Here is a film that will sharply divide its audiences and that’s exactly what happened at TWIXT’s world premiere at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. Those who hated it plotted harm against its director, Francis Ford Coppola. Those who adored it were rightly confused but in a very good way. No matter what your reaction the consensus is the same and that’s that there was no other picture at TIFF like it.

THE MOTH DIARIES is the long-awaited new Canadian-Irish psychological vampire film from Mary Harron that had its North American premiere at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. Mary Harron has had an excellent track record with I SHOT ANY WARHOL (1996), AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000) and THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE (2005) so I along with many other people were looking forward to her first foray into gothic horror. What we got was a tease...

Premiering at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, KEYHOLE is the full-length feature follow-up to Guy Maddin's acclaimed MY WINNIPEG (2007). While fans will find themselves in familiar 1920's/30's black & white surroundings, Maddin has made a very challenging film in this haunted house mystery, even by Guy Maddin standards.

In a strange accident of timing, STRAW DOGS is opening in the direct wake of a couple of schlock items (SHARK NIGHT 3D and CREATURE) involving citified young people running afoul of dangerous Louisiana hicks. STRAW DOGS, which was shot in Louisiana but is set in Mississippi, is a remake of one of the granddaddies of the backwoods-villainy subgenre (albeit one set in Britain), and the new film’s handicap is not necessarily that it’s following in the footsteps of a classic, but that so many other, similarly themed movies have followed in the wake of Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 shocker.

David Cronenberg’s latest psychodrama really is just that. A DANGEROUS METHOD, which had its world premiere at the current Toronto International Film Festival and opens theatrically November 23 from Sony Pictures Classics, may not be a horror film, but as it’s a character piece about sex and history, charting the period when Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud cross-pollinated each other’s lives and shared an interest in a most unusual patient, the subject matter puts it very much in line with Cronenberg’s previous body of work.

Lars von Trier has been accused of misogyny by a select number of short-sighted filmgoers and critics, but a closer look reveals that to be a woeful misinterpretation. Sure, von Trier films like BREAKING THE WAVES, DANCER IN THE DARK, DOGVILLE and especially ANTICHRIST see the director putting women in all manner of psychological and physical peril—but the thing is, he’s always on their side. In a von Trier picture, women are beacons of strength and tragedy, strong forces who valiantly fight for space and sanity in a harsh world run by bumbling, aggressive and weak men who fear their powers.

Don’t go to CONTAGION expecting a germophobic shocker full of people undergoing grisly viral meltdowns, or a pulse-pounding thriller about the race for a cure. Director Steven Soderbergh is after something different, which works equally well, just not in the way the movie’s being pitched in its marketing.