Andrew Kendall

Very little in Hong Sang-soo’s “The Woman Who Ran” plays as if it is a mystery to be solved.

Early in “Time” Sibil Fox Richardson – you may know her as Fox Rich – is recording a video for her social media, announcing an upcoming talk she’ll be giving.

“I Carry You With Me” opens with an older man, Iván, walking towards the subway in New York.

It speaks to the ever-increasingly blurred lines between television and cinema that one of the most vibrant pieces of filmmaking out of the fall festival season has been the entries from Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology premiering over the course of the New York Film Festival this year.

The first shot we see of Henry Golding as Kit in “Monsoon” is instructive.

The set-up for “Another Round” feels like it’s lifted from a punchline of a very good joke.

  There’s a scene in the middle of “Concrete Cowboy” where the film seems to be firing on all cylinders.

In a way, Kornél Mundruczó’s “Pieces of a Woman” feels doomed by its own title – a film that works better in pieces and moments, than it does as a sustained narrative.

There’s a scene towards the end of “Misbehaviour” that the film has been working to.

In the press notes for “New Order”, director Michel Franco announces that the film is a warning: “If inequality is not addressed by civic means, and if all dissenting voices are silenced, chaos ensues.”

There’s a brief sequence that follows the end-credits of the Nasser brothers’ “Gaza mon amour” that puts the previous 85 minutes into perspective.

Cinema continues to be a reflection of society, and the social and racial disruptions of the current times have been reflected in key titles of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Just over halfway into “Lovers Rock”, at a party where the music has been bursting through the sound systems for much of the runtime, the DJ stops the music and lets the crowd ‘vibe out’ a cappella.

There’s a moment that comes in the final act of “The Kid Detective” that made me yearn for movie theatres more than anything I’ve seen at TIFF this year.

In Philippe Lacôte’s moody “Night of the Kings,” telling stories becomes an act of survival.

In “Monday,” Argyris Papadimitropoulos takes the uncertainty that comes with exploring a new relationship and mines it for two hours as we watch a couple experience the highs, lows and everything in between of a new relationship.

In “Quo Vadis, Aida?” Jasna Đuričić stars as a Srebrenica resident whose position as a translator at a Dutch-run UN base becomes essential when members of the Serbian army encroach on the town.

Last year at TIFF, Nadav Lapid’s “Synonyms” presented the experience of an Israeli man acclimating to France as a frenetic, sensual bacchanal of chaos.

  Four men walk into a room on a night in February 1964, unaware of how their shared – and distinct – legacies will come to define the best half century in American history.

I’m not sure I’ll see an opening-credits sequence this year at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) that’s better than that of “Akilla’s Escape”.