Pronto in Toronto

In the whirlwind that is the Toronto Film Festival, Michael Dwyerruns from screening to screening, catching two new crime dramas - one outstanding (David Cronenberg's) and one a dud (Woody Allen's) - and a mixed batch from actors-turned-directors Stuart Townsend, Sean Penn and Helen Hunt

SNORING was audible at several Toronto cinemas during the week as the relentless daily round of movies and parties took their toll, but anybody feeling drowsy at the early morning press screening of David Cronenberg's Eastern Promiseswould have been jolted wide awake. A few minutes into the movie, a Russian gangster is seated in a barber's chair when he gets a cut he doesn't expect, and his throat is slit - in close-up.

Eastern Promises is set in London at Christmas time, among the city's new affluent Russian population and at the ethnic restaurant run by the ostensibly genial Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose clients are dripping in jewels and wear ankle-length furs. The restaurant is a front for the criminal empire Semyon runs, trafficking drugs and teenaged Chechen girls, with the help of his psychotic son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and their laconic chauffeur Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen).

A young English midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts), enters this world when she delivers the baby of a 14-year-old Russian prostitute, who dies after giving birth. The more Anna learns from the dead girl's diary, the more her own life is threatened in Cronenberg's tight, richly atmospheric thriller, which exerts an unsettling fascination and never follows a predictable route.

Scenes of startlingly graphic violence follow, one set in a bathhouse where the naked Nikolai fights for his life. Reuniting with Cronenberg after A History of Violence, Mortensen is on rare form in a perfectly chosen international cast that includes Sinead Cusack and Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski as Anna's mother and uncle.

Cassandra's Dream, Woody Allen's crime drama, pales by compassion. Allen's third consecutive movie to be shot and set in London (after Match Point and Scoop) features Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as working-class brothers Ian and Terry. Their uncle (Tom Wilkinson) lures them into a murder scheme when Ian seeks to fund his property-dealing dreams and gambling-addicted Terry is heavily in debt to moneylenders.

Allen's screenplay pointedly quotes a line between the Barrow brothers in Bonnie and Clyde: "Isn't life grand?" "Yeah, but look what happened to them." There are few flashes of humour - and some surprisingly risible dialogue - in this flatly disappointing Allen movie. It is serious in intent, but difficult to take seriously given how frequently it strains the willing suspension of disbelief.

Allen stays behind the camera for Cassandra's Dream (the title refers to the name of a boat, by the way), as does Sean Penn for Into the Wild, his fourth feature as a director. Penn adapted his screenplay from Jon Krakauer's book, which charts the experiences of the ultimate dropout, Christopher McCandless, a West Virginia student who, in 1990, embarks on a quest for utopian simplicity. He donates his substantial college fund to Oxfam America, destroys all forms of ID, changes his name to Alexander Supertramp, and heads north to Alaska.

As is de rigueur for the road movie genre, McCandless has several encounters along the way, with a post-hippie couple (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker), a jovially feckless farm worker (Vince Vaughn) and in the most touching scenes, a lonely retired army veteran beautifully played by Hal Holbrook. Emile Hirsch, who is on screen throughout, portrays McCandless with an engaging blend of determination and vulnerability in a physically demanding performance for which he clearly did most of his own stunts.

Penn's leisurely telling of the story never drags as it moves back and forward in time, and the film is handsomely photographed by Eric Gautier against striking, changing landscapes.

Had McCandless returned home, he may well had been out on the streets of Seattle with fellow idealists protesting against the World Trade Organisation meeting there in November 1999. Making an impassioned debut as screenwriter and director, Irish actor Stuart Townsend takes the viewer inside both sides of the conflict in Battle in Seattle.

Townsend himself is heard but not seen, narrating a succinct history of globalisation over newsreel footage that sets the context for the dramatisation to follow. While political agendas are to the forefront inside and outside the meeting, he simultaneously addresses the personal dimension, populating his picture with fictional characters, some factually based.They include the leaders of the protest (Martin Henderson and Michelle Rodrigeuz), whose avowed credo is nonviolent action; the city's beleaguered mayor (Ray Liotta); and a police officer (Woody Harrelson), and his pregnant wife (Charlize Theron) who ventures into the wrong place at the wrong time.

Battle in Seattle pinpoints troublemakers on both sides: demonstrators who break ranks and smash shop windows, and baton-happy cops out to get "tree huggers". Townsend extends his brief to focus on a Medicine Without Frontiers representative (Rade Sherbedgia) whose pleas for cheaper drugs in the developing world are stonewalled by the pharmaceutical industry.

When events spiral out of control, the movie is at its most effective, as Barry Ackroyd, Ken Loach's regular cinematographer, makes gripping use of handheld camerawork to capture all the chaos, fear and violence.

Helen Hunt, another actor turning writer-director with a movie premiered at Toronto this week, produces gooey blandness in Then She Found Me. In the whirlwind early scenes, April (Hunt), a 39-year-old New York schoolteacher, marries a colleague (Matthew Broderick). They break up within a year and April's adoptive mother dies.

Enter her birth mother, a daytime TV chat show host played by Bette Midler. She claims that April's father was a movie star (Steve McQueen, no less), although this is contradicted after a Google search by April's new suitor, an English single parent played by an uncomfortably miscast Colin Firth in a role that cries out for Hugh Grant.

Hunt came to fame in the long-running TV sitcom Mad About You, which peppered more wit and insight into a half-hour episode than her movie achieves at more than three times that length. It may play well with the so-called chick flick audience, but some of the chicks sitting near me at this flick were too busy texting to care.

Michael Dwyer concludes his reports from the 2007 Toronto festival in The Irish Times next Wednesday