Running downtown this morning, I saw a woman speaking to a couple of good-looking young men outside the subway entrance. The closer I got the clearer it was to see that she was upset. The two men backed away and into the station. "This city is not your ashtray," she screamed after them. She was on a bicycle. She wore expesive jeans. She didn't seem especially crazy or particularly Cantabrigian. What she wanted, I think, is what anybody who loves her city wants: an end to litterers. Although, I'd settle for ones as handsome as Toronto's. This city is one worth defending against gum wrappers and cigarette butts. In 2010, can anyone get elected on that platform? Can a Canadian? 

After five days of wandering downtown from theater to theater, we're still clamoring for something that approaches brilliance. That's in lieu of even discovering a movie that's flat-out brilliant. This morning we came close. Kelly Reichardt's "Meek's Cutoff" was shown, and it meets a standard of both general excellence and personal idiosyncrasy that is increasingly rare in serious American moviemaking. In other words, Reichardt isn't in pursuit of an Oscar. 

Not that he was ever compared unfavorably with his Nouvelle Vague brethren, but the late Claude Chabrol (left, in 1979 with actress Bernadette Lafont and his wife Stephane Audran) was considered the steadiest, least flashy of the bunch, with the faint whiff of patronization that implies. Where Godard was off manning the barricades of art, politics, and cinema, and Truffaut was reliving his youth and obsessing about women, and Rohmer was dissecting emotion in great arias of chatter, and the mysterious Rivette was fashioning marathon exercises in paranoia and the creative process, Chabrol was -- well, he was making dramatic thrillers. Where's the ambition in that?

In the craft, bien sur, and in the slow accretion of damning social portraiture that stretches from his first film, 1958's "Le Beau Serge", pretty much to the end (2007's penultimate "A Girl Cut in Two"). On the surface, Chabrol's visual style was polite, discreet, and occasionally glacial, but if you looked closer, you saw that every camera move was a scalpel wielded by a master surgeon who could fillet bourgeois pretension and reveal the beast within the civilized man. Chabrol wasn't a moralist or a cynic -- instead, he was torn between cool amusement and muted horror at the ways in which the human animal mistreats his own kind. If he had a kindred filmmaking spirit, it was probably Luis Bunuel, but whereas the great Spaniard eviscerated his targets with love and surrealism, Chabrol hung back and let his chic, murderous characters hang themselves.

Filed under: Drama, Horror, Thrillers, New Releases, Universal, Celebrities and Controversy, Polls, Movie News, New Releases, Cinematical

If your name is Guillermo del Toro or Steven Spielberg, acting as an "executive producer" on a small film or even just somehow being associated with it gives it a type of credence and name recognition that no ad dollars can buy. Would 'The Orphanage' have gotten any traction without del Toro's name attached? Maybe not, and that would be a pity because it's a damn fine little ghost story. Of course, this can totally work against the film if it's someone like, oh, M. Night Shyamalan.

If you went to see 'Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,' you probably also saw the trailer for 'Devil,' which is "From the Mind of M. Night Shyamalan." Chances are, you also heard the infamous boos that accompanied this message. Never mind that 'Devil's connections to Shyamalan are only that he came up with the story and that he's a producer; marketing 'Devil' with his name might be the kiss of death. People were pretty worked up about 'The Last Airbender' and its casting process, and he didn't do a really great job of defending 'The Last Airbender' against charges of racism. Others just think his career going down the toilet. Plenty of pixels have been spent arguing about M. Night Shyamalan.

Far less have been about 'Devil.' Is it simply because Shyamalan is associated, or because the trailer just isn't appealing? Even the trailer that showed up on YouTube (and has since been removed) was filled with anti-Shyamalan comments. As Erik Childress wrote, "The filmmaker once ridiculously dubbed the next Spielberg now instantly taints anything he comes in contact with as reactions to the 'Devil' trailer show."

Are you going to see 'Devil' despite M. Night Shyamalan's admittedly small role in its development? Do you think its association with him has tainted it? Or are you going to go and find out which of these people are THE DEVIL?!

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If these aren't outright perilous times for American movies, they are a little worrying, especially if you're an Oscar voter. How on earth does anyone expect to get to 10 best-picture nominees without subtitles? This festival is, among many other things, about getting tomorrow's Academy Award nominees positioned today. Some of the loudest noise has been for "The King's Speech," which is English and features Geoffrey Rush curing the stutter of king-to-be Colin Firth. I missed the one press screening, but like many of these award-season bellwether movies, it will be upon us soon enough.

On the American front, the last couple of days have turned up few signs of life. One of the alleged bright spots was one lots of other critics and I missed. A last-last minute screening of Clint Eastwood's supernatural drama, "Hereafter," was arranged the other day then poorly attended. But two very different people who were there said they were amazed. Oh, well. If only I could report the same about Eastwood's fellow movie-star director, Robert Redford, who has a new film at the festival, "The Conspirator."

Set in the hours before and months after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, the movie rather baldly tries to connect the state of divisiveness that gripped the country in 1865 to the divisiveness of 2010. Specifically, it's about the military tribunal of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright, no longer "Penn"), a Confederate supporter who ran the boarding house where Lincoln's assassins planned their attacks.

The film uses all of today's language about political moderation versus various sorts of extremism. Surratt's lawyer (James McAvoy) is a Union war hero who's skeptical about his client's innocence: How could she not have known what was going on under her own roof? 

The movie is angry and obvious. Redford has been righteous before, although never more effectively than in 1994's "Quiz Show," which made its political points while telling a very good story with intelligence, wit, and drama. The political climate must be sapping Redford of his dramatic strength. His moviemaking is flat-footed and hollow now. It lacks the thunder, lightning, and comedy that he's capable of.

For sheer humorlessness, though, Redford may never top "Lions for Lambs," his Hollywood tract about our current wars. But this feels even more like a petition, full of good actors (Kevin Kline, Tom Wilkinson, Colm Meany, Danny Huston, Evan Rachel Wood) who, because of the film's tedious allegorical nature, have very little acting to do. Wright has aged into one of our best actresses, but great parts continue to elude her. She's good here but is forced to share her performance with the movie's Grand Themes. They're not terribly persuasive or rousing. All the hair, British Southern accents, and tobacco-colored tinting make so much of the movie feels like a reenactment of a commercial for Civil War encyclopedias.

"The Conspirator" at least has moments that stir the intellect. Mitch Glazer's "Passion Play" has moments that stir only your stomach. Its badness is difficult to overstate. This is a movie that says, "You know what? I have the money to hire Mickey Rourke to play a washed-up saxophonist and Bill Murray to be a New Mexico gangster. I have the cash to have them fight over Megan Fox, who I'll make an angel -- not one of those Victoria's Secret angels, but, like, the real thing, like at a carnival freak show. What I don't have the budget for is effects that make the wings seem real. I know they look like cartoons, but who cares? I paid Mickey to make love to Megan. I know she can't act and that her character doesn't know how to fly. But she doesn't have to: She just has to stand in that glass box with an arm draped over her breasts. That's sure to get me European distribution."

Errol Morris is responsible for one of the festival's best movies. "Tabloid" is Morris in a frivolous mood. The subject of his documentary is Joyce McKinney, a former beauty queen and nude model who sits before the director's patented cameras, looks right at us, and proceeds to reveal why she might be one of the planet's most entertainingly weird people.

In the mid 1970s, McKinney became a sensational staple in the British press after flying to London and kidnapping her boyfriend, a Utah Mormon on a mission. Perhaps you recall the Manacled Mormon case. This is a true feat of tone. Morris's applies a high glaze of amusement to his characteristic thriller instincts. Some of the movie's comedy stems from the way it contrasts McKinney's version of what happened with both how it was portrayed in the press and the way some of the participants remember it. The object of her obsession was, as she put it, in a cult. 

Most of the rest comes from McKinney herself (that's her, above, holding one of the movie's more alarming developments). She wears pageant blue and speaks with an unbridled Southern accent. Her breathlessly florid descriptions of the greatest, most eternal love sounds like the passions of a woman in the cult of Harlequin romance. I'm not qualified to diagnose her, but she seems like a grade-A narcissist. No other perception of reality exists but hers. The sex scandal, as it turns out, is but one of several events that kept her . What we don't learn from McKinney is how she truly feels about her odd and sad life. That's a matter for our perception. One person's nadir is another's apex. 

Filed under: Drama, Awards, Celebrities and Controversy, Quentin Tarantino, Awards, Cinematical

What's the statute of limitations for Hollywood relationships? Quentin Tarantino has been accused by the Italian press of favoritism after ex-girlfriend Sofia Coppola's latest film won the top prize of the Venice Film Festival. Tarantino served as head of the jury, which also awarded prizes to his friend Alex de la Iglesia and one of his mentors, Monte Hellman.

Somewhere, Coppola's drama starring Stephen Dorff as an actor spiraling into despair, received such a tepid critical response that it's been written off as a potential awards contender, though Dorff received good notices for his work. (It's due out in theaters on December 22.) Balada Triste de Trompeta won screenplay and director prizes for Spanish director de la Iglesia, though an informal critics' poll ranked it just 17th out of 24 films in competition. Hellman's latest, Road to Nowhere, also failed to impress local critics, though his award was a lifetime achievement prize.

Tarantino, who hugged Coppola on stage after the award was announced, claims he wasn't influenced by relationships and denies that he forced the jury to go along with him: "I was just going to literally respond to the film." He added: "There was no me steering any directions. Sofia doesn't know any of these other people on the jury and her prize was unanimous."

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• A journalism student and her boyfriend try to navigate the pitfalls of a bi-coastal romance.
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• Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her companions head to a rumored safe haven in Los Angeles.
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Original: Movies.com Top 10 Box Office

Filed under: Foreign Language, Celebrities and Controversy, Newsstand, Movie News, Cinematical

Bollywood cinema -- Hindi movies emanating from the Mumbai region in India -- are often noted for their conservative values when it comes to onscreen interaction between male and female stars. This is, after all, the land where they used to cut away from onscreen kisses before they happened. This makes it all the more bizarre that actresses from the Indian film industry keep getting busted for prostitution.

Two actresses, Saira Banu and Jyoti, were arrested on August 23rd after an early morning raid of a brothel in the Hyderabad area -- further adding to the persistent rumor that India's leading ladies can be had if the price is right.

To be fair, neither actress is a Bollywood starlet -- both have worked in the smaller Tollywood region -- nor were they working on a street corner in a bad part of town. The area the actresses were arrested in is a high price neighborhood that houses government ministers, IT executives, and other well to do citizens. Still, both were arrested for taking part in what local authorities like to call "the flesh business."

As an article at Will Barnes Online mentions, this isn't the first time this happened. The real questions are why and are India's movie starlets really for sale?

Hit the jump for some possible answers and explanations.

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Ben Affleck is here with the entire cast of "The Town," a heist movie he shot in Boston, America's new favorite most dangerous and most dangerously accented city. This afternoon he held a press conference for the movie. Most of the cast was there. So was Chuck Hogan who wrote the book. It was a standard international festival press conference. The actors -- Chris Cooper, Blake Lively, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, and Jon Hamm -- sat and watched the director handle most of the queries. In this case, Affleck is a director who acts, so his animated responses didn't put everyone to sleep. He didn't get the best questions, but he made the most of what he had. Here, he talks about sex scenes with Lively and Hall.