Mike Jones over at Variety's The Circuit Blog posted yesterday the first 27 films announced for the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)and, not surprisingly, most of them hail from previous fest premieres at Cannes, Berlin and SXSW.

The Gala Presentation will be South Korean director Kim Jee-woon's The Good, The Bad and The Weird, which I saw at Cannes earlier this year and loved. Somewhat reminiscent of Tears of the Black Tiger, the film is a crazy, busy Western that centers around a map to a treasure happened upon by a (seemingly) bumbling fool, who ends up being pursued by a good-guy law-enforcement type, a wicked bad guy dressed in black, and, at one point, an entire army. It runs a little long, but it's funny and sharp, with a spectacular chase sequence near the end and a nice final payoff. Toronto film fans should really enjoy this one.

With only a handful of films to his credit, Sixth Generation Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke has become one of the world's great master filmmakers, and he has the lack of distribution to prove it. Like many other greats from Orson Welles to Hou Hsiao-hsien, he has struggled to get spectators and his movies together at the same place and the same time. His film Still Life won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival and promptly sat on the shelf. It received a cautious and limited release in New York earlier this year, but since it never turned up on the West Coast, the San Francisco International Film Festival picked it up as an entry in the 51st fest (after failing to secure it for their 50th), and it opens at the end of this week at the Roxie Cinema. It's by far the best film I've seen in this year's fest, and it probably would have been the best of last year too.

After it was introduced late into competition, leaving many critics unable to screen the film, Jia Zhang-Ke's Still Life was awarded Venice's top prize, the Golden Lion. The film, which tells the story of two people searching for loved ones during the controversial Three Gorges Dam project, took a lot of folks by surprise when it won, even after the pic was shown to a packed house following the awards ceremony. Thus, many began to question the jury's decisions, who were originally split four to three over the top prize and had to hold an extra meeting on Saturday in order to make a final decision.

Oh, but the surprises did not stop there: In the Best Actor category, Ben Affleck won for his portrayal of George Reeves in Hollywoodland. Yes, Ben Affleck. With very little buzz surrounding his performance, I think it's safe to say this one came from way out in left field. In fact, the only award folks seemed to be in agreement with was the prize for Best Actress, which went to Helen Mirren for The Queen.