A.O. Scott weighs in on a few Toronto festival films:
If you mixed up a handful of different breakfast cereals and flung it in the air, the randomly falling Corn Flakes, Cocoa Puffs and Froot Loops might appear to be arranging themselves, by color and shape, into interesting patterns and clusters. Similarly, if you gathered together more than 300 movies and scattered them across a large Canadian city, a serendipitous sense of order might emerge.
The image of cascading cereal does not come from left field but from "Mysterious Skin," a new movie directed by Gregg Araki that played this week at the film festival here. As it winds on, the festival, which began last Thursday and ends on Saturday, feels both utterly chaotic and at the same time governed by some strange, complex principle of symmetry. As you go from movie to movie to movie, they seem to pair off and bunch together.
