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Barbara Albert's Altman-by-way-of-Austria was the least impressive movie I saw at the festival. Following the life of a woman named Manu, the only survivor of a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico, Free Radicals branches off into the troubled lives of her satellites, her friends who fight off loneliness with the same fervor that she does. Their circumstances are no less tragic to them; one overweight woman is so despondent in her loneliness that she throws herself in front of a train (and survives, ridiculously). Another fights with an older, crippled lover who beats her if she comes in late. Manu's daughter dances briefly and sweetly with a guitarist who plays `San Francisco' for her in a subway station. The idea here is that we are all interconnected, but the movie plays this with embarrassing sentimentality. It has its moments-I love the scene where members of a church choir sing along with `Nights in White Satin' in a darkened pub-but overall, Free Radicals feels juvenile.

Clint Eastwood uses his trademarked helicopter shots better then he ever has in Mystic River, and their meaning has extra portent here: God watches over us all, but is ironically not always present. Easily the director's best work since 1992's Unforgiven, it asks a parade of important questions about fate, which make it perfect movie-material, since films are all about, in Lars Von Trier's words, `the God's-eye-view.' Shot by Tom Stern in a burnished, nostalgic style that, even in its mostly present-day sequences, suggests that its characters are permanently mired down by the past, it begins with young Boston punk Jimmy Markum enticing his buddies Dave and Sean into scratching their names into freshly-poured cement. Dave is the last to print, but before he's done, he'll be lured by fear and insecurity into a car ride that changes his life for the worse.

Suddenly, before the horror of this situation fully sinks in, we're vaulted thirty years later into the boys' adult lives. Jimmy (Sean Penn), hair streaked gray and skin prison-weathered, is now the owner of a corner store, a longtime widower of a woman who bore him one daughter, Katie (Emily Rossum), then promptly died of cancer before she could see her husband free from a liquor store robbery rap. Now remarried to Annabeth (a tough Laura Linney), and with a new passel of children, Jimmy seems to have found equilibrium in his life. Meanwhile, Dave (Tim Robbins) is the haunted father of a boy who himself carries the weight of Dave's troubled past, who can't find the joy in simply playing baseball because he feels that his failures weigh on his dad even further. Dave is now married to Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), a shell-shocked housewife who dances as fast as she can to keep up with Dave's neuroses, but is soon to be overcome by an event that tests her faith in her husband's sanity.

The third in the triumvirate, Sean (Kevin Bacon), along with his partner Whitey (Laurence Fishburne, excellent as the film's one detached, reasonable character), is called out to a Boston crime scene. Sean has long since lost contact with his old friends, but the past is constantly hectoring him. Bedeviled by a damaged wife who ran away with their child and makes silent long-distance phone calls to her emotionally needy but distant husband (in the film's one overly-sentimental device), Sean has thrown himself wholly into his detective work as a way of forgetting all he's been through. When he and Whitey are called into his old neighborhood, Buckingham Flats, on a murder investigation, Sean knows this can't be good; Bacon's face shows the gravity of a life lived experiencing death in a myriad of forms.

Thus begins an overcast story that mirrors Unforgiven in profound ways. Whereas the Oscar-winning western explored the mercenary past of perpetrators who are constantly lying to each other and themselves, Mystic River takes the more difficult road in examining the indefensible crimes of victims: the crime of making wrong choices, of not fighting back, of not taking a stand and following long-held faiths in gods and loved ones. Because of this, Mystic River is one of the saddest movies I've ever seen, a whooshing, screaming peer into the lycanthropic existence of nightcrawlers who've been bitten by violence and betrayal.

Certainly the centerpiece of the film is a scene between Robbins and Marcia Gay Harden, where Dave's demons come raring to the surface in a room illuminated only by the flickering image of a horror film on the television. Robbin's eyes burn through the screen as he brings us into Dave's firefly-ridden world of werewolves, vampires, and aliens. The allegory is quite apt, and heartbreaking, just as the stories of such horror characters often are; once infected, victims like Dave only have to wait for the soul's full moon before they are once again transformed into a monster that knows not what he or she does. Robbins' performance is a standout in his career, and certainly marks him as the frontrunner for a slew of yearend awards. He is tortured, panicked, darkened, confused, and dead inside. Harden, too, stands out in this cast, with a character that's buffeted between truth and fiction, between perceived loyalty to a husband she's starting to mistrust, and a larger morality that demands she do the right thing, even if it might be the wrong thing.

Eastwood is lucky to have Stern's shadowy yet sun-drenched photography at his disposal-it makes Mystic River into a sullen tone poem. Eastwood's longtime collaborators also make essential contributions: Joel Cox's editing is tensely precise, particularly in the film's final third; production designer extraordinaire Henry Bumstead (whose credits, incredibly, include Vertigo, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Sting, and Slaughterhouse-Five) produces a Boston that is palpably real, and closing in on its inhabitants; and composer Lennie Niehaus, who takes second billing to Eastwood for the (mostly) subtle, piano-driven score that hardly ever pushes our buttons. And we must pay tribute to Brian Helgeland's driven script, his best since his dealings with Curtis Hanson on L.A. Confidential. Working from novelist Dennis Lehane's best-selling source material, he and Eastwood have fleshed out an intimate, tasteful, cynical look at those who let themselves be whisked away and ruined by wickedness, and those follow but refuse to feel bad about it.

Errol Morris has always been fascinated with characters that make excuses for their past offences. In Mr. Death, he pointed his famous, intimacy-capturing Interratron camera at a specialist in capital punishment who was trying to construct the kinder, gentler electric chair before he was unknowingly duped by hubris-exploiting white supremacists into proving-in his mind and theirs-that the Jewish Holocaust never happened. What makes The Fog of War so amazing, and so perfect for our times, is the fact that it sympathetically examines Robert S. McNamara, leader of a World War II raid on Tokyo that killed 100,000 people, the man who claims that he introduced safety features like seat belts to the Ford Motor company (even though it was probably the eventually-crushed Preston Tucker who did this), and was the often hawkish Secretary of Defense under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (and therefore both advised on the saving of the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the destruction of it during the Vietnam War). Morris unerringly points his camera at a man who, at the end of his life, is making a serious reevaluation of his world-changing actions, and is sincerely worried, moved to think, that he may have made the wrong choices.

In this way, it makes a perfect companion piece to many of the films at the New York Film Festival this year. Richard Pena, the festival's programmer, is known to make his politics obvious in his and his jury's choices, and this year, in the midst of this country's and, unfortunately, his world's often dubious moral selections, he is wondering if the paths we are taking are the correct ones. Over and over again, particularly in the movies that I chose to see at the festival, is seems that the theme is `We better think, and think hard, about what we are doing, because it is just that which will determine what we will do in the future' Of course, this isn't all up to Pena-it's obviously a theme the filmmakers are they themselves coming to. We are on the verge of a new era in moviemaking, and the concerns of it are before us in these works at the 41st New York Film Festival. Morris' The Fog of War made me realize this.

At the press conference after the film, Morris stated that he began this film before the events of 9/11 visited us. He also admitted, when one journalist asked him if he liked Robert S. McNamara, that, yes, he did indeed like him, amazingly, even though Morris actively demonstrated against his policies during the 1960s. If anything proves the remittable side of truly progressive minds, this does. Here, on film, is forgiveness towards a once apparently inhuman human that, at one point, from the filmmaker's perspective, seemed impossible to achieve. The Fog of War is a document of understanding, of compassion, of repentance, reflection and humanism. Edited with quicksilver style, scored with Philip Glass' unmistakable tonal existential dread, and photographed with peculiar beauty (Morris admitted some of his favorite shots of the film involve padded skulls being dropped from great heights, all in the service of illustrating McNamara's obsession with greater car safety), it's a masterpiece just as are the rest of Morris' career works.