This Friday, the curtain will rise on the 46th New York Film Festival with Laurent Cantet’s award-winning classroom drama, “The Class.” Sixteen days later, it will fall with the bloodsport climax of Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler.” Smack in between, Clint Eastwood’s period mystery “Changeling” will serve as the festival’s centerpiece. In a way, the eye-catching range of these three tent poles signals the festival’s perennial tensions between the new and the familiar, convention and experiment, fresh faces and old hands.

In past years, some have griped that those tensions were not pronounced enough, though for varying reasons. Take your pick of rant: the fondness for returning to previously featured filmmakers; the Cannes-upon-the-Hudson bent that draws deeply from that pre-eminent French showcase; the simultaneously obligatory and myopic geographic spotlighting, or just the wariness of alienating viewers with too many adventurous movies in a given year.

Though often overblown (or of interest to a precious few), some of these concerns do crop up with this year’s roster, along with the usual outwardly mysterious absence of certain lauded films. But, despite all that, this year marks some identifiable steps toward getting some new names onto the foldout festival calendar.

After all, nearly half of this year’s 28 main-slate selections come from filmmakers who have never before appeared in the festival. This being the New York Film Festival, of course, these first-timers include the likes of Mr. Aronofsky and Darezhan Omirbaev, a Kazakh master in the process of critical ratification whose “Chouga” reworks “Anna Karenina.” But there’s also Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir,” which resembles last year’s “Persepolis” in its use of animation to remember fraught political events (here, Israel’s 1982 war with Lebanon). And, most exceptionally, there is one outright debut, Alexander Olch’s ruminative documentary “The Windmill Movie.”

You could call 2008 the New Directors edition, and not just because one of the top films, “Hunger,” about a 1981 hunger strike by IRA prisoners, is the British artist Steve McQueen’s first feature film. Several other festival newcomers are in fact graduates of the Film Society’s own New Directors/New Films series, including Antonio Campos (“Afterschool”), Matteo Garrone (“Gomorrah”), Brillante Mendoza (“Serbis”), and even Mr. Aronofsky, who, long before the magnificent folly of “The Fountain,” served up “Pi” in 1998.

But the big draws, as always, are big guns, auteurs challenging us — and themselves. Steven Soderbergh’s two-part “Che” is a kind of second sun in the festival, an alternate centerpiece that, at 268 minutes, promises more Guevara than you can shake a dialectic at. Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas mobilize two dazzling family dramas, “A Christmas Tale” and “Summer Hours,” respectively. Argentine three-timer Lucrecia Martel presents the profoundly unsettling “The Headless Woman,” while Poland’s Jerzy Skolimowski returns to festival screens after 26 years with “Four Nights With Anna.”

Remedying last year’s oversight of his “Still Life,” Jia Zhangke’s “24 City” chronicles the passing of a Chinese factory complex. Indeed, the traditionally Euro-centered festival gestures toward staking out a permanent wide berth for Asian cinema, what with Mr. Jia, Hong Sang-soo’s sprawling “Night and Day,” Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Tokyo Sonata,” and Wong Kar-wai’s fortuitous recalibration of his 1994 mind-blower, “Ashes of Time Redux.” A special highlight is this year’s retrospective: the iconoclastic works of Nagisa Oshima.

After last year’s heavily American roster of directors, the lonely Oregon drifter that is Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” (her follow-up to “Old Joy”) looks that much lonelier. But Michelle Williams’s extraordinary performance in Ms. Reichardt’s film finds an intriguing foil in that of Sally Hawkins, who stars in the aptly named character study “Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mike Leigh’s umpteenth entry in festival rolls.

Rounding out the festival is another grab bag of anniversary-marking revivals and restorations (ranging from Max Ophuls’s “Lola Montes” to Situationist theorist Guy Debord’s last film), panel discussions (“Film Criticism in Crisis?” lobbing a hopeful question mark), and the conversation series known as HBOFilms Dialogues. Whatever the success of these attractions, the festival’s grand main showcase of films will definitely look majestic: At this year’s temporary venue, the singular movie palace Ziegfeld Theatre, there’s plenty of screen footage — and red velvet — for everyone.

The 46th New York Film Festival begins Friday and runs through October 10 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Tickets are on sale online at tickets.filmlinc.com and at the Avery Fisher Hall box office (corner of Columbus Avenue and 65th Street).