Toronto starts Thursday. You do not have to be there.

The Toronto International Film Festival opens Thursday and runs through September 20. That is the actual news. The rest of the next two weeks will be people describing hallways. Some of the pictures will be good. Some of them will be campaigns wearing a runtime. Most of them will not be in your town this weekend, which is not a personal failure. It is geography.

A holiday Monday is a bad day to rank a festival that has not started. It is a decent day to decide you will wait for the titles that get a theater, a date, and a distributor that is not just a press release. Pat G. will score the ones that reach a room. This desk will not score a party.

If you are in Toronto, go to the movie, not the line for the movie's afterparty. If you are not, the Open is still on, the grill is still a grill, and the year of cinema has not abandoned you because you spent Labor Day off the carpet. The carpet rolls up. The movies, when they are movies, remain.