Love, war and porn

It's got Hollywood heavyweights, hard-hitting war films and hardcore porn comedies, but all the buzz at this year's Toronto Film Festival is around one man, former has-been Mickey Rourke. Michael Dwyerreports

WAR is hell, as countless movies have affirmed with varying degrees of conviction. And war movies can be hell to endure, as the Toronto festival audience discovered last weekend in the archly scripted, 1917-set Passchendaeleand Spike Lee's tediously overstretched 1944-set Miracle at St Anna. Midweek brought several new US movies on the Iraq war to the festival, and one was outstanding.

THE HURT LOCKER

Kathryn Bigelow, who established herself as a virtuoso action director with Point Break, gets up close and personal with a US bomb disposal squad in Baghdad in her taut, powerful drama, The Hurt Locker. The movie is structured as extended set-pieces, the first of which ends in the death of the squad leader (Guy Pearce).

Jeremy Renner is terrific as his replacement, a meticulous explosives expert so fearless that he is accused of getting an adrenaline rush from dicing with death so recklessly. Bigelow explores the patient, delicate and dangerous process of bomb dismantlement in documentary-style detail that is fascinating and gripping to observe.

Images of Renner in his hi-tech protective gear are so surreal that he looks like an astronaut on the heat-scorched streets of Iraq. Bigelow directly addresses the soldiers' sense of displacement, counting down the days to going home and letting off steam drinking and roughhousing. Her remarkable film is not explicitly political, but all the more effective as it seamlessly blends the personal and the political, raising challenging questions about this war that continues.

FIFTY DEAD MEN WALKING

Canadian director Kari Skogland proves adept at orchestrating action in her thriller, Fifty Dead Men Walking, staging riots, explosions and chases with impressive flair. The film was under threat of legal action because its subject, IRA informer Martin McGartland, objected to aspects of his representation in it. That threat was lifted on the eve of its Toronto world premiere on Wednesday night.

The credits state that Skogland's screenplay was "inspired by" McGartland's book, Fifty Dead Men Walking, so titled because he believes his undercover activities saved that many lives between 1987 and 1991. Energetically played by Jim Sturgess, McGartland is introduced as a petty thief hawking stolen goods before he's recruited by a Special Branch handler codenamed Fergus and played by Ben Kingsley.

The drama is most effective in building tension as McGartland has to tell one lie after another to cover his tracks, and as he attempts to maintain his family life throughout the consequent turmoil. The movie provides a precis of the background to the Northern Ireland conflict for the benefit of international audiences. It is generally accurate, although an IRA man refers to a "parking lot" and McGartland and his lover (Nathalie Press) first have sex on the roof of the Europa Hotel.

ME AND ORSON WELLES

Real-life characters abound on screen at Toronto with few, if any, as convincing as the 22-year-old Orson Welles played by Christian McKay - as vain, womanising, risk-taking and hugely ambitious - in Me and Orson Welles.

Teen heartthrob Zac Efron engagingly plays a 17-year-old high school student who lands a minor role, the ukulele-playing Lucius, in Welles's adventurous 1937 Mercury Theatre modern dress treatment of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

The movie, like that production, is impeccably cast, featuring James Tupper as randy actor Joseph Cotten and Eddie Marsan as frazzled producer John Houseman, along with Claire Danes and Ben Chaplin. It is steeped in the thrill of performance, from rehearsals through to opening night, and directed with palpable affection for the milieu by Richard Linklater, the versatile Texan whose diverse films incluse Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, Before Sunriseand Before Sunset.

WHO DO YOU LOVE

Set primarily in Chicago during the 1940s and 1950s, Who Do You Loveis named after the hit single by Bo Diddley and charts the rise of the Chess record label run by Leonard and Phil Chess (Alessandro Nivola and Jon Abrahams), the sons of Polish Jewish immigrants. Leonard enterprisingly established the company to release singles by black musicians he discovered, principally Willie Dixon (Chi McBride) and Muddy Waters (David Oyelowo). Director Jerry Zaks demonstrates an empathy for the characters and their music in this essentially formulaic yet engrossing narrative punctuated by faithful re-recordings of songs that changed popular music permanently.

ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO

As Zaks tells it, Leonard Chess employed the f-word more frequently than any other in his vocabulary, but his verbal effusions pale compared to Kevin Smith's expletive-littered screenplay for his most avidly provocative picture since Dogma, the romantic comedy, Zack and Miri Make a Porno. It posits a question quite unfamiliar to the genre: Can two platonic friends since high school days find true love when they co-star in a porn picture?

Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks play Zack and Miri, who share a rundown apartment in grim, wintry Pittsburgh. Reluctantly attending a school reunion because they are embarrassed to be regarded as under-achievers, they meet Miri's handsome teenage crush (Brandon Routh) and discover that he's in a passionate relationship with a gay porn star played by an unusually deep-voiced Justin Long.

In desperation to meet their mounting bills, Zack and Miri decide to make a porn movie. The consequences include Miri's suggestion of An American Werewolf in Brendaas a title, a radical reworking of Star Warsas Star Whores, a perfect parody of woodenly acted porn scenarios, unexpected YouTube captures, and outrageous visual gags involving soap bubbles and constipation - separately, that is.

Yet, at its core this is essentially a sweetnatured romance, and it even closes on Jermaine Stewart singing We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off (To Have a Good Time). More than 1,500 viewers packed the Tuesday afternoon screening here and their sustained ovation suggests the film is a front runner for Toronto's most coveted prize, the Audience Award.

• Michael Dwyer concludes his reports from Toronto in next Friday's Irish Times

Rourke's redemption

In a comeback to rival Lazarus, Mickey Rourke has risen from the ashes of a film career that appeared permanently burnt out to figure as a frontrunner for the best actor award at next year's Oscars. Had this scenario been a screenplay, producers would have dumped it in a bin.

Rourke, 52 next week, was one of the most exciting acting discoveries of the 1980s in movies as memorable as Diner, Rumble Fish, Eureka, Angel Heartand Barfly. He appeared to throw it all away, opting to star in rubbish such as 9 and 1/2 Weeks, Francesco, Shergarand a slew of movies that went directly to DVD.

He cultivated a reputation of being notoriously difficult, and he unwisely returned to the boxing ring, accumulating so many injuries that his appearance was eerily altered through reconstructive surgery. Against all odds, Rourke returns to form in The Wrestler, vividly portraying a washed-up, self-destructive ring star who peaked in the 1980s.

Rourke's performance is riveting to observe. He immerses himself so deeply beneath the skin of the wrestler that the parallels with his own career invariably intersect.

As art imitates life, the movie exerts a hypnotic hold as it achieves an achingly harsh study in desperation for personal and professional redemption. The wrestler longs to be closer to his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and the lap dancer (Marisa Tomei) whose years of using her body to entertain are also coming to an end. And he tackles that movie staple, One Last Bout, signalled many scenes in advance.

As directed by Darren Aronofsky, whose own career foundered with The Fountain, this is a disturbing, often exceptionally violent, sometimes unexpectedly funny melodrama. Like John Huston's excellent boxing picture Fat City(1972), it offers no false Rocky-style epiphanies. It's on a roll now, though, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival last weekend, and the subject of a late-night bidding battle for distribution rights in Toronto.