The New York Asian Film Festival puts the best of the Chinatown DVD rack up on the big screen. Depending on your purview, this indispensable event could either be underground or mainstream: It's both an intellectual haven and a fan-boy heaven.

Geographically, this year's edition is conspicuously lopsided, with 14 films from Japan and seven from Korea, and only a handful from anywhere else. Amazingly, China is almost a nonpresence. Thailand puts in an appearance (with "Art of the Devil 2," a nominal sequel to a film never released here), as do Malaysia (the grimy, Hong Kong-influenced "Gangster") and India, which gets a Bollywood close-up with a retrospective on filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma.

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