Is this a reasonable time to watch a movie?

Watching movies from dawn till dark, meeting Jodie Foster and director Ang Lee for a chat, subsisting solely on a diet of popcorn and Diet Coke, Seattle Times movie critic Moira Macdonald is on assignment at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Only at film festivals do people go to movies at the highly inappropriate hour of 8:45 a.m.; an hour which, in my experience, isn't good for much. Here in Toronto it seems doubly surreal: Not only are we strolling past the popcorn counter (yes, it's open) barely past dawn, but we're herded into a theater that's kept so dark you can't even read a newspaper while waiting for the movie to begin. This tends to bring about the natural consequences, and if Gavin Hood's "Rendition" hadn't started on time, I might well have nodded off and watched another movie in my dreams.

Once it began, though, staying alert wasn't a problem. Hood, the South African director who won the foreign-language-film Oscar last year for "Tsotsi," has crafted a taut and timely political thriller about the War on Terror and its price. Omar Metwally does remarkable work as an Egyptian/American chemical engineer detained and tortured in an overseas prison (on order of the U.S. government) on suspicion of terrorism. Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin and Peter Sarsgaard (who manages to give us the entire backstory between two characters in one glance) are all in fine form in this ensemble piece, which opens in theaters in October.

Less satisfying was "Reservation Road," Terry George's drama about a child killed in a hit-and-run accident, and the adults — the child's parents and the guilty driver — left behind. John Burnham Schwartz adapted his fine novel for the screen (with George), but in doing so left many of the nuances behind. The cast, particularly Mark Ruffalo as the driver, do good work, but the mixture of this devastating subject matter and the blandness of the characters leaves them stranded.

My first documentary of the festival was "My Enemy's Enemy," from Kevin Macdonald ("One Day in September," "Touching the Void"); an examination of the life and crimes of Klaus Barbie, the notorious Nazi "butcher of Lyon." The film focuses on Barbie's post-World War II years, during which he served as a counterintelligence officer for the U.S. and spent many years in Bolivia, doing undercover work for the extreme right wing and dreaming of a Fourth Reich. Its final scenes, in a French courtroom where Barbie was finally tried (in 1987) for his war crimes, are devastating. An elderly WWII survivor, so horrified she can barely form words, shouts out, "How can he still be alive? Still alive! A man like him!" It's a difficult, important film.

In between all of this, I scurried two blocks and entered an entirely different world: the posh Four Seasons Hotel, and the TIFF interview machine. A small army of publicists (about two dozen, a friendly flack told me) efficiently ushered me through a gauntlet to a pink-and-green suite where Jodie Foster was casually ensconced. Here to promote the tough-minded but affecting vigilante film "The Brave One," Foster made a 20-minute interview feel like a chat with a friend. "I love movies, and I endlessly love to communicate the reasons I made them," she said. What does she not love? "Photos!" Check the Times next Thursday for the interview; "The Brave One" opens Friday the 14th.

So, does the festival seem a little light on comedies so far? No kidding. Still, there are a few. Apparently a Canadian comedy called "Young People [blank]ing" (oh, you know the word I mean; it sort of rhymes with "Starbucking," which is what everybody does between movies) has lots of buzz, as does "Lars and the Real Girl," in which Ryan Gosling falls in love with a full-size doll. And I'm headed off late tonight to see "Juno," Jason Reitman's follow-up to the very funny "Thank You for Smoking." I could use a laugh. Or another Diet Coke. Or both. See you tomorrow.