It's that time of the year again when Manhattan's Lincoln Center area transforms itself into a mini-Toronto and/or Cannes with the start of the annual New York Film Festival, which runs from September 27-October 13. For its 51st year, the NYFF has programmed a wide range of cinematic offerings, from star-driven Oscar contenders (like the Opening Night feature, Captain Phillips) to anniversary retrospectives (like a 20th anniversary screening of Richard Linklater's last-day-of-high-school masterpiece Dazed and Confused) to experimental fare (like the sort-of documentary Manakamana, which consists of a stationary camera positioned inside a cable car in Nepal that records the various passengers comings and goings). Visit the festival's official site for the full rundown, but here are some of the highlights we particularly wanted to draw your attention to:

The New York Film Festival turns 50 this year and is appropriately throwing itself one heck of a birthday bash. The golden anniversary celebration kicks off tonight with the world premiere of Ang Lee's Life of Pi, an adaptation of the best-selling novel that ranks among the fall season's big Oscar hopefuls. Over the next two weeks (the festival runs from September 28 to October 14) a plethora of big-ticket films and events will be unspooling at the festival's headquarters at Lincoln Center on New York's Upper West Side. You can visit the official NYFF website for the full schedule and ticket information. In the meantime, we've gone through the festival line-up (and have even seen a few of the movies) to highlight some of this year's key titles.

The 49th edition of the New York Film Festival kicks off tonight with a gala screening of the Oscar hopeful Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski and starring a powerhouse cast that includes three Academy Award winners (Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster and Christoph Waltz) and one nominee and respected character actor (John C. Reilly). Although it comes at the tail end of the festival season, following the higher-profile Toronto and Venice media circuses, the NYFF has its fair share of big premieres and A-list attendees jostling for awards attention. Here are the five biggest stories to keep an eye on during this year's festival, which runs from September 30 to October 6.

You know you're in for a mind-bendy metapalooza when you go to see a Charlie Kaufman movie. Since capturing the hearts of critics with his dizzying dark comedy Being John Malkovich nearly a decade ago, Kaufman has been fairly consistent in his subject matter, bringing his distinctly dreamy surrealism to meditations on love, identity, art, fame and mortality. His latest, Synecdoche, New York, is a continuation of this odyssey, though infinitely bleaker and, if possible, even more complex to unravel than his previous offerings. As a friend put it perfectly when we left the two-hours-plus screening, by comparison it makes Adaptation seem like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

The New York Film Critics Online (NYFCO), of which TWoP's Moviefile is a voting member, met yesterday for its fourteenth annual awards ceremony. Here are the results from the meeting.

It's not even in theaters yet, but Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's follow-up to The Hurt Locker, is raking in the same kind of awards love bestowed on her earlier film. Several critics' groups have named the film 2012's Best Picture, including the New York Critics Online, of which Television Without Pity's Moviefile is a voting member. Other winners at the 2012 NYFCO awards meeting, which was held on Sunday, December 9, included Bigelow and ZDT's Mark Boal for Director and Screenplay respectively, as well as Michael Haneke's Amour for Foreign Language Film. In the acting categories, Amour's female star, Emmanuelle Riva, won Actress, while Daniel Day-Lewis triumphed in the Actor category for Lincoln -- the same award he's likely to win come Oscar night. A full list of NYFCO's 2012 awards are below.

Television Without Pity is a voting member of the New York Film Critics Online, an organization of New York-based online critics, which convened yesterday to hand out their annual awards honoring the best in film for 2011. The silent-film homage The Artist proved to be the big winner, going home with three awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. (We weren't alone in giving that film top honors -- The Artist has also been named Best Picture by the New York Film Critics Circle, Boston Society of Film Critics and the Washington D.C. Area Film Critics. It's also currently the closest to what resembles a frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar.) NYFCO departed from the mainstream consensus with two less expected picks -- Michael Shannon was named Best Actor for his searing work in Take Shelter, while Joe Cornish picked up Debut Director honors for his terrific alien invasion movie, Attack the Block. For a full list of winners, along with links to our original coverage of those films, click below.

Meet the real housewives of Drug Cartel County.

Before he co-starred in The Dark Knight Rises as Batman's cop sidekick, Joseph Gordon-Levitt played a hero who zips though a major metropolis on his own version of the Batpod: a single-geared, brakeless bike. The hero in question is Wilee, the speed-addicted bike messenger at the center of Premium Rush, which was shot on the streets and roads of New York two years ago and is opening in theaters tomorrow. Co-written and directed by David Koepp (whose past credits include the screenplays for Jurassic Park and the first Spider-Man and director of Stir of Echoes), the movie finds Wilee trying to complete an express delivery of a valuable package while staying one bike line ahead of a corrupt cop (Michael Shannon) who is on his tail. Don't let the lack of bat ears or Batarangs fool you; Wilee's superb bike skills practically make him a superhero in his own right. We spoke with Koepp and Gordon-Levitt about what it was like to shoot such a fast-paced thriller, what lessons the actor learned from 3rd Rock From the Sun and why Die Hard With a Vengeance is one of the best New York movies ever made.

Laugh it up at this weekend with four indie comedies, including The Babymakers and Celeste and Jesse Forever.