As a kid I fell in love with movies mainly for the stories and characters, and every once in a while, maybe some special effects. As I got older, my love affair was renewed when I discovered the Cult of the Director. The Cult of the Director allows one to look at movies in a far more personal way. It's an ongoing game; one can discover long-forgotten works, or piece together old puzzles, but one can also look ahead and guess how a director's career arc will come together. Basically, there are roughly four kinds of directors. The most common is the kind with no personality, and perhaps very little skill, someone like Brian Robbins, the director of Meet Dave (58 screens). Many of these folks eventually disappear without ever making much of a mark. After that, we get the craftsman, someone with lots of skill and talent but still no personality. These guys are the most interesting to talk to; they're unpretentious and tell the best stories. Brad Anderson, the director of Transsiberian (81 screens), is a good example.

Then there's a weird category of directors who have somehow come to popular attention, despite a lack of skill and/or a lack of personality. These can range from moneymakers like Brett Ratner to Oscar winners like Ron Howard. But of course, since we're talking about live human beings here, there's a lot of wiggle room in these categories, and I could probably establish several sub-categories. Not to mention that any director's career can suddenly change course at any point. Yes, even Brett Ratner could suddenly make a good film. (I'm not saying he will, just that he could.) These people manage to stay on top through a lucky combination of subject matter and promotion. Even though films like Brick Lane (31 screens) and Mongol (16 screens) have no skill or personality, they seem like great films because of their stories and packaging.

The latest documentary from Michael Moore will be released exclusively online beginning September 23. FOR FREE. Yes, that's right, and it's a dream come true for both Moore's fans and those millions of anti-fans that despise him. For the followers it's obviously good because they don't have to wait very long to own a copy of the movie. For the enemies it's good because they can check out the movie without giving the man a dime. Or be witnessed buying a ticket.

The 97-minute film is titled Slacker Uprising (formerly Captain Mike Across America), and it's about Moore's 62-city tour during the 2004 presidential election, as he attempts to rally young "slacker" voters. The premise doesn't sound quite as intriguing as his last election-year release, Fahrenheit 9/11 -- which may be part of the reason this one is not receiving a proper theatrical opening. But Moore also says this method is particularly to thank his fans as the 20th anniversary of Roger & Me approaches.

Under no circumstances is Ji-woon Kim's The Good, the Bad, the Weird a great movie, but I found myself genuinely impressed with it. The pitch – "Korean comic spaghetti western" – sounded like the sort of ultra-hip, insubstantial, self-consciously campy Asian actioner I've grown tired of; I kept flashing back to Riyuhei Kitamura's much-hyped but totally useless Versus, an acquired taste I haven't acquired. I needn't have worried. Though Kim's western pastiche may be insubstantial, it's anything but a drag. It's masterfully directed, legitimately funny, and legitimately fun, thoroughly enjoyable even at an excessive 129 minutes.

Though you may think you're here to see how Kim (whom you may remember from his terrific horror entry A Tale of Two Sisters) plays with the western genre, you're really here for the action sequences. There are two spectacular ones: the rollicking train robbery that opens the film, and a later all-stops-out chase scene involving several gangs of bandits and the Japanese army. These aren't the sort of scenes that bring you to the edge of your seat, but rather the sort that put a steady, delighted grin on your face. Unapologetically goofy, absurdly attenuated, brilliantly paced, and backed by a rousing musical score, they alone make the film worth sitting through.

In spite of the writer's strike keeping several larger films that otherwise would have been on the Telluride slate out of this year's fest, and the absence of Cannes Palm d'or winner The Class, which many had hoped to see here (that film is opening the upcoming New York Film Festival, and so was unable to play at Telluride), the 35th Telluride Film Festival was a solid success.

The fest scored sneak previews of Danny Boyle's hotly anticipated Slumdog Millionaire, which was very well received by audiences, and gave North American premieres to some films that you'll likely be hearing about come Oscar time, including I've Loved You So Long, Flame and Citron, and Adam Resurrected, and Everlasting Moments.

The Telluride Film Festival has wrapped up and we're gearing up for our non-stop coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival, which starts tomorrow. Just in case you missed any of our coverage from the Telluride Film Festival, here's a roundup of what we saw there. Most of these films will also be playing at Toronto as well; if you attended Telluride or are going to TIFF, be sure to let us know which films you love or hate -- we always enjoy hearing what our smart Cinematical cinephiles think about the films they catch at fests.

Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle): Fans of director Danny Boyle's work will find much to appreciate in his latest film, Slumdog Millionaire, a sweeping, hopeful story about a boy in the slums of India who becomes an instant celebrity after he wins millions on India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? ... read more

Adam Resurrected, adapted by Noah Stollum Stollman from the book of the same name by Yoram Kaniuk and directed by Paul Schrader, is a darkly abstract and haunting film featuring Jeff Goldblum in his finest, most layered performance ever. Goldblum portrays Adam Steiner, a tragic clown shattered by the horrors of the Holocaust. A clown and ringleader of his own highly successful circus act in pre-War Berlin, Adam finds himself, his wife, and their two young daughters caught in the roundup of Jews. Ironically, his audience was once full of soldiers in Nazi uniforms; now the very people Adam spent his life making happy are just as happy to see him and his family exterminated.

Adam in the present is a prisoner of his memories of those terrible years, and now resident ringleader of a fictional asylum for Holocaust survivors in the Israeli desert. He's a man with a fractured soul, and as a result of his unrelenting anguish and guilt, he astounds the doctors in charge of the asylum by the ability of his mind to make his body bleed and even grow malignant tumors as he repeatedly dies and is reborn.

One man to not truly break through the 1980s stigma and revamp his career is Eric Stoltz. James Spader did a heck of a job with it, now being smarmy fun on Boston Legal, as did the likes of Jon Cryer, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and more. But then again, even Stoltz's '80s classics, Mask and Some Kind of Wonderful, were drowned by the likes of Molly Ringwald and her swarm of teen romances, so it's not like he ever had a bit spotlight.

Stoltz remains a bit on the outside, but still working as hard as ever. He's got a bit of a role in Milk, and now Variety reports that he's joining a wartime indie drama called Fort McCoy. Along with the likes of Brendan Fehr, Camryn Manheim, Lyndsy Fonseca, Seymour Cassel, and Kate Connor, Stoltz is nestled in Wisconsin shooting the true story, based on a script from Connor.

McCoy centers on "a barber who moves with his family during WWII to a POW camp in Wisconsin, where the children are the sole youngsters on the base -- save for a German teenager who forges an alliance that crosses language barriers with the barber's little girl." I imagine we can see how this plays out sometime during next year's festival season, with hopefully a release after that.

For the cinephile, discovering a new film by famed Swedish director Jan Troell (one of this year's Telluride tributees) is a lot like eating a perfectly made truffle after a lifetime of mass-produced candy bars. His latest effort, Everlasting Moments, was like that for me; it's that rare cinematic experience that you settle back, bite into, and then savor as the subtle richness of the film cleanses the palate and fills the soul.

Based on the real-life story of Troell's wife's grandmother, the film takes us through the life of Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen, in a remarkable performance), a belabored mother of a large brood in the early days of the 20th century who finds renewed passion and intellectual independence through a Contessa camera she wins in a lottery. The camera sits for many years unused until one day, Maria takes it into the shop of the local photographer, Sebastien Pederson (Jesper Christensen), to sell it to help pay the rent.

The kindly Pederson shows Maria how to use the camera, and once she starts using it, she begins to see the world through a whole new lens. Finding herself unable to resist continuing to learn and improve her eye as a photographer, Maria becomes obsessed with capturing the little moments of life around her through the miraculous ability to capture living moments in still images.

A few stray thoughts from the end of the festival, hopefully of general interest. I still have one more review in the pipeline, which should come tomorrow afternoon.

- I am even more gung-ho about Slumdog Millionaire than Kim. It sort of ruined the last day and a half of the festival, because I've been unable to think about much else. I want to see it at least a dozen more times, immediately.

- I need to say something about With a Little Help from Myself, François Dupeyron's follow-up to the arthouse hit Monsieur Ibrahim. It's a respectable, low-key drama set in a French housing project, featuring a justly-acclaimed performance by Félicité Wouassi as a woman working to keep her head above water and her family together despite a seemingly infinite number of obstacles. It gets a bit too cute at points -- there's a subplot regarding the protagonist's sex-starved neighbor that is the epitome of "neither here nor there" -- but it's mostly the sort of solid, unpretentious film I greet with open arms at festivals. There's enough buzz about Wouassi that if you live in a city, you'll surely see it at a theater near you sooner rather than later.

Take one renegade Japanese director, set him to work on a Spaghetti Western, add a cameo by a talkative American filmmaker, and what do you get? First place in the indie four-day weekend box office race. Sukiyaki Western Django, directed by the prolific and extremely versatile Takashi Miike and featuring Quentin Tarantino in a small role, tore it up at the single Manhattan theatre where it opened, grossing $13,100, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. The version released in the US does not represent Miike's original vision, however. Distributor First Look edited 20 or so minutes for the bastardized edition currently playing, so this is a muted triumph. *

The light-hearted I Served the King of England had the right stuff to average $8,487 per screen at eight locations. Directed by Jirí Menzel, the film stars Ivan Barnev, Oldrich Kaiser, and the always wonderful Julia Jentsch. Naked Penélope Cruz outdrew mostly-clothed Penélope Cruz, as Elegy bested Vicky Christina Barcelona on per-screen numbers, $5,697 to $5,102. To be fair, however, Woody Allen's latest is playing on nearly 700 screens and cracked the Top 10; it's made more than $13 million so far, though Elegy's $1.7 million is nothing to sneeze at in the specialty field. Right behind came two consistent cold-weather flicks, Frozen River ($5,028 per screen) and Transsiberian ($4,728). The more temperate Tell No One blew past $4 million in total US earnings in its ninth week, averaging $4,480 at 102 theaters.

Up next? Chris Smith's very good drama The Pool opens on Wednesday; Friday will see the release of Chris Eska's entrancing poetic drama August Evening, Jessica Yu's playful comedy Ping Pong Playa, romantic comedy Everybody Wants to Be Italian, thriller Mister Foe, drama Save Me, and the self-explanatory comedy/drama Surfer, Dude.

* UPDATE: A representative for First Look says that the company acquired the film after it had already been edited from 121 minutes to 98 minutes, and further states that Miike did the editing. My apologies for the error.

As a further aside, the original-length version screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2007 and was released in Japan shortly thereafter.

Flash of Genius is a conventional crowdpleaser but not, I'm pleased to report, a shameless one. Chronicling the true story of a college professor's fight to reclaim his invention – the intermittent windshield wiper – from the car company that stole it, the film does many of the things you'd expect, but it may also surprise you. Don't let its Telluride placement fool you: this is a staunchly mainstream, unchallenging film, the sort of underdog-vs.-corporate-behemoth story you've seen time and again. But it's a decent rendition, hitting the right notes without insulting our intelligence.

Now, the intermittent windshield wiper is not exactly the light bulb. If you're not familiar with the term, the wiper is "intermittent" in the sense that it can pause between wipes – a problem that apparently puzzled engineers at all the major car companies until Kearns cracked it the late 60s. But part of what's nifty about the film is its ability to create suspense and curiosity around something so seemingly mundane. Kearns' first demo of his device to Ford is exciting in a very goofy way, but exciting nonetheless.

With his latest effort, Happy-Go-Lucky, director Mike Leigh takes a departure from the dark mood evoked by most of his films with a charming little tale about an eternally optimistic school teacher, Poppy (Sally Hawkins, previously seen in smaller roles in Leigh's films Vera Drake and All or Nothing), who breezes through life, always seeing the glass half full. Poppy is one of those people who never seems to get down about anything. She smiles at surly strangers, strikes up conversations with people who'd clearly prefer to be left alone, and puts a positive spin on everything.

When her bike is stolen, Poppy shrugs it off and decides to take driving lessons; her driving instructor, Scott (Eddie Marsan, also a Leigh alum from Vera Drake) is Poppy's polar opposite. Some of the film's best moments are when she's interacting with Scott and we have the dramatic tension of his simmering anger to contrast with Poppy's perkiness. Scott is intensely uptight, seems to hate everyone and everything, and adheres firmly to the belief that if only everyone would follow a strict set of rules (his rules, of course), all would be well. Naturally, the two clash.

Fans of director Danny Boyle's work will find much to appreciate in his latest film, Slumdog Millionaire, a sweeping, hopeful story about a boy in the slums of India who becomes an instant celebrity after he wins millions on India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. Adapted by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day) off the novel Q &A by Vikas Swarup, the tale is framed within an interesting narrative structure that revolves around the young man, Jamal, being interrogated for fraud by the police, who cannot believe that a "slumdog" orphan could possibly have known the answers to the questions on the show.

Boyle uses this conceit to take us back and forth from the police station, where Jamal (Dev Patel) is tortured to get him to confess how he cheated, to his appearance on the show, to the events throughout his youth that led to him knowing the answers to the game show questions. How did a boy growing up in the slums amid piles of garbage and filth know which US president is on the one hundred dollar bill, or who invented the revolver? Boyle takes us back through Jamal's life story to show us the mean-streets education that led to him knowing the answers, while managing to avoid making the set-up feel contrived.

One of my favorite things to do at Telluride is talk to people in line and on the gondola about what they've seen, what they've loved, and what they've hated. The folks who come to Telluride tend to be smart folks who love film, and I always have some fascinating conversations here.

I'm hearing strong positive buzz so far for I've Loved You So Long, Hunger, Flame & Citron, The Good, the Bad and the Weird, and Happy-Go-Lucky, all of which will play Toronto. Folks here are enamored of Sally Hawkins, who plays the lead in Happy-Go-Lucky; sadly, she broke her collarbone while shooting a stunt for her latest film, and isn't here in Telluride, but she will be at Toronto.

Hearing mixed response to American Violet (I haven't seen that one, but you can read Gene's review) and Adam Resurrected; the latter is the newest from film master Paul Schrader, and his films tend to be very heavy. I saw the film yesterday, but haven't yet written up my review for it; I need a bit more time to process what I saw. I will say this much, though: Jeff Goldblum's performance in the film is one of his strongest ever. I loved him in Fay Grim, but this is a very dark, very serious role, and he is great.

Saturday's big sneak screening was Danny Boyle's newest film, Slumdog Millionaire, which is going to be one of the biggest-buzzed films coming out of Telluride and heading to Toronto. Look for the energy around this film and positive response here to help it really pop at TIFF. My review of that film is coming shortly, but for now I'll just say that it's Boyle's best film to date by far. I had a conversation last night over drinks with a screenwriter friend who noted that Slumdog is very Dickensonian in its narrative, and we both agreed that filming over in India this time seems to have opened Boyle up in unexpected ways; this is his least solipsistic film, very accessible and with great mainstream potential -- audience response at last night's sneak, the first time the film has been seen publicly, was overwhelmingly positive.

Two more days of Telluride, look for more reviews to come ...

1. People are willing to get out of bed at seven in the morning to watch a movie about people starving themselves to death. I don't care how much people paid to be here: it is simply amazing that the 8:30 am showing of Hunger (which Kim reviewed at Cannes) -- one of the most intensely unpleasant films I've ever seen, with a program description that did that aspect of it justice -- was a near-sellout at Telluride's largest venue. By the time I got to the theater at 8 am on a rainy Sunday morning, I was 259th in line. Everyone keeps saying that what "makes Telluride special" is the enthusiasm and undying cinephilia of the audience (most of whom come back year after year), and nothing epitomizes that attitude better than this morning's Hunger queue.

2. Anyone who fights to save the whales is automatically a hero, no matter his means. Just as it was remarkable to see people line up at the crack of dawn to watch an indescribably painful art film, it was disappointing to see a Telluride audience give an uncritical standing ovation to "eco-pirate" Paul Watson following a screening of Pirate of the Sea, the mediocre, one-sided documentary profiling him. Watson, a Greenpeace dissident who goes out on a boat and tries to sink or sabotage whaling or seal-hunting operations, may well be a hero, but there's no way you could fairly come to that conclusion after watching the hagiographic documentary, which takes Watson's word as gospel, and refuses to explore the troubling implications of his often violent efforts. Another documentary about Watson, called At the Edge of the World, will play Toronto; here's to hoping it's a bit more considered and thoughtful.