Cream of the Crop Rises to Top at New York Film Fest : Movies: The prestigious event offers 27 features and documentaries, many of which have already won critical acclaim. It starts tonight with Robert Altman’s ‘Short Cuts.’

Elliott Wilhelm, who has attended the last 20 New York Film Festivals on behalf of the Detroit Institute of the Arts, calls it the “fillet of film festivals.”

David Sterritt, film critic for the Christian Science Monitor and a past member of the selection committee, says its annual fall program represents “la creme de la creme” of international film.

Richard Pena, the chairman responsible for its choices, sums it up as a “feast of global views” and says he hopes there is something in it for most sophisticated tastes.

All these culinary metaphors are not wasted on the prestigious New York Film Festival, which serves its first course, Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” tonight at Lincoln Center, and its dessert, Jane Campion’s “The Piano,” Oct. 17.

Not this year, anyway. If past programs have seemed a tad arcane, and a bunch dull, the cream has definitely risen to the top for the 31st. Of the 27 features and documentaries selected by Pena and the other four members of his committee, 15 already have U.S. distributors, and there are enough prize winners and audience hits from other festivals to give this one the onus of an all-star game.

Altman’s “Short Cuts” shared the top prize at the recent Venice Film Festival with Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors: Blue.” New Zealander Campion’s “The Piano” shared Cannes’ Golden Palm award with Hong Kong director Chen Kaige’s “Farewell, My Concubine.” The Kieslowski and Kaige films are also in the program.

Add to that foursome British director Mike Leigh’s “Naked,” winner of the best director and best actor awards at Cannes, American independent Victor Nunez’s “Ruby in Paradise,” winner of the Grand Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung’s “The Scent of the Green Papaya,” named best first feature at Cannes, and . . . as Spencer Tracy once said of Katharine Hepburn, there may not be much there, “but what there is is cherce.”

“Because we’re small and finite, we can take our time and get what we think are the best films out there,” Pena says. “We didn’t set out to get films that already had seals of approval. There was just more unanimity this year than I have ever experienced before.”

That unanimity set in at Cannes in May, where a bumper crop of great international films seemed to lift the venerated festival out of a decade-long slump. The American press concentrated most on “The Piano,” which stars Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel as illicit lovers in 19th-Century New Zealand. But there was plenty of excitement elsewhere.

“Farewell, My Concubine,” which tracks the social-political history of modern China through the lifelong relationship of two opera stars, was one of four provocative Asian films that tilted Cannes toward the East, and all four are in the New York program.

The rest of the Asian contingent is Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “The Puppetmaster,” about life under Japanese rule in China; Tian Zhuangzhuang’s “The Blue Kite,” set in the paranoid atmosphere of 1950s-60s China; and “The Scent of the Green Papaya,” a reminiscence on the life of a young woman growing up as a servant in French Colonial Vietnam.

At Cannes, and at subsequent festivals, the buzz grew equally loud over a trio of UK films that are rejoined in New York.

Leigh’s “Naked” stars David Thewlis as a London drifter who is equal parts sadist and charmer. Ken Loach’s “Raining Stones” is an ultimately upbeat tale about a working-class stiff’s desperate attempts to get money for a dress for his daughter’s first Communion. And Stephen Frears’ “The Snapper,” made for British TV but set for a theatrical release in the United States by Miramax, is a hilarious and moving father-daughter story adapted from the sequel to the novel that inspired Alan Parker’s “The Commitments.”

In addition to the program’s safe fest faves, the world premiere of Tim Burton’s stop-motion animated “Nightmare Before Christmas,” and promising documentaries on Leni Riefenstahl and Orson Welles, the program does stick its neck out, at least once:

Derek Jarman’s “Blue” uses voice-over narration, music and sound effects to express the filmmaker’s observations about living with AIDS, while the audience is left to stare at an unchanging cobalt-blue screen for 70 minutes.