As the second week of the New York Film Festival approaches, Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There,” the remix of the Bob Dylan enigma, and Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park,” the cinema equivalent of headphone music, set the tone. Quite literally: The week’s best selections are unimaginable without their music. Sometimes an intimate relation arises between what you hear, see, and feel in these movies, and sometimes the movie itself achieves the psychic intimacy that you might associate with closing your eyes and listening.

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Flight of the Red Balloon” is usually described as adapting the classic 1956 children’s short, “Le Ballon Rouge,” by Albert Lamorisse. It’s as good a starting point as any, because “Flight” is the sort of gorgeous, graceful film that’s maddeningly hard to render with any fidelity. The exquisite piano score offers a way into the experience: like those omnipresent melodic études, “Flight” should be absorbed and lived with for a while, like a piece of music, to fully appreciate Mr. Hou’s sublime sensitivity.

“Flight” lives and breathes the moments in the world of the Parisian puppeteer Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), her son Simon (Simon Iteanu), a wandering balloon, the city itself, and the changing light. Suzanne, who runs a puppet theater, hires a Chinese student, Song (Song Fang), to help look after Simon. But Mr. Hou’s camera registers so much more than the particulars of Suzanne’s hectic life, subtly reframing medium shots in preternaturally attuned long takes.

One of the film’s reflexive touches has a piano tuner teasing out the sweet notes on the upright in Suzanne’s living room.

Ms. Binoche, not incidentally, gives one of the best performances of her career. Imbuing the frazzled, compassionate Suzanne with the moment-to-moment spark of engagement, she seems enlivened by the possibilities in Mr. Hou’s open sense of space and time. Never one of my favorite actresses, she seems capable of more here by not having to hit the marks of traditional drama.

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With “Go Go Tales,” directed by New York filmmaker Abel Ferrara, you might want to attend to its attractions now, since even its twirling exotic dancers and one critic’s apt comparison to Altman’s “A Prairie Home Companion” might not suffice to thrust the film into distribution. Willem Dafoe plays a big-hearted Bronx club impresario who desperately wants the show to go on, but his harridan landlord (Sylvia Miles) is giving him and his “scariest, sexiest” girls the boot. For Mr. Dafoe’s romantic, only a lottery ticket scheme can save his Club Paradise.

Capturing a night in the life, perhaps the last night in this homey joint’s life, the film is an affectionate backstage comedy of sorts, with a buffoonish tough-guy staff and a roving camera for the beautiful “goyls.” The club’s music throbs continuously, stringing together loose scenes and flare-ups, and Mr. Dafoe warbles a memorable solo. But while Mr. Ferrara’s work is usually tough, and tough-minded, he’s a little too content with letting “Go Go Tales” ride, leaning back and enjoying what feels like his own club.

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One of the festival’s documentaries, “The Axe in the Attic,” also screens this week. Returning verité legend Ed Pincus, partnering with Lucia Small, chronicle their encounters with survivors and exiles of Hurricane Katrina. Filmed six months after the disaster, “Axe” records hopeful but often damaged voices, as well as the housing aftermath, best taken in on the fest’s big screen.

“Axe” bolsters the slowly growing chronicle of the Katrina experience, which sometimes seems less represented in cinema than does the Iraq War, but the filmmakers’ injection of their own ethical and emotional conflicts feels misjudged.

Also worthy, though previewed too late for coverage, are “Alexandra,” by Alexander Sokurov, director of the single-shot “Russian Ark,” and Catherine Breillat’s “The Last Mistress,” which brings the incisive director’s eye to bear on a 19th-century French novel. And finally, if the Japanese court system is your bag, by all means endure “I Just Didn’t Do It”; Masayuki Suo’s tale of a commuter wrongly accused is the “Zodiac” of subway groping.