Toronto Day 7 -- 6:49 p.m.

Oh, I think Todd Haynes likes Bob Dylan very much, Scott (see below); he’s just using “I’m Not There” as a way to A) illustrate the perils of sudden stardom and B) turn in a roughly accurate portrait of Dylan as a young and very confused jerk. Accordingly, you need six different actors to play him (including Cate Blanchett, above).

The movie’s terrific, among the best I’ve seen in Toronto, but it’s not for the casual Dylan fan. You need to know the ins and outs of the first half of Bobby Z’s career (If the phrase “Judas!” doesn’t ring a bell, you should probably do some reading up) so you can spot the references and read between the signposts – only then does the full impact of Haynes’ caustic labor of love become apparent. Not all of “I’m Not There” works, but about four-fifths does, and it adds up to a fitting bio-pic for its subject, Which is to say it’s metaphorical, non-linear, surreal, and, at its best, genuinely poetic. In other words, sort of like “Renaldo and Clara” if a filmmaker had directed it instead of Dylan. (And I love the idea of casting a little black kid as young Dylan, already fabulizing his early years as rail-riding bluesman prodigy.)

There’s so much more to say about “I’m Not There” – like how it makes a weirdly compelling answer film to “Across the Universe” – but there are other movies to get to. Such as “Angel,” the new film from “Swimming Pool”’s Francois Ozon. This is another one of my Toronto favorites so far because it establishes and maintains a remarkably tricky tone: loving period-film parody. It’s an adaptation of a 1950s novel by the cult writer Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one), about a headstrong young authoress (played by Romola Garai) who comes to fame in the Gilded Age before WWI. Premiere’s Glenn Kenny’s a big fan of the book and he told me the movie found just the right cinematic approximation of Taylor’s style: obviously fake rear-projection, a swooningly clichéd score by Philippe Rombi, and Garai’s pitch-perfect portrait of the artist as a young, self-dramatizing nincompoop. The unexpected pleasure of the film is that you come out loving Angel – and wanting to strangle her at the same time. Some people won’t be on the movie’s oddball wavelength (the Variety review provides a good example of someone who Just Didn’t Get It), and “Angel” really needs to be seen with a crowd to work its dippy magic. But magic it is.

Finally saw the new Woody. “Cassandra’s Dream” is pretty much the same movie he’s been making since he upped and moved to England: class-conscious strivers, sticky-fingered crimes, muted guilt and recrimination. This one casts Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as working-class brothers who get in over their heads – I will say no more – and while the performances are fine, it’s all so reminiscent of “Match Point” as to be a fair copy. Although, to be honest, I liked this a bit better than “Match Point” – Farrell is especially winning as a goodhearted yob. But Allen still has trouble writing dialogue that falls believably off the tongues of British characters, and around the midpoint comes a shift in tone that had the festival audience laughing out loud. They thought they were supposed to, but I'm not so sure.

Nick Broomfield’s “Battle for Haditha” is a rare fiction film from the controversial documentarian (although Courtney Love would probably disagree), and it’s close to a stunner: a dramatic, documentary-style re-enactment of the events of November 11, 2005 in Haditha, Iraq, when a roadside bomb killed a Marine and his comrades went on a panicked reprisal that ended with 24 civilians dead. Broomfield works hard to humanize everyone here, and a young actor by the name of Elliot Ruiz is a standout as the leader of the Marine squad. So is Yasmine Hanani as one of the civilians. The script occasionally turns clumsy when making larger points, but when “Haditha” is in the field, it feels immediate and real and intensely sad for all concerned.

The comparison, of course, is with Brian DePalma’s “Redacted” – see Wesley and Scott’s comments below. I haven’t seen it, but everyone I’ve spoken with who has seen both films, and I mean everyone, has said “Battle for Haditha” makes the DePalma look like a crayon drawing. The irony is that “Redacted” has a theatrical distributor and the Broomfield film doesn’t. Hopefully that will change.