In a year as inhospitable as 2007 has been so far to intelligent mainstream American movies, the 45th edition of the New York Film Festival (NYFF), which opens to the public today, couldn’t have had better timing. Over the past nine months, some of the most compelling studio releases (Zodiac, Grindhouse, and Sunshine, to name three) have taken their licks commercially and critically even as audiences and reviewers have joined their hands over blockbuster fare so pointless and insultingly anti-cinematic (The Bourne Ultimatum) that it threatens to take us back to that blanched decade when Warner Bros. and Twentieth-Century Fox offered us, respectively, Doris Day and Jayne Mansfield, the latter via what was then state of the art Technicolor Cinemascope. Commercial American movies needn’t by law be vapid, predictable, meretricious or leaden. Right?

Perennially calendared on the heels of trendier jetset gatherings in Cannes, Venice, and Toronto, programming at the NYFF has long tended to reflect the marriage of convenience between its knowing cinephilic selection committee (which this year includes the Village Voice’s incomparable J. Hoberman) and the gravy tastes at Lincoln Center, the festival’s urban haute bourgeois venue. What this means—as another Voice critic Nathan Lee explained on Wednesday—is that the festival’s riskier independent and foreign selections (to say nothing of its under-publicized experimental sidebar or restored B&W choices, like John Ford’s 1924 western The Iron Horse) must be counterbalanced by an ample serving of middle of the road, Oscar-baiting fluff pictures. The happy surprise of 2007 is that two of America’s most established (if not establishment) directors have come to the festival with complacency-rattling smart bombs disguised as go-down-easy pop masterpieces.

That’s not to say that by comparison this year’s NYFF has a weak international field. It is true that the movie this reviewer has been anticipating most for the last seven months, Jacques Rivette’s Ne touchez pas la hache, finally got its North American premiere three weeks ago in Toronto and won’t hit a Manhattan theater until November. Neverthless, you can’t exactly complain about a NYFF playlist that includes new releases from Bela Tarr, Eric Rohmer, Jia Zhangke, and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Jia and Hou alone are considered among the world’s finest working directors. Unfortunately, because several of the most adventurous foreign pictures will not be screened for us journos until after press time, I can only tell you that I hear good things from colleagues who have already caught some of these films at other festivals.