I attended my first public screening today. What I said the other day about everything running on time and no hiccoughs? Apparently, that’s for press and industry screenings only. The theatre didn’t let in until the movie was supposed to begin, and the actual start happened fifteen minutes late. Not terrible, obviously, but it did mean everyone waiting to get in had to stand in the rain a fair bit longer than they were expecting. Still, putting on a festival like this is a staggering logistical undertaking, so we can probably cut TIFF a little slack.

SYNEDOCHE, NEW YORK (dir. Charlie Kaufman)

I’m not even sure where to begin with this one. Synedoche is Kaufman’s directorial debut after writing such mind-melters as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. As should probably be expected when you give a dedicated weirdo complete control over a movie, Synedoche makes those others seem like simple, straightforward stories. Basically, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a playwright trying to complete his most ambitious project – a performance piece featuring hundreds of individual scenes acted out simultaneously, including ones that have actors playing Hoffman and his assistant, and other actors playing the actors playing Hoffman and his assistant. Reality loops in on itself like nesting dolls. Time, narrative and characterizations get toyed around with like something out of a Lynch movie, with the creepiness replaced with sadness and confusion.

The most amazing part is that it all works – despite the insanity, Kaufman never seems to be trying to put one past his viewers. He’s trying to communicate the big ideas – love, death and everything else – in a way that a more straightforward story never could. Rumour has it that Sony wants to trim this one down before releasing it, which would be a shame – and pointless, as no amount of editing could turn it into a traditional story.

THE WRESTLER (dir. Darren Aronofsky)

It’s a shame that most people will call The Wrestler a return to form for Aronofsky, because The Fountain was actually a far better movie than most people give it credit for. Still, there’s no denying Mickey Rourke’s performance as an over-the-hill pro wrestler trying to get his life back on track. The film reeks of sadness, loneliness and desperation, but not in the coldly clinical way that characterized Aranofsky’s breakthrough, Requiem for a Dream. The characters are universally vivid (Marisa Tomei is particularly good as the somewhat clichéd stripper with a heart of gold), and Robert D. Seigel’s script keeps the degradations plausible and painful. A scene where Rourke competes in a “hardcore wrestling” match, with barbed wire, broken glass and staple guns, is particularly harrowing. The Wrestler took top honours at the Venice Film Festival this past weekend, and the praise seems entirely justified.

A PERFECT DAY (dir. Ferzan Ozpetek)

This Italian drama opens with the revelation that something terrible has happened in a police officer’s apartment, then immediately skips back 24 hours to trace the causes, most of which revolve around a messy divorce between call-centre worker Emma and her increasingly deranged ex, Antonio. This storyline is actually fairly effective, as Emma and Antonio’s interactions consistently up the tension, although an early encounter plays its hand too early in revealing exactly what Antonio is capable of. A parallel story about the election aspirations of an Italian politician doesn’t work nearly as well, despite a few thematic echoes. An intense ending makes it easy to recommend this one even with the film’s uneven pacing.

GIGANTIC (dir. Matt Aselton)

During the Q&A that followed the screening of Gigantic, someone asked the director/co-writer why the film, which is mostly about the relationship between Paul Dano’s mattress salesman and Zooey Deschanel’s flighty pixie-girl, also features a sub-plot about a homeless Zack Galifianakis’s attempts to kill Dano. The answer sums up Gigantic’s problems – Aselton felt that the story was too straight-forward and needed something weird to throw it off balance. The result is exactly what you would expect, namely a fairly bland, occasionally charming romantic comedy with some tonally inconsistent tangents. John Goodman and Ed Asner excel as Deschanel and Dano’s respective fathers, stealing every scene with their larger than life personalities, but the rest of the film feels like a typical rom-com that happens to be gilded with indie quirk. It aims to be this year’s Juno or Little Miss Sunshine, but the offbeat characters are too indistinct and the vision far too muddled. A note to Aselton: if you think your story is too straightforward, the solution should be to revise the story, not hammer in an entirely unnecessary sub-plot.

Tomorrow: Con artists, real-life pirates and the secular answer to Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.