At film festivals, you usually have to make a choice between seeing about a quarter of the program and writing about everything you see, or seeing as much as you can and writing about very little of it. I usually opt for the former strategy, but at this year’s TIFF, I decided to switch it up. Tired of feeling like I miss all the good films at a given festival because I’m off seeing the important ones, I made it a point to spend my six days in Toronto seeing far more films than I could possibly write about within the temporal confines of the festival. As a result, I wrote about very little within the temporal confines of the festival. Whoops.

So, instead of rushing out a bunch of crap content just to do it, here’s a brief accounting of everything I did see, with links to things I did write about, and lazy letter grades for all! I’ll revisit a number of these films — including The Road, Hipsters, A Serious Man and Videocracy, when I have more time to do them justice.

She a Chinese - B+

Fresh off winning the grand prize at Locarno, this naturalistic drama feels something like a Dardennes-style 21st century globalist update on the Barbara Stanwyck classic Baby Face. Lu Huang plays Mei, a bored teenager with a rabid appetite for Western culture. After being raped in her small rural village, Mei and a friend escape to the big city, where she works first in a sweatshop, then in a barbershop that specializes in more intimate services than a shave. After her first brush with love ends in tragedy but leaves Mei with an unexpected windfall, she ends up in London, where she again uses her body in various attempts to better her situation. After Mei and the film leave China, She a Chinese becomes simultaneously less interesting as a character study, and more interesting as a distanced treatise on culture clash and the tug-of-war, the mutual threat and lure, between China and the West. Director Xiaolu Guo had another film at TIFF, a documentary companion piece called Once a Time a Proletariat, which I missed; I hope to be able to see it and write about both films concurrently in the near future.

Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags - B

Marc Levin’s documentary offers a history of the New York garment industry “a microcosm of everything going on in this country” — that is, our current toxic economy and how, through a combination of deregulation, changing consumption patterns and plain greed, the American middle class has been obliterated.It’s a great fertile premise, and in certain early sequences — a montage reverie of vintage fashion show footage set to Rhapsody in Blue, a positioning of the Triangle Factory disaster as the 9/11 of the 20th century — Levin finds the poetry in it — but much of the film is too content to not challenge the talking heads + stock footage made-for-TV formula. Schmatta will air on HBO soon, and that’s a better place for it than the festival.

Kelin - C

If I were to rattle off a list of the shock points featured in this wordless feature from Kazakhstan — rape evolving into consensual rough sex, eyeball gouging, implied bestiality, amateur gynecology — you’d probably be intrigued. If you were to actually watch it, you’d find an soft core soap opera that, in its pretentious gimmick and total lack of humor, feels like a parody of an art film. Until the terrible CGI avalanche, that is!

The Men Who Stare at Goats - C; City of Life and Death - A

I wrote about both war films here, and more on City here.

Jennifer’s Body - C; Up in the Air - C

Thoughts on the twin Juno follow-ups here.

The Road - A

All I can say is that I was profoundly affected by this film, to the point where O spent a couple of days after the screening walking around Toronto in a mildly nauseous daze. I will definitely write a full piece before its release, but I have to see it again first

A Serious Man - ?

I watched the Coens’ film shortly after seeing The Road, and felt in no way up for it. In fact, I almost feel like I didn’t even see it. Aside from the pot humor, the recurring Jefferson Airplane motif and the beautiful final image, I can’t remember a thing about it. Another one to revisit after a second viewing.

Cracks - B-

I had to leave before the end of Jordan “Spawn of Ridley” Scott’s debut feature to make another screening, but I saw was silly but fun in that “OMG, she coughed, so she’s obvs going to die!” sort of way.

The Invention of Capitalism - B+

I reviewed this Ricky Gervais comedy here, but I want to note that this film was the most fun I had at TIFF this year. At a screening, at least.

Capitalism: A Love Story - B-

See the above link for my review.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans - A-

See my review here.

Youth in Revolt - B and Leaves of Grass - B-

These two dual-role comedies would be worth talking about in the same breath if either was worth talking about at length at all. Edward Norton in Grass works harder at being two different people and in terms of characterization gets the more impressive results, but the ur-Michael Cera’s encounter with his alter-ego in Revolt is funnier and more surreal.

Hipsters - ?

I unfortunately dozed off for about half an hour of this Russian musical, which I’ve been dying to see since Cannes, but I liked what I did see. I plan to revisit it at another festival next month.

Videocracy - A- (pictured above)

This Zentropa-produced abstract think piece on Italy in the Berlusconi era is less about the media mogul/prime minister himself than the culture he’s fostered, in which the populist wisdom seems to be that the only route to power in that country is through trash TV. I’ve heard critics complain that there’s not much story here, and that’s valid; director Erik Gandini often takes long pauses from telling us what’s happening (which he does literally, in a voiceover that’s somewhat puzzlingly delivered in slightly broken English) to show us what it looks like. It may come down to a personal matter of taste: some viewers will struggle looking for the there there, but I couldn’t get enough of Gandini’s gorgeously grainy, creepily surreal video reveries. This is screening next month in New York at Stranger Than Fiction, and I hope to write more then.

A Single Man - A-

Tom Ford doesn’t exactly leave fashion behind with A Single Man–this highly-designed adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel has the feel of a video issue of Italian Vogue–but man, has he made a gorgeous, affecting film. The Weinstein Company bought this and will surely be pushing star Colin Firth for a Best Actor nomination, which he deserves; I’ll write more on the occasion of its theatrical release.

Micmacs - C

I’ve never seen a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film that didn’t make me want to poke my eyeballs out, and Micmacs didn’t change my mind. I can’t deny that the guy has a distinct style that must take a good deal of talent to render, but his movies seem to be getting increasingly braindead. Also: if chaos theory was banned as a subject for international art film, the world would be a better place.

Happy End - B+

I wrote about this here. Side note: of the three films I saw in Toronto in which a character had a prosthetic arm, this is the only one in which we were made to understand why the character actually needed a prosthetic arm — in Jennifer’s Body and The Men Who Stare at Goats, the prostheses were pure visual jokes.

Waking Sleeping Beauty - B-

This perfunctorily-made documentary about the resurrection of Disney’s animation in the late 80s and the subsequent glory period climaxing with The Lion King feels like a really awesome DVD extra. It was directed, produced and narrated by its subjects, Disney animation producers Don Hahn and Peter Schneider, and the inside point of view is both boon and bane: I like the casual, intimate storytelling of the narration but I could do without a lot of the home movie footage of the animators goofing around. Also, the handling of the AIDS-related death of composer Howard Ashman points up the odd irony that the more transparent the documentary storytelling, the more likely it is that when it comes to a complicated emotional issue, the filmmakers will revert to cloying cliche.

Lourdes - B

Sylvie Testud won an acting prize at Venice for her turn here as a paralyzed multiple sclerosis patient who may or may not experience a healing miracle while on a pilgrimage. There are some tonal problems here — I honestly can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a critique of organized religion, or just the hypocrisy of those who try to take what it offers without putting anything into it — but as a chamber piece on envy, Lourdes is especially in its second half, rather awesome.