I’ve made a preliminary list of 55 films worth seeing at the Toronto Film Festival (9.6 to 9.15). I’ve relied upon the usual criteria — (a) decent, good or strong advance buzz/reviews or (b) a film having been directed by a someone whose past work I respect (and who isn’t considered to be somewhat over the hill), or at least by someone whose output can be called “interesting” enough so that you can’t blow off his/her latest without feeling a bit guilty.

I’ve have seen 11 of these prior to the festival. The rest I’ve only heard or read about (or read the scripts for). If you’re attending the festival as a civilian, you can’t go too wrong if you focus on these (although if you ignore everything else you’re sure to miss the four or five out-of-the-blue surprises that always pop through). I’ve underlined the ones I’ve seen and totally swear by, or have heard only the very best things about. They’re listed in five groups of ten and one of five.

I’m going to wind up seeing maybe, at the very most, 25 or 30 of these. I’ve been begging L.A. publicists to show see whatever they can in advance, but most of them aren’t coming through. The parenthetical numbers at the end of each graph refer to films I’ve ever seen or expect to have seen by the time the festival begins.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Christian Mungiu), Across the Universe (Julie Taymor), Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who (Paul Crowder, Murray Lerner), Angel (Francois Ozon), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik), Atonement (Joe Wright), The Babysitters (David Ross), The Band’s Visit (Bikur Hatizmoret, .Eran Kolirin), Battle for Haditha> (Nick Broomfield), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Sidney Lumet). (1)

The Brave One (Neil Jordan), Captain Mike Across America (Michael Moore), Cassandra’s Dream (Woody Allen), Control (Anton Corbijn), Death Defying Acts (Gillian Armstrong), Le Deuxieme Souffle (Alain Corneau), Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Shekhar Kapur), Emotional Arithmetic (Paolo Barzman), George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero). (2)

The Girl in the Park (David Auburn), Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (Scott Hicks), Heavy Metal in Baghdad (Eddy Moretti, Suroosh Alvi), I’m Not There (Todd Haynes), I’ve Never Had Sex… (Robert Kennedy), In Bloom (Vadim Perelman), In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis), Into the Wild (Sean Penn), Joy Division (Grant Gee), Juno (Jason Reitman). (2)

Lou Reed’s Berlin (Julian Schnabel), Lust, Caution (Ang Lee), Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach), Married Life (Ira Sachs), Man from Plains (Jonathan Demme), Man of Cinema: Pierre Rissient (Todd McCarthy), No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen), Nothing Is Private (Alan Ball), The Orphanage (Juan Antonio Bayona), Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case (Andrei Nekrasov). (3)

Redacted (Brian De Palma), Religulous: A Conversation with Bill Maher and Larry Charles (panel), Rendition (Gavin Hood), Reservation Road (Terry George), Run, Fat Boy, Run (David Schwimmer), The Savages (Tamara Jenkins), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel), The Shock Doctrine (Alfonso Cuaron, Jonas Cuaron, Naomi Klein), Sleuth (Kenneth Branagh), Terror’s Advocate (Barbet Schroeder). (4)

Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings), Trumbo (David Askin), The Walker (Paul Schrader), Weirdsville (Allan Moyle), Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy). (1)

With 11 under my belt by the time Toronto happens, I’ll have 44 to choose from. I’ll almost certainly miss seeing 15 of this group if not more, so now I have to decide which among the chosen are doubtful or expendable. Not fun. Not enjoyable. I’d rather just see them all.

If this story about Martin Scorsese abandoning plans to direct Frankie Machine turns out to be true, my heart will survive the disappointment. The Paramount project, based on Don Winslow‘s “The Winter of Frankie Machine,” is about an aging hit man (to have been played by Robert De Niro) who’s hounded out of a respectable retirement as the target of a hit himself.

As I wrote last June 22nd, “I really can’t stand the idea of watching another movie about another hit man. I’m hit-manned out, although this one sounds more like a meditation on old age and the end of the road. The real problem is that De Niro is looking way too bulky and roly-poly these days. It’s good that Scorsese will be doing another mob movie, but he needs to summon the courage to tell De Niro that he’s over the hill and has lost his mojo. He’s eaten too many plates of rich food and gotten too soft and jowly….he looks like an old Russian wheat farmer.”

I spoke yesterday with Jeff Garlin, the director, writer and star of I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (IFC First Take), which finally opens limited on 9.5.07. “Finally” because fans of this film — an agreeably witty and poignant character comedy in the general vein of Paddy Chayefsky‘s Marty — have been waiting to see it in theatres since it played and scored at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival, about 16 months ago.

After catching it a couple of months later at at the L.A. Film Festival I called Garlins’ film “a Big Fat Greek Wedding for witty fat guys, only without the wedding or the slobbery cattle-yard relatives.”

It’s a sharply written (here and there genius-level) comedy-drama about a witty, likably humble Chicago comedian named James (Garlin) who lives with his mom but badly wants a soulmate girlfriend. Vaguely fortyish, James is saddled with a yen for slurping down junk food late at night (which costs him in the romantic department), and he’s pretty good at getting shot down or turned down or fired.

But as gloomy as James sometimes gets (and for good reason), he’s tenacious in a shuffling, good-natured, comme ci comme ca way, and you can’t help but feel for the guy and want him to succeed.

Director-producer-writer Garlin — best known for his ongoing role as Larry David’s manager in HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm — and his fellow performers (Bonnie Hunt, Sarah Silverman and a team of Chicago-based actor pals) are all top-notch. And in an unassuming little-movie way with the emphasis on spirit and tone and quirky-hip humor, Cheese works.

One thing: The fact that there’s no Cheese website doesn’t exactly help matters. IFC and Weinstein almost never pay for websites, but Garlin does pretty well and lives a fairly flush life, so he could obviously afford to pay for it himself….but he hasn’t. He could get a decent site designed and launched for less than $10 grand. If you the reader had a good little film you’d made and nourished and brought along step by step, wouldn’t you make sure it had a website one way or another? I sure as shit would.

I don’t know why Paul Haggis‘ In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.14) wound up using almost half the cast of Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men (Miramax, 11.9), but these films are certainly joined at the hip in this sense.

Elah has Tommy Lee Jones in the lead role and Josh Brolin in supporting, and this situation is reversed in Old Men. (Jones’ supporting role — a small-town sheriff — is far more pivotal than Brolin’s character is in Elah. You could argue that Jones’ guy is central to Old Men — the soul of that film, a one-man Greek chorus.)

In both films Jones has a frank, sobering chat with an old friend played by Barry Corbin (i.e., the Air Force general who said “Hell, I’ll piss on a battery if it’ll do any good!” in John Badham’s WarGames.)

Kathy Lamkin plays a straight-talking blue-collar employee in both — a fast-food worker in Elah, a trailer-park secretary in Old Men. And Josh Meyer has a walk-on role in both.

Elah was filmed after Old Men. Ellen Chenoweth was the Old Men casting director; Sarah Finn and Randi Hiller did the casting for Elah. They must be phone buddies.

And of course, Roger Deakins shot both.

This new high-def trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light (Paramount, early 2008) is a much more layered and engaging piece than the now-removed Spanish-market trailer that I posted a week or so ago.

The difference with the new trailer is the obvious indication that the doc, which is about the Rolling Stones playing at Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre in the fall of ’06, is at least partly about the backstage political maneuverings before and during the filming, and that Scorsese is “in” the film as himself, “playing” the exacting and sometimes confused director.

Here’s a sourpuss reaction from Chicago Tribune columnist Mark Caro (a.k.a., “Pop Machine”).

Whatever the final qualitative truth of the matter, Alliance Atlantis, the Canadian distributor of Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There, is stirring suspicion among Toronto journalists that this impressionistic Bob Dylan dreamscape film is some kind of “problem case,” to hear it from a guy up there.

“Three advance TIFF screenings [of I’m Not There] have just been cancelled by Alliance Atlantis owing to ‘print availability,'” he reports, “which as you know is often code for, ‘We’re afraid to have critics see it early.'”

The first cancelled screening was due to happen tomorrow, 8.24, at 2 pm at the Cumberland Theatre. The other two — 8.27 at 10 am and 8.28 at 2 pm — were also set for the Cumberland.

“No word yet on when they’ll be rescheduled, if ever,” the Toronto guy says, “or whether everyone will have to wait until 9.11.07, which is when the first official TIFF press screening will happen, which is just a day before the first public screening. Right now it doesn’t look like they will be rescheduled.”

The old teaser for Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., 9.21) — the one that’s been out since roughly September 2006 — had, at best, a marginal impact. It gave you a taste of what Casey Affleck‘s Ford might be like — his dorky, vaguely malevolent obsessiveness — and little else. But the new trailer is a huge compositional turn-on. As in, like, whoa….

Finally, the much-touted Andrew Wyeth–Terrence Malick-y element has been let out of the bag. With all the “uh-oh” buzz swirling around this film for so many months, why did Warner Bros. wait so long to serve up the visual majesty?

A friend who saw it the other day calls it “quite beautiful, lyrical, extremely well-acted, and definitely too long.

“It’s basically a film about celebrity and hero worship. Casey Affleck is excellent as the callow Bob Ford, who’s followed the career of Jesse James for years, and wants to be part of his gang. Brad Pitt is also very good as James, a melancholy psychopath with a certain charisma who is prone to murderous rages. It has a lot of voiceover narration lifted directly from Ron Hansen‘s novel, but in this case, it’s beautiful writing that perfectly fits the tone and magnificent visuals.

“But length-wise, it’s just too darn much of a good thing. Dominik could a have shaved five seconds here, ten seconds there off of any number of scenes, and easily gotten this down to a more manageable running time of 125 minutes or so.

“It won’t make a dime. Too languid, and Warner Bros. has no idea what to do with it. They didn’t even have notes at the screening I attended. and there’s less than a month before the release. The question I have to ask is: why didn’t someone put this in a European film festival? It would have killed over there, and gotten some critical support.”

Whatever DVDs might be coming out on a given Tuesday, you can almost always count on N.Y. Times columnist Dave Kehr writing about the discs most likely to be bought, rented or at least respected by elite cineastes …the most esoteric, the most artistically correct, the most venerated in the Dan Talbot or Jonas Mekas sense of the term.

Kehr rarely steps into the rancid swamp of popular taste, not even to put it down. He always writes about the art film DVD from Criterion or Anchor Bay that needs the press. Good fellow, heart in the right place, a little predictable.

It’s too early to get into James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma (Lionsgate, 9.7) which has a lot of good things going for it and will probably, I’m guessing, be widely liked, but if this film was an interactive video game with plastic pistols, I would have spent my whole time firing at Ben Foster‘s nutball bad guy. I wanted him dead — morte — as soon as he came on-screen. I almost mean Foster himself rather than the villain he plays.

Okay, that’s putting a bit harshly. Foster is “good” as Russell Crowe‘s loyal lieutenant — intense, commanding, colorful — but I hated his performance as much as his $850 Nudies-on-Lankershim leather jacket and all the Hollywood gunk he has caked all over his face at the end. I despised Foster’s performance even more than Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s in The Lookout, and that’s saying something.

Warning: a spoiler than means absolutely nothing follows two graphs from now.

Foster is totally actor-ish and post-modern diseased in ths film. He’s delivering one of those performances that say “look at me, Hollywood — I bring a charismatic evil-ness and a 21st Century loony-tunes intensity to my parts every time.” That is, unless he’s playing Angel in the X-Men movies or doing a quality TV thing in Six Feet Under, in which case he may be into something else. But that won’t happen for a while because Foster has become Hollywood’s go-to guy for parts Michael Madsen was playing ten years ago.

To deliver a classic lunatic performance you have to out-nutbag previous movie wackos, and one way to do this (ask the ghosts of John Ford or Budd Boet- ticher or Howard Hawks for advice) is to burn a guy alive inside a flaming stagecoach. And Foster manages this feat (the performance, not the burning) with just two expressions — his frozen-eyed Alpha Dog wacko look, and a slightly calmer version of same in which he seems to be thinking about turning wacko in about two or three minutes.

An awful lot of people get drilled in 3:10 to Yuma. I’ll bet more people die in this film than all the guys killed in all the dime western novels ever written by Elmore Leonard, Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey combined, and frankly I got a little tired of this after a while. But I kept wishing that Mangold would kill Foster’s psycho. Kill him for those ice-blue eyes, for that hat he wears, for those buttons on the back of his leather coat. Mangold is good at killing other guys you want to see die, but he lets Foster skate and that’s too bad.

If I saw Foster on a Los Angeles street I would smile and shake hands and act like a gentleman, but I’d give him a covert dirty look when his back is turned.

All we need is one more movie about people who run businesses that specialize in murder-scene cleaning and we’ll have ourselves an Entertainment Weekly News + Notes story. Right now we’ve got only two — Renny Harlin‘s Cleaner (Sony Pictures, opening later this year), a drama about a murder-scene scrubber (Samuel L. Jackson) who unknowingly participates in a cover-up at a job, and Christine Jeffs and Megan Holley‘s Sunshine Cleaners, an apparent dramedy about two sisters (Emily Blunt, Amy Adams) running a biohazard removal/crime scene clean-up service in New Mexico.

How is it that these ideas always pop up at the same time? There have probably been crime-scene cleaners in business for a long while, but for some reason nobody got around to making two movies about this subject until 2007. Within months of each other. I’m rooting for Jeffs’ movie because it’s certain to be more layered and emotional and perhaps even funny. (Alan Arkin is in it.) Harlin hasn’t much of a sense of humor. I remember Sylvester Stallone referring to “that Finnish thing” that he has in his temperament.

In any event, we need one more. How about a crime-scene cleaners TV series that would be half comedy (the up and downs of an eccentric workplace family that cleans up blood and brain matter and caulks up bullet holes) and half C.S.I. because the bickering couple that owns the business wants to be Nick and Nora Charles and are always thinking they’ve this or that hint or lead that will help the cops in their investigation.

Just as there are certain high-powered male directors (Michael Mann, Oliver Stone, Paul Verhoeven) who’ve been accused of not writing fleshed-out female characters — objectifying women by portraying them as sassy hotties, madonna-whores or out-and-out vipers — there are female directors and writers who also prefer opposite-gender fantasy characters, and so they write these sensitive-wimp males for women’s-market movies like The Nanny Diaries, The Jane Austen Book Club, Friends with Money, The Holiday, etc.

I’m saying that “chick-movie guys” are romanticized bullshit projections of men that certain female filmmakers would like to meet and fall in love with in real life. Males who are the polar opposite of Vince Vaughn in The Wedding Crashers or The Break-Up or Thomas Haden Church in Sideways. Tenderness, perceptiveness and sensitivity are admirable traits in any person, but there’s something almost other-wordly about those gentle, supersensitive guys in mature chick flicks. There’s something deballed about them. They’re just not “guys.”

The Toronto Film Festival synopsis of Paul Schrader‘s The Walker (ThinkFilm, 12.7.07) strongly implies that it’s a Washington, D.C. version of Schrader’s American Gigolo. What follows is a beat-by-beat comparison of the Walker synopsis alongside one for Gigolo.

Walker #1: “A contemporary drama set in Washington, D.C., The Walker centers around Carter Page (Woody Harrelson), a well-heeled and popular gay socialite who serves as confidant, companion, and card partner to some of the capitol’s leading ladies.”

Gigolo #1: “A once-contemporay drama set in Beverly Hills of 1978, American Gigolo centers around Julian Kaye (Richard Gere), a well-dressed and popular boy-toy who makes expert, well-paid love to some of the L.A.’s most well-heeled ladies.”

Walker #2: “Carter’s loyalty [to these women] is tested when his dearest friend (Kristin Scott Thomas) finds herself on the brink of a scandal that could destroy her reputation and her husband’s career. Offering to cover for her, Carter suppresses evidence only to find himself the chief suspect in a criminal investigation. Suddenly this well-connected man-about town is a pariah, hounded by the police and forced to find the true culprit to clear his name. More importantly, he must reexamine whether it is important to be accepted by a society based on betrayal, hypocrisy and corruption.”

Gigolo #2: “Kaye’s attraction for and growing romance with a politician’s wife (Lauren Hutton) is put to the test when he’s initially suspected and then hounded for a murder of a woman he’d serviced in Palm Springs. Suddenly this well-connected gigolo-about town is a pariah, hounded by the police and trying to find the true culprit to clear his name. More importantly, he must reexamine whether it is important to be accepted by a society based on betrayal, hypocrisy and corruption. Sent to jail, he’s ultimately saved by Hutton’s testimony — testimony sure to destroy her reputation and her husband’s career.”