12 Years a Slave, 30 days to live, a few minutes to rob a bank

Saturday morning outside the ScotiaBank Theater complex (the longest escalator ride in the world?), pouring rain. Inside, pouring people -- hundreds of Press & Industry-credentialed Toronto festgoers filing into Theater 1 for 12 Years a Slave. An unrelenting tale of injustice and woe, beautifully realized by Steve McQueen -- the British director of Granadian lineage who has already gone inside the infamous Maze Prison to chronicle a historic IRA hunger strike (Hunger) and inside the head of a sex addict (Shame) -- 12 Years is the true story of Solomon Northup, a free black man abducted and sold into slavery in the 1840s South. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Northup, a musician with a wife and two children, living in Saratoga, New York,  kidnapped on a trip to Washington, D.C. -- waking from a night of wining and dining to find himself chained to a stone floor in a windowless room. Northup's journey is staggeringly cruel, Ejiofor's acting is just staggering. So, too, Michael Fassbender (McQueen's Hunger and Shame star), as the Louisiana plantation owner who lords over his slaves with a Bible and a whip. Like Lee Daniels' The Butler, which begins on a plantation before moving to the White House for its take on the legacy of slavery and race relations in our country, McQueen's film is destined for the Academy Awards. Applause as the end credits rolled.

Matthew McConaughey's physical transformation in Dallas Buyers Club, as a Texas electrician who contracts the HIV virus, is downright creepy, chilling, disturbing. Gaunt, gray, his eyes sunken and his belt cinched, the actor's portrayal of Ron Woodroof, a boozing, coke-snorting, rodeo-betting wild man who is diagnosed with HIV, gets AIDS and is told he has 30 days to live, well, it's hard to shake. And sometimes hard to watch. Another real-life story. Another actor shedding crazy poundage for his art (McConaughey lost somewhere between 40 and 50 lbs). And possibly a first Oscar nomination? Jared Leto, as a transvestite AIDS victim who befriends the homophobic Woodroof ("Is that Courtney Cox?" a keen critic by my side observed), and Jennifer Garner as a doctor with a conscience, lend able support.

Who'd have thunk that a movie about an OCD bank robber who has no problem stabbing people to death while looking them straight in the eye could be fun? Well, Cold Eyes, the huge Korean box office hit starring Jung Wu-sun as the sinister heist master and Han Yoon-ju as the cute rookie surveillance detective on his tail, came as welcome relief after the whip lashings and emaciations of the day. A good old cops and robbers action pic, pulled off with speed and style.

My interview with Léa Seydoux and  Adèle Exarchopoulos, stars of the Cannes-winning and controversial lesbian love story, Blue Is the Warmest Color (long, graphic sex scenes -- gratutitous and pervy, or truth-seeking and beautiful?), was put off for another day. Quel dommage.

- Steven Rea