Last month’s Toronto International Film Festival featured more than 300 titles. By contrast, the just-completed New York Film Festival offered a mere 22 in its main program. Obviously, this represents a winnowing. Yet for audiences between the coasts, the NYFF also serves as a crucial focusing, a glimpse of what the coming year’s moviegoing will hold. Of last year’s 24 features, 13 have played Nashville, with another, the standout French documentary To Be and to Have, opening soon. But if this year’s NYFF truly functions as a compressed preview of the year to come, then our cinematic future may be cloudy indeed.

Judging by both mainstream and alt-press response, it’s been an especially weak festival year, with Cannes particularly censured. Lest we conclude the media’s initial take unduly harsh, Cinema Scope’s usually sober-sided editor Mark Peranson avers, “We could be nearing the end of the worst year in the history of film.” Thus the announced NYFF lineup, dominated by Cannes selections, engendered little advance buzz. With anticipation duly dampened, festival regulars made their annual pilgrimage to New York to discover a slate of films short on major statements, but deep in the minor pleasures that sustain during fallow periods.

Many festival entries, deliberately or not, eschewed the trappings of “greatness.” Instead, they opted for retrenchment, reworking and refashioning familiar materials into solid, enduring entertainment. French master Claude Chabrol’s The Flower of Evil revisits his prior film Merci Pour le Chocolat’s themes of murder and incest with a wittier, altogether stronger script—though, alas, without the benefit of Isabelle Huppert’s steely malevolence. Initially, Johnnie To’s PTU registers as a by-the-numbers Hong Kong actioner, but its tone proves gratifyingly restrained, its one-night arc well-executed and its bloody finale oddly mournful. Similarly, the Austrian drama Free Radicals, superficially a misbegotten pairing of Final Destination and Magnolia, transcends its more overt intimations of collective destiny through strong, uncommonly grounded performances and an unerring feel for pop music’s everyday usages.

And among the “solid entertainments,” a handful of titles offered a little something more—grace, insight, poetry, the makings of understated gems. The episodic saga of three Georgian women in Since Otar Left—matriarch Eka (the captivating Esther Gorintin), her daughter and granddaughter—seems deliberately slight. But minor incident and detail build imperceptibly toward a compelling portrait of the simultaneously suffocating and enriching demands of familial devotion and responsibility, a situation paralleling the limbo-like condition of post-Soviet Georgia’s citizenry. And though invention flags a bit in the film’s final hour, the magical Paris finale is both redemptive and heartbreaking.

Even less “narrative-driven,” Tsai Ming-Liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn is a pared-down absurdist delight, chronicling the in-theater and behind-the-scenes meanderings of patrons and staff during a screening of King Hu’s wuxia classic Dragon Inn. Tsai’s signature long takes are masterfully executed, exquisitely composed and, perhaps most importantly, slyly humorous—especially during an extended men’s room sequence. As the movie progresses, the viewing space itself gradually becomes subsumed in the filmic experience—audience members laughing, coughing, going to the rest room, even leaving in exasperation. Though some will find its minimalist aesthetic unduly forbidding, Goodbye Dragon Inn may be the Taiwanese director’s strongest work to date, a bittersweet ode to movie love.

Just as much an exercise in cinephilia, Ross McElwee’s latest documentary-cum-personal essay Bright Leaves explores North Carolina’s long, conflicted history with the “happy plant” tobacco: area farming families devastated by cancer, tobacco-funded Duke University’s cancer research facility, the director’s lingering resentment over the Duke family’s fortunes. Distinguished throughout by McElwee’s dry, acerbic wit and incomparable gift for juxtaposition, Bright Leaves courts transcendence mid-film courtesy of puckish film theorist Vlada Petric. Strapping the director and his camera into a wheelchair, Petric proves a manic force of nature, delivering an impassioned lecture on the glories of “kinesthesia.”

So...the worst year in film? Leave that determination to history, but at least two other NYFF selections noted in last month’s overview of the Toronto Film Festival, Dogville’s parable of salvation scorned and Crimson Gold’s study of Tehrani class resentment, approach greatness. And many other titles, at the very least, warrant a second look, notably Distant, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s clear-eyed sketch of Turkish urban anomie, and Pornography, Jan Jakub Kolski’s dreamlike portrait of a fragile World War II oasis. Throw in a glorious reconstruction of the late-silent era classic Piccadilly, a remarkably well-attended retrospective of the glorious Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu and several must-see shorts, and a purportedly middling festival just keeps looking better and better.

—Scott Manzler

Short cuts

♦ In the early ’90s, Canadian director Atom Egoyan surpassed the promise of his prankish, sinister early features with a string of masterpieces grounded in common themes: the nearness of inexplicable tragedy, the fragility of love and family bonds, the filmmaker’s fragmentary, voyeuristic relationship to the world around him. His recent film Ararat may be his most ambitious, elusive and provocative: a prismatic response to the oft-denied Armenian genocide at Turkish hands in the early 20th century. Shouldering the mantle of his Armenian heritage, Egoyan confronts an artist’s role in the representation of history, the witnessing of atrocity and the challenging of evil—topics he’ll likely discuss Thursday, Oct. 30, as a guest of Vanderbilt’s Holocaust Lecture Series. Egoyan speaks at 7:30 p.m. in Vanderbilt’s Wilson 126; the event is free and open to the public.

♦ Larry Meistrich, the veteran independent-film producer whose credits include the Oscar-winning Sling Blade and You Can Count on Me, will be in Nashville for two appearances Nov. 7 and 8 at the Watkins College of Art and Design. Recently, the Watkins Film School launched a free monthly film series devoted to overlooked indie films that never got distribution. Meistrich’s new indie-promoting company, Film Movement, is supplying the movies. Meistrich will introduce a Friday-night screening of the award-winning Latino drama Manito, then conduct a Saturday-morning distribution workshop for the local film industry. It should be fascinating: Meistrich founded the Shooting Gallery, whose touring packages of indie films were hailed for their innovation before the company’s demise in 2001. For more information, call 383-4848.

♦ Just an American Boy, a documentary about Steve Earle directed by punk filmmaker Amos Poe (The Blank Generation), will open simultaneously in New York and at Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre on Nov. 7.

—Jim Ridley