3rd Palm Springs Film Fest: It’s a Contender : Movies: Top films from across the world screen. English-language works make a strong showing too.

The weeklong, third annual Palm Springs International Film Festival, which reached its halfway point during the weekend, looks to be another winner for this fledgling event. First-rate films are in abundance, attendance is strong and James Stewart, this year’s special honoree, heads a list of 30 actors, 27 directors, 10 producers, eight screenwriters and 45 distributors who have come from all over the world to participate.

“My feeling is that attendance is way up,” David Nicks, the festival’s executive director, said Saturday. “ ‘Lost in Siberia’ sold out on the first day. It is the first time, to my knowledge, that we’ve had a sellout on a weekday.”

“This year is a quantum leap,” said Marshall Stone, manager of the Courtyard Theater and a festival founder. “The festival has turned out at least 100 times better than I ever dreamed it would.”

“Enchanted April,” which opened the festival Wednesday at the landmark Spanish-style Plaza Theater, proved to be a shrewd choice on the part of the festival’s artistic director, Darryl Macdonald. A sort of genteel “Shirley Valentine,” it tells of the liberating effects of Italy upon four upper-class Englishwomen in the 1920s and is the kind of charming period piece that can’t seriously offend either glittering socialites or film lovers with appetites whetted for the more challenging fare to come.

Opening night benefited too from the radiant presence of its star, Miranda Richardson.

As it happened, “Enchanted April” was one of several films dealing with repressed or otherwise-tormented Anglo-Saxon sexuality. Somewhat similar but far more substantial was Charles Sturridge’s elegant and harrowing “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” based on E. M. Forster’s first novel and revealing the consequences of a snobbish attitude of moral superiority on the part of some rich, turn-of-the-century English (Judy Davis, Rupert Graves) toward a young Italian (Giovanni Guidelli) who has married one of their relatives (Helen Mirren).

There was more sexual hysteria to be encountered (or better still, avoided) in the Canadian “The Events Leading Up to My Death,” an off-the-wall comedy about a dysfunctional suburban family, and Dennis Potter’s “Secret Friends,” in which poor Alan Bates is caught up in a lurid and tedious nightmare of midlife crisis.

More often than not we tend to associate film festival offerings with subtitled fare, and while Palm Springs has been offering many excellent foreign-language films, there has been a surprisingly strong showing of films in English. Australian writer-director John Duigan’s “Flirting” is an absolute stunner, a story of first love between a bright, free-thinking prep school student (Noah Taylor) and a beautiful, self-possessed Ugandan (Thandie Newton), enrolled at a girls’ school across the lake. The film skewers the small-mindedness of such schools with their petty regulations, narrow views and naked racism; that the time is 1965, just as Idi Amin is coming to power, adds further dimension to the film, which screens tonight at 6 at the Courtyard.

Also from Australia: Jackie McKimmie’s rueful and pertinent comedy on the perils of surrogate motherhood, “Waiting.” Meanwhile, Michael Apted’s “35 Up” adds yet another absorbing and provocative chapter to his study of a disparate group of English men and women, whom he has interviewed every seven years since they were seven years old.

American independent films have been represented impressively in the festival by “Samantha,” which represents 11 years of persistence on the part of first-time director Stephen Larocque and his writer, John Golden; and by director Matthew Irmas’ and writer Ann Wykoff’s “When the Party’s Over.” (The latter screens Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. at the Courtyard.)

The first stars Martha Plimpton as a talented, headstrong young woman who learns on her 21st birthday that she’s been adopted. In the second, Rae Dawn Chong is one of three young women caught up in establishing their careers in contemporary Los Angeles. Both films afford star-making roles for their lead actresses, and the second is already being billed “ ‘The Big Chill’ of the ‘90s.”

For sheer good acting, there’s Athol Fugard and Peter Goldsmid’s adaptation of Fugard’s play “Road to Mecca,” a highly theatrical but deeply moving account of an eccentric, aged folk artist (Yvonne Bryceland), who has filled her back yard with chicken wire-and-cement life-sized statuary.

Among the many fine foreign films are Sven Nykvist’s “The Ox” (Wednesday at 9 p.m. at the Plaza), a darkly poetic telling of the harsh fate of a peasant who steals to feed his family during a Swedish famine of the 1860s; Chen Kaige’s “Life on a String,” a gorgeous and spectacular fable from China; and a pair of wonderfully risque contemporary sex farces from Mexico: Alfonso Cuaron’s “Love in the Time of Hysteria,” about the fate of an incorrigible Don Juan, and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s ultra-erotic “Homework,” which amusingly verges on the hard core (screening Tuesday at 3 p.m. at Camelot One).

No festival is complete without an all-out disaster, and Nicolas Roeg’s “Cold Heaven,” a suspense thriller with a theme of spiritual redemption, more than qualifies. Neither director nor stars Theresa Russell and Mark Harmon were on hand for the debacle, but their capable co-star James Russo was in the audience to hear all the unintended laughter.