Selective rather than immersive, the New York Film Festival hearkens back to a more genteel era. In contrast to Toronto's cornucopia or even Tribeca's sprawl, the NYFF, now in its 43rd season, is practically a minimalist affair: Fewer than 30 features spread over two and a half weeks, not counting the concurrent retrospective devoted to Japan's Shochiku studio. Cancel your evening (and, for out-of-towners, afternoon) plans a couple weeks running and you could actually see the lot.

Definitely not coming to a theater near you is Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers, a three-hour chronicle of the student revolt of Paris 1968 and its underwhelming aftermath. Word was that Garrel, who lived through the time as a 20-year-old artist, intended his movie as a corrective to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, which starred his son, Louis, as a cloistered cinephile. But Lovers is nothing so simple as an "answer film," although Garrel does throw in a pointed call-out to The Dreamers' auteur.

Where Bertolucci made his name with Before the Revolution, Regular Lovers is the revolution and after, running from anti-establishment furor to a long, smothering disillusionment. Instead of a movie-mad loner, Louis Garrel plays François, an anarchist poet who takes to streets that glow with the light of burning cars and military spotlights. Handed a Molotov cocktail, François leaves it burning in the gutter, and soon ends up hiding on rooftops, a moment of almost supernatural stillness in the midst of purposeful anarchy.

The revolt fizzles, of course, and François' friends retreat into a hash-fueled haze, idly wondering if it's possible to "have a revolution for the working class in spite of the working class." He dances to the Kinks, falls in love, scribbles in his garret and generally drifts through life, ending up in a scene out of Garrel's 1967 Le Révélateur. Like the moment it chronicles, Regular Lovers is anticlimactic and intellectualized; rather than sweeping you up in revolutionary fervor, William Lubtchansky's luminous, high-contrast black-and-white photography threatens to stop time altogether. But it's a singular experience, not least because the movie's chances of U.S. distribution are practically nil. (Repeat New York screenings, at least, are likely, and one Philadelphia programmer is hot to book it.)

Also undistributed is Hong Sang Soo's Tale of Cinema, a twice-told life tale from South Korea's elliptical master. Split in two by a self-referential twist, Tale is a playful meditation on the way life imitates art and vice versa. Without retracing his steps, Hong's oeuvre is always folding back on itself, revisiting the same lonely hotel rooms, the same moments of desperate drunkenness and awkward sex; it's hard to think of a major filmmaker whose movies are so difficult to distinguish in the mind. Tale is Hong's most direct approach yet to the theme of repetition, but here it's recapitulated as a dark, cosmic joke. A lonely, suicidal young man develops a self-fulfilling obsession with the similarity between his life and a famous director's film, only to be liberated by the knowledge that he's been wrong all along. Like most of Hong's movies, Tale grows in the mind long after it's over. Hope that it, like his Turning Gate and Woman Is the Future of Man, finds a place in the Philadelphia Film Festival next spring.

Much as a showcase for underserved directors — like Through the Forest's Jean-Paul Civeyrac, whose 65-minute film sold out the cavernous Alice Tully Hall — the NYFF serves as an agenda-setter for the fall season (particularly for members of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, who get first crack at tickets). No doubt the virtuous but trying Good Night, And Good Luck. and the tony, lifeless Capote will dominate cocktail chatter for weeks to come, but let's hope there's room between courses for a few underbuzzed entries. Noah Baumbach's cine-memoir The Squid and the Whale has been circulating since Sundance, generating widespread but muted praise for its autobiographical story of a 16-year-old Brooklyn boy (Roger Dodger's Jesse Eisenberg) weathering his intellectual parents' divorce. Grainy and hand-held, Squid is self-effacing almost to a fault, but Baumbach handles big moments and minute detail with equal aplomb, and Eisenberg gives what's sure to be one of the best performances of the year.

Toronto screenings failed to ignite the hoped-for Oscar talk for Cillian Murphy's turn as an Irish transvestite in Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto, perhaps because the movie is too rich to lay down to a single performance (unlike Capote, which is simply a silver platter for Philip Seymour Hoffman's swan dance). Reteaming with Patrick McCabe, the novelist behind Jordan's brilliant and overlooked The Butcher Boy, Breakfast finds common ground between Murphy's woes and The Troubles, superimposing his effortless wholeness with Ireland's struggle for same.

The NYFF's greatest shock was Lars von Trier's Manderlay, a racial parable that seduced even this confirmed Dogville hater. The second panel of Trier's U.S.A. triptych is as didactic as Dogville but much better aimed; the story of a Southern plantation where slavery lingers 70 years after emancipation is an apt sledgehammer metaphor for the country's festering wounds. Doubling as an Iraq war parable (the idea being that you can't force people to be free), Manderlay is a vicious attack on well-meaning liberals which itself flirts with racism at times; Trier's fetishistic use of the black male is in full swing, which might suggest he ought to turn his attention closer to home when he gets done flogging the U.S. But at least Trier has flung his bomb into the right crowded room this time, and left NYFF viewers with a head start on their counterarguments.