Among those attending this year will be Manohla Dargis, The Times’s co-chief film critic. I asked her about TIFF and its place in world cinema:

Exhilarating, exhausting, essential — the Toronto International Film Festival is how many movie lovers start each new fall season. That’s certainly true for me. I’ve been coming to this annual event on and off (mostly on) for more than 20 years, and it’s now part of my cinematic life. The festival is well known for its splashy, starry premieres partly because it’s where a number of movies start sprinting toward the next Academy Awards. But for many of us, the festival means more than its role in the Oscar ecosystem or its celebrity quotient, even if I did sail past the British actor Charlie Hunnam (here for his new movie “Papillion”) at my favorite vegan joint yesterday.

The famous tend to remain hidden away in villas and yachts at Cannes, the world’s most glittering festival. There’s something different about Toronto (Canadians, for one), which despite its glitz remains enjoyably down to earth. Some of this has to do with the fact that TIFF is open to the public (Cannes isn’t). Some of it has to do with the energy that comes from the city itself. I saw only three movies my first day at the festival (usually I fit in four or five), slipping out for meals, coffee and fresh air in between a Swedish biopic about the tennis rivals Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, an American documentary about miners and an Indian take on Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.”

Every festivalgoer has her own methodology of what to see and when. I rely on a combination of experience, research and caprice. I study the schedule, determine what titles I absolutely, unequivocally need to watch, but sometimes I just go with the flow, wandering by chance into one of festival’s many theaters or tagging along with friend I haven’t seen since our last Toronto. Here, you can catch up with movies you missed at other festivals, but you can also see something you haven’t heard of. It’s a blast not knowing what you’ll see after the lights dim: a new favorite, a shock to the system, a revelation. And if you choose badly, there’s always another movie starting soon.

Originally called the Festival of Festivals, TIFF started in 1976 as a compilation of titles that had played elsewhere. Over time, the event greatly expanded, partly by taking advantage of its dates to become a launchpad for the new season. It bulked up on premieres, attracted Oscar hopefuls, rebranded and built a home in downtown Toronto. Now more than 400,000 attendees, including crowds of nonprofessionals, descend each year to sample a staggering number of movies from across the world. This year’s event is somewhat more tightly curated than in the recent past, although to be honest I am still trying to figure out what are the must-sees in a lineup of 255 titles.