Here It Comes Again

The Toronto International Film Festival officially begins on Thursday, though of course we in the local press have been slogging through advance screenings, and advance screeners, for three full weeks now.

I've already lost count of how many films I've seen -- it's something in the neighborhood of thirty, anyway -- but I'm hardly hardcore: If you saw the Festival runups in this week's Now or Eye, you know what real soldiering is.

(Ahem: I was hoping to link to both mags' comprehensive coverage in the graph above, and be all blog-savvy, but I can't seem to find the proper URL ... Now's festival coverage is broken up into individual links running down the left side of its Movies page, and it looks as though Eye isn't putting its reviews online yet.)

Anyway.

The point of my pre-TIFF whining is this: I'm sitting on the FIPRESCI jury this year, which means that in addition to gobbling up every movie I can for Metro and various other gigs, I have to see 15 features from first-time filmmakers. During the festival. It's rough.

Fortunately, I received the list of eligible titles yesterday, and it turns out I've already got five of them covered off. I might even be able to catch a few more before the festival really gets rolling -- thank you, angels of the press office -- so this jury's looking a lot less stressful than my last one, in 2004, when the eligible titles numbered 21, and all managed to involve some manner of animal cruelty.

No animals have been harmed in any of the contenders I've seen thus far, so things are already looking up.

Technorati tags: Movies, Toronto International Film Festival, FIPRESCI, Film Criticism