The 42nd New York Film Festival comes to its centerpiece with “Bad Education,” a master class in pastel noir from professor Pedro Almodovar. As at Cannes, the film was respectfully, but not rapturously, received, though a minority find it a bolder, more assured film than his wildly overrated “Talk to Her.” Guess that gives away which camp I’m in – the one that appreciates, for starters, a reduction of camp in Mr. Almodovar’s latest, its sharper tone and severity.

As in “Talk to Her,” the themes are desire, death, and transformation. This time, however, there’s no redemption. When people talk in “Bad Education,” they hustle and dissemble, and no one’s listening because they’re too rapt in looking. Gael Garcia Bernal plays the femme fatale Ignacio, an aspiring actor and author of “The Visit,” a provocative conte a clef detailing abuse at the hands of a Catholic priest (Daniel Gimenez-Cacho as Father Manolo). He arrives one day at the production office of his boyhood love Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez), a film director, and pitches “The Visit.” Flashbacks ensue, as “Bad Education” unlocks chambers of memory and imagination, searching for dark secrets.

There may be “nothing less erotic than an actor looking for work,” Enrique says, nonetheless captivated by the return of his beautiful friend – as were the audience at the “Bad Education” press conference, when Mr. Bernal made a late appearance, joining his director and co-stars on stage. Translating for his Spanish guests, Film Society director Richard Pena opened the discussion from left field with a geography question. Could Mr. Almodovar discuss the intent behind his choice of settings, Barcelona in “Talk to Her,” for example, or Valencia in “Bad Education?”

Affable yet commanding, Mr. Almodovar took this as an opportunity to discuss the cultural climate in post-Franco Spain, specifically the transexual-friendly culture of Valencia. This is a place where a man with “new breasts” might open a business with his wife and cavort for the local youth in a bikini. That this same man regularly chastises the missus for donning a miniskirt is, Mr. Almodovar said, “the best example of machismo” he knows.

Mr. Pena then queried Mr. Bernal on the difficulty of his very queer role, in which the rising young star is made to go face first onto a casting couch, prance about in high heels, and make out with a middle-aged former priest. Mr. Bernal embarked on a response entailing triangular equations, neurological specificity, and Spanish cultural baggage, until his director laid a gentle hand on his arm and said, “Let me stop you there.”

– Nathan Lee

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I’ll stop there too, and return to praise “Bad Education” when it arrives in theatres November 19th. Unfortunately, the festival may be one of your last opportunities to visit “The 10th District Court,” an improbably compelling look into a Parisian civil courthouse. Let’s see now, what’s more exciting: edgy transexual noir or a day in the life of the French judiciary? Wrong! Raymond Depardon’s superb documentary may prove the discovery of the festival.

Simplicity itself, “The 10th District Court” claims no rhetorical strategies beyond a handful of camera set-ups and the prerogative of the editing room. Within these parameters, Mr. Depardon frames a comedy of manners, a battle of wits, a theater of the absurd, and a rich cross-section of big city life. Standing before a wry, no-nonsense judge, the accused plead their case. There’s the guy who called a meter maid “salope,” and the one who arrives in court heavily self-medicated. A man busted for DUI describes the biggest mojito ever, and woman similarly charged claims to never drink excessively – but when she does, only the very best wine.

There are darker passages. We meet a sympathetic, stateless immigrant with no means of securing identity papers or residency, and another, a serial thief, who bristles with rage and frustration. In the most unsettling sequence, we’re introduced to jilted lover and the woman he abused and continues to harass. Is he guilty or not guilty? Are we seeing personality or personae? And how are we to distinguish between the two? “The 10th District Court” holds a mirror to the audience, daring us to hand down our own verdicts.

Then there are the lawyers, whose various gambits (or lack thereof) are fascinating, sometimes hilarious. “The 10th District Court” is an arena for competing discourses and body languages, a place where abstractions are made concrete. By flattening the image, Mr. Depardon opens the imaginative space; if Bresson made documentary, it might look like this.

– Nathan Lee

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Mike Leigh’s London in 1950, the setting of his outstanding “Vera Drake,” is a city of browns and grays. Five years after the war, the entire city is still gripped by post-traumatic stress disorder. The only source of light comes from the constant twinkle in the eyes of the titular middle-aged heroine. Like her cinematic forebear Mildred Pierce, Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton) is a hard-working mother. Constantly in motion and always with a sunny disposition, Vera, when not performing her duties as a full-time cleaning woman, comforts ailing neighbors, tends to her decaying mum, and performs abortions – toting a bar of soap, a grater, and a rubber syringe in her kit.

“Go all floppy for me,” the East End Mother Courage instructs one patient. Vera goes about her business quickly and perfunctorily while still assuring the terrified women in dingy apartments that she’s there to help them. In fact, Vera, never equivocates about the nature of her volunteer work. “I help young girls out,” she tells the police, who have interrupted a family dinner party to arrest her. Mr. Leigh’s film, never patronizing or preachy, presents the unbearable loneliness, secrecy, and shame women who wished to terminate pregnancies had to endure before abortion became legal in England in 1967.

“Fundamentally it is a woman’s problem because men f– and walk away,” Mr. Leigh responded sharply at the post screening press conference to a viewer who asked why he didn’t include more of a man’s point of view. It was one of several obtuse queries addressed to the director. One journalist had two questions, unintelligible to this viewer, about the use of music in the film and the movie’s relation to an old BBC series.

“I’ve never heard such a pair of ridiculous questions at the New York Film Festival in my entire life, and I look forward to regurgitating them as an anecdote at dinner parties in London,” the gruff yet silver-tongued Mr. Leigh shot back.

Ms. Staunton, also present, graciously entertained a few thickheaded questions herself. One viewer, clearly unaware that Ms. Staunton, one of the best-known stage and television actresses in the United Kingdom, had quite recently won the Best Actress award at the Venice Film Festival for her devastating performance in “Vera Drake,” asked what else she’d been in and to list any prizes, if any, she may have won. “Are you an agent?” she retorted with utmost equanimity.

– Melissa Anderson

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With one of most cunning titles of the year, Hong Sangsoo’s “Woman Is the Future of Man” (the words, apparently, come from the Surrealist French writer Louis Aragon), concerns itself not so much with tomorrow as with yesterday and today. Thirty-something friends Munho (Yoo Jitae), a married, upwardly mobile professor of art, and Hunjoon (Kim Taewoo), an impecunious filmmaker just back from the United States, meet for an alcohol-soaked reunion on a snowy day in Seoul. Both were in love with the same woman, Sunhwa (Sung Hyunah); still in their cups, the two men set out to find her.

Shuttling between the promising sex-filled days of yore and the boozy, dreary present, Mr. Hong’s film captures the slow, creeping panic of realizing the halcyon past can never be regained, a terror that leads all too often to states of abjection. Continuing their bender in Sunhwa’s apartment, both Munho and Hunjoon hope to have sex with her; she leads the latter to her bedroom while the former sleeps on the couch – only to ask her the next day if she will perform oral sex on him. But while the two men are clearly delineated as characters, albeit, at times, pathetic ones, Sunhwa remains obscure. If she is the future of man, it’s a tense rendered in the passive voice.

– Melissa Anderson