Staying ahead of the pack

Toronto is a leading showcase for international cinema. This year's festivalwas full of home-grown talent too, writes Michael Dwyer

Peter Ustinov described Toronto as New York run by the Swiss. His quip sums up a vibrant, cosmopolitan city that is sensibly, accessibly organised and seemingly populated by invariably polite, good-humoured people. Those qualities are abundantly evident in the impeccably smooth running of the city's ever-growing film festival, now the finest annual showcase of international cinema.

Unlike the major European film festivals - Cannes, Venice and Berlin - it is not restricted in its programming by a high-profile competition that nowadays is more likely to deter than encourage established film-makers to participate. Nor is it bound by misplaced loyalties to auteurs who have long passed their peaks yet remain fixtures of festivals such as Cannes.

The Toronto festival is structured across 15 programming strands, one of them devoted to new Canadian cinema, an area often overlooked by us foreign visitors eager to gorge on the vast international menu. This year's line-up was so attractive, however, that I saw five new films by Canadian directors, having already savoured the festival's excellent opening presentation, Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, at Cannes.

The Saddest Music In The World, the most inventive and satisfying film to date from the experimental film-maker Guy Maddin, is a companion to The Heart Of The World, his brilliant 2000 short film, in its loving and quirky homage to silent cinema.

Based on an original screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, the new film is set in the Depression era of the 1930s, as the London Times selects Maddin's home town of Winnipeg as the world capital of sorrow - for the fourth consecutive year.

Capitalising on this dubious distinction to boost sales for her brewery, Lady Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini) launches an international competition to find the world's saddest music, offering a prize of $25,000. The contestants include three members of the same family: the doctor who drunkenly amputated Port-Huntly's legs represents Canada; one of his sons, a sleazy minor entrepreneur, waves the Stars and Stripes; the other, a morose widower and hypochondriac, is the Serbian entrant.

The consequences are wildly unpredictable and played with sustained, admirably deadpan aplomb. As Siam takes on Mexico in the first round, one of the pompous radio commentators glibly notes: "Nobody beats the Siamese when it comes to dignity, cats and twins." As the countries strive to outdo each other with musical misery the African team performs a pygmy funeral song and the Spaniards deliver a "savage lament" for a jailed woman facing execution.

Maddin's cherishably zany concoction is fashioned in the style of a flickering black-and-white valentine to the heyday of silent movies.

It was one of two unorthodox musicals directed by distinctive Canadian talents on show at Toronto this year, the other being Greendale, a neo-hippie eco-musical written, performed and directed with passionate conviction by Toronto native Neil Young under his film-making pseudonym of Bernard Shakey.

More than a few critics sneered at what they perceived as the naivety of Young's heartfelt venture, a "musical novel" blending a family saga with firm pro-environment and anti-war messages and set among a small population of archetypes in the fictional town of Greendale. In the film's most audacious device, spoken dialogue is entirely eschewed in favour of having the characters lip-sync to Young's vocals on the vigorous soundtrack, and this proves wonderfully effective in a movie that I found as irresistible as it is patently sincere.

Young's 23-year-old fellow Torontonian Jacob Tierney made his name as a child actor - in Josh And SAM, The Neon Bible and the Irish production This Is My Father - before turning writer-director with Twist. The twist is that Tierney has transposed Oliver Twist to contemporary downmarket Toronto. Nick Stahl (from In The Bedroom, Bully and Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines) is edgily vulnerable as Dodge - the Artful Dodger - a heroin addict who works as a male prostitute to fund his habit.

Oliver (Joshua Close) is the naive new kid in town who's taken under Dodge's wing as a rent boy in the brothel that is owned by the unseen but notoriously vicious Bill Sykes and run by the gross sleazebag Fagin (Gary Farmer).

Remaining true to the spirit of the Dickens novel, Tierney convincingly draws a harsh portrait of evil, exploitation and the cyclical nature of violence.

John Greyson, the adventurous Canadian director of the flamboyant 1993 AIDS- history musical Zero Patience, collaborates with South African film-maker Jack Lewis for Proteus, an allegory of sexual and racial intolerance based on a criminal case in Cape Town in 1735.

Rouxnet Brown plays Chass Blank, an educated black servant convicted of insolence to a white man and given the supposedly lenient sentence of 10 years' hard labour on Robben Island, which much later acquired infamy as the place of Nelson Mandela's incarceration.

Although feigning initial reluctance, Blank gets caught up in a passionate sexual relationship with a Dutch prisoner (Neil Sandilands) known as "the faggot" - their only respite from the prison's brutal regime until their affair is exposed, with tragic consequences. The film's seemingly random use of glaring anachronisms undermines its impassioned case against prejudice and sexual repression and the contemporary references it obviously intends.

By coincidence Stander, the third feature from the Toronto director Bronwen Hughes, is another factually based story set in South Africa, although one from the much more recent past. It begins in Johannesburg in 1976 as the police respond violently to growing unrest in the impoverished townships.

When the high-ranking police officer Andre Stander becomes disgusted with his part in killing black people in the line of duty, he decides to defy and embarrass the authorities by embarking on a succession of increasingly audacious bank robberies.

In this lively and involving stranger-than-fiction story, Stander and his gang are turned into folk heroes in the manner of Bonnie and Clyde, and the US actor Thomas Jane plays the title character with gusto. Although the film peters out on a weak coda, Hughes's work demonstrates a flair for the medium in a welcome stretch after her two US features, Forces Of Nature and Harriet The Spy.

Several established US directors were eclipsed in Toronto by emerging film-makers. Robert Benton, the Oscar-winning director of Kramer Vs Kramer, stumbles with his screen treatment of Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain, which suffers from a blandly unimaginative adaptation at the hands of Nicholas Meyer. It opts for the lazy device of having the story told in flashbacks to a writer, played by Gary Sinise, whose only function is to give reaction shots.

Its theme of a mixed-race character concealing his racial background was treated far more effectively as long ago as 1959, in Douglas Sirk's superb melodrama Imitation Of Life, and there is a crucial miscasting of Anthony Hopkins in the central role, not least because he does not remotely resemble Wentworth Miller, the impressive young actor who plays the character in his youth. This is not the fault of Hopkins, who bravely delivers a characteristically committed performance as a college lecturer who becomes a victim of extreme political correctness. The film, which also features Nicole Kidman and Ed Harris, retains much of the novel's punchy dialogue, and there are several strong dramatic scenes, but they all fall through the gaping holes in the film's misconceived structure.

After yet another return to form with Gosford Park, the veteran director Robert Altman takes another misstep with The Company, essentially a filmed record of life in a prominent US ballet company. It is based on an exceedingly slender storyline devised by its Canadian star, Neve Campbell, who has been dancing since childhood.

She is cast as a rising dancer with the company, James Franco engagingly plays the young sous-chef with whom she falls in love and Malcolm McDowell invests the company's artistic director with authority and humanity. The copious ballet scenes are impressively staged and photographed, but little else happens in a film that recalls the description of Seinfeld as a comedy about nothing - but at least that series offered laughter as an alternative.

Denzel Washington reunites with Carl Franklin, his director on Devil In A Blue Dress, for the sprightly thriller Out Of Time, in which the star plays a Florida Keys police chief who becomes the prime suspect in a murder case.

To complicate matters further, he is about to be divorced from his wife (Eva Mendes) when she is promoted to take charge of the case. Dean Cain, who played the young Superman in the 1990s TV series Lois & Clark, is effectively cast against type in this breezy entertainment shot in attractive locations.

The brutal slaying of four people in Los Angeles in 1981 would have been unlikely to prompt a 2003 movie on the subject - Wonderland - but for the fact that John Holmes was one of the key suspects. Holmes's claim to fame was a 13-inch penis that made him the biggest US male porn star of all time.

When Wonderland takes place, however, his screen career has come to an end; he is portrayed as a desperately insecure, drug-addicted opportunist in an immersed and intense performance from Val Kilmer. The film's 28-year-old US writer-director, James Cox, employs the technique used by Akira Kurosawa in Rashomon to examine the case from multiple perspectives, but the movie is most absorbing in its down-and-dirty recreation of a decadent era in all its sleaziness. The strong cast also includes Lisa Kudrow, Kate Bosworth, Dylan McDermott, Eric Bogosian, Josh Lucas and Tim Blake Nelson.

Arguably the most impressive of the new US productions at Toronto, Shattered Glass marks an auspicious directing debut for the screenwriter Billy Ray. Inevitably prompting associations with the recent exposure of the New York Times journalist Jason Blair, its highly topical story relates the case of Stephen Glass, an ambitious young staff writer at New Republic magazine whose meteoric rise ground to an abrupt halt when it emerged that he had fabricated many of his stories.

Ray reveals his unravelling with forensic precision in this stylish and fascinating film, which is intelligently, methodically structured and scripted with skill and insight. In a part far more complex and demanding than his recurring role as Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars series, Hayden Christensen admirably rises to the challenge of playing a character as conflicted and duplicitous as Glass, and Peter Sarsgaard is perfectly cast as the magazine's determined new editor, Chuck Lane, who takes him on. There hasn't been a better film about journalism since All The President's Men.