Last month the Film Society of Lincoln Center hosted its 52nd annual New York Film Festival, undeniably the city’s most important cinematic event, and therefore an ideal setting to see the state of narrative filmmaking today.

Chris Marker’s latest film, The Case Of The Grinning Cat, was originally released in France in 2004, and played in last Spring’s Tribeca Film Festival. Wandering the streets in search of a response to the current state of the nation, Marker finds himself taken by these unexplained images of cats, which, for him, must be connected to political discontent.

Matt Peterson on Michael Haneke’s 1989 debut The Seventh Generation and the Brecht-inspired Lars von Trier’s Manderley.

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1985 Hail Mary, coming twenty years after Contempt, and twenty years before Notre Musique, springs from smack in the middle of the no-man’s land that was Godard in the ’80s. ...