NYT film critic Manohla Dargis talks about the New Directors/New Films festival taking place in New York over the next 12 days. An excerpt:

Now in its 35th year, the pocket-size New Directors/New Films festival serves New York cinephiles looking to take a trip around the cinema world — from Iceland to India and Ireland — in 12 days. This year's selection, which gets off to a strong start tonight with Ryan Fleck's drama "Half Nelson," allows you to catch sneak previews (about half of the features have distribution) and discover more rarefied works that may never make it to a theater near you — like the mesmerizing 162-minute German documentary "Into Great Silence," about Carthusian monks living in enveloping quiet in the French Alps, which shows next week.

New Directors makes no attempt to be all things to all people; there are no juggling clowns and dancing bears, just 32 dramas and documentaries, short form and long, for thinking adults. A joint venture of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Department of Film and Media at the Museum of Modern Art, the event is invariably eclectic and determinedly inclusive. There are films about Filipino kids on the verge of sexual awakening and Mexican outsiders on the brink of an entirely different kind of epiphany. While personal expression sometimes seems to matter more than production values, the embrace of world cinema remains the festival's most significant virtue, particularly given the unfavorable climate for foreign-language film distribution.