The 46th New York Film Festival (NYFF) presented by the prestigious Film Society of Lincoln Center opened on September 26 in New York city. The selection was made by Richard Peña, chairman and programme director at the Film Society; Kent Jones, associate director of programming at the Film Society; Scott Foundas, film editor and chief film critic for L.A. Weekly; Jim Hoberman, senior film critic at The Village Voice and Lisa Schwarzbaum, film critic at Entertainment Weekly.

The ongoing 46th NYFF features many outstanding titles from this year’s Cannes festival along with newcomers and seasoned filmmakers, Hollywood features and independent work. It opened with the Golden Palme winner from Cannes, Laurent Cantet’s The Class (France); its Centerpiece is Clint Eastwood’s Changeling and the festival will close with Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler after its spectacular opening at the Toronto festival with Mickey Rourke’s performance winning rave reviews.

This year’s NYFF programme lists 28 films from 18 countries, many of them made by names familiar to its regular viewers. Jia Zhangke’s 24 City presents a poetic, stylised vision of China’s rapid development as it probes the human factor behind a factory’s conversion into luxury apartments. Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes Of Time Redux restores his 1994 exercise in swordplay pyrotechnics and melancholy. Mike Leigh turns to ironic upbeat comedy in his latest film Happy-Go-Lucky while he continues to examine a society’s personal and public dysfunction. The talked-about, controversial bio-pic “Che, a two-part, four-hour epic stars Benicio Del Toro, winner of this year’s Best Actor award at Cannes.

NYFF holds its press screenings close to a fortnight prior to the main event, held in Lincoln Center’s well appointed Walter Reade Theatre in an atmosphere of classroom informality, which continues into its post screening press conference. These are addressed by the world’s leading directors and stars, mercifully without the usual scramble and hype that mark other such events.

A rewarding aspect for film journalists at NYFF are the new names and faces it introduces in its hand-picked films. This year they included 23-year-old American independent filmmaker Antonio Campos with his first feature, Afterschool, an insightful study of the psychological repercussions on adolescent minds at an insulated New England prep school. Celebrated Kazakh documentarian Sergey Dvortsevoy presents an impressive first feature, Tulpan, about the limited choices open to a young man living in the stark storm-driven, wild of the desert. Cannes FIPRESCI winner Steve McQueen also features with his remarkable debut film, Hunger, the story of IRA member Bobby Sands and his 1981 hunger strike.

NYFF’s special events include key panels, such as ‘Film Criticism in Crisis' presented by Film Comment magazine and a discussion centered around the documentary It’s Hard Being Loved By Jerks tackling the 2006 controversy over a cartoon satirizing Islamic fundamentalism. NYFF also presents restored versions of the classic film, Pandora And The Flying Dutchman (presented by Martin Scorsese in a new Technicolor print) and The Day Shall Dawn, a little-known masterwork from Pakistan celebrating its 50th anniversary. The festival also paid tribute to Japanese filmmaker Oshima Nagisa and to experimental avant-garde filmmaking.