Film Comment Selects: Intriguing cinematic offerings

One of the great joys of attending any film festival is the experience of discovering a movie for the first time, to sit down without any preconceptions and to emerge with your mind expanded and your perspective shifted.

There's a flip side to that, of course. Entrusting your moviegoing experience to a team of festival programmers leaves you exposed to their whims and desires.

There's a serious measure of trust involved, and the credentials of the curators matter.

Fortunately, those credentials don't get much better than the editors of Film Comment, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's venerable publication. So it's hard to go too wrong at the 14th annual Film Comment Selects, which is running now through Feb. 27.

These are some of the most intriguing options among the festival's 22 features:

'Enemy'

Jake Gyllenhaal reunites with "Prisoners" director Denis Villeneuve in this adaptation of José Saramago's novel "The Double," an absurdist story about a man and his very different doppelgänger. It's one of the festival's closing night features and it hits theaters March 14.

'Our Sunhi'

The great South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-Soo's latest movie focuses on a former college student named Sunhi who awakens strong romantic feelings in three different men when she returns to campus for a letter of recommendation. Hong received the best director award at the 2013 Locarno Film Festival for his efforts.

'The Sacrament'

Ti West, among the most exciting voices in horror filmmaking, returns with a found-footage flick about a religious cult that strongly resembles Jonestown. It's entertaining and creepy even if you know where it's going.

'The Carey Treatment' / ‘The Hospital’
The Film Comment Selects programmers are adept at reviving little-seen, or underappreciated, past features. They have deemed this double feature “Healthcare Mayhem.” First up is Blake Edwards’ 1972 thriller starring James Coburn as a pathologist investigating a teen’s death in the wake of an illegal abortion. Arthur Hiller’s 1971 flick “The Hospital,” scripted by the iconic Paddy Chayevsky, stars George C. Scott as the head of a troubled hospital.