I would add to these the superb short by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu that's part of the feature- length anthology film called 11.09.01. The film ought to be released soon, given the timing and topicality, but apparently won't be, according to something I read during the festival.

My second-tier, pretty-good list includes WHITE OLEANDER, a decently made woman's drama noteworthy for Michelle Pfeiffer's performance as a brilliant, egocentric jailbird mom; HORNS AND HALOS, Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley's touching, perceptive documentary about the author of a Dubya-bashing tome called FORTUNATE SON whose life ended in tragedy; Neil Jordan's THE GOOD THIEF; Eugene Jarecki and Alex Gibney's no-holds-barred THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER; Patrice Leconte's L'HOMME DU TRAIN; Jim Sheridan's IN AMERICA; Stephen Frears' DIRTY PRETTY THINGS; Paul Thomas Anderson's PUNCH DRUNK LOVE; and Paul Schrader's AUTO FOCUS.

I said last week that David Cronenberg's SPIDER is exquisitely made but a trying sit. THE MAGDELENE SISTERS, good as it is, is a bit of a haul to get through also. IRREVERSIBLE is a grueling punisher for the first 45 minutes or so, until it begins to let some light in as it moves further and further from its hellish beginning (which is actually its end).

JET LAG is light and moderately quirky, but of little consequence. MAX has an interesting subject to work with, but is too talky and stagey. PHONE BOOTH has a good Colin Farrell performance, but is otherwise a rote high-voltage exercise salvaged only by its use of an arguably morally grounded villain. Alan Rudolph's THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS felt minor and didn't hold me, so I didn't stick it out.

Brian De Palma's FEMME FATALE starts with a visually arresting, dialogue-free robbery sequence at the Cannes Film Festival, but is soon after undone by a lame script. Eli Roth's CABIN FEVER was being touted as a hot midnight movie, but it felt to me like a rote horror programmer (i.e., kids in jeopardy while vacationing in the same woodsy log cabin used by EVIL DEAD's Sam Raimi, not to mention two or three Jason films before that).

The biggest semi-qualified stinkers, for me, were THE FOUR FEATHERS and THE EMPEROR'S CLUB. The lamest, most insipid, least qualified stinker of the festival was Larry Clark and Ed Lachman's KEN PARK, and I say this having been okay with BULLY and having liked KIDS.

The ones I missed and am still looking forward to include Kristian Levering's THE INTENDED, Lisa Cholodenko's LAUREL CANYON, Patricia Cardoso's REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES (which I also missed at Sundance), Xiaogang Feng's BIG SHOT'S FUNERAL, Michael Moore's BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, Shane Meadows' ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE MIDLANDS, Garrett Scott's CUL DE SAC: A SUBURBAN WAR STORY, Catherine Breillat's SEX IS COMEDY, Brad Silberling's MOONLIGHT MILE, André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer's HITLER'S SECRETARY, Jim Simpson's THE GUYS, and Caro's WHALE RIDER.

Friendly Persuasion

Dave Poland and I might have started the ball rolling, but the reaction to Phillip Noyce's THE QUIET AMERICAN at the Toronto Film Festival cinched it.

VARIETY's Charles Lyon announced yesterday that Miramax Films will give this period war drama, which stars Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, an Oscar-qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles sometime in December. A Miramax spokesperson said the film will play for a single week, which is what an Oscar-qualifying run usually implies. A wider release expected in January '03.

Miramax has also confirmed that Noyce's well-received RABBIT-PROOF FENCE, which he shot before lensing AMERICAN, and which also played Toronto, will open November 29th limited.

In one of my last columns for Reel.com, which ran August 9th, I ran a praise piece about QUIET AMERICAN, which Noyce had shown me a couple of days earlier. "This movie is not a commercial slam-dunk -- it's a haunting, adult, carefully measured piece -- but the caliber of the work that went into it deserves a commercial opening this year and a run at Oscar nominations," I wrote. Poland, who also attended the August 7th screening, said roughly the same thing in his column (www.thehotbutton.com).

I added that Caine's performance as an aging, love-struck LONDON TIMES correspondent, immersed in a romantic rivalry with a young American intelligence operative (played by Brendan Fraser) for the affections of an 18-year-old Vietnamese girl, is especially deserving of Academy consideration. His performance "is not only one of his best ever," I wrote, "but pays off in much richer and more flavorful ways than Caine's Oscar-winning turn in THE CIDER HOUSE RULES."

A roster of top-drawer critics who saw THE QUIET AMERICAN in Toronto, including Roger Ebert and VARIETY's Todd McCarthy, generally agreed on these points.

"What Toronto proved is that the movie has critical support," Miramax/Los Angeles president Mark Gill told Lyons in yesterday's edition. "Not only Michael Caine's performance but for the film itself. That's given us confidence to [release it] in the most competitive time of the year."

A source close to the situation told me yesterday that before the critical raves changed everything, Miramax was "ready to let this film quietly die...that was the plan...they were putting out the word that it doesn't work. What's happened is amazing. In the last few weeks the film has gone from having no release date, not even one in January, to having a release date confirmed for this year on top of talk of an Oscar campaign....astonishing."

Single Day's Journey

My last full day at the Toronto Film Festival started with an unprecedented landmark event -- i.e., actually paying to see a film -- and ended with a torrential downpour like something out of the rainy season in Central America.

In between were screenings of THE MAGDELENE SISTERS, THE QUIET AMERICAN and Brian DePalma's FEMME FATALE, followed by a late-night sitdown with a couple of journalist pals and Jacqueline Bisset, who was in town playing Jackie Kennedy in a made-for-TV biopic about John F. Kennedy, Jr.

The $14.50 Canadian (roughly $10 U.S.) I paid to slip into a noontime screening of Peter Mullan's THE MAGDELENE SISTERS was worth it. It's a visually gritty, unsparing prison drama with one intense (read: agonized) performance after another. Based in fact, it's about three Irish girls (played by Nora Jane Noone, Anne-Marie Duff, Dorothy Duffy) who were given what amounted to life sentences at a Catholic asylum for morally wayward women sometime in the mid-to-late '70s, for the crime of having overtly flirted with or had sex with young men out of wedlock.

The punishments inflicted upon these women and their cellmates under the yoke of a group of severely moralistic and tyrannical nuns is not, to put it mildly, pleasurable or illuminating to sit through. Still, there's never any doubt from the beginning (the sequences showing how and why the girls got into dutch in the first place are beautifully done) that this is an extremely well-crafted thing that's been painted with a blunt brush.

Once the full horridness of the situation is made clear, which takes about 30 minutes, THE MAGDELENE SISTERS becomes a waiting game for those in the audience, who in effect are imprisoned also. When is someone going to rebel or escape or exact vengeance upon these loathsome crones marching around in starched habits and discharging almost nothing but misery? The feeling of relief among the crowd I saw it with was unmistakable when the paybacks finally came in the third act. People yelped and applauded...it was like watching Spartacus and his fellow gladiators break out of Peter Ustinov's training school in Capua.

A Catholic lobbying group has already protested the harsh portrayal of the Irish nuns along with the Catholic system that supported them. The film does seem rigidly schematic (nothing is "good" in the oppressive world it creates -- there's even a molesting priest thrown into the mix), but I was inclined to accept most of what Mullan was showing me on faith.

After all, I've been indoctrinated all my moviegoing life about what a pack of horrific sadists nuns in a position of authority can be. Remember that ugly, ranting nun in Mia Farrow's dream sequence in ROSEMARY'S BABY? And that line Marlon Brando spoke about his childhood in ON THE WATERFRONT, to wit: "I mean, the way those sisters used to whack me, I don't know what!" Or the comparison between Russian Bolshevism and Irish Catholicism delivered by Jack Nicholson's Eugene O'Neill in REDS?

Next came a late afternoon showing at the Elgin Theatre of THE QUIET AMERICAN, which I wanted to see with a crowd. It played just as satisfyingly as it did the first time I saw it, some five weeks earlier.

I then met up with longtime friend, former PREMIERE editor and current NEW YORK magazine columnist Anne Thompson at Bistro 990, and we cabbed down to Roy Thomson Hall for what turned out to be a sad, numbing encounter with Brian De Palma's FEMME FATALE.

All due respect, but it's De Palma's worst ever. It's absolute tripe. The best thing in it, as with any De Palma flick, is the virtuoso camera work, which is memorably used for a heist sequence at the very beginning, sans dialogue and accompanied only by a piece of music strongly resembling Ravel's "Bolero."

But a familiar De Palma bugaboo -- a ludicrous script, which he wrote himself -- brings it down, and then down further. Let's take this opportunity to propose an eternal ban on all scripts ever again using the idea of a dream as a raison d'etre for a character's experience, or as a POV device. Dream sequences will, of course, be allowed, but no more "it's all happening inside a dream" schemes. I mean, movies are dreams...right?

De Palma is commonly thought to be a flagrant misogynist, but I couldn't help but support his decision to use Danish supermodel Rie Rasmussen for a walk-on role as a mostly nude girlfriend of a film director in the robbery sequence. Very hot stuff, especially a lesbo lovemaking session she gets into with star Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in the ladies room inside Cannes' Palais du Festival.

Staggered, Thompson and I cabbed back up to Bistro 990. We were joined by CHICAGO TRIBUNE film critic Michael Wilmington, his girlfriend Jackie Fitzgerald (also of the Tribune), and Jacqueline Bisset, whom I last ran into at Sundance '01 when she was plugging her latest film, SLEEPY TIME GAL. Bisset is bright and perspicacious, and has generally chosen wisely in the films she's acted in over the years, all of which contributes to her being pretty fascinating. Still, it's a struggle every time I see her to concentrate on her works and words, and not fantasize about her in a more primitive vein.

Anyway, we all sat around, tossing the usual festival shit back and forth. Then it began to rain, and then stopped, and then started up again like cats and dogs. It came down in sheets. I wanted to just sit there and feel the moisture and absorb nature's energy, but it was after midnight and I had to pack and catch a plane the next morning.

Dorff

"I see you don't have Deuces Wild or feardotcom in your Worst of '02 list. They are easily the worst of '02, a fact that is curiously amplified by Stephen Dorff being the star of both. I was looking forward to The Devil's Throat with Dennis Quaid until I found out Dorff was in it. Dorff's being in a film is a sign to me that every other actor in town has turned it down so they settled for Dorff. I'm waiting for him to do straight-to-video stuff with Tim Conway. 'Dorf on Golf' meets 'Dorff on Sadism.'" -- John English

Wells to English: Man, that's cruel. Dorff does seem to be the guy on the bottom of the list and his being in a film does seem to imply a rough sit, but I don't know....I feel for the guy. Maybe Lady Luck will shine down one of these days, and he'll turn up in a film that everyone will admire and tell their friends about.

Black Squirrels

"There are black squirrels in Stuyvesant Town, an apartment complex on Manhattan's lower east side. I've been fascinated with them ever since I moved to the city. Why don't they mix with the other squirrels? Did they have a war with the greys and the reds and chase them out.... ? I've never seen them anywhere else, although I did experience a war between greys and reds in Minnesota one time. The smaller reds won decisively!" -- Andrea Sandvig, c/o Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw

"You can find black squirrels as far south as Virginia, and I've even seen them in North Carolina. They are far more enjoyable to watch than the standard brown variety. Much more energetic in climbing trees, chasing each other, and so on." -- Edward McFadden, c/o Reader's Digest.

"I recently made the 20 mile move from Manhattan to Westchester (after growing up on Long Island) and was shocked to find that squirrels in Westchester are all black. Who knew that crossing a river could have such an effect on the squirrel population?" -- David Lichtman

"The only place I've ever seen black squirrels is outside the building where my former shrink lives, a few minutes' walk from my place in Greenwich Village. Are there any shrinks in the immediate vicinity of the Toronto Film Festival?" -- Kevin Kusinitz, New York City.

Role Playing

Today's cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mark Rydell, David Arkin, Sterling Hayden, Nina van Pallandt, Henry Gibson, Warren Berlinger, Jim Bouton, Elliott Gould.

What's That Line?

Starting fresh and clean: A couple of gravediggers have finished shoveling the dirt, and it's now time to say a few words.

Gravedigger #1:		Here lies....(pauses)....you know, [name], I've forgotten who we've just buried.
Gravedigger #2:		[says last name of deceased]
Gravedigger #1:		Here lies Corporal Herbert [name], serial number #0123457. Valiant member of the King's Own or the Queen's Own, or something. Who died of beriberi in the year of our Lord [year]...for the greater glory of.....[to Gravedigger # 2] What did he die for?
Gravedigger #2:		Ah, come off it! No need to mock the grave!
Gravedigger #1:		I don't mock the grave or the man. May he rest in peace. He found little enough if it while he was alive.