You never know. And that's the whole point -- the beauty of it, really.

You can be standing in a Toronto Film Festival line for an unprepossessing little pregnant teen comedy called "Juno" that no one's ever heard of.

Or sitting down for a screening of a George Clooney film no one has seen yet, called "Michael Clayton."

Or standing, at 8 a.m., in a "Press and Industry" line that snakes down and around three floors of a large Toronto office building, filled with people excited to see a previous Cannes Festival smash called "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

We're not even talking about the world premiere of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," which you just made by running full out from another theater. Or a tiny theater crowded with journalists to see an ultra-buzzed angry documentary about Rust Belt calamity called "Roger and Me" by a cherubic joker in a baseball cap named Michael Moore. Or the even tinier and grungier theater where the audience was packed with just about every major critic in America and quite a few major filmmakers getting their first look at a little thing called "Reservoir Dogs" by a little-known fellow named Quentin Tarantino.

Or the mini-screening room with absurdly comfortable seats watching the tenuous outreach of civilization into the outback in a little film called "The Piano."

You have no idea what you're going to see.

And, with the obvious variations, the experience is the same for the paying festival audience as it has been for those of us critics who have been going to the Toronto Film Festival since its second year.

You can be lined up to see something that's absolutely lousy with pedigree and high international hopes and find out, after far too long a time in a theater, that lousy indeed is just what it is.

The Toronto International Film Festival -- now in its 35th year and running for 10 days beginning Sept. 9 -- has long since become one of the three international film festivals that sets the entire film world agenda for the coming year. It's the only one that's 90 minutes away from us on the Queen Elizabeth Way. (The others are Cannes across the pond and Sundance in the Rocky Mountains.)

In the anniversary fact sheet merrily dispensed by the festival's publicists, one learns that the festival has screened 9,542 films since its first year and that the number of accredited press has swollen from 145 at the beginning to 1,104 in 2009. (Attendees were 35,000 total in 1976, a half million total in 2009.)

And now, as Monty Python might say, for something completely different.

2010 will bring forth a new Toronto Film Festival, one that has moved from Yorkville to downtown, in accordance with the fall opening of the Toronto International Film Festival Bell Lightbox, five stories for our Canadian neighbor to officially consecrate itself year-round as one of the centers of international film, the place where everything from smash hits to Oscar candidates to emergent film cultures is launched into the world.

Here is one new building on the Toronto skyline that is, for sure, going to change everything.

No one knows yet what it will do to the festival.

So yes, the usual inundation of international film luminaries -- among them Javier Bardem, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen and Robert DeNiro, along with Colin Firth, Ewan McGregor, Marion Cotillard, Juliette Lewis, Helen Mirren and Natalie Portman -- has good reason to offer up public face time.

And that's just for the 15 gala films. We're not even talking about the hundreds of other films to be shown.

And if you think that really gives you any idea what to expect, forget it.

The Toronto Film Festival is always one of the places in the world where major film reputations are made and unmade.

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A sneak peak at some of the films:

The Toronto galas this year will see the world premieres of films offering Kevin Spacey as crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff (George Hickenlooper's "Casino Jack"), Robert Redford directing a movie about, yes, the Lincoln assassination ("The Conspirator" starring James McAvoy, Robin Wright and Kevin Kline), and Emilio Estevez directing his father Martin Sheen in a film, "The Way," that probably cuts closer to the Sheen/Estevez religious and political idealism than anything yet, no matter what new tabloid troubles brother Charlie can get himself.

North American premieres among the galas will be Paul Giamatti, Minnie Driver and Dustin Hoffman in an adaptation of Mordecai Richler's novel "Barney's Version"; Natalie Portman as a troubled ballerina in Darren Aronofsky's thriller "Black Swan"; Colin Firth as King George VI (Queen Liz's dad) learning from Geoffrey Rush how to cure his stammer in "The King's Speech"; and surprisingly strong director Ben Affleck ("Gone Baby Gone") returning to his native Boston to direct Jon Hamm, Blake Lively and Jeremy Renner (star of "The Hurt Locker") in "The Town."

What else will the Toronto Film Festival see this year?

Try these:

Malcolm Venville's "Henry's Crime" -- The film starring Keanu Reeves that ever-so-briefly commandeered the streets and cemeteries of Buffalo with Vera Farmiga, James Caan and Fisher Stevens. A world premiere.

Tony Goldwyn's "Conviction" -- Sam Rockwell doing a life sentence, Hilary Swank as the sister trying to spring him. World premiere.

Sylvain Chomet's "The Illusionist" -- The new animated film by the man who created the delightful "The Triplets of Belleville," this time working from a never-produced script by the late filmmaster Jacques Tati. North American premiere.

David Schwimmer's "Trust" -- Yes, David Schwimmer, former star of "Friends" directing -- are you ready -- indy film royalty Clive Owen and Catherine Keener in a suspense story about a family whose 14-year-old daughter unsuspectingly befriends a 40-year-old pedophile online.

Julian Schnabel's "Miral" -- New film, about a young girl growing up in East Jerusalem who has never known anything but war, by the flamboyant painter who wowed the cinematic world with "Basquiat," "Before Night Falls," and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." North American premiere.

John Cameron Mitchell's "Rabbit Hole" -- Would you believe Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhardt in a film by the man who made the sexually ultra-explicit "Shortbus"? Well try. He did. It's about a grieving husband and wife. World premiere.

John Curran's "Stone" -- Heavyweights on parade: Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton as men on either side of a prison cell door, directed by the man who wrote the current brutal adaptation of Jim Thompson's "The Killer Inside Me." World premiere.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's "Jack Goes Boating" -- The first directorial effort by Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, about a couple of blue-collar couples in New York, starring Hoffman and Amy Ryan.

Woody Allen's "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" -- In which Anthony Hopkins, Josh Brolin, Antonio Banderas, Naomi Watts, Gemma Jones and Freida Pinto get the Woody Allen comedy treatment in a tale of two neurotic couples unlikely enough to be family.

jsimon@buffnews.comnull