Daniel Day-Lewis in 'Lincoln'

Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's tribute to a time when men were men and Presidents wore big hats, is reportedly this year's "surprise" screening at the New York Film Festival. The Daniel Day-Lewis film, set to debut shortly after the Presidential election, is to follow in the footsteps of Hugo, which screened last year with little advance fanfare and before its completion. That movie went on to win five Academy Awards.

With relatively brief screen time in The Paperboy, Ms. Kidman takes over the film; a lurid mélange starring Zac Efron as a young man who stumbles upon conspiracy and evil, the film tips all too often, as did Mr. Daniels’s last effort, Precious, into excess. But the Australian actress, playing a past-her-prime beauty with a deadly attraction to things that are just plain wrong, clarifies the film’s Baroque obsession with violence.

In her polymorphous perversity, Ms. Kidman’s character humanizes the film’s nastiness. She puts a face on its obsession with the depraved, and through a conscious dulling of her intellect and her stock-in-trade melancholia, makes that depravity seem almost sweet. A scene in which she takes a near-naked Mr. Efron, 21 years her junior, into her arms and waltzes with him is the communion of two broken souls; when she urinates on him to relieve a jellyfish sting, it’s is an act of pure, frenzied love. “She gets her—she understands this woman,” Mr. Daniels told The Observer. “And she understands my insanity.”

That is precisely what, at least since her reinvention as a serious actress 11 years ago, Nicole Kidman does for every serious movie in which she chooses to act. She personifies the human consequences of directors’ intellectual arguments. And of all the actresses working today, she has the riskiest attitude when it comes to her collaborators. Among her contemporaries and past co-stars, Meryl Streep has winnowed her stable down to a few subpar directors who let her to do her thing. Meanwhile, few directors seem to have any idea what to do with Julianne Moore, who’s largely moved to TV. By contrast, Ms. Kidman has worked with Mr. Daniels, John Cameron Mitchell, Noah Baumbach, Jonathan Glazer and Lars von Trier, among other iconoclasts, and in each case she hasn’t merely been a part of an exacting vision, but pushed it to new places.

Part of her uniqueness, as has been widely observed, is her appetite for a kind of chic suffering. Before 2003’s Cold Mountain came out, New York Times critic A.O. Scott, in an essay on Ms. Kidman, noted of her characters, “Their misery is a sign of her independence, her courage, her victory over unpleasant circumstances, and our applause is the measure of our compassion.” This view of the actress’s career took into account her then-recent divorce from Tom Cruise and all the subsequent tabloid attention. In the years since, Ms. Kidman’s celebrity has dimmed—her name is no longer, as Mr. Scott’s put it, “inscribed at the very top of the Hollywood A-List.” With her name coming up only in the context of a paycheck movie, like 2007’s The Golden Compass, or a magazine spread on alleged plastic surgery victims (remember last year, when she claimed her beauty was natural, then admitted having used Botox by saying she’d stopped?), her audience’s compassion has waned commensurately. “Everyone was against hiring her. How could you hire her? She’s an ice princess,” said Mr. Daniels. “But those are the roles Hollywood offers you. They put you in a box. And she refuses.”

Through it all, though, she’s kept on trucking, with the loud flops of 2007 (The Invasion was the other one) reminding her that the Hollywood route is not exactly for her. There’s something deeply unsympathetic about Nicole Kidman both on- and offscreen. She’s uninterested, in a chilly way, in the give-and-take of Hollywood. Her Oscar acceptance speech for The Hours, delivered while wearing a deeply un-belle-of-the-ball, downright funereal black gown (granted, it was the beginning of the war in Iraq) and while taking out for a spin an increasingly, ahem, immobile visage, is a case study in elegant boredom. “Art is important,” the actress intoned. We may have really liked her, but did she really like us? During her two-year window of extreme fame, Mr. Scott argued that Ms. Kidman wanted to suffer for a broad audience. But the period since the fading from collective memory of her divorce from her famous Scientologist ex has proved that the more apt formulation might be that she wants a very limited art-house audience to suffer alongside her.

Her directors are, broadly speaking, known for contorting their performers into uncomfortable or compromising positions, and yet, in every case, Ms. Kidman has taken the initiative, pushing her movies further than, it would seem, even their directors intended. (Mr. Daniels said he was initially embarrassed before she urged him to direct her forcefully, at which point he told her she’d need to sit on a washing machine and spread her legs.) No moment in Mr. Daniels’s work, which has gained two performers Oscar nominations and one a win, has ever been so deeply felt as the scene in which his Paperboy star pushes younger women out of the way so that she might pee on Zac Efron.

So too do her performances in other movies push the bounds of what their directors might have intended: people remember Birth, her 2004 psychodrama about a woman united with a child she believes is her reincarnated husband, not for its directorial flair, but for a minutes-long shot of Ms. Kidman silently emoting as she watches an opera. The actress is feeling the consequences of the action more deeply than her director, who tosses away the plot of the movie in a dumb, poorly paced finale, and far more deeply than her audience, who greeted Birth with disdain and negligible box-office returns.

And consider The Hours, the film that earned Ms. Kidman an Oscar. Out of a triple-lead miasma in which two of the actresses, though credible, projected vague, early-2000s mumbly indie-film disdain for their surroundings, Ms. Kidman, playing Virginia Woolf, wrenched the film into melodrama through her sheer dogged commitment to the emotional, despite director Stephen Daldry’s clinical detachment. Or Rabbit Hole, in which director John Cameron Mitchell’s clear hope for another indie triumph—complete with animated interstitial segments—was waylaid by Ms. Kidman’s dogged earnestness in the face of losing a child. Or Dogville, in which Ms. Kidman, nearly alone among Lars von Trier’s long line of tortured leading ladies, manages not to transform into something more or less virtuous than that which she essentially is. Mr. von Trier’s other favored actresses, including Björk and Charlotte Gainsbourg, usually fall somewhere within a dull, nihilistic Scandinavian good-bad dialectic, whereas Ms. Kidman presents the sort of reactions a real person might have to being held captive and enslaved in an isolated Western town. Mr. von Trier’s films, generally, are meditations on broad themes, but with Ms. Kidman in place, Dogville became the story of a woman under duress. Amid a stream of postmodern ideas, she was, implacably, that most conventional of devices: a character.

Mr. Scott’s appraisal of Ms. Kidman’s career, for the Times, concluded that suffering was the essential element in bringing audiences to love and idolize her. Lincoln Center tributes aside, those fans have largely moved on after an unrewarding period between 2004 and 2008. Suffering is Ms. Kidman’s alienation effect—she manages to turn every picture she is in into a woman’s picture. Hers is a very particular talent, one not seen since the heyday of Joan Crawford, and Ms. Kidman’s icy public persona—buffed, polished and impervious to both age and negative press—is its perfect complement.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Ms. Kidman has never been a whiz with accents, and viewers of The Paperboy will have to forgive her tortured attempt at a Southern one. She’s never, in any sense, disappeared into a role (leaving aside The Hours, in which makeup and special effects rendered her unrecognizable). When she plays an American, as in, for instance, Margot at the Wedding, her Australian lilt comes to the fore, but it works as an aid to her portrayal of hauteur, rather than an impediment. It’s not range in the sense of breadth of possible roles that Ms. Kidman seeks—she can play a very narrow slice of the roles offered to 40-something actresses—but in the range as depth of emotion. And she has succeeded in conveying a shocking depth of emotion to an unfeeling audience in our post-ironic age. “I now know what those old-time directors felt like while working with Bette Davis or with Greta Garbo—one of the legends,” said Mr. Daniels. A director like Michael Curtiz would know exactly what to do with Ms. Kidman. As it stands, she’s had to make her own way—a vaguely defined mission that Lincoln Center honors even as audiences remain puzzled.

Mandy Patinkin in 'The Princess Bride'

The cast of eighties cult fantasy film The Princess Bride is set to reunite at the New York Film Festival this year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced via press release today. Cary Elwes, Billy Crystal, Carol Kane, Mandy Patinkin, Chris Sarandon, and Robin Wright--along with director Rob Reiner--are all 25 years older and wiser than they were when Bride was released (Ms. Wright's gained and lost a "Penn" on her name!), and will attend a screening of a new print of the film on October 2, along with a discussion afterwards. Perhaps the most memorable cast member--Wallace Shawn, who played the lisping Sicilian criminal Vizzini, told The Observer last year that he doesn't like being stopped on the street with fans' impersonations of his comic role.  “I must admit, they’re rarely that flattering. Even short or bald people such as myself have–we don’t have grotesque self-images.”

Maybe he'll change his mind and attend!

A scene from Alexander Payne's The Descendents, which closes the New York Film Festival.

Wednesday, October 10

Lucy Liu by the Numbers

In New York, a night can often be of two minds—two disparate occasions, with opposite crowds, on far-off edges of Manhattan. Take Wednesday, for example. Lucy Liu is having friends over to the Tory Burch boutique, a tony edifice up on Madison Avenue, to celebrate Seventy Two, her exhibition based on the Book of Exodus that opened this month at Salon Vert in London. It comprises 72 works, inspired by Chinese calligraphy and butterflies, and follows a theme inspired by the 72 names of God from the Bible. (Did we mention it’s called Seventy Two?) And it looks like, for Ms. Liu, books beget books—a hardcover coffee table rendition of the show will be released Nov. 1. But don’t think it’ll be easy to get your hand on one: it’s quite the limited edition, with only—wait for it—72 copies being made. Ten percent of sales at the store will benefit UNICEF, but why not stay on-theme, and donate 72 percent? Just saying.

Flat out not feeling Tory Burch tonight? What about a mild-mannered blues duo and some pretty stellar cell phone reception? Over at espace, a Room of Requirement over on 42nd near the Hudson, T-Mobile is celebrating the launch of two gadgets with cumbersome names—the Samsung Galaxy S II and the HTC Amaze 4G—with a performance from the Black Keys, two Akron boys with a few bar chords and hearts of gold. It’s hard to keep track of what the Keys are up to these days, what with all their Rza collaborations, but we’re pretty sure they still sound like a rock band. But if you think it’ll be awkward when you pull out your iPhone for the requisite “Oh, wow, it’s that song that band plays!” picture, maybe skip this one. (Miss you, Steve!)

Seventy Two: Lucy Liu book party; 797 Madison Avenue, 7 p.m.; invitation only. Special performance by the Black Keys, espace, 635 West 42nd Street, 9 p.m.; invitation only

Thursday, October 13

If You Want Denim, Join ’Em

The unmistakable characters were spotted on subway trains, Times Square billboards, front-page newspaper ads and email inboxes. What were they, what did they say, what did they mean? On the left, Japanese characters. On the right, those characters translated. The word was UNIQLO, in that red and white box. And why? Oh, just the first tremors of the retail store’s inevitable world domination. Things get started Thursday night with the opening of a new flagship, where founder Tadashi Yanai will be holding court. Come stop by before every evacuated Gap space gets filled with super-cheap Japanese denim.

UNIQLO NEW YORK flagship opening, Fifth Avenue at 53rd Street, 7 p.m.; small dinner to follow at Monkey Bar, invitation only.

Friday, October 14

Beers to Ya!

In September, the 21 Club—perhaps the best Old New York lunch spot—did the unthinkable. Along with your choices of either a gin martini or, um, a gin martini, the restaurant would now be offering beer. On tap. The nerve! The new corner of the restaurant is called Bar 21, with bar stools that befit jeans, and a lax sport-coat policy. On offer is a small but satisfying list of lunch fare, and after 4:00 patrons can nibble on tasty snacks. But September’s gone, and October calls for something heartier. Something more festive, that is. If you’re already salivating over the thought of bratwurst and pretzels, you’re on the right track. Bar 21 is now serving its Oktoberfest menu, so stop on by for some of Germany’s finest flavors. Veal schnitzel is accompanied by lemon, fennel and cucumber salad, or there’s the charcuterie plate, which includes aged ham, barrel pickles, Tilsiter cheese, rye bread and sweet mustard. And of course beer! An autumnal lunch isn’t complete without a few pints to warm the soul, and there are four different Oktoberfest favorites on tap. O.K., we’re no longer bemoaning the changes at 21. Another Radeberger, please.

Bar 21 at the 21 Club, 21 West 52nd Street, 212-582-7200, closed Sundays.

Saturday, October 15

On Your Mark, Get Set—Tweed!

Another thing that makes mid-October just the best? Tweed. Tweed jackets, tweed suits. Tweed skivvies. (O.K., that might be a tweed too far.) Of course, Ralph Lauren’s got you covered on that front. Doff your light summer coats and grab the fall weights for the Rugby New York Tweed Run, a bike race that’s more about style than speed. Things get started in the West Village this Saturday at noon, and you can take your wheels all the way to Brooklyn, where there will be a soirée awaiting you as you pedal up. Also, there’s a tea break somewhere in there. If you feel insufficiently appareled for the event, Ralph Lauren will be selling knitwear by the barrel, from scarves to mittens to sweaters. Or, if you want to keep warm the old fashioned way, they are selling flasks, too. Hey, you can’t partake in an autumn tweed bike outing without a buzz—and a tam o’ shanter—on!

Rugby Ralph Lauren Tweed Run, the West Village, 12 p.m.; more info at www.rugby.com/tweedrun/

Sunday, October 16

Grapes of Wrath

It seems like it just started, but like all good things, the New York Film Festival must come to an end. What began with Roman Polanski’s Carnage will wrap up with The Descendants, the first film from director Alexander Payne since Sideways. There’s a gala too, and so we can help but ask: will a certain type of red wine be served? (If you don’t know what we’re talking about, here’s a hint. “If anyone orders merlot, I’m leaving,” Paul Giamatti’s character, Miles, says in Sideways. “I am not drinking any fucking merlot!”) No word on whether Mr. Giamatti—who appears in this fall’s The Ides of March, a potential Descendants Oscar rival—will be at the party, but spies should watch the labels of the bottles tipped into glasses, lest anyone wants to be called a traitor. Though it would be a somewhat egregious if guests undertook an exodus over a little merlot, we think.

The New York Festival Premiere of The Descendants and closing gala, Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway, 9 p.m.; sold out.

Monday, October 17

Nude Descending a Sotheby’s Staircase

Things are getting risqué tonight at the auction world’s über-house. It’s the 20th-annual Take Home a Nude auction, where men and woman can bid on the chance to leave the gala with a painting of someone going au naturel. The heavy hitters in attendance will include Larry Gagosian, Chanel CEO Maureen Chiquet, Andre Balazs, Bob Colacello, Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber and the newly single Blake Lively. Perhaps she’ll bring along rumored flame Ryan Reynolds? He’s a well-respected art collector, right? I mean, we have no idea. Regardless of whom Blake brings, the New York Academy of Art will honor critic John Richardson and British portrait master Jenny Saville. Congrats, guys!

Twentieth-annual Take Home a Nude® Benefit Art Auction and Dinner to Honor John Richardson and Jenny Saville, Sotheby’s, 1334 York Avenue; silent auction and cocktails, 6 p.m., live auction, 8 p.m., dinner, 9 p.m.; individual tickets available from $175 to $1,000 by calling 212 842-5971 or emailing events@nyaa.edu.

Tuesday

October 18

Cristal Poppin’

In 1867, Tsar Alexander II was not exactly the most popular guy in Russia—he was so unpopular, in fact, that he was worried someone would kill him by putting a bomb in a bottle of Champagne at his Three Emperors Dinner. The solution? A new vessel was created with “crystal” clear glass, unlike the dark green bottles that would obscure any TNT. Thus, Cristal was born. To celebrate the 135th anniversary of this happy consequence of potential political assassination, Cristal parent-company Louis Roederer is hosting a salon in a mansion on Park Avenue, where the legendary Champagne maker will let the stuff spill into the flutes of enlightened guests. Managing director Frederic Rouzaud will be on hand to officiate the vintages, and even if the conversations on Balzac and Zola get cut short, there’s a good chance we’ll walk out of the salon with our spirits leavened.

Champagne Louis Roederer & Frederic Rouzaud host Cristal’s 135th Anniversary Salon, 41 East 72nd Street between Park and Madison avenues), 7 p.m.; invitation only.

Wednesday, October 19

Ace Rocks Out

There are so many people at the Ace Hotel on laptops clacking away that even if you’re there for fun, it can certainly feel like working. Then again, if you had to spend a day out of the office but still needed to hammer out a few projects, the Ace isn’t the worst place to do it: there’s Stumptown coffee, grade-A grub at the Breslin and plenty of attractive people to pretend to be associated with. What if you added four sets of top-notch indie rock, too? Starting at 10:30 today, Seattle radio station KEXP will bring a commendable lineup of acts to the hotel for a day of free music. Things kick off with Zola Jesus, the Russian freak-electro goth princess, and wrap up with those almost forgotten (but still awesome, trust us) guys Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. They go on at 4:30. So throw the lighters in the air, and if your boss asks where you are, well, you’re working from home.

KEXP Radio Live: CMJ broadcasts from the Ace lobby, the Ace Hotel, 20 West 29th Street; Zola Jesus, 10:30 a.m., We Are Augustines, 12:30 p.m., Portugal, the Man, 2:30 p.m., Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, 4:30 p.m.

Ms. Mulligan, Ms. Williams, Ms. Dunst.

“Wow, this is it, this view, New York City!” Michael Fassbender said after opening the door to the roof of the Standard, where the glass buildings lining the West Side bound forth from the meatpacking district toward midtown.

It was Friday night, and The Observer had just watched the New York Film Festival’s screening of Shame, a sexually violent fantasia in which Mr. Fassbender beds scores of random women in every dirty corner of Manhattan—including a few times against the floor-to-ceiling windows in the rooms of the hotel we were standing atop.

What better venue for the after party?

“This hotel …” the actor said. “I was staying in the rooms, once, and was told, ‘Beware! People can see inside.’”

Mr. Fassbender lit a cigarette and sat down at the table next to three of his oldest friends—buddies from his youth in County Kerry, Ireland. He had insisted on a roundtable conversation.

“How much of the sex was real?” we asked.

Here’s some context: Shame’s tamer scenes, which conceal nothing from the camera, find Mr. Fassbender engaging in sex under the Williamsburg Bridge, sex with prostitutes, sex with random men in a cavernous clubs, and of course sex in rooms at the Standard, for the entertainment of pedestrians on Little West 12th. (Don’t worry—things get wild toward the end.)

“Um, next question,” Mr. Fassbender said. “Now you gotta ask my mates one!”

“What was it like watching your buddy have more sex than you can ever imagine?” we asked.

“Unfortunately I haven’t yet seen his crown jewels!” one of them said. “I haven’t seen the film.”

“It’s really something,” The Observer responded.

“What is?” Mr. Fassbender asked, taking a last drag. “My crown jewels?”

“Well, I meant the film is really something,” we stuttered. “But, yeah, I have seen them now, I guess.”

“But I haven’t seen yours!” he shot back.

Mr. Fassbender downed his martini—his character, Brandon, was fond of the same cocktail, we remembered—and revealed that he hadn’t been with these guys, his closest friends, since 2001.

“We needed a significant break after we had a go at it,” said one of the friends.

Then they all started chiming in.

“We can only see each other every 10 years.

“I just got over it.”

“The shaking just stopped.”

“But we did a road trip together!” Mr. Fassbender interrupted. “And we were gonna call Marco’s ass up in Italy. Why didn’t we do that?”

“Because we were constantly drunk and we had the memory of a fucking goldfish!”

“Ah, that’s right.”

Steve McQueen, the film’s director, chose the Boom Boom Room for the film’s centerpiece scene, in which Carey Mulligan, playing Mr. Fassbender’s chanteuse little sister, sings “New York, New York” as the camera refuses to waver from her mascara-heavy eyelids.

“A lot of New Yorkers live in the sky, work in the sky, spend their time in the sky,” Mr. McQueen had noted during the postscreening Q&A. And when we spoke with him at the Boom Boom Room, it was up against the glass, with the docks and piers dangling out below us.

“This is the first time I’ve been back since we shot here …” he said. His eyes wandered downward. “The view, the expanse of water!”

After another drink next to a table where Olivia Wilde sat with Zoe Kazan, it was time to go. The cast cleared out too: this was just a small respite from the go-go of anyone involved in the New York Film Festival, where the fall’s slew of Oscar-bait pictures make their first impressions on filmgoers.

Two days later, another bash was underway at the Hudson Hotel in honor of Michelle Williams, who plays the blonde bombshell of the title in My Week With Marilyn.

“Does she pull off Marilyn Monroe?” Harvey Weinstein was asked. He was standing next to an enormous tin water pitcher that decorated the hotel terrace. “Well, see the film, then let me know. Me? Oh, I think she definitely pulls it off.”

Ms. Williams was herself at the party, but at Alice Tully Hall later that night she was Ms. Monroe—My Week With Marilyn is, after all, a film with actors playing actors. As we sat down for the screening, buzzed on a Negroni impetuously purchased from a Lincoln Center lobby cocktail cart, Ms. Williams-as-Marilyn began dancing on the screen-within-a-screen, as Kenneth Branagh’s Laurence Olivier sat in his own theater puffing on cigarette after cigarette. If only!

And all of this after our festival began with the earth caroming into a much larger planet in a deafening bonanza of fire—twice, actually—in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which premiered last Monday. It’s a glorious dismantling of terrestrial cores and emotional cores, an expansive vision set to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

And it wasn’t even the only end of the world going on. Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day On Earth, which also premiered at the festival, ends as you’d expect, and takes place on the Lower East Side. Oddly, on our way to My Week With Marilyn, we witnessed a plane etching the words “LAST CHANCE” across the sky.

Yet, despite Melancholia’s global destruction, the cast managed to make it to the Stone Rose Lounge for the after-party. (Mr. Von Trier, who infamously referred to himself as a Nazi when the film opened in Cannes, didn’t make the trip—then again, he’s never been to the United States.)

“I would definitely be with my family for sure,” Alexander Skarsgard, who plays Kirsten Dunst’s doltish (and doomed!) new husband, said to The Observer of his doomsday plans. “Where else would you want to be?”

“I don’t know, man” Ms. Dunst said to us. “I’d hopefully be with my family. It would be nice to be in the forest somewhere, chilling out. It’s such an awful thing to think about. What would you do?”

We told her we’d probably try to have a last night of fun.

First though, there were trays of truffle grilled cheese bites to eat, and DeLeon Tequila apple cocktails to down. The end would have to wait a little longer.

nfreeman@observer.com

Polanski. (Photo: Miguel Medina / AFP / Getty Images)

The first New York Film Festival, in 1963, featured Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water, the then-30-year-old director's Polish-language feature debut. "Film Fete Places Accent on Youth", The New York Times headline read. Mr. Polanski was joined by established directors like Alain Resnais, with Muriel, and lesser-known names like Glauber Rocha, with Barravento, his feature debut at the fest.

That inaugural festival ran from Sept. 10 to Sept. 19, and the Sept. 20 cover of Time featured two of the actors from Knife in the Water, with the headline "Cinema as an International Art." Two American directors were featured at that inaugural festival: Alex Segal, who had previously worked almost entirely in television, and Adolfas Mekas, with his debut feature, Hallelujah the Hills. The festival's official program depicted a film canister covered in shipping labels and addressed to Lincoln Center - its international origin obscure.

This year, Mr. Polanski's work will return to a festival that has changed a great deal since his debut. He will show Carnage, a Brooklyn-set theatrical adaptation with an A-list cast including Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet, which will be screened at an opening-night gala, buttressed by a centerpiece screening of My Week With Marilyn (directed by British TV veteran Simon Curtis, and starring Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe) and a closing night screening of The Descendants (Alexander Payne's return to cinema, starring George Clooney).

There are also two more galas planned, one in honor of David Cronenberg's new Freud/Jung drama A Dangerous Method and, the other to toast the Antonio Banderas thriller The Skin I Live In, directed by Pedro Almodóvar.

While he will not and—given his longstanding legal issues in the U.S.—cannot be in attendance, Mr. Polanski's history looms over the festival from its first night. The director's repute and sway grew on the back of his early success and his desire for mass acceptance. The same could be said of the festival's. But in contrast to Mr. Polanski's internationally minded art, the festival at which he first gained acclaim can seem inward-looking, often celebrating films that already have distribution and are surefire Oscar-season winners.

In recent years, the galas have been a convenient spot to slot the highest-profile films and directors in the run-up to early winter's Oscar race, as exemplified by of the two additional galas beyond the opening, closing and centerpiece screenings, which allow Messrs. Cronenberg and Almodóvar parties of their own. The opening-night spot that went in 2001 to Jacques Rivette's Va Savoir and in 2004 to Agnes Jaoui's Look at Me—films that, despite their directors' pedigrees, would seem to the mass American audience to illustrate that distancing that has occurred from that 1963 Time headline about "Cinema as an International Art"—went in 2005 to George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, in 2006 to Stephen Frears's The Queen, in 2007 to Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, and in 2010 to David Fincher's The Social Network. (2008 and 2009 saw The Class and Wild Grass, hugely anticipated French films that had played at Cannes.) Justin Timberlake et al. posed on a red carpet for last year's opener, and Kate Winslet, fresh from promoting Carnage at the Venice Film Festival, may well do the same this year.

Has the gala changed the opening night? "I don't know that they've changed that much," said Richard Peña, program director for the Festival. "I think perhaps they've become, at times, a little more sparkling. When the N.Y.F.F. started it was quite literally the only game in town. Now, we're not the only game in town, we're not the only game on the continent, we're not the only game in the country. So our opening nights are the chance to send out a little bit of a signal."

"Certainly over the last 24 years of my reign, there have been less foreign language films, for example, as opening nights and more films that might feature bigger stars. I think that's a function of a lot of things that have changed." Mr. Peña (who, in the interest of disclosure, taught a lecture course on film that this reporter took in college) declined to comment on the quality of both Carnage and The Social Network, though he mentioned without prompting that both high-profile films were of "a slightly different breed than when the festival was opening with Truffaut films."

What of the rest of the slate? Many of the films included-but-not-feted (there are 22 in all) played in Cannes this year, including Lars von Trier's Melancholia, a Best Actress winner, and Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist, a
Best Actor winner. Major directors, including Wim Wenders, the Dardenne brothers and Martin Scorsese (in his second consecutive year at the festival with a documentary, this time about George Harrison), are included as well, reprising past themes: Mr. Wenders's Pina is a music documentary in the vein of Buena Vista Social Club; the Dardennes' The Kid With a Bike, a social drama about family. "The Festival represents," said Mr. Peña, "a choice, a curatorial point of view. We're not panoramic, we're not encyclopedic. There are festivals like that and I think they're very useful. But we're not like that, we've never been like that and as long as I'm here, I don't think we ever will be."

As for a uniting theme behind this year's festival, Mr. Peña stated, "There's an interesting re-evaluation of what constitutes political cinema—films that deal with politics in a different way.  There's a sense of opposition, films that, instead of just revealing the world, depict opposition in a certain way. You get the sense of the emergence of a new generation of talent, and we do have a lot of new names in the festival."

Such political films include The Student, a drama about campus activism set in Buenos Aires and directed by Santiago Mitre; Miss Bala, a look at drug violence and beauty pageants directed by Gerardo Naranjo; and Policeman, an examination of Israeli anti-terror cops directed by Nadav Lapid. In the 1960s, any of these films might have landed that Time cover. Mr. Naranjo is promoting Miss Bala through a Tumblr account.

The oxygen in the room may not be as consumed by the galas as one might expect—even the greenest of New York Film Festival filmmakers have now had their credibility bolstered among the Film Comment crowd with various international festival appearances, and find the festival less competitive than others. After all, Cannes, Venice and Toronto have their own galas, their own politics.

Mr. Lapid, who has already taken his film to the Locarno Film Festival, said of New York: "There are festivals where you come to work and to sweat—there is a kind of harsh competition. You're very stressed, in a way. And there are festivals where you come for the pleasure of watching movies and being watched by others. I have the feeling and the hope that New York is one [of
the latter]."

Said Mr. Naranjo, the director of Miss Bala, whose previous film I'm Gonna Explode played the Film Festival in 2008: "When I was growing up, one of the best references—the people you could trust about great cinema was the Lincoln Center. For me, it has always been the Lincoln Center. I'm very aware of the curatorial good quality—and I never expected to be in the
elite, and I never expected to be there with my first movies."

Sean Durkin, director of Martha Marcy May Marlene, agreed. "They just make such amazing choices, and to be playing with the group of directors that's playing this year is blowing my mind! To look at the list and see yourself on there is amazing."

There's room for all sorts at Lincoln Center, it would seem, though the galas—an opportunity for New York Film Festival exclusivity in a red-carpet-glutted world—will always be the province of the stars. Said Mr.Pena: "As always, the festival is trying to reinvent parts of itself. Increasingly, very few people want to do multiple openings. They want one opening. They want this to not only be where the film is shown, but to have the red carpet and the press and stars and its crew. We're in a way responding to that new perceived need. People seem very happy with that possibility. We want the events to be successful, so we choose from among the films we've chosen, some that would have a somewhat broader reach."

Of those gala screenings, perhaps the most instructive as to the N.Y.F.F. philosophy is My Week With Marilyn—a depiction, Mr. Peña said, of the collision between Lawrence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe: "It was a curious meeting between the two of them. They represent different aspects of film culture, but very vital aspects of film culture." Disregarding the thesis that Monroe was, as Mr. Peña puts it, "a ditzy icon," the mélange of uncompromising auteurist vision and the lure of star power make, in both My Week With Marilyn and the festival hosting it, an interesting brew.

Mr. Durkin, though, is more excited for opening night. "I'm dying to see the new Polanski movie," he said. "He's an all-time favorite. One of the few. I want to see all of them, but that's not possible."

ddaddario@observer.com

Pedro Almodovar (Getty Images)

The New York Film Festival is ready to party. On top of its opening night, centerpiece, and closing gala, the Festival is to throw itself two additional galas: for Pedro Almodovar's sci-fi-noir-ish reunion with Antonio Banderas, The Skin I Live In [The Skin in Which I Live? --ed.] on October 12, and for David Cronenberg's Freud/Jung drama A Dangerous Method on October 5. In Film Society of Lincoln Center's press release, Executive Director Rose Kuo said: "This year has seen a great deal of growth for us with the opening of our new Film Center and we are thrilled to continue that expansion at this year’s NYFF."

The growth, as we previously pointed out, seems to be in the wattage of films NYFF can attract: opening nights have become major screenings for highly anticipated films, and have become something like victims of their own success as NYFF attracts more and more heavily-hyped films, each deserving or desiring a spotlight of its own.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The film follows the tangled love story of a writer and his muse, played by Penélope Cruz, in what Mr. Almodóvar called “a love declaration to the cinema.” In signature Almodóvar style, the complex plot channels decades of cinematic history, including his own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

If the image of Mr. Almodóvar and Ms. Cruz walking down the red carpet together takes you straight back to 2006—and 1999, and 1997—you’re not alone. Broken Embraces is the fourth of five films on which the two Spaniards have collaborated.

But, Ms. Cruz told the Transom of her career-long professional relationship with the director, “I haven’t lost the fear or the butterflies in my stomach when I’m working with him.”

According to Ms. Cruz, who first met Mr. Almodóvar when she was only 17, “He’s really the reason I decided to become an actress when I was a teenager. It’s because I was obsessed with his movies, and I still am.”

Asked about his next move, Mr. Almodóvar said: “I can’t say anything very concrete,” he said. And, in the next breath: “I’m facing the possibility to make my first movie in English next year if everything goes well.”

Also there was 84-year-old Hollywood legend Lauren Bacall. Asked how she felt about recent news that she’ll be receiving an honorary Academy Award in November (along with cinematographer Gordon Willis and director Roger Corman), Ms. Bacall allowed only that she thought it was “shocking.”

And Friday's Lincoln Center screening seems to have precipitated a medical emergency. Page Six quotes a report from TheLostBoy.com's Peter Kneget:

A man in the audience had a seizure while a scene was unfolding in which Charlotte Gainsbourg tortures the dangly bits of Willem Dafoe's character. "People starting screaming, 'Call an ambulance!' 'Call 911,' including the familiar voice of actress Lili Taylor."