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After a long week and a half chock full of films and celebrity intrigue, the Toronto International Film Festival has come to an end. And like any good fest, the end means the nice wrapping bow of award-giving (each link is to a review) and final hurrahs.

The Cadillac People's Choice Award: Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire
First runner up: Mao's Last Dancer
Second runner up: Micmacs
The New Cadillac People's Choice Award for Documentary: The Topp Twins
First runner up: Capitalism: A Love Story

The New Cadillac People's Choice Award for Midnight Madness: The Loved Ones
First runner up: Daybreakers

FIPRESCI Prize for Discovery: The Man Beyond the Bridge

FIPRESCI Prize for Special Presentations: Hadewijch

Best Canadian Feature Film: Cairo Time

Best Canadian First Feature Film: The Wild Hunt

Best Canadian Short Film: Danse Macabre

Hit the jump for a round-up and the last little bits of TIFF...

There's an interesting piece over at the Guardian's film blog on how critics should tackle their reviews of film adaptations. It's one of those topics of conversation that I've seen turn perfectly reasonable cinephiles into frothing-at-the-mouth adversaries -- do you critique a film based entirely on its own stand-alone merit, or do you discuss how well the director brought the original material to the screen, as well?

Both sides of the argument have validity. Here at Cinematical, Jeffrey M. Anderson's review of The Time Traveler's Wife didn't compare it to the source novel at all, and he still managed to illuminate the movie's many flaws. Me, I wrote a review of the same film for another venue, and I came at it from the perspective of someone who had read, and loved, the book. I considered omitting that information from my review entirely, and just focusing on the specifics of the film, but conversations I had with colleagues after the screening kept bumping around in my head.

A couple of the folks with whom I saw the movie were confused by some elements of the plot -- elements that I, as a reader of the novel, could fill in while I was watching. Once I explained to them what they were missing, they nodded and said that, oh yeah, now they got it. But shouldn't the movie have been able to stand on its own without a crib sheet? And shouldn't my being able to compare the book with the movie inform my review?

We wanted our SXSW '09 coverage to be pretty much wrapped up by this point, but then we figured ... what's the rush? At this point we'd be covering mostly the smaller films anyway, none of which have been seen outside the festival circuit, and it'd be stupid to pack our Cine spotlight into storage without shining it a few more times for the indie guys.

So yes, Drag Me to Hell was damn fun; Observe and Report was shockingly funny and unexpectedly ... dark; and everyone pretty much loved I Love You, Man. (Oh man, and don't even get me started on the Bruno footage!) Thanks to SXSW for programming some fun, flashy studio fare -- but now we're gonna tone the budgets down just a little. Not that it matters really. A movie is a movie is a movie, right? And I'd rather pick through any of the following flicks than deal with 80% of Hollywood's summertime output. (Ummm, fine. Let's say 70%.)

My first "little" favorite is a dry indie comedy called The Overbrook Brothers, which seems a lot like every "dry indie festival comedy" I've ever come across ... for the first few minutes. But once the tone is laid down and the two leads settle into an effectively fractious chemistry, it becomes a very funny road trip with a few moments of real insight and strange warmth. It's about two brothers (Nathan Harlan and Mark Reeb) who discover that they're adopted, and so they (along with one long-suffering girlfriend, excellently played by Laurel Whitsett) hit the road to an Austin adoption agency. Much banter, backbiting, and bickering ensues, but director John Bryant keeps a solid balance between absurd behavior and sincere heart.

Featuring Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and Madison Pettis, The Game Plan feels both grimly modern and charmingly retro. The plot, with Johnson's all-star pro football quarterback discovering he's the father of an 8-year-old girl (Pettis), feels like it was deliberately calculated in some horrible, airless conference room at Disney where a group of development execs were locked in and denied lattes and e-mail until they came up with the perfect movie for separated dads to take their 'tween daughters to during court-mandated custodial weekends. At the same time, The Game Plan has the gentle, breezy execution of prior Disney family films like The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday, where the children are plucky, the parents are clueless-yet-kindhearted and the plot's schemes and complications all culminate in a cleansing, healing hug at the happy ending. Walking out of The Game Plan, I snuck a peek at my watch -- not because I was curious about the hour, but because The Game Plan was so numbingly, charming similar to Disney family films from years gone by I thought I might have fallen through a wormhole back to the Carter administration.

The timeless-but-not-quite-tired nature of the pitch can explain a lot of that feeling; strip away the more modern details, and you could have made The Game Plan in the '50s or '70s with Hayley Mills or the young Jodie Foster as Peyton. Johnson is Joe "The King" Kingman, ace QB for the Boston Rebels. Joe's bravado and self-regard would be unbearable, but for the fact that he can deliver: During the fourth down with the clock running in the game they have to win to make it to the playoffs, Joe tells his teammates "Everyone get on The King's back and I will lead you to the promised land." And they do, and he does. Joe lives in one of those stylized ice-kingdom high-tech apartments, makes money for himself and his agent (Kyra Sedgwick) and enjoys the good life, despite a nagging feeling of ennui and never having won a championship. At which point the plucky, perky Peyton (Pettis) shows up: She's his daughter, a reminder of a long-past, long-over marriage in Joe's youth. Apparently Joe's ex-wife Sarah is off to Africa for a month, and she's leaving Peyton with Joe. Joe is not necessarily prepared for this, and the film hurls itself into wringing laughs from all of the flailing and fumbling that adjustment entails. Peyton figures Joe out immediately: "You sure got a lot of pictures of yourself in here. ..." Joe has no clue about how to be a father figure, let alone an actual father; he barely has a sense of how to be a grown-up.

The directing debut of Helen Hunt gets a passing grade, barely -- the story she's telling is as old as the hills, but Then She Found Me is still executed with style. Sometimes charming, occasionally funny, it never draws attention to itself as the work of a director with training wheels on. The film follows the journey of April Epner (Helen Hunt) a 39 year-old woman who is inexplicably marrying a man named Ben (Matthew Broderick) who is so inconsiderate and self-absorbed that no woman could find him to be primo marriage material. Just as they begin to realize their mistake, April gets the shock of a lifetime: her birth mother shows up and informs her that her real father was Steve McQueen. I kind of liked that premise and hoped the movie would go with it, but it turns out to be just a gag. April's mother, played well by Bette Midler, has a couple of screws loose. More to the point, she has a couple of screws loose when it's convenient, and provides sage and sound advice at other times.

Colin Firth co-stars as April's love interest, an emotionally volatile man with a kid who happens to be in the same school where April teaches, which leads to the kind of scene where the teacher is red-faced by having the kid notice that she is having a 'sleep over' with the father. Firth's character, Frank, tries hard to start up a relationship with April and aggressively pushes her onto his kids, but naturally he isn't very understanding of the fact that she's still seeing her almost-husband on the side, here and there. Usually, a romantic comedy of this type would set up the love triangle but make it more or less clear from the start who is going to win out and who isn't, so Then She Found Me deserves some credit for going a more complicated route and portraying all of these characters as seriously flawed. Frank, for instance, is prone to yelling and storming around in an absolute rage, which is never a good sign. Ben is worse, having nothing whatsoever going on in his life.

Late one night, a family stops at a gas station as they return from a recital; another man drives his son home from a baseball game. A young boy steps too near the road; a father swerves his SUV to avoid oncoming traffic.

And hits the boy. And keeps going.

Reservation Road, the new film from Hotel Rwanda director Terry George, doesn't deal in the clashing of mighty armies or the conflict between nations; it looks at a smaller slice of the world. At the same time, the themes here -- guilt, sorrow, anger, forgiveness -- are explored with power and passion thanks to two extraordinary lead performances. Joaquin Phoenix plays Ethan, a college professor dealing with the sudden death of his son and how that's affecting his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and daughter (Ellie Fanning). He can't go on. He has to go on. Mark Ruffalo plays Dwight, a lawyer who's just drifting through his life -- his job, his shabby apartment, the ruins of his marriage -- and trying to be a good dad to his son (Eddie Alderson). When Dwight strikes and kills Ethan's son, he keeps going -- a single moment of weakness that comes to devour him. He didn't do anything deliberately. But that's no excuse. It was an accident. But it killed someone.

Chalk up another stunning achievement for Joe Wright, who must now be recognized as an auteur with few equals of his age and experience in world cinema. With Atonement, an exacting and relentlessly faithful adaptation of Ian McEwan's 2002 novel about the seismic repercussions of a betrayal in a WWII-era English family, Wright has shaped and refined that uniquely blended style -- at once as calculating as Kubrick and yet receptive and attentive to intimacy and raw feeling -- that made his debut film, 2005's Pride & Prejudice, such an unexpected and welcome surprise. Much like Anthony Minghella, his more senior contemporary who has a bold acting cameo in this film, Wright is an artist who staunchly refuses to run away from the artificiality of cinema. Instead, he co-opts and embraces it. He does so in big ways, such as in a splurgy and acrobatic tracking shot that occurs halfway through Atonement and takes about six minutes to complete, and in smaller, throwaway moments, such as an aggressively painted three-shot on a boat, with Keira Knightley posed exactly in the center.

The year is 1935 and Knightley is Cecilia, a chain-smoking waif who, despite the advantages of her upper class existence, seems on the verge of expiring through sheer boredom. Her only noticeable activity is her flirtation with Robbie (James McAvoy) who is, he tells us, "not a toff." In other words, his situation is closer to that of Elizabeth Bennett in Pride & Prejudice -- he knows how to move in high society, but has not yet found a means to anchor himself to it. When we first see Cecilia and Robbie together, it's through the spying eyes of Cecilia's little sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan), a young teen whose natural tendency is toward fantasy and make-believe -- a passion that's only partly diverted into useful pursuits, like writing. As the movie opens, we see Briony finishing one of her childish plays and recruiting the household members to put it on. Later, she watches from afar as Cecilia and Robbie flirt by an outdoor fountain -- he accidentally breaks a vase, and she sinks into the water to fetch a piece of it, before stepping out again in a mostly transparent dress.

Prior to watching Rush Hour 3, I sat real low in my seat and took a look around the theater. This particular screening had a section roped off for critics, and everyone around us were, for lack of a better description, your average urban moviegoer. Essentially, the target audience for a film like this. My row, the one in front and one in back, consisted of white, middle-aged (or older) film critics; some of whom spoke about their tickets to an upcoming opera. And that's when it dawned on me -- these people are going to hate Rush Hour 3. Say what you want about film critics, but a 60 year-old guy in a sports jacket with tickets to the opera is not going to dig Chris Tucker making bootie jokes while trying not to direct traffic. The rest of the audience, however, devoured the Tucker/Chan shtick as if it were the best all-you-can-eat buffet in town. Sadly, I wasn't as hungry.

It took six years and millions of dollars to convince Chris Tucker to return to his most lucrative role, and fans of the actor will be happy to see him back doing what he does best: shouting ... loudly. The story is exactly the kind you'd expect from a third installment; Jeff Nathanson (Rush Hour 2) returns with a script that felt as if it were ripped out of a Food Network recipe book: 1) Take the African-American male and the Asian male, then combine using a mixture of ethnic jokes, wild stunts and predictable villains. 2) Microwave on high for 90 minutes. 3) Plate your dish, and garnish with something pretty so that the audience is convinced what they're watching is something fresh and original, instead of old, stale and repetitive. 4) Serve your meal with a smile, and cross those fingers -- $25 million is a lot of money for a piece of meat that's been sitting in the freezer for six years. Enjoy!

Wayyy back in seventh grade, there was about a two-week period where a group of kids were calling me Gay-vis, instead of Davis. There's an unspoken rule amongst teenage males that states you must call your fellow peers by their last name only. And, since I was always an easy target for gay jokes (not because I was gay, mind you, but because I was weaker than a wet tissue), the boys had a grand time at my expense. I grew up in Staten Island; a borough of New York City full of tough Italian-Americans who used the word 'gay' to describe anything or anyone that wasn't worth their time.

Watching I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry was like taking a trip back 17 years -- back to a time when you couldn't step foot inside a school cafeteria without hearing someone blurt out another unoriginal gay joke. And that's exactly what this latest Adam Sandler comedy is -- a long, 140-minute version of those stereotypical gay jokes that were popular during my youth in the early '90s. Problem is, it's 2007. But if blatant, in-your-face homophobia tickles your funny bone, and you're the type that feels Sandler can do no wrong, then Chuck and Larry should definitely get you off -- but not in a, ya know, gay kind of way.

With six months of 2007 solidly behind us, it's time to talk about the successes and failures of the first half of this year. Rotten Tomatoes has released their mid-year report, outlining the Top 25 fresh-tomato reviews, and the Bottom 10 worst-reviewed films, which might not even be worthy of an old and very rotten tomato. To figure out the list, the site gathered all of this year's movies with at least 50 reviews, and came up with a "weighted calculation" that figures in the Tomatometer and number of reviews -- a scheme that lets some of the indie picks shine amongst the blockbusters. Using their fancy calculations, Pixar's ratty movie Ratatouille came out as the big victor.

A lot of these films you could probably place without looking at the official list. Of course, the goodies include Zodiac, Knocked Up and Live Free or Die Hard, while the craptacular collection houses movies like Because I Said So, Code Name: The Cleaner and Premonition. What does this all tell us? Well, four of the Top 10 are funny -- and they range from the dork stoner getting the hot girl to killer tadpoles, so yes, critics do have a sense of humor. That being said, what are the chances that comedies will get some cred at next year's Oscars? I'd say almost zilch, but I have to admit that as much as I enjoy Knocked Up and think it belongs in its spot, I wouldn't consider it a big cinematic achievement.

That aside, kudos to Sarah Polley, whose freshman directorial feature Away from Her got the top 2 spot, and is one of only two dramas in the top 5. Unfortunately, that also says something about what moviegoers are going to see these days. While we all love our action and comedy, it's almost as if dramas are becoming an indie genre -- unless they're packed with thrilling aspects or other popcorn-marketable fare. Thoughts?