This weekend the 44th New York Film Festival will conclude with Guillermo Del Toro’s fairy tale “Pan’s Labyrinth,” but the headliner is Sofia Coppola’s much-anticipated “Marie Antoinette.” Every festival can use a symbolic send-off party, and this fashionable exercise in fabulous creative anachronism probably qualifies. (Of course, anyone with tickets to Guy Maddin’s pseudo-autobiographical “Brand Upon the Brain” will find the better hoedown, featuring live orchestra, foley artists, and narration by Isabella Rossellini.)

“Marie Antoinette” is rather another entry in Ms. Coppola’s cinema de hanging out, writ almost parodically large. Even amid the brocade trappings and whispering intrigue of the Versailles court, it’s a follow-up faithful to the romanticized drift and slouch of “Lost in Translation,” for which she won the 2003 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Here we have the original arbiters of cool (by force of violence): royalty. The hovering buzz-kill is the teen queen’s new responsibility, which she tries mightily to “whatever” her way around.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and not just for monarchs moping to post-punk music. Marie’s pressures doubtlessly hit close to home for Ms. Coppola and other directors burdened with praise who returned this year to face either affirmation or debunking. The unforgiving spotlight of the festival’s limited selection only fuels the urge to distinguish a filmmaker’s recurring themes and techniques between the variations of an auteur and mere ruts and tics.

So while Ms. Coppola may know her way around “in between days” and moments (to quote a Cure song, as she does), her obsessions with mood and look are currently exposing her limitations with everything else.

Much the same could be said of Mr. Del Toro, who unnecessarily repeats himself with “Pan’s Labyrinth.” A comic-book allegorist of the first order, the director here forgoes new territory and instead revisits the Spanish Civil War, likewise his setting for his superior earlier work, “Devil’s Backbone.” A young girl, whose mother has married one of Franco’s officers, sets out on missions and tasks for a secret parallel kingdom of fairies, flamboyant satyrs, and the like. Her sadistic stepfather quashes rebels in the mountains, bashing in a skull personally here and there.

Mr. Del Toro’s zeal for nightmarish creatures and worlds within worlds is palpable, but this “Labyrinth” feels composed of mechanical setups (and, alas, no David Bowie). The dizzying interlacing of fantasy and reality the director is capable of achieving is missing from the workaday fairy-tale frame. Meaning is closed down, sectioned off, rather than left to entangle us.

No such problems for David Lynch. His three-hour “Inland Empire” blew out cognitive amps and was the sort of glorious, headlong, warts-and-all experiment by an established auteur that garners wonder and respect even from detractors. It’s hard to match the expectations and mysteries surrounding a new Lynch film, but the festival demonstrated its reach by finding a suitable twin selection to temper the mood: Satoshi Kon’s “Paprika,” an animated head-trip, pure polymorphously perverse exhilaration, about a dream machine on the fritz.

Neither explosion nor implosion, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s aching, visually crisp “Climates,” which plays this weekend, falls in with the films whose directors simply held their own. Depending on the filmmaker, this can be laudable or insufficient: Jafar Panahi’s “Offside,” about Iranian soccer fans, was perhaps deceptively straightforward, but the perennial Pedro Almodovar may have made the generational maternal melodramas of “Volver,” the festival’s centerpiece film, go down a little too smoothly. (It’s hard to believe that a few years ago the same slot was held by Mr. Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.”)

Still, an even keel is a virtue for a festival that occasionally invites a few real head-clutchers. This year, only “Falling,” unfortunately one of the few films by woman directors, felt like the awkward guest. Austrian director Barbara Albert, inexplicably called back despite her previous subpar entry “Free Radicals,” ladles out the biographical ironies and pratfalls in her drama of a reunion of friends, squandering a couple of affectingly spontaneous moments. And while Todd Field’s “Little Children” should have been duly shamed by critics, most, transparently, could not resist the prospect of more juicy suburban malaise, even though the faux knowingness was more reductive than ever.

But whatever critics thought, a remarkably high percentage of the films this year came with distributors already attached. The festival may as a result have felt less like a garden of secret delights than usual, but it’s hard to complain when a challenging experiment like Abderrahmane Sissako’s “Bamako” or smart genre flicks like Johnnie To’s “Triad Election” and Boong Joon-ho’s “The Host” are guaranteed an afterlife. It’s a pity that another Korean director, Hong Sang-soo, despite the subtle emotional countercurrents of “Woman on the Beach,” once again seems destined to remain underexposed outside such elite venues.

Overlooked masters, burnished reputations, overpraised also-rans — in the long view, it was business as usual at this year’s cinematic convocation. And perhaps the greatest anxiety of repeatable success every year involves the festival itself, where choices must pass muster in a famously cosmopolitan cine-market always hungry for such a sanctuary.In that respect, even in the intimidatingly long shadows of the Janus Films celebration, the presentation of ambitous, diverse works like “Bamako,” “Woman on the Beach,” and “Syndromes and a Century,” all of which are both formally adept and deeply engaging, shows the New York Film Festival still hasn’t lost its golden touch.