With a few honorable exceptions, the New York Film Festival, now in its ninth year, has come to mean timorous experiments and feeble works from "name" directors. Some representative features this year:
FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER Robert Bresson? Surely not the Robert Bresson. The director whose work (Diary of a Country Priest; Mouchette) has the bite and permanence of a woodcut? It seems inconceivable that Bresson could have confected this pastel romance. Everything in it has been said before in cheap yellowbacked French novels. A boy, Jacques (Guillaume des Forets), spies a girl,...