At Toronto Film Festival, Works of Hope and Despair

TORONTO â€" There is a fine line between inspiration and emotional annihilation. And two movies at the Toronto International Film Festival â€" both with performers who will be an inevitable presence in the race for a best actress Oscar â€" walk it in very different ways.

“Gravity,” which Warner Bros. has been showing here, after a warm reception at the Venice film festival, features Sandra Bullock in the loneliest of circumstances. She plays an astronaut, Ryan Stone, who is stuck in outer space, all alone, when the space shuttle that got her there is destroyed in a bizarre, but believable, orbital accident.

The film has only two featured actors, Ms. Bullock and George Clooney. And Mr. Clooney disappears fairly early in the film, so there is no question as to who has the leading role.

Ms. Bullock’s challenge is to survive, with no resources but her own wit and will. Obstacles arise, some internal, some external. But she struggles to escape annihilation, and therein lies the heart of a frankly inspirational film.

“August: Osage County,” by contrast, is cluttered with actors. Dermot Mulroney, Sam Shepard, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Ewan McGregor, Julianne Nicholson and Chris Cooper all join the cast. But the show belongs to its two leading ladies, Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.

Save for a minute or two, nobody is ever alone in this film. Rather, the performers, and especially the two leads, as a drug-addicted mother, Ms. Streep’s Violet Weston, and her ferocious daughter, Ms. Roberts’ Barbara Weston, engage in nonstop emotional warfare that might be described as a collision between “Steel Magnolias” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

The characters, members of a fractured family on the plains of Oklahoma, are doing their best to annihilate each other.

But hiding in all of it is a whisper of inspiration, and a struggle to survive that is every bit as real as Ms. Bullock’s.

One film is cosmic; the other is down-to-earth. One pits woman against the elements; the other, woman against woman against woman, plus some men. Which better captures the current mood is now for the audience, and Oscar voters, to decide.