Seeing stars at Toronto International Film Festival

TORONTO - It's No. 40 for the Toronto International Film Festival, launched in 1976 as "The Festival of Festivals." The idea was to bring to town movies from the world over, throw cool parties, and put the city "on the map," according to one of the celebratory, self-congratulatory "bumpers" (promotional trailers) shown before just about every film on TIFF's daunting program.

The bustling burg on Lake Ontario is, indeed, on the map: Today, it's an industry hub with more than 1,300 films, TV shows, and commercials shot every year. Come this time each September, Hollywood's A-listers touch down, do the red carpet thing, and get Yukon-ed and Escalade-ed from hotel to news conference to gala screening.

This year is no different - and altogether different, with nearly 300 new features from 71 countries playing through Sunday. A few are fresh from debuts at Cannes, Telluride, and Venice. But the majority are being presented to festival audiences (and critics, buyers, and programmers) for the first time.

One of those world premieres kicked off TIFF40 on Thursday night: Demolition, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a New York investment banker whose life spirals into dangerous territory when his wife dies in a traffic accident. Written by Bryan Sipe and costarring Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper, and kid actor Judah Lewis, it's a head-spinning, darkly funny look at grief and loss and reconciliation, with a boldly bizarre epistolary gimmick (a series of complaint letters to a vending-machine company).

Jean-Marc Vallée, the Québécois director who has become a major presence at TIFF (Wild with Reese Witherspoon last year, Dallas Buyers Club with Matthew McConaughey in 2013), lined up seven of Demolition's producers on the Princess of Wales Theatre's stage during his long-winded intro, thanking his casting and costume directors and beckoning his cast to take a bow. Vallée proceeded to take credit for discovering Heather Lind, who plays Gyllenhaal's spouse (lots of flashbacks). She also has had a recurring role on HBO's Boardwalk Empire since 2011 - not to mention, she's Greta Gerwig's arch nemesis in Noah Baumbach's Mistress America. No one, however, wanted to ruin Vallée's moment (more like half-hour) in the spotlight by challenging his claim. Demolition is to open in April.

The grief/loss/reconciliation theme has popped up again and again in the films I've seen these first five days of the fest. In Five Nights in Maine - Philadelphian Maris Curran's finely crafted, hushed feature debut - David Oyelowo is a loving husband whose wife dies (yes) in a traffic accident, and who takes the urn with her ashes to his mother-in-law's house on the Maine coast. Dianne Wiest plays Lucinda, the mom, who is in the care of a hospice nurse (Rosie Perez) and who does not like the man her daughter married.

Shot by Sofian El Fani, the cinematographer of Blue Is the Warmest Color, Curran's film is close-up and aching, leavened with a gentle wit and anchored by Oyelowo's inside-out performance. At a post-screening Q&A, the Selma star gracefully thanked the female directors for whom he has worked (Curran, Ava Duvernay, Mira Nair) and implored the Hollywood community to right a woeful wrong: the gaping disproportion of men to women in the directing field. A charming, funny speech, and clearly, he meant what he said.

Nanni Moretti, the great Italian director and screen star, is here with Mia Madre, about a filmmaker (Margherita Buy) and her brother (Moretti) trying to cope with their dying mother. John Turturro plays an American actor who claims to have worked with Kubrick and who has been cast as a callous factory owner in Buy's movie. Full of bittersweet and comic moments, production crises and hospital crises, Moretti's story is pointed and profound.

Freeheld is one of several TIFF titles to address hot-button issues of the right-now - in this case, equal rights for same-sex partners. The film is based on the widely reported story of Ocean County, N.J., police detective Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore) and her 2005 battle to leave her pension benefits to her life partner, Stacie Andree (Ellen Page), when Hester was diagnosed with stage IV cancer. Moore, who won the Best Actress Oscar last year for her turn as a professor with early-onset Alzheimer's in Still Alice, could be back in contention for her portrayal of the dedicated cop turned reluctant gay-rights standard-bearer.

Sexual identity and gender identity are what The Danish Girl, starring 2015 Academy Award-winner Eddie Redmayne and Ex Machina's Alicia Vikander, is all about. Redmayne is Einar Wegener, the Copenhagen painter believed to be the world's first recipient of gender-reassignment surgery. Vikander is his wife, Gerda, whose own art career took off when she painted portraits of Einar in his new incarnation as Lili Elbe, a chic Roaring Twenties femme.

Redmayne brings the same exacting physicality to the role as he did to his Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, and the film has a classy patina, thanks to The King's Speech director Tom Hooper. But Vikander, as Einar/Lili's enabler and deeply conflicted soul-mate, steals the show. Next up for her: the female lead in the new Bourne film, opposite Matt Damon.

Damon is in Toronto, too, for the premiere of Ridley Scott's stranded-in-space survival thriller, The Martian. It's an all-star affair (Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor), but for at least half the running time, it's Damon's alone, as he is left on Mars by his NASA crewmates, who believe he has been killed in a raging sandstorm. A botanist, Damon's Mark Watney has to figure out how to grow food on an inhospitable planet, hoping that he can live long enough for the folks back in Houston to 1) realize he's alive and 2) figure out how to get him.

Another kind of survival tale: Room, Lenny Abrahamson's brilliant drama starring Brie Larson as a woman held captive in a garden shed for seven years with her son (a remarkable pip-squeak, Jacob Tremblay). Adapted by Emma Donoghue from her novel, it's a story of trauma, abuse, and resilience - and the essential connection between mother and child. Intense.

Intense is the word for 11 Minutes, Jerzy Skolimowski's Warsaw-set existential whirligig, tracking the fateful intersection of a half-dozen or so characters in a fragment of time. The film plays like Run Lola Run if the master Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski had been behind the wheel. Skolimowski, making his first film in 17 years, is no slouch in the master Polish director department himself.

If there has been a high point in my TIFF run so far, it would have to be Hitchcock/Truffaut, Kent Jones' documentary about the weeklong interview session between the iconic Hollywood director and the French New Wave auteur. Using the audio recordings that served as the basis of the 1967 Hitchcock/Truffaut book, Jones interweaves glorious clips from both directors' work with commentary from contemporary directors (David Fincher, Richard Linklater, Wes Anderson, and Olivier Assayas, among them), offering their respective takes on the genius of Hitchcock.

He Named Me Malala, Davis Guggenheim's doc about 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager shot in the head by Taliban militants for insisting that girls had the right to attend schools, is certain to inspire, too. It's another kind of survival story, a real-life one, that speaks to the power of the human spirit.

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@Steven_Rea