Journalists are forever looking for themes that connect the movies in a film festival. Programmers, on the other hand, are always adamant that they don’t purposely mix-and-match movies to create thematic resonance.

Still, any critic – or English major, for that matter – can string together a group of films within one lineup and find a common thread. You can do it with a whole festival – or with a series of films within a festival.

Sunday in Toronto, for example, I happened to see three films back to back that offered powerful, sometimes disturbing ruminations on the idea of family. Two of the three focused on the ripple effect that comes from an unsuitable parent; the third dealt with the power of a parent’s love to sustain, even when the world is ending.

But first, a digression: In trying to get to a 9:30 a.m. Sunday screening of Ricky Gervais’ “The Invention of Lying,” I headed for the subway at 8:45 – only to find it locked, with a sign listing the starting time as 9:05. Now there’s one of the big differences between Toronto and New York: New York is the city that never sleeps – whereas Toronto, apparently, is the city that prefers to sleep late Sundays.

As it turned out, all that haste was wasted: The Gervais film was a huge disappointment. I’ll have a full review when it opens in a couple of weeks – but even as someone who has loved everything Gervais has done and thinks he’s one of the funniest humans on the planet, I found myself growing impatient for actual laughs, which were dismayingly few and far between. End of digression.

My mini-family-centric film festival began with John Hillcoat’s harrowing “The Road,” a film that has drawn mixed reviews coming out of the Venice Film Festival. The chief knock on it? That it’s downbeat and depressing.

How shocking – given that it’s based on Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a father and son trying to survive a world-killing nuclear winter. I guess those critics were looking for a more cheerful post-apocalyptic tale.

In fact, Hillcoat’s film is both faithful to and expands upon McCarthy’s novel. But as the book did, it always returns to the father, played with fierce tenderness by Viggo Mortensen, and his efforts to keep his boy alive and get him to some safe place – if such a place still exists. It’s a performance that alternately smolders and flares, as Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee (as the boy) trudge through a gray, desolate landscape, trying to maintain their humanity and stay alive, while dodging others who have succumbed to the Darwinian imperative.

It’s an important and a genuinely moving film, one that deserves a wide audience. Here’s hoping that it finds one in the crowded award season of November, when it will be released.

Not all parents are as protective or nurturing as the father in “The Road.” Consider Thea, a stage actress in Martin Zandvliet’s “Applause,” a stark Danish drama that thrives on her compelling performance.

Tellingly, Thea (played as alternately intense and seductive by Paprika Steen) is right at home on stage playing Martha in a production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” Offstage, she’s not much more of a mother than Martha was (and we all know what happened to Martha’s kid). A raging alcoholic struggling with sobriety, Thea gave up custody of her two young sons to her long-suffering ex-husband in their divorce. There is mention of the fact that, when she was drinking, she would leave the kids home alone unattended for long stretches of time.

Now that she’s sober (or nearly so), she reconnects with her husband, hoping for the chance to spend more time with her boys. But even the boys are wary when they reunite with her.Though they obviously want a mother, they’re just not sure about this mother.

Steen gives a crushing performance as a woman who longs for love but can’t handle responsibility, who pushes for more time with her children but doesn’t know what to do with it when she has it. She has a mother’s love but not a mother’s instinct – and Steen’s expressive ice-blue eyes show how it’s tearing her apart. This is one of the most revealing family dramas of its type since “A Woman Under the Influence” – and Steen’s work needs to be seen by American audiences.

For the distaff side of that equation, we have Michael Douglas, doing some of his best work in ages in “Solitary Man,” directed by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, the team best known for writing “Rounders.” It’s a fascinating character study that has the rhythms of a comedy but the heart of a tragedy – thanks to Douglas’ nuanced performance.

Douglas plays Ben, once the biggest car dealer in New York – now a convicted felon (for scams against the car company) and divorcee who gradually pushes away everyone in his life with his me-first approach to living. He’s the kind of character that easily could have been played for laughs; just make him a little wackier, a little more lovable, a little funnier – and he’s the guy you hate to love but can’t resist.

But Koppelman, Levien and Douglas refuse to go warm and fuzzy. Embracing Ben would be like hugging a sack of razor blades; you end up getting cut every time. Douglas understands the guy’s charisma and charm and how he’s learned to coast on that – but the film refuses to let him do so, until he ultimately alienates his daughter (Jenna Fischer), his girlfriend (Mary Louise Parker) and almost everyone else in his life. It’s a risky performance and Douglas has no fear of risk. Here’s hoping it gets a chance to be seen.

Let me toss in one more on the same theme, that I saw before I got up here: “The Boys Are Back,” starring Clive Owen. He plays a British sports writer working in Australia for a newspaper, whose on-the-go life is crashingly transformed when his wife dies. Suddenly he’s forced to care for his 6-year-old son - and for the now-teen-aged son he left behind in England when he divorced his first wife.

It’s a funny and touching film (which opens Sept. 25), one that reveals a side of Owen we haven’t seen before. He plays a dad who has to figure out how to be part of his own life - and how to escape his own Type A personality in order to give his young son what he needs. Director Scott Hicks does a terrific job getting at the emotional core without succumbing to the maudlin.

Monday is my last full day in Toronto and I’m hoping to make the most of it by hitting five films before I start packing for a Tuesday flight. More tomorrow.

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