These are the months when studios trot out the films they think have a shot at getting rewarded with Oscar statues. And the crowd at Tavern on the Green—made up of executives in the movie industry, as well as critics, publicists, journalists and self-anointed film aficionados—certainly fancied itself the kind of crowd that knows just which films those gold statues might be going to.

Many stuck to the conventionally held (and reviewed) opinion that Ms. Mirren’s performance was unbeatable; others were quick to hiss that the film has been overhyped.

“If you give this four stars, I will beat you,” said one partygoer to Us Weekly’s Thelma Adams. (“I already did, I think,” she replied.) Some talk was devoted to non-festival entrant The Departed, from past festival darling Martin Scorsese, already getting the usual “This is Marty’s year” treatment. More than a few guests dismissed Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. (“It’s like sticking your hand in a giant meringue. Mark my words, no one will see it but gays and girls”), while still others griped that many of the guests hadn’t adhered to the evening’s black-tie requirements. (“I mean, he’s not even wearing a tie!”) One man who had followed the rules—his tux looked like a million bucks—poked at his plate of pasta glumly and said, “This has got to be the exact same pesto they’ve been serving for the last 44 years.”

A few days later, The Queen’s much-lauded British screenwriter, Peter Morgan, didn’t hesitate in answering whether he’d had a good time at the party.

“No,” he said. “It was absolute madness. I went there, I got claustrophobic, and I left. That’s how anybody in their right mind would have been.”

Mr. Morgan has not only The Queen but also The Last King of Scotland making its way through the festival circuit. He’s also got a stage play, Frost/Nixon, just ending a run in London, which he said Ron Howard might be making into a film. “The opening night in New York befits the city,” he said. “You feel it’s a more discerning, sophisticated and yet somehow violent experience. Just the business of getting to the New York Film Festival—I’m not a religious man, but I always privately mouth ‘Thanks’ when I arrive anywhere in New York. You generally arrive anywhere in the state of car sickness, fairly traumatized by the violence of the journey getting there.” The New York Film Festival has a proud reputation for keeping things stubbornly the same. In fact, they’ve been banking on it since the festival’s inception in 1963, when festival director Richard Roud started introducing New York City audiences to Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and to show roughly 25 features handpicked by a distinguished panel out of thousands of submissions. The mission has remained pure, even while new North American festivals have cropped up to court the festival-goer’s fancy: the overwhelming six-movies-a-day of Toronto, the wool caps and furry boots of Sundance, the glitzy downtown circus of Tribeca.

“Do I ever feel pressure? Not really,” said New York Film Festival program director Richard Peña. “I’m sort of lucky in that way. One of the things about the New York Film Festival is that I think I’m really given extraordinary freedom and latitude to pretty much do what I want. We sell out every year, and that’s a wonderful privilege.”

This year, the festival has its usual expected exotic offerings: Paprika, a Japanese anime that is described as a “head-on collision between Hello Kitty and Philip K. Dick”; Offside, about Iranian girls who dress up as boys to watch “footie”; festival favorite (and centerpiece holder) Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, starring Penélope Cruz; and Inland Empire, the latest from David Lynch.

But there’s also easily digestible fare on this year’s menu, too: the Marie Antoinette fashion strut; The Host, an already-popular monster movie from South Korea that had Toronto audiences buzzing; and the film adaptation of the beloved Tom Perrotta novel Little Children, starring Kate Winslet. “To be honest, I think they got a little scared of Tribeca,” said an industry veteran of this year’s program. “Wouldn’t you, if you had $4 million from Amex going down there and your budget is only one third of that? Tribeca has a premiere every two seconds and stars walking the red carpet. The New York Film Festival, they need to sort of glitz it up again. The y need movies with Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst there.”

Mr. Peña insists that Tribeca is not a factor.

“Frankly I don’t think it’s really affected us. The way it could is if we were losing films and audience—and neither seems to have happened. We’re really different styles, and people see that and judge accordingly.”

As for this year’s selections, he said: “I just think this is the way the winds blew this year. There is always a sort of tension between mainstream and art cinema. I think it’s a little bit inscribed in the founding of the New York Film Festival, which in 1963 had a watershed moment when arts cinema started to go one way, creating one sort of world, with mainstream cinema going towards another way. So I think the mission of the popular is something that always lingers around our choices.”

What everyone does seem to agree on is that the New York Film Festival carries a certain class within its Alice Tully Hall walls. Because it doesn’t give out awards, filmmakers and movie studios are able to feel that just getting into the New York Film Festival is an award unto itself.

“The New York Film Festival favors quality over quantity,” said director Guillermo del Toro, whose Pan’s Labyrinth nabbed the coveted closing-night spot. “They always take a stringent point of view, a very selective eye on what they are showcasing, so it automatically becomes a great honor to be there. It’s not a festival about favorites as much as it is a discerning point of view in cinema, right now, from all over the world.” “It’s always meant a lot to me. I got in a film called Careful in 1992, and for years it was the highlight of my filmmaking career,” said Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, whose Brand Upon the Brain!—a silent movie narrated by an in-the-flesh Isabella Rossellini and accompanied by a live orchestra and a castrato—is part of the Special Events program in the Walter Reade Theater (“I don’t see it as a ghetto,” Mr. Maddin said). “Some festivals are more important for craft versus markets and sales. But the New York Film Festival—just in pure, powerful iconography terms—is so important. It always has a great audience who are knowledgeable to the point of it being a bit overwhelming sometimes.”

“This is the first festival in America to play people like Victor Nunez and Gal Young ’Un,” said Little Children director Todd Field. “It was before independent film became a buzzword and a marketing tool. When there really was an independent-film movement—where people had to struggle and scrape to get money together and make films—it was the only place that recognized that. Before there was a Sundance film festival, there was the New York Film Festival.

“When I moved to New York in 1984,” Mr. Field continued, “my experience with movies was based on being a projectionist in a second-run movie house in Portland, Ore. I had never seen what we would consider independent-minded film, or specialty films, or even many foreign films. I was working across the street at O’Neill’s Saloon, and I met all sorts of extraordinary people—but the most important thing that happened to me is that someone said to me, ‘The New York Film Festival is on, and you need to go to it.’ And I came over here, and they were screening Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, and it completely blew my mind. And I thought, Oh my God! This exists? They let people make films like this? It was like discovering another country.”

During the dark days of summer, Times Square became our cultural fiefdom and The Lion King its jewel in the crown. Elitism and intellectualism were suddenly four-letter words. Alien vs. Predator reigned over the box office. Miramax was flinging staff members to the streets. We absconded from the city and, when we returned, we found that the city seemed to have absconded from us.

But now it’s officially autumn—elsewhere, a sign of decay; in this city, a sign of rebirth, with the first crisp, cold wind blowing the foul stench of warm garbage away. Goodbye, tourists gaping at ostentatious billboards in the sky. Hello, Columbia intellectuals flocking to those dear, gray Great Society–era buildings of Lincoln Center. Yes, we’re atoning for our dog-day sins, and we’re doing it at the altar of the New York Film Festival.

The first salvo against vacuous summer delights was launched in late July, with the announcement that the French, female director Agnès Jaoui’s Look at Me would open the NYFF on Oct. 1. It was a statement that however "big tent" and commercial Sundance, Toronto, Cannes and Tribeca have gotten, the New York Film Festival would be sticking to its 42-year-old roots: giving priority to qualité over célébrité. "Obviously, we like to have an opening film that sends a signal." said Richard Peña, the festival’s director for 17 years, sitting in a warren-like Film Society office in Lincoln Plaza with a tan jacket hanging on his thick frame.

This year, the NYFF will screen just 25 films over a 17-day period. It will fête NYFF stalwart Pedro Almodóvar—his Academy Award–winning Talk to Her closed the festival in 2002, and All About My Mother opened it in 1999—and show his most recent work, the noir Bad Education, starring the smoldering Gael García Bernal, as the centerpiece film. Alexander Payne—another NYFF regular—will close the festival with Sideways, starring a misanthropic Paul Giamatti and a hilarious Thomas Haden Church ( Wings) as two aging college buddies.

This small and super-exclusive slate stands in stark contrast to what seems like every other notable film festival on the planet. In January, Sundance screened 255 films, with 82 world premieres. In March, Tribeca answered with 250 and 30, respectively. Cannes clocked in at 56 and 46, in May, and Toronto trailed in earlier this month with 328 and 100. All of these events have become mega-malls of the film world: one-stop shopping for every buyer’s needs.

The New York Film Festival used to be a hot spot for acquisitions, but that time has come and gone. Its boutique size, elitist philosophy and penchant for auteurism make it an anachronism. And we are all better off for it.

"It is by far the last of its kind," said New York industry veteran Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which has four films in the festival. "What’s great about it, and always been great about it—it’s about cinema."

The New York Film Festival has held onto the one thing that is hardest to replicate in the film industry, or any industry: prestige.

"One of my first weeks at [Fox] Searchlight was attending the festival with Boys Don’t Cry," said Nancy Utley, the subsidiary’s president of marketing, invoking the movie that won Hilary Swank an Academy Award in 2001. "And that screening led to a ton of free publicity and was one of the factors in getting the ball rolling toward all of the acclaim that the film got."

Last year’s festival alone sent Mystic River, Barbarian Invasions and 21 Grams barreling toward Academy Award nominations.

To be sure, every year people dispute the quality of both the omitted and the included. Most recently, Mr. Peña felt the wrath of documentary behemoth Michael Moore for not accepting Bowling for Columbine. Mr. Moore repeatedly denounced the festival in subsequent interviews (our call to him was not returned), and according to Mr. Peña, whose committee did accept Mr. Moore’s first work, Roger and Me, the two had a short falling-out. All seems well now, though: Mr. Moore recently graced the cover of Film Comment, the society’s official publication.

Telling directors whose work he has admired in the past that it will not make the cut this year is just part of the job description for Mr. Peña. "Every year, I think it is important that the audience feels that our selection, whatever it is, has been an honest one," he said. "And that we chose films because we really believe in them."

"Nobody buys their way into the New York Film Festival," said Mr. Bernard. "Nobody bullies their way in. No one is selected unless they are deemed worthy by the committee. It gives a movie a certain pedigree with the critical community that can’t be bought."

In the independent-film world, acquisitions executives are constantly on the lookout for the next My Big Fat Greek Wedding or Bend It Like Beckham. But at the NYFF, there is nary a (working) film buyer in sight; almost all of the films arrive at the festival with distribution already secured. Overall, far more sweat is produced by filmmakers awaiting their reviews in The New York Times than by publicists or agents hustling for their clients.

This year, big Hollywood heavyweights seem particularly marginalized. Last year’s opening-night entry of Mystic River had more stars—Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden, just for starters—than all of the films this year combined. "I would be lying if I said that there weren’t certain moments where people said, ‘Well, there aren’t big stars here,’" Mr. Peña said. "But then we thought, ‘We’ve never been a big-star festival.’"

At the NYFF, the red carpet is reserved for the directors. Ever since its inception in 1963, a year after critic Andrew Sarris published Notes on the Auteur Theory, those behind the camera have taken center stage at the NYFF. "Now, how do you define auteurism?" asked Mr. Peña, who teaches film theory to both undergraduates and grad students at Columbia. "You could define the notion of auteurism in every sense from the notion of the centrality of the director, in terms of the creative process, to a kind of sense that once you discover certain artists, you follow all of their work."

But that doesn’t mean the festival promotes auteurs for auteurs’ sake. "I think if you follow the festival over the years and see work by certain directors, often that work deepens and grows in the sense that auteurist criticism argues," Mr. Peña said. "But even our dedication to certain auteurs never guarantees them a slot."

Call it mere coincidence, then, that there’s such an abundance of legends this year. Jean-Luc Godard will screen his latest movie, a visual poem about war, Notre Musique. Ingmar Bergman has Saraband, the sequel to 1973’s Scenes From a Marriage and more than likely his last film. The aforementioned Mr. Almodóvar contributes a sexually charged investigation of Catholic boyhood. New Wave director Eric Rohmer has Triple Agent, a love story set in 1930’s Paris. Hero ’s Zhang Yimou, who opened the festival in 1995 with Shanghai Triad, returns with another kung-fu masterpiece, House of Flying Daggers. The Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien returns with an indirect tribute to Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu in Café Lumiere. And the U.K.’s Mike Leigh offers up Vera Drake, a compassionate tale about a maid who helps women get rid of unwanted pregnancies.

It is a tony list, to be sure. But at this point, any discerning cineaste might wonder: What’s in store for American art-house cinema?

It’s an eclectic array: Alexander Payne’s Sideways, Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, David Gordon Green’s Undertow and Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane.

"At best I was thinking a night at Anthology Film Archives or Galapagos or Hole in the Wall Coffee Shop in Williamsburg, but never, never this," said first-time director Mr. Caouette, 31, from his home in Astoria, Queens.

An impressionistic account of his troubled relationship with his own mother, who is mentally ill, Tarnation was put together using iMovie software, weaving together home-video footage, pop-culture references and phone-message recordings into a unique emotional and narrative tapestry. Total cost: $218.32. You read that right.

"It’s unbelievable that this film has gone from my desktop computer to a 35-millimeter print with a worldwide release in, like, less than a year," Mr. Caouette said.

Championed by Hedwig and the Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell and Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant (both signed on as executive producers), and previously screened at Sundance, Cannes and Toronto, Tarnation is the most surprising success story of the festival calendar.

"I would love to think that this film could be a catalyst for anybody that’s never felt like they’ve had a voice," Mr. Caouette said. "I was always intimidated by the film industry and the whole idea of raising money to make a film. And we don’t really need to necessarily live in that kind of world anymore. I really, really—as God is my witness—really believe that filmmaking is really as easy as picking up a pen and paper now." (Let us be the first to say that this might not be a good thing.)

On the opposite side of the spectrum is Mr. Green’s Undertow, a fictional account of two Southern brothers (Jamie Bell from Billy Elliot and child actor Devon Alan) who run away from home after their disturbed uncle (Josh Lucas) returns from prison. Chaotic confrontations with their father (Dermot Mulroney) ensue. The film is framed as a recollection of previous events.

"Their faded memory, their confused memory—that’s what interests me," said the 29-year-old Mr. Green in a Southern twang, sitting Indian-style on the floor of a conference room in Toronto. Even with two features under his belt ( George Washington and All the Real Girls, both well-received by critics), he still looked like a fresh-faced film-school student.

"If somebody comes home from a hard day of work and has something funny to tell me, they better exaggerate it and make it really good," said Mr. Green, expounding on his theory of narrative. "I don’t want to hear just this normal version; I don’t want to hear what really happened. Who comes back from a date and talks about the peck on the cheek? Nobody—it’s not interesting. Don’t tell me that shit."

Mr. Green was mentored by director Terence ( Badlands) Malick, who became the producer on Undertow.

"I respect his movies because they feel like the movies that you can touch," said Mr. Green. "It’s nothing remarkable; it’s just well-done earth. You know? It’s just capturing life, and moments and thoughts—that kind of odd, lyrical journey.

"I don’t in any way try to imply that I have an armpit of that guy’s talent," he added with a grin.

Palindromes, Todd Solondz’s fifth film in 15 years, is characteristically controversial. A 13-year-old girl is played by several actresses of varying ages, including a 42-year-old Jennifer Jason Leigh. The girl, Aviva, runs away from home after her mother (Ellen Barkin) forces her to have an abortion. She winds up in the hands of the Sunshine Family, Christian zealots who take in physically and mentally handicapped children abandoned by their parents, and has a sexual encounter with a truck driver three times her age.

"There’s nothing that I address in my work that isn’t already out there in a much more sordid display, on TV or in papers, any day of the week," said Mr. Solondz, the granddaddy of the group at 44, dining on a bowl of oatmeal with sliced banana in Toronto. Still looking for distribution as of press time, Mr. Solondz was hoping to avoid the censorship fiasco of Storytelling, where Universal forced him to cover up certain scenes with a big red box.

"In a certain sense, [ Palindromes] is my most discreet, most very tactful movie," he said. "What makes it difficult is that it’s not a polemic. It’s a film that is full of all sorts of ambiguity on subjects that are very hot-button. What is shocking is that maybe it does not come with a liberal bias—that it isn’t functioning as a kind of statement or message movie along those lines."

The title, he said, is a reference to how people remain the same throughout life, no matter how much they seem to change on the surface—sort of like a palindrome, a word that’s spelled the same forward and backward.

"While some people may, of course, describe me as hateful and misanthropic and cruel—and there are a few other adjectives that I’m omitting along those lines—I think in part it’s because of the expectations of what a movie is supposed to do for you," Mr. Solondz explained in his nasally voice as The Observer continued to scratch its head over the whole palindrome thing. "But for me, it’s hard to make a celebration of humanity when I read the newspaper every day, and I see every day the atrocities that go on."

No less disturbing in its way is New York native Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane, a naturalistic tale of a man dealing with the abduction of his daughter. When the man, William Keane (Damian Lewis), meets a single mother with a daughter the same age as his at a transient hotel in North Bergen, N.J., his questionable mental stability slowly begins to unravel, and the audience begins to fear the worst for the newly befriended young girl. The movie was shot entirely with a handheld camera and never waivers from its protagonist, a deliberate ploy to make the audience truly feel Keane’s grief and despair.

The protagonist is seen in every shot of the movie. "I thought that it would have the greatest emotional impact," said Mr. Kerrigan, 40, in a phone interview. A slow worker, this director has made three films in 10 years. His 1998 film Claire Dolan was nominated for the Palmes D’Or at Cannes, the festival’s highest honor. And his first feature, Clean, Shaven, screened at MoMA’s New Directors/New Films in 1994, on the same day as the birth of his daughter, the muse behind Keane.

"The impetus for the movie came because my daughter is very independent and free-spirited, and I actively encourage it," Mr. Kerrigan said. "And I would lose track of her in various public spaces, as most parents do with their children. The dread associated with that was really the impetus for the film." He added, "All the films that I’ve made have started with some event that has really affected me in a visceral way."

After seeing Palindromes and Keane, one will probably be very thankful to relax into Alexander Payne’s Sideways. A funny, insightful take on male vanity, Sideways chronicles the misadventures of a failed writer, Miles (Paul Giamatti), and a failed actor, Jack (Thomas Haden Church), who embark on a bachelor party/road trip to California’s wine country to celebrate Jack’s impending wedding. While traveling, they encounter a lusty barmaid (Sandra Oh) and her good friend, a waitress (Virginia Madsen). The film marks a comeback of sorts for Ms. Madsen, the once-hopeful ingenue of Dune, who delivers a poignant monologue that will have audiences kvelling.

When The Observer met with Mr. Payne, 43, back in Toronto, he was dapperly dressed in a white button-up shirt, black pants and expensive-looking loafers, and politely offered a glass of water and then some grapes.

He talked briefly about how he uses sex in all of his films, from the blowjob scene in Election to a naked Kathy Bates in About Schmidt.

"It’s like Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors," said Mr. Payne. "Mia Farrow says, ‘You use sex to express every emotion except love.’"

Alas, the interview quickly devolved into a tirade against the Bush administration.

These five American directors, along with the 19 foreigners at various stages of their careers, will be thrust to the forefront of art-house film criticism in the coming weeks. Every nuance of their labors will be examined for cracks and weaknesses. It is a grueling, unnerving process that a New York audience, with its congenital Schadenfreude, is particularly primed to enjoy.

"Happily, we live in a city where you can still put on a festival like this, where there are many people who have extremely exacting standards when it comes to cinema," Mr. Peña said. "I would like to think that there are many other cities where you have this kind of audience, but I don’t really know if there are. The great ace in the hole for the New York Film Festival is New York."

The committee has already announced its gala opening-night pick, Alexander Payne's About Schmidt , starring Jack Nicholson, and its closing film, Pedro Almodóvar's newest, Talk to Her. And though the entire slate is scheduled to be announced by Monday, Aug. 19, sources close to the situation said that Magnolia director Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love , starring Adam Sandler, will be the festival's centerpiece film. Other selections include Paul Schrader's film about the secret sordid life of Hogan's Heroes star Bob Crane, Auto Focus ; Trouble Every Day director Claire Denis' Vendredi Soir ; Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Son ; Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark, which was shot in one 90-minute take in St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum; Aki Kaurismäki's Man Without a Past ; Abderrahmane Sissako's Waiting for Happiness ; Blind Spot , a documentary about Hitler's secretary; and Divine Intervention , a film by Palestinian director Elia Suleiman.

With the possible exception of Mr. Anderson's picture, these aren't exactly films that will one day blow the doors off the Loews multiplex in Paramus, N.J. But the larger question is, how many of these pictures will resonate beyond the wood-paneled doors of the Walter Reade Theater once they unspool for festival audiences there? The New York Film Festival's principals have long enjoyed a reputation for being aloof and insular, but increasingly there is a notion among film-industry denizens that the committee's stubborn resistance to the changing film industry and popular tastes has snuffed out much of the cultural heat that the festival once radiated.

These observers recall that the festival premiered Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice in 1969, Last Tango in Paris in 1972 and The Big Chill in 1983. And they say they won't soon forget the giddy revelations that Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction served up in 1994. The screening of Mr. Tarantino's film wasn't even a world premiere (it had debuted months before at Cannes), but it was the last time that many New York film lovers-and there are no shortage of them-recall equating the film festival with a heightened level of excitement. In comparison, last year's tepid reception for Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaum s left an already demoralized film community even more deflated.

But according to those familiar with the festival process, the selection committee is not the only reason that the New York event has lost its heat. A proliferation of competing festivals and even the reviewing habits of The New York Times have contributed to the malaise, prompting both major studios and independent distributors to avoid New York in favor of friendlier venues.

Too Cannes

"The impact of the New York Film Festival [on the film business] is negligible," said Jeff Lipsky, head of independent distributor Lot 47 Films. Mr. Lipsky doesn't have any entries in the New York Film Festival this year, but has shepherded films-including My Dinner with André, The Marriage of Maria Braun, and Ruby in Paradise -in past years.

According to Mr. Lipsky, a lack of true premieres has contributed to the festival's loss of luster. "I love Jack Nicholson," Mr. Lipsky said of the star of About Schmidt , "but you're telling me the New York Film Festival can't do better than to offer something that was already regaled months ago at Cannes?"

Cannes is hardly the only competition. Venice, Toronto, and San Sebastián-all of which take place in September-and the brand-new Tribeca Film Festival, which debuted last May, have made it increasingly hard to land the big premiere. Indeed, all of the aforementioned films will have premiered elsewhere by the time they're shown at Lincoln Center. Mr. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love bowed-to good reviews-at Cannes. And Mr. Schrader's Auto Focus will premiere in Toronto. New York won't even get to showcase what is the first film to deal directly with events of Sept. 11. For that, look again to Toronto, where the industry will gather on Sept. 11 to remember being there last year and watch the world premiere of Jim Simpson's feature The Guys , which is about a fire captain and the writer who helps him to eulogize the men he lost on Sept. 11.

But during a phone interview, Mr. Peña shrugged off complaints about his lineup's resemblance to other schedules. When asked whether the fall's lineup would include any world or American premieres, he said he didn't "really know."

"Happily, after 40 years, the real concentration is on film as art," said Mr. Peña. "If people want to buy or sell a film during the festival, we'll be happy. But that's not our concern when we select our films."

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Peña was unruffled by the suggestion that his committee's sophisticated taste in films might be elitist.

"Guilty as charged," he said. "Are there certain audiences who would not appreciate the films that we do? Sure. But there are certain audiences that eat at McDonalds every day."

Even so, some familiar with the festival's history said that the festival's organizers weren't always such die-hard snobs. "In the days when Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice could be [shown on] opening night, there was not the kind of antipathy toward the commercial prospects that there is now," said former New York Times film critic Janet Maslin. "If a movie looked like it was going to be popular, that didn't sink it for the festival. I think that for good reasons they would like to avoid that kind of thing now, but it does cost them oomph."

No Moore

"The perception is that [the New York Film Festival] has much more of an academic and scholarly slant now," said Ms. Maslin, who added that she was perplexed by persistent speculation that Michael Moore's documentary about gun violence, Bowling for Columbine , will not appear in the New York lineup. The film caused a sensation at Cannes, and several sources said that Mr. Moore had wanted it shown at the New York festival. But according to sources familiar with the situation, the festival's selection committee was split on the film and decided not to accept it. Mr. Peña would not confirm that the film was not selected.

"This is a conversation piece, and an ambitious attempt to say something about American life," Ms. Maslin of Bowling for Columbine . "I think American audiences would want to see it in a festival as much as the French …. I understand that they [the NYFF] don't think of themselves as in the business of repeating what other people liked; they like to discover films and filmmakers who other people don't know about. But then why are opening, closing and middle nights taken right from Cannes? It makes no sense."

Another film that was named as a potential New York festival entry was Martin Scorsese's long-awaited Gangs of New York . A sweeping New York epic directed by Mr. Scorsese and produced by Miramax, Gangs would have seemed an obvious choice to open, or close, the festival with a bang.

Mr. Peña said that though the committee spoke to Mr. Scorsese about the film early on, a change of release dates-to December 2002-meant that the timing wouldn't be right for a festival debut. Other sources said that the famously meticulous Mr. Scorsese, who is still at work on the picture, could never take the risk of getting reviewed by The New York Times months before he was completely ready for his debut.

"It could get torn to bits early," said Ms. Maslin of Gangs. "It could get torn to bits later, too-but then there would be more stuff out there, and there wouldn't be as much attention on it …. The New York Film Festival needed Gangs of New York more that Gangs of New York needed the New York Film Festival."

Hard to Control

Mr. Peña is only the second man to run the NYFF since its 1963 inception. He was appointed programmer in 1987 after the ugly ousting of longtime head Richard Roud. Mr. Roud clashed with the Film Society administration over the direction of the festival, and his departure prompted the resignations of Time critic Richard Corliss and then-independent critic David Denby from the board.

The view from the outside is similar, albeit more charitable.

"My view of the New York Film Festival is that it has unimpeachable integrity and is one of those festivals where I don't believe I can talk them into something," said Michael Barker, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which this year has four films in the festival, including Auto Focus and Talk to Her.

"Our festival is a very hard institution to control," said Mr. Peña. "Films get shown to a New York audience that isn't necessarily friendly. The studios don't like to lose that kind of control over how a film opens."

Mr. Peña laughed. "Look, [the studios] understand us and we understand them."

One of the things that studios and independents all understand is the power of The New York Times , an institution that is not formally linked to the festival but is nevertheless inextricably entwined with it, in large part because of its exhaustive critical coverage of the films that play there. While Cannes and Sundance generate buzz, the New York Film Festival produces meaty New York Times reviews by the gross-reviews that carry a lot more weight than those that run, for instance, in Le Parisien or the Toronto Sun . With few exceptions, the day after a film screens in the festival, The Times runs a review. The only films that dodge this bullet are those that open commercially within a few days of their festival premieres, since they'd be getting reviewed anyway.

For films with later release dates, a bad or lukewarm review will spread like poison, potentially killing the film's chances at the box office. And even if the Times news is good, the news is still frequently bad, since a film opening within 90 days of its festival premiere is not guaranteed a reprinted review or prime Arts-section placement when it opens commercially.

Selection-committee member Dave Kehr, who is also a freelance Times film columnist, recalled his first year with the festival, in 1985. Among the films shown that year were Raoul Ruiz's City of Pirates ; Manoel de Oliveira's debut feature, The Satin Slipper; Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien's A Time to Live and a Time to Die ; and Jackie Chan's Police Story .

"They all got massacred by The Times, " said Mr. Kehr. "Which effectively meant that they were not shown again in this country for many years. So while these directors became big in Europe, nobody ever heard about them here." Mr. Kehr paused. "That's the kind of thing that's in the back of your mind when you're picking the films and you're looking at a really great little Argentinean movie: 'Am I doing it more harm than good?'"

Mr. Peña preferred to look at the bright side of the Times factor. "It's just like opening on Broadway instead of having an out-of-town run," he said.

But Mr. Lipsky saw it differently "You're playing Russian roulette," he said. "Because if you don't get a money review-not a good review, a money review, because that's what it takes to wrench New Yorkers out of their chairs and send them hurtling into multiplexes-then you've dug a grave for yourself."

"It's a problem," said Mr. Kehr, who acknowledged that filmmakers who play in the New York festival must face the risk of seeing "your movie flame out in front of the whole East Coast media elite."

Not that that will hurt your chances of being invited back to the New York Film Festival. Those 1985 films that crashed and burned?

Mr. de Oliveira and Mr. Hsiao-Hsien have each gone on to have six of their subsequent films screened at the NYFF. Mr. Ruiz, who'd already been in the festival for two previous films, has been back three times. On the other hand, Jackie Chan has never had another NYFF showing.

On the whole, the New York festival is notoriously loyal to its favored, frequently foreign, filmmakers. Though Mr. Peña would not reveal his full list of films, he said that only "four or five" of the 25 were American movies.

"They have their favorites, like de Oliveira and Hsiao-Hsien and a handful of others," said Mr. Vanco of Cowboy Pictures. "And they're going to be in [the NYFF] every time they make a movie."

If Mr. Chan were so inclined, he might want to enter his next film-which will probably star Chris Tucker or one of the Wilson brothers-in the upstart Tribeca Film Festival, which has shown that it's willing embrace the shiny marble face of Hollywood commercialism. In May, the Tribeca festival premiered such big, blowzy movies such as Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and About a Boy . It filled downtown's streets with celebrities and money. Its fairs and tea parties and Star Wars screenings felt fresh and fun. At the time, sources wondered if that rebel festival's founders-Jane Rosenthal and her Tribeca Films partner, Robert De Niro-were attempting to unseat the incumbent by making it look like a crusty dowager. (Ms. Rosenthal was on vacation and could not be reached for comment.)

Asked to comment on the Tribeca festival, Mr. Peña told The Transom that the New York Film Festival was never supposed to be about face paint and Imperial Storm Troopers, and said that he thought there was plenty of room for both events.

"I don't know what their intentions are, because they've never shared them with me," Mr. Peña said. "But I think it a little unlikely that the films and filmmakers we go after would suddenly switch. They [Tribeca] have an opportunity to carve out their own identity."

A 'Total Anachronism'

One of the most distinctive aspects of the New York festival's identity is its size: 25 films over 17 days make it look Lilliputian in comparison to Cannes' 83-movies-in-12-days schedule, and even the fledgling Tribeca festival, which reportedly screened 80 movies in May.

"We're a total anachronism now," said Mr. Kehr. "But that kind of big festival wouldn't make sense in New York. What we are now is a local showcase. I hope we're a prestigious one that still means something to people."

For some, it does. "Talking about show business has become a national pastime, which has created more festivals, which has turned them into markets, which has really hurt the integrity of so many of them," said Rachael Horovitz, an executive producer of About Schmidt and an executive at Revolution Studios, which produced Punch-Drunk Love. "At [the New York Film Festival,] you don't have to fear badges and tote-bag people. [The Walter Reade Theater] is one of the best screens in New York. It's like our own Palais."

"The opening-night gala is easily the premiere film-industry event of the year in New York City," said John Vanco, president of Cowboy Pictures.

And whatever critics may be saying today about the status of the New York Film Festival, it takes several years, Mr. Peña maintained, to form a true perspective about the success or failure of any particular slate of the festival's films.

"One of the most difficult nights at the festival was in 1990," he said. The festival opened with Joel and Ethan Coen's Miller's Crossing. The film got mauled by The Times and by the festival audience. It has since been reclaimed by Coen Brothers aficionados.

"Whatever we suffered that night was worth it," said Mr. Peña, "because the future proved that our choice was a good one."

Gotta Serve Somebody

Considering Bob Dylan's long-standing reluctance to lend his name to a cause, it's worth pondering just what convinced him to headline this year's All for the Sea Benefit Concert, the annual lawn concert to benefit tiny Southampton College's marine and environmental-science program.

The Aug. 19 event will be Mr. Dylan's first benefit performance in several years, not to mention his only scheduled appearance in the New York metropolitan region this summer. So what's a college of 1,500 students located in one of the Eastern Seaboard's toniest hamlets got that puts it on a short list with Ruben (Hurricane) Carter and Bangladesh?

The answer is SFX Entertainment executive chairman Robert Sillerman.

Within the music business, Mr. Sillerman is well-known as the man who made rock promoters rich by paying a premium for such regional operations as California's Bill Graham Presents, New England's Don Law Company and New York's Delsener/Slater Enterprises Inc., and cobbling them together to form SFX, the national concert behemoth he then unloaded to Clear Channel Communications for $3.3. billion in 2000.

But out at Southampton, Mr. Sillerman is just an alumnus who hasn't forgotten his roots: He's now the school's chancellor, a university trustee and Southampton's biggest benefactor, having donated in excess of $20 million.

And getting Mr. Dylan was just another way for Mr. Sillerman to be true to his school. "We did the Paul Simon and Bob Dylan tour," Mr. Sillerman said of SFX. "We got to know Bob and Bob's management. I spoke to his people, and he agreed to do it."

The Marine and Environmental Sciences Program is justly proud of producing 32 Fulbright scholars in the last 25 years. Still, it's hard to imagine that mattering much to Mr. Dylan-or to Crosby, Stills and Nash, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Tina Turner, James Taylor, Rod Stewart and the Allman Brothers, all of whom have taken turns helping out Sillerman's favorite charity. To date, All for the Sea-a.k.a. the Concert Superstars Have to Play-has raised over $6 million for the program.

Though Mr. Sillerman said that Mr. Dylan "may get a bad rap" when it comes to charity appearances, he also told The Transom that "we're never so presumptuous as to ask people to play for free." Indeed, in 12 years the only performer to donate his services to All for the Sea has been Jimmy Buffett, who did it twice. The rest of the time, performers are paid out of the concert receipts-the top tickets are $1,000, the cheap seats $50-or by corporate underwriters.

Still, Mr. Sillerman offered that Mr. Dylan "made some concessions to us," although he declined to be specific. It's not likely Mr. Dylan would have done that if Mr. Sillerman hadn't promoted his 30-date tour with Mr. Simon three summers ago. That tour grossed over $30.6 million, according to the concert-industry trade journal Pollstar . Mr. Simon showed his gratitude last summer when he headlined the Southampton show.

-Fred Goodman