There's Adam and Eve (Still) and Adam and Steve. There's Inside Man and Inside Deep Throat. There's Night of the Hunter, Black Night, Two Lost in Dark Night, Night Watch, Through This Night and, simply, The Night. And there's more where that came from.

The 13th Annual Febiofest is the latest film festival to demand our attention, and the largest. Rather than the specialist's focus that made the 13 Days–European Film and the recent One World International Documentary festivals worth seeking out, Febiofest is a massive wall of movies subdivided into miniature festivals within the larger entity.

Febiofest also serves as an intelligent scavenger's hunting ground, as many of the films shown at the festival will be denied proper runs in the Czech Republic. For reasons best left to their analysts, heads of the various distribution companies in Prague would rather foist drek like Saw II and the forthcoming The Fog upon the public than give people the opportunity to see such acclaimed and intriguing films as The Squid and the Whale, Me and You and Everyone We Know and Mysterious Skin, all of which will be receiving screenings at Febiofest.

Among the sub-categories this year are overviews of new films from South America, South Africa and Central and Eastern Europe. There are also a number of salutes to cinematic greats, such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Mitchum. Antonioni is represented by his best-known films, the beautiful L'Avventura, Blow-Up and the haunting The Passenger, with a superb central performance from Jack Nicholson. But the Antonioni film to discover here is The Night (La notte) with Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau. Mitchum fans can feast again on The Night of the Hunter, while giving Joseph Losey's Secret Ceremony (with Mitchum, Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow) a second chance.

There's also a small gay film fest embedded within Febiofest. Here, Latter Days, a very moving story of a club boy who falls in love with a Mormon missionary, is definitely worth catching. A few of the other offerings sound like harmless pieces of campery, though probably not of the caliber of a few films outside the category, such as the high camp of Edmund Goulding's 1932 Grand Hotel (where Garbo famously uttered "I vant to be alone") to the camp nadir, Barb Wire (1996), with the pneumatic Pamela Anderson.

The main draw of Febiofest, however, is the new international releases. A few, such as the disappointing Libertine with Johnny Depp, Spike Lee's best film in years, Inside Man, and The Constant Gardner (an excellent film that was slated for multiplex release here in December then mysteriously pulled) are scheduled for proper multiplex premieres in Prague. Others, most notably The Squid and the Whale (with its critically praised performance by Jeff Daniels), Junebug, and the German film Sophie Scholl: The Last Days, have no future here at present. So Febiofest may be your only chance to see these before they end up on DVD.

Naturally, there are a few heavily touted American films that aren't really deserving of wider distribution. The mind-numbing Rent, based on the overblown off-Broadway musical, is proof positive that, Chicago aside, the American musical is dead. If you still need convincing, try sitting through the appalling, tuneful remake of Mel Brooks' classic The Producers. Two-plus hours of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick hamming it up should be against the Geneva Convention. However, within this mess there are wonderful performances by Gary Beach (who is hilarious) and, surprisingly, Uma Thurman.

It probably goes without saying that Woody Allen's latest, Match Point, is a failure: What film of his in the past 10 years isn't? It's a weak reply to Allen's own superb Crimes and Misdemeanors. But Takeshis', by Japanese actor-director Takeshi Kitano, has the spirit of Fellini's 8 1/2 about it.