Buzz is a funny thing. Some of the most talked about movies of the past year won’t see anything close to an American theatrical release, no matter how much affection is heaped on them by critics and bloggers.

Take the French horror film “À l’intérieur,” from the first-time directing duo of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury. It’s one of the most edge-of-the-seat, fingers-over-the-eyes flicks in recent memory. At once darkly stylish and shockingly violent, the film’s minimalist scenario builds to an agonizing peak of sustained tension that is the essence of grindhouse. Yet, like all things once disreputable, it skews toward a sophisticated audience that can pick up on its horror-geek allusions: It’s equal parts cinephilia and hemophilia.

Yet the Weinstein Company, which owns the American rights to distribute the film, is dispatching “Inside,” as it’s known in English, straight to DVD next month. Go figure.

“Inside” is one of 26 features (plus a collection of shorter pieces) that will be screened during the next two weeks in the annual Film Comment Selects series at Walter Reade Theater. The event began as a way for Film Comment magazine, published six times a year by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, to expose the sometimes hard-to-see films that its writers celebrate. Since the late 1990s, distribution of once-obscure international and independent fare has improved, so the screenings offer less of that sense of discovery that draws critics to the festival circuit.

If the Weinsteins are blowing their chance at opportunistically tagging “Inside” as a kind of “Juno Goes to Hell,” this tribute to maternal instinct nonetheless gets its fleeting due. The thriller concerns a young photojournalist (Alysson Paradis) who has survived a car accident that killed her husband and gravely injured another motorist, yet miraculously left her unborn child unharmed. On the night she sits alone in her empty house, preparing to leave for the hospital to give birth, a stranger materializes in darkness. What happens next is visceral, extreme, and puts a whole new twist on the recent cycle of comedies about surprise pregnancies. It also marks an extraordinary performance by Béatrice Dalle (“Betty Blue”), still crazy after all these years — and yet, even awash in torrents of blood, so oddly sympathetic.

“Inside” is among the choice rarities on offer at Lincoln Center, joining previews of looming releases such as Olivier Assayas’s “Boarding Gate,” Jacques Rivette’s “The Duchess of Langeais,” and Grant Gee’s DVD-bound documentary “Joy Division.” Elsewhere, “Damon Packard’s Greatest Hits” is a program devoted to the Spielberg-obsessed anti-auteur, whose mash-up montages of 70s mass media are spliced together with his own maniacal detours through urban Los Angeles, where the increasingly obese cineaste appears lost between reels of a zombie movie and an off-off-Broadway production of “Hair.” Crispin Glover will make an appearance at a screening of “Rubin and Ed,” Trent Harris’s rarely seen 1992 follow-up to his underground classic “The Beaver Trilogy,” a true-life triptych about an Olivia Newton-John impersonator. Toss in a tribute to Alex Cox “Walker”, a revival of Richard Fleischer’s “Mandingo,” and the radical fantasia of Lukas Moodysson’s 2006 “Container” (making its American premiere), and it’s a beautifully gonzo bonanza.

“Our desire was to make it as diverse and interesting as possible,” Film Comment editor Gavin Smith said. “Not all French films. Not all horror films.”

But as long as he mentions it, “Inside” handily covers both bases.

Back when the film was making its festival rounds last fall, Messrs. Maury and Bustillo were enjoying the strong response that its most intense scenes provoked. The filmmakers wisely settled on the most primal of circumstances.

“There are a lot of pregnant women in fantastic movies, but it’s always like ‘Rosemary’s Baby,'” Mr. Bustillo said. “To have a pregnant woman in a realistic horror movie, it is maybe the first time.” The movie came to life after a friend of Mr. Bustillo’s became pregnant. “She was the first inspiration. I wondered what can she feel when she is alone at home at night. It could be very frightening.”

The directors, who spoke during an international horror and fantasy film festival in Sitges, Spain, last October, wanted to complicate audience response to the character. “We tried to make her not so sympathetic, she’s not nice,” Mr. Maury, a former critic for the French magazine Mad Movies, said. “It was a trick for us to begin a movie with a character like that. But for us, nothing is so black and white and simple. The line between good and evil is very thin.”

And what actress to better draw that line than Ms. Dalle? “It was a dream for us,” Mr. Maury said. “We wanted for the role a woman who can express a lot of feelings. She’s very charismatic and very animal. Very sexy and very frightening.”

Through February 28 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).