I was pleased to be asked to participate in indieWIRE’s post-TIFF critics poll, through which consensus selected Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Still Walking as Best Film, Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) as Best Performance, and Les Plages d’Agnes by Agnes Varda as Best Doc. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any of those movies, but the three titles I named as my favorite films of the fest all made the poll’s top ten: Summer Hours, Rachel Getting Married, and Treeless Mountain. For Best Performance, I named Treeless‘ Hee Yeon Kim, Mathieu Almaric from A Christmas Tale (maybe technically a Cannes film, but he still blows most of the competition out of the water, as far as I’m concerned) and Matthew Newton, director/writer/star of Three Blind Mice. I didn’t see as many docs as I would have liked (I guess I’m saving them for the fall season of Stranger Than Fiction, programmed, like TIFF’s Reel to Reel, by Thom Powers), but by far my favorite was Blind Loves.

We still have a bit of TIFF coverage in the can for posting over the next few days, BTW. Look for interviews with Jonathan Demme, Anne Hathaway, Ari Folman and more by the end of the week.