Toronto -- Day 8, 7:16 p.m.

Things are winding down in Toronto. This festival has become increasingly front-loaded in recent years, more determined to serve the industry and the media, so the back half is starting to look more and more like a backwater. Not of films: It’s still possible to find something as startling as Johnnie To’s “Mad Detective”. But the theaters are half empty, and lines for the ticket booths and bathrooms are manageable. Everyone’s going home, including me, tomorrow.

Johnnie To directed the "Election"/"Triad Election" duo, which you saw at the Brattle a few weeks back if you were smart. He makes Hong Kong crime dramas that are slightly bent, with violence erupting not constantly but simply unexpectedly. The title of “Mad Detective” (written by To Collaborator Wai Ka-Fei) is certainly honest enough: Officer Bun (Lau Ching-wan) is a psychotic police detective gone way off his meds who solves crimes by listening to the voices in his head and characters who aren’t there. Sort of like if Russell Crowe had turned to crime-fighting in “A Beautiful Mind.” “Mad Detective” is alternately funny, sad, and a real mess, but it keeps you involved all the way to the end, not bad for a film that opens with the hero being thrown downstairs in a suitcase.

The word is that 83-year-old Sidney Lumet has relocated his moviemaking mojo in “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” and the word is correct. This feverish little nasty about two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke, both in top form) who plot a heist of their parents' suburban jewelry shop isn’t the epic I was expecting – such vast, dark Lumet opuses like “Prince of the City,” “Serpico,” and “Dog Day Afternoon” are apparently in the past. Lumet has discovered high-def video, though, and “Devil” has a bare-bones speed and agility that recalls the director’s groundbreaking work in early 1950s TV. Some of the lighting set-ups are downright Playhouse 90. The film is compact and tense as everything goes wrong and then wronger and the brothers’ father (Albert Finney, coming on awfully strong) begins to suspect the worst. There’s a plum role too for Marisa Tomei, whose character is married to Hoffman’s and sleeping with Hawke’s, and who spends half the movie with her clothes off for no easily defensible reason. An inside-the-park home-run for Lumet, who I hope has at least a few more movies in him.

I also finally caught up with “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (in photo above), Julian Schnabel’s true-life drama about Jean-Dominique Bauby, a Paris magazine editor who was paralyzed by a stroke but still managed to write his memoirs by blinking one eye. Go ahead, be cynical -- after you’ve seen Daniel Day-Lewis write with “My Left Foot” and Javier Bardem discover “The Sea Inside,” how can you still be amazed? Trust me, you’ll be amazed. Mathieu Amalric (“Munich”) plays Bauby as a refreshingly not-always-nice man, but the real star is Schnabel’s witty, compassionate filmmaking, which literally recreates the hero’s viewpoint for about 60% of the movie. Regardless of what you think of the bad boy of 1980s art, he’s a genuine filmmaker, visualizing the world in ways that seem new, direct, sometimes breathtaking. This was the most purely emotional experience I had at the festival, and it makes me think the movies rather than art may be Schnabel’s enduring legacy.