NEW YORK, NY.- Every year, the New York Film Festival sets up a big tent at Lincoln Center and invites its hometown to the greatest show on Earth, or at least to watch some of the finest movies from across the world. This year is no different, with standout selections that include the opening-night attraction, “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’ tender, beautifully expressionistic adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel; “All We Imagine as Light,” Payal Kapadia’s delicately observed, stirring drama about three women living in Mumbai; and “Dahomey,” Mati Diop’s intellectually electrifying documentary about the fraught complexities of repatriation.

Over the decades, the festival’s tent has grown larger and its attractions more expansive. The main lineup and the Spotlight section feature a mix of established and lesser-known auteurs, as well as a smattering of stars. This is where you can find the recommended latest from Mike Leigh (“Hard Truths”) and Pedro Almodóvar (“The Room Next Door”), as well as the second and third parts of Wang Bing’s absorbing documentary trilogy about young people in China — “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming)” — which together run a whopping 378 minutes, about an hour longer than Julia Loktev’s 324-minute “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow,” about journalists in today’s Russia.

In 1963, its inaugural year, the festival presented 21 new feature films, and created a major stir. Not everyone on Lincoln Center’s board had been happy about the prospect of movies sharing space with the performing arts, with one member carping, “What’s next, baseball?” The festival programmers pushed on, and the film lovers came running. A critical and financial success, the ’63 iteration even made the cover of Time magazine, which trumpeted that the event “may well mark for Americans a redefinition of what movies are and who it is that sees them.” Six years later, the cultural legitimation of movies hit another milestone with the formation of what’s now known as Film at Lincoln Center, which runs the festival.

Given that such snobbism about movies now seems quaintly absurd, and given too the ubiquity of festivals, it can be difficult to convey what the New York Film Festival meant when it was founded. Although Cannes and Venice had been around for decades, festivals hadn’t yet emerged as the crucial international distribution network that they are now for smaller, less mainstream work. In 1963, the big Hollywood studios were releasing bloated epics like “Cleopatra,” and art houses and audiences were both quickly growing. Yet the movies still had a maddening reputation problem. In an editorial titled “The Film as Art” published the day the first festival opened, The New York Times made a sweetly sincere case for the event.

“Moviegoers and moviemakers are divided into two unequal parts in this country,” the editorial began. “The vast majority of the moviegoers go to see what the moviemakers call ‘product.’” The selections in the festival, by contrast, the editorial continued, “dignify movies in this country; tell the world that we too are interested in cultural efforts.” I’ve quoted these words before, and I’m sure that I laughed the first time I read them. Even so, they bear repeating given the state of the art and industry, especially in the United States, where movies are still referred to as product (and content) and the Oscar race tends to generate more attention than the movies do. These days, any defense of art bears repeating.

That defense is at the heart of every edition of the New York Film Festival, which is now a city institution and remains a bulwark against the industry’s inanity and triviality. Much has changed since it began, including the interval between when selections play in the event and when they’re released commercially. Some selections, like Sean Baker’s exuberant, raunchy romp “Anora,” which won top honors at this year’s Cannes, will be theatrically released soon. “Anora” opens Oct. 18, but events like New York are always about more than the individual selections. Film festivals are happenings, communal celebrations, spiritual gatherings and declarations of love for, and faith in, the movies as well as the moviegoing experience. They are where true believers like you and I can find our people.

This year’s event includes 73 features and scores of shorter works from around the world, making it a less Eurocentric, more thoroughly international showcase than it was in its earliest incarnations. Among the must-sees is “No Other Land,” a documentary from Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who, in a directors’ statement, describe themselves “as a Palestinian-Israeli group of activists and filmmakers.” Shot over five years, it is an intimate, gravely harrowing chronicle of life in the Palestinian community of Masafer Yatta, in the occupied West Bank, where residents struggle to stay put as the Israeli military bulldozes their homes into rubble. The movie has been rightly praised since it had its premiere at the Berlin film festival in February, but doesn’t yet have American distribution.

Tickets to this year’s New York event are selling out fast, though unsurprisingly it is the splashier, starrier selections — like Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” — that are in the greatest demand. Set in the aftermath of World War II, this sumptuous historical epic tracks a Hungarian Jewish architect (a great Adrien Brody), a survivor of the Holocaust, as he finds and all but loses his way in the United States. Consistently beautiful and brilliantly acted (Guy Pearce, Guy Pearce, Guy Pearce!), the movie runs three hours and change, including an intermission. It’s a great big swing from Corbet, who has set out to make a magnum opus about the States in the vein of “There Will Be Blood,” one that will inspire much critical thumb-sucking.

Other high-profile offerings include “Blitz,” a touching period story of love and survival from Steve McQueen, last at the festival with “Occupied City.” Set during World War II during the conflagration of the title, when Nazi Germany began dropping thousands of bombs on London, “Blitz” centers on the parallel journeys of a white mother (Saoirse Ronan) and her young Black son (Elliott Heffernan), who are separated soon after the story begins. Tender and intimate, the movie initially brings to mind John Boorman’s film “Hope and Glory,” but McQueen charts his own steady course with altogether lovely performances and a nuanced take on what war, both the global and the more harrowingly personal, means for this child.

Like other festivals, New York has its favorite auteurs, and among its dependable favorites is the dependably prolific Hong Sangsoo, back again at Lincoln Center with two new movies. In the drolly funny, often delightful “A Traveler’s Needs,” Isabelle Huppert plays a low-key French adventurer who’s landed in a Seoul, South Korea, suburb, perhaps permanently. There, she drifts through the streets and in and out of different homes, where she delivers amusingly unorthodox French-language lessons to an assortment of receptive, at times baffled Korean clients, finding connections amid the miscommunications. Huppert is one of the marvels of contemporary cinema, and it’s very pleasurable watching her navigate Hong’s world.

Over the years, as the festival expanded the number of selections and the types of movies it shows, it also branched out geographically, and there are now (limited) screenings in all five boroughs. It continues to present revivals and this year is showcasing a dozen restored titles, including “Compensation” (1999) from independent filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis, and “Bona” (1980), from great Filipino auteur Lino Brocka. If you want to know if the nails studding Pinhead’s noggin now gleam more threateningly in Clive Barker’s horror classic “Hellraiser” (1987), here’s your chance. There are plenty of tickets available for all of the restorations; if you’re a student, remember to bring your ID to get a discount.

Tickets can be expensive at major festivals, but there are always reasonably priced options here, especially in Revivals and Currents, a section that features more experimental work. If you’re a member of Film at Lincoln Center, you receive a discount to both festival tickets and its year-round programming. If you’re eager to see “Dahomey,” for instance, it’s less expensive to see it at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens than at Lincoln Center. If you’re eager to see something that’s sold out, you may want to try the standby lines, which form the day of on a first-come, first-serve basis. Rush tickets ($15) may be available, so it’s a good idea to regularly check the festival’s website, filmlinc.org — worlds await you.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.