I’ve barely landed in Toronto and I’m already being reminded why I’m here. “So,” begins my portly middle aged cab driver. He seems to speak English fluently, once I manage to decipher his dense French accent. “You’re here for the film festival, aren’t you?” Damn, am I that obvious?

Now hopelessly unveiled as a foreigner, I have no reservations about admitting that it’s my first time visiting the city. My affable chauffeur promises an informal tour along the way to my hotel, but the best he can muster is pointing out the “nice view of skyscrapers” from the highway and the arena where the Blue Jays play.

OK, one thing is immediately clear: The surrounding environment of the Toronto International Film Festival doesn’t offer serene naturalism like Sundance or glimmering European cohesiveness a la Cannes, but it does have a hefty reputation as one of the world’s finest annual gatherings of top notch film industry vets and casual cinephiles alike. It’s also one of the last big festivals of the year (Telluride wrapped last week) and the final major one to feature world premieres (the New York Film Festival, which fills the last week of this month, has no premieres).

There are plenty of awesome-sounding movies on schedule this year, with buzz circulating faster than bees in turbulence (sorry, easy comparison). Hotly anticipated titles include I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’ esoteric ode to Bob Dylan, Sean Penn’s adaptation of Into the Wild, and The Visitor, an intriguing immigration drama from the director of a sweet indie film starring Peter Dinklage that came out a few years ago called The Station Agent. In between are oddities like Werner Herzog’s Antarctica doc Encounters at the End of the World and some Canadian film called Young People Fucking. It’s going to be an interesting nine days.

I vow to anyone dedicated enough to check out my regular updates at this here site that I’ll keep you informed on nearly everything at TIFF that zips past my retina at 24 frames per second (or something like 30 frames, if it’s shot on digital video—precision counts in movieland.). Present time constraints prohibit me from going into too much detail at the moment, but let me just throw this out there: There are 271 feature length films from 55 countries screening at the festival this year (thank you, TIFF fact sheet). Of those, I’ve caught 33 titles at various other festivals around the globe, in addition to early press screenings in NYC and a few DVDs. That amounts to roughly 12% of the festival’s line up, which I figure isn’t a bad way to get things going. I’ll be lucky to raise that figure past 30% by the end of the event.

I’m going to keep a log of everything I’ve seen, complete with brief remarks that may vary in terms of their level of critical finesse (it all depends on my respective levels of fatigue and timeliness), but the evolving list should give you a sense of the festival’s variety and quality, and hopefully offer a peak at some neat low budget discoveries. For now, I bid you adieu—but first, in no particular order other than the arbitrary way that I wrote them down, a rundown of what I’ve seen so far. It’s just an assemblage of words at the moment, but I promise to fill in the blanks soon:

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

THE BRAVE ONE

VERY YOUNG GIRLS

FINISHING THE GAME

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD

JIMMY CARTER: MAN FROM PLAINS

COUNTERFEITERS

ALEXANDRA

CHOP SHOP

MY KID COULD PAINT THAT

MISTER LONELY

THE BAND’S VISIT

PARANOID PARK

RUN FATBOY RUN

SMILEY FACE

THE VIRGIN SPRING

THE POPE’S TOILET

AND ALONG COME TOURISTS

THE MAN FROM LONDON

THE VOYAGE OF THE RED BALLOON

YOU, THE LIVING

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

PERSEPOLIS

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

THE BANISHMENT

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’

SECRET SUNSHINE

STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING

WITH YOUR PERMISSION

CHRONIQUE D’UN ETE

THE ORPHANAGE

XXY

OPERATION FILMMAKER

FUGITIVE PIECES