Pardon the lateness of this report. This feature was originally supposed to run in the paper, but due to space issues it got caught in limbo for a week. I've posted it on the blog just to get it out there before its shelf life is completely outdated.

Toronto wrapped its 10-day festival on Saturday, September 15, with Closing Night Gala Emotional Arithmetic – a Canadian production, like its opening night counterpart Fugitive Pieces. Like Seattle's gargantuan festival, Toronto leaves the major awards to the audiences, and in keeping with the home grown theme, audiences awarded Best Film to Toronto director David Cronenberg's emotionally bruising and brutal Eastern Promises, with first runner-up to the unabashedly charming, audience-pleasing comedy Juno, from Canadian-born (but US based) Jason Reitman. The full list of winner can be found here. Between these Canadian brackets, 275 feature and mid-length films from all over the world unspooled (or, in the case of the increasing number of digitally shot and projected productions, unleashed their torrents of binary impulses) over the ten day festival.

Long considered the most impressive film festival in North America and treated by studios and journalists alike as the unofficial start of the awards season, Toronto casts a long shadow over every American film festival by sheer power of its line-up.

As the first major North American film festival after the continental chic of Cannes and the selective class of Venice, Toronto programmers have their pick of the most talked about international films. And as the sprawling giant of North American festivals, it commands the biggest single gathering of film journalists on this side of the Atlantic and thus becomes a magnetic for high-profile American films.

Simply put, Toronto is closest we have to a single (if expansive) snapshot of the state of international cinema of the "moment" (that moment stretching back to the Cannes Film Festival in May). The line-up is an invigorating balance of elegance and egalitarianism, Hollywood class and indie ambition, international masters and daring young turks. I only saw a mere 30 films in my brief star, barely a taste of the 275 feature and mid-length films in the ten-day festival and hardly a large enough sampling to proclaim trends and themes, but one definitely jumps out.

The Iraq war – until now left to the margins of mainstream cinema or relegated to documentaries – looms large in "serious" Hollywood drama like In the Valley of Elah (which addresses the damage done to our soldiers) and Rendition (the danger of suspending civil liberties in the name of homeland security). While these take a traditional approach to comment on how the war affects us back home, Brian De Palma's demanding and divisive Redacted confronts our actions in Iraq with a technique as alienating as it is fascinating. Take the next comparison as you will, but Redacted has more in common with George Romero's Diary of the Dead, which reworks his zombie apocalypse for the YouTube generation and confronts the responsibility and reliability (and even the motivation) of the media and its reporters, than it does with Hollywood's obvious statements on the war.

Toronto is where buzz begins for those films gearing up for the Oscar season, such as The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, an epic folk song of a western with gorgeous cinematography, a career-making performance by Casey Affleck, and Brad Pitt's best shot an Oscar nomination for Best Actor (an award he won at Venice). If so, he'll surely be up against Tommy Lee Jones' deft performance for the otherwise heavy-handed In the Valley of Elah.

The Brave One and Elizabeth: The Golden Age were dramatic disappointments but leading ladies Jodie Foster and Cate Blanchett (respectively) have staked out their spots on the Best Actress short list. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, a gorgeous and shadowy mix of espionage thriller and erotic drama, won the Golden Lion at Venice, but this overlong (157 minutes!) favorite for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination was coolly received at Toronto.

One film I didn't see, Atonement, is racking up the best reviews of any film at Toronto. Directed by Joe Wright and adapted from Ian McEwan's novel by Christopher Hampton, this period drama has earned raves for stars Keira Knightly and James McAvoy as well as it creators.

The Coen Bros.' razor-sharp adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men is their most accomplished and riveting film in years, though its offbeat sensibility and tough violence may lose it favor among Oscar viewers. Sean Penn's exhilarating and devastating adaptation of Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild is gathering a small but impassioned following and remains my most treasured experience at the festival.

I was as pleased to see Todd Haynes rework the musical form to express the mystery and the contradiction of the man behind the artist we know as Bob Dylan in I'm Not There as I was disappointed to see so-called visionary Julie Taymor throw her visual creativity into the worst clichés of musical melodrama in Across the Universe.

For pure, unabashed joy and fun, Jason Reitman's bright, breezy sophomore film Juno is poised to become the sleeper comedy of the season and the feel good film of the pregnant teenager comedy genre.

There were plenty of other films, seen and unseen, that surely deserve comment, but let me end it with something close to home. Battle in Seattle (which I missed due to scheduling conflicts) was largely shot in Vancouver (come on, folks, isn't there something a little disingenuous about outsourcing the location of a film about the WTO protests?) and played to a mixed reception, but like most Seattle residents I'm curious. The good news is that it found a distributor in Toronto, so hopefully we'll all get a chance to satisfy our curiosity.