Liam Lacey’s TIFF Diary: The big story is that there’s no big story

'What's the buzz?" everyone asks me at the Toronto International Film Festival. Do I look like a honeybee or a hornet? At best, maybe a red-eyed house fly, smacking against movie screens and celebrity fishbowls.

A critic may be the last person one should ask for any aerial perspective on the festival's 284 feature films. We spend too much time in the movie theatres, or hotel corridors for interviews, or offices, typing at computers, expressing our own opinions rather than tapping into the festival's hive mind.

Yet, it's also true that film festivals are all about forging a consensus. The ideal chain of events begins with an enthusiastically received first screening, rave reviews, a bidding war, a successful theatrical release. The reality is more of an impressionistic muddle of daily press reports, crowd reactions, word of mouth and distributors' hopeful gambles.

From the business side, this year's big story was Chris Rock's enthusiastically reviewed comedy Top Five, which was bought by Paramount for more than $12.5-million (U.S.). But million-dollar deals can be poor predictors of box office success. Last year's the buzz was all about a film called Can A Song Save Your Life, bought at TIFF for a then-record $7-million, which opened quietly last June, under a different name, Begin Again.

The big story of TIFF 2014 is that there's no big story. There's no obvious audience favourite, no early perspective on the Oscar race. The one obvious Oscar contender, Bennett Miller's crime drama Foxcatcher, was already seen in Cannes in May. Like the other top Cannes films – Winter Sleep, Leviathan, Wild Tales, Mr. Turner and Mommy, it was well-received in Toronto, but Foxcatcher may be too dark to launch a Slumdog Millionaire or The King's Speech-style popular campaign.

In several cases this year, enthusiasm was more about performances than films. Much of the praise for Wild, from Quebec's Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club) focused on Reese Witherspoon's acting as a troubled young woman on a harrowing hike. There's some speculation that Oscar recognition could go to Julianne Moore as an Alzheimer's patient in Still Alice, or possibly Jennifer Aniston as a chronic pain sufferer in the drama Cake.

As for male performances, a trio of top-rated films feature English actors playing geniuses: The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as code-breaker Alan Turing; The Theory of Everything, with Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking; and Timothy Spall's work as painter J.M.W. Turner in Mr. Turner.

Oscar handicapping is a very small part of TIFF, where the real business is sifting out which independent and art films have a chance of winning favour with mainstream audiences. And by that standard, there are some clear winners and losers.

Among the winners, reports are all positive for Noah Baumbach's wry middle-aging comedy While We're Young, with Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts. Most people enjoyed Dan Gilroy's entertaining, if obvious, Nightcrawler, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a sociopathic ambulance chasing TV reporter. Whiplash, the music school drama starring Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons has already won a couple of big Sundance prizes. St. Vincent, with Bill Murray as a curmudgeonly boozer who befriends a boy, is rated as formulaic but entertaining.

The biggest English crowd-pleaser is Pride, about lesbian and gay activists joining forces with striking Welsh miners in Margaret Thatcher's England. Cineastes were impressed by the sophisticated kink of Peter Strickland's period piece, The Duke of Burgundy. Yann Demange's drama '71 (first shown in Berlin last February) is an admired drama about a young British soldier lost in war-torn Belfast.

From Europe, Christian Petzold's post-Holocaust melodrama Phoenix features a superb performance from German actress Nina Hoss. French director Mia Hansen-Love's Eden, a multiyear story set in the world of electronic dance music, earned praised for its emotional nuance. The Tribe, Ukranian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's thriller set in and around a boarding school for deaf students, is another favourite with critics. Although it is entirely in sign language, Slaboshpytskiy's film never bothers with subtitles, forcing anyone unversed in signing to pay close attention to each gesture.

In Canadian film, one of the most encouraging trends is the high quality of work from relatively young directors, including Albert Shin's Korea-set In Her Place, Kyle Thomas's small-town anthology The Valley Below, and Mathieu Denis's FLQ drama Corbo.

The losers? Start with The Judge, starring Robert Downey Jr. in a creaky legal thriller/family drama. As the festival's opening film, it did not set a celebratory tone. Other movies that failed to match their advance hype included the Kevin Costner-starring interracial drama Black and White, Liv Ullman's production of Miss Julie, My Old Lady with Kevin Kline, and Lone Scherfig's The Riot Club. Jason Reitman's Men, Women & Children, with interweaving stories about the dangers of social media, was, at best, divisive.

Most films were too low-profile to have any detectable buzz at all, though a few earned reverse buzz, a rejection that might be called "zzub." One case was Tom McCarthy's The Cobbler, starring Adam Sandler, who plays a shoe repairman who can assume appearance of his customers by stepping into their shoes. The Cobbler was rated by some critics as the worst film of the festival, the zzubbiest picture of all.

Editor's note: The title of Noah Baumbach's film is While We're Young. An earlier version gave an incorrect title.