At the Toronto International Film Festival, good isn't good enough. At any given moment, as many as two dozen movies may be showing somewhere in the city, which means every intriguing misfire, every lukewarm success, is an opportunity missed elsewhere. As you check your screening schedule by the flickering light, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see an unalloyed masterpiece is passing you by. If you're not watching a work of genius, you have only yourself to blame.

At least, that's the theory. But as the days of TIFF 2005 rolled by, screening-room conversations and fitful blog-scrolling confirmed that everyone else was having the same good-not-great week. Highly anticipated premieres from established directors like Terry Gilliam and Laurent Cantet fell wide of the mark (to say nothing of Cameron Crowe's widely trounced Elizabethtown, the worst movie I wish I'd seen), and the surprises, like the soft-edged Korean melodrama Sa-Kwa, were mild, the kind of thing that would make for a perfectly pleasant day at the movies if you weren't hunting bigger game.

Auteurists took the biggest hit, with one favorite director after another turning in subpar work. Gilliam's Tideland, while not the disaster some claimed, is certainly far from his best, an overwrought study of a traumatized girl's escape into fantasy which plays like a feature-length riff on the asylum scene from 12 Monkeys. Apparently relishing the release from the Weinsteins' tether, Tideland is Gilliam at his most unrestrained, and least disciplined, abusing the fisheye lens as if he banked every rejected shot from The Brothers Grimm. The images of 10-year-old Jodelle Ferland bouncing through fields of wheat are the simplest and most beautiful Gilliam has ever filmed, but they're overwhelmed by the movie's stridency. At least Tideland ends on a quiet note, a tragic, lyrical coda that almost redeems its shrillness.

A more complicated failure, Laurent Cantet's Vers le sud (Heading South) sacrifices the diamond precision of his shattering Time Out for a dissipated story of 1970s Haiti, where three white women have come to soak up the sun and the attention of the island's young males. Not the facile anti-colonial treatise you might expect, the movie is almost over-generous, following so many characters, black and white, that it loses focus; it's Cantet's attempt at a John Sayles movie, which is not a promising development. Charlotte Rampling's icy hauteur has become so familiar she's almost unidentifiable without it (we shared an elevator for three floors before I recognized her thawed-out self), but Karen Young's turn as a southern divorcee with a passionate, even pathological, attachment to Ménothy Cesar's young Haitian is so rich you wish the movie didn't squander it.

Three Times, the latest from Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien, was a letdown only by his rarified standards. A time-hopping triptych spanning the last century, it's at least one-third a masterpiece. Revisiting the milieu of Hou's Flowers of Shanghai, the film's thrilling middle section is a silent movie complete with intertitles and fluttering piano score, contrasting concubine Shu Qi's restrained resistance with the republican revolt of 1911. Perpetually romancing Wong Kar-Wai regular Chen Chang, Shu turns up as a pool hall girl swaying to "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" in 1966, and a depressive bisexual chanteuse in the present day, bringing the movie to a wrenching conclusion.

After Ocean's Twelve, Steven Soderbergh's Bubble was a comeback of sorts, a spare, self-consciously arty Ohio chamber piece about aimless small-town factory workers. But if it doesn't precisely condescend to its characters (played by local nonprofessionals), it also doesn't quite seem to consider them interesting enough to support a movie, awkwardly injecting a left-field plot twist at the 45-minute mark. A pretentious thriller masquerading as autocritique, Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies shows he doesn't understand the genre well enough to deconstruct it, while watching Vincent Ward's River Queen and Tsui Hark's interminable Seven Swords was like being buried in an art gallery avalanche. At least Lee Myung-se's Duelist was eye-popping enough to make up for its incoherence; as the title character and his female pursuer do battle by moonlight, they step into the shadows so only their blades remain, locked in a struggle that time will never resolve.

Coherence isn't Abel Ferrara's stock in trade; Mary, the conflicted Catholic filmmaker's double-barreled response to The Passion of the Christ, polarized critics with its beguiling blend of talking-head interviews, alarm-bell psychodrama and Biblical reenactment. But if it's hard to say what Ferrara's getting at, it's clear he's getting at something, possibly a lot of somethings. Most intriguing among them is the Gnostic notion that Mary Magdalene was a disciple, not merely a follower, of Jesus, and the erasure of her role has unbalanced every subsequent interpretation of his teachings. (Ferrara's Christ has the humility that Mel Gibson's notably lacked.) Playing a director who casts Juliette Binoche as Mary and himself as Jesus (because "I'm the best actor I know"), Matthew Modine explicitly channels Ferrara's high-octane mannerisms, while Binoche is so impassioned in the film-within-a-film segments you wish Modine's movie really existed. Mary is hardly perfect, but even if it's a failure, it's better than most people's successes.

For sheer sock-in-the-gut power, Mary's only competition was the shattering conclusion of Tsai Ming-Liang's otherwise whimsical The Wayward Cloud and the Romanian The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. A two-and-a-half hour, near-real-time depiction of the last night in an elderly intellectual's life, Death might seem like the ultimate bringdown, but Christu Puiu's sobering odyssey is leavened with moments of black humor, and its long, hand-held takes establish an astonishing physicality; Lazarescu's first knife-sharp cough sent a spasm through my own body. Inevitably reminiscent of the ultra-vérité documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, Death plunges Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) into a nightmare purgatory of ambulance rides and emergency rooms, where caring nurses are trumped by ego-tripping doctors whose god complex leans toward the Old Testament. Like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, Lazarescu's deteriorating body connects us more deeply to our own, and, ideally, to each others'.

As bodily links go, though, Lazarescu has nothing on the Siamese twin rockers of Brothers of the Head, Temple grads Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's follow-up to their too-good-to-be-true Lost in La Mancha. Going the mock-doc route, Pepe and Fulton shoot surprisingly straight; outlandish premise notwithstanding, Brothers is tender, almost mawkish, at times. Despite their special bond, the brothers' conflicts are strictly Behind the Music fare, but insights about the double bind of collaboration and the queerness of glam rock lie just under the surface. As Pepe quipped during the Q&A, "When you strap two good-looking 20-year-olds to each other, a certain subtext starts to emerge."

No more at ease in his body is The Sun's Hirohito, the Japanese emperor awaiting his surrender to Gen. Douglas Macarthur. Issey Ogata's emperor is a twitchy-lipped ex-god whose renunciation of his divine status has opened a world of immediate physical sensations: The touch of a brocade tablecloth is more pressing than the demands of his cabinet ministers. The third in Aleksandr Sokurov's despot troika (after portraits of Lenin and Hitler), The Sun uses digital video to stunning effect, shooting in candlelit half-dark so extreme the subtitles often cast the brightest glow. Like Three Times, The Sun is part of the New York Film Festival, which starts this weekend, and currently without a distributor, so committed fans should consider a day trip.

After a few five-movie days, sitting down to a full plate starts to feel like a job, but two TIFF entries made work feel like play. Based on an ostensibly "unfilmable" novel, Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy is a relentlessly self-referential take on Laurence Sterne's formidable tale, which, as star Steve Coogan notes, "was postmodern before there was any modern to be post about." Pushing intertextuality to the breaking point, Tristram winks and nudges until you feel you might scream, then gives way to its own making-of, where the digressions that prevent the novel's narrator from reaching his own birth are replaced by the frenzy of filmmaking (not a surprising substitution for a director who makes movies faster than distributors can release them). Directed by Guy Maddin, My Dad Is 100 Years Old is Isabella Rossellini's tribute to her late father, Roberto, whose centenary arrives in 2006. Rossellini, who wrote and plays every role (except her father, who is represented by a talking stomach), mounts a touching appreciation of her father's oeuvre and his contentious relationship with contemporaries like Hitchcock and Fellini (whose heirs, rumor has it, don't appreciate the ribbing). Rossellini's recreations are mainly played for comic effect, though they double as surprisingly cogent criticism, but her encounter with the image of her late mother, Ingrid Bergman, is enough to reduce the hardiest postmodernist to tears. The festival's most succinct pleasure, at just 17 minutes, My Dad was also one of its richest. If only the bad movies were so brief.