ld school meets new school at the 39th New York Festival, where a formidable faction of Nouvelle Vague auteurs and their upstarts overwhelm the program. There are 10 features from France (including several co-productions), with aging masters Manoel de Oliveira, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, and Eric Rohmer lending sincere self-reflexivity to films obsessed with the relationship between art and life. This is a common theme at this year's festival, which includes David Lynch's penetrating Mulholland Drive, a cautionary tale about La La Land's magnetic pull, and Richard Linklater Walking Life, whose radical aesthetic evokes a slacker's philosophical awakening.

Equally impressive, Catherine Breillat offers another polemical rite of passage with Fat Girl, and Nanni Moretti, Wes Anderson, and Shohei Imamura bemoan and celebrate the joys and thorns of family living. But the festival's highlight could very well be the return of a ghoulish friend: Almost 50 years after its original release, Charles Laughton's gothic The Night of the Hunter is still the most cutting and precise inquisition of American puritanism. Without a divisive Dancer in the Dark to set political hearts afire, New York will have to settle for Laughton's vision of wayward godliness; it's sure to cast a serendipitous shadow over a terrorist-wounded city coping with a sense of lost innocence.

Please check back on a daily basis as a synopsis and full review of each festival film will be added to Slant Magazine's ongoing coverage. The 39th New York Film Festival will take place from September 28 to October 14, 2001. For more information please check the festival's main program.

All capsules and reviews by Ed Gonzalez.