Quotes of the Day

Ten days and hundreds of movies after it began, with a gala presentation of Score: A Hockey Musical (after all, this is Canada), the Toronto International Film Festival wrapped this weekend. With celebs from Clint Eastwood to Bruce Springsteen treading the red carpets, TIFF is never short on stars and story lines (Casey Affleck admitted that I'm Still Here, his Joaquin Phoenix "documentary," was made up). The festival had its share of marquee films: Eastwood's Hereafter, Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, the Oscar-bait British dramas The King's Speech and Never Let Me Go. But critics and buyers also seek out "little" movies to take a chance on. Some, like Let Me In, will open in U.S. theaters soon; others, maybe never. And one, Rabbit Hole, seems sure to be an awards-season contender. Here are snapshots of 10 pictures people were talking about.

1. Rabbit Hole
The sudden death of a beloved child can be a near fatal blow to the parents. Becca (Nicole Kidman) and her husband Howie (Aaron Eckhart) are neither dead, as they might sometimes wish to be, nor alive, at least as they once were. Eight months after 4-year-old Danny ran into the street and was killed by a teenage driver, they dwell in a limbo defined by their status as survivors of an atrocity. Their lives, jobs and relationship with each other become secondary to their existence as full-time mourners. To move on is a betrayal of Danny's memory; to remain paralyzed by sadness is to count not one but three fatal victims to the tragedy. This sensitive, painful film version of David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize–winning play (which starred Cynthia Nixon and John Slattery on Broadway in 2006) is remarkable both for avoiding the pitfalls of the mourning-parents genre and for allowing Howie and especially Becca to embody a prickly, often comic grace. John Cameron Mitchell, creator of the vivacious outrages Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus, surprises with the subtlety of his directorial hand. This is no Lifetime Channel weepie; it is an evocation of coping that is deeply, complexly, heartbreakingly human. —M.C.

2. Let Me In
A seductive mashup of two incompatible genres — tender preadolescent romance and lurid my-girlfriend-is-a-vampire horror film — the 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In gets a surprise happy ending: a satisfying Hollywood remake. Young Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee, who played Viggo Mortensen's winsome child in The Road), bullied at school and feeling abandoned by his estranged parents, finds a kind of soul mate in the ethereal Abby (Kick-Ass's Chloë Grace Moretz), who's "been 12 for a very long time." Marking a giant step up from his stupid monster-movie mockumentary Cloverfield, adaptor-director Matt Reeves makes only minor adjustments to the story — recasting one character as a detective, playing half the movie as a flashback — in transferring it to Los Alamos, N.M. Reeves knows that if the kids' creepy-sweet relationship works, the shock elements will take care of themselves. He gets lovely performances from his two young leads and is flawless at locating the desperate passion in what for Owen is a first love and for Abby is the last. —R.C.

3. The Debt
Another English-language remake, this time of a 2007 Israeli political thriller, The Debt stars Oscar winner Helen Mirren and Avatar's Sam Worthington — who never share a scene because they inhabit different halves of the movie, 32 years apart. In Berlin in 1965, Worthington's David joins two other Mossad agents on a mission to capture a genocidal Nazi gynecologist (Jesper Christensen) and return him to Israel for trial. His colleagues are the ruthlessly efficient Stefan (Martin Csokas) and novice spy Rachel (Jessica Chastain, a cross between soft Julia Roberts and flinty Katrina vanden Heuvel), who must get close enough to the Nazi — can you guess just how close? — to anesthetize and kidnap him. Mirren is Rachel in 1997: divorced from Stefan (Tom Wilkinson) and wracked by the recent suicide of David (Ciaran Hinds), she follows the goad of her conscience to go on one final mission. Though director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) is expert at steering both the knotty plot and his gifted actors, The Debt is never more than moderately engrossing. It's less a great night out at the movies, more a reasonable Netflix rental. —R.C.

4. Essential Killing
A week ago at the Venice Film Festival, Vincent Gallo was named Best Actor and director Jerzy Skolimowski took the third-place Grand Jury Prize for this parable of a lone man in a desperate situation. As played by Gallo in an expressively wordless performance, Mohammed could be akin to the trapped mountaineer in 127 Hours, but with a political agenda and more blood on his hands. An Afghan who is captured by the invasion forces and is to be taken to an East European prison for rendition, Mohammed is utterly out of his element: a hot-weather creature in a vast expanse of snow. Yet he escapes his captors and stays alive by any means necessary. Skolimowski, who began his career as an auteur 50 years ago and has directed exemplary films in Polish (Barrier), French (Le Départ) and English (Deep End), doesn't seem to care if viewers are sympathetic to Mohammed. He wants them to feel the chill of mortality, which can be forestalled only by extreme measures. If survival is essential in a time of war, says this bleak, powerful film, so is killing. —M.C.

5. The Sleeping Beauty
With three decades' worth of provocative films (A Real Young Girl, Fat Girl, Anatomy of Hell), Catherine Breillat has proved herself a naughty transgressor of sexual boundaries. Lately, she has turned even more perverse by retelling children's fables with not nudity but an impishly clinical humor. Last year Breillat had a swipe at Bluebeard; now, in another film that played Venice before arriving in Toronto, she tilts Charles Perrault's fable of the princess with the hundred-year snooze. Her version is both closer to the Perrault particulars than the Disney version (of course) and more imaginatively revisionist. The original three fairies are here to loom over Princess Anastasia's bed. But when the youngest proposes that the girl "be pricked by a yew thistle at 6, sleep for 10 years and wake up at 16" and is asked, "What's the point of that?," she replies sagely, "Childhood lasts too long." This film doesn't; it's over in 80 minutes, yet it's got an adventure in the cave of a pustulant troll, a magical train ride and a tentative romance between Anastasia and a peasant boy that makes this a French kissing cousin to Let Me In. —R.C.

6. Miral
Sometimes moviemakers don't know where their story is. Julian Schnabel, the artist turned filmmaker (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), had a wealth of dramatic, not to say tragic, material in this history of Palestine from 1947 to 1994 that centers on a home and school for displaced Palestinian girls. He begins pertinently with a quick biography of the school's founder, Hind Husseini (handsomely embodied by Israeli actress Hiam Abbass, who played the mother in The Visitor). The emotional heft of Husseini's heroism almost outweighs the try-anything directorial style, which is all quick cuts and motion-sickness camera instability. Then Schnabel finds what he thinks is his main tale — of the schoolgirl Miral (Slumdog Millionaire's Freida Pinto), who becomes radicalized as she matures — and the movie degenerates into visual sloganeering. Israeli police are awful because they're ugly; Palestinians are pure and noble because they look like Indian fashion models. (At Venice, where the film had its world premiere, audiences emerged from the screening to see posters of Pinto shilling for L'Oréal.) Even those sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians should be annoyed by the black-and-white view here. Come on, don't make it so easy. —R.C.

7. Little White Lies
With more than 300 slots to fill and 300,000 tickets to sell or dispense, the Toronto selection committee is always happy to showcase a new work from a director whose last film was an art-house hit. Hence the inclusion of Little White Lies by Guillaume Canet, whose adaptation of the American novel Tell No One attracted more admirers than it should have. Whatever the merits of that insufficiently compelling thriller, it seems like a masterpiece compared with this meandering Gallic version of The Big Chill. A group of friends take a vacation each August at the beachside home of their eldest member — and most of them will do it again this year, even though one is in the hospital recovering from a motorbike accident. The presence of the incandescent Marion Cotillard, along with such accomplished actors as Benoit Magimel (The Piano Teacher) and François Cluzet ('Round Midnight), may lure the careless cinephile. But be wary: each character has exactly one trait, tiresomely recombined with other characters over the film's 2½-hour span. The occasional emotional or comic connection can't redeem Little White Lies. —M.C.

8. The Trip
Accompanying his fellow actor and friend Steve Coogan on a weeklong road journey from London to fine restaurants up north, Rob Brydon suggests they stop to dine at an ordinary place serving food eaten by real people. When Coogan demurs that that's been done before, Brydon says, "It's 2010. Everything's been done before. The only thing is to do something everyone's done before but do it better or different." In a festival clogged with strained seriousness, The Trip is different: the semi-real, semi-improv display of two funny men enduring each other's company. (It's the theatrical version of a soon-to-be-aired six-part BBC series.) Similar to the 2004 Sideways in its setup and time frame, The Trip has Coogan on the prowl for sexual encounters as well as elegant repasts and Brydon as his more stay-at-home companion. The two actors played together in the shaggy period caper Tristram Shandy, and that film's director, Michael Winterbottom, is again at the helm. But the stars' badinage is the real treat and definitely worth catching if the movie (or the TV show) ever comes to the States. Do not, however, bring a beverage into the theater. While watching Brydon and Coogan's dueling impressions of Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Hugh Grant, you may laugh so hard that liquid will come out of your nose. I speak from experience. —R.C.

9. Meek's Cutoff
Director Kelly Reichart and writer Jonathan Raymond, who collaborated on the austere indie dramas Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, go epic this time, but with the same mute admiration for outsiders in a hostile land. Set in the Oregon Territory in the 1840s, the movie tells of a small cluster of pioneer men and women (including Wendy and Lucy star Michelle Williams) who must rely on a grizzled, garrulous mountain man (Bruce Greenwood) to lead them to the promised land ... or astray. What J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice of Old Joy — that it is "literate but not literary, crafted without ostentation, rooted in a specific place and devoted to small sensations" — is also true here. These are the movie's strengths and weaknesses: an uninflected attention to the minutest detail and a minimalist's abhorrence of dramatic impact. Worthy and wearying, Meek's Cutoff stirs an admiration for the beset settlers while begging the question of how anyone ever reached the Pacific Coast. —R.C.

10. Balada Triste de Trompeta (The Last Circus)
Before it ever played Toronto, Alex de la Iglesia's Spanish horror film was both denounced — as a lurid panorama of degradation and self-mutilation — and laureled: the Venice Jury, headed by Quentin Tarantino, gave it Best Director and Best Screenplay. The movie offers plenty of reasons to be either appalled or enthralled. Spanning virtually the full history of Franco's Spain, it opens in 1937 with a machete-wielding killer clown and ends in 1973 atop the huge cross in Franco's Valley of the Fallen. The central story of two men, a sadistic Happy Clown (Antonio de la Torre) and a soulful Sad Clown (Carlos Arecas), who love the same gorgeous acrobat (Carolina Bang) could be a parable, in grotesque whiteface, of the Franco period, which the writer-director sees as the domination of the brutal right over the ineffectual left. The acrobat might stand in for the Spanish people: she's sexually abused by Happy Clown, and she loves it. Beginning in carnage and soaring into surrealist tragicomedy, Balada Triste is a film hell-bent on madness and in full control of it. Is it the best movie in Venice and Toronto or the worst? Could be either. But it was surely the most. —R.C.

• Richard Corliss and Mary Corliss / Toronto
• Ten days and hundreds of movies after it began, with a gala presentation of 'Score: A Hockey Musical,' the Toronto International Film Festival wrapped on Saturday night