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Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri, who made the powerful film The Attack, which not many people beyond the festival circuit saw, continues to impress with The Insult, a large-scale drama that should appeal to bigger audiences. The new film, which is well shot and well acted, is about a seemingly trivial street incident – a slur – between two working class men, which first escalates into a vocal verbal dispute, then into a physical brawl, and finally into an emotionally and politically charged courtroom drama about broader moral and ethical issues.

Hurricane Irma tore into south Florida this weekend and shuttered movie theaters across the state, but that wasn’t enough to scare off New Line and Warner Bros. ’ killer clown flic It.

At only 27, Jennifer Lawrence has won four Golden Globes (Joy, American Hustle, Silver Lining Playbook, Winter’s Bone), one Oscar (Silver Lining Playbook) and attended many film festivals as she traveled the world also promoting her blockbuster trilogy The Hunger Games. But when she arrives at the Toronto Film Festival, she’s come with the experience of having her film mother! booed at the recent Venice Film Festival and remains unfazed.

Idris Elba hasn’t been wasting much time this year, packed with performances in  The Dark Tower, Thor: Ragnarok, The Mountain Between Us and Molly’s Game, the latter films both premiering back to back in Toronto. In Molly’s Game, Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, he is defense lawyer to Jessica Chastain’s Molly Bloom (the film is the based on the life Olympic skier turned high stakes poker player).

Paolo Virzì’s The Leisure Seeker is among the several films which world premiered at the Venice Film Festival before bowing in North America in Toronto. Virzì is less known than Italian compatriots like Paolo Sorrentino, Matteo Garrone or Nanni Moretti but he has been a solid chronicler of his generation, with personal stories mostly centered around his native Tuscan city of Livorno.

Julianne Moore has had a busy month, first hitting the Lido at the Venice Film Festival with co-star Matt Damon and filmmaker George Clooney for their movie Suburbicon, and now the 56-year-old Golden Globe-winning actress is being feted again, along with her co-star and director, at the Toronto Film Festival. Suburbicon stars Matt Damon as Gardner Lodge, a seemingly model husband and father living in the picture-perfect suburb of Suburbicon in the 1950s.

As usual, the Toronto International Film Festival’s first Saturday culminated with what has become a tradition. The annual HFPA/InStyle bash took over the Windsor Arms off Bloor street, as a veritable who’s who of filmdom descended on the hotel to celebrate film, the beginning of the Fall awards season, and generally catch up with one another at North America’s largest festival.

The Italians did not just run the festival, they also ruled the red carpet. This year there were more local designers than ever before, and jury president Annette Bening, as well as Rebecca Hall, set the tone by wearing Italian designers exclusively.

Guillermo del Toro’s Cold War fantasy drama The Shape of Water took home the top award at the 74th Venice Film Festival. “ I believe in life, I believe in love and I believe in cinema,” del Toro said as he accepted the Golden Lion to a massive standing ovation at the Palazzo del Cinema’s Sala Grande.

What begins as an old-fashioned family melodrama turns into a more complex existential meditation on the way we live now in Robert Guédiguian’s La Villa  (The House by the Sea). Unlike most Hollywood family sagas, the story doesn’t center on the inevitable conflicts between parents and children – the classic generation rift – but on three late middle-aged siblings, when they reunite at the place where they grew up.