The Telluride Film Festival, at the base of the 15,000-foot snow-capped San Juan mountain range is a peak experience for the intrepid cineastes who brave unreliable airlines and stand in line with their $600 movie passes for four days of films that are not revealed until they arrive. This 29th year seemed sparser, the lines not quite so long, the theaters not always filled. The economy and 9/11 fears were possible reasons, but it left time for fraternizing with filmmakers, stars and critics who assemble from all over the world in this surreal western stage setting.

The weekend is packed solidly with premieres (many already picked up by Sony and Miramax); with tributes to Peter O'Toole, Paul Schrader and documentarian D.A. Pennebaker; and docs, like Michael Moore's Cannes prizewinner Bowling for Columbine, which decries America's penchant for violence, and Lost in La Mancha, about Terry Gilliam's ill-fated attempt to adapt Don Quixote. The filmmakers, Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton, started their careers in Philadelphia with a successful documentary about the making of Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. A couple of works dealt with the Hitler horror story. Scholar Kevin Brownlow's The Tramp and the Dictator, about the parallel lives of Chaplin and Der Fuehrer, revealed that the motivation for the making of The Great Dictator was the Nazi vilification of Chaplin as a "disgusting Jew" (he was not Jewish). Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary (directed by André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer) features an exhaustive interview with Adolph's private secretary, who, finally, just before dying, confessed to her naiveté and subsequent feelings of guilt.

Telluride is never complete without its vintage program -- great silent films like a new two-color Technicolor print of The Black Pirate (accompanied by a Philadelphia favorite, the Alloy Orchestra) with Douglas Fairbanks Sr. at his swashbucklingest. There were early Italian films (Il Posto, Bitter Rice), as well as Marco Bellocchio's new work, My Mother's Smile, an involving anti-church melodrama. There were two golden anniversary celebrations -- a new, digitally restored print of Singin' in the Rain, introduced by octogenarian scenarist Betty Comden, and a group of films selected by the encyclopedic Michel Ciment, editor of the 50-year-old intellectual French cine-journal, Positif.

The hot sex and violence in last year's tribute to Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl) continued this year in Gaspar Noé's outrageous Irréversible, critiques of which ranged from "Irresponsible" to "must see." Pressing other hot buttons, Schrader's Auto Focus explored kinky lower depths, and Ken Park, co-directed by Ed Lachman and Larry Clark (Kids) and written by Harmony Korine (Gummo), raised the ante on teen violence.

Highlights coming to your local theater soon: Frida, a sumptuous Mexican visual feast about the thorny and horny relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, by brilliant Julie Taymor (Titus, The Lion King); The Man Without a Past by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, back with wry wit and deceptive narrative simplicity; Talk to Her, Pedro Almodóvar's accomplished melodrama of male bonding at the bedside of two comatose women; and Spider, Cronenberg's Beckett-like take on oedipal violence, with Ralph Fiennes as a repressed tortured introvert; and Australian filmmaker Philip Noyce, with Rabbit-Proof Fence, an inspirational survival film about three Aboriginal girls (abducted as a consequence of a racist law) who walk 1,500 miles to get back to their mothers.

Our favorite: Russian Ark by the great Aleksandr Sokurov and filmed brilliantly by Tilman Büttner (Run Lola Run) who, without rehearsal, shot a single 90-minute take through the stately halls of the majestic Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, covering 300 years of Russian mythology. A formal ball climaxes the film with 700 aristocrats dancing in full regalia on the eve of a revolution that altered the course of Russian isolation.

Pervading the whole weekend was the spirit of the inimitable Chuck Jones, who died this year and has been a crown jewel of the festival since its inception when the programmers recognized that he was not just for kids but an original wit -- in fact, sometimes described as Samuel Beckett masquerading as a cartoonist.

Telluride, the Mae West of American film festivals, once again had beckoned us to come up and see her.