The first weeks of press screenings for the 45th annual New York Film Festival proved to be a restless haul and a real mixed bag. The selection committee, headed by The Village Voice's superlative tandem of Scott Foundas and J. Hoberman along with Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum, expectedly took their cues from the mack-daddy of film festivals, Cannes. Directors just beginning to make a name for themselves (Christian Mungiu, Carlos Reygadas) laid claim with seasoned pros (Wes Anderson, the Coen brothers, Hao Hsiao-hsien) and living legends (Eric Rohmer, Sidney Lumet, Claude Chabrol) in a tidal wave of cinematic abandon. It's the best four weeks of my year.

My first day started with an ominous disappointment: Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding had been pushed back in the press schedule. In its place was Masayuki Sou's I Just Didn't Do It (), an entertaining judicial procedural that marks Sou's return to filmmaking after a 10-year hiatus. Fluidly mapped out with both absurd and frustrating intimations on the Japanese court system, Sou's breezy but effective dramedy investigates a court where everyone's guilty and government employees wash each others backs at the expense of innocent citizens, in this case a young nobody who is accused of molestation on a packed transport train on the way to an interview.

Earlier that day, Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly () screened, followed by a press conference with the plaid-shirt-wearing, gloriously-pretentious artist-of-all-trades. You could so easily hate Schnabel if the man didn't know how to make a great film. As it turns out, he knows all too well. Jean-Dominique Bauby's evocative biography, which gives the film its name, was written by the author from a wheelchair using only blinks and a specialized alphabet after a stroke left him a paraplegic. Brakhage-type swells of fractured light and imagery formidably frame the great Mathieu Amalric, who plays Bauby, and give this biopic a welcome sense of disorientation. Faithfully adapted, Schnabel's form shows maturity and restraint and a fresh foot forward from his promising Before Night Falls.

A night of heavy work thwarted my attempt to catch musical experiment Fados but nothing short of the taking of Astoria N, R, W was going to keep me from Wes Anderson's boundless The Darjeeling Limited (). The review can be found on the front page but let me reiterate the fact that Anderson fully recovers from the woozy Life Aquatic with this boisterous, patently hilarious trip through India with the Whitman brothers (marvelously played by Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, and Anderson newbie Adrien Brody). Anderson's first steps out of enclosed habitats are astoundingly assured and revealing; perhaps that adaptation of The Fabulous Mr. Fox isn't a half-bad idea after all.

New efforts from Rohmer, Lumet and Chabrol were admirably lined up one-after-the-other, although for the life of me I can't understand the absence of Jacques Rivette's new film. The best of the lot, unpredictably, comes from the American: Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead () holds a panorama of contrivances and a jump-cut that could cause epileptic seizures, but it's also insanely well-acted, overwhelmingly visceral, and endearingly clear-eyed; who knew the old kook had it in him? Top-lined by a uniformly brilliant performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dead revolves around the botched robbery of a mom-and-pop jewelry store by the proprietors' two spoiled sons (Hoffman and Ethan Hawke). Lumet orchestrates a dazzling and dark family drama that spills black blood over the filmmaker's well-touted love of Eugene O'Neil, bringing the family of monsters together in a shattering climax involving the brothers and their father (the great Albert Finney).

The same praise does not befit the other two auteurs, although Rohmer's The Romance of Astree and Celadon () is so absolutely ludicrous that you almost have to commend it. But while Rohmer (reportedly) bows out of the business by going over-the-top, Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two () belies his recent resurgence by turning in one of his most bland features to date: a love triangle stricken with ennui rather than scintillation. Though boosted by the appearance of the enchanting Ludivine Sagnier, Girl has neither the venomous pur of The Bridesmaid nor the stinging wit of Comedy of Power and seems to have effectively ended Chabrol's recent winning streak (the latest in a career of dizzying highs and lows).

Thanks to a faulty alarm clock (damn you, Virgin Mobile!), I missed out on Ira Sachs' Married Life but arrived on time for the geeky high point of the festival: the this-is-it-we-promise cut of Blade Runner, referred to as Blade Runner: The Final Cut (). Though its original incarnation has been largely dismissed, following cuts of the film have revealed it as the blueprint for the rare type of no-nonsense sci-fi films (recently: Children of Men, A Scanner Darkly). Inspired by Philip K. Dick's meditation on death, persona, and reality in the guise of a film noir, Blade Runner's visuals feel as relevant as ever and Ridley Scott, who has yet to make a better film, shows deft sensibility and restraint in a genre that almost demands overbearing melodrama.

Monday brought the biggest surprise of all: The young Mexican director Carlos Reygadas has delivered a film that proves his first pair of raging eccentricities (Japón, Battle in Heaven) were just a warm-up. Set in a Mennonite community of farmers, Silent Light () turns Carl T. Dreyer's Ordet into a beautiful and complex study of people ruled by faith and privacy but bewildered by strong emotions (it's the first time the Mennonite dialect has been heard on-screen). Bookended by bravura landscape shots that swoop down from the heavens into the emerging daylight of a wheat field, Reygadas will surely be both praised for his daring and condemned for his (arguable) pretension, but you can't deny the film's haunting imagery. I'll talk more about this stunning work next week.

What else could follow a mesmerizing piece of art but a brazenly-trashy New York fantasy? From the respectfully ragged Abel Ferrara comes the illicit stage antics of Go Go Tales (). Though it takes the guise of a displaced reevaluation of Cassavetes' Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Tales could be read in any number of ways from its melancholic commentary on NYC gentrification to its bemoaning of the death of perversity. Willem Dafoe stars as the patron saint of Ray Ruby's Paradise, one of the last bastions of sleaze in New York City, which is on the edge of being foreclosed and mutated into a Bed, Bath and Beyond. Though Dafoe plays his rueful character to often grotesque heights, it's the pulverizing gaze of Asia Argento as she makes out with her dog and seduces Ray's brother (a creepy Matthew Modine) that turns a decrepit comic fantasy into a rotting bookmark in the tome of New York City cinema.

Those who know the work of Hao Hsiao-hsien know what the man is capable of but no amount of preparation quite settles you in for the transcendent beauty of his first foray into French cinema, The Flight of the Red Balloon (). Easily the best reevaluation of a French classic by a Chinese auteur in the history of film, Hao does away with the plot of Albert Lamorisse's beloved The Red Balloon, keeping only the titular inflation and the child who yearns to possess it. The balloon travels through the homey environs of France as a mother (an astonishing Juliette Binoche) desperately tries to hold onto her sanity as she kicks out her downstairs neighbor and hires a film student (Song Fang) as a nanny. Hao not only rebuilds Binoche and coaxes out her best performance since Kieslowski's Blue but he completely rethinks France in terms of its cinematic potential with help from the brilliant Mark Lee Pin-bing's radiant cinematography. Picked up by perhaps the most forward-thinking distribution house working today, IFC First Take, Balloon has already a secured spot on my top ten for 2008.

A similar spot will be reserved for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (), the debut feature from Romanian commercial director Christian Mungiu. Adorned with the Palme D'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Mungiu's account of two girls attempting to secure a black-market abortion in 1980s Romania validates the theory that Romania has a new wave on their hands. Bundled with the devastating The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and this year's fantastic 12:08 East of Bucharest, Mungiu's shattering portrait of life during Ceausescu's regime is a paradigm of Bazinian theory; an engaging and unrelenting personal drama with a sublimely realistic aesthetic. When interviewed, Mungiu expressed his wanting to simply tell a story but he's done that and then some with his two brilliant actresses, Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu. A generous piece of cinema, 4 Months is one of the best debuts I've seen since Lazarescu.

Later I waded through Ed Pincus & Lucia Small's The Axe in the Attic (), a misguided documentary about the aftermath of Katrina as seen through the eyes of two white liberals, but quickly regained my composure with Lee Chang-dong's novelistic Secret Sunshine (). An apt follow-up to the Korean filmmaker's riveting Oasis, Sunshine focuses on Shin-ae, a widowed mother who quickly finds herself sinking into delirium when a tragedy strikes her in her new home in Miryang. As with Oasis, the film hinges on its two leads and Chang-dong again proves himself an extraordinary director of actors. As the man in love with the mother, Song Kang-ho, a force of nature in Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, brings pathetic adoration to the level of grandeur as he follows Shin-ae from terminal depression to religious devotement to brazen hysteria. But it's ultimately Jeon Do-yeon's once-more-into-the-breach performance as Shin-ae that turns Chang-dong's humid melodrama into a sublime and essential study of reactionism in the face of inexplicable tragedy.

Hungarian maestro Bela Tarr returns to the fold after a six year absence with The Man from London (), a contemplative thriller based on a mystery by late, great Georges Simenon. Though shot in the same long takes that have adorned all his work, London acts more like the cumbersome stuffed whale from his masterwork Werckmeister Harmonies. Beautifully shot, Tarr's latest simply doesn't go anywhere and doesn't seem to have any idea why its actions and transactions are taking place, made all the more strange by the appearance of Tilda Swinton. It's a failure for sure, but London strangely befits the director's work to date and, if nothing else, reminds one of how unique and uncompromising an artist he is.

"Psychological terrorism", as the Village Voice's Nathan Lee put it, is at the core of Noah Baumbach's acerbic Margot at the Wedding (). The Zeller sisters, both the residuum of a tortured childhood, reunite for the younger sister's wedding while each trying to exercise their own specific schisms. Margot (a superbly disheveled Nicole Kidman), the eldest, uses her blunt honesty as a serrated blade, both on her family and herself, while the younger Pauline (the great Jennifer Jason Leigh) attempts to recede into the sisterly bonds that have evaporated since their teenage years. In the middle of this battle of grinning assaults is Pauline's fiancé Malcolm (an admirably restrained Jack Black), Margot's son Claude (Zach Pais), and Pauline's daughter Ingrid (Bee Season's Flora Cross). Shot in a green, day-lit haze by Harris Savides, Margot's demeanor tends toward more bleak and spare considerations than Baumbach's equally caustic The Squid and the Whale. In the visceral barbs the sisters trade with each other, their children and their husbands, the Zellers become the paradigm of both a childish adulthood and a decaying childhood.

Titled for the act of editing wartime communiqué, Brian De Palma's Redacted () sets its sights on our national communication that has become even more complex with the internet now becoming a chief medium. Through YouTube, video diaries, war-wife blogs, hosted videos on Taliban websites, and e-mails, DePalma presents a devastatingly dumb account of a group of soldiers who raped and killed an entire family while on checkpoint patrol in Iraq. Simplified and tepidly executed as evil vs. morality in bombed-out cities, De Palma's panorama becomes preachy hogwash peppered with a few images of striking brutality (a blown-off leg, a decapitated soldier, a burnt body). De Palma employs Kubrickian swells of classical music to create a batshit dichotomy, but the most damaging aspect of this limp scenario is its incapability to say anything new about the conflict while being one of the first to use media that has become the new language of the Iraq war (exception: Paul Haggis' well-considered use of camera phones in his brooding In the Valley of Elah).

Aleksandr Sokurov's Alexandra () moves from The Sun's fractured meditation on power and war to a more natural state of being. Throughout his career, Sokurov has always been in a state of ebb-and-flow from the strangely alien terrain of Russian Ark and The Sun to the earthbound haze of Mother and Son. The dusty earth of Chechnya grounds his latest, if not binds it, to a human simplicity accented by the barely-existent plot. The titular character, a bulky grandmother, travels to the tented army barracks where her grandson lives. The grandmother, played by opera legend Galina Vishnevskaya, shuffles around the base while chastising soldiers and eventually makes it over to a small marketplace where she bonds with some Chechnian elders over bad tea. Sokurov has often been accused of polarization, but the complex emotions that run in Alexandra are deeply human, though done in a style that is (often) agonizingly pensive and the farthest thing from cathartic. Drained of almost all color to punctuate the dry desert yellows and the sultry nighttime blues and grays, the film hinges on the lumbering Vishnevskaya's performance. Alexandra is at once mother Russia, the world at large, the specter of death, and every soldier's grandmother without ever being pandered to as a metaphor. Sokurov, one of the late, great Susan Sontag's favorite directors, has the ambition to make a setup like this feel like a full-bodied film rather than just a self-conscious experiment.

I'm Not There () picks up where Martin Scorcese's thorough No Direction Home left off in excavating the remains of Bob Dylan mythology. Directed by the formidable Todd Haynes, this outright masterpiece references Fellini's 8 1/2, Godard's Masculine Feminine, Peckinpah's '70s westerns, Moby Dick, A Hard Day's Night, Arthur Rimbaud, and a few hundred more pieces of pop culture whatsits to create a complex visage of an American icon. But as Larry Gross acutely observed in Film Comment, this is a film about "Bob Dylan" not Bob Dylan. Psychology becomes a free-floating enemy of the state in Haynes's film, and what gets highlighted in neon yellow is the work that the artist creates, not his home life or his moments of personal drama. Evoked through Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), a Woody Guthrie obsessive (Marcus Franklin), a folk-singer turned Christ-crazy preacher (Christian Bale), an actor trying to forget the folk singer he once portrayed (Heath Ledger), Billy the Kid (Richard Gere), and an androgynous 1960s rebel (Cate Blanchett), it's the public persona of Dylan that's melded into a dizzying but undeniably engaging assemblage of a life unknowable. And though the film never utters his name and only shows his face at the very end, this groundbreaking film breathes and rambles like "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" all over again.

Equally groundbreaking but for its director's style rather than its social relevance, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park () stirs up the dust between the director's early work and his recent "Young Death" trilogy and finds a striking moment of clarity in the maelstrom. Based on Blake Nelson's novel and shot by the masterful Chris Doyle, the story of a teenage skater who accidentally becomes implicit in the death of a train yard security guard sounds similar to the stories of his previous trilogy but his filmmaking and storytelling have been elevated into completely new dimensions. At times both eerily reminiscent and stunningly new, Van Sant's sense of composition has matured and mutated into something that far surpasses the avant-garde intimations of Elephant and Last Days. Recruiting his lead actor from a MySpace page, the director achieves something profoundly mysterious: an honest portrayal of a teenager at a moment of crisis. Mysteries unto themselves, the teenagers in Park are often muted and softened in Van Sant's sound design while he indulges in swells of swaying nature sounds, guttural hardcore punk, and peppy 1950s dance tunes. With scant few American equivalents, Van Sant's elusive cinematic identity continues to go without definition with this brilliantly jagged piece of pop cinema.

The Coen brothers returned to the festival sporting their best film since 2001's haunting The Man Who Wasn't There with Cannes-hyped, insanely-anticipated No Country for Old Men (). Faithfully adapted from Cormac McCarthy's blistering 2003 novel, the Coens return to the gothic themes that inhabited their earlier work but with a more refined sense of dread that gives the film a tone all its own. The laughs aren't as desperately self-conscious as they once were as we follow an aging lawman (Tommy Lee Jones), a foolish welder (Josh Brolin) with a satchel of stolen money, and a calculative psychopath belched up from the bowels of hell (Javier Bardem in a performance for the ages). Certainly the most fatalistic of the Coens oeuvre, Country also marks the most serious shift in production for the clever brothers. What the brothers cut out (references towards the sanctity of women, a good deal of Jones' characters' screen time) tightens an already vice-like grip on the material. Like their earlier masterworks (Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing), the act of death and murder becomes its own set-piece, especially in the instance of an early strangulation in a jailhouse. To dismiss it as a simple return to form would be childish: The Coens have focused on a kindred spirit with determination and the effect is brutally deployed in No Country for Old Men.

Lastly, there was Catherine Breillat's daring The Last Mistress (). As if channeling Mulvey's theory of the narrative gaze, Breillat uses Jules Amedee Barbey d'Aurevilly's immoral tale of a Spanish mistress's entangled hold over a young French dandy, even when the young man marries to address, rather bluntly, the death of reason. The film wouldn't work if it weren't for the supreme Asia Argento as the titular Spanish entrancement, whose eyes and sultry voice demolish any sense of male power or ownership in her path. Although the source novel addressed the Romantic Age with pestilential resolve, Breillat's surprisingly buoyant film could be taken as further commentary on our current familial epidemic of a nation of men raised only by women. Such considerations, however, would too easily define a film that is somehow classic in its aesthetic yet fiercely modern in its structure and execution without coming off as kitschy (Marie-Antoinette). Without her staple cruelties and shocks, Breillat's ambitious period piece approaches accessibility but makes it all too clear that she'll never take the poison out of the darts.

This week marks the last haul both of the press screenings and the public screenings with Peter Bogdonavich's Runnin' Down A Dream, Jia Zhangke's Useless, John Landis' Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project, Carmen Castillo's Calle Santa Fe, and Valeria Bruni Tadeschi's Actresses still waiting to be screened.