One week, 20 movies, and Springsteen: Our critic’s picks from Toronto

Emily Dickinson famously wrote that “There is no frigate like a book.” Had she lived in the movie age, she might have revised her opinion.

The Toronto International Film Festival features hundreds of movies representing more than 40 countries. Over the span of a week, I managed to check out about 20 of them. My press pass functioned as a kind of passport. Even when the movies were subpar, the novelty of experiencing other cultures, or more deeply delving into one’s own, was ever present.

Faced with so many conflicting screening options, I chose to see films that in many cases reflected the theme of forbearance for the differences of others in a divisive world. Some of these movies were also clarion calls for justice for those unfairly wronged.

It would be folly, with so many movies on offer, to signal any official “trend” here. No doubt there were scores of other movies in which hope, tolerance, and justice play no part. Still, I detected an overarching mood, a way of seeing, that I attribute to more than happenstance. For a lot of filmmakers now, the assumption seems to be that coming together is better than breaking apart.

In many ways, the most powerful movie I saw was Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here” (“Ainda Estou Aqui”). It fuses the personal and the political. Beginning in the early 1970s at the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship, it follows the real-life travails of Eunice Paiva (played by the great Fernanda Torres), whose activist husband was “disappeared” by the government.

Paiva’s quest for justice – she was herself imprisoned for a time – transforms her into an icon of resistance. But she is no cardboard crusader. What she and her five children endure has primal force. Salles, best known for “Central Station” and “The Motorcycle Diaries,” was a teenage friend of the Paiva family, and perhaps this explains the film’s immediacy. It’s a movie about the obligation to right wrongs. (Opens in early 2025.)

The theme of righting wrongs is given a fanciful treatment in “Meet the Barbarians” (“Les Barbares”) a delightful comedy co-written and directed by, and starring Julie Delpy. It has a great premise: A small French town in Brittany is set to welcome a group of Ukrainian immigrants, only to discover that France already has more than enough of them. Instead, a Syrian family, the Fayads, shows up.

The villagers react to this incursion in ways ranging from delight to disgust. Delpy spares no one – the progressives in the community are as gently mocked as the nativist types. The Fayads are alternately bemused and beleaguered by their predicament. (They make better crepes than the town’s baker, to her dismay.) Delpy has described the film as “a bit of a left-wing feel-good movie,” but we are never allowed to forget the very real damages of the Syrian crisis.

“Hard Truths,” Mike Leigh’s 23rd film, stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who was Oscar-nominated for his “Secrets and Lies” in 1996. It’s great seeing her front and center again. Her Pansy Deacon is a London housewife seemingly at war with the world. She gets into fights at the supermarket, at the checkout counter, in the parking lot, in a furniture showroom, at the dentist’s office. She fumes at her beaten-down husband and son – and even at the pigeons clucking outside her window.

Pansy is so aggressively irritating that at first she’s a figure of fun for the audience. But this is a Mike Leigh movie, so her hurts and fears soon open up for us. Mixing compassion with regret, her consoling sister (a wonderful Michele Austin) tells her, “I don’t understand you, but I love you.” There are no easy answers here, nor should there be. (Opens Dec. 6.)

The sexually explicit “Anora” won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, its highest honor, and I wouldn’t quarrel with that. It’s both deliriously funny and deeply bittersweet. Mikey Madison plays Ani, an exotic dancer in a Brooklyn sex club who hooks up with the rambunctious son (Mark Eydelshteyn) of a Russian oligarch. When they impulsively marry, his aghast parents and their henchmen descend upon them. Writer-director Sean Baker (“The Florida Project”) is supremely open to the human comedy. He and Madison never once condescend to Ani or stigmatize her. (Opens Oct. 18.)

Another Cannes prizewinner is “All We Imagine as Light,” a first dramatic feature from the Indian documentarian Payal Kapadia. She has a marvelous feel for how to photograph faces. The main protagonists are nurses at a Mumbai hospital. Anu (Divya Prabha) is carrying on a secret love affair with a Muslim boyfriend. Her older roommate, Prabha, whose uncommunicative husband now works in Germany, is lonely. Their marriage was arranged. “How can you marry a total stranger?” Anu asks of her. She answers, “People you know can be strangers, too.” (Opens Nov. 15.)

“Conclave,” based on the Robert Harris novel and directed by Edward Berger (“All Quiet on the Western Front”), is a behind-the-scenes Vatican thriller about the election of a new pope. With a cast including John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, and Ralph Fiennes – particularly good as the cardinal running the sequestered conclave – the film is never less than watchable. The melodrama runs pretty thick, though. And its message is unmissable: As Fiennes’ liberal Cardinal Lawrence states in his homily, “God’s gift to the church is its variety.” (Opens Nov. 1.)

Thom Zimny’s “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band” (hitting Hulu and Disney+ on Oct. 25) documents the coming together of the band for its first live shows in six years. There are way too many close-ups of blissed-out fans in stadiums worldwide, but Springsteen, at 74 years old, still puts on a wow of a show. The film places us right at the center of the action. Offstage, Springsteen is candid about how much longer he can continue to go on. A great documentary could be made, I think, about the ways in which still-performing rock ’n’ rollers like Springsteen and the Rolling Stones have transitioned into seniority.

Meantime, if I’m right in believing that filmmakers these days are looking more to unite audiences than to divide them, who is a greater uniter than The Boss?

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic.