Last year, the Toronto International Film Festival opened with Jeremy Podeswa's World War II film Fugitive Pieces -- an opener that elicited descriptors from "smart choice" to "leaden and pretentious." This year, we're going to get more war, but this time around, it'll be a few years earlier for WWI and it comes from a surprising source.
The NY Post reports that Paul Gross' Passchendaele will kick off the festival on September 4. Yes, this is the Paul Gross of Mountie-clad Due South, who starred with now-director Peter Berg in Aspen Extreme, and recently was one of the Men with Brooms. He wrote the feature, and stars as Michael Dunne -- a man injured in France who comes home to Calgary. However, a romance with a nurse inspires him to go back to France to protect her younger brother, who is embroiled in the third battle of Ypres, otherwise known as Passchendaele.

Unfortunately, even though Gross has a ton of light fare under his belt, this film should prove to be just as heavy as last year's selection. Passchendaele wasn't a battle that ended in great strategic gains, but rather a battle that gained a little bit of land in exchange for the deaths of approximately half a million men. (And most of the territory was regained by Germany the next year.) Still, kudos to you, Mr. Gross, and I can't wait to see what you've done!

Cinematical was just handed this exclusive poster for the film Fugitive Pieces (click on the image to enlarge), based on the best-selling novel from Anne Michaels and directed by Jeremy Podeswa (Six Feet Under, Dexter). A Canadian film, Fugitive Pieces helped launch last year's Toronto International Film Festival, where a whole crop of people really dug it. Named one of Canada's Top Ten of the year, the film "tells the story of Jakob Beer (Robbie Kay), a man whose life is haunted by his childhood experiences during WWII. As a child in Poland he is orphaned during wartime then saved by a compassionate Greek archaeologist. Over the course of his life, he attempts to deal with the losses he has endured. Through his writing, and then through the discovery of true love, Jakob is ultimately freed from the legacy of his past," so says the synopsis. Looks good. Looks meaty. I like it.

Fugitive Pieces is due out in theaters on May 2, and you can check out the trailer right here.

Expect Sigourney Weaver to receive an Oscar nod for her work in The Girl in the Park, which got a warm reception at this year's Toronto fest. Weaver plays Julia Sandburg, a 40-something business executive and mother of two, including a toddler named Maggie. Julia's life, which we can sense has been planned down to the smallest detail, is unexpectedly shipwrecked when, during routine playtime in a park one day, Maggie goes missing under her nose. The child is not found, and her disappearance is tied to a string of similar abductions in the area, leaving practically no hope. Cut to fifteen years later -- Julia now looks to be in her late 50s and has spent the last fifteen years living a solitary, robotic existence, the disappearance having disintegrated her marriage, poisoned her relationship with her remaining child, and taken a toll on her mental health. Existing more or less as a shut-in these past years, her own relatives, including her son and new daughter-in-law, can hardly believe it when she turns up at a family function.

The son and daughter-in-law, played by Alessandro Nivola and Keri Russell, are budding suburbanites who are planning for a new child and have no intention of living their lives in the past, but the past is the only place Julia feels safe, and there seems to be little prospect of her returning to any kind of social normalcy. This is the lay of the land when Louise comes into the picture. A sleazy drifter and scam-artist in her young twenties, played effectively by Superman's dame Kate Bosworth, Louise meets Julia in the city by chance and picks up on her vulnerability, perhaps sensing she's some old, lonely lesbian who can be taken for a ride and cleaned out or more simply, someone who will feel sorry for her. During their first meeting, Louise gives Julia a phoney tale of woe, and in the space of a few minutes, Julia has her checkbook out and is shelling out for travel fare and medical expenses for an unborn child (which doesn't exist.) Louise then wisely disappears, but their interaction isn't over yet.

It's been said that great moves forward don't have to be in mighty arenas; indeed, you could argue that some revolutionary acts are bold precisely because of their triviality. Breakfast with Scot -- a hometown favorite here in Toronto for the Film Festival -- is a heartwarming, fish-out-of-water family comedy. It details what happens to ex-hockey player Eric (Tom Cavanagh) when his partner Sam (Ben Shenkman) has to take in, temporarily, his brother's dead ex-lover's child, Scot (Noah Bernett). Breakfast with Scot shows us gay relationships, gay struggles, gay family. It is as agreeably, tastefully, charmingly slight and lame and trivial as anything the hetero mainstream could make out of the same plotline. The closest thing to a controversy in it is that, as near as I can tell, Eric and Sam aren't using real maple syrup for the title meals.

Eric used to play as a pro with the Toronto Maple Leafs; now, he's a sportscaster. (As a press piece I was handed leaving the screening noted, it's the first time a major pro sports team has let their logo and name be used in a gay-themed film. All I could hear in my head was a paraphrase of The Kids in the Hall: It's a Canadian fact.) Eric 's been so far in the closet for so long he's on a first-name basis with the shoe trees, though -- much to Sam's annoyance, as Sam would probably like to you know, hold his boyfriend's hand now and then. Much to Eric's annoyance, Sam has to take in Scot until his screw-up brother can get back from Brazil. And Scot is ... a bit of a fancy lad? Gay? Who can say -- Scot's 11 -- but he's boa-clad, fond of make-up and might as well be carrying a French horn in one hand and a three-dollar bill -- excuse me, a welded-together Loonie and Toonie -- in the other.

Closing the Toronto International Film Festival, Paolo Barzman's Emotional Arithmetic opens in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where a family's awaiting the arrival of a guest. But it's not a normal family, and it's not a normal guest. Melanie (Susan Sarandon) is looking forward to the guest's arrival; her husband David (Christopher Plummer), less excited. The guest is Jacob (Max von Sydow), who Melanie hasn't seen since the darkest days of World War II, where Jacob looked out for her and a young Irish boy, Christopher at a French transit camp. At the airport, Melanie's surprised to find that Jacob, just released after 35 years in a prison psychiatric camp, is accompanied by the now-grown Christopher (Gabriel Byrne). Memories, regrets, past pain and and what-could-have-been hang in the air. ...

Based on Matt Cohen's novel, Emotional Arithmetic is earnest and fact-filled ... and completely inert; it's like looking at a civics class diorama. The problem isn't primarily the actors, all of whom are fine; it's more that they aren't asked to do much more than show up and be who they are -- Plummer brisk and brusque, Sarandon flighty-yet-flinty, Byrne handsome but haunted, von Sydow weary but wise. Roy Dupuis, playing Melanie and David's son, actually stands out even though his character's not given much to do; it may be because Dupuis isn't simply coasting on his familiarity and prior roles.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was first introduced to Allan Moyle in Squeeze Play, when he was the "Wet T-Shirt Waterboy." The flick is an old, risque adult comedy that my friend and I would sneakily watch late at night during sleepovers (when we were way too young for the buttocks-ball-catching material). But it wasn't until the '90s that Moyle hit his stride, directing two music-laden, teen cult classics -- my beloved Pump Up the Volume and the goofy yet lovable Empire Records. After that, he was teen-tuckered out and made a few forgettable movies with Baldwin brothers and the surprisingly mellow New Waterford Girl. But now he has revisited some of his previous music magic with the quirky, Canadian black comedy -- Weirdsville.

The flick is pretty much Harold and Kumar meets Bubble Boy, but take away the Fabio-freaks and add in some Satanists. Wes Bentley's Royce and Scott Speedman's Dexter are stoners who hang out with a waifish escort named Matilda (Taryn Manning -- what a surprise). They owe a drug dealer named Omar (Raoul Bhaneja) a big chunk of change, so they strike up an agreement to sell drugs to pay it off. But Royce and Matilda speed through the stash in a marathon week of drugging, and now the trio is without the money or drugs to pay Omar back. Oh, and Matilda has OD'd and died.

"Did we polygraph the Egyptian?"
"He came up clean."
"Polygraph doesn't mean diddly."
'We always say that when they pass."
"Put him on the plane. ..."

That exchange comes early in Gavin Hood's new film Rendition, between senior intelligence officer Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep) and her underling (J.K. Simmons). 'The Egyptian' is Anwar El-Abrahimi (Omar Metwally), a chemical engineer of Egyptian descent who's been living in Chicago for years, with a wife (Reese Witherspoon) and son and another baby on the way. But Whitman doesn't care about that; Anwar's phone has been receiving calls from a number linked to a known terrorist, so after a conference which sees him flying back to Chicago he's plucked from his flight, hooded and bound and taken to an unnamed North African country, where the head of the local intelligence branch, Abasi (Igal Naor), will try to crack him. CIA field paper-pusher Doug Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) is there to observe, not to apply the electric shocks or pour the water until Anwar can't breathe or hurl him naked and shivering into a too-small cell -- because, hey, America doesn't do that stuff. But, through the Clinton-created, Bush-approved invention of 'Extraordinary Rendition," we can ask other people to do it, and pay them to do it, and make all the arrangements to have it happen. ... Anwar's suffering will stop when he tells what he knows. But what if he doesn't know anything?

Deficit drops you directly into a day in the life of an upper-class, college-aged brat in a posh suburban neighborhood outside of Mexico City. Gael Garcia Bernal directs, as well as stars as the main character, Cristobal, and as the film opens we see him driving over rundown streets with a friend, a quizzical expression on his face, giving off the vibe that we're about to enter some kind of crime drama. In a way, we are -- there are hints and accusations peppered throughout that perhaps Cristobal's father is some kind of drug lord, but Bernal isn't interested in bringing these things to the forefront. Instead, he confines any possible backstory to the whispers of the servants, who are both frightened of their employers and in awe of them. One of them, Anan, a dark-skinned Mexican of Indian descent played by Tenoch Huerta Mejia, is propped up as something of a rival to Cristobal even though they are worlds apart. He endures racist snickering and even slurs by the houseguests and zeroes in on one upper-class girl who has captured his attention.

While Anan is pining away and seething at his own poverty, Cristobal is suffering from a more lightweight concern -- his girlfriend, Mafer (Ana Serradilla) is on her way to the pool party, but has gotten lost and needs precise directions in order to get there. The problem is that Cristobal has met someone else at the party, Dolores (Luz Cipriota) and doesn't want Mafer showing up at all. There's a lot of comedy in this film, mixed in and surrounding the overall class tensions and underlying current of criminality, and it's to the credit of Bernal that it all meshes together so well. When dramatic events present themselves, such as Cristobal's receiving a rejection letter from Harvard in the mail, the film doesn't linger on them or turn them into grist for a debate or an argument, it simply acknowledges and moves on. As I watched Deficit at a recent screening, I noticed the audience members paying very close attention, undoubtedly because they had no idea where this film was going but were intrigued by the possibilities.

The best possible signpost to what kind of movie you're in for comes early in Flash Point, when Donnie Yen's hard-bitten cop Jun Ma is standing before the equivalent of Internal Affairs or some other review board. Apparently, one of Jun's more recent busts resulted in a perp with " ... three fractured ribs, a broken hip ... and anosmia. ..." It only took a second to translate the subtitled medical jargon and have it sink in: Donnie Yen hits melonfarmers so hard he slaps the very sense of smell out of their heads.

And after seeing Yen in action, you believe that; hell, you're amazed anyone he slugs even has a nervous system left. Yen choreographed the action in Flash Point for director Wilson Yip, and the Toronto Midnight Madness premier of Flash Point saw Midnight Madness program head Colin Geddes reading an e-mailed manifesto from Yen about how he's enthusiastically moving towards using 'Mixed Martial Arts" for better, stronger, faster fight scenes. I don't know what, exactly, 'Mixed Martial Arts" means, but having seen it, I know I like it. A lot.

Yen's one of a group of cops trying to take down a bloodthirsty band of Vietnamese 'brothers' led by crazy-mean Tony (Colin Chow) with the brutal-crazy Tiger (Xing Yu) as their enforcer in pre-handover Hong Kong; his partner Wilson (Louis Koo) is undercover with the group already. And the fun of Flash Point isn't in the plot, which is just a return to the classic Hong Kong action Woo-niverse of cops and crooks and conflicted undercover agents. It's in the fighting.