Cannes Film Festival

“Fair Game” was directed by Doug Liman, a talented filmmaker who’s spent his career bouncing between independent films like “Go” and Hollywood projects like “The Bourne Identity,” without quite finding his métier. He told us at the press conference after the Cannes premiere that he’s been trying all along to make movies that are both entertaining and meaningful, and he’s accomplished that pretty well here. Especially during the early scenes, when we learn a little — admittedly not very much — about exactly what Plame did as a counter-proliferation specialist trying to interdict or intercept sales of nuclear-weapons technology, “Fair Game” is a gripping yarn of 21st-century espionage, more realistic and vastly less pornographic than TV’s “24.”

Liman understands something about politics, because his father, Arthur Liman, was a prominent New York and Washington attorney who worked on high-level official investigations, including the congressional inquiry into the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal. So he may understand that “Fair Game” isn’t really the Frank Capra-style inspirational yarn it pretends to become during an abrupt third-act reversal. It’s a fable of power, politics, truth and lies, all right, but when the film itself is telling maximum truth it’s much murkier and more fatalistic than that.

How does the story end, after all? Plame and Wilson survived their ordeal, and this is the story of a troubled marriage between two strong personalities as much as anything else. (Marriage, with all its joys and discontents, is a major theme here this year.) They have left the world of power and intrigue behind, probably forever, and are raising their kids in New Mexico. Scooter Libby, an aide to Dick Cheney, briefly went to prison for smearing and betraying them (until Bush commuted Libby’s sentence). But the news media, once again, was successfully distracted from noticing not only that they’d been lied to — which is normal — but also that they had lapped it up like a big, happy pile of puppies. And do we really believe that ideology will have less of a distorting effect on intelligence gathering, policy decisions or the perception of reality, under Obama or any future president?

Wait, don’t answer that. Let’s talk about the movie instead. Penn and Watts are well matched as this highly improbable couple, and the portrait of a marriage they construct is full of complexity: They are guarded with each other, loving, still in love yet perennially a little bit at war. Both actors are highly skilled at the challenge that comes from impersonating a living individual without simply mimicking them, and the resemblances are astonishing.

As Liman said at the press conference, Plame is an “incredibly private person” whose best friends didn’t know she was a covert agent. She was regarded as one of the CIA’s toughest and best, who had graduated first in her class at “The Farm,” the facility where covert agents are trained. She traveled the world under “non-official cover,” posing as a financial analyst for a private firm. Among other things, this meant that the agency would deny any knowledge of her activities if she were captured.

“She’s a complicated woman who had an incredibly important job,” Watts told the press conference, “and it was definitely a challenge for me to get the essence of who she was. The closer I got to her — which took some time given what a fiercely private person she is — the more I understood that she still operates like a covert agent. I wanted her to tell me as much as possible about what she had done, but there was still lots of stuff she couldn’t talk about.

“I didn’t get Valerie all at once,” Watts continued. “She’s quite a woman — more of a woman, I think, than I’ve ever played before. I’ve often been drawn to playing roles of women who are dealing with psychosis, at least since I worked with David Lynch. But this is a woman who overcomes her psychosis, partly with the help of her amazing husband. She’s so cool and calm and collected, and sometimes I wanted to pump up the drama or make her more emotional. But that really is not who she is.”

Of all the people in her life, Watts said, only Plame’s husband and her parents had known what her real occupation was. Her friends read about it in the newspaper when her identity was leaked. “They had no idea,” Watts said. “Not only was she betrayed, but in a sense she was betraying other people.”

Liman asked Watts to take a two-day, stripped-down version of the training course for covert agents, which included being hooded, beaten and interrogated with various techniques. “Doug told me, ‘Toughen up, lady,’” Watts laughed. “It helped me to understand that while Valerie is very feminine, very calm, she has this other side we don’t know about.” Watts was, however, permitted breaks to be with her newborn. “How many people can say they have breast-fed while being strapped with a weapon?” she quipped.

Wilson, a former United States diplomat in Iraq and Africa, is something quite different, an “extroverted, larger-than-life character,” in Liman’s phrase — exactly the sort not to keep his opinions to himself, even when expressing them might endanger his family. Although Penn is a huge star in France and was president of the Cannes jury in 2008, he passed on this year’s festival in order to testify before Congress on the Haitian recovery effort. (I guess he thinks that’s more important than partying on the Riviera.) Liman stepped up to discuss his star: “I think Sean Penn is our greatest living actor. It must be almost impossible to live up to those expectations, but he did not disappoint.”

“Sean hung out with Joe Wilson every day during the shoot, and you could watch him becoming more and more like Joe,” he went on. “It was like watching a horror movie! Joe’s personality was being sucked out of him, and it was going into Sean.”

As long as the action bounces around from Kuala Lumpur to Amman to Cairo to Baghdad to CIA headquarters, with occasional stopovers in the Wilson-Plame household in suburban Washington, Liman is in his element. It may help that the Butterworths are not American and came to this complicated story as outsiders. They’ve written it as a well-structured political thriller, balancing action beats and relationship moments in careful measure. But the central drama here, of course, is what happens after Wilson goes public (in a now-infamous New York Times Op-Ed) with his view that the Bush administration was exaggerating, if not falsifying, the evidence for war with Iraq.

Just to review: Wilson knew to a near-certainty that Saddam Hussein had not tried to purchase uranium “yellowcake” from Niger, as the administration alleged — because he was the guy the CIA had sent to Africa to check out the story. And, to repel any leftover incoming right-wing missiles: 1) Plame was an extremely valuable CIA operative, not a minor player; 2) she suggested Wilson, but didn’t make the decision to send him; 3) he was definitely qualified, as one of the very few Americans who knew Niger well; and 4) he didn’t get paid anything.

As we now know, Dick Cheney’s office counterattacked by leaking Plame’s identity to columnist Robert Novak, seeking to frame Wilson as an unqualified beneficiary of CIA nepotism. Novak probably didn’t understand that printing her name was against the law, but either way her undercover career was over. This was undoubtedly a central drama in the couple’s life — Wilson became an antiwar activist, Plame struggled with depression and they briefly separated — but it’s tough to dramatize without relying on hackneyed movieland devices. Plame has an expositional heart-to-heart with her Air Force retiree dad (nice cameo for Sam Shepard) and then comes home to utter the line: “They’re not going to take my marriage!”

There was actually a smattering of boos — the first I’ve heard personally this year — amid the polite applause after the “Fair Game” press screening. Maybe that was because the film loses dramatic energy in the last half hour, and maybe it’s because Liman and the Butterworths try to pin a patriotic, call-to-arms tail on their donkey at the last possible moment. This is not a cinephile picture by any means, but it should play well with a fairly large, left-of-center audience, at least in the United States, and Penn and Watts will likely be in the Oscar mix.

Liman ducked a question from an Iranian journalist about whether the international case against Iran’s nuclear program is built on a sounder footing than the Bush White House’s case against Iraq. He’s of course not qualified to answer that, although I’d love to hear the real-life Valerie Plame Wilson, who is here with the anti-nuclear doc “Countdown to Zero,” talk about it. When a female Arab reporter asked a long follow-up question about whether he meant “Fair Game” as a rebuke to the complacent and compliant American media, he opened up a little more.

“I’m not trying to be that opinionated,” he said. “I’m trying to convey what it was like in America at that time. This isn’t ‘Countdown to Zero’ or ‘The Cove,’ where I want you to come out of the movie with a particular position. This isn’t advocacy filmmaking. I’m just trying to tell this story because I feel it’s important to tell this story. I mean, I understand how it happens that the media just parrots what the White House says. That’s how they get access. I’m not sure how that ever changes.”

What a handful of patient moviegoers may find in “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” however, is a subtle, gorgeous and mysterious allegory that may be Ceylan’s masterwork to date. (His only previous films distributed in the United States were “Climates” in 2006 and “Three Monkeys” in 2008, both of them award-winners at Cannes, as was this film.) It’s like an episode of “CSI,” scripted by Anton Chekhov, stretched to two and a half hours, and photographed against the bleak, impressive scenery of Turkey’s central steppes. (The amazing cinematography is by Gökhan Tiryaki, Ceylan’s usual collaborator.) This is a road movie that reaches no clear destination, and a story of an investigation that reaches clumsy and inconclusive results. To enjoy it, you have to travel at Ceylan’s pace, and accept his moments of elusive unexpected revelation as they come. There’s no point pretending that kind of movie is to most people’s taste.

A handsome, mustachioed country doctor named Cemal (Muhammat Uzuner), whose manner suggests an urbane, educated background, goes out into the night with a police commissar (Yilmaz Erdogan) and the local prosecutor (Taner Birsel). While it’s fair to say that Ceylan is always concerned with the conflict within Turkish society between the secular, Europeanized elite and the traditional, Islamic interior, that issue is addressed here only in symbolic, oblique fashion. They’re dragging along a stringy-haired miscreant named Kenan (Firat Tanis), who has already confessed to killing someone in a stupid dispute and promised to lead authorities to the body. But the scraggly wilderness proves baffling, it’s not clear how well Kenan remembers the crime, and the expedition wanders back and forth on remote roadways, devolving into territorial bickering and attempts by the cop and prosecutor to impress Cemal or enlist him as an ally.

It’s useless to talk about this kind of movie in terms of plot and climax, since in conventional terms there isn’t any. If Cemal has more than a little in common with Astrov, the doctor hero of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” Ceylan’s filmmaking style (at least in this case) is probably closer to another Russian, Andrei Tarkovsky. There’s something almost mythical about the night journey in “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” and its characters are like Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, filling up the darkness with their fragmentary serio-comic anecdotes, or like Odysseus’ doomed crewmen. The culmination of their journey comes at a tea break in a poor and remote village, where they are served by a local landowner’s beautiful daughter. It’s like a mini-voyage into Turkey’s inaccessible past, a vision of almost religious intensity that is redolent with possible meanings but never explained. After that, they wrap up their mission and go home — what you take away from it is entirely up to you.

“Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” opens this week at Film Forum in New York, with more cities and home-video release to follow.

It’s highly unfortunate that French director Catherine Breillat already released a film this year with a nearly identical title. Leigh’s film is in English with a contemporary setting, and unlike Breillat’s “The Sleeping Beauty” is not based (to any measurable extent) on a fairytale, although it certainly possesses that sort of mysterious undertow. Emily Browning, also seen this year as the 22-year-old star of “Sucker Punch,” returns here in a vastly different kind of movie but with even less clothing. Actually, she wears no clothing at all for much of the film, especially after Lucy, the loose-cannon sexpot she plays, takes a job that involves sleeping with a succession of leathery, repellent, gargoyle-ish older men. “Sleeping with” is not a euphemism in this case; Lucy goes to visit a beautiful, buttoned-up schoolmistress type named Clara (Rachael Blake) and drinks a tea that knocks her out cold for eight to 10 hours. During this time she is subject to the attentions of ancient lechers, but Clara assures her, rather too clinically, that she will not be penetrated: “Your vagina is a temple, my darling.”

Lucy doesn’t think her vagina is a temple; in fact, she doesn’t seem to care too much what happens to it, or to her. We’ve already seen her offer herself to strangers in a bar based on the result of a coin flip, and she meets Clara through her work as a lingerie-clad wine waitress at some kind of faintly kinky underground supper club. (It’s arguably preferable, and definitely better paid, than the menial jobs and medical guinea-pig work she’s otherwise doing.) Browning is indeed a remarkable beauty, with perfect, brilliant-white skin and delicate doll features, and delivers a powerful performance as this self-destructive adventuress. Leigh’s assured direction wants to play on all the emotions we may feel toward Lucy, from desire to concern to fear to shame.

Lucy herself mostly seems at home in this sinister, erotically charged landscape, where nothing is forbidden and her acts do not appear to have consequences. Leigh has created a world that looks like our own, but seems full of secret corridors built by Michel Foucault, the Marquis de Sade, and Pauline Réage, author of “The Story of O.” (The chilly, beautiful compositions are the work of cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson.) But don’t get the wrong idea; “Sleeping Beauty” has an atmosphere charged with sexual electricity, but it doesn’t have any sex. Lucy has one semi-normal encounter, when she does drugs with a good-looking co-worker and brings him home, but we don’t see any of what happens between them.

Otherwise this is a fable about frustration and desire, about wanting things and not being able to have them. When told about the no-penetration rule, one of Lucy’s geezer clients grumbles, “The only way I can get a hard-on is to eat a truckload of Viagra and have a beautiful woman stick her fingers up my ass. I’m the one that needs the penetration.” In a funny, upside-down way, in fact, “Sleeping Beauty” is more about intimate relationships between women than it is about the corrosive marketplace of heterosexuality. Every time Lucy is in the frame with another female character, the moment seems loaded with all sorts of potential energy that almost but doesn’t quite explode, whether that’s narcissism or sexual attraction or violence or psychological breakdown or some combination thereof.

I halfway suspect that if we could fully grasp Leigh’s intentions here they might sound didactic: a parable about how women’s lives have become sexual commodities and too often they repress their true emotions and participate in their own oppression, etc. But she isn’t delivering a lecture and doesn’t necessarily want us to understand everything about Lucy or “Sleeping Beauty.” This movie isn’t exactly overflowing with warmth and human goodness, and will no doubt strike many viewers as simultaneously too chilly and too pervy. But in its own way it builds toward a moral and emotional crisis and catharsis, and it’s without doubt a strikingly impressive debut.

“Sleeping Beauty” is now playing in New York, with other cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers.

McQueen broke into feature-length cinema in 2008 with “Hunger,” an extraordinary sound-and-vision experience that starred Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, a legendary Irish hunger striker who starved himself to death in a British prison. Largely a wordless, kinetic and almost physically grueling experience, “Hunger” was almost like a triptych built around an intensely talky scene between Sands and a visiting priest, in which the camera never moved. A movie that felt more like a transmission from an alien planet than a conventional historical drama, “Hunger” won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes (for best debut film at the festival) and went on to collect many more awards.

So expectations in the film world could hardly be higher for “Shame,” McQueen’s NC-17-rated film that again stars Fassbender, this time playing a sex addict in 21st-century Manhattan. His character, Brandon, is an executive in some unspecified financial or I.T. profession who measures his days and nights by anonymous sexual conquests, not to mention dates with hookers, online chat sessions and regular old porn-fueled masturbation. As you may have heard by now, Fassbender is stripped naked in “Shame,” but the physical full-monty nudity (while likely to be of interest to many viewers) is honestly the least of it.

Here’s what I wrote after first seeing the film in Toronto:

“Shame” hints at a conventional movie narrative a fair bit more than “Hunger” does, but it’s first and foremost a visual and sonic symphony, and a Dante-esque journey through a New York nightworld where words are mostly useless or worse. (The credits say the movie was “based on a screenplay by” McQueen and Abi Morgan, which suggests that what we see on screen was largely improvised.) I would say we get 12 or so minutes into the film before anyone says anything, and most of that is a tense and powerful scene of Brandon trying (and apparently failing) to pick up a married woman on the subway. Even when someone finally speaks, it’s only Brandon asking a co-worker what happened to his computer, which is infested with viruses from all the hardcore porn sites he visits. (A man has to have his priorities straight.) Whatever garbage in their past has driven Brandon and Sissy (Carey Mulligan), his drunken, slutty and suicidal sister, onto their self-destructive paths, we never learn about it and don’t need to. (Can we revise Tolstoy’s famous maxim so it observes that all unhappy families are alike?)

A bottle-blond cabaret singer who shows up from L.A. to camp on Brandon’s couch, Sissy somehow catalyzes a crisis in his life of unrepentant, beyond-compulsive horndoggery. Again, we don’t exactly know what specters Sissy’s arrival conjures up, and I would argue we don’t need to. Perhaps because of his career working in largely or entirely nonverbal media, McQueen feels no urge to overexplain. Sissy sings a killer cool-jazz rendition of “New York, New York” that reduces Brandon to tears (and may well do the same for you). Then she goes home with his married boss, who’s way more of a loser than Brandon is. Brandon tries to go cold turkey, stuffing all his porn — and even his laptop — into trash bags and going on an actual date with an attractive woman from work who actually seems to like him. But he can’t even fake an interest in the normal rituals of courtship. When his date (the African-American actress Nicole Beharie) asks him about his longest relationship, he says it lasted four months, but we suspect it was more like four hours, or $400.

Fassbender and Mulligan both give massive, irresistible performances (the former won the acting prize in Venice) as people drowning in a hostile sea of commodified sexuality and self-hatred. For all the nakedness and all the screwing, much of it framed by views of Manhattan at its most anonymous and terrifying, “Shame” is more a clinical spectacle than a prurient one. McQueen combines ’80s disco-pop and 19th-century Romantic music brilliantly, in one of the best soundtracks of the year, and cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt, uses the antiseptic New York interiors as no one has since Mary Harron’s “American Psycho.” While “Shame” isn’t an easy film to sit through, to describe or to figure out, it’s riveting, spectacular, passionate cinema.

I met Steve McQueen in a SoHo hotel room that was alarmingly plausible as a place where Brandon might have sex with a woman (or man) he’d never see again. A gruff, fast-talking guy with an East London accent and the traces of what I suspect was a childhood speech impediment, McQueen doesn’t crack jokes or engage in small talk. He did tell me, before I turned on my digital recorder, that he’s had to abandon his childhood passion for the Tottenham Hotspur soccer team because of “too much grief, too much heartache.” What struck me upon listening to the interview a second time was the intense earnestness, even idealism, of his vision to cinema, which is quite the opposite of the ironic or detached demeanor you might expect from someone with McQueen’s art-world reputation.

I want to start by talking about your relationship with Michael Fassbender, which I already characterized as being a little like the one between Scorsese and De Niro, or maybe between Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich. You’ve made two movies with him, and I certainly hope you’ll make more. Is it the kind of situation where you guys talk over the film a lot, or do you just get out there and do it?

Just do it. I’m not so keen on talking, I’m more keen on doing. It’s often the case that when you talk about something, you talk yourself out of it. Or, you know, you think too much about it. Sometimes you’ve just got to jump. Michael has the capacity to do that; he’s similar to me in that regard. You’ve got to find out through doing. It’s a great collaboration, to work with him, but I don’t write scripts for him at all. It’s not that I have him in mind. But what happens is that he can transform himself into that situation.

What you get in “Hunger,” with Bobby Sands, is a person who’s very different from Brandon. He’s using language, he’s trying to find things through language. Once you push violence to its total, absolute extreme you push language, and that’s what he’s doing. He’s trying to find things through communicating, through talking, as in the long scene with the priest. And this person, in “Shame,” he hardly talks at all, you know, it’s all internal. It’s an incredible feat to communicate that to the audience, and I think within the first 10 minutes we put the whole sex addiction thing to bed, in a way. We understand it, we get it out of the way.

Right, well, we certainly understand that Brandon’s sexual addiction is an extreme example.

This is not a person who’s just in the situation of being promiscuous. It’s a person whose days and nights are spent dealing with sex, in the same way some people deal with alcohol. To get through a day this person may have to relieve himself sexually 20 times, or engross himself in pornography for 72 hours at a stretch. So there’s a big difference.

Both of these films, as I see them, are about the body. What Bobby Sands and Brandon do with their bodies is quite different, I guess. But they’re both pretty extreme examples.

We all use our bodies, that’s how we are. We hardly ever talk. In film, people are talking all the time about how they feel and whatnot, and in reality that’s just not the case. We made “Hunger” in the way we did to reflect some kind of reality, and I feel the same way about “Shame.” The whole idea of back story and what could have happened to them — I wanted to make that situation familiar rather than unrecognizable. I wanted it to be about what we know, about what happens to them in everyday life. You meet someone for the first time and you have no idea who that person is really. What they do is present themselves the best way they can, and possibly through a period of time, after getting to know them, through the present you might see the past in them. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do with Sissy and Brandon and the audience.

If you think about the way Bobby Sands used his body, he was in a maximum-security prison in Belfast and within that he created his own freedom by stopping eating. On the other side of the pond in a different decade, Brandon is living in Manhattan in this metropolis of excess and Western freedom. He has a great job, he’s attractive, he has money. Within those possibilities, he creates a prison for himself through his activities with sex. So they are polar opposites, in a way, but they are somehow related. The situation of the body is very much in there. But, see, the body is what we do. In reality we are not Shakespearean actors having long conversations about how we live and whatever. We groan and grunt and get through a day. And often when we do talk, we talk a lot of shit, because it’s a way of filling time, avoiding stuff. If we do talk, possibly to our best friend or our psychiatrist or whatever, most of the time people don’t listen.

There’s no explicit social commentary in the film, in the sense that it’s a story about one guy and his sister and their problems. But you could definitely read it as a parable about social isolation, about family trauma, about sexual dysfunction, about consumer society and so on.

We’re making a film about now. It’s not a costume drama, it’s not something that happened 40 or 50 years ago. It’s about now, and for me — I don’t care what anyone says — I think cinema has a responsibility. You’ve got HBO and AMC doing whatever they’re doing, but cinema has another way of doing things, which can actually be closer to how we live today than any nine-part series on television. Absolutely. We can do that, and people are interested in seeing that and having a conversation about it.

What happens when you make a film about now is that it does have an aspect of social commentary because it’s urgent, there’s an immediacy about it. Particularly about the Internet, about pornography on the Internet, and about how that affects us, how we navigate this maze of sexual content that’s all about us.

Well, there’s the environment in that sense, and there’s also the physical environment of this film, which is a hyper-modern, anonymous, vertical vision of life in New York. You were obviously very careful about picking locations …

I wouldn’t say I was so careful. People have said that before, but I wasn’t careful at all. What I was careful about was where Brandon lived, where he worked, how we would travel to work, where he would get his dry cleaning done, where he would get his takeout food. These things were basically about ritual, about following Brandon and his rituals. So something could be the ugliest building in the world, and I’d have to shoot there, and that’s fine. Actually I love that limitation. It makes me happy to work with it to tell the story. It’s all about the story. I don’t make adverts, I’m not choosing wonderful locations. I’m choosing the reality that this character lives in and works in, how he gets from A to B.

One can also talk about the fact that a lot of New Yorkers live and work in the sky. It sounds corny and some people in New York tilt their heads and look at me, but it’s true. It’s amazing.

Well, a certain class of people in Manhattan, yes. Not me or most of the New Yorkers I know.

That’s right. It’s not everyone, but it’s a lot of people. You get these huge windows, like we have right here [in this hotel room], and you’re putting yourself in the perspective of the city all the time. It’s interesting, isn’t it? What happens is: Within this metropolis, you’re always in the frame. What am I, in this huge sea of people? It’s almost like reversing a telescope. It puts a microscope on you. Within the frame it’s quite lonely, these huge apartment buildings and office towers, all these windows and reflections, reflecting the surroundings where you are. It’s a lot of stuff to deal with, and it’s a reality. Maybe I heighten it by putting the camera on it — this is cinema — but it’s not a case of telling a story that’s different from what’s already here.

To the extent that we can’t resist identifying a character’s surroundings with his psychology, Brandon’s psychology seems kind of horrifying.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s like prison, in a way. A prison with no bars. Maybe it’s too much freedom.

You had that intense conversation at the center of “Hunger,” and you do something similar here, with the heartbreaking scene when Brandon goes on a real date and tries to have a conversation with a woman instead of just sex.

It’s the first time he actually opens up verbally, as opposed to opening up emotionally, which he does with Sissy. I love that scene, with the waiter coming every five seconds. It’s a bit comedic, but it’s also something that happens in reality when you have dinner. It’s difficult to have a conversation! The date happens in the walk-and-talk outside, and it’s so awkward and sweet, these people trying to get to know each other.

Talk about the song, Sissy’s killer rendition of “New York, New York.” That totally destroyed me, and maybe it’s just the way that Carey owns it, which is amazing. But it’s also the way it’s placed in the film, and of course how Brandon reacts to it.

What it does is that, in verse, it talks about the past and the present, and you can see what happens. Brandon, I imagine, would like to leave. He’d like to get out of that situation, but he can’t, he’s brought his boss to see his sister sing. So he’s forced to listen, and it’s the only time he actually listens. Earlier we were talking about listening, and people don’t listen, man. It’s difficult, isn’t it? And people don’t do it.

Sissy is communicating with him in verse, she’s singing the truth — it’s all there in the lyrics — and it evaporates his defenses. It opens doors which are locked inside him, and for that moment he’s opened up, he acknowledges the past. As soon as she stops singing, the doors are locked and the drawbridge goes back up again. That moment can give us so bloody much. We recognize it, we understand. It’s like setting off a dog whistle in the cinema; it’s something we know about although it’s not necessarily talked about or tangible. That’s the power of cinema, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s what cinema can give us, it can go much further on emotional journeys.

I don’t want to give away the ending, but you deliberately leave Brandon’s fate undecided. I don’t know what direction he’s going, but I have to say I fear the worst for the guy.

There has to be some kind of glimmer of hope. I hope he doesn’t get off that train! But of course he might stay on the train this time and get off another time. I don’t know. All of us are trying, that’s the thing. We’re all on that train. I want cinema to be like a mirror, that reflects the audience, so we see ourselves on the screen. Sometimes people might not want to look at that, because it’s not particularly attractive. But we have to look at it in order to move on, to engage with where we are, to reflect on what we are and alter what might happen.

“Shame” opens this week in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Washington, with wider national release to follow.

We never learn much about Georgy (Viktor Nemets), who picks up a load of flour one morning in an unnamed city and sets off into the vast Russian interior. He seems a decent enough guy, actually — he leaves some money and a note for his wife, and picks up a teenage hooker largely to get her off the road (which she bitterly resents). Whether Georgy is a good guy or a bad guy, he couldn’t possibly deserve what’s coming. From the moment he stops at a checkpoint run by a pair of lecherous, sadistic, beyond-corrupt cops, he seems to have wandered into an episode of “The Twilight Zone” authored by Gogol. Loznitsa’s portrait of Russian existence is one of perpetual gloom punctuated with occasional outbursts of violence, and after Georgy leaves the highway for a “shortcut” — hey, the mean teenage hooker warned him it was haunted! — you will never labor under the delusion that we’re headed for a happy ending. Loznitsa is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker (this is his first narrative feature) who left Russia in 2001, and he clearly has a social and historical agenda of sorts. “My Joy” appears to suggest that all the tyranny and brutality of the 20th century have left Russia, in the era of Putin and the plutocrats, stupefied and morally denuded.

Still, there’s something larger than despair beneath the impressively somber landscapes of “My Joy.” (The film was shot by Oleg Mutu, the Romanian cinematographer of “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.”) Loznitsa can’t resist the fatalistic, seriocomic storytelling tradition that’s such a big part of Russian life: When an aged passenger tells Georgy a tale of his fateful encounter with a fellow Soviet officer on the way home from World War II, we travel back to 1946 and witness the whole thing. Later, more mysteriously, we see another terrible incident, probably from World War I, which happened in the house where Georgy ends up living with a Gypsy woman who seems to have claimed him as her sex toy.

That’s the closest thing to tenderness Georgy finds in this land of endless stupidity and evil, where any human impulses seem to have been overrun by the most ruthless and Darwinian kind of struggle. He is beaten and left for dead; his truck and cargo are sold off. At last, the old man who told him the World War II story becomes his final refuge. And he hasn’t seen the last of those terrible cops. Believe me, Russian readers, I don’t assume that this dark fantasy bears much relationship to Russian reality — or at least, no more than “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” depicts real life in 1970s central Texas. Like all horror movies, this is a grossly exaggerated fable, one that arrives by way of its impressive cinematography and interpolated tales at a startling, violent, tragic and inevitable conclusion.

“My Joy” is now playing at the Cinema Village in New York and the Art House Cinema 502 in Ogden, Utah. It also opens Nov. 4 in Spokane, Wash., with more cities and dates to be announced. Home video release will follow.

To some viewers — maybe quite a few — “Take Shelter” will look more like an above-average genre film, somewhat in the M. Night Shyamalan mode (before Shyamalan inflated into a Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon version of himself), with a bit more grit and realism. It’s not an unfair comparison; “Take Shelter” revolves around Curtis (Michael Shannon), an ordinary Ohio husband and father, who begins having a series of apocalyptic, and increasingly terrifying, visions and nightmares. But Nichols, a 31-year-old Arkansas native who previously made the no-budget underground hit “Shotgun Stories” (also starring Shannon), is after something more complicated than the Scooby-Doo parlor trick of most Shyamalan-style films, where the spooky narrative events are eventually explained through a big “reveal.” Curtis believes throughout the film that he’s suffering a psychotic breakdown, and the possibility that there’s some objective, external, parascientific explanation for his midnight terrors (and midday ones too) is kept locked away until the story requires it.

If there’s a strong horror-movie undertow right under the surface of “Take Shelter,” its main text is a recession-era marriage drama about a family struggling to cling to the lower edge of the middle class. Curtis has recently been promoted to a supervisor position at his construction firm, and his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain, of “The Help” and “The Tree of Life”), is increasingly anxious about how his wobbly personal behavior will affect their financial future. If Shannon’s anguished, brooding performance as a man who’s petrified by what he finds in his own head is very much the movie’s centerpiece (and while Shannon gets a certain amount of stick for overacting, I think he’s almost always good), Chastain provides its moral tether. Samantha is keenly aware that if Curtis loses his job, they lose their house, their deaf daughter (Tova Stewart) won’t get cochlear implant surgery, and the family will slide into the chaos of poverty.

What makes this gripping and compact tale of marriage, faith, madness and possible apocalypse so unusual is the fact that it works so well on all levels. Nichols and cinematographer Adam Stone capture the undramatic Ohio landscape and wide Midwestern sky in almost lyrical compositions, and the rituals of Curtis and Samantha’s days and nights are captured with no hint of anthropological condescension. Yet as Curtis’ visions become more pronounced and more troubling — they almost always begin with eerie and unexpected storms, involve unseen but dangerous intruders, and often end with someone he loves or trusts turning against him violently — the sense that something shocking lies just below the film’s everyday realism becomes almost unbearable. And with no more than a few deft allusions, Nichols makes the point that the pressure on Curtis and Samantha is coming from all directions, and is not purely psychological: Extreme weather and climate change, bad economic news, vanishing healthcare and the prospect of unemployment and bankruptcy are all very real threats for this family and millions of others. (Even the painfully inadequate mental-health services available to someone in Curtis’ position play an agonizing role in the story.)

In an Oscar race that’s likely to feature Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Ryan Gosling, an eccentric outsider like Shannon probably doesn’t stand a chance. But I’d like to think this enormous, marvelously compassionate performance will put him in the running. Always a commanding physical presence, Shannon displays a gravity in this role, a gut-wrenching sense of inner turmoil, that I haven’t quite seen before. Curtis is an intelligent but uneducated guy who’s struggling to understand something no one can understand (the deepest mysteries of our own minds), and profoundly grieving for the loss of his own sense of self as a competent husband and father. He checks out books from the public library, tries to confide in his best friend (Shea Whigham), even goes to see a sympathetic counselor (a nice bit part for Lisa Gay Hamilton). When he borrows money to build out the underground storm shelter in his backyard, it’s partly because he feels an irresistible compulsion to do so, even though he knows it’s irrational. But he also does it because it’s something he knows how to do; his relief at handling practical and logistical problems, rather than the murkier ones raised by faith and psychology, is tangible.

“Take Shelter” culminates with an escalating series of crises and explosions, the biggest of them when Curtis goes off, with all the pent-up fury of a volcano releasing magma, at a local fish fry full of whispering, gossiping neighbors. All I’ll say is that Curtis and Samantha and their daughter will indeed wind up down in that storm shelter, but that even then the question of what Curtis’ visions mean, or what’s “really happening,” is very much up in the air. When I talked to Jessica Chastain about the movie, she declined to offer any explanation for its breathtaking final scene, but she’s right that the key to that ambiguous ending, and to the whole film, lies in the look that passes between the couple. It’s that look that allows Nichols to end his terrifying tale of American apocalypse on a hopeful note: Whatever storm is coming, these two will face it together.

“Take Shelter” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.