Toronto Has "Good Year," Closes with "Grace"

With a lineup this promising, how do you not conclude the festivities with a rendition of Amazing Grace?

The Michael Apted-directed drama, starring Rufus Sewell, Michael Gambon and Albert Finney is set to close the 31st annual Toronto International Film Festival next month, but audiences should theoretically have plenty to chirp about beforehand.

This year's smorgasbord of 352 feature-length and short films from 61 countries includes the world or North American premieres of the latest offerings from Ridley Scott, Christopher Guest, Pedro Almodóvar, Anthony Minghella, Mira Nair and Darren Aronofsky, as well as 62 directorial debuts.

A few celebrities will be onscreen, too.

Festivalgoers get first dibs on watching Russell Crowe play a banker who inherits a vineyard in the Ridley Scott drama A Good Year; Jude Law, Juliette Binoche and Robin Wright Penn cross paths in Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering; Christina Ricci and Reese Witherspoon in Mark Palansky's first feature film, Penelope; and the usual Christopher Guest lineup--plus Ricky Gervais--in the aptly titled For Your Consideration.

Steven Zaillian's remake of All the King's Men, starring Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet and Mark Ruffalo, also gets its grand unveiling during the 10-day event.

Two of the big favorites at Cannes earlier this year--Babel, directed by 21 Grams auteur Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu and starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael García Bernal, and the Spanish-language Volver, Pedro Almodóvar's latest love letter to feminine strength and Penélope Cruz--will have their gala debuts on this side of the pond during the first week of the event.

Ken Loach's Palme d'Or winner, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, will screen as part of Toronto's Master series, along with Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn and Spike Lee's Hurricane Katrina documentary, When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.

Also added to the Gala Presentations lineup is the documentary Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, the first nonfiction film to be given a Gala slot in 14 years. As you may have guessed, the doc chronicles the trio's past three years of performing and recording in the face of death threats and boycotts following Natalie Maines' onstage bashing of President Bush in 2003.

But what's an international film festival without a little polarizing controversy?

"I am extremely proud to be associated with this film. It's not only an outstanding and creative piece of work but it also exposes our responsibility as Americans to confront our fundamental right to freedom of speech," said former Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein, who took a similar approach to distributing Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 when Disney washed its hands of the project. The Weinstein Company announced Tuesday it had acquired the rights to Shut Up and Sing.

Speak of the devil (depending on whom you ask), the festival's Maverick series features live interviews with Michael Moore and John Waters.

Other festival centerpieces include Gwyneth Paltrow, Sandra Bullock, Daniel Craig, Jeff Daniels, Sigourney Weaver and Isabella Rossellini in Infamous, Doug McGrath's addition to the Truman Capote biopic canon, starring Toby Jones as the In Cold Blood scribe; Paul Verhoeven's World War II thriller Black Book; and the female-bonding drama Bonneville, starring Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates and Joan Allen.

On the fringes of the fest, but not to be overlooked, are screenings of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (is there a special award for titles?) as part of the Midnight Madness series; The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, a documentary from Sophie Fiennes (Ralph's sister); Mira Nair's The Namesake; Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain; Tony Goldwyn's The Last Kiss; Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction, starring Will Ferrell as an IRS auditor who finds himself blessed/cursed with a personal narrator only he can hear; and Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights, directed by Ari Sandel.

The Toronto fest has also introduced a Vanguard series this year, of which the goal is to hit audiences "with a raw, pulsating aesthetic that speaks to sexual, cultural and cinematic freedoms." The button-pushers this year include Geoffrey Wright's Australian underworld take on Macbeth; Ethan Hawke's adaptation of his own novel, The Hottest State; and Christian Volckman's French-language, black-and-white, animated sci-fi thriller Renaissance.

The Danish family drama The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, from director Zacharias Kunuk, has been tapped to open the Toronto International Film Festival Sept. 7. The unspooling comes to a close Sept. 16.