“El es el unico! He is the only one!” shouted a woman from the balcony of Alice Tully Hall last Thursday night, helpfully translating her own words for the monolingual among the crowd of Pedro Almodovar enthusiasts gathered for “Viva Pedro!” Featuring clips from several of Mr. Almodovar’s films and gushy testimonials from three of the actors in his latest, “Bad Education,” the tribute was hosted by Richard Pena, chair of the New York Film Festival selection committee, who concluded his opening remarks with Pauline Kael’s praise of the director: “He’s our Godard – Godard with a happy face.”

When Gael Garcia Bernal, one of the stars of “Bad Education,” took to the stage with his beaming visage, the audience went wild. “Guapo!” yelled one GGB admirer. “Pedro, you have transcended and redefined cinema – not that you don’t know this,” the actor joked about his boss. When Mr. Almodovar walked onstage, he was greeted with the first of two standing ovations.

Seated in a Barcelona Chair facing Mr. Pena (who was not only emcee and moderator but also translator), the affable, voluble director fielded queries about genre, music, cinematography, and drag queens. Occasionally he began to answer questions in English before responding completely in Spanish. By the end of the evening, Mr. Almodovar may have been a bit giddy. “I used to make comedy before making films,” he said in English, rising from his leather chair, microphone in hand. “Now I want to do stand-up for the last question.” The Film Society of Lincoln Center, alas, was unable to provide a brick-wall backdrop for him.

Mike Leigh makes comedy too – in the form of witheringly witty responses during Q& As. The helmer of “Vera Drake” patiently answered questions for 90 minutes at the Kaplan Penthouse on Saturday in a dialogue moderated by writer Philip Lopate (another member of the festival’s selection committee). One gentleman in the audience, who identified himself as a documentary filmmaker, asked Mr. Leigh about “the symbolism of tea” in “Vera Drake.”

“Not until we started showing this film here have we been asked about the leitmotif – much less the symbolism – of tea,” Mr. Leigh responded with just a touch of spleen. “Drinking a lot of tea is simply what people in the British Isles do.” To one woman’s assessment of the preponderance of extroverted mothers and introverted daughters in his films, the director replied, “Well, there’s a lot of that around. It’s a bit like the tea. I am neither a mother nor a daughter myself. But I’ll think about it. Perhaps I’ll go into therapy.”

– Melissa Anderson

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I find, scribbled on the pages of a notepad devoted to “The Holy Girl,” this phrase: “what does the aerosol girl mean?” A minor but expressive element of the plot, the aerosol girl works in an Argentinean hotel where a conference of doctors has gathered. We encounter her no more than three or four times, darting in and out of the frame, doing exactly one thing: spritzing the atmosphere with a freshener or antiseptic spray.

That hotels actually employ cleaning personnel explains her existence. But nothing is insignificant in “The Holy Girl”; everything evocative. This is a film of maximum precision, to be studied with the diligence of an exegete.

Our attention, however, is drawn primarily to a young girl named Amalia (Maria Alche) who lives in the hotel with her mother Helena (Mercedes Moran). The story begins with scenes from a Catholic education, as Amalia and her best friend Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg) attend choir practice and mull over Sunday school questions. If I hear the voice of God in the night, how will I know it isn’t the Devil? How will I recognize my calling, acknowledge my vocation? These questions buzz through the movie like mosquitoes, attaching themselves to the flesh of incident, inflicting a rash of ambiguities.

One day, while observing a street musician gesture over his theremin, Amalia is rubbed up against by a visiting doctor, Jano (Carlos Belloso). Stimulated by this intimate encounter, she develops a peculiar attachment, spurred on in part by her developing sexuality and in part by a vaguely grasped notion of salvation. Her mother, meanwhile, is kept awake at night by a persistent auditory nuisance. Jano offers advice; a relationship simmers between them; Amalia looks on. “The Holy Girl” triangulates their paths around the live-wire intersection of faith and foolishness, doubt and desire.

Helena’s condition fits a larger constellation of ideas (God is in the details; He speaks in mysterious ways) and motivates the film’s extraordinary audio texture – amplified butane hiss, muffled telephone bells, the crystal splash of a swimming pool. Writer-director Lucrecia Martel has made a film about transparent things caught at the threshold of visibility: sexuality and religion, pattern and coincidence, miracles and the mundane. She has reinvented the coming-of-age story from the ground up, radically decentralizing and lyricizing the form.

Like the theremin, “The Holy Girl” resembles no other instrument. By the subtlest, most elusive of means, the filmmaker draws out uncanny vibrations from her tale; her picture thrums with hidden life, inchoate impulses that rise to the surface. And the aerosol girl? Thematically, we might note that the tool of her trade is both cleansing and mildly toxic. Aesthetically, she reflects her creator, deploying a mist of images into space. As particular, perfect, and mercurial as a cloud, “The Holy Girl” suspends itself in time, drifts through your senses, and, in a gesture of shocking syncopation, evaporates without a trace.

Ms. Martel has learned from Bresson a hard imagism of the body. Portraiture in “The Holy Girl” is structured from hands, torsos, faces, the nape of the neck. Like Claire Denis, she has found a way of structuring stories at weird angles, mastered a rigorous obliquity, fashioned a celluloid equivalent to projectivist verse. Yet here is something tantalizingly new, bracingly fresh. Her impeccable “Holy Girl” is a triumph, close to sublime.

– Nathan Lee

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Any film attempting to capture a moment in Miles Davis’s career is bound to look like a Muybridge photograph: a still picture of motion. Davis was the most restless of jazz talents, always searching, pushing, evolving his sound.

“Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue,” a new film about Davis’s electric period and performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, played at the Film Festival this weekend. Director by Murray Lerner, it deals with this problem by combining elements of two different film types: the biopic and the concert film. By bringing us up to speed, it captures Davis as something other than a blur.

The film’s raison d’etre is Davis’s performance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, a five-day concert that included Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Joni Mitchell, Kris Kristofferson, Joan Baez, and the Who, among others. For Lerner, it is a fresh look at familiar territory. His earlier film, “Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival,” documented the entire festival, the largest and last of its kind.

Though it substantially broadened Davis’s popular appeal – his 1969 album “Bitches Brew” became the best-selling in jazz history – Davis’s electronic music was loudly decried by the jazz community. The backlash is often likened to the one Bob Dylan experienced when he went electric at Newport. But where Dylan’s early electric work is now embraced as his best, Davis’s is still bitterly divisive.

This debate plays out on the screen in “Miles Electric.” Representing the pro camp is Carlos Santana, who here serves much the same role Wynton Marsalis did for Ken Burns’s “Jazz”: cheerleader and musical demonstrator. Wearing a tie-dyed Miles-head shirt, he plays snippets of Davis’s electronic compositions on the guitar, showing that the exchange of ideas between Davis and rock was mutual.

Santana describes the experience of Davis’s electronic music as “spiritual orgasm.” “It converted a lot of people into a multidimensional consciousness,” he says. Jazz critic Stanley Crouch is more plainspoken: “That’s bulls-. Miles Davis was trying to make some money,” he says, and compares listening to “Bitches Brew” to “having nails driven into my hands.”

After all the back-and-forth and build up, it’s a relief to see and hear the music itself. “Miles Electric” ends with the entire 38-minute Isle of Wight set – which was not previously available as audio or video – and it’s just as exhilarating and infuriating as we’ve been told to expect.

– Martin Edlund