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My friend Garth has gone to the Toronto Film Festival for the last several years. Every September he returns with stories designed to make me jealous. So this year, I decided I'd scrape up the money and see what all the fuss was about.

The Toronto Film Festival, which takes place over ten days in early September, has become the most important festival outside of Cannes. Due to its timing (a few months before the big Oscar season), its cosmopolitan location, and its relatively inexpensive cost, Toronto is a perfect site for industry, press, filmmakers, and movie lovers to congregate. And because the festival is both public and egalitarian, it attracts a wonderfully diverse crowd--jaded critics, high-falutin' cineastes, and casual moviegoers--who mix and talk about what they've seen. Everyone stands in line with everyone else. On a couple of occasions, I had to "rush" a show, since I didn't have a ticket. But those 90-minute lines turned out to be wonderful, as I chatted with my fellow line-mates about what we'd seen, what we liked, and Toronto itself. The stereotypical friendliness of Canadians was on full display. One elderly gentleman and his wife even offered to let me stay with them in case I got tired of my hotel.

Toronto itself was fabulous. It reminded me of Chicago in a lot of ways, with its mix of restaurants, people, and things to do. Even Torontoans had to admit, though, that Chicago has a much nicer lakefront. The weather was absolutely perfect; every single day was sunny, mid-70s, with little humidity. I didn't see a cloud until the last Saturday of the festival. It seemed almost a shame to spend most of the weather in dark rooms. But that's what you do when you see 36 films in nine days.

I'm thrilled to say that of the movies I saw, I only disliked six, and there were at least that many movies I'd classify as great. Thirty movies that I enjoyed, including six candidates for my year-end best-of list, makes for a fantastic festival.

My pick of the fest was a Japanese film entitled Shara. It's directed by Naomi Kawase (Suzuku) and is a moving family drama told with grace and power. Focusing on a teenage boy, his pregnant mother, and artistic father, the movie develops its tale of loss, love, and rebirth with perfectly paced scenes and moments of exquisite beauty. The movie has one of the loveliest long kisses I've ever seen in a film, and the hand-held camerawork is gorgeous. The film requires a little patience (though it's much quicker than Suzuku), but it rewards that patience with a treasure.

Two other favorites continued this year's trend of amazing documentaries. Errol Morris's latest, Fog of War, might be his best film ever, and that's saying a great deal. He examines the life of Robert McNamara through both archival material and interviews. McNamara was most famous for being Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, and his name is almost synonymous with the Vietnam War. But Morris delves deeper into McNamara's life, and McNamara himself provides some startling admissions and thoughtful reflections. The score by Philip Glass is brilliant, but even better is Morris's gripping editing and sense of pace. What could've been a dry history lesson becomes a powerful exploration of war and the men who wage it. The movie opens in Chicago at the end of year. Look for a full review then.

Even more gripping is the documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. This one is playing next month at the Chicago Film Festival, so I'll save my detailed praise for then. But you'll want to make room for this incredible fly-on-the-wall account of the 2002 attempted coup in Venezuela.

Those of you who've read my writing for a while know that I am a fan of slow, meditative works, and two more favorites of mine certainly fit that description. Tsai Ming-liang's gorgeous Good Bye, Dragon Inn uses a run-down movie theater as its inspiration to explore the nature of movie watching. Some of it is extraordinarily funny. In one scene, a young man trying to watch the film is constantly irritated by a couple eating loudly behind him. When he moves to get away from them, he's beset by other patrons with irritating quirks. Anyone who sees many movies will roar with laughter. The movie, however, is also a deeply personal consideration of the types of stories we tell. By contrasting Tsai's main character, a club-footed woman who acts as the theater's manager, with the heroine on screen, a martial artists in full flight, Tsai interrogates why we tend to favor certain types of movies and then makes a stirring defense for his own cinematic style. The final scene is breathtaking in its beauty.

Time of the Wolf, directed by Michael Haneke, is breathtaking for other reasons. His take-no-prisoners approach makes for difficult but extremely rewarding viewing. Isabelle Huppert stars as a mother of two trying to survive after an unnamed catastrophe has occurred. This apocalyptic tale is challenging in many ways (animals are killed on screen, for instance), but Haneke's spectacular nighttime cinematography, rigorous narrative, and almost spiritual conclusions are profound and well worth your time.

If I had to find a central theme in this year's festival, it would be striking cinematography. Every day brought movies that pushed the boundaries of cinema: the landscape compositions of Koktebel and The Return, the long-take Steadicam shots of Elephant, the experiments with depth-of-field in Distant, the spectacular long shots of A Thousand Months, or the gorgeous interior lighting of Dry Eyes. Those last two films were both from Morocco and reminded me of the tremendous variety of moviemaking taking place around the world. And this doesn't include the impressive shorts of experimental filmmaker Pat O'Neill, the power of movies made in Afghanistan like Osama and At Five in the Afternoon, the family dramas of Broken Wings and Since Otar Left, the lush beauty of Zhou Yu's Train and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, or the quirky animation of Les Triplettes de Belleville. I would enthusiastically recommend any of those films, and many will show up in Chicago's festival or arthouses. It should be a great fall in Chicago.

J. Robert Parks