Toronto Thriller

Turning 23 years old this year and now firmly established as the world's most important film festival after Cannes, the Toronto International Film Festival offers such a vast programme of world cinema in its 70 screenings a day, that audiences could be forgiven for wilting as the 10-day event draws to an end. Then along comes a movie like Run Lola Run or Rushmore. I went bleary-eyed into a 10 p.m. screening of Run Lola Run, having seen four films already that day - and emerged from the cinema giddy with enthusiasm. The third feature from the young German director, Tom Tykwer, Run Lola Run doesn't waste a second getting down to business, and it pumps up the adrenalin right from its opening shot of a policeman kicking a ball high in the air to get the game under way.

From an overhead shot we see a throng of extras form the movie's German title, Lola Rennt; then the animated credits roll with Tykwer's own pulsating techno score setting a frantic pace on the soundtrack, and we're off. The storyline is simplicity itself. The setting is present-day Berlin and the eponymous Lola (played by the athletic Franka Potente) has 20 minutes to raise 100,000 Deutsche marks, to replace a sum of money lost by her inept minor criminal boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu). His life is threatened if she fails.

The clock is ticking but her moped has just been stolen, so she has to travel on foot. Lola runs, and runs and runs, her shock of flaming red hair blowing in the wind as she races on her quest. Then, about 20 minutes into the movie, something startling happens, followed by something even more unexpected, and that's as much as anyone needs to know before surrendering to the exhilarating pleasures of Tykwer's inventive and innovative movie.

It deftly employs split screen, video, still photographs, animation, jump cuts and a whole lot more in its precisely planned scheme of things, and it impishly throws in for good measure that old standby of workmen carrying a vast sheet of glass across the road while a chase is in progress. Not surprisingly, this invigorating - and very witty - entertainment has kept the US blockbusters off the top of the German box office in recent weeks.

The wittiest of the US movies at Toronto, Rushmore is an exuberant yet strangely touching (though never mawkish) picture of a precocious 15-year-old scholarship student at the exclusive eponymous private school. Played by Jason Schartzman, Max Fischer is a dreamer and idealist whose grades suffer as a result of his numerous extra-curricular activities - editing the school paper, running a variety of clubs and writing and producing plays for his drama group. Around the same time that he is put on academic probation by the head, Dr Guggenheim (Brian Cox), Max falls head over heels for the new English teacher, Miss Cross, a young widow played by Olivia Williams (from The Postman), and he finds a benefactor in the self-made steel tycoon, Mr Blume (Bill Murray), who despairs for his own twin sons, the most oafish boys at Rushmore. Further complications arise when Blume also falls for Cross.

A highly imaginative and deceptively light comedy that is wonderfully quirky, Rushmore builds confidently on the promise shown by its young director, Wes Anderson, and his co-writer, Owen Wilson, with their low-budget first feature, Bottle Rocket. In his film debut, Jason Schwartzman - the son of actress Talia Shire - exhibits a marvellously droll screen presence, while Bill Murray is a treat in his sharpest performance since Groundhog Day.

Arriving in Toronto laden with awards from Sundance and Cannes, Slam, the first narrative feature from the documentarist Marc Levin is a worthy effort which fell well short of expectations. Saul Williams plays a gifted black rapper/poet in Washington D.C.; arrested on a drugs charge, he is told that young men of his race and background don't stand a chance. He releases his frustrations through free-style rap poetry sessions, and finds a soul mate and inspiration in the writing teacher (Sonja Sohn) he meets while in jail. Slam comes to life in the fluid and spirited rapping sessions which are the raisons d'etre of an often trite and patronising movie. While Saul Williams persuasively plays the central role, director Levin ought never to have allowed Sonja Sohn to improvise some of her scenes to such shrill effect. Much less of a let-down but just not quite what it might have been, Antz, the first computer animated feature from Spielberg's company, DreamWorks, had its world premiere as Toronto's closing film. Directed by Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson, this comic study of the struggles of the individual against the system features Woody Allen as the voice of the ant, Z-4195, a nonconformist who, undaunted by the ant caste system, sets his sights on the spoiled princess Bala (Sharon Stone).

There is a very impressive depth and scale to the images, and the stand-out sequences include an elaborate dance number (to Guantanamera) in which only Z, who resembles ET, is out of step. However, the film's surfeit of Woody Allen's characteristic references to neuroses and therapists seems out of place in the context and will probably bewilder younger viewers.

Pick of the requisite post-Tarantino thrillers at Toronto was Judas Kiss, the first feature from the Venezuelan director Sebastian Gutierrez. Not to be confused with the recent David Hare play about Oscar Wilde, this Judas Kiss is a dark-humoured, intricately plotted kidnapping drama atmospherically set in New Orleans over an eventful 24 hours. As the detectives on the case, Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman shine in a strong international cast which includes Gil Bellows, Simon Baker-Denny, Til Schweiger, Carla Gugino, Greg Wise and Hal Holbrook.

Director David Dobkin makes a less auspicious debut with the self-consciously off-beat thriller, Clay Pigeons, set in a sleepy Montana town where a serial killer is on the loose. Joaquin Phoenix plays the fall guy who unwittingly finds himself at the scenes of several crimes, with Vince Vaughn as the smooth-talking trucker who is a more likely suspect, Janeane Garofalo as a dope-smoking FBI agent, and Georgina Cates as a merry widow. But it's all too thinly scripted and riddled with implausibilities.

The problems with television director Anand Tucker's first cinema film, Hilary And Jackie, lie with its uneven screenplay and awkward structure. The story of the flamboyant English cellist, Jacqueline du Pre, who died of multiple sclerosis in 1987 at the age of 42, it opens on a compelling extended prologue detailing the close childhood friendship between Jackie and her older sister, Hilary, both of them gifted young musicians.

It goes on to document Jackie's rise while Hilary withdraws from music into marriage to a young conductor, Kiffer Finzi (David Morrissey), and on to Jackie's own marriage to the pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim (James Frain), and her history of manic depression. The movie echoes the marital relationship in John Boorman's The General when Hilary unexpectedly grants Jackie's repeated requests to have sex with her husband, Kiffer.

Given that the screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce is based on A Genius In The Family by Hilary du Pre and her brother, Piers, it inevitably views the relationship between the two sisters, and their sometimes bitter sibling rivalry, from Hilary's point of view - until it abruptly switches to reviewing events through Jackie's eyes. That repetitive element undermines a film in which Emily Watson and Rachel Griffiths give their all in vivid portrayals of Jackie and Hilary, respectively. The music includes an original Jacqueline du Pre recording of Elgar's cello concerto - and a duet which begins with Beethoven and segueways into the Kinks' You Really Got Me.

For me, the most disappointing of all the movies I saw in Toronto was Bernardo Bertolucci's Besieged, an inconsequential, pretentious chamber piece which began life as an hour-long drama for Italian television. It features Thandie Newton as a refugee from an oppressive regime in an unnamed African country and David Thewlis as an eccentric pianist who hires her as a cleaner in Rome, and falls in love with her. Altogether more satisfying was Julio Medem's The Lovers Of The Arctic Circle, a quite magical and thoroughly engaging love story following its protagonists from the ages of eight to 25, and the parallel relationship between the boy's mother and the girl's father. Photographed in beautiful wide-screen images on Madrid and Finnish locations, Medem's film is rooted in coincidences which seduce the suspension of disbelief.

Michael Dwyer looks at some of the more controversial films showing at Toronto this year in tomorrow's Weekend section