Bollywood star John Abraham, accompanied by Bipasha Basu, has been in Toronto right from day one of the ongoing international film festival.

He may not have had Indian fans swarming all around him like Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan did earlier on in the event, but the media attention he has attracted has been no less.

In Toronto for the special presentation of Kabir Khan's thriller "Kabul Express", John addressed a press conference at the downtown Sutton Place Hotel Thursday in the company of the film's director Kabir Khan and co-star Arshad Warsi.

"Kabul Express" hasn't exactly floored local critics - one of them described the film as "the most sublimely terrible movie in this year's festival" - but that hasn't exactly affected John's considerable fan following in Toronto.

The reason is pretty obvious: his fame here rests solely on his widely lauded performance as a Gandhian idealist in Deepa Mehta's "Water", which was the opening night film of the 2005 edition of the festival.

John is now due to play a role in Mehta's next film - the $15 million "Exclusion", based on the ill-fated 1914 Komagata Maru voyage that ended well short of Vancouver in the face of the racial laws that prevailed in Canada back then. So there is reason to believe that John Abraham's romance with Toronto is far from over.

While John has taken all the time at his disposal to soak in the sights and sounds of Toronto while not missing his three-hour daily workout in the hotel gym, another Bollywood star, Tabu, flew in and flew out before one could spell the word m-o-v-i-e.

The lady put in an appearance at the public screening of Mira Nair's well-received "The Namesake", which is being lined up for release in India by the end of the year. But the real star of the film, Irrfan Khan, whose superbly modulated performance is the heart and soul of "The Namesake", was conspicuous by his absence.

"The Namesake" is, of course, not the only film that Tabu has up ahead. Although she wasn't going to say as much, she is more excited about "Chini Kum", the film that pits her opposite the one and only Amitabh Bachchan for the first time ever.

Being shot in London, this comedy has Tabu playing a 30-year-old to Bachchan's sexagenarian character. That's certainly a film to look forward to.

Now on to a Danish actor who is not quite a household name yet outside his own country. But make no mistake, he could well be an international supernova once the next James Bond film premieres mid November.

We are talking about 40-year-old Mads Mikkelsen, who plays the evil Le Chiffre, the chief adversary of Daniel Craig's Secret Service Agent 007 in the upcoming "Casino Royale".

In the 31st Toronto International Film Festival, he has two major films - Susanne Bier's "After the Wedding" and Ole Christian Madsen's "Prague".

In the former, he plays Jacob, a Dane who went to India as a youth and never left, while the evocative "Prague" has him in the role of a man learning to reconcile himself with the slow break-up of his 14-year-old marriage.

It is pretty clear that Mikkelsen is an actor with tremendous screen presence and star appeal. So don't be surprised if he upstages James Bond a bit when the much-awaited showdown does unfold on movie screens across the world in a couple of months from now.