Jemal Countess/Getty Images"The great thing about New Directors/New Films is that most of the films we select come from larger festivals. We're the perfect cheat sheet for the cinema-loving public," Rajendra Roy, chief curator of the Film Department at the Museum of Modern Art, told Yahoo! Movies on the eve of the festival's opening. A joint program between MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the annual event, now in its 42nd year, highlights the work of up-and-coming filmmakers. Last year, "Beasts of the Southern Wild" closed the festival. The year before, "Margin Call" played opening night.

This year's fest premieres tonight in New York City with "Blue Caprice" and runs through March 31 when "Our Nixon" screens. It includes 25 features and 17 shorts from 24 countries. "We're looking for the most exciting new voices, and we're distilling it down," continued Roy. "If anybody wants to know the future direction of film, we've sorted it out -- there's a comedy ("Les Coquillettes"), drama ("Blue Caprice"), avant-garde ("Emperor Visits the Hell") and documentary ("Our Nixon," "Stories We Tell")."

Here are five to watch for when they break out of NYC and open at a festival or an art-house cinema near you:

James Franco in 'Oz the Great and Powerful' (Photo: Walt Disney Pictures)

There is a very simple litmus test to know if your child can comfortably handle "Oz the Great and Powerful": were they afraid of "The Wizard of Oz?" If not, take them to the new Disney movie because it is less scary than the 1939 original.

I first saw that movie on TV when I was 8 -- I was both terrified and unable to look away, and then it wasn't on TV for another year. My daughter watched it at 6 and, then, thanks to the wonders of the DVD revolution, she watched it on an endless loop, dulling the edges of the scary bits.

Six is a little young to watch either "Oz." I would hold out for 8 or 9, with a parent's hand on call for the airborne baboons and Wicked Witch.

Photo: Disney

In person, Rachel Weisz couldn't be less witchy, which makes her enjoyment of being bad to the bone in "Oz The Great and Powerful" all the more delicious. She talked to Yahoo! Movies over breakfast in Manhattan's East Village about her fear of flying, her joy in frying foes with lightning bolts — and her terror of "The Wizard of Oz."

The Wicked Witch, now and then (Photo: Entertainment Weekly/Everett Collection)

What, no ruby slippers? They may be in the Smithsonian, but they are not in the Disney prequel to "The Wizard of Oz" because Warner Bros. has the copyright to those sparkly shoes that popped so vividly in Technicolor. In fact, Dorothy wore silver slippers in the Frank L. Baum novels and, since she doesn't even get a mention in "Oz The Great and Powerful," no ruby kicks. Warner Bros. were such legal sticklers that you won't even see a wart on the chin of the Wicked Witch of the West (her identity in this movie is supposed to be a secret, but squint at the Entertainment Weekly cover and you'll probably figure it out) -- and while she does turn green, it's a different shade from that immortalized by Margaret Hamilton in the original, directed by Victor Fleming.

Photo: Jeffrey Mayer/WireImageToday at New York celebrity lunch spot Michael's, "Les Misérables" director Tom Hooper arrived minutes before 1 p.m. sure that he was not going to get nominated. He knew DGA president Taylor Hackford was supposed to call all five nominees before the 1 p.m. announcement, and Hooper had yet to hear from him. (By the way, Quentin Tarantino and David O. Russell didn't get the call; Steven Spielberg, Kathryn Bigelow, Ang Lee, and Ben Affleck did.)

Photo: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

I have been a member of the New York Film Critics Circle since I was pregnant with my first child, who accompanied me and the rest of the family to last night's awards dinner at Crimson on 21^st and Broadway in Manhattan. He's now a junior in high school and looks down on me from a height approaching six feet. That's just to say that I've seen a lot of these untelevised dinners, even hosted a couple, and what struck me last night at the intimate affair for something like 300 guests was two major distinct camps: that representing "Lincoln" and that representing "Zero Dark Thirty." An uneasy truce exists between the two -- the hip and controversial capturing history on the fly versus old-school Hollywood describing the well-documented past -- as the awards red-carpet season opened last night.