope it’s more original.

Habibi: Susan Youssef‘s romantic drama brings to mind all of the premieres I’ve seen at festivals that might have been great if they had ripened just a bit more before facing the public. Set in the Gaza strip, the story is centered on two lovers kept apart by cultural and political factors. Layla (Maisa Abd Elhadi) has abandoned her studies and returned home to an increasingly worried and conservative family; Qays (Kais Nashif) is a poet who lives in the refugee camps (so you know he’s doomed). Youssef uses the language of poetry to illustrate Qays’ hopeless desire to marry Layla and move to Holland, increasing the level of despair as the literal and figurative roadblocks hem them in. Feeling like a documentary for most of its runtime, the surrealist ending feels a bit like a cheat.

The Moth Diaries: If you want to see the new movie by American Psycho director Mary Harron and you are not a fantasy-prone teenager, I suggest staying up for at least 24 hours before taking in her wan vampire thriller set at a boarding school for edgy girls. Enter fully drained. Lily Cole plays Ernessa, a suspected vamp, and her face could launch a thousand new Mark Ryden paintings. Ernessa’s arrival disturbs the intimate friendship between Lucie (Sarah Gadon) and Rebecca (Sarah Bolger) as she fixates on Lucie. Rebecca, fragile after her poet father’s suicide, has a somewhat Sapphic connection with her best friend, and her suspicion and fear is ratcheted up several notches when Ernessa’s curious behaviors come to light. Problem is: Harron resorts to near-constant voiceover by Ms. Bolger, who comes across more like Cady in Mean Girls and less like Veronica from Heathers. She’s a weak heroine, and I wanted Ernessa to win. Re-edited, this could make a decent mini-series, but as a movie, it’s purely for youths.

Intruders: Nope, it’s not another home-invasion thriller; instead, this is an almost great psychological horror/fairy tale from Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who started off so promising with Intacto before accepting the Herculean task of following up 28 Days Later … Intruders‘ twisty premise, about 90% cogent, involves a faceless boogeyman who haunts two children, Juan (Izán Corchero) and Mia (Ella Purnell), looking for a face to claim as his own. Juan’s mother (Pilar López de Ayala) and Mia’s parents (Clive Owen and Carice Van Houten) are pulled into the nightmare as the line between imagination and reality gets blurry. Priests, art therapists, and the police follow, but here these character types bog down the story, especially Daniel Brühl as a Spanish-speaking holyman. Fresnadillo and his screenwriters crib from countless horror films, however, their story commits to showing horror and anxiety from a child’s perspective as it cleverly plays with timelines. Though one problem remains: you can easily outthink major plot points.

Urbanized: I love Gary Hustwit for making obsessive documentaries about fonts (Helvetica) and industrial design (Objectified). Expanding his scope in his latest project, Hustwit tackles the much broader subject of city planning/urban design with a tangible wit heretofore absent from his work. The best part of Morgan Spurlock‘s otherwise lackluster The Greatest Movie Ever Sold was a segment on Sao Paolo and how politicians successfully lobbied to have advertising removed from public space, from skyscrapers to taxi cabs. Hustwit goes macro with the concept as he looks to architects, planners, activists, and others on the historical and contemporary importance of smart design. May Hustwit always be a filmmaker for people who do crosswords in ink.

The Invader: Promising an unflinching look at racial relations in Europe, short filmmaker Nicolas Provost‘s feature debut has a hard time shedding its sex-thriller trappings. A beautiful and promising opening scene introduces Amadou (Isaka Sawadogo, who has two films at TIFF this year) as he washes up on a Southern European beach from Africa. His illegal and meager existence faces myriad threats and constant uncertainty, though once he sets his gaze upon the entrepreneurial Agnès (Stefania Rocca), his focus becomes quite singular. It’s a pity, because for a few introductory minutes, I thought we were going to be treated to some sociopolitical realness; instead, we got some decent full frontal nudity and a common story about sexual obsession that is oversold as being intellectual.

Poster for The Descendants

The Descendants: My favorite film of the festival (Your Sister’s Sister is my second favorite) will also likely be responsible for George Clooney getting his Best Actor Oscar. At first, one wonders where director Alexander Payne (Election, About Schmidt and Sideways) is going as Clooney’s ineffectual, put-upon character is treated and talked-to shabbily by all around him. Much like Jack Lemmon‘s role in Save the Tiger, however, his innate courage and decency shine through resulting in a satisfying, ennobling, adult film.

Page Eight: I have no idea why Page Eight is the closing night film of the festival. Heck, it’s nearly out on DVD. Regardless the film harks back to great Cold War mellers The Spy Who Came in From the Cold or The Ipcress File but with much, much, much less going on. Bill Nighy turns in a dry, witty performance and Rachel Weisz has to kiss him but writer and director David Hare (The Hours, The Reader) keeps his upper lip so stiff that my patience was tried.

Butter: There’s nothing like a fair political and social satire and Butter, a sneering film, is nothing like a fair political and social satire. Middle America is depicted as one long strip-mall of avarice, lust and stupidity. Well, conservative middle America is anyway. Jennifer Garner slips into a Sarah Palin lilt as she bulldozes her way into a butter carving competition. The best surprise here was the comedic chops of Olivia Wilde, who plays a sexy stripper who exploits every opportunity she’s given.

Hysteria: The cast is very engaging, particularly Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hugh Dancy (please, please, please, someone find this fine actor a worthy leading role!) but Hysteria, a film about the invention of the vibrator, fails to gel at any given moment; it’s more like an entertaining pamphlet from the Salvation Army. Rupert Everett looks like his face has been buffed on the “Jolly Old Saint Nick” setting and should fire his plastic surgeon and damn him for not letting himself age gracefully anyway.

Trishna: Michael Winterbottom‘s new film based upon Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Ubervilles reminds me more of his film In This World than either of his past Hardy adaptations, Jude or The Claim, as his focus seems to be driving home the environment and the culture of India and the caste system rather than investigating the characters. Freida Pinto captures every scene she’s in and she continues to mature as an excellent, rounded actress.

Keith Simanton

Trishna

Whoever said the good thing about a bad Michael Winterbottom film is the fact that you don’t have to wait long for his next work might have just walked away from Trishna, a modern-day India interpretation of the novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Winterbottom’s third Thomas Hardy adaptation after Jude and The Claim. It’s a liberal take on the material – a streamlined narrative stripped of enough prominent characters that the inevitable book vs. film debate is groundless. While the director’s aesthetic is at its most immersive and the story and its pacing engage early on, the entire work flattens out for a dozy middle section that makes the tragic third act feel like a relief instead of an ending that’s proportionate to the audacity required to take on the work. At the most, Winterbottom reminds us that all the film world needs is Polanski’s Tess.

Freida Pinto plays the titular character, the eldest daughter of a humble family living in Rajasthan, whose fate becomes tied to Jay (Riz Ahmed), a Londoner on vacation who becomes enchanted by Trishna at first sight. Their relationship — formal at first, then passionately young and dramatic — first develops as Trishna works at Jay’s father’s hotel in far-away Jaipur. Ashamed after making love for the first time, Trishna flees for home, where her relationship with her family soon changes as she begins to experience morning sickness … Jay locates her, and their coupling hits its stride as the lovers run off to Mumbai to live in the open as an unmarried couple.

After a too-brief blissful period, a family crisis and Trishna’s revelation about her abortion cast doubt over their future, as Jay returns to London to care for his ailing father. By the time they reunite a second time and return to Rajasthan, Jay’s maleness has been wounded and Trishna has glimpsed a possible self-sufficient future, yet they are forced to live clandestinely at a new hotel. Trishna labors in formal garb, Jay reads and smokes hash, becoming a monster in the process, Trishna’s worst oppressor.

The jump from this paralyzed state to their relationship’s fatal end is a bit questionable, but I realized I had been checked out for possibly an hour as the knives literally came out. Let’s just say there’s no happy Slumdog ending to be experienced here. Also: I’ve never seen an audience leave a theater faster and with nothing to say.

Winterbottom excels at taking snapshots of daily life, and his portraits of contemporary India are honest and not overworked. Here, he goes on to show ways in which youth culture is clashing with tradition, though many of his Mumbai characters are more interesting than Jay but not as captivating as Trishna.

That’s my main problem with the film at this time: Pinto’s beauty is the true star. Most everything else feels maladapted, and the pacing is stodgier than your average period piece.

Mark Duplass, Lynn Shelton and Emily Blunt goof around for the camera in Toronto.

The films are rolling in. Here’s some first-hand experience and some third-hand hearsay about the films at the fest:

Your Sister’s Sister: Writer/director Lynn Shelton leads Mark Duplass, Emily Blunt and Rosemarie Dewitt in one of the best received films at Toronto by an audience so far, Your Sister’s Sister. Shelton continues to create, along with her actors, dialogue and situations that are funny, sexy and engaging with a particular regional vibe, capturing the cadence, the halting pauses and passive/aggressive pitch of the Pacific Northwest. Duplass creates a lovable schlub whom, unlike even some of the schlubs he’s created in the past, is lovable. You miss him when he’s not in the picture. Here’s hoping this small-ish film can find a large-ish audience.

Shame is Steve McQueen‘s highly anticipated follow-up to Hunger, which starred our new favorite actor Michael Fassbender, who also stars here. It’s described as very difficult to watch but excellent in execution, much like Hunger. Fassbender plays Brandon, a feckless, horny, dissolute New Yorker whose life is thrown out of balance when his wayward younger sister, played by Carey Mulligan, moves into his apartment.

Actress/director Sarah Polley‘s Take This Waltz is also getting pained raves. It stars Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen and Luke Kirby and though the write-up pushes the romance and humor it’s been described as meditative and dark, and those who praise it explain that it forced them to confront their own failings as husbands, wives and lover.

Anonymous, the “who wrote Shakespeare’s works?” movie is getting begrudgingly firm positive notices. Why begrudging? Because it’s by disaster-director Roland Emmerich. Let’s repeat that: Anonymous, is a “who wrote Shakespeare’s works?” movie by disaster-director Roland Emmerich and people like it.
Given that Emmerich’s movies are complicated set pieces it will be fascinating to see how he works with a tightly configured and constrained drama. Stars Rhys Ifans, David Thewlis, Joely Richardson, and Vanessa Redgrave. Yes, Thewlis and Redgrave in an Emmerich film!

Friends With Kids: I fought liking this film for the first half hour until I succumbed to it. And then, in the last five minutes, remembered why I’d fought for so long in the first place. An ensemble cast gives a great opportunity for Adam Scott to show his range, Jon Hamm to deliver a great soliloquy, Megan Fox to be funny (really!) and Chris O’Dowd to steal every scene he’s in. Writer/director Jennifer Westfeldt (Kissing Jessica Stein) almost had a bonafide hit here but this script needed one more scrub; it wasn’t ready.

The Oranges by Julian Farino is Blame It on Rio without the humor and without Michael Caine (hell, or even without Michelle Johnson). With Leighton Meester (okay, that’s not fair, she’s not half-bad) and Hugh Laurie .

Hick: Eddie Redmayne shows himself to be the real deal in Hick, a combination of overt charisma and quiet energy. Otherwise, Hick is loathsome little film, remarkable only in its ability to make a Jim Thompson-type true crime story that doesn’t ask anything particularly unrealistic or outlandish seem perpetually stagy and unbelievable. Chloe Moretz is convincing as Taxi Driver jail-bait but it’s all in the service of a film that appears to be describing just how teenage girls end up in prostitution or porn. The most derided film at the festival so far.

Like Crazy, the Sundance award winner from Drake Doremus, star Anton Yelchin as Jacob, an American, and Felicity Jones as Anna, a Brit, meet at college in Los Angeles and fall madly in love. That love is tested by time and tide when Anna returns to London, and the couple is forced into a long-distance relationship. Things as simple as time zones become the enemies of something as powerful as love. At least that’s what I thought it was about. It’s not. What it is about is sneakier and more mature than you can imagine and it has me reflecting on this intriguing indie from Doremus.

Unfortunately sounding a lot like the shlockly Hobo with a Shotgun, Machine Gun Preacher couldn’t be more diametrically opposed. It’s directed by Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) in a true story of violence and redemption, about Sam Childers (Gerard Butler), a drug-dealer who undergoes an astonishing transformation and finds an unexpected calling as the savior of hundreds of kidnapped and orphaned children. People say it’s very good but extremely harrowing and tough sledding.

Keith Simanton

Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding

Ten years ago I was attending the Toronto Film Festival for the first time. The day before 9/11 I had met legendary film critic Roger Ebert, a personal hero of mine, for the first time as well. We were interested in figuring out a way we could work together as he was a fan of the site and we were fans of his. September the 10th is my birthday (and my wedding anniversary) and, as I was far away from home, Roger had kindly taken me to a late-night screening of a forgettable Fred Schepisi movie, Last Orders, as a bit of celebration. The next morning was the 11th and Roger and I met up again to see the press and industry screening of the Mira Nair film, Monsoon Wedding, which started at 8:30 in the morning, in the old screening venues for Toronto, the Varsity Cinemas. We walked out of that colorful, cacophonous, joyful, loving film to be greeted by a reporter from the Detroit Free Press. “What’s your reaction to what just happened?” he asked, thrusting a microphone between Roger and me. In my mind I thought, “Sigh, this guy’s getting all worked up about a flighty Mira Nair film?” but said, out-loud, “To what?” “To what just happened in New York,” he said.

Roger went one direction, I went the other, around the corner, where the televisions inside the theater were all showing the devastation in New York and around the U.S. The press screening of Monsoon Wedding, I was to learn later, was one of the only screenings that was not stopped when the news hit.

The next few days were a blur, yet oddly remain crystal clear in my memory. All the journalists gathered in the main press room, watching the horrible scenes unfolding. We all congregated in the Hyatt bar, unable to leave the city and many of us without hotels. I was supposed to leave the next day but had to check out of my hotel, whose rates had sky-rocketed $300 more a night. I heard a tubby geek decrying that the festival stopped the screenings for the rest of the day, bemoaning that “everyone is making such a big deal about this.” I yelled at him. I watched Pauly Shore, who finally looked somber, sitting on a chair, which made me think well of him. That was quickly dispersed when he started hitting on a girl who was nearby.

I didn’t want to see movies; I wanted to get home to my wife and my four and one-year-old sons. I went to the Greyhound Bus terminal and talked to a lady at the ticket counter. I just needed to get to Vancouver, British Columbia, as we live in Seattle and my wife could come and get me in a short ride up. She informed me that they had a bus that went to Vancouver, that it had to loop around the Great Lakes and that it drove, essentially non-stop across the continent. She said it would take three days, that I would meet a lot of characters and “personally, I wouldn’t recommend it.” A few days later I flew to Vancouver on Air Canada when they opened up Canadian airspace. I flew home with several people wearing turbans and I looked at them with great suspicion, something that wouldn’t even have crossed my mind before. The world had definitely changed. They have a short about 9/11 and TIFF that ran just yesterday at public screenings. It was an honorific recollection of those horrific days and how the festival had soldiered on with the screenings (though all parties and celebrations were cancelled) just two days later. It was the right thing to do, showing movies again. I learned from that short that the first public screening the festival had was Mira Nair‘s Monsoon Wedding.

Thank you, Miss Nair.

Keith Simanton

Brad and Angelina at Moneyball

The big draws at TIFF have been the Moneyball premiere and The Ides of March premiere. Moneyball brought Brad and Angelina, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jonah Hill and Chris Pratt (and his wife, Anna Faris).

Ides drew George Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Marisa Tomei, and Paul Giamatti. Both premieres included shrieking fans but, perhaps most interesting to me was that the person who drew the most coordinated chants of their name from the crowd? Brad? Nope. George? Nope. It was Gosling. “Ryan. Ryan. Ryan” rang out around the Roy Thomson Hall long after the red carpet had closed. The King is Dead. Long Live the King.

As we were leaving A Dangerous Method I heard the best review of the film when someone said: “It’s an intelligent, witty script about psychology and philosophy, with hot spanking scenes.” Though I was hoping for something a little more transcendent with Method, I had to agree with the moviegoer. The film is a series of discussions over the years about morality and matters of the brain (and one would probably be smacked down if one said “of the heart”). The first fifteen minutes with Keira Knightley acting the mad Russian woman drew snickers from the audience when she trilled out, “Herr doctor” and she practiced a pursed Renee Zellweger face until it began to make me wince. But once the film gets going and her character is allowed to relax she’s much more digestible. One does feel for the actress. She’s figuratively and literally naked in this film and it’s a brave role for her. Fassbender continues to build his estimable persona and Viggo Mortensen sits back with all the best lines as Sigmund Freud.

Private Snafu was a propaganda character used by the Army in WWII to illustrate incompetence. Future schools of journalism will not need such a fictitious creation because they already have the films and the work of director Nick Broomfield. His documentary, Sarah Palin, You Betcha!, is the kind of lame trash we’ve come to expect from the filmmaker, a kind of smear campaign where the smearer gets as much, if not more, befouled as the smear-ee. Once again, Broomfield announces his surprisingly quick captivation with his subject, this time the former governor of Alaska but, unlike Eileen Wournos or Heidi Fleiss, who appeared to beguile him over a longer period of time, in You Betcha it happens while Broomfield is in line for one of her book tours.

A Palin documentary could have had teeth and made larger points about why people identify with this personality and politician but in the hands of the hapless Director Snafu, Nick Broomfield, it’s one idiot against another.

by Keith Simanton

U2 in From the Sky Down

Davis Guggenheim‘s documentary about U2, From the Sky Down, opened the fest. Having a rock documentary at Toronto is a bit like having Kid Rock play at the opening game of the NFL season (which also happened last night). While you understand the attraction and find it amps up the wattage of the event, it feels a bit out of place and superfluous. The film, in the pantheon of great rock-umentaries (it’s not a concert film), however, will not be a mere sideshow. Though very talky, and perhaps even tending toward too much navel-gazing, From the Sky Down does give a keen insight into a band on the brink. Guggenheim does a very credible job dissecting what is, in essence, U2′s mid-life crisis, which took place after “Rattle and Hum” and during the creation of “Achtung Baby.” The title comes from a quote from Bono, “When you live life as a composer you’re building from the sky down” which, out of context, sounds ego-maniacal, as do the title cards where U2 is referred to as the capitalized “The Band”. But watching the four artists try to tear down the very legacy that made them famous is ennobling and instructive. Hearing those famous Edge riffs and watching the creation of “One,” which both Bono and the Edge both seem to later rediscover, is chilling and wonderful.

There’s little doubt that the most compelling reason to open Toronto with Sky Down is because freakin’ U2 will show up!! That kind of hysteria surrounded the premiere at Roy Thomson Hall last night where the band showed up to announce the film and that scene, a band being feted by worshipful fans and filmmakers, will likely be repeated several times from now until the close of festivities on the 18th. There are a number of potential hagiographies at Toronto including Cameron Crowe‘s Pearl Jam Twenty and Jonathan Demme‘s Neil Young Journeys, his third Neil Young-themed film (Heart of Gold and Neil Young Trunk Show being the other two).

Poster for The Ides of March

Best Bets:

The Ides of March: A portentous title and a cast laden with former awards and accolades makes this George Clooney-directed film on the “must see” list. Stars Ryan Gosling as an experienced staffer working for a charismatic presidential candidate (Clooney), who uncovers some seamy truths and gets his own taste of power. Also with Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright and Marisa Tomei. Watch the trailer.

Ides Tidbit: The film has been co-adapted by Clooney-collaborator, co-producer and longtime character actor Grant Heslov.  On the DVD commentary for Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005), George Clooney says that shortly after he met Heslov in 1982, Heslov loaned Clooney $200.00 to buy his first set of headshots, and they have been friends ever since. PS: Those who actually read Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in high school will know what the title is getting at…and be even more intrigued.

A Dangerous Method: [Update 9/7: Word has it from early screenings that Method really doesn't have much of a method, or a point, despite some fine performances. It remains to be seen, however.] Toronto-native David Cronenberg (A History of Violence, Dead Ringers, The Fly) premieres his new film at TIFF and it, too, bears the hallmarks of a great film. It’s an adaptation by Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, The Quiet American, Atonement) starring Michael Fassbender as philosopher/psychoanalyst Car Jung and Viggo Mortenson as Sigmund Freud as they find themselves at odds as to the treatment of a tortured, sexual Russian woman, Sabina Spielrein, played by Keira Knightley.  Watch the trailer.

Dangerous Tidbit: The film looks to be able to claim, “based on a true story” without shame as Spielrein was one of Jung’s first patients at his earliest appointment as a doctor. Avoid looking up Spielrein, however, if you don’t want some serious spoilers about this fascinating tale.

Moneyball: [Update: 9/7: This year’s Social Network for the baseball set Moneyball chalks up another sturdy, nuanced performance by Brad Pitt who may be, much like a his character, Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, more valuable in the front-office than on the field. He produced Moneyball and, as he’s been wont to do, hires a smart director in Bennet Miller, who needs to work more. The film, which can be added to the short roster of movies that successfully mythologizes, yet doesn’t coddle, our cherished pastime, also helps explain that rarest of breeds, the cross-pollinated bleacher nut who takes stats while wrapped in their team’s colors. It’s in my current Top Ten Films of the Year.] It isn’t actually the participation of Brad Pitt, Robin Wright or Jonah Hill that gets us excited about this film based on the Michael Lewis best-seller. It also isn’t the story, which is how perennial also-rans, the Oakland A’s, used logistics and statistical analysis to field a winning team. It’s the participation of great screenwriters Steve Zailian and Aaron Sorkin and direction by Bennett Miller, whom we haven’t heard from since 2005′s Capote. Miller also created the wonderful doc. The Cruise so we’re curious and excited to see how all that promise fleshes itself out.

The Descendants: The buzz out of Telluride says that this second film with George Clooney is another winner for him and will eclipse his own directorial effort, Ides of March. Director Alexander Payne, who made Election (and About Schmidt and Sideways) and whose films therefore get a lifelong presumption of quality, supposedly has another smart, funny film on his hands.

Intriguing

The Awakening: Boasts two actors that we adore that are woefully under-appreciated, Rebecca Hall and Dominic West. Hall plays a widow who, in the aftermath of WWI and deep in her own grief, sets out to expose seances and other paranormal activity as hoaxes. When she is summoned to a boys’ boarding school, however, she is forced to re-evaluate her beliefs. Directed by Nick Murphy (who did some memorable and engaging Primeval episodes), co-written by Murphy and Stephen Volk, who also wrote the creepy Gothic and the weird but memorable The Kiss.

The closing night film of the festival is Page Eight. Bill Nighy plays Johnny Worricker, an MI5 officer whose perspective of the organization is profoundly changed when his boss and best friend (Michael Gambon) dies suddenly and leaves with him a secret file. Meanwhile, Johnny’s striking next-door neighbor Nancy Pierpan (Rachel Weisz) takes an interest in him. Written and directed by David Hare (The Hours, The Reader), also starring Ralph Fiennes and Felicity Jones.

Mess or Masterpiece?:

Butter: One has to assume it was a crack script that attracted the array of talent to Brit director Jim Field Smith‘s film. How else to explain the presence of Jennifer Garner, Hugh Jackman, Olivia Wilde and Ty Burrell to this tyro effort about a butter carving competition?

Hysteria: What attracted Maggie Gyllenhaal, Hugh Dancy, Felicity Jones, Rupert Everett and Jonathon Pryce to this film about the invention of the vibrator? We hope it’s hysterical.

Winnie: Jennifer Hudson (!) portrays Winnie Mandela, the controversial wife of Nelson Mendela, played by Terrence Howard (!). Directed by Darrell Roodt, the South African helmer who appears to have a lock on any film made in or about the area, including Cry, the Beloved Country, Dangerous Ground, and Sarafina!

There’s also a new Michael Winterbottom film. Now, I can’t resist Winterbottom, the maddening, prolific, fascinating director. In 2010 he made one of my favorite films, The Trip, and one of the films I found to be the most morally bankrupt, The Killer Inside Me. He’s made the confounding, pretty disturbing, incest, sci-fi film, Code 46, and the incredibly brave and ennobling A Mighty Heart, In This World, and Welcome to Sarajevo. His new film, Trishna, sounds like it fits in this latter category, about the daughter of a rickshaw owner (Freida Pinto) who falls for a scion of a property owner.

Francis Ford Coppola has a world premiere with Twixt starring the Val “watch as I waste my talent and screen presence” Kilmer, as a writer whose book tour takes an unexpected twist when he gets involved in a murder. Those who were bludgeoned into not trusting Coppola after Youth without Youth and then coaxed back to him with the unexceptional yet intriguing Tetro are waiting to see if Coppola can start challenge himself with the experiment of making good films again. Also stars Bruce Dern, Elle Fanning and Ben Chaplin.

360: Fernando Meirelles, the director of City of God and The Constant Gardener, uses Arthur Schnitzler‘s La Ronde as his inspiration for a globe-trotting rondelet of characters and stories with Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Rachel Weisz and Ben Foster.

Films of this globe-trotting, star-wattage scope from directors with cachet rarely seem to work (see: Until the End of the World) and the list of exotic locals, ending with some less-romantic destinations seems like a joke t-shirt:

Vienna,
Paris,
London,
Bratislava,
Rio,
Denver ,
Phoenix

Geoffrey Fletcher, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Precious, has Violet and Daisy, described as a “whimsical story of a teenagers’s surreal and violent journey” through New York. How one manages whimsical violence remains to be seen. Starring Saoirse Ronan and Amber Tamblyn, with Marian Jean-Baptiste.

Known Quantities:

The Artist: Michel Hazanavicius’s mostly silent film won the hearts (if not the minds) of those who saw it at Cannes; I found its middle saggy. It’s A Star is Born premise has George Valentin, a silent movie star who falls for a perky ingenue but despairs as talkies come and she eclipses him.

Sleeping Beauty: Emily Browning stars in Julia Leigh’s controversial film about a somnambulistic bordello. People were either creeped out but impressed or bored and unimpressed (and still creeped out).

50/50: Jospeph Gordon-Levitt allows his character to be flawed and unlikeable in this film about a young man facing cancer and “50/50″ chance of survival. Characters are allowed frailties and self-interest comes to the fore. Anna Kendrick is winning and Seth Rogan is in full lout mode, though a lovable one.

We Need to Talk About Kevin: People describe Lynne Ramsay’s new film as wrenching (it debuted at Cannes) but they also cite another standout performance by Tilda Swinton as the mother of a child who commits a horrific act.

Drive: Nicolas Winding Refn won Best Director at Cannes for this violent tale about a stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) who takes on a job he shouldn’t.