Hits and misses from last week’s Toronto International Film Festival

The Oscar race came out of the festival pretty much the way it went in.

Juliette Binoche stars opposite Kristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria.

The Oscar race came out of the Toronto International Film Festival pretty much the way it went in. Eddie Redmayne heads into the fall as the Best Actor favorite for his turn as a young Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, and Julianne Moore vaulted to the head of a weak Best Actress pack when Sony Classics picked up Still Alice, in which she plays a woman experiencing the symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s. You could have guessed those two by skimming the catalogue.

Toronto’s status as an Oscar bellwether is overblown — last year, we were bowled over by 12 Years a Slave; two years ago, everyone agreed that Argo was solid but unexceptional — but it remains one of the best places to see the world’s masters ply their trade, and to watch new ones solidifying their grip.

With more than 300 features to be absorbed in a maximum of 11 days — most out-of-towners stay a week, give or take a day or two — Toronto’s a difficult place for unknowns to gather momentum; it wasn’t until the end of 2012’s festival, after I’d missed all my chances to see it, that I started to get wind of Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, a dazzling homage to Italian giallo that coaxes existential horror from the slicing of vegetables. But I went in this year with Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy high on my list, and it surpassed my already substantial expectations.

Strickland takes his time clarifying Duke’s central relationship between Sidse Babett Knudsen and Chiara d’Anna, so I’ll be vague except to say that they’re playing some sort of dominant-submissive game in a turn-of-the-century mansion filled with the bodies of butterflies, whose beautiful captivity provides an apt, if not over-labored, metaphor for the duo’s rapport. Their bond is built around fetishes, so Strickland worships at the boots of ’70s softcore titans Jesús Franco and Radley Metzger, but the film’s superficial perver-sity overlays a story that’s almost mundane: what happens to a relationship when the initial ardor begins to cool. It’s a canny, and eventually devastating, way to explore a condition so familiar we rarely pause to give it thought.

An even less easily defined bond between women is at the heart of Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, which stars Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart as an international movie star and her personal assistant, a situation that both riffs on and inverts their real-life roles. As Binoche prepares to revisit the play that launched her career — this time playing the destroyed older woman in a lesbian romance rather than the young seductress — she and Stewart engage in an ongoing debate about the nature of acting, taking on roles as they run lines with each other and finding it difficult to slip back out again. Clouds can feel disjointed and thesis-driven, but Stewart shows none of the mumble-mouthed hesitancy that drives her haters nuts: It’s one of her best performances, and one of Binoche’s, too.

In Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes, playing a construction worker who takes a job with the real estate broker (Michael Shannon) who foreclosed on his house, Andrew Garfield feels more alive than he has in years, while Reese Witherspoon brings the engrossing prickliness of How Do You Know to her role in Wild, Jean-Marc Vallée’s up-the-middle adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir. But one of Toronto’s most surprising turns came from Anna Kendrick, who hoists Richard LaGravenese’s The Last 5 Years on her shoulders. The through-sung musical about the end (and the beginning) of a marriage is gracelessly adapted from Jason Robert Brown’s stage production, but Kendrick has the rare ability to act a song as well as sing it. Given the lack of a Les Miz showstopper, her magnificent performance probably won’t generate much in the way of awards chatter, but between The Last 5 Years and the forthcoming Into the Woods, it’s safe to say we’ll be talking very differently about Kendrick this time next year.

Excess reigned in A Mid-summer Night’s Dream, Julie Taymor’s quickie document of her phantasmagorical stage pro-duction, and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, a personal history of French EDM that feels more like untamed autobiography (her brother, a former DJ, co-wrote the script) than an epic rave.There’s no beat and you can’t dance to it. But even though it was slightly trimmed in its new “director’s cut,” Neil Young’s Human Highway, originally released (so to speak) in 1982, was hard to beat. An allegory about nuclear power and social conformity set in a studio-bound wasteland with Devo as a radiation-soaked cleanup crew, where every radio plays songs from Trans and Dennis Hopper serves sausages at a roadside diner? Sign me up, please.