Dustin Hoffman at the 'Luck' premiere (Getty Images)

In keeping with the new zeitgeist of renewing shows very early on (a la Game of Thrones on HBO, or Boss on Starz), HBO has granted a second season to its prestigey drama Luck, which stars Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte in a horse-racing milieu. The ten-episode second season is to launch in January 2013.

When this Canadian clambake was started back in 1976 by three eager film buffs in a Toronto saloon, they couldn't convince one Hollywood studio to send them a full-length feature. Thirty-five years later, TIFF is arguably the friendliest, most popular and best organized movie convention in the world. This year it sold 300,000 tickets to 300 films in 11 days, generated a revenue of $170 million; published a program book 448 pages long; and boasted a staff of 100 full-time employees, 19 programmers and an army of 2,000 unpaid volunteers in orange T-shirts who do everything from ushering to pouring salt on your popcorn. TIFF has come of age, and this year it has even moved into a brand-new permanent home at the Bell Lightbox, a sci-fi superdome on the site of an old parking lot owned by the father of director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), replete with art galleries, film libraries, five state-of-the-art screening rooms and two restaurants where the flacks and hacks gather to meet, greet and tweet. They're still $25 million short of their $196 million fund-raising campaign goal, but ready or not, they opened anyway, staging a Sunday afternoon block party with balloons, fireworks, live rock bands, celebrity arrivals and trucks of free cupcakes. One caveat: Along with smaller, glam-free flicks, the dynamic has changed geographically, too. Now that festival headquarters has shifted miles away, from the swanky neighborhood of Yorkville to the seedy downtown entertainment district near the waterfront, the annual Brangelina parties, shopping sprees at Tiffany's and posh luxury hotels are a thing of the past. With screening venues sprawled all over the city and the press agents and stars 10 miles away, it is nothing to spend $40 on a taxi ride between movies to share a cocktail with Catherine Deneuve. The red carpet premieres are on one side of town in traffic gridlock, but the boldface names have to travel to the gift lounges on the other side of town to collect their free swag bags of Hermés scarves, Gucci handbags and Canadian maple syrup.

Things were off to a rocky start. The TIFF opened in the middle of a bedbug invasion that left audiences at the early press previews complaining of bites on their thighs, backs and rear ends, and so armies equipped with pesticides invaded the combat zone in the days before the official red carpet rolled out, and sponsors and organizers have promised an "itch-free festival." So far, so good. But when all is said and done and the last projector starts rolling, the only that matters is the movies. Excelsior! This year, the richness and diversity has a higher quality than usual. From documentaries about disgraced New York governor Eliot Spitzer and the decline of American public education (starring Bill Gates), to a graphic gay porno film called L.A. Zombie that has been banned in Australia, there is something for everybody. After the opener, a campy musical about hockey with Olivia Newton-John that was generally dismissed as an embarrassment, things picked up with two of the best films I've seen in decades. Actor Ben Affleck has triumphed as both star and director of The Town, a cajones-in-your-face crime drama about the brutal crime scene in Boston's historic Charlestown neighborhood, labeled the bank robbery capital of America. Mr. Affleck is wonderful as the leader of a gang of violent, ruthless thieves who makes the mistake of falling for the pretty, blindfolded hostage who can turn them in to the Feds. Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) is especially creepy as the most vicious thug in the group, and Jon Hamm, in one of his first major roles since Mad Men, emerges as a powerful screen force in the role of a witty, hard-boiled F.B.I. agent. Set in the Boston alleys and Irish bars familiar to Scorsese and Eastwood, and featuring a $3 million robbery during a pivotal Red Sox game in Fenway Park, it is a film with a grip as smart and unforgettable as it is fresh and surprising. The Town is the best heist movie--as well as the most intensely plotted, brilliantly written and carefully directed film about the complex members of a criminal gang--since The Asphalt Jungle. Equally memorable is Never Let Me Go, a lyrical, haunting and lushly photographed adaptation of the great book by metaphysical novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day), about idyllic children growing up in a baronial English country school who love, laugh and learn about life as all children do, until we discover [ed note: Spoiler alert!] they are clones in a dystopian government project, secretly marketed for the purpose of donating their organs to society in order to save mankind. Carey Mulligan, the Oscar-nominated marvel from An Education, leads a splendid cast that includes Keira Knightley, Charlotte Rampling and Sally Hawkins, in a cautionary tale about the dangers of science vs. humanity. One of the few films I've seen lately that audiences and critics were still debating fiercely days after its premiere, Never Let Me Go is a heartbreaking, imaginative work of art that left me devastated. So did Hereafter, a touching triptych of stories related to the theme of life after death; it finds Clint Eastwood in a more muted tone than usual, with Matt Damon as a sensitive psychic.

After nine months of Hollywood drivel, TIFF is always the launching pad for works of more serious ambition. Common underlying themes in the films coming this fall include people seeking dignity in the face of overwhelming adversity and the sad desperation of terminally lonely people trying to connect in a troubled world--to someone, some place, some sense of justice and meaning, anything! As the director of Trust, actor David Schwimmer does a disturbing job of tackling the terrifying world of Internet predators. In this powerful drama, an emotionally vulnerable 14-year-old in Chicago falls for a boy she believes to be a cute California volleyball player in a popular chat room, but when he arrives in person, while her parents are out of town, he turns out to be a 35-year-old rapist who is nothing like his photos or promises. The story centers on the disastrous effects of the rape on the girl as well as her parents (Clive Owen and Catherine Keener), as they all cope with a nightmare that changes their lives forever. Tony Goldwyn's Conviction is the inspirational true-life story of Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank), a Massachusetts wife and mother who devotes her life to proving the innocence of her brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) after he is sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn't commit. Neglecting her husband and two sons while scrimping and saving to put herself through law school, she pulls every lever in the corrupt legal system with the aid of famed attorney Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher) to reopen the case, only to discover after 16 years of work that the DNA evidence has been destroyed. The film chronicles her undying faith as she overcomes one obstacle after another;  Ms. Swank is aided by a first-rate cast (Juliette Lewis, Melissa Leo, Minnie Driver and others) and a script that plays like a detective yarn. The ending will leave you cheering. Beautiful Boy is a wrenching story about two parents in a rocky marriage (Maria Bello and Michael Sheen) who are shocked to heartrending depths of despair when their perfect 18-year-old son commits a mass shooting on his college campus before taking his own life. In the hot new "hunky alpha males in jeopardy" genre, nothing could be more harrowing than 127 Hours and Buried. The first one is writer-director Danny Boyle's first film since the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, the true story of adventurer Aron Ralston, who fell through a crevice on a hiking trip through Utah in 2003 and lay pinned under a boulder for 127 hours until he was forced to cut off his own arm to save his life. A graphic story of courage and survival guaranteed to make you pinch yourself to keep from fainting, with James Franco giving a heroic performance, it forced several members of the audience to be carried out on stretchers during an early preview in Sundance. Not for sissies. In Buried, Ryan Reynolds is a civilian truck driver delivering kitchen supplies in Iraq who wakes up in a wooden coffin underground with no oxygen and a cigarette lighter running out of fluid. With my heart pounding and nerves jangled, I was only able to stand it until the snake showed up. But I wasn't bored.

If proof was ever required that the movie business has changed, consider Robert Redford. The once glamorous and hugely powerful commodity is here like everybody else, shlepping a new film he directed with independent money called The Conspirator, hoping to interest a distributor. It will need all the shlepping it can get. The Conspirator takes place two years after the Civil War during those dark days of April 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. John Wilkes Booth, who was gunned down before the curtain fell, is just a peripheral player in the aftermath of the shooting at Ford's Theatre. Seven men and one lone woman--all civilians--are accused of being co-conspirators in a corrupt trial that should have been tried by a jury, not a military tribunal. The war department, run by Lincoln-appointed Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline), is so hell-bent on pacifying a country desperate to avenge the president's murder that it sacrifices the Constitutional rights of an innocent woman without a shred of evidence. The result is a shameful trial that is both immoral and illegal. Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) is guilty of nothing more than the misfortune of owning the boardinghouse where Booth sometimes visited and his followers lived, but even after the court finds her not guilty, Secretary of State Stanton changes the verdict and makes Mrs. Surratt the first woman ever sent to the gallows in the U.S. With excellent performances by Ms. Wright (she's dropped the Penn), James McAvoy, Tom Wilkinson, Evan Rachel Wood and Danny Huston, a carefully researched screenplay and the kind of period authenticity most indie-prods on a reduced budget only dream about, Mr. Redford has provided a worthy footnote to a part of American history they do not teach in classrooms. The Conspirator has "worthy" stamped all over it with a capital "W," but to me, it lacks momentum, its commercial prospects seem dim and with a running time of more than two hours, it is somber to the point of tedium.

Not bad for a first week in Toronto. And still more new films by Jean Luc Godard, John Sayles, Ken Loach, Francois Ozon, Stephen Frears, Darren Aronofsky, John Carpenter and Werner Herzog to sift through, plus Kevin Spacey as crooked politician Jack Abramoff, and Mickey Rourke as a broken-down jazz musician stranded in the desert who falls in love with the Bird Woman in a traveling circus. So many movies, so little time. Sleep, balanced meals, exercise--they're all on hold. You live on pizza, candy bars and eye drops. Then you prop your eyes open and head for another double feature.

rreed@observer.com

Behind-the-Scenes Pedigree

Yes, everyone is excited to see a Martin Scorsese directed television show -- but how much input could he have had post-pilot when he's been busy working on a cadre of film projects? Based on that alone, Mann seems like he might be more invested in the success of Luck. And while everyone loves The Sopranos -- and though Matthew Weiner was able to break out on his own with Mad Men -- with due respect to Terence Winter: He isn't David Milch.

Advantage: Luck.

Cast

By sheer quantity, Boardwalk Empire wins in a landslide. Among the sprawling cast for the 1920s set Atlantic City epic are Steve Buscemi, Michael Shannon, Michael Pitt, Michael K. Williams, Kelly Macdonald, Paz de la Huerta, Dabney Coleman, Gretchen Mol, Michael Stuhlbarg and Stephen Graham. Still, Luck has its fair share of character actors, too -- Richard Kind, Jason Gedrick, Dennis Farina, John Ortiz -- and gets to boast about Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte. And those dudes are movie famous.

Advantage: Tie.

Longevity

With its ensemble feel and expansive backdrop, Boardwalk Empire feels like a show that could be on for years to come -- continually winning Emmy Awards, critical praise and a devoted audience. Luck will have those three things too -- Jon Hamm better win his Emmy before Dustin Hoffman starts getting nominated -- but does anyone think this is a series destined for the long haul? Like Michael Mann and Dustin Hoffman won't have other things to do (read: movies). And that's to say nothing of the outsized personalities of Hoffman, Mann, Milch and Nolte, which might adapt as well behind-the-scenes as oil does to water. Luck figures to burn bright and fizzle quick -- and there's nothing wrong with that. However...

Advantage: Boardwalk Empire.

So, a tie. Which should have been expected, since with shows the the only losers are those people who don't have HBO yet.

(500) Days of Summer, might look like a predictable romantic comedy—there’s the cuteness of its couple, a clever song-and-dance scene, a montage, an infectious nostalgia-baiting soundtrack with the Smiths, Belle and Sebastian and Regina Spektor—but in fact, this is a movie about love written by two dudes: Scott Neustadter, 32, and Michael H. Weber, 31. The two friends met a decade ago when Mr. Neustadter hired Mr. Weber as an intern at a production company in Tribeca. They shared the common desire to write “a Cameron Crowe, Woody Allen kind of relationship story, something that Hollywood had kind of shied away from,” said Mr. Neustadter.

 And so they have! (500) Days of Summer, directed by Marc Webb, is a bittersweet and wholly relatable film to anyone who has suffered the disillusionment of unrequited love or who have found themselves besotted while holding hands in Ikea. (The New York Observer’s Rex Reed wrote “I haven’t seen college-age angst so beautifully shared since Splendor in the Grass.”) Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays our hero, Tom, an unabashed romantic who has the misfortune of falling hard for his winsome co-worker Summer (Zooey Deschanel), a pragmatist where affairs of the heart are concerned. The film bounces out of chronological order amid the 500 days of a mismatched affair, a road map from infatuation to devastation. The Observer had the chance to chat with Mr. Neustadter and Mr. Weber and tried to get to the bottom of love, the Smiths, and the decline of the rom-com.

It seems like a lot of inspiration was taken from older romantic comedies, ones that you’ve mentioned you feel like Hollywood had gotten away from.

SN: It all came from rejection. I was rejected, I had to reject something. All of my anger went into rejecting the last 20 years or so of these Hollywood romances where if you look like Matthew McConaughey, you’re going to be alright. I could not relate to any of that stuff. We would watch movies like Annie Hall, and The Apartment. The Graduate means the most to me. 

The Graduate is referenced early in the film when one of the character apparently misinterprets it.

SN: I think The Graduate might have ruined my life actually.

 How so? 

SN: It warped me, because it made me think romance was this thing where there was always running and yelling at each other and it was like all drama, all the time. That’s what I associated romance with. It had to be a roller coaster. It totally comes from that movie and my adoration of it

MW:  And also because every time you date a girl, you now sleep with her mom, but that’s a whole other thing.

SN:  It’s sort of the same story we’re telling—a character who thinks that the answer lies in someone else. If he wins this woman, he will be happy. And our character is exactly the same. And it’s not until he realizes that happiness lies within that he’s able to kind of get his shit together a little bit. 

One of differences between this movie and other recent romantic comedies is that this time it’s a guy who we watch pining.

SN: We were really writing about us and our friends and guys that we knew. Only subsequently did we realize most guys are more this way than the way they’re portrayed in the movies. Who doesn’t sit around with their guy friends and talk about the date they went on last night?

MW: It’s so frustrating because there’s another sensibility out there. We don’t need to name names, but there are TV shows and movies—I don’t know those guys. They’re from another planet. A friend of theirs gets a girlfriend and they make fun of him. They don’t talk about their relationships, they don’t talk about their feelings. Guys talk about these things all the time. Scott and I do. Our friends do. It’s a more honest portrayal of what men are like certainly that we’re at the age now.

It actually crossed my mind how some of my male friends would react if I were to recommend a romantic comedy to them.

SN: We should have put in one gratuitous nude scene, that way you can say to your friends: ‘Oh man, there’s this one scene, boobies, it’s great.’

The soundtrack, especially the Smiths, is a big part of the film. 

SN: We’re getting so much shit about Garden State, because of our elevator scene where they’re talking about the Smiths. But I feel like there’s this shorthand with people when talking about the Smiths.  It’s not as though the character is saying to him, ‘Here’s this indie band you gotta hear that no one’s listening to.’ It’s more like, ‘You’re a Smiths fan and I’m a Smiths fan. You and me we can go to the next step. We already know we think alike.’

Was it hard to get all the music and pop culture references into the movie?

SN: We didn’t have a very big budget and we definitely had a lot of music that was going to be expensive. Marc and I ended up writing a lot of personal letters to people. We’ve written to Johnny Marr. We’ve written to Morrissey. We’ve written to Dustin Hoffman. Personal touches, I think, can’t hurt. And in the end, it wasn’t that hard.

Was there any music you wanted that you didn’t get?

SN: The one that comes to mind was actually a Bruce Springsteen song, ‘Born to Run.’ We wanted Summer to sing ‘Born to Run’ at the karaoke bar, because if a girl did that, it would be pretty badass.

MW: There was one other music disappointment. It’s that we wrote Hall and Oates into a scene. And Hall and Oates didn’t want to be in the movie.

SN: I think Oates might have wanted to be in the movie, but I think Hall might not have wanted to be in the movie.

This was also the first feature for Marc Webb, your director. What’s that like as writers and a director all working on a first feature?

SN: For Marc and Weber and myself, we always feel like the Three Musketeers. All for one, one for all, it’s really fun to see all of this happening, learning together and getting angry together and being excited together. And I think right now all of us are in our rooms refreshing our browsers on the Rotten Tomatoes site. 

Did you guys hit it off right away?

MW: I remember the first time we sat down and had lunch with Marc in L.A., we weren’t even talking about the script so much as Marc was telling us his relationship war stories and the traumas and the girls that had messed him up. We knew right then and there we had our guy. 

S: There is nothing more terrifying than having written something that is the most confessional thing that you’ll probably ever write it in your life and then have someone hired to make it theirs. Whoever they hired, it didn’t even matter if it was Ang Lee or a guy off the street, I was going to be very, very nervous. To Marc’s credit, he’s not only a great dude, but he’s extremely collaborative and welcoming and inviting. Even though it’s the director’s show, he was very much about we’re in this together, and I don’t want to cut anybody out of the process, which most directors would never do and I’m sure he’ll never do again.

What’s up next for you guys?

MW: We’re in the process of adapting a book. It’s called The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp. It won the National Book Award last year for young-adult fiction and it’s a great book. It’s sort of a dark coming-of-age story about a troubled high school kid. And Marc is attached to direct and it’s Fox Searchlight also, so we’re getting the band back together. 

SN: We’ve also got something kicking around that’s at Ivan Reitman’s company at Paramount. It’s a story called Underage, and it’s another one of these relationship stories where the obstacle is a real thing. Hint: It’s in the title. I think it’s a tricky thing for a marketing department, but if you read the script it’s way more emotionally less-creepy than it sounds. 

At the beginning of this film, there’s a reference to woman who was a real life Summer for one of you. Has she seen the film? 

SN: Well …

MW: Be careful here, be careful.

SN: Let’s just say it’s based on two girls. And they both have read the script and they’re both aware of the movie ... but I do believe there will be some surprises.

MW: I’m saying ‘be careful’ because his current girlfriend will kill him.

Manhattan's Downtown Armory normally reeks of sweaty atheletes.

On Wednesday, May 27, the place smelled of "Fairy Dust"—that is, Paris Hilton's signature perfume—and a mix of myriad other scents at the Fragrance Foundation's 37th annual "FiFi" awards ceremony, where designer Marc Jacobs was awarded Hall of Fame honors.

Among the many luminaries strolling the red carpet, Argentinean polo player Nacho Figueras, the face of Ralph Lauren’s new ad campaign, “World Of Polo,” stood out with his stunning looks and strong accent.

Properly sporting the same cologne he was promoting, Mr. Figueras boasted that out of all the polo players he knows, he smells the best.

This weekend, the dashing, musky-scented athlete will be competing against Prince Harry in the second annual Veuve Clicquot Manhattan Polo Classic on Governor's Island. “It’s going to be an exciting game and a great thing for polo,” he said.

Albeit probably quite smelly. Of course, Mr. Figueras naturally loves the stench of horses, he said. How do they smell? "They smell like horses!"

Of course, equestrian odor is nothing compared to the scent of a woman. “I think perfume on a women’s neck is sexier than her wrist, because, well, the neck is a sexier part of a women’s body,” Mr. Figueras said. He paused, laughed, and added, “It gives you an excuse.”

The ever striking Ms. Hilton took her time walking down the short carpet with her new boyfriend, Doug Reinhardt, perhaps best known for his dubious turn on MTV's The Hills, breaking up with Lauren Conrad and then making the moves on Stephanie Pratt. Mr. Reinhardt stood at the end of the carpet with his mother, Kelly Reinhardt, whose hair seemed even blonder than the towhead Ms. Hilton. 

Mr. Reinhardt is a baseball player, but tonight, his mind was solely on Paris. "I love how Paris smells," he said. "She smells like roses."

His mother had nothing but nice things to say about the notorious heiress. "She treats him with so much respect," Ms. Reinhardt said. "I think respect is a very beautiful thing this day and age. He’s very protective over her, and she’s very protective over him. They laugh, and have fun, and they’re wonderful together."

Ms. Hilton and her new beau were headed back to Los Angeles after the event. “Her BFF show comes out [on June] 2nd, so they have to get back for that,” Mr. Reinhardt explained as he walked up the stairs into the hall. Mr. Hilton lingered on the carpet as long as possible, before she walked up the steps, blew the photographers, reporters, and random fans her signature kiss, and nearly walked right smack into the green fence at the top of the steps.

Queen Latifah was in a rush because she was the first to present, but seemed to recall her first perfume was “Obsession” and added that her new perfume is called “Queen,” which comes out in September.

“It smells delicious, making me edible!” she said.

The actor Dustin Hoffman smiled for cameras with a noticeable band-aid on his finger that he received from cutting his finger on a plane. He gave a young male reporter advice and said, “Never listen to anyone. Don’t take anyone’s advice. Go by your gut, and do what makes you passionate. When it doubt—and this is mainly for the women,” he said, staring down the Daily Transom—“when in doubt, don’t. We raised six kids. When it doubt, don’t.”

Mr. Hoffman said he doesn’t wear cologne, but admits he wears his wife Lisa Gottsegen’s perfume by assimilation—perhaps appropriate for the cross-dressing star of Tootsie.

“I have never understood why women wear perfume on their wrists,” Mr. Hoffman said. “I never smell a women’s wrist, I always go for her neck, like Dracula. What kind of guy goes like this,” he added, sniffing his wrist and asking, “‘What are you wearing?’ Would you go out with him? He smells your wrist. ‘What?’ you say. ‘Who is this guy?’”

His wife and a nearby reporter both pointed out that it’s because of the pulse point. “I never knew that!” Mr. Hoffman said.

Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was one of the last guests to arrive, casually walked down the carpet wearing a gray suit. He kept one hand in his pocket, and used the other hand as he talked.

“I think my first cologne was Old Spice, but I didn’t buy it. It was for Christmas,” he said.

 When asked what smell he wishes he could bottle up, Mr. Combs replied, “This may not sound sexy, but I love how a baby smells.”

If the recession were to be the name of cologne, he said, it would stink! “It stinks like garbage. It doesn’t smell good. It affects us all. I have a business that goes to Middle America, if they feel the crunch, we feel the crunch, but we’re tightening our boot straps, and we’re making sure we’re conscious and being there for the customers who have been there for us for over 10 years.”

Like Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Combs didn't understand the whole wrist thing. “I don’t get into really smelling the wrist, I’m probably more in the neck than I am the wrist, me personally,” he said.

Had he ever dated a women wearing too much perfume? “No,” he said. “I mean, I kind of test that out before I even get to that point, you know what I’m saying?”

Joel Hopkins' Last Chance Harvey, from his own screenplay, transforms its low-key litany of two transatlantic losers, Dustin Hoffman's Harvey Shine and Emma Thompson's Kate, into a passionate love song for London as we've never seen it before, indeed as if it were Paris. It helps that it is a down-on-his-luck American like Harvey Shine who finds salvation in a kind and understanding Brit like Kate even though she stands larger and taller than her forlorn American admirer. They look a little strange walking together, even in a post-feminist era before which the Hollywood studios made sure that short men with big heads like Humphrey Bogart in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) and Alan Ladd in Jean Negulesco's Boy on a Dolphin (1957) were not visually dwarfed by Amazonian actresses like Ingrid Bergman and Sophia Loren, respectively. Of course, Mr. Hoffman has had prior experience looking up at his leading lady, as with the even more towering Vanessa Redgrave in Michael Apted's Agatha (1979).

When we first encounter Harvey, he is on the verge of losing an unenviable job writing jingles for an advertising firm. His boss (Richard Schiff) is making ominous comments about exciting new young people coming into the company presumably to do better at what Harvey has been doing all these years. When Harvey tells the boss that he is flying to London over the weekend for the marriage of his only daughter (Liane Balaban) to another American, the boss warns him that he'd better be back for an important Monday morning meeting or face the dire consequences.

At the same time, in alternating scenes with Kate in London, we see that she is working in the same sort of dead-end job interviewing arriving passengers on incoming flights at Heathrow for a statistics company. In her spare time, she goes on fruitless blind dates, in between being continually badgered by her mother (Eileen Atkins) about Kate's lack of a husband. When Kate tries to interview Harvey on his arrival at Heathrow, he brusquely dismisses her and rushes off to baggage claim. She then makes a point of yelling after him that he is being rude. Not exactly an example of meeting cute.

When Harvey arrives at the hotel to which he has been assigned, he discovers that he is the only member of the wedding party booked at the hotel. Everyone else has been quartered at an enormous mansion rented by his daughter's wealthy stepfather (James Brolin), and it is then that we discover that Harvey has been divorced by his wife (Kathy Baker), and he has not seen his daughter since her childhood. When he finally joins his daughter and ex-wife at the wedding rehearsal, he is jolted by the news that his daughter has decided to let her stepfather rather than her father give her away to the groom. Harvey is so disappointed by his daughter's decision that after sadly witnessing the wedding he decides to leave the reception early so that he can be sure to catch his plane back to New York. But because of a citywide traffic jam, he misses his flight. When he calls to explain and apologize, his boss tells him he is fired.

After this final blow to his self-esteem, Harvey goes to the airport bar for a much needed drink. There he encounters Kate, licking her wounds after her latest humiliating blind date. She is busy reading a book, but having recognized her from their brief collision at the airport, he playfully coaxes her to smile. Much of the fun of the movie comes from the badinage exchanged between two powerful screen personalities pretending to be losers. He persuades her to let him take her home to meet her mother, and they begin to tell each other their life stories. When Harvey tells Kate that he left his daughter's wedding reception early, Kate insists that he return to it. But when Harvey stipulates that he'll go if Kate goes with him, she points at her work clothes as inappropriate for the occasion, and a reason to refuse his invitation. Harvey offers to buy her a new dress, and she accepts his offer.

At this point, so many things could go wrong, and don't because of the mutual respect shared by the real father and the stepfather, and the quietly sensitive understanding of Harvey by his hitherto estranged wife and daughter. In these times of institutionalized bad manners onscreen and off, it is refreshing to see a movie smoothly returning to an age of courtesy and courtliness leavened by wit and genuine sincerity.

The suspense is generated by sudden spasms of vulnerability and infirmity, and one calculated complication in the plot to prolong the very slender romance. Fortunately, Mr. Hoffman, now past 70, and Ms. Thompson, inching toward 50, still retain enough buoyancy to keep the picture afloat. And the rest of the cast kicks in with flawless ensemble support, especially the sublime Eileen Atkins, who makes her comedy relief, as the unexpectedly susceptible mother, the frosting on the cake.

asarris@observer.com

Tootsie is one of the great actors' showcases. Everybody in it's magnificent. There's Dustin Hoffman, of course. In drag, as Dorothy Michaels, the soap opera star, he is brassy, gentle, not convincing exactly, but committed. And as Michael Dorsey, the manic, Method-y, utterly unemployable thespian, he offers about as honest and harmful a self-parody a man could, at least without losing his mind and giving up completely. On second thought, maybe he did ruin himself. After Tootsie, there were no more Ratso Rizzos or Ben Braddocks or Little Big Men. He was twinkly, older, boring.

And we could write a whole poem cycle about the supporting cast: There's Sydney Pollack, also the director, doing another of his exasperated, slick, tired-of-this-shit turns; and Charles Durning, as the widower who falls in love with Dorothy, and whose response to what's really under her skirts is more heartbroken than homophobic. There's Terri Garr, who we adore, even though no one in the movie adores her back; and Jessica Lange, as Southern and strange as a Faulkner novel, still beautiful, back before plastic surgery turned her catlike.

And there's Bill Murray. He's only in about 10 minutes of the movie, playing Dustin Hoffman's best friend and the movie's one-man Greek chorus. Sure, he'd made Stripes and Caddyshack by then, and done his time on SNL, but it was still sort of a miracle how fully-formed his Groucho Marx-meets-Cary Grant persona already was. He improvises lines like "I don't want a full house at the Winter Garden. I want people who just came out of the worst rainstorm in history. These are people who are alive on the planet... until they dry off. I wish I had a theater that was only open when it rained," which would qualify as satire if he didn't sound so serious and anguished when he says it.

This was 1982. Two years later, Bill Murray quit acting. Look it up. His earnest, only-slightly-awkward adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge was released within a few months of Ghostbusters and made something like 34 times less at the box office. So he moved his family to Paris, read philosophy at the Sorbonne, went to the Cinematheque Francaise and watched a lot of old movies. He turned his whole life into a Maugham novel. It's hard to imagine what a 'fuck you' this must have been.

Eventually, of course, he came back. In 1988, he made Scrooged, which is also on this weekend (Cinemax, Saturday, 2:15 a.m.). As with any remake of A Christmas Carol, even one this silly and punk, it ends not just with an affirmation of life, but a reengagement with other human beings. So Bill Murray, having seen all the holidays he's wasted, is wasting, will waste exclaims: "I get it now! If you give, then it can happen...then the miracle can happen to you. It's not just the poor and hungry, it's everybody who's gotta have this miracle! And it can happen tonight for all of you! If you believe in this spirit thing, the miracle will happen...and then you'll want it to happen again tomorrow. You won't be one of those assholes who say Christmas is once a year and it's a fraud; it's not! It can happen every day; you've just got to want that feeling. And if you like it, and you want it, you'll get greedy for it...you'll want it every day of your life. And it can happen to you."

The movie was a big hit. He was so famous again, nobody even remembered that he'd disappeared, or why.

For the third week in a row, American Gangster (No. 2) and Bee Movie (No. 3) find themselves in the top four. No Country For Old Men (No. 3) maintained a $40,000 per-theater average, even as it expanded into seven theaters. The only film with a better average (and not by much) was Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding (No. 7), which was only showing at two theaters. The film received mixed reviews, but at this point, Mr. Baumbach has a devout following, which will always mean a solid opening weekend. It's questionable whether it will be able to keep up this momentum.

Love in the Time of Cholera (No. 5) struggled to find both a national and local audience. Its $15,000 per theater average will keep it in our top 10 for at least another week, but not for much longer.

Meanwhile, Fred Claus (No. 6) and Lions for Lambs (No. 8) continued to sink, with neither able to maintain an above $10,000 per theater average. (Consider that the waterline, if they're making below it, they're drowning.)

This week's biggest surprise, at least in the city, is the absence of Mr. Magorium's Magical Emporium, the kid-themed fantasy flick starring Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman, from the city's top 10. I guess parents got confused and thought it was the sequel to Rain Man. Watch the trailer to see what I mean ... There's got to be a point when an actor just runs out of characters. Or in the case of Tommy Lee Jones, learns to make the most of out of just one. I would put this one on the Straight-to-Netflix-Queue, but, um, that award is on strike.

List of theaters: Paris, Zeigfeld, Oprheum, East 85^th St., 86^th St. East, 84^th St., Lincoln Plaza, 62^nd and Broadway, Lincoln Square, Magic Johnson, 72^nd St East, Cinemas 1, 2 &3^rd Ave, 64^th and 2^nd , Imaginasian, Manhattan Twin, First and 62^nd St., Angelika Film Center, Quad, IFC Center, Film Forum, Village East, Village Seven, Cinema Village, Union Square, Essex, Battery Park 11, Sunshine, 34^th Street, Empire, E-Walk, Chelsea, 19^th Street East, and Kips Bay.

Manhattan Weekend Box Office: How moviegoers in the multiplexes of middle America choose to spend their ten-spot is probably a big deal in Hollywood. But here in Manhattan, the hottest movies aren't always the ones making the big bucks nationwide. Using Nielsen numbers for Manhattan theaters alone and comparing them to the performance of the national weekend box office can tell you a lot about our Blue State sensibilities. Or nothing at all! Each Monday afternoon, we will bring you the results.

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium opens Friday at United Artists 54th street and Regal Battery Park.

A MUCH (MUCH) smaller film is The Life of Reilly. This is a 90 minute adaptation of Charles Nelson Reilly’s one-man show (Yes! He had one!) Save It for the Stage. And if some of you born after 1975 are struggling to remember where you know the name from, don’t worry: The film opens with a montage of director Barry Poltermann asking people on the street to place him. Most think he’s dead (Mr. Reilly did indeed pass away last May). A Broadway star (and Tony winner), Reilly is perhaps—for better or for worse—best remembered for his campy game show appearances on programs like The Match Game and Hollywood Squares, not to mention regular visits to Johnny Carson’s couch. Mr. Poltermann coaxed Reilly out of retirement for one final stage presentation, and the result is a funny and bittersweet look back at his childhood growing up in the Bronx (as he says, “Eugene O’Neill wouldn’t touch this family”), and the early days of television and Hollywood. We learned a lot, not the least of which is that Reilly was best friends with Burt Reynolds. Who knew?

The Life of Reilly opens Friday at Cinema Village.

AND THEN THERE’S Beowulf. When having to read the Anglo-Saxon epic (in ye olde English) in school, it didn’t exactly scream “Box Office Winner!” But we’re guessing that’s how it’s going to be remembered for generations to come. Maybe it’s an age thing, but the whole Polar Express/300 weird digital animation kind of freaks us out. We’d love to report on how the movie itself was, but the studio (sniff) didn’t let us see it. However, we’re more than happy to go with Variety’s “muscular, stirring but ultimately soulless” summation (listen, when digital animation starts having soul, we’re all going to be in trouble). The big news is that Angelina Jolie appears in nothing but gold paint as Grendel’s mother, getting everyone all aflutter with the news that she’s nude. But is she really? Isn’t this where the whole animation thing comes in? This is just one of the many confusing things about the future. All in all, it doesn’t really matter because somehow we just know this thing is going to rake in the money this weekend. Just you wait … it’s only a matter of time before the Canterbury Tales show up 3-D.

Beowulf opens Friday at AMC Loews Kips Bay, 34th Street and Third Avenue, and Regal Battery Park.

Beatrix Potter was the legendary British author and illustrator whose stories about Peter Rabbit and his four-legged friends have captivated millions of children throughout the world for more than 100 years. Oddly enough, every publisher in London rejected her early stories and drawings, but by the time she died in 1943, at the age of 77, she was one of the most successful best-selling authors of children’s books in the history of publishing. Adored and celebrated from sea to sea, she remained so private that little was known of her personal life—until now. This is her endearing story, scandal-free and utterly resistant to the tragedy and suspense required of most biopics about famous writers.

Renée Zellweger is pluperfect as Miss Potter, so-called because she was a proper middle-class Victorian who spent most of her life as a spinster. The British accent that Ms. Zellweger worked on in the two Bridget Jones movies has been polished so effectively you’d swear she was the toast of Bloomsbury—no mean feat for a cowgirl from Texas. She literally takes us by the hand, guiding us through the dreams and aspirations of a polite but secretly ambitious girl who shocked her parents by admitting, early on, that she was more interested in a self-fulfilling career than a socially acceptable marriage to a dullard simply because it was the expected thing to do. Using her drawing skills and the menagerie of pets she and her younger brother kept in the schoolroom on the top floor of their house, Beatrix illustrated her first book and published it herself in 1902. Overnight success drew the attention of a fussy, foppish editor, Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor), who turned Beatrix into a literary sensation and awakened her heart to the even more unthinkable reward of first love. Ignoring the vocal disapproval of her snobbish parents, Beatrix turned for guidance to Norman’s family, especially his sympathetic and caring sister Millie (Emily Watson), and eventually a comfortable, privileged but emotionally dormant old maid whose only friends were the animals in her watercolors found bliss as Norman’s intended.

The triumph was brief. Sadly, Norman died of leukemia a few weeks after their engagement, leaving the celebrated but decimated author to move from the fashionable drawing rooms and lush gardens of London to the isolated farm country of the Lake District. With her decision to make a new life by buying an idyllic cottage in Windermere, Beatrix fell in love with both the land and a neighboring lawyer, whom she eventually married—paving the way for a second career as a sheep farmer and land conservationist. Eventually, her dedication to preserving the endangered rural beauty of the Lake District and protecting it from developers resulted in a real-estate windfall more lucrative even than her books. When she died, she left over 4,000 acres of Lake District property to the National Trust, to be preserved in its natural state of scenic perfection for posterity. Combined with the 23 volumes of Peter Rabbit books that are still being published today, “Miss Potter” has left behind quite a legacy.

It is easy to see why Ms. Zellweger became so infatuated with this story that she executive-produced it. It’s also obvious why so much nursery-school innocence informs it visually. The director is Chris Noonan, who rocketed to prominence with Babe, and the script is by Richard Maltby Jr., the distinguished Tony Award–winning lyricist and director of such intelligent Broadway musicals as Baby, Big, Fosse and Ain’t Misbehavin’. The film’s rapturous visual splendor is the work of Andrew Dunn, the distinguished cinematographer of Gosford Park and, more recently, The History Boys. Collaboratively, they have brought to life Miss Potter’s world with the daffy, delightful whimsy of pop-up Hallmark Easter cards. The frogs, mice, squirrels, foxes and porcupines in her lovely watercolor illustrations come to life in the animated sequences just as they did in her fertile imagination. The movie is as rarefied as the life of Miss Potter herself—no big revelations, but oozing endearment in a discreet, old-fashioned way. Mercifully, it is only 92 minutes long. So lower your eyebrows and check your cynicism at the door, and Miss Potter will move and entertain you in happy, surprising ways.

Perfume Stinks

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is another nauseous example of style over content: a toxic tale of serial homicide set in 18th-century France that creeps you out faster than it makes you think. The movie is helmed by German director Tom Tykwer, with all of the Gothic horrors for which the Germans have an enduring affection, and is based on the gruesome book by Patrick Süskind, which first raised hairs on the wrists of page-turners nearly 20 years ago and, curiously, has remained a popular favorite to this day among bored passengers browsing in airport lounges. The book is a moribund mix of muted, malevolent mystery and metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. But setting a lurid imagination free on a crowded plane is not the same thing as being trapped in a grotesquely graphic film for two hours: The audiovisual medium of movies threatens a more visceral form of bondage than the pages of a novel. Trapped in a cinema with a screen the size of a stage, there is no escape. This makes for double jeopardy with a movie like Perfume, because it’s all about smells, and the one sense that no motion picture can capture or share is the olfactory. This is a good thing, because the scents conveyed in this movie are largely putrid.

This loopy black fable is about Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an ill-fated lad conceived by fishmongers and born into a pile of fish guts and maggots in the filthy streets of Paris in 1744. A weird, almost catatonic urchin alienated from the cruel world by everything except his nose, J.B. lives with the constant stench of sewers and rotting swill, raised in an antediluvian orphanage that makes the tribulations of Oliver Twist look like a picnic at Versailles. By the age of 5, his talent for sniffing out every kind of malodor is already evident, but nothing prepares him for what he encounters after being sold as an apprentice to a tannery run by a vicious brute replete with boils. Ironically, he was born with no scent of his own, which makes his obsession more acute. The day his refined sense of smell leads him to his first scent of a perfumed woman selling plums, he has no choice but to stalk and kill her in a fearless attempt to preserve the aroma forever. But perfume fades, and as he tries feverishly to bottle another pleasurable scent, more women die in pools of blood throughout Paris. The gendarmes move in, but J.B. survives every peril like a resilient bacterium. The first hour wobbles along interestingly enough, but the movie seriously slides downhill with the entrance of Dustin Hoffman as the charlatan Giuseppe Baldini, a has-been perfume merchant who needs fresh inspiration. Identifying the ingredients of Baldini’s old creations and creating new essences that revive his career, the boy begins a whole new series of repellent murders to preserve every scent and find one of his own to prove his miserable existence has not been meaningless. It’s a pity Mr. Tykwer didn’t spend more time developing the point of the novel that “the soul of all things is their essence,” instead of wasting so much time on a hammy performance by the miscast Mr. Hoffman that comes off like a cross between the Merchant of Venice and Helena Rubinstein. While narrator John Hurt gives a blow-by-blow description of the boy’s rise and fall from olfactory insanity, British newcomer Ben Whishaw admirably performs above and beyond the call of duty in a role that I fear is hardly worth the sacrifice. The odyssey leads to the guillotine, where a crowd bigger than Marie Antoinette’s stages a massive sexual orgy and declares the “disciple of Satan” the true Messiah. If you’re still awake at this point, you’ll find renewed respect for Givenchy, Armani and Chanel No. 5.