By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies

It's getting a little strange now, the way so many of the movies I've watched in the last week at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival spotlight family life, or the absence of it. But don't think for a moment that these flicks fall into the simplistic patterns of family relations that Sarah "Madonna" Palin, her brood and their hunkish sire apparently represent to besotted Republicans.

No, there's no room for Stepford lives in movies like Lisandro Alonso's "Liverpool," Brillante Mendoza's "Serbis" ("Service"), Michael Winterbottom's "Genova," and Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy." These tough, smart, often visually stunning explorations of the most fundamental form of community — wives, husbands, parents, children — are worlds away from Good Housekeeping-approved fairy tales. Look for families fractured, corrupted, lost, reconstituted, fantasized — but rarely bland, boring or second-rate Norman Rockwell.

In the superb "Liverpool," a middle-aged crew member on a freighter takes a couple of days' leave to visit his old mother up in the snowy mountains of southernmost Argentina. Laboring for years in the booming bowels of the ugly boat, sleeping in his sterile boxlike room, Farrel (Juan Fernandez) looks as though all love and life has been leached out of him forever.

Farrel's idea of getting home seems oddly slow and roundabout, requiring frequent swigs of vodka, as though this aging loner isn't quite sure he really wants to get there. Despite bitter cold, he sleeps where he can, in a decaying bus or abandoned shack. In a restaurant, we watch him eat, raising his eyes as others enter off-screen, then shifting back to his meal. He's like an animal: alert to threat, then returning to self-containment, indifferent to other life.

By implication, mostly by dint of our slowly intuiting relationships and old history, we come to understand that when our loner ran away from his village long ago he left a daughter behind; she's now a young, developmentally disabled woman who either can't or won't acknowledge her father. And his dying mother doesn't even know who he is. Eventually, Farrel presses some money on his child, as well as a fancy keychain, and then walks out of the movie, trekking up a snowy incline, disappearing into the woods.

I know what you're thinking: Where's the drama? What makes this postscript to a sad life so gripping? Well, for starters, "Liverpool" delivers an acutely physical sense of environment, from Farrel's metal prison to the port's dark, windswept streets to the harshly beautiful mountain where he grew up. Cutting from some cold, snowy exterior, we find Farrel enjoying bread and wine, backed by a sun-drenched vista of autumn-hued forest and lake. It's discombobulating, as though reality has jittered — until we register the scenery as a restaurant mural.

The director of "Liverpool" expects you to be a lively participant in discovering what the "story" is about. There's little dialogue, and he tells you what the movie means through close-ups of wonderfully lived-in faces; by framing scenes for a long time, giving you leisure to sift through their significance; and ordinary actions, such as the way Farrel's daughter plays with rabbits in the snow, or the way an old man in the village snares foxes.

You can see that the place and people the young Farrel fled might have looked like traps, and the sea appeared to be freedom. But after the lost son has departed, the old man spoon-feeds the dying mother in a bedroom glowing with golden lamplight, while the granddaughter crawls under a comforter to sleep.

Memory jogs; we recall the cold chemical-white light in Farrel's berth, the cover of a girlie magazine taped to the metal wall, a couple of packs of cigarettes on the table — all the comforts of his chosen home.

The Philippine "Service" is a very different kettle of fish. Imagine a run-down porn house with a splendid art deco façade boasting the two-story sign FAMILY, and then populate it with an unattractive tribe of noisy relations, hangers-on and ever-present male prostitutes and trannies who offer "service" to any male who passes.

The theater's a labyrinth of staircases, closetlike rooms, flooding toilets and graffiti-covered hallways. Surrounded by huge posters of buxom women and macho men, with bigger-than-life sex sagas playing in the filthy auditorium, the Pineda family (matriarch, daughters, sons, cousins, et al) deals with crises and disappointments. However, the small, sordid details of their dead-end lives inspire little sympathy or interest.

Seems like you can smell every disgusting aroma in the place, and the nonstop noise from the crowded street outside is deafening.

Hard to tell — or care — what Mendoza's up to with the in-your-face realism of "Service." Is he implying that this porn house-brothel might be a metaphor for contemporary entertainment? Does he mean to paint a picture of human relations as nothing more than plumbing that needs to be periodically unplugged? Is all that running up and down the theater's mazelike stairs and halls supposed to suggest the futility of our hamster lives? Or is the "Family Theater" just Filipino soap opera? In any case, call the Sanitation Department!

If you double-featured "Service" and "Lovely Still," both would disgust, but the latter would do it by drowning you in treacle, then brimstone. A lonely old man (Martin Landau) finds happiness with a lovely widow (Ellen Burstyn) during a picture-perfect week before Christmas. Could this be a Lifetime yuletide offering?

Every scene is a god-awful greeting card, a gold-tinted and Christmas-lighted cliché of cheery small-town life and budding love. Did I mention that the oldsters are practically infantile in their cutesy-poo small talk? Saccharine Christmas music and other assorted sentimental tunes accompany their first date, sledding in the snow, and kissing while carolers pass by.

Just as you think you will go mad from this excess of goo, "Lovely Still" takes an ugly turn, making what came before even more of a lie than you expected. I guess an atrocity like this is to be expected since the wizards of Hollywood have discovered that movies about old people might be box-office bait in a graying America.

One of the three great women directors in the world (the other two are Catherine Breillat and Jane Campion), Claire Denis often makes movies that play with the tension between settling down and moving on, between the need for connection and fear of the pain its loss can cause.

Her latest offering, "35 Shots of Rum," probably the best film I've seen so far at TIFF, centers on the tender familial bond between a black subway driver (Alex Descas) and his beautiful college-age daughter (Mati Diop), who lives with and dotes on him. Others in their apartment building are Lionel's former girlfriend (Nicole Dogue) and a young man (Gregoire Colin) who can't quite let go of the home in which he grew up, though his parents are now dead.

The glowing rapport between father and daughter both attracts and repels. Lonely Gabrielle yearns toward their light rather too ardently and is often shut out, while Noé, the man upstairs, travels nonstop because he cannot breach their castle and carry off the princess.

Denis unspools all of the subtle threads of a human relationship that thrives on trust, communion that goes beyond words, self-sufficiency. It seems that nothing must ever change, that the exquisite structure and rhythm of their lives leaves nothing to be desired. But nothing stands still, even love.

After their car breaks down one night, Lionel, Jo, Gabrielle and Noé take shelter from the rain in a warm, colorful café where they eat and dance — and the "family" begins to change partners. While Lionel and the lovely café-owner exchange heated glances, Noé and Jo dance as though tranced, their passion for each other emerging in every move and caress.

It's a palpably sensual evening, full of promise and loss. In its aftermath, there is tragedy, a pilgrimage, a sharing of memories with an old friend of Jo's dead mother — and a seismic shift in community. Like "Liverpool," Denis' "35 Shots of Rum" doesn't tell you what it's about in cartoon captions (see "The Dark Knight" for that mode of making sense), but invites you to use your eyes to savor the richness and complexity of her world and characters.

Few directors surpass Winterbottom at conjuring a sense of place, and his "Genova" is about the Italian city as well as a family that has been broken by the death of the wife and mother (Hope Davis) in a car accident, for which the youngest daughter blames herself. The father (Colin Firth) takes an overseas teaching gig in hopes that hearts may mend in new surroundings.

Sunny beaches, ancient churches and monasteries, narrow, meandering streets — the city seems both enchanted and somehow full of shadows, menace. Firth, of course, is almost immediately courted by an old college love (Catherine Keener) and a lusty Italian student. The older sister, a leggy adolescent, exorcizes her grief in boys, drugs, the excitement of being young and beautiful in Italy. She wants nothing to do with her sad little sister, who takes comfort in the presence of Mother, whom she sees everywhere. Trouble is, the child has fallen in love with death.

Winterbottom shows how a family fragments when its center is gone, and that vital glue that holds people together (individually and communally) disappears. The children in "Genova" are excellent, each wrestling with the angel of death in her own fashion. And, as Firth's unrequited lover, Keener's face fairly glows with compassion and the readiness to love.

At the beginning of Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy," the camera tracks a girl and her dog, playing fetch with a stick, along a sunlit path in front of some Oregon woods. Someone hums — warm, comforting music — as we watch this idyllic scene. This is young Wendy (Michelle Williams, simply stellar), heading north to Alaska, with what family she's got: her dog, Lucy. (A phone call to a brother in Indiana nets a cold kiss-off.)

Caught shoplifting some dog food, Wendy's hauled off to jail, leaving her faithful mutt tied up outside the supermarket. When she finally gets back, Lucy's gone. What Reichardt so deftly demonstrates is how one thing leads to another when you're on the road and strapped for cash. When your dog disappears, you have to get to the pound, but your car's broken down, and when you finally get there, you don't have a phone number where you can be reached if they find your dog.

Such a sense of contingency, of being outside any system of support, as we suffer through a day and night of uncertainty and homelessness with Wendy. Swiftly, her world shrinks to three or four points of reference: the gas station where she brushes her teeth in the morning, the garage where her Honda's being repaired, the Walgreens parking lot where an old geezer-guard treats her kindly, the supermarket, the pound.

No less than "Genova," this deeply moving minimalist tale concerns the fracture of family, all the more poignant because Wendy and Lucy are a community of two.

"Three Monkeys" begins on a narrow road that curves through a dark wood. A man is run down by a car and left to die. Soon the driver, an ambitious politician, is convincing his chauffeur to take the rap, for a generous sum. While the accommodating chauffeur is in jail, his wife falls for the politician and his slacker son takes an early payout to buy a car.

You might say Nuri Bilge Ceylan's bleak movie is about bad moral weather. As wrongdoing metastasizes in this seaside setting, thunderclouds gather above a useless lighthouse and, by film's end, a spectacular storm erupts over the home of Ceylan's unhappy family.

There's always a moment when father, wife, and son might choose good or ill, when money or sex or self-sacrifice is on the table. But goodness never really has a chance in this depressing climate. "Three Monkeys" begins in motion, ends in stasis, and nothing that happens in between ever seriously retards this family's slow, inexorable slide into a spiritual dead end.

Looks like Elsa's gone off her rocker again, insisting that she's found her daughter, dead in infancy in a hospital fire. Based on a true story, "Mark of an Angel" spotlights two excellent actresses (Catherine Frot and Sandrine Bonnaire) each playing mothers who claim the same daughter.

No one believes Elsa's story that 7-year-old Lola, the child of a well-to-do couple about to move to Canada, is her own flesh and blood. We really don't believe her, because she stalks Lola's family, neglects her son, lies to her parents and friends, and stares at the little girl as though she'd like to devour her.

"Mark of an Angel" consistently holds your attention, building considerable tension, especially between the two women — at one point, they engage in a fistfight so brutal it looks as though it must end in murder. Mother-love isn't always pretty.

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"Appaloosa," Ed Harris' first directorial outing since "Pollock," is mostly an old-fashioned oater, with character and action honoring genre convention. Pleasant to be in the excellent company of Viggo Mortensen and Harris, gunfighters and fast friends, and thanks for the modern take on female psychology (via Renée Zellweger) in the Wild West. "The Duchess," starring Ralph Fiennes and Keira Knightley, is dull, dull, dull. And the slate at the Venice Film Festival must have been mighty thin to result in the top prize going to Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler." Surprisingly sweet, featuring a really juicy part for Mickey Rourke, the film never rises above its schematic plotline and fails to generate much emotional heat.

Do any of these films excite you for Oscar season? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com