328 movies and EI has until Tuesday to see them all. Well, to see a lot of them anyway.

For the third year, we're covering the Toronto International Film Festival. And this year's festival includes exciting films both big and small.

Last night's opening red carpet gala featured the Annette Bening starrer BEING JULIA. Stars strutted their stuff down the red carpet runway and Bening's usually politically active actor/director husband was in attendance with the BEING JULIA star. JULIA directed by Istvan Szabo has Benning playing an aging diva in London's West End in the late thirties who has an affair with a young American.

As HERO is burning up the box office (well, kind of) director Zhang Yimou gives Toronto audiences THE HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS. Folks need not be surprised that there being another Yimou film in theaters, after all, Miramax waited (and given the box office, smartly) something like 2 years to put HERO in North American theaters. DAGGERS is a period martial arts film that has the alluring and flexible Ziyi Zhang (currently seen in theaters playing Moon in HERO) as a dancer named Mei who is on the run from police deputies that suspect her of having ties to a revolutionary faction know as the House of Flying Daggers.

Danny Boyle has brought his new film MILLIONS to this festival. Readers are certainly always interested in what Boyle is up to, his 28 DAYS LATER was, at least, partially responsible to reviving and mainstreaming the zombie genre in 2002. MILLIONS appears to be the small but exciting story of two boys who find a bunch of cash from a robbery but are forced to spend all of it in a week before the UK switches to the Euro. Sounds like one spending spree I want to catch.

Alexander Payne has a new film here called SIDEWAYS. Although I found Payne's ABOUT SCHMIDT in 2002 to be marketed wrong during a holiday season (the film had funny moments but is ultimately sad and bitter), SIDEWAYS appears to be a little more light-hearted, however, with Payne's usually deft touch of dark reality. Starring Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church, SIDEWAYS is about two men who take a trip to the California wine country prior to Church's character's wedding. Church was that lovably brainless guy in WINGS the popular 90s television show. If the film is critically popular, Church's star could be on the rise. He reminds me of a younger Chris Cooper.

Prior to the festival, I saw two Miramax films: DEAR FRANKIE and LES CHORISTES. CHORISTES is an extremely moving story of a supervisor at a school for troubled children who uses music to calm the distressed boys. His choir is buffered by one boy whose voice is exceptional and whose single mother is, well, single like the supervisor. DEAR FRANKIE stars Emily Mortimer as a single mom on the run with her deaf child Frankie. The touching story has Mortimer trying to find a stand-in for the boy's absent father. I'm supposed to interview the director of LES CHORISTES (Christophe Barratier) and actress Mortimer later this weekend.

There are so many films generating buzz at this huge festival. Al Pacino is playing Shylock in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE and eclectically controversial director John Waters Tracey Ullman and Johnny Knoxville in the inevitably NC-17 rated sex film A DIRTY SHAME. Watch for our morning updates as EI's coverage of the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival continues.

For more information about the Festival visit the festival website: http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2004/default.asp

Jonathan W. Hickman