The press screenings at the 44th New York Film Festival came to a close yesterday with a repeat screening of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. (Public screenings continue until tomorrow.) We're sad to report that even a second helping and personal appearances by Coppola, Kirsten Dunst, and Jason Schwartzman couldn't make the sugary confection that is Marie Antoinette any more filling. Marcy came in with an open mind, very much wanting to embrace the film. The first third, in fact, she found enormously satisfying as the fourteen-year-old Marie Antoniette, clutching her little dog, leaves her native Austria to marry a man she has never met. Together, Dunst and Coppola capture the enormity of journey. And then, alas, the champagne and the cake and the music overwhelm a misguided attempt to tell a genuine story. Check back for footage from the Marie Antoinette press conference soon.

The buzz this week was that David Lynch decided to distribute his three-hour freak-out INLAND EMPIRE himself. In the meantime, you can watch a few minutes from his short film "Rabbits" online. The bizarre sitcom, which features characters with bunny masks and the voices of Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring, shows up at important moments in INLAND EMPIRE. Here's what else we saw as the festival was winding down:

Our Daily Bread
Koyaanisqatsi without Philip Glass and more butchery: in Our Daily Bread, Nikolaus Geyrhalter observes the industrialized production of food, from cucumbers and tomatoes to olives, salt, and fish as well as beef, pork, and chicken. Except for casual snippets overheard during worker's poignant lunch breaks, there is no dialogue-just striking images: men crawling after a neon-lit vehicle on their knees to harvest salad at night; scientists analyzing bull sperm like science fiction aliens conducting bizarre experiments; workers in hazmat suits spraying enormous hothouses growing bell peppers; chicken getting vacuumed off the floor by the hundreds; machines specifically designed to gut pigs.

What Geyrhalter finds at the intersection of biology and mass consumption, again and again, is the conveyor belt: everything we eat sooner or later gets ripped from mother nature's bosom and shuffled mercilessly toward civilization's insatiable maw. Geyrhalter saves the killing floor for last, and it's impossible to watch the endless, efficient slaughter without thinking of the trains that ran (on time) to Auschwitz. An eerily beautiful and profoundly unsettling documentary.

Pan's Labyrinth
In what seemed to be everybody's favorite festival movie, Guillermo del Toro mashes up fairy tales with the Spanish Civil War. The evil fascist stepfather is played by With a Friend Like Harry's Sergi Lopez, the caring maid by Maribel Verdú (Y Tu Mama Tambien.) The outstanding Ivana Baquero plays Ofelia, the adolescent girl at the center of the story which connects a grim reality straight out of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls with a mythical storyline, fairy-tale elements, and the sort of gnarly CGI creatures that Terry Gilliam only wished he'd had the budget for in The Brothers Grimm. Some of the images--liquor seeping through gauze, fairies chomping down on raw bacon, a ghoul with eyes in his hands--are bound to haunt for a long time to come. We'll have a full-length review soon; Pan's Labyrinth will close the festival tomorrow night and is scheduled for U.S. release on December 29, 2006.

All coverage from the 44th New York Film Festival: Weeks 1 , 2, and 3 with coverage of Volver, The Host, Little Children, 49 Up, The Queen, Woman on the Beach, Paprika, August Days, Mafioso, and Belle Toujours.