People love to bitch about the New York Film Festival. It’s too limited in scope, too elitist in outlook, too far above 14th street. There’s too much Hsiao-hsien Hou, not enough Nicole Kidman. Everything sells out in advance, but everything’s opening in a couple months anyway, so why bother – let the film freaks go to town.

For their part, the film freaks weigh in with their own set of gripes. Where’s the new Kiarostami? (MoMA’s got it.) The new Wong Kar-wai? (Unfinished.) The new Wes Anderson? (Is it that bad?) The new Claire Denis? (Checkout “Film Comments Selects” in February). And of course, my favorite complaint: We’ve seen it all before at Cannes, Sundance, Venice, Toronto.

Now that’s just fine for New Yorkers with enough cash and clout to trip off to those festivals, but for 99.9% of everyone else it comes down to this: Over the course of 17 days, just a train ride away, the 42nd New York Film Festival assembles two dozen of the most vital films you haven’t seen. Vital, that is, according to the tastes and agendas of the five-person selection committee, that is. Does that seem a tad oligarchic? Tough. You want a less opinionated festival, try Canada.

Carping about “Cannes redux” isn’t just snooty, it’s bogus. Of the many films beamed down by that mothership festival, New York chose 10. That’s not received wisdom, it’s an act of criticism. “Bad Education,” “Notre Musique,” and “Moolaade” aren’t in New York because Cannes said so; Pedro Almodovar, Jean-Luc Godard, and Ousmane Sembene are at the top of their game. The impatient press corps at Cannes stormed out of “Tropical Malady” then booed when it garnered a minor prize. By inviting it to New York, the cool-headed selection committee ratifies the minority view that Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of the most exciting and adventurous filmmakers around.

If anything, this year’s festival is a rebuttal to Cannes, where many of the selections pandered to philistines. You couldn’t find strong new work by Mike Leigh, Eric Rohmer, Jia Zhangke, or Hou Hsiao-hsien along the Croisette – try Broadway and 66th. Our festival is an argument, an expression of values, a case being made for these 20-odd films. Chances are something here will knock your socks off, but by all means argue, question, formulate your own case.

Liberated from the constraints of buying and selling (enough of that goes on elsewhere in this town), the NYFF is an event whose value lies in an image. Godard defines an “image” as two things brought together from a distance: the greater the distance, the stronger the image. (More on that Monday.) The choice of films posits one thing – a particular view of the state of the art. How this snapshot is looked at, absorbed, and mulled over by the film lovers of New York completes the image. For the next two weeks in these pages, we’ll investigate what’s coming into focus.

As for the much-derided exclusivity of the festival, that’s part of the point: You don’t waltz into Babbo whenever you feel like it, but if you luck into a table, prepare to bliss out. Early reservations at the NYFF are a must, but if you’re really desperate for a taste of Bergman (whose “Saraband” is a festival must-see), brave the standby line at the box-office. You might be able to wrangle a pair of tickets to the four-and-a-half-hour-long Egyptian film, “The Gate of the Sun,” and there’s tons of great Shaw Brother’s stuff to catch in a sidebar program (“Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan” is flabbergasting filmmaking). But you’re not getting anywhere near the new Rohmer picture.

If it makes you feel any better, neither will the majority of the press: When the festival projectionist got around to checking the “Triple Agent” print sent for the press screening, it was discovered to be subtitled in German. Achtung! An English-language version is en route for the public screenings.

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Agnes Jaoui is only the third woman to open the New York Film Festival, and on the strength of her intelligent, witty second film, there’s every reason to suspect she’ll be back for Centerpieces and Closing Nights of the future. In many respects, “Look at Me” is the ideal Opening Night film – not least for its meta-licious first line: “Can we start?” Dubbed “the first decent Woody Allen movie in 20 years” by one wit, this withering examination of the Parisian culture class might well be transposed to the Upper West Side.

Marilou Berry stars as the ironically named Lolita, the wry, overweight daughter of a monstrously self-involved writer (Jean-Pierre Bacri, who is exceptional as Etienne). Lovesick, self-deprecating, and utterly ignored by her Pop, Lolita aspires to be a singer, taking lessons from a teacher played by the multitasking Ms. Jaoui. Sylvia’s sympathies increase when she finds out her student is the daughter of a literary celebrity, and together with her insecure writer husband, Pierre (Laurent Grevill), they cozy up to Etienne and his charming country home.

A superb director of actors, Ms. Jaoui mounts this bittersweet ensemble comedy with grace and nuance; “Look at Me” is as French as brie, a rich slice of middle-brow naturalism. The opening-night crowd will surely gobble it up; everyone else can sample the goods when Sony Pictures Classics releases the film next year.

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As for the reception of “Tropical Malady” – well at least they didn’t boo at the press screening. In fact, no one made the slightest sound. As this defiantly experimental film crept to it’s strange, shadowy conclusion, you could have heard a tiger blink in the Walter Reade. Was the room enthralled? puzzled? dumbfounded? hypnotized? It’s hard to imagine anyone was merely bored or indifferent: Like “Blissfully Yours” before it, “Tropical Malady” is a weird and wondrous film, clear frontrunner for most audacious film of the festival.

With only three films to his crazy name, Apichatpong Weerasethakul has proven himself a genuine visionary. Yet for all the phantom cows, telepathic jungle monkeys, and shape-shifting tiger spirits of his latest, his is an exceptionally intricate and difficult vision. On first viewing, “Tropical Malady” plays like an idiosyncratic love story fused to an avant-garde folk tale. Passing between a rural village and a modern Thai city, a confident soldier pursues a young, ambivalent peasant. The long, trippy takes of “Blissfully Yours” have been replaced by confident cutting, unmotivated fades within a single scene, and an even more elliptical flow of narrative information.

It’s a demanding style, one that might seem mannered or willfully oblique at first. But when you get a chance to see it again – it will be opening in New York next year – you’ll know what this odd romance is heading toward: the bewildering collapse of plot into dream, a hallucinatory plunge into legend and myth, a jungle landscape animated by ghostly trees, lovers reincarnated as tigers. With the whole peculiar picture in mind, it becomes evident that each scene has been carefully connected to the next, themes quietly introduced and reworked, and that the entire film is animated by the imagination of desire.

– Nathan Lee

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“This is fictional life based on factual death,” reads the grim, no-nonsense title that begins “The Big Red One,” Samuel Fuller’s caustic, masterful World War II epic, newly restored with close to an hour of footage added back in. Fuller, the stogie-chomping, tough guy maker of delirious masterpieces about lowlifes, crazies, and strippers, had made several combat pictures before – the Korean War movies “The Steel Helmet” and “Fixed Bayonets” – both from 1951, and “Merrill’s Marauders” (1962), an earlier effort about World War II. But 1980’s “The Big Red One” is the director’s most autobiographical take on the subject, based on his own horrific experiences as a soldier.

Averse to glorifying bloodshed and lionizing heroes, Fuller had previously turned down directing “The Longest Day” (1962) and “Patton” (1970). “No audience would stomach the reality of war. It was too gruesome. I had to use images straight out of my imagination … to convey the horror of war and the harsh life of the men who had to fight it,” Fuller wrote in his autobiography, “A Third Face.” The resulting project was rife with the crazy-making aspects and the absurd details of combat.

Following four young GIs – Griff (Mark Hamill), Zab (Robert Carradine), Vinci (Bobby Di Cicco), and Johnson (Kelly Ward) – and their sergeant (Lee Marvin, in perhaps the best performance of his career) from battle to battle in North Africa, Sicily, Omaha Beach on D Day, Belgium, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, “The Big Red One” achieves its power through a focus on the quotidian. Condoms, for example, become a leitmotif: Early in the film, dewy-faced soldiers are instructed to put prophylactics over their M-1s; later Johnson uses rubbers as makeshift surgical gloves while helping a French woman deliver her baby.

The emphasis on condoms is part of Fuller’s refreshingly candid look at horniness amid horror. We learn that saltpeter was put in the soldiers’ K-rations to prevent tumescence. Moments of same-sex love – a German gives a wounded Lee Marvin a big wet one; Zab has a moment of off-screen man-on-man making out – are treated matter-of-factly. Detailed erotic fantasies – one soldier longs for “a zaftig girl with a big, frozen butt”- give the film some of its funniest, warmest moments. But there is no Greatest Generation nostalgia here. A man’s testicles are blown off, ears are severed and tossed into a burlap bag, a soldier’s entrails spill out of his body. When the war is declared over, there is no fanfare, just the hope that the benumbed survivor’s instincts will eventually thaw.

When “The Big Red One” was originally released, it was whittled down to 113 minutes from Fuller’s own four-and-a-half-hour final cut. With the 35mm restoration, led by film critic Richard Schickel and Brian Jamieson, the movie clocks in at 158 minutes and includes 15 unseen sequences. A cinematic marvel, the restored “Big Red One” is one of the stand-outs in an already stellar festival lineup. Its one-week run at Film Forum begins November 12.

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Surviving violence is also the theme of “Undertow,” David Gordon Green’s beautifully shot third feature. Awash in the atmospheric haze of both “Badlands” (Terrence Malick is one of the film’s producers) and “The Night of the Hunter,” “Undertow” takes place in a torpid, backwoods Georgia town, where widower John (Dermot Mulroney) raises his two sons. When his snarling ex-yard bird brother Deel (Josh Lucas) pays a visit, silly Southern gothic schematics are cued: vengeance, pools of blood, odd-talking strangers.

For all the trite plot points, several factors elevate the film. As he proved in his debut, “George Washington,” Mr. Green is a gifted director of children; he coaxes an especially moving performance from Alan as a pica suffering, book-loving pint-sized weirdo. “It’s a hard world for little things,” Lillian Gish’s character says in “The Night of the Hunter.” Mr. Green shares a similarly empathic understanding of the daily duress of being a child, which makes the sons’ fraternal bond all the more poignant. These young actors, Jamie Bell and Devon Alan, form their own remarkable two-man band of brothers.

– Melissa Anderson