To say that NYFF 2008 is a total letdown would be overstating things. For one thing, the movie I have most looked forward to, Steven Soderbergh’s five-hour Benicio Del Toro-helmed biopic Che, hasn’t even previewed yet for critics (it will screen for the public on October 7). Moreover, the sidebars, as always, rule. On the avant-garde end alone, there’s theorist Guy Debord’s 1978 oddity, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, as well as James Benning’s RR, a two-hour feast of watching trains go by. And then restoration-wise, on October 4, the landmark Zeigfeld Theater will host NYFF’s screening of a new version of Max Ophul’s last film, the long chopped-up masterpiece, Lola Montès (1955).

The only picture Ophuls ever shot in color, Lola Montès is also in CinemaScope. Lusty, overcooked, and fashionably jaded, it’s the story of a nineteenth-century femme fatale and the men she beds (who include a Prussian King, Franz Liszt, and a young Peter Ustinov) before ending up, in her later years, as a circus freak. Ophuls was purportedly interested in everyone but the title character (“that woman doesn’t interest me”), but the main attraction here is his gliding camera, which somehow manages to snake through complex interiors without ever seeming intrusive.

Eastwood’s Changeling is the festival’s nominal centerpiece selection, but it is Lola Montès that is the heart of this year’s program. It is therefore worth remembering that Ophuls’s swan song was a flop upon its initial release. NYFF 2008 may only be as good as what’s out there, but for better or for worse what’s out there isn’t going to look the same to us fifty-three years from now.