2007 New York Film Festival

Javier Bardem stars in the Coen brothers' 'No Country for Old Men' (Credit: Richard Foreman / courtesy of Miramax Films)

New York Film Festival: Sept. 28 to Oct. 14
For a full list of scheduled screenings and locations, visit www.filmlinc.com.

What’s worth powering off your TiVo and iPod and venturing into the savage wilds of the Upper West Side for a few nights?

Sex. Greed. Senseless violence.

Not to mention old-school New York, feuding families and a female Bob Dylan, all of which are a part of the landscape at the 45th annual New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. This lavish and literary 17-day affair continues to present the most important new American and international films by taking chances on fresh young voices and reinvigorating world cinema masters seemingly past their sell-by date. How else has the Film Society showcase managed to maintain its artistic integrity over the last 45 years? By keeping Paris Hilton off of Main Street (hello, Sundance!) and porn stars off the Croissette (bonjour, Cannes!).

While the recent Toronto International Film Festival was filled with images of Iraq and Darfur, and Hollywood studios are horny as hell over foreign filmmakers, the NYFF continues its obsession with homegrown American auteurs.

Wes Anderson, who made a nerd-size splash here with “Rushmore” in 1998 and “The Royal Tenenbaums” in 2001, returns with his fifth film, “The Darjeeling Limited.” This time he transposes his idiosyncratic, imaginative vision to India, where three brothers take a loopy train trip to reconnect after an estrangement. Some may be tiring of the lanky director’s prepackaged quirk, but the performances by co-writer Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson are worth it, as is the irony of Wilson’s bandaged character and his real-life suicide troubles.

Noah Baumbach, who co-wrote Anderson’s last film, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” with him in a downtown coffee shop, is back uptown himself as the writer-director of “Margot at the Wedding.” The film follows up the hyper-articulate, hyper-neurotic New York tone of his last comedy, “The Squid and the Whale.” Nicole Kidman stars as a woman who doesn’t like the disappointing dude (Jack Black) her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is marrying at an upstate weekend wedding.

The secret Porcellian-like selection committee has an uncanny knack for predicting Oscar winners. Last year, Helen Mirren graced the throne of “The Queen,” and the year before Philip Seymour Hoffman wowed the Upper West Side set with his dead-on turn in “Capote.” This year, the rumbling is already growing for Cate Blanchett’s impossible turn as Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ impressionistic biopic of the folk legend, “I’m Not There.” The Academy Award–winning actress is one of seven actors (including Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Marcus Carl Franklin, a 14-year-old African-American boy) who portray the legendary troubadour at various stages of his confounding, culture-defining career.

There is also Javier Bardem as a vicious, ethnically dubious, cattle-stun-gun-toting killer in Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country for Old Men.” The adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy’s novel—which also stars stonefaced Tommy Lee Jones and an impressive Josh Brolin, continuing to shed his “Goonies” boyishness—is part meditation, part bloody thriller set in the desolate Texas desert. It’s already drawing raves as the Coen brothers’ best work since “Fargo” and “Blood Simple.”

Alice Tully seat-fillers may remember Bardem from his turn in “Before Night Falls,” directed by Julian Schnabel, the outsize painter-turned-filmmaker also back at the fest with “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

There is one American filmmaker who can finally, after more than four decades, stop checking his mail for an NYFF invitation: Sidney Lumet. The octagenarian New York crime chronicler holsters his resentment and puts on a tux to present “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” a caper about two downtrodden brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) whose greed gets the best of them.

Fill your play list with as many shorts, director dialogues, parties and special presentations as possible. Worth checking out is the actual Bob Dylan as a young man, live at Newport circa mid-1960s, in Murray Lerner’s recut concert documentary, “The Other Side of the Mirror” ; Harrison Ford’s young grimace in the 25th-anniversary screening of “Blade Runner”; and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a haunting Caucescu-era Romanian drama about abortion that continues the tradition of emotionally probing European films like “Breaking the Waves” and “The Celebration.”

All in the name of escapism. Or cinema. Or art. Or whatever you call that thing that gets you out of your apartment, if just for a few hours, and into the darkness with hundreds of others looking into a window of another world.