Every fall, the New York Film Festival arrives to remind you of the pleasures of sitting in the dark with a community of movie nuts as new worlds and visions open your mind and blow it. This year’s edition — 153 movies, two dozen talks, assorted free events — offers plenty of chances for mind-and-spirit expansion with new and old movies, short and long. If you’ve never seen Bela Tarr’s seven-hour masterwork, “Satantango,” now’s your chance. The opening-night title — Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” — is comparatively fleet at three hours, 29 minutes.

Scorsese’s latest revisits the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), the combative Teamster boss who went missing in 1975. It has its world premiere Friday (there will be 10 screenings!) and is, as you would expect, the most frantically anticipated movie at the festival, which runs through Oct. 13. Every new Scorsese movie is an event, this one more than most given that it finds the director again exploring crime in America with some of his legendary, career-defining collaborators: Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel. All the showings are sold out, but the standby lines might answer your prayers. The movie opens theatrically Nov. 1 and starts streaming on Netflix on Nov. 27. (Our review will follow the opening-night showing.)

Ideally, though, try to watch “The Irishman” on the largest, brightest movie screen you can find, advice that holds true for much of the rest of the selections at the festival. As the new name of its parent organization suggests — it’s now Film at Lincoln Center, having dropped the charming if fusty “society” — the event remains committed to film as an art and a visually driven medium. Even when the image nearly floods over with talking and at times shouting heads, as in Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story,” a festival high point about two people’s agonized, self-conscious uncoupling, these are movies to ­see and to see big.

Like some of the other titles in the main slate, “Marriage Story” (another Netflix release) is passing through New York in the middle of a festival run — it has played at Venice, Telluride and Toronto — that sometimes feeds right into the long road to the Academy Awards. Don’t hold its awards chances against the movie and its stars, Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver. In its prickliness and insistence on the messiness and ineluctable pain of life, this is very different from the pandering, gold-grubbing titles that tend to hit theaters starting around now.