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\u201cIf you are on the sensitive side, please take your Kleenex out,\u201d the Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland warned the audience Tuesday at the Toronto International Film Festival<\/a>. Holland was trying to prepare us for her latest, \u201cGreen Border,\u201d a great howl of a movie about the crisis at the border between Poland and Belarus. There, migrants largely from the Middle East have become pawns in what European Union officials have called a \u201chybrid war,\u201d a conflict that she dramatizes with formal rigor, deep feeling and palpably restrained outrage.<\/p>\n Holland said that she only began shooting \u201cGreen Border<\/a>\u201d at the end of March, a remarkably brief timeline for a movie on this scale. \u201cWe made it with a lot of passion and urgency,\u201d she said, qualities that infuse every minute of this mostly black-and-white nail-biter. Divided into chapters, it shifts among characters \u2014 a Syrian family with kids, a Polish guard, ministering activists \u2014 swept up in the crisis. Although her focus remains fixed on the human stakes, Holland sketches in the larger geopolitical context even as she also looks to the past, notably in the forest images of frantic, terrified people that evoke the Holocaust.<\/p>\n Holland\u2019s honesty has made her a target in her home country, with Poland\u2019s hard-line justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, likening \u201cGreen Border\u201d to Nazi propaganda<\/a>. This has prompted the 74-year-old Holland \u2014 whose father was Jewish and whose mother was in the Polish underground \u2014 to consider legal action. \u201cWe want to see ourselves as a just and right people, victims and heroes, but never perpetrators,\u201d she said after Tuesday\u2019s screening. \u201cThe violence against the refugees is not a Polish specialty,\u201d adding that she didn\u2019t make the movie to be against anyone but to be \u201cfor humanity and for sisterhood and brotherhood.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cGreen Border\u201d was one of the highlights of the festival, which in its 48th edition remains among the fall\u2019s essential industry convocations. That was still true this year, even if the crowds during the event\u2019s first half, which is when industry types like to descend, were thinner than usual. The most likely reasons were rising Covid cases and the strikes by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, which dimmed the festival\u2019s starry quotient and meant fewer people overall. Every red-carpet appearance involves entire ecosystems, from handlers to hair and makeup artists, which left directors like Richard Linklater \u2014 here with \u201cHit Man<\/a>\u201d \u2014 to joke<\/a> before his festival premiere that \u201ceverybody\u2019s stuck with me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It was a pleasure, Mr. Linklater. One of the most enjoyable, tonally pitch-perfect movies of his recent career, \u201cHit Man\u201d centers on a professor (Glen Powell) who inadvertently becomes a phony contract killer, a new identity that allows Linklater to play with questions of the self while riffing on noirs like \u201cOut of the Past\u201d with laid-back wit. The movie was one of a handful of comedies at the festival that also included cheerfully pandering entertainments like Taika Waititi\u2019s \u201cNext Goal Wins<\/a>\u201d with Michael Fassbender (about a lovable losing soccer team that \u2014 spoiler! \u2014 triumphs) and Jessica Yu\u2019s \u201cQuiz Lady<\/a>\u201d (a tale of self-discovery that\u2019s basically a feature-length joke rally between Awkwafina and Sandra Oh).<\/p>\n One of the draws of the Toronto festival isn\u2019t just its size and scope, with a lineup that includes hundreds of movies from across the globe, but also the variety of its offerings. In contrast to, say, the hothouse atmosphere of Cannes, an art-film showcase for established and newly anointed auteurs, Toronto embraces abundance as an ethos, a strategy that in part seems intended to fill as many seats as possible. To that end, while the festival has its share of art films \u2014 programming numerous critical favorites from Cannes, Berlin, etc. \u2014 Toronto also invites the kind of sturdy genre fare and middlebrow titles that would never make the cut at a more self-consciously prestige event like the New York Film Festival.<\/p>\n That has always made it difficult to identify an overarching programming sensibility at Toronto, but it also makes the event a reliable gauge of the state of the art and industry. And there\u2019s a lot of good, really good and excellent movies to look forward to this year and next, including Alexander Payne\u2019s wistful, nuanced comedy \u201cThe Holdovers<\/a>.\u201d Opening shortly before Christmas 1970 and set at a Massachusetts boarding school for boys, it centers on a teacher, a cook and a student \u2014 beautifully played by Paul Giamatti, Da\u2019Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa \u2014 who discover one another and something about themselves over the course of a lonely, eventful holiday break. It\u2019s lovely and one of the finest of Payne\u2019s career.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m still mulling over \u201cAmerican Fiction<\/a>,\u201d a biting, often caustically funny satire from Cord Jefferson about an unhappy (and underselling) writer, Monk (Jeffrey Wright), who, in a moment of dyspepsia tinged with despair, decides to write a fake memoir that embraces crude racial stereotypes. He submits it under a pseudonym, which leads to expected complications, a lot of smiling white people and some pointed soul-searching about matters of race and representation. Wright is predictably one of the movie\u2019s strengths and it\u2019s especially nice to see him in a leading role that allows him to be by turns spiky, vulnerable and sexy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Michael Keaton\u2019s darkly comic thriller, \u201cKnox Goes Away<\/a>,\u201d and Viggo Mortensen\u2019s moving western, \u201cThe Dead Don\u2019t Hurt<\/a>,\u201d don\u2019t try to reinvent their genres, which is more than fine. Shortly after \u201cKnox\u201d opens, Keaton\u2019s titular character is diagnosed with a fast-moving dementia, which is terrible and proves especially problematic given that he\u2019s a contract killer. Set in the mid-19th century, \u201cThe Dead\u201d is a heart-heavy story about two immigrants \u2014 played by a tender, well-matched Mortensen and Vicky Krieps \u2014 whose lives are undone when he sets out to fight in the Civil War. When his character rides off, Mortensen makes his intentions clear by keeping his camera steadily fixed on Krieps.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There were, of course, some unfortunate selections \u2014 oh, Harmony Korine! \u2014 but I rarely walked out of a movie. I even made it all the way through Korine\u2019s \u201cAggro Dr1ft<\/a>,\u201d 80 minutes of guns, poses and bouncing booty about a hit man (Jordi Moll\u00e0) who seems to be experiencing an existential meltdown, which doesn\u2019t stop him from blowing people\u2019s brains out. The meltdown may explain why the striking visuals \u2014 the movie owes its look partly to thermal imaging \u2014 suggest a color Xerox that was left out in the rain so the colors would bleed; the movie plays like it was made by someone who spent too long in lockdown with a lot of violent video games, a stack of Michael Mann Blu-rays and a hefty bag of hallucinogens.<\/p>\n I appreciate that Korine is trying something different, but the almost willful lack of ideas in \u201cAggro Dr1ft\u201d and his commitment to juvenile genre clich\u00e9s and troll-worthy images of women \u2014 however self-aware or, at least, self-amused \u2014 quickly grows tedious. A festivalgoer looking for something really different would have been better off sampling selections in this year\u2019s very strong Wavelengths lineup, which included Chantal Akerman\u2019s earliest films<\/a>, made when she was a teenager; a ravishing musical short from Pedro Costa, \u201cThe Daughters of Fire\u201d; and the last movie from Jean-Luc Godard, \u201cTrailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars.\u201d Named in honor of the filmmaker Michael Snow, who died in January, Wavelengths consistently offers selections that transcend ideas about what movies can and should be.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Among my favorite Wavelengths offerings was \u201cShrooms<\/a>,\u201d 18 minutes of color and joy from Jorge J\u00e1come that opens with a young man foraging for magic mushrooms in woods outside Lisbon. The movie isn\u2019t formally radical; it\u2019s attractive, elliptical, pleasantly drifty, and when the forager holds a mushroom up to the light, a subject-appropriate spectrum of vivid colors appears. It\u2019s more of a meditation than a documentary in the fashion of Errol Morris\u2019s engaging, feature-length sit-down with John le Carr\u00e9 in \u201cThe Pigeon Tunnel<\/a>.\u201d The most far-out thing about \u201cShrooms,\u201d which may have even more pigeons than Morris has in his doc, is that in \u201cShrooms\u201d the birds are used to deliver the forager\u2019s goods. \u201cIs this for real?\u201d I excitedly whispered to the programmer Andr\u00e9a Picard, who replied yes as the pigeons took flight and delivered me a perfect contact high.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n