Royal women—Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette—dominated last year’s New York Film Festival. A disparate collection of males reigned this year, from both sides of the camera.

In the opening night film, Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, three emotionally stunted brothers sought to exorcise their father's ghost during a journey through India.

The centerpiece movie was the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, aptly described in the program as a “tough novel of masculine madness.”

Eighty-three-year-old Sydney Lumet impressed with Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, the story of two dissolute New York siblings (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) who plot to rob their parents’ jewelry store.

And brothers played by Willem Dafoe and Mathew Modine were at the heart of Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, a surprisingly poignant comedy set in a New York strip-club.

Musical males were prominent during the festival fortnight. With Bob Dylan as an elusive referent, Todd Haynes pieced together a collage using six different actors (including Cate Blanchett) in I’m Not There. Dylan was also the subject of the concert documentary The Other Side of the Mirror; and Peter Bogdanovich tried to capture the essence of rocker Tom Petty in his four-hour-thirteen-minute documentary Runnin’ Down a Dream: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel delved into the remarkable true story of a French fashion editor trapped in his own paralyzed body. Funnyman Don Rickles was profiled in Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project.

Almost as yuk-worthy was director John Landis’ post-screening press conference. Brian De Palma, making his NYFF debut with the Iraq-themed Redacted, publicly squabbled with representatives of the film’s distributor who were in the audience during his strange sit-down with journalists. The schedule included Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: The Final Cut, about which enough ink has been spilt. And venerable he-man helmer John Ford got a micro retrospective with screenings of Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and his 1924 silent film The Iron Horse.

But not every standout among the 28 feature-length films was by an American. Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr brought The Man From London; Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astree and Celadon, reportedly his last film, unspoiled; and South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine met with praise.

Michael Lynne and Robert Shaye presided over the festival’s major social event, New Line Cinema’s 40th Anniversary Gala, a black-tie shindig that raised $2 million toward a new home for the festival’s parent organization, the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

While it was raining men on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, women were also ably represented by, among others, Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress, starring Asia Argento (also featured in Go Go Tales) and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s Actresses. Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh played sisters in Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding; and Mother Earth was the real star of Silent Light, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ transfixing work concerning an adulterous Mennonite farmer who is saved, after a fashion, by the two ladies in his life.

For sheer uniqueness, though, nothing could top the closing-night film, Persepolis, an animated movie from France about a girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution, co-directed by Marjane Satrapi and based on her graphic novel. For all its “masculine madness,” the 45th New York Film Festival gave the last word to a woman with a timely political perspective.