Photo By Attlia Dory/Sony Pictures

Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance as author Truman Capote was a highlight of the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival.

TORONTO -- A daytime rainstorm ends with a warm September evening on launch day of the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival. The standout film of a long day takes place at midnight, not such an unusual occurance at this audience-friendly event.

Late-night fun means a rowdy crowd and a film that plays to the audience's partying spirit. Luckily, girlish comic Sarah Silverman is here to help.

Silverman, queen of the popular dirty joke documentary The Aristocrats, takes the stage at the large college auditorium that's home to the festival's midnight screenings to help introduce her one-woman film, Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic. Director Liam Lynch breaks up popular concert footage with musical numbers and clever comic bits about Silverman's jealousy over friends' successes.

True to stand-up routines, some of the jokes, especially ones about her relationship, generate huge laughs: "A couple of nights ago, I was licking jelly off my boyfriend's penis ... and I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm turning into my mother!' " Other jokes, especially her jabs at the 9/11 terrorist attacks, fall flat.

Supporting one's film means Silverman comes back for a 2 a.m. post-screening banter session complete with impromptu stretching and performance of her goofy Jewish Dance.

Asked if the dance is her new trademark, Silverman, sitting in the afternoon sun on the crowded Hotel InterContinental patio the following day, laughs loudly. One never completely knows what jokes will work with audiences and what jokes won't.

The same thing is true for festival films, no matter the genre or celebrities involved.

Philip Seymour Hoffman lays out plenty of charm as author Truman Capote in director Bennett Miller's Capote, a film that centers on the creation of the writer's landmark book, In Cold Blood. The story begins on Nov. 15, 1959, when a young girl enters the rural Kansas farmhouse of her friend and discovers a slain family. It's a solemn, quiet and brutal beginning to what might be the best film here.

After reading about the slain family, Capote wants to write a story about the murders' impact on the small Kansas town for The New Yorker. So he and his friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) join the townspeople. It's not long before Capote realizes the scope of the story: It's too much for a magazine article. He is going to write a book -- the book he was always meant to write.

Hoffman has tortoise shell glasses, wispy blonde hair, a squeaky voice and a slight lisp. He makes an impression as Capote with his full lips and a pudgy face. Capote ingratiates himself to the locals with celebrity encounter stories involving Humphrey Bogart and John Huston. He bedazzles the crowds, and Hoffman bedazzles us with his performance.

More than a traditional biography story, Capote is about writing. It's about artistic inspiration that morphs into obsession. It's about becoming too close to one's subject -- in this case, a convicted killer named Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.).

Another film that audiences will have a chance to see in theaters later this year is director Ang Lee's forbidden love western, Brokeback Mountain. The challenging nature of the film, as beautiful and spectacular as any classic western, is that Lee stops short of giving audiences what they want. (For more extensive coverage of Brokeback Mountain, see "Right Place, Wrong Time," issue of Sept. 14-20.)

The prize for the hardest workers at the festival -- even more so than press, publicists and festival staff -- goes to the thankless autograph hounds and junior league paparazzi who line up every morning outside the InterContinental Hotel and stay through the evening for a chance at an up-close celebrity meeting.

Amateur photographers gather outside the window of the Toronto hotel bar, where actor Pierce Brosnan sits for interviews on his latest film, the sharp, comical hit-man tale, The Matador. Madonna makes a red carpet appearance in support of husband Guy Ritchie, in town to promote his forgettable caper tale, Revolver.

Turnabout is fair play for doe-eyed British actress Keira Knightley, who knows firsthand about being the celebrity deer in the headlights thanks to constant paparazzi and tabloid reporters interested in her every move. The autograph mob would love to know that Knightley begins her first morning interview by staring out of her hotel room window to spy on a woman in a nearby apartment building.

Knightley laughs hard when caught in the act.

"Absolutely, it feels good for someone watched to become the watcher," she says, eyeballing the woman's breakfast routine. "It's only fair."

Challenging films worthy of discovery, even if they fail to achieve all of their chancy goals, include Terry Gilliam's jet-black fantasy Tideland, about a young girl (Jodelle Ferland in an amazing performance) who seeks a better life away from her junkie parents, and Brothers of the Head, co-directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's rowdy, ambitious adaptation of the Brian Aldiss novel about conjoined twin brothers who become Rock stars. For Fulton and Pepe, who first gained notice for their documentary Lost in La Mancha, which told the story of Gilliam's failed attempt to make his Don Quixote movie, Brothers of the Head finds them still channeling Gilliam's creative, audacious spirit.

There are always films that disappear from memory and films that suffer festival setbacks. Audio problems turned the debut screening for the pulpy Cuba Gooding Jr. film Shadowboxer into a disaster.

Films that succeeded here with theatrical deals include the satire Thank You For Smoking, Tommy Lee Jones' western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the Julianne Moore/David Duchovny romantic comedy Trust the Man and the basketball documentary The Heart of the Game.

Other films worth seeking out include Michael Winterbottom's film-within-a-film-within-a-film comedy Tristram Shandy; Thai filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang's musical fantasy The Wayward Cloud, set during a Taipei drought; South Korean filmmaker Park Chanwook's artful revenge thriller Sympathy for Lady Vengeance; and Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas' Mexico City-set morality drama Battle in Heaven.

Like all challenging films, this group divides audiences. But you'll not soon forget the experience of watching them.

The worst thing that can happen to a festival film is indecision. On the festival's last night, polite applause followed director Mary Harron's The Notorious Bettie Page, a matter-of-fact biography of the famous pin-up model. It quickly faded from memory.

Later that final evening, Romanian actress Monica Barladeanu speaks on behalf of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a documentary-like drama set in a poorly equipped Romanian hospital. Her director, Cristi Puiu, refuses to fly, so the brunette actress is in Toronto to support the film entirely on her own shoulders.

One audience member complains about its 154-minute length, but he's in the minority. The Death of Mister Lazarescu, much more emotional than any ER television episode, is worth sticking around to watch.

It's a discovery, the best one can hope for at any film festival. ©