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McQueen's account of the real-life travails faced by Solomon Northup, from whose 1853 autobiography this is adapted, is in a different league. It must, and will, be braved by millions. Every bit as brutal and unflinching as it needs to be, the movie's far too grounded to lapse into the ahistorical, OTT revenge fantasia of Tarantino's Django Unchained.

McQueen's formal mastery subtly bulwarks the experience – he knows how strong this material is, and has harnessed his aesthetic to serve Northup's story beautifully. Though Michael Fassbender, as a maniacal plantation owner, and Lupita Nyong'o, as his lust object, are rivetingly good, the film's heart and soul is Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose unforgettable performance as Northup burns with a compound fire of fury and longing.

Though Oscars are unquestionably on the cards, it becomes instantly tasteless to contemplate them when great art's before you, like thanking someone for a lavish birthday gift by asking how much it cost. Still, it's a game everyone at Tiff shamelessly plays, and a tricky one to dodge, given that many of the films here are being strategically positioned for that express purpose.

Matthew McConaughey, not yet nominated, has a plum showcase to end the drought in Dallas Buyers Club, a surprisingly honest and credible drama about the early years of Aids treatment. He's not playing gay – in fact, the film's thorniest moments involve his character, a real-life Texas rodeo cowboy called Ron Woodroof, being subjected to that assumption and going ballistic. If it sounds depressing, it's worth emphasising that this film is about survival, not dying – the medicine, not the illness. Woodroof's fight against US regulation body the FDA, which was notoriously slow in the late Eighties to approve drug-combination treatments and put them on the market for patients, involves a black-market business plan which suits McConaughey's wheeler-dealer charisma to a tee. There's startlingly good support from Jared Leto as the ailing drag queen he employs as a factotum.

When a film of Tracy Letts's blockbuster play August: Osage County was announced with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts in the leads, and backing from the unavoidable Weinstein, everyone rushed to overhype it, perhaps without contemplating how the adaptation might work. Unveiled here, the movie deserves two solid cheers, not a standing ovation. John Wells's direction is self-effacing to the point of invisibility, and the two-hour running time (versus three on stage) makes it that rare thing: an Oscar hopeful that's frankly too short. However diminished, as a smorgasbord of Southern-fried family dysfunction, unearthed bombshells and spiteful hysterics, it's still irresistible. Streep's bullying matriarch, Violet Weston, is arguably too blatant a scene-stealer to belong in her top drawer, leaving a brilliant Roberts out in front, with a dynamic supporting cast – Juliette Lewis, Chris Cooper, Julianne Nicholson – snatching what they can.

When you begin to feel every scene's a potential "for your consideration" clip, festival fatigue can take hold, so it's important to seek out the wilder and weirder attractions here, too. Fresh from Venice, Jonathan Glazer's gobsmackingly strange Under the Skin falls into that category, with an ice-cold, frequently naked Scarlett Johansson luring horny Scottish hitchhikers into… No. Just see it. Good comedy here can sometimes be thin on the ground, too, but Daniel Radcliffe makes a promising first step into the sweet shallows of romantic comedy with The F Word, a light, Toronto-set charmer.

Meanwhile, Jason Bateman's character in Bad Words, his directorial debut, feels like a mercifully rude antidote to every sobering, good-for-you ordeal the programmers want to inflict. He hijacks a spelling bee, exploiting a technicality in the rulebook, and sends an assortment of anxious, diligently-prepared schoolchildren quaking off the stage. When one of them innocently tries to break down the meaning of "autofellatio", you know you've stumbled into a wicked oasis of bad-for-you entertainment.