The 44th New York Film Festival opens tonight with Stephen Frears’s “The Queen,” so inaugurating another three weeks of known and unknown pleasures for the city’s moviegoers. The fare ranges from far-flung locales (Mali, Turkey, Iran, Thailand) to far-out minds (David Lynch and his latest mondo bizarro opus).

As always, the fall evenings seem made for minting new cinephiliac memories. It’s an autumn tradition in New York, which makes it fitting that memory plays a central role in a number of the films on display this year.

True to the often reflective bent of the festival’s selections, some of this year’s filmmakers have constructed notable works around repetitions and returns. It’s a way of exploring the pull of memory and the persistence of the stories that characters (and filmmakers) tell. Through a grab bag of approaches, some new films tease out the promises and pitfalls of nostalgia and draw us in through the intimacy of reexamined experience.

The standard-bearer for this group is not a more popularly anticipated work like Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” or Pedro Almodóvar’s “Volver,” but the latest by visionary Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, “Syndromes and a Century.” Like his last film, “Tropical Malady,” also a festival selection,”Syndromes” is a free-flowing film in two parts, a story told twice that creates its own universe of memory and desire. Part 1, which begins at a hospital in a Thailand of a few decades past, is a drifting tale of love and friendship lost and found. Part 2 restarts the same tale, with the same characters (unaged), but in the country’s sleeker, more modernized state of today.

The memory in question here is chiefly that of the filmmaker, who is partly recalling and then reworking the courtship of his parents (both doctors) and the vicissitudes of his homeland. But the repetition also draws the audience in through thwarted expectations. Both halves open with the same scene — a young female doctor interviewing a man for a position — and curlicue into a few other shared elements (a monk seeking pills, for example). But the second half soon deviates from the first’s tantalizing near-romances and interactions between doctors, a bashful soldier, a dentist, an orchid gardener. Instead, the film hardly makes it out of the hospital basement, frustrating us by neither repeating nor completing the events of its first part.

Like “Tropical Malady,””Syndromes” is probably the most complex and bewildering of this season’s dances with memory. Unlike “2046” or “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Mr. Weerasethakul prefers to forgo an explicit overarching premise and taps instead into a dreamlike lack of explanation. It’s clearer than the mystical tiger tale of “Malady”‘s second half but still plays with narrative desire and, more explicitly, a sense of national memory.

The repetition in “Belle Toujours” is easier to describe, but deceptively so and no less tantalizing.Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, now 98, has made an oddity, an art-house sequel. His follow-up to Luis Bunuel’s “Belle de Jour” revisits onetime housewife and part-time prostitute Severin (originally Catherine Deneuve, now Bulle Ogier) and her old menacing family friend Husson (Michel Piccoli, always). We rejoin the middle-agers at the moment of their own rediscovery and recognition: Husson spots Severin at a classical concert, but she quickly slips away.

His ensuing bar rambles and stalking of her may result in less than meets the eye, but Mr. Oliveira does conduct a curious experiment by unfreezing our conception of Bunuel’s devilish original. When Severin and Husson finally meet in a sumptuously appointed room set up by the latter, the inevitable anticlimax is that nothing has changed (he still torments her) and everything has changed (she doesn’t enjoy it, and leaves). Secrets remain, but, like the table candles melting to nothing, the spark of perversity has long gone, and the gap between the events of the two movies is suddenly less mysterious.

The urge to recapture lost lust, even rather soon after the fact, also lies at the center of Hong Sang-soo’s “Woman On the Beach”and its romantically insecure lead male character, Joong-rae (Kim Seung-woo).Mr. Hong’s use of doubling and expertly tuned emotional echoes underline Joong-rae’s clear obsession for love’s first spark and how it prevents him from advancing beyond the past.A struggling filmmaker, Joong-rae drags a colleague with a disinterested girlfriend, Moonsook (Go Hyun-jung), out to a beachside resort under grey skies, where he and Moon-sook end up making out. He abruptly drops her after one night, only to take up with a second woman who reminds him of her.

Not all the directors achieve as poignant and sensitively observed results as Mr. Hong (by now a festival fixture). Marc Recha’s ambitious “August Days” is a highly personal hybrid travelogue that restages actual wanderings by the director and his brother through Catalonia. Part of the search involves Mr. Recha’s attempt to reconstruct his recollections of a family friend. But the narrative, co-starring sprawling Iberian landscapes, is so unmoored that the movie feels like an adventurous nap daydream.

It is appropriate that the cinema of déjà vu hits one of its high points in a case where the filmmaker does not even know what his characters have been up to.This year’s festival includes “49 Up!,” the latest installment of the documentary series “Seven Up!,” which every seven years tracks down the same group of Britons, drawn from varied classes and backgrounds.Begun in 1963 as a retrospective look at the leaders of the future, it’s an epic that has written itself, accumulating drama in slow motion about marriages, births, ambitions fulfilled and dashed, life philosophies tested and rejected.

In its heartening surprises and reluctant determinism, “49 Up!” is the ultimate entry among the class of works that double back upon themselves (depending, of course, on how Mr. Lynch’s festival follow-up to “Mulholland Drive”turns out). The power of such films comes from empathizing with characters by feeling privy to the paths they take and retake, tragically and sometimes comically.And the bird’s eye view of “49 Up!” reminds us that sometimes the best answer to what happens next may be what just happened. For a little while, at least.