In spite of the writer's strike keeping several larger films that otherwise would have been on the Telluride slate out of this year's fest, and the absence of Cannes Palm d'or winner The Class, which many had hoped to see here (that film is opening the upcoming New York Film Festival, and so was unable to play at Telluride), the 35th Telluride Film Festival was a solid success.

The fest scored sneak previews of Danny Boyle's hotly anticipated Slumdog Millionaire, which was very well received by audiences, and gave North American premieres to some films that you'll likely be hearing about come Oscar time, including I've Loved You So Long, Flame and Citron, and Adam Resurrected, and Everlasting Moments.

The Telluride Film Festival has wrapped up and we're gearing up for our non-stop coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival, which starts tomorrow. Just in case you missed any of our coverage from the Telluride Film Festival, here's a roundup of what we saw there. Most of these films will also be playing at Toronto as well; if you attended Telluride or are going to TIFF, be sure to let us know which films you love or hate -- we always enjoy hearing what our smart Cinematical cinephiles think about the films they catch at fests.

Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle): Fans of director Danny Boyle's work will find much to appreciate in his latest film, Slumdog Millionaire, a sweeping, hopeful story about a boy in the slums of India who becomes an instant celebrity after he wins millions on India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? ... read more

Adam Resurrected, adapted by Noah Stollum Stollman from the book of the same name by Yoram Kaniuk and directed by Paul Schrader, is a darkly abstract and haunting film featuring Jeff Goldblum in his finest, most layered performance ever. Goldblum portrays Adam Steiner, a tragic clown shattered by the horrors of the Holocaust. A clown and ringleader of his own highly successful circus act in pre-War Berlin, Adam finds himself, his wife, and their two young daughters caught in the roundup of Jews. Ironically, his audience was once full of soldiers in Nazi uniforms; now the very people Adam spent his life making happy are just as happy to see him and his family exterminated.

Adam in the present is a prisoner of his memories of those terrible years, and now resident ringleader of a fictional asylum for Holocaust survivors in the Israeli desert. He's a man with a fractured soul, and as a result of his unrelenting anguish and guilt, he astounds the doctors in charge of the asylum by the ability of his mind to make his body bleed and even grow malignant tumors as he repeatedly dies and is reborn.

For the cinephile, discovering a new film by famed Swedish director Jan Troell (one of this year's Telluride tributees) is a lot like eating a perfectly made truffle after a lifetime of mass-produced candy bars. His latest effort, Everlasting Moments, was like that for me; it's that rare cinematic experience that you settle back, bite into, and then savor as the subtle richness of the film cleanses the palate and fills the soul.

Based on the real-life story of Troell's wife's grandmother, the film takes us through the life of Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen, in a remarkable performance), a belabored mother of a large brood in the early days of the 20th century who finds renewed passion and intellectual independence through a Contessa camera she wins in a lottery. The camera sits for many years unused until one day, Maria takes it into the shop of the local photographer, Sebastien Pederson (Jesper Christensen), to sell it to help pay the rent.

The kindly Pederson shows Maria how to use the camera, and once she starts using it, she begins to see the world through a whole new lens. Finding herself unable to resist continuing to learn and improve her eye as a photographer, Maria becomes obsessed with capturing the little moments of life around her through the miraculous ability to capture living moments in still images.

A few stray thoughts from the end of the festival, hopefully of general interest. I still have one more review in the pipeline, which should come tomorrow afternoon.

- I am even more gung-ho about Slumdog Millionaire than Kim. It sort of ruined the last day and a half of the festival, because I've been unable to think about much else. I want to see it at least a dozen more times, immediately.

- I need to say something about With a Little Help from Myself, François Dupeyron's follow-up to the arthouse hit Monsieur Ibrahim. It's a respectable, low-key drama set in a French housing project, featuring a justly-acclaimed performance by Félicité Wouassi as a woman working to keep her head above water and her family together despite a seemingly infinite number of obstacles. It gets a bit too cute at points -- there's a subplot regarding the protagonist's sex-starved neighbor that is the epitome of "neither here nor there" -- but it's mostly the sort of solid, unpretentious film I greet with open arms at festivals. There's enough buzz about Wouassi that if you live in a city, you'll surely see it at a theater near you sooner rather than later.

Flash of Genius is a conventional crowdpleaser but not, I'm pleased to report, a shameless one. Chronicling the true story of a college professor's fight to reclaim his invention – the intermittent windshield wiper – from the car company that stole it, the film does many of the things you'd expect, but it may also surprise you. Don't let its Telluride placement fool you: this is a staunchly mainstream, unchallenging film, the sort of underdog-vs.-corporate-behemoth story you've seen time and again. But it's a decent rendition, hitting the right notes without insulting our intelligence.

Now, the intermittent windshield wiper is not exactly the light bulb. If you're not familiar with the term, the wiper is "intermittent" in the sense that it can pause between wipes – a problem that apparently puzzled engineers at all the major car companies until Kearns cracked it the late 60s. But part of what's nifty about the film is its ability to create suspense and curiosity around something so seemingly mundane. Kearns' first demo of his device to Ford is exciting in a very goofy way, but exciting nonetheless.

With his latest effort, Happy-Go-Lucky, director Mike Leigh takes a departure from the dark mood evoked by most of his films with a charming little tale about an eternally optimistic school teacher, Poppy (Sally Hawkins, previously seen in smaller roles in Leigh's films Vera Drake and All or Nothing), who breezes through life, always seeing the glass half full. Poppy is one of those people who never seems to get down about anything. She smiles at surly strangers, strikes up conversations with people who'd clearly prefer to be left alone, and puts a positive spin on everything.

When her bike is stolen, Poppy shrugs it off and decides to take driving lessons; her driving instructor, Scott (Eddie Marsan, also a Leigh alum from Vera Drake) is Poppy's polar opposite. Some of the film's best moments are when she's interacting with Scott and we have the dramatic tension of his simmering anger to contrast with Poppy's perkiness. Scott is intensely uptight, seems to hate everyone and everything, and adheres firmly to the belief that if only everyone would follow a strict set of rules (his rules, of course), all would be well. Naturally, the two clash.

Fans of director Danny Boyle's work will find much to appreciate in his latest film, Slumdog Millionaire, a sweeping, hopeful story about a boy in the slums of India who becomes an instant celebrity after he wins millions on India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. Adapted by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day) off the novel Q &A by Vikas Swarup, the tale is framed within an interesting narrative structure that revolves around the young man, Jamal, being interrogated for fraud by the police, who cannot believe that a "slumdog" orphan could possibly have known the answers to the questions on the show.

Boyle uses this conceit to take us back and forth from the police station, where Jamal (Dev Patel) is tortured to get him to confess how he cheated, to his appearance on the show, to the events throughout his youth that led to him knowing the answers to the game show questions. How did a boy growing up in the slums amid piles of garbage and filth know which US president is on the one hundred dollar bill, or who invented the revolver? Boyle takes us back through Jamal's life story to show us the mean-streets education that led to him knowing the answers, while managing to avoid making the set-up feel contrived.

One of my favorite things to do at Telluride is talk to people in line and on the gondola about what they've seen, what they've loved, and what they've hated. The folks who come to Telluride tend to be smart folks who love film, and I always have some fascinating conversations here.

I'm hearing strong positive buzz so far for I've Loved You So Long, Hunger, Flame & Citron, The Good, the Bad and the Weird, and Happy-Go-Lucky, all of which will play Toronto. Folks here are enamored of Sally Hawkins, who plays the lead in Happy-Go-Lucky; sadly, she broke her collarbone while shooting a stunt for her latest film, and isn't here in Telluride, but she will be at Toronto.

Hearing mixed response to American Violet (I haven't seen that one, but you can read Gene's review) and Adam Resurrected; the latter is the newest from film master Paul Schrader, and his films tend to be very heavy. I saw the film yesterday, but haven't yet written up my review for it; I need a bit more time to process what I saw. I will say this much, though: Jeff Goldblum's performance in the film is one of his strongest ever. I loved him in Fay Grim, but this is a very dark, very serious role, and he is great.

Saturday's big sneak screening was Danny Boyle's newest film, Slumdog Millionaire, which is going to be one of the biggest-buzzed films coming out of Telluride and heading to Toronto. Look for the energy around this film and positive response here to help it really pop at TIFF. My review of that film is coming shortly, but for now I'll just say that it's Boyle's best film to date by far. I had a conversation last night over drinks with a screenwriter friend who noted that Slumdog is very Dickensonian in its narrative, and we both agreed that filming over in India this time seems to have opened Boyle up in unexpected ways; this is his least solipsistic film, very accessible and with great mainstream potential -- audience response at last night's sneak, the first time the film has been seen publicly, was overwhelmingly positive.

Two more days of Telluride, look for more reviews to come ...

1. People are willing to get out of bed at seven in the morning to watch a movie about people starving themselves to death. I don't care how much people paid to be here: it is simply amazing that the 8:30 am showing of Hunger (which Kim reviewed at Cannes) -- one of the most intensely unpleasant films I've ever seen, with a program description that did that aspect of it justice -- was a near-sellout at Telluride's largest venue. By the time I got to the theater at 8 am on a rainy Sunday morning, I was 259th in line. Everyone keeps saying that what "makes Telluride special" is the enthusiasm and undying cinephilia of the audience (most of whom come back year after year), and nothing epitomizes that attitude better than this morning's Hunger queue.

2. Anyone who fights to save the whales is automatically a hero, no matter his means. Just as it was remarkable to see people line up at the crack of dawn to watch an indescribably painful art film, it was disappointing to see a Telluride audience give an uncritical standing ovation to "eco-pirate" Paul Watson following a screening of Pirate of the Sea, the mediocre, one-sided documentary profiling him. Watson, a Greenpeace dissident who goes out on a boat and tries to sink or sabotage whaling or seal-hunting operations, may well be a hero, but there's no way you could fairly come to that conclusion after watching the hagiographic documentary, which takes Watson's word as gospel, and refuses to explore the troubling implications of his often violent efforts. Another documentary about Watson, called At the Edge of the World, will play Toronto; here's to hoping it's a bit more considered and thoughtful.