An amusing report in The Daily News today recounts an awkward incident involving Roger Ebert that I nearly witnessed at the early morning press screening for Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire last week. According to the report, Ebert, unable to speak since having throat surgery several months ago, gently tapped New York Post critic Lou Lumenick, who was sitting in front of him, to see if he could move over. One thing led to another, and after repeated taps, Lumenick swatted at Ebert with some undetermined object before a studio person helped the cantankerous Post critic find another seat.

I entered the Slumdog screening rather early, spotted Ebert in back row on the right hand side of the theater and sat down directly in front of him. I gather Lumenick had not yet arrived. Shortly after settling in, I realized that my favorite spot in the house, an aisle seat in the middle section of the room, remained vacant, so I took that place instead. I’d like to think that I would have gladly shifted over if it was me that Ebert had tapped — but, you know, once the movie gets going, it’s hard to say what an abrupt interruption can do to one’s temper.

Ebert hesitantly responds to the story on his website, but does so with class. “It has been blown out of proportion,” he writes. “It is of little interest.” Still, he portrays himself as a tough cookie with no reservations about a potential confrontation when his theatrical experience gets threatened. “A film critic of all people should be respectful of the sight-lines of fellow audience members,” Ebert concludes. “But in one way I feel sorry for [Lumenick]. He had no idea who was behind him when he smacked me. Now it looked like he was picking on poor me. I have had my problems, but I promise you I am plenty hearty enough to withstand a smack.”

Smacked or not, Ebert’s presence at TIFF this year is a heartening one. Spotting the famous thumb-thruster en route to handful of screenings each day (with his faithful wife, Chaz, in tow) proves his commitment to seeing movies in their primal stages on the festival circuit (I imagine he could probably arrange to have a lot of the prints shipped to his home theater in Chicago). What’s even more refreshing is that Ebert’s TIFF coverage has been pretty spot-on. People often complain these days that the former television personality gives out too many four stars, applies too much hyperbole to average fare and can’t be taken seriously. Having watched several films this week and discovered them at the same time as Ebert, I can testify that many of his conclusions make sense.

Slumdog Millionaire is a manipulative feel-good drama, but it excels at that precise style of filmmaking. Happy-Go-Lucky once again proves that Mike Leigh understands character arcs better than most screenwriters in the history of the art form. The Dardenne brothers’ Lorna’s Silence eloquently portrays the tribulations of maternal instincts and the pratfalls of greed. And while I haven’t seen The Wrestler, I hear it’s quite good, too.

In this dispatch and this one, Ebert agrees with me. So he’s still okay in my book.

Long-winded narratives tend to have limited appeal. Drifting around the main turf of the Toronto International Film Festival (the Cineplex Odeon theater on the top floor of a downtown mall), one heard the laments of tired volunteers, press and industry alike about the hefty screening of Steven Soderbergh’s Che slated for 9:30 a.m. Nobody was worried about the content of this detailed biopic, the ferocity conveyed by Benicio del Toro in the title role, or Soderbergh’s ability to direct the story with a mature, steady vision. Rather, most qualms involved the fact that Che runs a whopping 262 minutes, which is pretty much half a day of viewing time. Soderbergh envisioned the movie in two parts, not two movies, so even the rough, barely finished cut that played at the Cannes Film Festival in May screened as a single piece with one intermission. Now, the movie has snappier opening credits, but very few other additions. It continues to be something of an anomaly, given that its bloated running time isn’t the sort of thing you’d expect to see in theaters. Nevertheless, IFC Films has decided to take a chance and believe in audiences’ bravery, announcing today that they have purchased North American rights to the film. The movie will play in theaters this December for an awards-qualifying run before going into a slightly wider release in early 2009, while becoming available through IFC’s video-on-demand platform.

What’s impressive about Che has little to do with the running time, because Soderbergh himself doesn’t feel the pressure of it. The film moves at a brisk pace, rarely drags and never gets too preachy, but the filmmaker doesn’t try to make an epic out of it. Instead, we feel the strain of time as a device that evokes the duration of Che Guevara’s influence during his lifetime, much like David Fincher used the device to evoke the reign of terror caused by a serial killer in Zodiac. Che won’t appeal to people who like a lot of big explosions and very little character depth, but it’s a helluva better movie than another lengthy war drama playing at Toronto, Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna. Lee’s noble attempt to create a World War II drama with African American soldiers fails to create a compelling narrative, marred as it is by forced melodrama and a shoddy screenplay that sounds like some kind of second rate pulp novel from the fifties. The director undoubtedly qualifies as one of the finest American filmmakers of the last thirty years, but he might work better on his home turf.

Anna begins in the early eighties, when a black war veteran gets arrested for shooting a patron at the bank where he works. Questions surrounding his mysterious motives prompt a flashback to the forties, where the soldier and his battalion wind up stranded in Italy and cultivate a relationship with the locals. The story itself has an innate appeal, with a great enigmatic hook, but Lee’s sloppy attempts to emulate classic WWII narratives frequently fall apart. He uses a blaring trumpet score and choreographs choppy shootouts, hopelessly insisting on tired genre tropes even as he tries to subvert them. The cheesy dialogue doesn’t help. When a Nazi woman tries to turn black soldiers against their country by telling them that the United States treats African Americans like slaves, one soldier moans, “that goddamn woman is going to start a race riot.” When the main character watches a John Wayne war movie in the opening scene, he sighs, “We fought for our country, too.” With obvious lines like these, Lee might want to bring change to the evolution of the war film, but he could learn a thing or two from Che about how to stage a revolution.

Among the many regular sightings on the festival circuit, one that tends to make me perk up is Harvey Weinstein. The famous indie film huckster, co-Miramax founder (with brother Bob) and current head of The Weinstein Company doesn’t negotiate the same show-stopping deals that reinvented the model for independent film distribution when he helped the world discover the likes of Quentin Tarantino in the early nineties, but he’s still keeping company with the same gang of filmmaker buddies he helped discover over a decade ago. There’s a certain charm to a Harvey festival appearance, especially when he’s lingering in the background, as he did on Sunday night during the Q&A following the premiere of Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno at the Toronto International Film Festival. Like Tarantino, Smith has a relationship with Weinstein that goes back nearly fifteen years, when Miramax purchased Clerks and emboldened the notion that ultra-low budget comedies could turn a profit. So even if The Weinstein Company isn’t embarking on the same historic deals and indomitable marketing strategies that put the brothers on the map, there’s something innately amusing about seeing the distributor stick with the people he knows best.

Harvey infamously interrupted the press conference for Tarantino’s Death Proof at the Cannes Film Festival last year just to rebut claims that Grindhouse was a flop (but Harvey…it was); fortunately, on Sunday night, he remained in the shadows. When Smith came onstage at the packed Ryerson Theater and explained how he convinced the Motion Picture Association of America not to rate his film NC-17, the director joked that it probably deserved one, anyway. “Did it feel like an NC-17 film?” Smith asked the audience. “How many people say yeah?” The crowd went wild, of course, but backstage, I spotted Harv, his eyes glued to a Blackberry in his left hand, inconspicuously raise his right — like a proud papa, a satisfied executive, or maybe both.

You will get a chance to read more about Jonathan Demme‚s spectacular new feature, Rachel Getting Married, in this space soon enough. But I wanted to contribute my two cents now, because it is hard to overstate Demme’s achievement with this powerful narrative. Both melodramatic and, at times, so real it almost seems like a documentary, Rachel Getting Married stars Anne Hathaway as a neurotic recovering drug addict named Kim, who leaves rehab for the weekend to attend the marriage of her older sister (Rosemarie DeWitt). One of the few young mainstream actresses capable of conveying grounded personalities without letting glamor and make-up obstruct her performances, Hathaway does her best work as a destructive, frighteningly haunted young woman whose dark past involves her role in a terrible accident that drove the family apart. With the magnificent wedding set piece that closes the film and a somewhat unlikable lead female character, it’s easy to compare it with a movie from last year that shared those distinctive plot points, Noah Baumbach’s Margot At the Wedding. Unlike Margot, Rachel was rejected from this year’s New York Film Festival, but it’s far superior to Baumbach’s minimalistic drama. Demme’s last few films have been documentaries (including the Jimmy Carter portrait Man From Plains), and that skill comes into play here, as the director uses a technique reminiscent of Robert Altman by staging a large wedding event and finding the intimate story buried within it.

This is tragicomic family drama you can believe in, and for that it should be compared with Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration before even considering the similarities to Margo. Kim is the sort of gal nobody trusts anymore, somebody whose second and third chances to avoid the pratfalls of having an addictive personality dried up long ago. This tension keeps you on edge for the duration of the movie; it always seems like Kim is moments away from screwing up the party and losing touch with the only people who still care about her. That said, there is a sense of redemption, albeit a subtle one, when Kim faces off with her troubled mother, a woman living in denial of her responsibility for her daughter’s problems. That the two engage in an actual fist fight (uh, spoiler alert) testifies to the raw onscreen emotion, which makes you uncomfortable and utterly hooked at once.

Oddly enough, Rachel Getting Married isn’t the only film at the Toronto International Film Festival that involves a pretty nasty girl fight and an even nastier character named Rachel, although it is the superior one. Nothing But the Truth, a strangely uneven political drama from The Contender director Rod Lurie, stars Kate Beckinsale as a Washington, D.C. reporter loosely based on The New York Times journalist Judith Miller, who did jail time rather than reveal her anonymous source in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame (Vera Farmiga). Lurie’s story involves a bleaker outcome for both the Miller and Plame characters (here called Rachel — not to be confused with the one in Demme’s film — and Erika), and the strained melodrama eventually forces the entire situation into a kind of political pulp fiction. Alan Alda and an icy Matt Dillon nibble on the scenery as the legal advisers to the case, but Lurie fixates on the women in peril as if he were making a snuff film. They are constantly angry, vainly attempting to evade trouble from the authorities and almost never get the chance to smile.

It’s one thing that Truth is bleak, but another entirely that it continually lingers on Rachel’s discomfort. Her husband (David Schwimmer) talks down to her: “Whatever it is that’s keeping you in here is more important than what’s going on out there,” he shrugs, nonchalantly admitting to his extramarital affair. A few minutes later, we get a brutal scene where another prison inmate beats Beckinsale into a bloody sack of meat. It’s an engaging scene, but does it really serve the part of the story that’s important here? Where are the juicy details of Rachel’s trenchant muckraking finesse, the stuff that got her into the slammer in the first place? That’s where the real movie hides. When Lurie occasionally flashes back to Rachel’s investigation into the CIA agent story, the film grows slightly more enthralling, but these scenes are frequently interrupted by a focus on the brutality of prison life that serves little purpose outside of exploitative motives. Regardless, the combative women in Demme’s Rachel pack a better wallop.

American popular culture commands such a vast media space that it is often forgotten how much of it comes from abroad. At the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the major crossroads for international cinema en route to the United States, the crowded program makes this point all the more apparent. Some people might think the distinct phenomena of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Jean-Claude Van Damme (the respective focuses of two films at the festival) to be North American by nature due to their prevalence in that part of the globe, but neither one is any more American than apple pie — which, of course, originally came from England. Ditto for Millionaire, originally a British program that now exists in several formats around the globe. In Danny Boyle’s appropriately titled Slumdog Millionaire, the show takes place in Mumbai, where a sharply divided class system makes the prospects of winning television fortunes practically a religious endeavor.

The entire story is framed around a single installment of Millionaire, with an Indian teenager named Jamal (Dev Palet) becoming an overnight sensation after a landmark winning streak. The Indian government, however, distrusts the former street dweller’s remarkable literacy, and arrests him on charges of cheating. After a little torture brings the authorities to closer to the truth, Jamal reveals how each question related to fragments of his rough upbringing, which leads to a series of spectacular flashbacks. Jamal’s hardened youth involved escaping from anti-Muslim riots, conning tourists and evading slum lords — but, all along the way, he absorbed the bits and pieces of his world and cobbled together his own unique kind of wisdom. With an unexpected flair for Indian culture, Boyle has crafted his greatest narrative since Trainspotting, a real feat when you consider the trite game show at the center of the new work. The French director Patrice Leconte also used Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? as a narrative device, in his goofy buddy comedy My Best Friend, but its implementation practically seemed like an easy exit strategy (two characters talk out their problems when a contestant calls his estranged buddy for help during the competition).

Boyle, on the other hand, draws a shrewd contrast between the sleek game show atmosphere and Jamal’s grim upbringing, the latter of which evokes neorealism for its observant portrait of urban life. Jamal’s trivia skills are derived from his stature on the outskirts of high society, peering into the privileged realm while staying in his own place (in one scene, patrons watch a symphony performance while Jamal steals their wallets). That said, there’s also an element of fantasy to the film, with Jamal desperately trying to locate the love of his youth and finding her through the program. Some might argue that Slumdog Millionaire has too many contrived thriller sequences and dies a slow death basked in cliché. But this precise ingredient makes it possible to comprehend the value of personal triumph in the face of impossible odds. Boyle at once embraces Indian culture even as he implicitly critiques the nuances of the society, and even closes the movie with a spectacular dance number, Bollywood style.

Now, onto Van Damme. The Belgian star made any number of bad American action movies in the eighties and nineties, but failed to retain the respectability of American audiences in the manner that others stars have revitalized their own personas. How startling it is, then, to see the actor in the festival’s Midnight Madness entry JCVD play himself with startling finesse and calculated self-deprecation. The film, directed by French filmmaker Mabrouk El Mechri, focuses on Van Damme coping with his diminished popularity and tentative stature as a national joke. After a remarkably well-choreographed opening sequence showing the actor at work on another trite action vehicle, the movie gradually settles into Van Damme’s depressed reality, his divorce and subsequent lonely existence. Then, quite suddenly, it becomes a heist movie, and Van Damme may or may not be one of the bad guys. El Mechri keeps that foggy as the actor deals with two criminals who appear to take him hostage in a Belgian bank, while the cops outside seem continually flustered by the dreamily bizarre situation.

Oddly enough, despite a few clever swipes at Van Damme’s career, the movie mostly plays out like a smart genre film, rather than the deconstruction of one. Van Damme puts on a solid performance, subtly spoofing audience expectations and unafraid to make himself look like a loser. It’s interesting to see that this intelligent breakdown of an American icon comes from abroad; like practically everything else, satire is outsourced.

–Eric Kohn

Film festival coverage tends to focus on emerging trends in contemporary cinema, particularly the thematic connections shared by films and filmmakers grappling with modern times. Last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, for example, the presence of Brian De Palma’s Redacted and Paul Haggis‘ In the Valley of Elah sparked an ongoing debate about fictional narrative responses to the Iraq war. At this year’s gathering, I have yet to find a series of films that share a specific tendency related to modern times, but two films have struck me as notably individualistic depictions of recent global concerns.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn After Reading, although a minor accomplishment in light of the sibling filmmakers’ greatest achievements, nonetheless showcases their sly approach to satirizing contemporary anxieties. The movie was panned by Variety after it premiered at the Venice Film Festival shortly before it screened here, but it’s only a letdown if you superimpose the depth of No Country for Old Men or The Big Lebowski, two other Coen brothers films that deal, like Burn, with missing possessions and crime. Burn doesn’t aim for the poetic subtlety of No Country or the goofy generational statement of Lebowski. Instead, the Coen brothers have doodled in the margins of their acclaimed careers, presenting a wild send-up of America’s mangled security procedures and the West’s revitalized fear of it.

Without going into much detail about the plot (because that would defeat the purpose), it’s safe to say that Burn essentially works like a parable. It centers on a disgruntled ex-CIA employee (John Malkovich) whose nagging wife (Tilda Swinton) is cheating on him while he lounges around the house trying to write his memoirs. He doesn’t realize that she’s been sharing his computer files with a divorce lawyer in anticipation of taking off with her lover (George Clooney), and naturally the files fall into the wrong hands. Of course, Malkovich’s character is a total loser, and files have absolutely zero value whatsoever, but the two rather vapid gym employees who find his unfinished memoir (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, never funnier) don’t know that. A half-assed blackmail plot follows, with nobody ever quite sure what everybody else wants — especially the CIA (headed by a typically amusing JK Simmons), which would rather destroy the case than try to understand it.

Like The Dark Knight, where Batman resorted to wiretapping for the sake of the greater good, Burn explores how surveillance anxieties have begun permeating daily life (although the notoriously reserved Coen brothers would never admit it). Everyone is culpable for the craziness in this paranoid comedy, and that’s the point. The Coens are the ultimate equalizers when it comes to placing the blame.

Speaking of blame, on a drearier note: The harrowing thriller Vinyan, which focuses on two white parents searching for their missing child in Burma six months after he washed away in the 2004 tsunami that hit Thailand, also fictionalizes a recent issue in the headlines. A prolonged exploration of grief in the wake of natural catastrophe, Vinyan places the blame on those unable to comprehend the full nature of the calamity. Hauntingly beautiful, the film horrifically evokes the experience of drowning during the opening credits, using muted sounds and watery, abstract images. It then proceeds to tell the story of the bereaved parents, who remain estranged since their son’s apparent death. The couple’s journey into Burma is a perilous one, but their quest gradually gives way to symbolism, and Vinyan becomes, like Burn After Reading, a parable before all else. In the final act, the parents wind up in wandering through a mangled jungle as horrifically demonic youth — the ethnic equivalent of the Children of the Corn — chase after them. The depiction of these young Thai dwellers, caked in mud and living in the wilderness like savages, clearly has racist overtones, but, again, that’s the point: Much of the world couldn’t see past its own biases to comprehend the vast loss of life when that monumental wave swept across the earth. Directors Oliver Blackburn and Fabrice Du Welz have crafted a metaphoric horror film out of the wreckage, and suddenly the tragedy doesn’t seem so long ago — as if it ever were.

It goes without saying that the program for the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the most significant annual gatherings of its type, contains a vast, diverse lineup. Still, there’s a detectable formula to its design. Situated on the eve of the fall movie season, TIFF serves as a launch pad for Hollywood studios to showcase their coming attractions, and for those same studios’ specialty divisions to reveal the “indie” titles intended to find audiences on a comparatively smaller scale. Last year, for example, Warner Bros. premiered Michael Clayton, its foremost Academy Awards contender, while Fox Searchlight flaunted Juno. Now, Warner Bros. has unveiled the British crime comedy RocknRolla, while Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist arrives courtesy of Sony Pictures. There’s also Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn After Reading, Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna, Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, all of which have guaranteed distribution and sizable audiences. For this bunch, the festival is hardly more than the first step in an eternal cycle of marketing schemes.

That said, TIFF is also the place where some films come to die — or, rather, to live the only life they’ve got. Like many festivals, the entries situated way beyond mainstream sensibilities often receive their greatest showcases here before teetering off to oblivion. The opening night slot at TIFF, generally a Canadian film, typically suffers that fate: Last year’s disjointed Holocaust drama Fugitive Pieces virtually evaporated after its fleeting spot in the limelight; this year, the World War I romance Passchendaele seems destined follow. But there’s a greater region of obscurity where certain films barely even register with most attendees. These are often found in the outer tiers of the festival, such as the Discovery and Wavelengths sections, where the festival can become the exclusive venue for uniquely eccentric artistry that fails to interest the general public. It’s not a limbo, but a rarefied glance at the bolder, less accessible experiments with the art form. In the current festival, I can single out the befuddling, audaciously minimalistic drama Liverpool, an Argentinian film virtually devoid of plot. Director Lisandro Alonso has an international cult following from his earlier features, including Freedom and Los Muertos, but the excruciatingly intimate detail in Liverpool of a single character wandering around Ushuaia, a town near the isolated port where ships travel to Antarctica, will only interest daring viewers with particular enthusiasm for this seriously patient approach.

That said, the countless long takes in Liverpool where the quiet, lonely protagonist (Juan Fernandez) stomps across massive, snowy landscapes or dines at vacant eateries throughout a very long journey to visit his ailing mother hold far more appeal than pretty much anything in RocknRolla. The latest from the United Kingdom’s champion of sleek outlaws, Guy Ritchie (Snatch), the film contains a needlessly overstuffed plot about corrupt real estate brokers in the seediest regions of London. It glides on autopilot with the usual roundup of Richie-isms, including trite slo-mo sequences of smoothly dressed business folk walking around as rock music blows out the soundtrack, and hyperstylized, dime store Tarantino dialogue that sounds like it was written after a rough night at the pub (”It’s not about the drugs, the money, the hospital trips…rockers never die”). Despite intense performances by Gerard Butler and Tom Wilkinson, RocknRolla doesn’t offer much beyond the plastic shine of Ritchie’s music video direction. Story-wise, it’s equal parts Glengarry Glenn Ross and Ocean’s Eleven, but that’s not a compliment. In general, Ritchie’s script suffers from a confusion of tones, unable to choose between crude humor and faux suavity.

Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist is neither of those things, which means it’s a welcome antidote. Although technically just another studio movie making the obligatory festival rounds before its theatrical release in October, it has roots in the independent film community, being the sophomore effort of director Peter Sollett, whose debut feature, Raising Victor Vargas, became a major indie success story just a few years ago. It’s the sort of movie that proves a young, ambitious filmmaker doesn’t have to compromise his creative integrity once faced with commercial pressures; instead, he grooves with them at his own pace. Although occasionally uneven and not an essential TIFF movie like some of the lower profile works, it’s still a testament to the perseverance of independent expression.

Sollett has an eye for Manhattan’s Lower East Side youth culture, as Vargas initially proved, and he does it again with Nick and Norah. An adorable hipster fairy tale about the two eponymous disaffected teenagers (Michael Cera and Kat Dennings) wandering around the city with a wild bunch of drunken pals, it’s one of the most sincere mainstream romantic comedies I’ve seen in a long time. The would-be lovers meet while still uncertain about their previous romantic excursions, but a mutual attraction blossoms out of the revelation that they share the same outsider anxieties. Drifting from one gritty New York venue to another, Nick and Nora wholeheartedly supports that sentiment — it’s cheesy, but honestly so. The characters continually express themselves with ironic glee, yet the conclusion is agreeably mushy. All hail the best date movie for this generation’s East Village elite.

**Special Toronto Film Festival Report from Eric Kohn**

With the sudden eruption of stars, industry heavyweights and flash
photography, the Toronto International Film Festival always starts
with a bang. More than that, however, it starts with buzz.

Opening just a few days after the highly exclusive Telluride Film
Festival in Colorado, Toronto often serves as a vast launching pad for
films that first gained momentum at the earlier gathering. Last year,
this crop included everything from Juno to Werner Herzog’s Encounters
at the End of the World, both of which went on to perform sizable
business in their respective markets. (The movies were pretty good,
too.) This year, the shadow of Telluride doesn’t hang too low over
Toronto as the Canadian festival begins today, and there were precious
few American films with any significant buzz at all. However, while
everyone’s busy blabbering about the riches of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog
Millionaire (the gem of Telluride this year), I’d like to single out
another promising entry that has carved a steady, if somewhat humbler,
reputation out of its Telluride premiere as it arrives in Toronto: Jan
Troell’s Everlasting Moments.

This attentive period piece from one of Sweden’s highly regarded
contemporary filmmakers takes place in the early twentieth century,
while the country strained under the pressure of poverty and social
upheaval. With his co-writer and wife Nklas Radstrom, Troell marries a
deeply personal drama to the epic backdrop. A troubled housemother
named Maria (Maria Lundqvist) spends the first half hour of the film
dealing with her alcoholic husband’s rage, but she quickly finds an
exit strategy from her woes after unexpectedly winning a camera at a
neighborhood lottery. Rather than pawning it to help the household,
she is trained to use the device by a local photographer, and finds
herself entranced. Against her husband’s wishes, Maria starts
photographing everyone and everything around her, as the device
unlocks her latent creativity. By refusing to give up the hobby and
continually improving the community with her talent (she even
photographs a dead girl upon the family’s request), Maria represents
the liberation of artistic expression. It’s a very specific obsession,
one that often overpowers her. “It’s as if the pictures take over,”
she says. Toronto might consider adopting that bit of dialogue for its
tagline.

Burn baby Burn. The 2008 Toronto International Film Festival will debut and screen 312 movies this year and Jaman will be there to capture all the movie news, reviews and of course happenings around Toronto. I was actually amazed at the caliber of films offered and the star power the festival is packing. Not to mention that every Best Picture nominee (with the exception of There Will Be Blood) has played at Toronto.

We plan on checking out Kevin Smith’s “Zac and Miri Make A Porno” starring Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks to get our comedy fill.

And speaking of comedies…

The Coen brothers’ comedy “Burn After Reading” starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton and John Malkovich.
Burn After Reading - Trailer

On a more serious note:

Steve Soderbergh’s Guerilla (Che), about the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara who travels to New York City to address the UN. Benicio del Toro won for Best Actor at Cannes.