I haven’t yet had time to buy my copy of the official Festival program book, so I do something I always enjoy—going to a movie that I know absolutely nothing about. Well, I do know that Creation is one of the Festival’s Gala (that is to say, Big Deal) films, and that it was directed by Jon Amiel, one of those British filmmakers who went from TV success (“The Singing Detective”) to a middlebrow film career. That pleasant sense of suspense is dissipated in the first frame of the film, where title proclaim it a biography of Charles Darwin on the anniversary of his birth. I watch enough of this BBC Films production to figure out that it will so OK but not tremendous arthouse business before I leave to check into my hotel.

(Maybe that was a bad call: what if the increasingly vocal right-wing nutcases try to get it banned from American theaters for promoting evolution? Stupider things have been happening lately.)

My hotel is at one end of the financial district, and the theater where tonight’s movies will be screened at the other, so I have a pleasant 20 minute walk each way. It’s amazing to see how much bigger and higher Toronto gets every year, with more and ore skyscrapers in development (among them the new home of the Festival, to where it will move from it’s 30 year home in toney Yorktown next year.)

This growth is underscored by the opening material shown before each of the Festival films, which this year includes a sequence from that all-time hoser classic Goin’ Down the Road (1971), the story of two Newfoundlanders who move to the big city of Toronto to make their way in the world. (Plot summary: they don’t.) If you can find it its worth checking out to see how Toronto looked less than 40 years ago.

Tonight’s films sart with are The Invention of Lying, a fantasy written and co-directed by Ricky Gervais about an alternate universe where people always tell the truth. He plays the first man in history to conceive of the benefits of lying, and in the movie’s best scenes becomes a messiah. The parody of religion is terrific, but unfortunately not at the center of what is at heart an oddball romantic comedy.

Next is The Informant, in which Steven Soderbergh mixes his big box office and indie auteur sides to tell the mostly true story of a whistle blower who had more than a few of his own secrets to hide from the FBI agents he was working with. It opens next Friday in Buffalo, and tomorrow morning we’ll see what Soderbergh and stars Matt Damon, Scott Bakula and Melanie Lynskey have to say about it.