I forget what I was planning to see that Tuesday night at the Toronto International Film Festival—was it the Hong Kong gangster movie or the Danish comedy-drama about a small-town streaker?—but my plans abruptly changed when word started to trickle in about a film called Stuck. On paper, the movie—based on the real case of a motorist who creamed a pedestrian, then drove home and dithered while the victim lay bleeding on her dashboard—sounds iffy. It has a talented but erratic director (Stuart Gordon, of Re-Animator fame), an odd cast (The Crying Game’s Stephen Rea as the bug on corn-rowed Mena Suvari’s windshield) and a premise better suited to a short than a feature.

But Stuck emerged from the fest’s rowdy Midnight Madness program as a taut, splattery black comedy of callous indifference. It notches up one skillful surprise after another: the hilarious topsy-turvy chemistry between human-doormat Rea and freaked-out Suvari, the juicy twists and embellishments of John Strysik’s script. The very quality that makes Stuck seem fresh—its refusal to fit a neat pigeonhole—probably explains why it has yet to find a distributor, even after a strong showing at the largest and most prestigious film festival in North America.

Toronto has earned a rep as the place where Hollywood dangles its year-end awards bait: prestige pictures such as Chopper director Andrew Dominik’s elegiac Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Ang Lee’s erotic Shanghai spy drama Lust, Caution. But unheralded finds like Stuck make people rearrange their schedules and chase screenings like elusive butterflies. Last week I spent seven days without success trying to catch a few of these buzz-building films, including Spanish director Jose Luis Guerin’s near-silent Dans la ville de Sylvia and South Korean filmmaker Hur Jin-ho’s Happiness, a romance between two gravely ill lovers.

Not that the awards bait at this year’s TIFF was underwhelming. “I think we’ve just seen this year’s Best Picture,” my bud Noel Murray whispered under the closing credits of Into the Wild, Sean Penn’s version of the Jon Krakauer book about a young outdoorsman’s fatal venture into the Alaskan wilderness. For a film about someone who found the romance of nature brutally unrequited—the doomed Chris McCandless, in Emile Hirsch’s beatific performance, carries more than a hint of Grizzly Man’s foolhardy Timothy Treadwell—Into the Wild evokes the pull of wide open spaces with a passion that, like the hero’s, is no less grand for being borderline crazy.

Better still is No Country for Old Men, a cold-blooded gutbucket noir stretched tight as razor wire by Joel and Ethan Coen, working from Cormac McCarthy’s novel. The book’s pulpy ruthlessness comes off here as savagely unforgiving—crime drama with not just lives but a way of life at stake. It was a delight to watch Josh Brolin, excellent as the movie’s hellbound hero, dust off his laconic cowboy cool again for the Coens’ segment of the above-par anthology film Chacun çon cinema. There, he saunters into an arthouse and takes a gamble on the Turkish drama Climates—a find from TIFF 2006.

The audience prize at TIFF ’07 went to homeland hero David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, a vicious, sleekly directed (if shakily written) companion piece to the director’s A History of Violence, with another first-rate Viggo Mortensen performance as a morally conflicted hero with a false face. Surprisingly, it beat out a movie Toronto audiences clasped to their hearts, director Jason Reitman’s Juno. If you can make it without vomiting through an infernally twee first trimester, it becomes a funny, bittersweet character study of a pregnant teen (future star Ellen Page) and the yuppie couple she picks as adoptive parents (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner, both first-rate).

A far grimmer consideration of unplanned parenthood, Cristian Mungiu’s stunner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days follows two Romanian women in 1985 on a largely real-time quest to procure an abortion—a process, from bartering to soul-scarring aftermath, that Mungiu depicts with harrowing use of limited perspective. Similarly, Chop Shop, by Man Push Cart writer-director Ramin Bahrani, shrinks the world to the view of its main character, a pre-teen Latino hustler working the angles at a shady Queens garage. As with Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, the chop-shop milieu and asphalt-hard location shooting offset the problem-drama plotting.

Life during wartime linked the impressive animated feature Persepolis—adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s (autobio)graphic novels of growing up in the wake of the Islamic Revolution—to Paul Haggis’ Iraq drama In the Valley of Elah (see Short Takes on p. 68). A fictionalized telling of an appalling real-life incident—the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of her family by U.S. soldiers—Brian De Palma’s gutsy, conceptually flawed Redacted stitches together a new-media patchwork of fake YouTube footage, video diaries, vlogs, news broadcasts, even a pretentious French documentary scored to the “Saraband” music from Barry Lyndon. This should be entirely in De Palma’s wheelhouse—it amounts to a sobering update of his stunning Vietnam rape-murder drama Casualties of War—but if anything, the movie isn’t splintered and contradictory enough.

Even so, Redacted would make a good triple bill with two other movies on the subjects of media fragmentation and the shaping of reportage by the reporter. George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead augments the director’s landmark Dead trilogy with a scrappy addendum: purported found footage from kids shooting a horror movie just as the zombies rise. Poor acting and writing blunt Romero’s sophisticated satire of the age of vloggy solipsism, but fans will be gratified by the exploding heads and flesh-ripping.

As different from Romero’s MySpace apocalypse and De Palma’s downloaded diatribe as a movie could be, Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary My Kid Could Paint That nonetheless raises similar matters in reporting the rise of Marla Olmstead, a 4-year-old painter who became an art-world sensation. Then the story takes a jarring twist—and Bar-Lev asks probing questions about modern art, our fascination with prodigies, and even his own perhaps exploitative role as filmmaker. If nothing else, Bar-Lev issues a direct challenge to those who form their impression of an artwork from the signature.

Speaking of which, Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely seemed to overcome much of the press corps’ apparent hostility toward its maker. (It was picked up by IFC First Take, who came away with several of the fest’s finest films, among them 4 Months…, Gus Van Sant’s exquisite study in elided guilt Paranoid Park, and Catherine Breillat’s lacerating Une Vieille Maitresse.) The Nashville-based director’s first film since julien donkey-boy, it’s a childlike fable of faith and forged identity about a lonesome Michael Jackson look-alike (Diego Luna) who finds temporary shelter with a coastal commune of fellow celebrity impersonators, including a vulnerable Marilyn Monroe (a heartrending Samantha Morton) and her brutish Charlie Chaplin husband (Denis Lavant). Korine’s gift for shambling vaudeville and striking absurdist imagery shines here, as in the marvelous opening shot of a clown-bike rider and a stuffed monkey-angel circling lazily to the Bobby Vinton title song. But it’s the haunting ending that makes the film.

The other movie that’s been buzzing in my head for days is I’m Not There, writer-director Todd Haynes’ mesmerizing take on Bob Dylan’s life, career and ever-changing personas, each embodied by a different actor: Cate Blanchett (better than you could even hope) as the frizzy Judas Dylan of the mid-60s; Richard Gere as the outlaw Dylan out of Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and the Harry Smith Anthology’s old weird Americana; Christian Bale as the folkie Dylan who goes Christian; Heath Ledger as a sort of composite of ’70s sell-out Dylan and the folly of traditional biopics; young Marcus Carl Franklin as the Woody Guthrie wannabe Dylan. Will it make a lick of sense to anyone who can’t list everyone pictured on the cover of The Basement Tapes? Maybe not, but it’s a thrilling intellectual puzzle—the best movie anyone will ever make of Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic.

On a whim, I ended the festival with a film I knew nothing about—and it proved to be my favorite. A Gentle Breeze in the Village, by Japanese director Nobuhiro Yamashita, follows the children of a village’s tiny school on countless small rites of development: walks to the swimming hole, trips to the city. Neither self-consciously cute nor precious, it exudes an innocence and concern for the lives of all its characters that’s almost unthinkable in contemporary movies. It’s a film I love so much I feel somewhat protective of it, as if I were nervously watching it walk off to school. Here’s hoping it graduates, with the finest of Toronto’s Class of ’07, to a theater near you.