The Toronto Star previews the city’s upcoming film fest for you. Here are some of the desi entries:Kabul Express has one of the most howlingly inept performances in the history of cinema. The most sublimely terrible movie at the festival

Kabul Express: Imagine a late-’80s action buddy comedy transplanted to Afghanistan in the weeks following Sept. 11, 2001. Then imagine it translated into Hindi and starring a couple of guys (the impossibly handsome John Abraham and the Bob Hope-like chicken-hearted Arshad Warsi) who crack wise, call each other dude and bicker collegially while the bombs explode and the bullets fly. Imagine a movie that opens with a shot of the World Trade Center attack and closes with a gag about Osama Bin Laden disguised as a donkey, and imagine one of the most howlingly inept performances — by someone named Linda Arsenio as an American photojournalist — in the entire history of global sound cinema. That’s Kabul Express in a nutshell, my candidate for the most sublimely terrible movie in this year’s festival…

L’intouchable (The Untouchable): After her mother describes a liaison with a lowest-caste Indian, young Parisian actress Jeanne (Isild Le Besco) sets out on a physical and emotional journey of discovery to the banks of the Ganges river. Veteran French filmmaker Benoît Jacquot’s lens lingers, repeatedly robbing the movie of its momentum, while sourpuss Jeanne does little to inject light or energy…

Paris, je t’aime: This is a candybox of 21 shorts by a who’s-who of world cinema, each celebrating a particular arrondissement (area) in Paris. Among names well-known on this side of the Atlantic are directors Gus Van Sant (who offers up a very funny case of gay attraction), the Coen Brothers, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuarón [and Gurinder Chadha]. Among the American stars onscreen are Maggie Gyllenhaal, Nick Nolte, Elijah Wood and Steve Buscemi…

Venus: Hanif Kureishi’s script and Roger Michell’s direction may be inconsistent, but Peter O’Toole’s turn as a randy but ravaged septuagenarian actor reduced to playing corpses in TV movies is anything but. A kind of gender-reversed response to Kureishi and Michell’s anti-romance The Mother, Venus thrusts O’Toole’s old goat against Jodie Whittaker’s teenaged housekeeper. A strange film, but with a magnetically likeable central performance. (Sept. 9, 9 p.m., Elgin; Sept. 11, 12:15 p.m., Paramount.) [Link]

For the review of Murali Thalluri’s 2:37, click here. Not reviewed: The Namesake.