The Squid and the Whale director Noah Baumbach (R) plays hardball with Philip Lopate and the NYFF press corps (Photos: STV)

I have been alternately dreading and anticipating this day since mid-August: The New York Film Festival is set to pop in a few hours, flooding Reeler HQ with a torrent of activity, stress and reheated coffee.

Seriously, though—would any self-respecting film dork want it any other way? Haunting Lincoln Center this week has been one of the great privileges of my life, and I just have to get a few of the week's highlights and drags out of the way before the big gala charm-a-thon that is the Good Night, and Good Luck premiere.

First of all, the best thing I saw this week was neither Steven Soderbergh's spectacularly crafty class drama-cum-whodunit Bubble nor Geroge Clooney's well-received Good Night (the press screening clashed with my court-ordered community service) nor the tired Dardenne point-and-shoot prize-hog L'Enfant. No way. The best film I saw this week was the short Victoria Para Chino, NYU film student Cary Fukunaga's horrifying narrative about a group of immigrants crossing the Mexican border as a truck driver's cargo. Loosely based on a true story, Chino eschews politics for a more direct focus on the risks and rewards of the American dream; without judgment, fear or favor, Fukunaga asks once and once only what freedom is worth. The answer stunned everybody in the room, and you should try and gauge it yourself when Victoria Para Chino screens with Michel Negroponte's Methadonia tomorrow, Sept. 24, at 6 p.m. Meanwhile, stay tuned for a word here with Fukunaga (and hopefully news of additional screenings) when The Reeler finds its festival sea legs in the week ahead.

Capote director Bennett Miller looks on as Philip Seymour Hoffman struggles to approximate his character's peculiar voice for the crowd at the Walter Reade Theater

Yesterday, Philip Seymour Hoffman dropped by with director Bennett Miller to discuss their film Capote. Since the film screened at Telluride and Toronto, critical buzz places Hoffman in the Best Actor Oscar race's early lead, but perhaps it is just my malfunctioning suspension of disbelief that prevented me from getting with his lisp and half-determined hardest-working-man-in-literature affectations. He is great as Capote the social animal, but as Capote the author—capsized with ego and alcohol—I could not take Hoffman as seriously as he (and Miller, for that matter) appeared to take himself.

Filmmaker Noah Baumbach—a Brooklyn native and occasional Wes Anderson collaborator—made an appearance this morning to discuss his own festival hit, The Squid and the Whale. I plan to write more when the film opens Oct. 5, and while I would hate to insult Baumbach and his cast (including Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney and a frighteningly selfless Owen Kline) by diminshing their brilliant work, one of the reasons I enjoyed Squid so much was precisely because it is the type of great film I always see behind Wes Anderson's facade of pretense and irony and style and the other wispy stacks of shit he stuffs into his movies. Baumbach can write his ass off, and you can tell he really loves and knows his characters and trusts them with more of his insecurities than Anderson or Miranda July or Mike Mills or whoever the quirk-du-jour filmmaker of the moment is.

Of course, it is a semi-autobiographical film, so Baumbach had kind of a head start. "I wrote it in Brooklyn in the '80s because it was when I was a teenager, and it was important in approaching the material to connect to it emotionally," he told The Reeler in the Q&A following the screening. "The subway stations, the distance across (Prospect Park) and those things were all part of my life then. They were all a part of living in Brooklyn for me."

Next up: The Reeler hits the carpet for Opening Night. And God willing (or least a conveniently placed $50 bill), there may be a party crash in our future, but one thing at a time, OK?