The Toronto Film Festival is rich with stories drawn from real life, writes Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent.

The programme of the 31st Toronto International Film Festival is so vast - 261 feature films, very many world premieres, and dozens of shorts - that it entails agonising timing clashes and planning one's own schedule with military precision. Consequently, the question on everybody's lips at the many festival parties and in the hurly-burly of racing between screenings is, "What's the best movie you've seen?" My reply has been unhesitating since last Friday night when I saw Guy Maddin's bravura new film, Brand Upon the Brain! The surge of elation that lingered was so strong that I passed on the movie I planned to see after this rare and wonderful audio-visual experience.

Born and raised in Winnipeg, Maddin is Canadian cinema's most idiosyncratic director, renowned for throwing out the rulebook and setting himself new challenges. Six years ago, he directed a thrilling homage to silent movies in The Heart of the World, one of the greatest short films ever made, and he takes this passion to wildly ambitious extremes in the full-length feature that is Brand Upon the Brain! It was shown at the Elgin, the city's grandest old theatre, where 11 members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra performed the superb score, conducted by its composer, Jason Staczek, with actor Louis Negin passionately delivering the narration from a box high in the theatre, a singer performing several songs in a castrato voice, and a trio of foley artists, wearing white lab coats and headsets and achieving the myriad sound effects with admirable precision.

The film is sub-titled A Remembrance in 12 Chapters, and although the central character is named Guy Maddin, we can assume that the writer-director is taking wild liberties with autobiography. This Guy grows up with his older sister in an island lighthouse where his tyrannical and exceedingly eccentric mother runs an orphanage, while his inventor father toils away in the basement day and night.

It transpires that he is extracting nectar from the brain fluid of the orphans and using it to keep his wife youthful; her ambition is to age in reverse back to childhood, and already she has installed a cradle for herself in her bedroom. Maddin embellishes this surreal scenario with wild pubescent fantasies, letting his vivid imagination run riot for a movie that is often uproariously funny and surprisingly touching. A magical experience.

Marc Forster's aptly named new US serious comedy, Stranger Than Fiction, introduces its protagonist Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) as a lonely government tax auditor whose meticulously ordered daily routine falls apart when he realises that he is a character in a novel - and that the author (Emma Thompson) plans to kill him in the last chapter. The offbeat consequences involve a left-wing young baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal, radiant) and a literary theorist (Dustin Hoffman) who doubles as a lifeguard.

Zach Helm's screenplay is smart, intriguing and witty in the style of Charlie Kaufman's work on Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, and tender and appealing as it reflects on mortality, fate, self-belief, the stress of modern life, the creative process, affection for fictitious literary characters, and the symbolism of different guitars.

Many of the factually based movies at Toronto proved to be stranger than fiction. Australian director Phillip Noyce's South African drama, Catch a Fire, contained so many unlikely narrative developments that it came as a surprise towards the end to discover that it's based on the experiences of a former African National Congress activist, Patrick Chamusso, who appears as himself just before the closing credits. Impressively played in the film by Derek Luke, Chamusso is introduced as a hard-working Mozambique immigrant promoted to foreman at a Transvaal oil refinery.

An apolitical man intent on providing a good life for his wife and children, he takes the racist humiliations of life in early 1980s South Africa in his stride - until he and his wife are interrogated and beaten when he is suspected of bombing the refinery. His alibi is based on a double coincidence that heightens suspicion.

In the movie's most implausible scene, the anti-terrorism squad officer played by Tim Robbins, oddly playing good cop and bad cop simultaneously, brings him to his house for Sunday lunch with his family. The screenplay is the work of Shawn Slovo, who wrote the far more potent apartheid drama, A World Apart, and the film is dedicated to her late father, the white ANC leader Joe Slovo, who figures briefly as a character.

Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning director of the Munich Olympics documentary One Day in September, artfully blends fact and fiction in The Last King of Scotland, which is "inspired by real people and real events" and based on the novel by Giles Foden. It opens in 1970 as a young Scottish medical school graduate, Nicholas Garrigan (engagingly played by James McAvoy) impulsively decides to practise at a small clinic in rural Uganda.

His arrival coincides with the coup that brings Idi Amin to power, and when their paths cross, the dictator expresses his love of Scotland and reveals he has sons named Mackenzie and Campbell. To the bemusement of the British bureaucrats who approve of the coup, Amin appoints Garrigan as his personal physician, and through the Scot's amazed eyes, we get an inside look at the excesses of Amin's lifestyle, while Garrigan is shielded from the brutality of the regime.

When that awareness inevitably dawns, the movie builds to a taut dramatic finale. It is yet another example of a film using a white outsider as a filter to illustrate the horrors of life under despotism in another country.

That said, it is anchored in Forest Whitaker's exuberantly intimidating portrayal of Amin as a man out of his depth as a national leader, making it up as he goes along, and resorting to mass homicide when he turns desperate.

Christian Bale's expressive features are lined with desperation for most of Rescue Dawn, Werner Herzog's dramatisation of the fate that befell Dieter Dengler, a German-born US Navy pilot whose plane crash-landed in Laos during the early years of the Vietnam war. Herzog clearly is fascinated with the subject, on which he made the 1997 documentary, Little Dieter Wants to Fly, as he is with jungle terrain, which has featured in several of his films, most notably Fitzcarraldo. When Dengler is captured, he is tortured and held in a primitive makeshift prison with several other men who help in his plans to organise an escape.

It's a long wait, and Herzog is not in a hurry. The viewer empathises with their impatience, but the film remains compelling all the way to its robust resolution. The ever-adventurous Bale is put through the mill, immersed in a well and dragged on his back with his feet bound to a harness drawn by a cow. As one of his fellow inmates, Jeremy Davies (from Spanking the Monkey) emulates Bale's diet for The Machinist, opening his shirt to reveal a disturbingly emaciated frame.

In a festival rich with stories drawn from real life, one of the most striking discoveries has been the New Zealand production, Out of the Blue, which dramatises a shooting spree that took 13 lives in a sleepy coastal township on the South Island in November 1990. The film opens on the day of the incident with scenes of mundane domesticity as we meet various local people, many of whom will not survive the convulsive events to follow, and the police officers, whose attention will be drawn from minor break-ins and dogs killing sheep to a crisis for which they are ill-prepared.

The killer is presented as an edgy recluse who, thanks to lax gun laws, buys a weapon that gives him a rare sense of power and an instrument of revenge on the community that regards him as a laughing stock. As in Herzog's film, much of the time is spent waiting, as people cower in fear before the gunman strikes again, and as director Robert Sarkies builds and sustains the terrible tension.

Based on Peter Mayle's best-selling book about an Englishman's experiences in Provence, A Good Year proves as bland as its title. There may well be an entertaining movie in Mayle's reminiscences, but his book has found an entirely wrong match in the Gladiator team of director Ridley Scott and actor Russell Crowe. It begins promisingly with a prologue in which Max Skinner (played by Freddie Highmore) is 11, precocious and already a wine connoisseur under the tutelage of his vineyard-owner uncle (Albert Finney). Cut to the present, and Max (now played by Crowe) is a boorish, cynical London stock market trader surrounded by yes men and women, and smugly glorying in dubious dealing.

Inheriting his uncle's chateau and vineyard, his instinct is to sell off the property, but the set-up is so obvious that some moralising life lessons surely are further down the predictable menu. The movie aspires to the jaunty insouciance that marked one of Scott's best pictures, Thelma & Louise, but it falters in its eagerness to entertain - an over-extended bit of farce as Crowe struggles to get out of a muddy, empty swimming pool is particularly grating, as are all the tired references to the French as frogs, and in a couple of tennis games, the repetition of John McEnroe's protest, "You cannot be serious." The crucial problem is that, while Scott and Crowe can do serious very well indeed, they cannot be funny - certainly not on the evidence of this jaded trifle.

• Michael Dwyer continues his Toronto reports in The Ticket on Friday.