Being the best by far on earth came crashing down on the Toronto International Film Festival last month: for the hot preview screenings, there were rarely enough seats in the theaters to accommodate all the press and industry members who were clamoring to get in. It was frustrating being shut out of key film showings. But unlike some crybaby American critics, I didn’t make a stink about it.

"Go back to your own country!" a Montreal journalist shouted at Roger Ebert, who’d been fuming very loudly. Polite Canadians couldn’t help noticing that it was mostly VIP press from the USA (there were journalists from around the world) who were registering complaints and even threatening to boycott this great festival in future years.

Speaking of ugly Americans: The Trials of Henry Kissinger, a superb documentary directed by Eugene Jarecki, played this September 11 at Toronto, and it reminded us that on September 11, 1973, bombs fell on the palace of Chilean president Salvador Allende, an action that was backed and blessed by the CIA and Secretary of State Kissinger. This movie shows Henry dancing over the map doing treacherous things (such as dismantling a Vietnam peace plan) to consolidate his power in Washington. We also see Mayor Rudy sanctimoniously welcoming him to speak to TV cameras before the rubble of Ground Zero.

More ugliness: The Quiet American, an excellent film version of Graham Greene’s prescient 1950s novel about the USA/CIA presence in Vietnam, had its official world premiere at Toronto, where festival attendee Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein was noticeably MIA from the screening. Miramax bought The Quiet American prior to September 11 and since has been distancing itself from Phillip Noyce’s less-than-jingoistic movie; perhaps because of the overwhelmingly positive response at Toronto, a limited November 28 release has just been authorized. Another possible reason for the Miramax cold shoulder: Michael Caine, as a world-weary British journalist in Vietnam, delivers an Oscar-level performance, but Weinstein is looking to focus Miramax’s Academy Award push on Daniel Day Lewis’s performance in the upcoming Gangs of New York.

Toronto’s disappointments included Atom Egoyan’s opening-night Ararat, a ponderous, self-conscious jumbling of Armenia’s tortured history with several torturous psychodrama plots. Too bad, because we’ll probably never get another film chronicling the Armenian Holocaust. David Cronenberg’s Spider is a movie that only elite film critics could love, an arid, ascetic exercise in stasis and gloom, with Ralph Fiennes as a hardly speaking walking dead man, a schizophrenic zombie as the result of tragedies in his childhood. Check out Patrick McGrath’s novel instead: there you’re privy to Spider’s lively mind. And you can add Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity to the list of heralded prizewinners from Sundance (the filmmaker is Arthur Miller’s daughter) that turn out to be total losers: these tales of woe about young women (Parker Posey doing her urbane shtick, Kyra Sedgwick doing a blue-collar thing) has a winsome, sticky, John Irving–type voiceover. As for Claire Denis’s Friday Night, it’s a no-plot mood piece that takes place during an elongated evening rush hour in Paris: cars hardly move (that’s the first act), a woman driver picks up a handsome pedestrian, and eventually they go to a hotel and make love. Not enough to sustain a movie.

What was good? Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, a tender, kooky romance between a beautiful young dancer in a coma and the mama’s-boy hairdresser who watches over her. Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, where the talented Scottish director of Ratcatcher, triumphs again as the great Samantha Morton as the title blue-collar gal rambles through Spain and pretends that she’s the author of a novel written by her suicide boyfriend. And Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven, a brilliantly conceptual rewrite of the 1950s Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind) but with two differences: this Eisenhower-era movie includes a closeted gay husband coming out (Dennis Quaid) and an interracial romance (Julianne Moore, Dennis Haysbert), both no-nos in the dying days of the studio system. Haynes’s film won deserved awards at Venice for Best Actress (Moore) and Best Cinematography (Ed Lachman). But Far from Heaven is worth it just for his pulpish re-creation of a 1950s gay bar.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com