By Johnny Ray Huston

AIMING 325 MOVIES at screens over a 10-day period, the 29th Toronto International Film Festival is one mother of an event. I arrive woefully sleep-deprived. Twenty-seven features and one week later, I depart even more so. Proof: I have to fight off the dozing urge during Park Chan-wook's prison of sadism, Old Boy, even as one character devours a live squid and uses pliers to rip teeth from an enemy's mouth.

The TIFF is a mother ship – extending to and from spring's Hollywood-Oscar and Cannes-art film frenzies – so it's fitting that many of this year's features are devoted to bad, good, crazy, and bloody mamas. Cast against neurotic type, Isabelle Huppert strives for libertine status in the silly Bataille adaptation Ma mère. In Todd Solondz's Palindromes, different actors portray the same teen-mom protagonist, a ploy that generates unspoken commentary about American race relations. Asia Argento channels Courtney Love's look and child-rearing skills in her surprisingly not-lousy film version of J.T. Leroy's The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things, demonstrating prodigious talent as a visual stylist – as garish as, but distinct from, her father – even if celebrity cameos (the worst: Marilyn Manson) trivialize the film's nightmarish spell. The heroic mother of Ousmane Sembene's vivid Mooladé guards other women's daughters against circumcision, while the immature mom in Hirokazu Kore-eda's wrenchingly observant Nobody Knows abandons four kids to an unfriendly Tokyo.

Those last three films dovetail with an even more dominant TIFF theme: children in peril. I count twentysome titles in the festival catalog possessing this subject matter, and see a handful – including Pedro Almodóvar's melodrama about molested boys Bad Education, and Gregg Araki's similar step into relative maturity, Mysterious Skin – though I miss Innocence, directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic (wife of Gaspar Noé). GreenCine's Shannon Gee first identified the child-in-peril trend, referring to U.S.-based examples such as David Gordon Green's Laughton-derivative Undertow. But U.S. foreign policy has a role in the theme's proliferation: Bahman Ghobadi's powerful Turtles Can Fly bears witness to children at the Turkish-Iraqi border. I watch it on a TV at the fest's press headquarters while U.S. military doc Gunner Palace plays on the one next to mine.

After a few days of nonstop viewing, delirium sets in, films blur together, and strange coincidences pop up. Two markedly different movies – Alexander Payne's drunken, talky Sideways and Kim Ki-duk's sober, near-mute 3-Iron – contain scenes in which characters use golf clubs as weapons. (Sideways is superb: if Virginia Madsen isn't collecting best-supporting-actress statuettes next year, there's no justice.) Che Guevara (as Gael García Bernal) stars in The Motorcycle Diaries, cameos in Agnès Varda's Cinévardaphoto, and graces walls and T-shirts in Bruce LaBruce's Raspberry Reich. And then there's the odd plethora of heart-y titles: The Heart is Deceitful, David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees, and Lukas Moodysson's divisively abrasive A Hole in My Heart.

Among the fests's latest and largest onslaught of explicit films, Moodysson's experimental, narratively fractured attack on porn is the most provocative. Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs is the most sentimental, framing smudgy bedroom romps in between concert footage of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Franz Ferdinand, and others. (The darkness is supposed to connote bruised memory, but it looks like someone dumped a toner cartridge onto the lead couple's sheets.) Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell begins with Eurotrashy promise at a gay nightclub before descending into sub-Romance bedroom-as-analyst's-office squabbles. LaBruce's hard-ons-a-poppin' terrorist comedy misfires left and right. His and John Waters's "dirty" films are woefully outré compared with Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady, which – through a narrative more innovative than Moodysson's – hunts the impulses behind gay male sexuality with more insight than Breillat's warmed-over French feminism can muster.

Another standout film brandishes just about every element mentioned above, save the golf-club violence. Outfitted in a new sound track, minus Nick Drake yet sonically sharper, Jonathan Caouette's autobiographical Tarnation is experimental, homo-romantic, fleetingly explicit, and a onetime imperiled child's tribute to his mom. Caouette's mother's battles against mental illness seem to spark his own wild visions, and if Varda makes still photos dance, his perform emotional acrobatics. Just like Toronto's relentless onslaught, Tarnation leaves a viewer dizzy – half devastated and half exhilarated.

Johnny Ray Huston's Toronto top 10

• Be Here to Love Me: A Film about Townes Van Zandt (Margaret Brown)

• Cinévardaphoto (Agnès Varda)

• The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things (Asia Argento)

• Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

• Palindromes (Todd Solondz)

• Sideways (Alexander Payne)

• Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette)

• 3-Iron (Kim Ki-duk)

• Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

• Whisky (Juan Pablo Restella and Pablo Stoll)