Alexander Payne’s The Descendants was the Closing Night film of the 49th New York Film Festival, which concluded last night. Fox Searchlight will release the film theatrically on November 18.

The Descendants suffers from George Clooney syndrome. No matter how ethically compromised the character played by the Oscar-winning actor—whether it’s the corporate downsizer specialist in Up in the Air or the assassin in The American—good-guy Clooney always embodies a sense of moral redemption, the actor’s innate benevolence beaming from his rugged, wrinkled face. In the new Alexander Payne movie, the Clooney character, lawyer Matt King, is nowhere near as inherently loathsome as in some of his other recent roles; the worst that can be said of him is that he has neglected his family to focus on his career.

But the need to vindicate this occasionally prickly character necessitates an unnecessary if structurally significant plotline involving the character in a decision on whether or not to sell a large and valuable plot of ancestral Hawaiian land to developers. (Guess which choice Clooney’s character makes?) And yet, this easy bit of moral reckoning is foreign to the rest of Payne’s film, a work that often veers into questionable directions only to perpetually right itself by uncovering unsuspected layers of complexity in its characters and situations.

Essentially a coming-to-terms-with-grief family drama, The Descendants focuses on patriarch King and his two daughters, 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller), both undergoing their own forms of teen and preteen rebellion in the wake of a freak motor boat accident that has left their mother a vegetable. Mining edgy, somewhat vulgar humor that sometimes verges on the sort of cruel caricaturing that made notorious such earlier Payne efforts like About Schmidt, as well as a surprising vein of earnestness in its attitude toward the struggles of family life, The Descendants follows Matt as he discovers and investigates his wife’s past infidelity, tries to connect in a more meaningful way with his girls and makes frequent visits to his soon-to-be-deceased spouse’s deathbed.

As in many a film dealing with tragedy, grief exacerbates existing tensions and Payne is shrewd in the way that he uses the mother’s limp, brain-dead body as a sounding board for everyone’s angers, grievances and regrets, an easy receptacle for feelings whose real aim is always a less passive target than the dying woman. Treading such treacherous grounds, aiming for grace and humor in equal measure, the director commits his share of missteps, such as the introduction of an obnoxious teenage stoner who often feels like little more than a target for sneering laughter. But while that character’s presence is never fully justified, even he’s granted his moment of humanity—as is the film’s most vicious presence, Matt’s reproachful father-in-law. Only a final ill-advised one-two punch that follows up the inevitable morality play with an off-note of sentimentality tips the scales away from the delicate balance that the film had managed so skillfully to maintain throughout the rest of its running time.

Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist played this weekend at the 49th New York Film Festival. The Weinstein Company will release the film theatrically on November 23.

A project of such stupefying irrelevance as The Artist doesn’t come around often. Conceived as a pastiche of silent film, presumably covering the years 1927-1933 in which the mute movie breathed its last and in which the action of the current project takes place, Michael Hazanavicius’s failed experiment in retro-stylizing achieves a sleek pish-posh look that seems to reflect less a knowledge of how late silent films looked and behaved than a desire to cook up a glossy stylistic stew. There’s a little German Expressionism, an iris-out here and there, a lengthy snippet from the Vertigo soundtrack. None of it matters; it’s all completely dehistoricized and grab-bag random.

Telling once again the story—in its dullest, least inspired form—of a silent film star (Jean Dujardin) unable to make the adjustment to the talkies and a younger ingénue primed for success in the new format (Bérénice Bejo), The Artist punts narrative and characterization in favor of style, but as a pure exercise in look, it’s more or less worthless. Technically skillful and handsome enough as an object, the film has little understanding of, and nothing to say about, movie history or the nature of the cinematic medium. Hazanavicius employs intertitles, shoots in academy ratio, and, with the exception of one dream sequence and the film’s ending, fills the soundtrack with nothing except a persistent musical score. But as quickly becomes evident in watching The Artist, it takes far more than a facility at mimicking the most superficial aspects of classic Hollywood to capture the essence of what made the films from one of the cinema’s most productive periods worthy of lasting memory.

Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre plays Sunday, Monday and Wednesday at the 49th New York Film Festival; Janus Films will release the movie theatrically on October 21.

The first two scenes in Le Havre, Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s latest deadpan fable, conjure an air of menace and frustration—but most of the rest of the film is refreshingly good-natured. Wizened shoeshiner Marcel Marx (André Wilms), who plies his trade in the eponymous French port town, is introduced blackening the boots of a customer when sinister figures emerge at the corners of the screen, the director cutting in to their comically expressionless faces. After these men carry off Marx’s customer, they offer him a pittance for his business losses, which is more than he gets in the second scene, when he’s rudely booted from his perch in front of a department store.

In just a few minutes of screen time, the film establishes that specifically Kaurismäkian world of sad-sack losers, humorously incongruous but uncommented-upon presences, and the director’s trademark careful attention to visages, generally shot straight on and accented by exaggerated lighting. In fact the world of Le Havre can be said to consist of a succession of friendly faces and comically sinister figures—one of whom, in a film heavy with allusions to French literature and cinema, is played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. But positive vibes dominate this go-round as Marx takes an African refugee, a young boy escaped from a shipping crate at the docks, into his home, helps him elude the authorities (represented by an ever-present police inspector in black hat, black trench coat, black leather gloves, and a grey moustache) and escape via boat for London. Along the way he’s helped by a community of friends and sympathetic companions as well a few surprising turns of fate (whose lack of narrative credibility Kaurismäki has fun with).

But despite the film’s feel-good tone and its staging of a few rather spectacularly humorous sequences (Marx intimidating a refugee center director, the detective entering a bar carrying a pineapple while he draws stares from the locals), the specter of death and detention hangs perpetually over the proceedings. The former emerges via Marx’s terminally ill wife and her anguished face, which Kaurismäki honors with a conspicuous zoom-in early in the film; the latter comes courtesy of the refugee storyline and provides the film with one of its most haunting moments. When the police open the crate by the docks to reveal a population of Africans, the director cuts out the music, and picks out a succession of close-ups which simply stare back at the camera. But it’s the convergence of the two storylines—via a meeting of the refugee boy, Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) and Mrs. Marx at the latter’s hospital bed—that provides the project with its sentimental highlight. Suddenly, Idrissa goes from being a black cipher in a white person’s story to a young man of precocious understanding and a natural generosity matching that of Kaurismäki in crafting his irrepressible latest.