Festival season continues with the New York Film Festival, which offers 18 days of cinema selections for the press and public alike. This year’s lineup repeats some films from other fests, like Toronto and Cannes, while offering some anticipated world premieres and revivals. The famous fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center will bear witness to the annual crowd of movie lovers heading toward the venues showing works by Tom McCarthy, Ava DuVernay, and James Gray.

And for the first time, a certain giant of Japanese cinema emerged at Alice Tully Hall, disproving the notion that the NYFF shows nothing but movies for indie snobs. I’ve attended this festival since 1991, and would never have imagined it would show a Godzilla movie.

Let’s start my first of two dispatches with that big ol’ kaiju. While that Nor’easter from last week drenched the I-95 corridor, attendees at Alice Tully Hall braved the elements to witness the world premiere of “Godzilla Minus Zero,” the sequel to the Oscar-winning 2024 film, “Godzilla Minus One.” Writer-director Takashi Yamazaki, and his stars Minami Hamabe and Ryûnosuke Kamiki, return with a new chapter of the Shikishima family’s life in post-World War II Japan. The film is set primarily in 1949.

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I was at a screening with my fellow critics, but from what I heard, the public screening brought the house down the way Godzilla smashes a building. A lot of houses come down in this sequel, most of them courtesy of an event I’m not allowed to mention. The score by Naoki Satô is ominous and foreboding. Godzilla’s immortal theme gets a beefy makeover that sounds like every trombone and viola in Japan was used to record it.

Still from “Godzilla Minus Zero.”Toho

As with most sequels, this one’s bigger, louder, darker, and longer; the spectacle is worth it, however, and Yamazaki may earn his second best visual effects Oscar after his win for the “Godzilla Minus One.”

The NYFF screened “Godzilla Minus Zero” for the press the morning before its world premiere. Watching a kaiju movie on a rainy Saturday morning in the New York City area took me back to my childhood. Except now I was sitting in the Walter Reade Theater instead of in front of a television — and I was watching an R-rated movie. For the first time in 37 films, Godzilla is in a movie kids can’t see without an adult.

You’ll have to wait until November to experience an adventure that’s equally terrifying and heartbreaking, not to mention a lot of fun. Yamazaki lingers on the carnage long enough to make the MPA skittish, but I’m not sure if this deserved an R (its predecessor was PG-13). The MCU movies are just as violent, but they skirt the R by being relatively bloodless. People bleed in “Godzilla Minus Zero.”

A still from Ken Russell’s “The Devils.”Warner Bros. Pictures

Another hot ticket at this year’s NYFF was the restoration of Ken Russell’s 1971 horror movie, “The Devils.” This film was so controversial in its imagery that its distributor, Warner Bros, demanded cuts to a movie that had already been rated X by the ratings board. At the time, it was believed that the excised footage had been destroyed.

For decades, this censored material was as big a white whale to cineastes as the missing footage from Orson Welles’s “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Unlike Welles’s film, “The Devils” has finally been restored to the vision its director intended, and is being released by Clockwork, the new revival arm of Warners. Also unlike “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “The Devils” isn’t a good movie. It’s an over-the-top bore based on a possession that occurred in Loudon, France in 1634. I bet it happened just like this movie depicts it, with camera zooms and nuns executing stripper maneuvers while under the spell of Old Scratch.

This was my third time seeing the film (and my first time in its completed version). I didn’t like it the first two times, and I knew that a few minutes of supposedly scandalous debauchery involving nuns wasn’t going to suddenly make me give this movie four stars. However, the new footage is admittedly the Ken Russell-est of all Ken Russell scenes, which means all shock value is negated by its unintentional hilarity. Ken Russell’s gonna Ken Russell, and you can’t help but applaud him for that.

Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave in Ken Russell’s “The Devils.”Warner Bros. Pictures

I know I’m supposed to rant and rave about this new version, rending my garments with exaltation the way Vanessa Redgrave’s sex-mad nun does after licking the blood off Oliver Reed’s interpretation of Jesus. That’s not going to happen. I’m happy the movie can finally be seen the way the director intended — censorship should never be tolerated. But that doesn’t mean I have to like “The Devils.” Decide for yourself when it gets a one-week release on Oct. 16.

When I discovered that James Gray’s “Paper Tiger” was originally intended as a sequel to his dreadful 2022 film “Armageddon Time,” I wanted no part of it. However, I’m duty-bound to cover the opening night film of the New York Film Festival. To my surprise, this Adam Driver-led vehicle had nothing to do with the prior film. Instead, Gray returns to the neo-noirish gangster trappings that propelled earlier works like “We Own the Night” and “Little Odessa.”

Adam Driver and Miles Teller in “Paper Tiger.”NEON

Set in 1980s New York City, “Paper Tiger” follows the Pearl family, led by nebbish patriarch Irwin (Miles Teller) and his wife, Linda (Scarlett Johannson). Their lives are upended by the return of former cop and black sheep of the family, Irwin’s older brother, Gary (Driver). After leaving the precinct, Gary became financially successful and estranged from Irwin. His return proves you should never trust anyone who comes to your house with gifts of Peter Luger steaks (and Peter Luger employees to serve them).

Gary wants scientist Irwin to go in on a project to advise a Russian company about cleaning up the Gowanus Canal. A seemingly innocent job turns dangerous when Irwin sees something he should not have seen, putting his family and his own life in jeopardy. Meanwhile, Linda is facing her own crisis at home, and I don’t mean ScarJo’s overbaked Noo Yawk City accent.

Scarlett Johansson in “Paper Tiger.”NEON

Gray ratchets up the tension in every scene, delivering an effective, if flawed, thriller with enough New York-based Easter eggs to satisfy its residents. Johannson is good, and Driver is a riveting study in contrasts. But it’s Teller who’s the biggest surprise. An actor whose work I have never been a fan of, Teller delivers the best performance in “Paper Tiger.”

Next time: One of the year’s best films, and director Tom McCarthy returns to the spotlight.

Odie Henderson is the Boston Globe’s film critic.