The 2009 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was marked by a smackdown of American corporate culture. Usually, especially in Cannes, we could depend on Lars Von Trier and other European auteurs to do the job. But this time round, it was American filmmakers who blasted inequities and corruption in the executive suite. At the same time, these reports on the zeitgeist couldn't have been timelier and doubled as razor-sharp entertainments.

Also notable this year was the slew of accomplished films from women directors. Already, both An Education by Lone Scherfig and Bright Star from Jane Campion have collected buzz as awards-season fodder and will doubtless run up against The Hurt Locker from Kathryn Bigelow.

If TIFF's 200-plus lineup produced no breakout Slumdog Millionaire, the consensus had it that Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, the tale of a corporate hatchet man played by George Clooney, emerged as an awards-season front-runner. Unlike previous editions of TIFF, which could count a cluster of candidates, Reitman's film stood alone. Generally, buying was sluggish, though mid-fest the Weinsteins snapped up for $2.5 million Tom Ford's splendid first feature and Colin Firth starrer A Single Man.

Chief among the cluster of strong films that critique the U.S. was, of course, Michael Moore's much-anticipated Capitalism: A Love Story. Moore does a bang-up job of taming his vast, diffuse topic into a broadside at once instructive, enraging and entertaining. Essentially, he sets out to demystify a system rigged to permit Wall Street titans and bankers to rake in the shekels while less fortunate citizens spiral into poverty from unemployment, get ousted from foreclosed homes, and die from lack of health care. Singled out for attack are Goldman Sachs and other key players in a shadow government that calls the shots in Washington.

Reprising his signature set-pieces, Moore shambles up to security guards at corporate strongholds to request face time with the CEO, and surrounds the New York Stock Exchange with crime-scene yellow tape. Predictably, some critics taxed Moore with oversimplifying. I agree—but Moore adopts this tactic in the hopes of expanding his reach beyond the elites. And considering that even a Harvard prof interviewed in the film pfumphered around when asked to define "derivatives," maybe simpler is to the good.

First-time director Derrick Borte gave us The Joneses—as in "keeping up with"—which lobs a grenade at American-style consumerism. Toplined by Demi Moore, David Duchovny and Amber Heard, the film follows the handsome Joneses as they move into their new McMansion in an affluent gated community. But it quickly becomes apparent that this foursome is a faux family positioned by a company to whip up the acquisitive instinct of their neighbors and inspire them to go on a buying frenzy. As Duchovny’s character puts it, "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." Despite a feel-good denouement you can spot 15 minutes in, the film offers a mordant morality tale about the American Dream turned rancid.

Steven Soderbergh’s recently opened The Informant! could stand as an enlarged detail from from the broad overview presented by Moore's Capitalism. A stealth social critic, Soderbergh continues to explore the values of America's corporate culture, conveyed in his films as no more a choice than the air we breathe. His Girlfriend Experience, for example, proposed that everything's up for sale and even intimacy can be purchased like socks.

In The Informant!, based on the book by Kurt Eichenwald, a chubbed-up Matt Damon plays a young exec at agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, who exposes his employer's price-fixing scheme. Avoiding the earnestness of, say, Michael Mann in The Insider, Soderbergh sidewinds his attack on corporate abuse using Marvin Hamlisch's vaudeville-like score, complete with kazoo, and his anti-hero's oddball voiceover. The film's murky-yellow palette reveals as much about this milieu as dialogue or plot.

Canadian Jason Reitman, who grew up and attended college in the U.S., might be considered an honorary Yank. His lavishly praised Up in the Air, loosely adapted from American Walter's Kirn's novel—and following on Thank You for Smoking and Juno—marks a winning three-for-three for Reitman. George Clooney plays a coolly detached executive who makes a living flying from hub to hub and firing people. He meets his romantic double in fellow road warrior Vera Farmiga, who also avoids entanglements and gets off on elite status, and his nemesis in an arrogant B-school grad who prefers axing people via video. The mix of screwball comedy, hot-button issues and the Clooney charm offensive should resonate at the box office.

Other American films touch on corporate rot—or Yankee cluelessness—in less direct ways. In Soliltary Man by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, Michael Douglas delivers a brave turn as an aging, once-successful exec in freefall. In the film's morally bankrupt world, Douglas' compulsive womanizing is presented as a compensation for his loss of status. Constructed like a thriller, The Art of the Steal by Don Argott (just picked up for distribution) is an exposé about a power grab by charities and Philadelphia pols and financiers to control and relocate the multi-billion-dollar Barnes collection of art. The film's little guys battling to protect Barnes' bequest could have come from the playbook of Michael Moore. Finally, even The Invention of Lying by Ricky Gervais presents the citizens of Anytown U.S.A. as gullible yahoos.



As mentioned, this year's TIFF was also marked by a strong showing from female filmmakers. Regrettably, I missed Drew Barrymore's Whip It, which sounds like a hoot, The Vintner's Luck by Niki Caro, and Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, featuring a lauded turn by Robin Wright Penn. I did catch the standout Bright Star from Jane Campion, which re-imagines the romance of poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and girl next-door Fanny Brawne (Abby Cornish).

Though a period piece, Bright Star bears no trace of Merchant Ivory or “Masterpiece Theatre.” Taking great formal risks, Campion reinvents the biopic, replacing straight narrative with scenes that play like stanzas in a poem, separated by fades to black. The film charts Fanny's budding intimacy with the penniless Keats, which is opposed by a society that expected women to marry well. From a flirtatious minx, as Keats calls her, Fanny evolves into a woman whose passion for the poet embraces his work. To judge by all the figures bathed from the left in light, Campion has looked at a lot of Vermeer. In fact, this exquisite film is besotted with light, conveying an ethereal passion less through story than degrees of radiance.

Lone Scherfig's An Education, a launch for new It girl Carey Mulligan, arrived in Toronto fresh from accolades in Telluride. Set in early-’60s London, it features a bright teen gunning for a spot at Oxford, who gets seduced away from her goal by older sophisticate Peter Sarsgaard. Though Nick Hornby's script expertly combines a coming-of-ager with a culture on the cusp of change, I found Sarsgaard's older man a bit smarmy and distasteful.

Vision by German feminist auteur Margarethe von Trotta will doubtless not find distribution here. A pity, since its portrayal of a medieval German nun starring the sublime Barbara Sukowa showcases a proto-feminist who should resonate with women across the globe.

Similarly, Lourdes by Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner (Hotel) might be too austere to attract a stateside distributor. It follows a paralyzed woman played by Sylvie Testud to the famed Christian hot spot where the ill flock seeking a cure. Elina Lowensohn indelibly plays an otherworldly nun conducting the pilgrims through the shrine. The film takes no religious stance, preferring simply to observe the "miracle" that mysteriously heals one pilgrim who, ironically, has little faith. Haunting and stately—and much admired in Venice—Lourdes is the work of a richly gifted filmmaker.

As always, this year's lineup included films that landed somewhere between between watchable and misfire. In fact, you could gauge audience judgment when more people in your row were looking at their BlackBerry than at the screen. Falling among the blunders was Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass, with the excellent Edward Norton in the roles of identical twins, one an Ivy League professor, the other a lowlife yokel mired in the ’60s. Ostensibly an attempt to explore the power of fraternity, the film ricochets between farce and melodrama like a car stripped of gears.

Into the category of guilty pleasure falls Oliver Parker's Dorian Gray, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's famous novel about a gorgeous innocent who sells his soul to retain his youth and beauty. Meanwhile, his portrait, famously, reveals his true inner rot. Toplined by Ben Barnes and Colin Firth, the film works Gothic horror tropes to often enjoyable effect, yet fails to tease out the homosexual subtext of this Victorian tale about a love that dare not speaks its name. But, oh, those great rugs in Dorian's mansion.

When two fine dirty minds combine forces—think director Atom Egoyan and scripter Erin Cressida Wilson—you're apt to get a sizzler like Chloe. Julianne Moore plays a long-married woman who suspects her professor husband (Liam Neeson) of having an affair. After she hires a sultry escort (bug-eyed babe du jour Amanda Seyfried) to seduce her husband and test his loyalty, the relationship between the two women gets hot and heavy. Egoyan's psychosexual thriller uncorks a wicked twist, but derails when it lapses into Fatal Attraction territory. You come away from this wondering: Is there anything gutsy Julianne Moore won't do?

Finally, TIFF usually delivers one film that soars above the rest. In this edition it was designer Tom Ford's debut feature A Single Man. Mid-fest, its star Colin Firth took best actor in Venice, creating frenzy in the halls of the Manulife Center, home to most of TIFF's theatres.

In this adaptation from a late novel by Christopher Isherwood set in 1962 California, Firth plays a gay college professor mourning the death in a car accident of his longtime lover (Matthew Goode). Far from reconciling with his loss, Geroge is methodically staging a suicide. But fellow Brit and best gal pal Julianne Moore keeps him tethered to life, along with a dishy male student whose eyes express more than a search for a mentor. Not only is the period detail spot-on, but Ford ties the convergence of Cold War fear-mongering to a gay man's isolation in 1960. I've always thought Colin Firth a superb thesp, yet never suspected in him the incandescence and depth he brings to the title character, using his voice like a Stradivarius.