The 46th New York Film Festival ran from September 26 to October 12, 2008. In addition to screening the feature films listed below, which were often preceded by short films, the festival ran a sidebar retrospective of the films of controversial Japanese director Nagisa Oshima. The festival also included its twelfth annual series Views from the Avant-Garde, showcasing a variety of experimental films.
| English title | Original title | Director(s) | Country | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opening Night | The Class | Entre les murs | Laurent Cantet |  | |
| Centerpiece | Changeling | Clint Eastwood |  | ||
| Closing Night | The Wrestler | Darren Aronofsky | |
| English title | Original title | Director(s) | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 24 City | 二十四城记/二十四城記 Er shi si cheng ji | Jia Zhangke |  | |
| Afterschool | Antonio Campos | | ||
| Ashes of Time Redux | Dung che sai duk redux | Wong Kar-wai |  | |
| Bullet in the Head | Tiro en la cabeza | Jaime Rosales |  | |
| Che (Part I: The Argentine and Part II: Guerilla) | Steven Soderbergh | | ||
| Chouga | Shuga | Darezhan Omirbaev |  | |
| A Christmas Tale | Un conte de Noël | Arnaud Desplechin | | |
| Four Nights With Anna | Cztery noce z Anna | Jerzy Skolimowski |  | |
| Gomorrah | Gomorra | Matteo Garrone |  | |
| Happy-Go-Lucky | Mike Leigh | |||
| The Headless Woman | La mujer sin cabeza | Lucrecia Martel |  | |
| Hunger | Steve McQueen | |||
| I'm Gonna Explode | Gerardo Naranjo |  | ||
| Let It Rain | Parlez-moi de la pluie | Agnès Jaoui | | |
| Night and Day | Bam guan nat | Hong Sang-soo | ||
| The Northern Land | A Corte do Norte | João Botelho |  | |
| Service | Serbis | Brillante Mendoza |  | |
| Summer Hours | L'heure d'été | Olivier Assayas | | |
| Tokyo Sonata | Tôkyô sonata | Kiyoshi Kurosawa |  | |
| Tony Manero | Pablo Larrain |  | ||
| Tulpan | Sergey Dvortsevoy | | ||
| Waltz with Bashir | ואלס עם באשיר Vals Im Bashir | Ari Folman |  | |
| Wendy and Lucy | Kelly Reichardt | | ||
| The Windmill Movie | Alexander Olch | |