Julianne Moore

Brian D. Johnson on Quebec’s enfant terrible

Fearless Oscar winner blazes revolutionary path for women in Hollywood

With his best film since ‘Eastern Promises,’ and one of the most playful of his career, Cronenberg is a contender for the Palme D’Or

Björk versus Canada, Microsoft’s founder sues just about everyone, and Brian Orser exacts sweet revenge

Women rule in this week’s new films

Amanda Seyfried and Ben Stiller to take a walk on the wild side with auteurs Atom Egoyan and Noah Baumbach.

In Atom Egoyan’s ‘Chloe,’ Amanda Seyfried has the scary power of a young Bette Davis

Our ever-expanding gallery of Hollywood’s hottest at TIFF

A big slate this weekend. The movie of the moment that everyone’s raving about, me included, is Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. It’s a must-see, and Anne Hathaway is Oscar’s first It Girl. Then there’s a deck of jokers to choose from—Canada’s Michael Cera, America’s Bill Maher and Britain’s Simon Pegg—in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Religulous and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People respectively. But if you’re in the mood for a thought-provoking drama to accompany world economic collapse, the movie of choice is Blindness. This elegant disaster movie—a Canadian co-production blessed with an unusually wide North American release—is no walk in the park. But with the world as we know it going down the tubes, it has a timely resonance and gives you something to talk about after the final credits.

I never recognize anyone. In my recent blog about the Saturday night party of Blindness (Blindness, Deafness and Babbling Zombies), the geeky DJ who cranked up the sound and pointed the speaker at the VIP area—forcing stars like Juliane Moore and Gael Garcia Bernal to plug their ears and flee from their velvet-rope pen—was none other than Moby.

One of the maddening things about TIFF, at least for a journalist trying to cover it single-handedly, is that most the action is front-loaded into the opening weekend. That’s when the big, star-driven movies premiere. The Hollywood studios invite a horde of North American press into town for junkets to promote these prestige pictures , and many of those same journalists have gone home by Tuesday or Wednesday. Which means if you want to get maximum media exposure for your film, you need to show it on the opening weekend. Which makes for a hectic time, to say the least. All this is by way of an apology to say it’s hard to find time to see all the absolutely unmissable films, interview all the absolutely irresistible stars and find time to blog on a daily basis. You’re always running to catch up to a festival that seems to be forever sliding through your hands.

Went to the Blindness party, which got going just before midnight at the Carlton Beach after the Cannes opening gala. Walked through a corridor of white fog to get to a soirée where Veuve Clicquot flowed like Kool-Aid and waiters swooped about with fishy things on toothpicks. The white fog was the only thematic concession to the movie. Some had joked that we would be eating in the dark, like in one of those light-starved restaurants, or groping each other on a dance floor slick with the sort of filthy slime that covered the floors of the film’s quarantine internment camp for the blind. But there wasn’t a dance floor. And some of the black-tie crowd seemed, well, blindsided by the bleakness of the film. Despite an uplifting ending that’s arrives like an oxygen tent of fuzzy sentiment, this movie is a grueling ride, and not typical of opening night galas in Cannes. Opinions about the film were mixed, although those at the premiere reported the audience was attentive and the ovation respectful. I’d seen the film with the press, whose opinions were also mixed, verging on negative.