Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents showed this morning at 9 a.m., and it’s obviously going to be huge with the over-30 crowd (an exhibitor suggested after the screening that it could make as much as $100 million) and without question provide Judy Dench with an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. It may even nudge itself into the Best Picture competish. “Inspired” by a true story, it’s a British period piece (late ’30s, Word War II) about a spirited and snobbish widow from the upper classes (Dench) who buys a debilitated London theatre, revovates it, and then hires a dignified old-school producer (Bob Hoskins) to put on vaudeveille shows. This works well enough at first until competition forces Dench and Hoskins to try something bawdy — i.e., adding naked women to the mix. Martin Sherman’s script is spirited, bouncy and appropriately rude…which is to say hilarious. Frears (High Fidelity, Dirty Pretty Things, The Hit) has hit one out of the park…again. And congrats to producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein. One thing I’m still not clear on — who exactly is going to be distributing their Weinstein Co. movies?

Danis Tanovic’s L’Enfer, which was press screened Thursday afternoon and which I was fairly pleased with (although it doesn’t stand up to Tanovic’s No Man’s Land), is getting zapped. A Variety critic I just spoke to hasn’t seen it, but he just told me he’s heard from three different people that the Tanovic is “just plain bad,” “don’t bother,” “not well directed,” etc. Apart from my view that these folks are being way too harsh and dismissive, it reminds me once again how varied reactions can be at a festival of this calibre with all kinds of headstrong know-it-alls chit-chatting a film up or down, depending on their findings and dispositions.

I’ve been watching festival movies for exactly one day and already I despise that Universal-produced trailer that exhorts audiences to show some love for the festival volunteers. It starts with a small team of filmmakers taking bows in front of a big festival and receiving modest applause, and then after they leave the stage a lone festival volunteer comes on stage to turn off the mike and the crowd rises to its feet and cheers him like he’s a pre-couch-bouncing Tom Cruise. It’s sickening, and I have to watch this thing every day, probably two or three times a day, for the next seven or eight days.

Disney is junket-screening Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan (9.23), the Jodi Foster thriller about a mother who can’t find her daughter aboard a plane, in Toronto. The talk among festival-attending journos was that it probably was nothing to run over and catch with any particular haste. This is wildly speculative, but one big-name reporter assumes that Disney’s decision to have its L.A. all-media screening only two days before the national opening is indicative of quality issues.

Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye also had mixed reactions to Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown while attending the Venice Film Festival. He also says that the party thrown at that festival for the film was “flat,” which has nothing to do with Paramount’s decision not to throw any kind of shindig here, and yet the meaning or import of the no-Toronto-party decision has been a matter of discussion among journos. Crowe films are regarded by most journos as semi-events, and the Toronto Film Festival’s hosting of Crowe’s Almost Famous in 2000 was treated by DreamWorks as a very big deal with a very swanky party. The assumption, whatever this may be worth, is that Paramount isn’t going hog-wild on Elizabethtown at the current festival for a reason.

No clear consensus among journos as to which may be the better movie about a Middle Eastern suicide bomber who experiences second thoughts — Joseph Castelo’s The War Within (Magnolia, 9.30), which is set in Manhattan, spoken in New Yawkese and is about “a Pakistani involved in a planned attack in New York City experiences a crisis of conscience,” or Hany Abu-Assad’s Assad’s Paradise Now Paradise Now (Warner Independent, 10.28), which is set in Israel, spoken in native tongues and, according to a 9.6 piece in the New York Times, is about “two young Palestinians who volunteer to become suicide bombers” whose mission is also beset by doubts. Both are playing at the Toronto Film Festival and obviously I have to see both and make comparisons, etc.