The 45th edition of the New York Film Festival begins on Friday, and a single glance at its annual Lincoln Center home shows just how quintessentially New York the season’s premiere movie event is: Like seemingly every other block in our dynamic city, the arts complex is in the throes of glass-sheathed reconstruction, as part of a project that will yield, among other goodies, an elaborate new film center.

So while the festival’s opening-night and closing-night selections — Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited” and the animated adaptation “Persepolis” — will still take their bows in old-school style at Avery Fisher Hall, the primary screening venue for this year’s slate has shifted from the Alice Tully to the Frederick P. Rose Hall, which usually plays host to Lincoln Center’s jazz programs and is located in the neighborhood’s Johnny-come-lately behemoth, the Time Warner Center.

But whatever the festival’s momentary physical dislocation, the movies themselves are, by and large, rooted in very familiar soil: This edition of the New York Film Festival is the most American in recent memory.

Eleven of the fest’s 28 premieres are by American directors (and that’s omitting New Yorker Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” which is a French co-production). While the number of slots filled by Americans ebbs and flows from one year to the next, the average usually comes out to about five — a total that, according to my supercomputer, is doubled handily by this fall’s selections.

The upshot is, partly, a dense celebration of contemporary American cinema’s most distinctive and recognizable voices, often on distinctly American terrain. Besides the India-transplanted Andersonia of “The Darjeeling Limited,” Todd Haynes unpacks the multiplicity that goes by the name of Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There”; “No Country for Old Men” poses the mouthwatering (and bloodletting) prospect of a Coen Brothers adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “West”; Gus Van Sant returns to the adolescent mind, viewed from the inside out, with the skatehead high-schooler of “Paranoid Park.” Even comedy veteran John Landis unleashes a distinctive, caustic voice of another kind with the rib-tickling documentary “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project.”

In addition, Bronx-born Abel Ferrara, a true Gotham patriot, lovingly imagines a waning pole-dancing joint in “Go Go Tales,” while in “Margot at the Wedding,” Park Slope-incubated Noah Baumbach sets out a rather less sentimental study of two sisters (played by Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh) who have lost touch with each other.

One thing this confluence of American talent also does is change, subtly, the flavor of a traditionally internationalist festival. While the standard account of the festival singles out its selective, boutique character (versus the insert-your-smorgasbord-metaphor-here of Tribeca and elsewhere), what has always struck many first-time attendees has been the veritable United Nations of filmmakers (representing China, Romania, Russia, Chile), and the new names from even familiar European points of origin.

Which is not to say that the 45th edition has ceased to bring the globe’s art-house all-stars to your doorstep: Hou Hsiao-Hsien honors a Western children’s classic with Juliette Binoche’s help in “Flight of the Red Balloon”; industrial-China chronicler Jia Zhang-ke takes his turn at explicitly shooting documentary with “Useless,” and Alexander Sokurov casts another gaze upon his native Russia with the Chechnyaset “Alexandra,” about a woman voyaging to her grandson’s military camp. Imports gleaned from this spring’s Cannes Film Festival abound, too, from Lee Changdong’s “Secret Sunshine,” to acclaimed French actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Actresses,” to the latest Romanian gem, Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.”

But the home-turf feel of the 45th edition is notable for a festival that in the last several years has cautiously filled its opening night slots with such imminent English-language releases as Stephen Frears’s “The Queen” and George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck.” This year, instead of acting as footholds in what is sometimes daunting multinational territory, the opening night selection, “The Darjeeling Limited,” as well as the centerpiece film, “No Country for Old Men,” are closer to the rule than the exception; the art house, in this case, resides closer to home.

Not that the festival’s intrepid attendees would ever be cowed simply by language barriers or hard-to-place auteurs, as the happily name-dropping queuers for standby tickets attest annually. But for film lovers of all stripes, the selections make the festival’s essential but rarefied offerings feel a little less forbidding. Cursory evaluations of the lineup as “strong” can sometimes loosely be translated as, “I actually recognize a lot of these titles because they’re coming out soon” (which in turn probably means wider press coverage), or, “I’ve actually seen films by these directors already.”

As for the motive behind the American bent to the festival, it’s probably foolhardy to try to pinpoint it, given the cyclical nature of clusters like this, though the preponderance of established talent (Messrs. Haynes, Van Sant, Coens) discourages the sussing out of a new wave (the heralded “New York Wave” of the Coens, Mr. Baumbach, and Mr. Anderson notwithstanding). “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” even brings Hollywood über-veteran Sidney Lumet, one of cinema’s many indestructible octogenarians, back to the New York Film Festival for the first time since 1964’s “Fail-Safe,” and “Redacted,” the multimedia rendering of an Iraq war atrocity, is directed by old-guard voyeur-gadfly Brian De Palma.

At the end of the day, if what only turns out to be a temporary uptick in American directors lures stray walk-ups to the ticket windows, it’s probably a good thing during the festival’s uprooting from its customary venue. And if a thoroughly reconstructive mind-blasting by something like Mr. Haynes’s “I’m Not There” is a starter drug for works like “Alexandra” or “Useless,” so much the better.