Nobody does it better

The mood at this year's Toronto International Film Festival was decidedly upbeat and celebratory, and not just because the event was marking its 25th anniversary. Fielding a wonderfully diverse international programme of 328 movies over the course of 10 whirlwind days and nights, Toronto has moved to the forefront of world film festivals. Nobody does it better.

Being a non-competitive event, Toronto is unencumbered by the problems besetting Cannes, which has scared off many filmmakers because of the inane decisions of its juries in recent years. Taking place in the most crowded period of the year for high-profile festivals, Toronto easily eclipses its competition - most of the movies showing at the overlapping Deauville festival have already been released in Canada; 19 of the 24 features screening in the New York Film Festival were shown in Toronto before travelling across the US border; and all the major prize-winners shown at Venice a week earlier turned up in Toronto.

The winner of the Golden Lion for best film at Venice this month, the Iranian drama, The Circle, proved to be one of the most unsettling and powerful films on the Toronto programme. Written, produced, directed and edited by Jafar Panahi (who made The White Balloon), The Circle is an unflinching depiction of the lowly place of women in patriarchal Iranian society. It chronicles the experiences of seven women, beginning in a hospital where a woman faces being divorced by her husband for giving birth to a girl.

It goes on to chart the fates of women who are on temporary release from prison - for unexplained transgressions - as they realise that the outside world is another form of prison in which a woman cannot smoke in public, travel out of town unaccompanied, or even be in a car with a man to whom she is not related. As the focus shifts from one woman to another, the film captures the desperate plight of a woman reluctantly reduced to abandoning her little daughter on the streets, and the drama's circular structure brings it to a chilling conclusion. Not surprisingly, The Circle has been banned in Iran. Absurdly, it was turned down by Cannes earlier this year.

Another riveting picture of marginalised characters oppressed, Julian Schnabel's Be- fore Night Falls arrived in Toronto with the Venice jury's runner-up prize and its best actor award, which went to the film's Spanish star, Javier Bardem, best known here for his roles in Jamon, Jamon and Live Flesh. Before Night Falls details the traumatic experiences of the Cuban novelist and poet, Reinaldo Arenas, from his birth in 1943 to his death in New York City in 1990, and it takes its title from his posthumously published memoirs.

This thoughtful and revealing drama pulls no punches in its dramatisation of the persecution Arenas underwent as a writer and homosexual in Castro's Cuba. At its core is Bardem's synpathetic and touching portrayal of the outspoken but vulnerable Arenas, and its strong cast also features Olivier Martinez, Andrea Di Stefano, and in cameos, Johnny Depp (as a transvestite) and Sean Penn. While Before Night Falls represents a significant leap forward for Julian Schanbel as a director after his rather over-praised Basquiat, another second-time feature director, Christopher Nolan, a 29-year-old Englishman, firmly builds on the promise of his low-budget debut, Following, with his first US movie, Memento.

A true mindbender of a thriller, Memento cleverly and tantalisingly plays with the themes of time, memory, reality and illusion - and with the viewer's brain - as it teasingly unravels its twisted tale of a former insurance investigator seeking to solve the mystery of his wife's murder, and constrained by a rare condition of shortterm memory loss which causes him to forget everything 15 minutes after it happened.

He addresses the dilemma by shooting and captioning a succession of Polaroids, writing Post-Its to himself and tattooing essential information on his body. This visually stylish thriller is dexterously assembled by Nolan as a particularly complex jigsaw and anchored by Guy Pearce's richly enigmatic central performance.

Another English director, Terence Davies, who made a disappointing American debut with The Neon Bible, is back at the peak of his form for his second US-set picture, his enthralling adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, The House of Mirth, which he actually filmed in Scotland. In a rash descision, Cannes rejected it this year in favour of James Ivory's soporific literary piece, The Golden Bowl.

Davies's best film since the searing Distant Voices, Still Lives and a far superior Wharton adaptation to Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, the impeccably composed The House of Mirth proceeds at a precisely measured pace as it reveals the emotionally bruising fate of Lily Bart, a New York socialite in the early years of the 20th century. She is played in a revelatory performance by X-Files star Gillian Anderson.

In his best film since the provocative 1992 Falling Down, director Joel Schumacher gets back to basics in Tigerland, which he shot in just a month on 16mm. This tight, gritty drama is set in a Louisiana boot camp in the autumn of 1971 as a platoon of young men, conscripts and volunteers, are put through a gruelling training regime by foul-mouthed sergeants before being shipped off to Vietnam - and almost certain death. Cast in his first screen leading role, the 24-year-old Dublin actor, Colin Farrell, gives a charismatic, star-making performance as the cocky, rebellious soldier who defies and frustrates the authority figures.

Tigerland inevitably evokes Robert Altman's similarly themed but more loquacious 1983 film, Streamers, made back in the days when Altman was still a director of stature. Altman has foundered in recent years, returning to past form only with The Player and Short Cuts, and his decline continues with the feeble Dr T and the Women, a silly and cacaphonous yarn thinly scripted by Anne Rapp (who also wrote Altman's over-rated Cookie's Fortune). With Richard Gere as a supposedly charming gynaecologist whose surgery is awash with Stepford Wives and their offspring - vapidly devised stereotypes bravely played by, among others, Farrah Fawcett, Laura Dern, Liv Tyler and Kate Hudson - the movie has all the subtlety of a pantomime.

The fast-rising Kate Hudson is featured to much more impressive effect in both Gerry Stembridge's delightful Irish romantic comedy About Adam, which opens the Cork festival next month, and in Cameron Crowe's entirely engaging Almost Famous, which had its world premiere at Toronto and charts the experiences of a naive but enthusiastic 15-year-old San Diego schoolboy, William Miller (charmingly played by newcomer Patrick Fugit) assigned by Rolling Stone magazine to go on the road with an early 1970s rock band, the fictitious Stillwater. Unlikely as that outline may sound, Crowe's screenplay draws on his own youthful experiences as a Rolling Stone reporter and this lovingly crafted semi-autobiographical picture rings consistently true in its evocation of the era's music, fashions and attitudes.

William's sister's stash of classic vinyl albums is caressed with due affection, while the soundtrack makes inspired use of hits of the period, most effectively, perhaps, when the feuding Stillwater are unified by the power of music as they sing along with Elton John's Tiny Dancer on the tour bus. In an exemplary cast, Kate Hudson plays Penny Lane who vainly insists she's a band aide rather than a groupie; Frances McDormand as William's loving, worrying mother; Billy Crudup and Jason Lee as the rival frontline egos in Stillwater; and Philip Seymour Hoffman as William's mentor and fellow San Diego native, the legendary rock journalist, Lester Bangs.

The versatile and prolific Hoffman turns up again, as the screenwriter who is the moral conscience of David Mamet's wickedly cynical picture of the movie business in State and Main. Mamet's jagged, highly entertaining screenplay follows the chaotic consequences when a film crew sets up base in Waterford, a small town in Vermont, where they intend to exploit the starstruck locals. Responding eagerly to such juicy material is a fine cast that notably includes William H. Macy as the movie's director, Sarah Jessica Parker as the leading actress who baulks at doing nude scenes, and Alec Baldwin as her co-star who harbours a penchant for teenaged girls.

Toronto reports continue tomorrow and next Friday.