At New York Film Festival, Stiller and Cineaste Fodder A Ben Stiller comedy in the New York Film Festival? Well, why not? Four years ago, amid complaints that the festival expressed a snobbish, ivory-tower contempt for movies as popular entertainment, such a possibility seemed unthinkable. But those complaints were heard. Since then, the festival, now in its 51st year, has expanded and developed what might be described as a split personality. Mr. Stiller's film "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," adapted from the James Thurber short story, is a sweet, likable studio-financed romp that is as family friendly as the 1947 Hollywood adaptation starring Danny Kaye as milquetoast with a rich fantasy life. It also happens to be the official centerpiece of this year's festival. Disgruntled cineastes may wonder what's ahead, "Grown Ups 3"? The updated "Walter Mitty," directed by Mr. Stiller, who plays a photo editor for Life magazine on a quest to find a missing still, is mainstream entertainment with blockbusting aspirations whose fantasy and adventure sequences incorporate whiz-bang C.G.I. Kristen Wiig plays Walter's dream girl and Shirley MacLaine his mother. Mr. Stiller's Walter is a wide-eyed man-child who demonstrates superhuman daring when under pressure. But fear not, highbrow cinephiles. For every "Walter Mitty," there is a selection like the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's "Stray Dogs," a nearly wordless exercise in Asian miserablism, about a down-and-out father who lives with two children in an abandoned building. What unfolds has the halting momentum of a series of exquisitely photographed tableaux vivants of modern life, many of which take place in a drenching downpour. The movie decelerates as it goes along, culminating with static shots that last as long as 10 minutes each. You may nod off, or you may swoon. Besides "Walter Mitty," the festival's populist side is represented by several British comedies, including Richard Curtis's "About Time." In it, Bill Nighy and Domhnall Gleeson (both of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows") play a suave, witty father and son who share a secret power that has been passed down for generations of men in their family: They can time-travel. Once Mr. Gleeson's character is told about this inheritance, he sets about reliving recent incidents in his life to go back and correct mistakes. "About Time" is also a touching male weepie about a family relationship without a trace of discord. Mr. Curtis, whose writing credits include "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Notting Hill," has a deft touch that infuses fantasy fluff with charm, pathos and an illusion of substance. The movie suggests a lighter answer to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." Parent-child bonds are also explored in "Like Father, Like Son," the great Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda's story of a successful architect and his wife who learn that their son was switched at birth by a hospital nurse with a boy from a working-class background. The two sets of parents meet and experiment with exchanging the children, whose points of view are given equal weight to their parents. Throughout the festival, history beats its drums. The Polish director Agnieszka Holland's magnificent docudrama, "Burning Bush," is a three-part mini-series made for HBO Europe that remembers the Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia following the Prague Spring. It begins with the death in 1969 of Jan Palach, a Czech student who set himself on fire as a political protest, and follows the diabolical attempts of the Soviet occupiers to blacken his name by portraying him as a fraud and right-wing tool. The film's depiction of the Communist regime's relentless harassment of his family and its sowing of paranoia within the student resistance recalls the 2007 film "The Lives of Others," about the Stasi's operations in East Berlin. In the sophisticated worldview of "Burning Bush," oppression may win in the short term, but the spark that ignites freedom movements, once lighted, can't be extinguished. Jehane Noujaim's documentary "The Square," filmed during the popular Egyptian uprising against Hosni Mubarak in Tahrir Square in Cairo puts you in the center of the action to the extent that the protesters" passion is so contagious, it seems to leap off the screen and into your heart. Events are described by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and by several liberals. Since "The Square" was first shown at the Sundance Film Festival, Ms. Noujaim returned to Egypt to shoot more footage that shows the evaporation of initial euphoria once the protesters realized that the oppressor wasn't just Mr. Mubarak but his entire regime. The adage that the personal is political is given a fresh and disturbing slant perspectives in Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson's documentary, "American Promise,,"" which follows two African-American boys from Brooklyn families on their paths to the elite Dalton School in Manhattan, which they entered in 1999. Because you watch the boys growing and changing over 14 years, "American Promise" has a lot in common with Michael Apted's "Seven Up" documentary series. At the same time, it suggests that even in the most liberal "post-racial" environment, perceptions of race and ethnicity are unavoidable impediments to both boys who are now college age. Some of the same concerns are addressed in the French director Arnaud Desplechin's "Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian." This intelligent, if somewhat ponderous film, adapted from a 1951 book by the French-American ethnologist and psychoanalyst Georges Devereux (played with a twinkling exuberance by the French actor Mathieu Amalric) follows Devereux's treatment of the title character at the Menninger Clinic in the late 1940s. Playing Jimmy, a Blackfoot Indian and World War II veteran who suffers from mysterious symptoms that resemble post-traumatic stress, Benicio Del Toro gives a restrained performance, bottled-up passion glinting from the corners of his eyes. As a cerebral contemplation of ethnicity and its discontents, "Jimmy P." advances the boundaries of cinematic inquiry. So does Alain Guiraudie's "Stranger by the Lake," in a completely different way. A murder story set at French gay cruising area, it contemplates the imperative of desire in the face of danger, and has explicit sex scenes. The story of two men, one of them the killer, who hook up in the woods next to the lake, evokes Alfred Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train," with its erotic subtext laid bare. A continuing thread in the festival is a "60s nostalgia, evidenced not only in this year's Godard retrospective, but also in new films like the Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu's "When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism," which wryly compares the process of filmmaking to conducting a relationship, and Philippe Garrel's "Jealousy," starring the director's son, Louis Garrel. Watching "Jealousy," filmed in black and white, you may feel transported to the late 1960s, when this director first made his mark and, in the movies, anything seemed possible. The New York Film Festival runs through Oct. 13; filmlinc.com.