It was the fifth day of the Toronto International Film Festival, just
before a 3 p.m. screening of a new Johnnie To movie, when the stranger
stopped dead in front of me. Having returned to the darkened theater,
where the lights were too low to read by and almost to see, he had
entered the wrong row. "I can't take it anymore," he declared
morosely, shaking his head. "This festival is killing my love of cinema."

I felt for my befuddled stranger, lost in the dark and clutching a cup
of megaplex coffee. It's hard to know what and how to love when there
are so many suitors. Now in its 32nd year, the Toronto festival has
grown into an immense industrial happening, with 349 films from 55
countries. You may have already heard about some of these titles —
"Atonement," "Rendition," "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," "Reservation
Road" — the ones with the supernova stars and name directors who pop
up in the next day's news and then, in the months leading up to the
Academy Awards, every media outlet imaginable. For many of these
movies, Toronto is just the beginning of the end, the launch site for
the seasonal red carpet bombing.

The movie that the lost man and I had come to see, "Mad Detective,"
directed by Wai Ka- fai and the astonishingly prolific Mr. To, may not
have restored anyone's love of cinema, but it sent a jolt of energy
through the audience, which laughed and twitched throughout this daft
genre exercise. Even the credit sequence has its pleasures: to conjure
up the mind-set of a murderer, the madman of the title repeatedly
stabs a pig's carcass, and then has himself zipped into a cloth
suitcase and tossed down one flight of stairs after another. The ice
cream man done it, he announces on tumbling free. Bullets, elegant
mayhem and a homage to Orson Welles's "Lady From Shanghai" follow amid
circling cameras; bodies in fast, furious motion; and shattered film
space.

"Mad Detective" isn't Mr. To's finest hour and a half; it just
reaffirms his status as an action master. It's also precisely the kind
of movie that's guaranteed to play at Toronto, which has long been a
showcase for global genre cinema alongside rarefied art-house fare and
prestige Hollywood product. Nothing if not democratic, the festival
has now become big enough to be all things to all movie people. Here,
jostling side by side with industry executives and nonprofessional
enthusiasts, aesthetes and fan boys, journeymen journalists and
bloggers, long- and short-lead critics can each carve out a festival
to their own choosing, finding the movies that matter, if only for 89
minutes and their next column.

Among the films that made my festival were some that will open within
the month, like Todd Haynes's imaginative tour de force "I'm Not
There," a multiple-personality portrait of the artist formerly known
as Bobby Zimmerman, as well as as a folkie, a sellout, a has-been and
a born-again Christian. Other films, like "Happiness," a touching
South Korean melodrama from Hur Jin-ho about two lovers who meet at a
hospice, may never make it into American theaters because it may not
seem aesthetically daring or novel enough to warrant the risk.
Non-martial arts Asian films generally don't fare well at the American
box office, even those that come with glowing reviews and that, like
"Happiness," cause an entire audience to break down audibly weeping.

Because the Toronto is so large and functions both as a preview for
the fall studio season and as an international bazaar, with goods from
Germany, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia (the multinational provenance
for the period epic "Mongol"), it affords an instructive view of the
state of the American art and industry. More than any other major
festival, Toronto makes clear the divide between those movies that
matter aesthetically and intellectually — think the work of Hou
Hsiao-hsien, the Dardenne brothers and Gus Van Sant — and those movies
that matter largely because of their awards potential and the presumed
interest to what remains of the discriminating, adult audience. Think
"The Queen," "Good Night, and Good Luck" and any number of films
nominated for best picture in recent years.

These two subsets — the art cinema of Mr. Hou and the quality studio
cinema of George Clooney, in Toronto with "Michael Clayton" — are
dwarfed by big-studio trash like "Pirates of the Caribbean," of
course. But that's another story. The story here, one as complex if
more urgent, involves radical shifts in distribution and exhibition;
the ever-escalating numbers of movies pouring into (and quickly out
of) theaters; and the demise of the sort of movie love that once
inspired cartoons in The New Yorker. This isn't a story about the
death of cinema or even of movie love, which is alive and excitably
well at a blog near you. It's about how the films that once thrilled a
segment of the audience — Bergman, Antonioni — have become marginalia,
increasingly obscure objects of cinephilic desire.

The truth is that if Antonioni were directing features today, there's
a good chance that his films would not be picked up for distribution
in the United States. He would play the festival circuit. And, if he
were lucky, he might sign a deal with IFC Films, which this year
snapped up some of the best films at Cannes, some of which were also
at Toronto and will also be in the New York Film Festival later this
month, including Mr. Hou's "Flight of the Red Balloon," Mr. Van Sant's
"Paranoid Park" and Catherine Breillat's "Vieille Maξtresse." One of
the best films I saw at Toronto — which showed in Berlin and is
inexplicably missing from New York — is Jacques Rivette's eccentric
romance "Ne Touchez Pas la Hache" based on Balzac's "Duchesse de
Langeais."

The marvelous (if distractingly thin) Jeanne Balibar, all sharp angles
and shuttling eyeballs, plays a married noblewoman whose flirtation
with a Napoleonic-era general, played by an equally idiosyncratic
Guillaume Depardieu, leads to tragedy. Love blooms, as do betrayal,
confession and sacrifice.

Mr. Rivette's superb camera moves through the period spaces and around
the performers fluidly, surprisingly; at times, the director
disappears behind the two lovers; at other moments, he takes care to
remind us of the performative aspect of their mutual seduction. The
tilt of the duchess's head suggests a thousand and one nightly
intrigues; the ravaged contours of the general's face invoke other,
more distant torments, while Mr. Rivette's direction affirms that he
remains at the height of his artistic powers.

"Ne Touchez Pas la Hache" isn't a difficult film. It isn't slow,
oblique or exotic, though neither is it fully transparent. The
complexities of Mr. Rivette's direction and of the performances, which
embrace both emotional realism and near-theatrical artifice, prod you
to think about what you're feeling, intuiting, while you're watching
the screen.

I expect that the film will offer up more of its secrets the second
time I see it, along with beauty, grace and form, as will "Flight of
the Red Balloon" and "Paranoid Park." What remains uncertain, now far
more than when Mr. Rivette was first making his name in an earlier
era, is whether movie lovers who complain that there's nothing to see
will seek it out. The audience, I fear, does not always listen.