Guess what’s surprisingly good? And is easily one of the best edited films I’ve seen at the Toronto Film festival so far, not to mention one of the most unsettling and a dead-serious spiritual seeker? Abel Ferrara’s Mary, which I saw Sunday night at the Isabel Bader theatre. I didn’t have many hopes for this thing because — frankly? — I’ve been wondering about Ferrara lately. How long has it been since he’s really hit the mark, which I guess was Bad Lieutenant in ’92? Half improvised and half “written” by Ferrara and Simone Lageoles and one or two others, and excitingly captured by dp Stefano Falivene and very strongly acted by Forest Whitaker, Juliet Binoche, Matthew Modine and Heather Graham, Mary gets into all kinds of religious issues (particularly religious hatred and bigotry) but it’s partly about how a film about the passion of Jesus Christ called This Is My Blood stirs up the wacko right and puts its producer and star (played by Modine) into the media spotlight. It’s also about how the spiritual current of this film somehow gets under the skin of the actress who plays Mary Magdelene (Binoche) and prompts her to abandon acting and wander around the Middle East, looking to connect with Christ’s spirit on some level. It’s also about how the film touches the life of a Charlie Rose-type smoothie who hosts a vaguely exploitative TV show called “Jesus — The Real Story,” and how a health crisis threatening his wife (Graham) and newborn son shakes him up big-time and leads to a feverish talkin’-straight-to-God prayer scene that amounts to one hell of an acting moment for Whitaker. This movie is nothing if not a handful, and I was surprised at how “good” (challenging, intense, impassioned) it plays.

Congratulations to Sony Pictures Classics for acquiring Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada…and I’m sure everyone concerned is breathing a huge sigh of relief. A film as good as this one (which everyone saw in Cannes last May) deserves to be released during Oscar season, but the clock was ticking all summer long and no distribution deal. In her story about the pickup, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson said that Europa Corp., the film’s producer, had been asking $6 million for the film but that Sony did not meet that price. However, SPC did agree that Jones would not have to make any changes to his cut. Directed by Jones and written by the great Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams), Burials has been called “the best Sam Peckinpah film since Peckinpah died,” or words to that effect. It stars Jones as a Texas cowboy who forces a border-patrol cop (Barry Pepper) who has not-quite-intentionally killed his good Mexican buddy to dig up the body and carry it across the Rio Grande and down to a final resting place in Mexico, as a gesture of respect.

Cheers to the Brokeback Mountain team — director Ang Lee, producer James Schamus and Focus Features — for having taken the Golden Lion (i.e., the best feature prize) at the just-wrapped Venice Film Festival. A BBC report claims that George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck “had been the hot favourite among film critics to take the Golden Lion,” but at least David Straitharn — Good Night‘s Edward R. Murrow — took the Best Actor prize, and Good Night‘s screenplay, by Clooney and Grant Heslov, was named best also. And…wow, this is a head-turner…director Abel Ferrara won the Jury Grand Prix for Mary, which stars Juliette Binoche as an actress haunted by the figure of Mary Magdalene after playing her in a film. (If the Best Actor prize had been my call, I would have said that as good and precise as Straitharn is, Heath Ledger’s performance in Brokeback Mountain is deeper and more fully realized.)

There’s apparently some concern at Sony/Columbia about Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.9), a pricey period drama and a presumed Oscar contender (in the costume and production design categories, at least). The story is about how a young girl (Zhang Ziyi) “transcends” her fishing-village roots and becomes one of Japan’s most celebrated geishas. Research has apparently indicated that the exotic story elements (the film is set in Japan in the 1930s and ’40s) aren’t being understood and/or absorbed as clearly as Sony would like, so Cold Mountain director Anthony Minghella has been brought in to write some voice-over narration. Adding narration to a film isn’t an absolute guarantee that the movie isn’t telling its story well enough on its own terms, but let’s face it — it usually means trouble. Then again, it could mean that the test audiences who’ve seen it are perhaps a tad too provincial and could use a bit more schoolin’ about other cultures. I have to be honest and say I’ve never been very hot about seeing this film. I could go on and on, but tracking the intrigues of a Japanese hottie who makes her way up the ladder by providing sexual excitement for rich guys…I don’t know.

Some buyers told me yesterday about a couple of recently-arisen festival favorites. First and foremost is Ward Serrill’s The Heart of the Game, a doc about the development of a naturally talented female basketball player from Seattle over a six-year period. The festival program calls it a film about “girls, basketball and the evolving relationship of race and sports in the United States,” blah, blah. (It screens at 11:15 this morning at the Cumberland. Will Hollywood Elsewhere manage to attend or will the slow-motion rigors of posting a fresh column interfere once again, for the 349th time?) The other one to see is a film I ignored yesterday morning — Jason Reitman’s Thank You for Smoking, a satire about the tobacco industry. Providing a reportedly worthy follow-up to his heartless Chad in Neil Labute’s In The Company of Men, Aaron Eckhardt plays a smoothly manipulative spokesperson for the fictional Academy of Tobacco Studies. The program calls his character, whose name is Nick, “the most stunningly proficient poster boy America’s Big Tobacco industry could hope for: charming, virile, remorseless.” There’s a public screening happening in about 15 minutes (9:15 am), which….naah, no way. The next screening is on Saturday evening, 9.17, at 9:15 pm at the Riverson.

About halfway through a chat I had last night with documentarian Eugene Jarecki, director of Why We Fight (and the excellent The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which I saw here in Toronto in ’03), I asked if he’s given any thought to shooting a documentary about the ongoing Katrina disaster, which would naturally include the Bush administration’s sluggish response to the crisis. He said it would be an absolute natural, but that he’s focusing right now on promoting Why We Fight, etc. And then I went to Jeannette Walls’ column this morning and read that Michael Moore is said to be “seriously considering” making a Katrina doc himself. (Walls actually posted the item three days ago, on 9.8.) Moore’s rep didn’t offer comment about the speculation, but Moore has said a few things about Katrina on his website. “Hurricane Katrina came in and blew off the facade that we were a nation with liberty and justice for all,” he said in a posting that went up this morning. “The wind howled and the water rose and what was revealed was that the poor in America shall be left to suffer and die while the President of the United States fiddles and tells them to eat cake. That’s not a joke. The day the hurricane hit and the levees broke, Bush, John McCain and their rich pals were stuffing themselves with cake. A full day after the levees broke (the same levees whose repair funding he had cut), Bush was playing a guitar some country singer gave him. All this while New Orleans sank under water. It would take another day before the President would do a flyover in his jumbo jet, peeking out the widow at the misery 2500 feet below him as he flew back to his second home in D.C. It would then be TWO MORE DAYS before a trickle of federal aid and troops would arrive. This was no seven minutes in a sitting trance while children read ‘My Pet Goat’ to him. This was FOUR DAYS of doing nothing other than saying ‘Brownie (FEMA director Michael Brown), you’re doing a heck of a job!'”

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.