TORONTO -- How did the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival stack up against previous years? I've been to 31 of them, and as usual I had a great time. I saw about 30 movies, interviewed some fascinating people, met a lot of friends, and saw movies with audiences who know and love them.

By Roger Ebert

TORONTO, Ont.--"Slumdog Millionaire," an improbable mixture of deep poverty and a quiz show, won the Cadillac Audience Award here Saturday at the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival. In a festival without an overall jury, it is the top prize. Movie audiences vote for each movie as they leave its screening, and a statistical system corrects for the sizes of audiences.

By Roger Ebert

If it were up to me, you would never have heard about the incident at the Toronto Film Festival on the morning of Sept. 6 when a fellow critic whacked me with a rolled-up program or a festival binder or something. It has been blown out of proportion. It is of little interest.

TORONTO -- Mike Leigh is 65 years old and universally acclaimed as one of the leading British directors, although "Happy-Go-Lucky" is only his tenth theatrical feature sine 1971. There's a reason for that. He went another 17 years before making "High Hopes" in 1998, although he kept busy with BBC films and stage work. His problem was, he couldn't get financing to make a film without a screenplay, and he famously has two conditions to make a film: (1) No outside interference, and (2) the screenplay is devised in collaboration with the actors, after the project has started.

TORONTO -- Mickey Rourke is back. The legendary tough guy in 1980s movies like "9½ Weeks," "Barfly" and "Year of the Dragon" has never been away. He's been working steadily, with 16 movies just since 2000 -- but his title role in "The Wrestler" is arguably his best career performance and could win him an Oscar nomination. The film, playing here at the 33rd Toronto Film Festival, arrived after winning the grand prize at Venice, and is drawing turn-away crowds. It came to Toronto without a distributor, but was snatched up for $4.5 million by Fox Searchlight.

TORONTO — First the long windup. Then the fast pitch. The Toronto International Film Festival, always front-loaded, exploded over the weekend with movies day and night, all over town, every audience movie-savvy, every theater selling bran muffins right next to the popcorn, thousands of volunteers in their blue T-shirts like a jolly welcoming committee. Never a frown, and believe me, we moviegoers test them plenty.

by Roger Ebert TORONTO, Ont.--Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire" hits the ground and never stops running. After its first press screening early Saturday morning, it became a leading contender for the all-important Audience Award, which is the closest thing the Toronto Film Festival has to a top prize. And an Oscar best picture nomination is a definite possibility.

by Roger Ebert

TORONTO, Ont.--In Denver and Minneapolis, the streets are filled with demonstrators against the political conventions. Here in Toronto, demonstrators were outside the gala opening of the 33rd Toronto Film Festival. What were they demonstrating against? Cuts in government spending for the arts. O, Canada!

By Roger Ebert

TORONTO -- In the beginning, its organizers were happy to sell out a 500-seat theater. Now the Toronto Film Festival requires 35 theaters and assorted screening rooms, starting with the 2,800-seat Roy Thomson Hall. If you're a moviegoer in central Toronto and want to avoid the festival, you've got your work cut out for you.

Maybe Simone Signoret was right after all. The title of her 1978 autobiography was La nostalgie n'est plus qu'elle était ("Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be".)

I remember her in twilight, sitting outside the Colombe d'Or, the legendary restaurant in her home village of St.Paul de Vence, clutching her shawl, hunched over like a little old French lady.

Roger Ebert was planning to attend Cannes 2008 when a broken hip derailed that plan, but his wife, Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert, went anyway, and filed this blog in the form of "a letter to Roger."

by Jim Emerson

The first thing Paul Schrader wanted to talk about after the Ebertfest screening of his ambitious 1985 "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" was his youthful fascination with the primitive rite of "suicidal blood sacrifice." That's what he said his script for "Taxi Driver" was rooted in -- and, no wonder, since he had been raised a strict Calvinist (is that redundant?) and, as he put it, "Christianity is a blood cult" that glorifies sacrificial suicide. In "Mishima" it's the act of seppuku; in "Raging Bull" it's boxing; in "The Last Temptation of Christ" it's crucifixion... To writer-director Schrader, they're all manifestations of the same bloody thing.

by Jim Emerson

In Sally Potter's "Yes," there's a scene in a restaurant kitchen in which a Lebanese chef and a young Brit-punk dishwasher get into fierce confrontation (you can't really call it an "argument") over politics and religion. The kid grabs a frying pan and goes after the chef. The chef picks up a knife. Standoff. The manager arrives. Summarily, he fires the chef.

by Jim Emerson

My Ebertfest has already been made for me because I spoke to Bill Forsyth yesterday and, at one point, he said "Great." This is major -- particularly for a guy who, with his friends, went around saying "Great" in Gordon John Sinclair's Scottish accent from "Gregory's Girl" for years. It's a well-known fact. Bella, bella.

by Jim Emerson, editor

After the Ebertfest screening of "Delirious" Thursday afternoon, writer-director Tom DiCillo ("Johnny Suede," "Living in Oblivion," "Box of Moon Light," "The Real Blonde") recalled sending Roger Ebert an e-mail. He was in despair over the distributor's treatment of his latest film, which Ebert had reviewed quite favorably. Out of frustration, and although he'd never written to a critic before, DiCillo posed five pained (and semi-rhetorical) questions about the injustice of the movie business, the last of which was: "Is this all a Kafkaesque nightmare that will never end?"

Ebert wrote back and answered every question. To the final one, he said yes.

by Jim Emerson, editor

What is Ebertfest without Ebert? Fest? Kicking off the 10th Anniversary edition of Roger Ebert's (formerly Overlooked) Film Festival, Chaz Ebert passed along her husband's sentiments that, today, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time -- that is, in a bed in Chicago instead of in at the Virginia Theatrer in Urbana-Champaign. But, she reported him saying, you could also say the same thing about the day he tripped on the carpet and fractured his hip. Nobody's giving up hope, though. Chaz said they were consulting with doctors day by day and that she wouldn't be surprised if Roger wound up making it here after all before the fest is through.