As those who have seen Kore-eda’s wrenching 2004 near-masterpiece “Nobody Knows” are already aware, he has a remarkable ability to work with children, and also to capture the geographical and psychological landscape of childhood, where objectively minor events can have enormous significance. (Other titles from Kore-eda’s exceptionally varied oeuvre to check out: “Still Walking,” “After Life” and his 1995 feature debut, “Maborosi.”) In “I Wish” he captures the different worlds of two separated brothers, who both yearn (at least officially) to get their parents back together and reunite as a family. Koichi (Koki Maeda), aged around 12, is an introspective kid with a permanently stunned expression who’s on the edge of teenage alienation. He lives with his mom and grandparents on the southern tip of the island of Kyushu, in the shadow of the ash-spewing volcano Sakurajima. (A major eruption, he imagines, might be just the catastrophe required to undo the divorce.) His younger brother, Ryu (played by Koki’s real-life brother, Ohshiro Maeda), is an ultra-cute, gregarious kid who hangs with a posse of platonic girlfriends and lives with his kind but irresponsible indie-rock dad in the city of Fukuoka, about 175 miles to the north.

Kore-eda is often celebrated in international film circles as a throwback to the Japanese Golden Age of big-name directors like Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa — he has said his favorite is the lesser-known Mikio Naruse, director of “Late Chrysanthemums” and “Floating Clouds” — but there’s nothing forbidding or ascetic about the precise, bittersweet childhood world of “I Wish.” Indeed, according to Kore-eda, the initial inspiration came from the new bullet-train line (or “shinkansen,” in Japanese) that opened last year on Kyushu — and the first image that came into his head was that of the kids walking along the railroad track in “Stand by Me.” Indeed, “I Wish” possesses the tender intimacy, mixed with the slightest tinge of grown-up irony, of some of the very best tales of childhood adventure, from Stephen King to E. Nesbit to Truffaut’s “Small Change.”

Koichi and Ryu, you see, have heard about a piece of shinkansen folklore: When a new train line opens, if you can observe the precise moment when two trains pass each other at high speed for the very first time, wishes can come true and miracles become possible. They’d like to believe this, and maybe partly do, but Kore-eda clearly sees that the imagination of children (and adults too) is not constrained by questions of logic or plausibility. The two boys’ convoluted (and surprisingly expensive) scheme to run away overnight, along with several friends and all their wishes, becomes its own kind of miracle, and the magic it yields — including a fairy godmother! — is even more precious because it requires no suspension of disbelief.

Arguably, the quest for a bullet-train miracle is something of a MacGuffin in “I Wish.” It’s a good one, because it pays off in the end, but the real point of the movie is watching the way Kore-eda and the Maeda brothers (who also work as a kid-comedy act in Japan) capture the competing worlds of Ryu and Koichi with heartbreaking specificity. Koichi, the older of the two, is in many ways less worldly; he can’t quite see that his desire to reunite the family is about as likely to happen as one friend’s desire to become the next Ichiro Suzuki, or another’s to grow up and marry the leggy middle-school librarian. (Like a true romantic, he doesn’t notice or care that she’ll be pushing 50 by the time he’s legal.) As we regard Koichi through Kore-eda’s sympathetic but slightly detached camera — the cinematographer is Yutaka Yamazaki — we both cling to his last moments of innocence and root for him to grow up and reach a more mature understanding of the world. On that knife edge of yearning and longing is this whole film balanced.

Koichi’s only sustaining adult relationship is with his garrulous, chain-smoking grandpa (Isao Hashizume), who was once famous for his traditional sponge cake but now can’t get the recipe right. His mother Nozomi (wonderfully played by Nene Ohtsuka) is lost in booze and self-pity after her breakup with indulgent wastrel Kenji (Joe Odagiri), who’s raising Ryu in a household of benign rock ‘n’ roll neglect. Perhaps the most devastating scene in the entire movie is a wordless interlude when we watch Nozomi coming home from an evening out drinking with friends. Momentarily giddy, she buys an electronic flashing duck from a street vendor, but by the time she reaches her bus stop she doesn’t think it’s so funny anymore and gazes at it in puzzlement and anguish: Why did I buy this, and how did I get here?

Children, of course, will forgive the grown-ups in their lives almost any degree of lameness and irresponsibility if they feel loved, and Kore-eda takes somewhat the same attitude with his adult characters. Even in a slightly darker subplot involving Ryu’s aspiring actress friend Megumi (Kyara Uchida) and her embittered bartending mother (Yui Natsukawa), what we see is a parent doing the best she can, who has lost the ability to see the bigger picture. (If you have kids too, you’ve been there and done that.) When the kids make their pilgrimage to the mystical bullet-train spot, it may not bring Ryu and Koichi back together permanently, or launch a baseball superstar’s career, or bring a beloved family dog back to life. But those aren’t the only forms of magic, and this marvelous work of all-ages movie craftsmanship has magic aplenty.

“I Wish” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It opens May 25 in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington; June 1 in Chicago, Honolulu, Palm Springs, Calif., San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.; June 8 in Atlanta, Denver and Phoenix; June 14 in Bloomington, Ind.; June 15 in Minneapolis and New Orleans; and June 22 in St. Louis and Seattle, with other cities and home video to follow.

A Park Avenue society girl turned Greenwich Village beatnik, Clarke was the pioneering female director in the early history of American independent film, good friends with John Cassavetes, Frederick Wiseman, Jonas Mekas and other downtown legends of the period. If her name and her films have virtually disappeared from history, that’s partly due to institutional sexism, no doubt, and partly to bad luck and bad timing. Milestone Films, which is releasing this version of “The Connection” restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, will go on to release Clarke’s 1960s documentaries “Robert Frost: A Quarrel With the World” and “Portrait of Jason,” an interview with a black gay street hustler, along with her 1985 comeback film “Ornette: Made in America,” about jazz legend Ornette Coleman. (Clarke died in 1997.)

“The Connection,” Clarke’s first feature, was a high-profile project, the screen adaptation of a 1959 Living Theater play by Jack Gelber that had become a cause célèbre despite scathing reviews, attracting uptown artistic types like Leonard Bernstein, Salvador Dalì and Lillian Hellman to take a walk on the wild side. Clarke and her producer, Lewis Allen, funded the film’s $177,000 budget — not so meager, at the time — through the then-unknown tactic of collecting small sums from a large number of investors, establishing a model that endures in micro-budget and mid-budget filmmaking to this day. (Weirdly enough, as Manohla Dargis has reported in the New York Times, former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s parents were among the investors, along with Norman Mailer and architect Philip Johnson.)

But once completed, “The Connection” only screened twice at a single theater on Manhattan’s 45th Street before being closed by New York State’s censorship board. I’m not sure which is more amazing: the fact that New York had a censorship board in the early ’60s that could control what movies the public saw, or the reason for the seizure of “The Connection,” which was two or three uses of the word “shit” (as a synonym for drugs). By the time some edits were made and the ban lifted, public interest had faded, largely because of a swath of unrebutted hostile reviews. Bosley Crowther of the Times, a noted get-off-my-lawn crank of the time, wrote an especially peculiar one in which he praised the actors, the live jazz soundtrack and Clarke’s “bold direction,” but described the film overall as “deadly monotonous, in addition to being sordid and disagreeable.”

I won’t pretend not to understand what Crowther was talking about. “The Connection” remains much better known among jazz fans for its soundtrack album featuring pianist Freddie Redd and saxophonist Jackie McLean (who play live in the film, as they did onstage), than it is among movie buffs as, you know, a film. Clarke should certainly get credit for exploring the faux-documentary format decades before it became a film-school gimmick (the story-within-a-story premise was already present in Gelber’s play), but the first 10 minutes or so of “The Connection” are decidedly awkward. Squaresville white filmmaker Jim Dunn (William Redfield) wanders around in his high-waisted chinos, trying to convince the group of crashed-out junkie hipsters to “act natural” and “be themselves,” and assuring them that he’s studied the documentaries of Robert Flaherty and knows what he’s doing. (A dig at the old-school variety of documentary film, before cinéma-vérité, I guess.) It’s clear that the addicts would rather relate to Dunn’s hipper African-American cameraman, J.J. Burden (an early role for future Hollywood character actor Roscoe Lee Browne), who is rarely seen but makes occasional oracular pronouncements.

In the interests of art, Dunn has apparently agreed to finance a major purchase from a smack dealer named Cowboy, but for most of the movie we are obviously encouraged to ponder the similarities between drug culture and Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” and to wonder whether Cowboy will ever show up at all. Prowling the dingy, open flat restlessly — it looks disconcertingly like a group household I actually lived in, 20-odd years ago — Clarke’s camera introduces us to the all-male assemblage, in fragmentary interviews. Leach (Warren Finnerty), a wiry, whiny fellow who looks and acts alarmingly like the young Steve Buscemi, is the official tenant. He is troubled by a painful boil on his neck, which may symbolize the fact that the other denizens suspect him of being gay. As his black friend Sam (Jim Anderson) will tell him later, he’d be more relaxed if he could “get with the whole homosexual scene.”

There’s also Ernie (Garry Goodrow), an embittered-genius West Coast white jazzman who has hocked his horn to buy junk, and Solly (Jerome Raphael), an educated, middle-class Jewish guy who has thrown it all away for philosophical reasons, or none at all. McLean, Redd, bass player Michael Mattos and drummer Larry Richie get fewer lines, but every so often pick up their instruments to deliver angled, edgy blasts of early-’60s hard bop. Today these characters would presumably be obsessed by some other cultural form — hip-hop or Scandinavian black metal or YouTube clips or hockey fights or something else I’ve never even heard of — and they’d be able to badger Cowboy with illiterate texts every few minutes. But they’d basically be the same guys; Gelber’s characters are drawn so sharply that many 21st-century viewers will identify people they know or used to know (perhaps even people they used to be).

When Cowboy finally arrives (played by Carl Lee, who would become Clarke’s longtime partner), he turns out to be the archetypal “hip Negro” in Ray-Ban shades, sporting a blazing white outfit and a messianic mien, and bringing with him an old-lady evangelist, as comic relief and cover story. He brings other kinds of blessings too, the kind that allow this cast of semi-lovable, self-destructive losers to get through another day. The central conflict faced by the characters in “The Connection” doesn’t have much to do with heroin, though — that too is a symbol or synecdoche. It goes way back before Clarke’s time, not to mention ours. If this film has something to say to us now — and I emphatically think it does — it’s about the costs and opportunities that come with “dropping out” of mainstream society, in the name of political-cultural-aesthetic rebellion. It asks a question that has no answer, one that every disgruntled young dreamer — every potential Shirley Clarke, of every generation — must face on her own.

“The Connection” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with other cities and DVD release to follow.

If “Whores’ Glory” successfully resists romanticizing the lives of women who sell their bodies to make a living, Glawogger also does not surrender to what you might call the vulgar Marxist alternative, in which such women are interchangeable victims in a vast, mechanistic sexual economy, stripped of any agency or personality. Indeed, if there’s an ideological point (and a smidgen of hopefulness) to be found in “Whores’ Glory,” it lies in the film’s insistence that the women Glawogger meets in Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico remain defiantly individual, even in the face of a system of sexual and economic exploitation they cannot (or at least do not) resist. Indeed, “Whores’ Glory” has a surprising double focus on the women’s economic lives and on their spiritual and religious pursuits. If one is inevitably reminded of Marx’s famous remark that religion is the opiate of the masses, one might also remember that his preceding comments were not nearly so harsh: “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.”

Right after that scene with the girls from the Fish Tank strutting over the Bangkok street, Glawogger introduces an extraordinary epigraph from Emily Dickinson, one that convinced me right away that this movie was something unusual. “God is indeed a jealous God,” Dickinson wrote. “He cannot bear to see/ That we had rather not with Him/ But with each other play.” Indeed, we have already seen brief vignettes of women in the three countries talking startlingly about their relationship to the divine. In Reynosa, a battered Mexican border city across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, the street hookers all seem to pray to La Santissima Muerte (the Most Holy Death), a demonic female entity who seems to coexist with God and Jesus in their version of Roman Catholicism. In the City of Joy, a filthy warren of stone buildings in Faridpur, Bangladesh, a young woman tells the camera that she resists clients who demand oral sex by telling them that Allah did not make her mouth for that purpose; it is the mouth she uses to recite the suras of the Quran.

It’s details like those that make “Whores’ Glory” both a wrenching journalistic exploration of real life and something close to great cinema. This film, which took four years to complete, is the third installment in Glawogger’s series of documentaries about work in the era of globalization, which began in 1998 with “Megacities” and continued with “Workingman’s Death” in 2005. (I’m coming late to his work but what I’ve seen so far is absolutely remarkable — and you can see it for yourself in a retrospective that just concluded in New York and will soon reach other cities.) While the fluid camerawork of Wolfgang Thaler is never ostentatious, this film has considerable artistic ambition, with a score by Pappik & Regener (members of the German band Element of Crime) and soundtrack songs by PJ Harvey, CocoRosie and other indie-type artists. I suppose some viewers will find those ingredients intrusive or distracting, but sometimes the music (and Monika Willi’s remarkable editing) serve to create a little dreamlike distance from what we’re seeing on-screen. Without that distance, “Whores’ Glory” might be too difficult to sit through, quite frankly.

Compared with the dire conditions found in Faridpur and Reynosa, the women who work at the Fish Tank have almost middle-class lives. They live in modest but clean apartments, often have outside boyfriends, come to work by taxi, and punch in on a digital clock like industrial workers all over the world. On the other hand, the universal commodification of sexuality in Bangkok and the relentless capitalism of contemporary Asia seem to permeate almost every aspect of their lives. Perhaps it’s surprising that many of them spend their leisure hours hanging out with “bar boys” — coiffed and styled young men who work as prostitutes for an older female clientele — but on the other hand, this is a world where no one believes in romantic love, and everything is for sale.

In Bangladesh, social and religious taboos mean that the prostitutes generally won’t perform oral or anal sex (both of which are routinely available in Thailand). But the women of the City of Joy are virtual prisoners, often sold to madams after their first menstrual period and expected to live out their lives there, first as sex workers, then as madams and finally as servants. On the dusty back streets of Reynosa, where groups of profane, hard-bitten women turn tricks out of tiny sidewalk-level apartments, it’s a drive-by Darwinian free market for every possible sexual act or display, along with drugs, liquor and almost anything else that can be bought or sold. Both these sections of the film are tough to watch, at times, but Glawogger’s interviews with the prostitutes (and sometimes with their clients) always reveal things you aren’t expecting.

In Thailand and Bangladesh, what happens between the women and their johns remains behind closed doors, but in Reynosa, Glawogger persuades a prostitute and her client to let him film their interaction from beginning to end, an utterly businesslike encounter that’s about as sexy as buying half a pound of roast beef at the deli counter. It’s a moment of physical nakedness, but not nearly as revealing as when we see the same woman a bit later, smoking crack with a friend who is avidly trying to seduce her and talking about how visions of the Holy Death have eased her fear of mortality. There’s no judgment in “Whores’ Glory” — certainly not of the working women it depicts, and not even especially of their bewildered clients, who seem to vacillate from misogynist hostility to wistful romanticism and back again. There is, however, tremendous compassion, and more than a few moments of piercing clarity, as when a Bangladeshi hooker who looks no older than 15 tells Glawogger that women are fundamentally sad creatures. “Who can explain why this is true?” she wonders. “Is there no other path?”

“Whores’ Glory” is now playing at the Cinema Village and Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, and the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle. It opens May 25 in San Francisco, June 15 in Boston, June 22 in Philadelphia and July 6 in Atlanta and Washington, with other cities and home-video release to follow.

But movies, speaking generally, are better at depicting psychological states than objective reality. And given the pervasive anxiety of our times, it isn’t surprising that mainstream cinema has started to hark back to the ’70s, a decade of maximum screen disorder and maximum creativity. There are quite a few thrillers and action flicks of the past few years that partake of a ’70s-flavored dystopian and/or paranoid vision, from Chris Nolan’s “Batman” series to “The Hunger Games” to “In Time” and the underappreciated Liam Neeson thriller “Unknown.” (Jonathan Hensleigh’s “Kill the Irishman,” one of my favorite dark-horse actioners of the past several years, has the excuse of actually being set in the ’70s.) But none, perhaps, possess the Charlie Bronson, bullet-in-the-teeth authenticity of writer-director Boaz Yakin’s trashy, bloody, riveting “Safe.”

I assume the title is meant to be ironic, possessing all the subtlety of Jason Statham hitting you repeatedly in the head with a shovel. I don’t think that actually happens in “Safe,” but given the impressive body count piled up by Statham’s character, an ex-MMA cage fighter (and ex-NYPD officer, and ex other things I’m not supposed to tell you about) named Luke, I wouldn’t be surprised. No one and nothing is ever safe in “Safe,” and no one is decent or trustworthy, with the possible and partial exception of Mei (Catherine Chan), a kidnapped 11-year-old Chinese girl whom Luke fastens on to as his vehicle of redemption. Luke would be the first to tell you — in Statham’s put-on but entertaining Noo Yawk wise-guy accent — that he’s a bad dude in all senses of the term. But he’s also one of those action-movie heroes who’s lost everything and everyone he’s ever cared about and has decided to go out with guns blazing to fight for whatever flickers of decency still exist in this crazy freakin’ world.

Yakin builds an impressive mountain of nihilism in this movie. And though it’s not precisely the same nihilism you’d encounter in a genuine Charlie Bronson movie from the Carter administration, it has a similar nightmarish flavor of present-tense dystopia. In the New York that Luke moves through, kicking extensive ass without bothering to take names, the ungovernable metropolis of 35 years ago has been transformed into a massive rigged game. Russian and Chinese mobs are engaged in an endless turf war, with Mei — a math prodigy who can hold massive amounts of numerical data in her head — serving as their pawn. Meanwhile, the NYPD are depicted as a posse of cynical scumbags who make the vicious, warring gangsters look honorable, playing them off each other for an ever-larger piece of the action. And need I even mention that when the upper echelons of city government get involved, they’re the worst of all? (Among all the sleazy supporting roles in “Safe,” I especially enjoyed Chris Sarandon as the gay, mustachioed and profoundly evil mayor of Gotham.)

Arguably the vertiginous, corrosive, all-encompassing paranoia of “Safe” is just a matter of style for Yakin, a Hollywood veteran whose career as a producer, writer and director follows no particular pattern. (Maybe you can connect the dots between “Hostel,” “Remember the Titans” and “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” but I can’t.) More to the point, it’s a style that sets a perfect stage for Statham, the bald, blocky, graceful English action star who seems on course to becoming a modern-day Bronson or Burt Reynolds. (He will reportedly star in a remake of “Heat” — the 1986 Reynolds vehicle, not the 1995 Michael Mann movie — for Brian De Palma.)

Statham definitely possesses a certain man’s-man charm to go with his admirable stunt-man skills, but I hope he’s smart enough to understand that this role opposite a preteen Chinese girl is as close as he should come to doing kiddie movies (à la late Schwarzenegger, or Dwayne Johnson). Absolutely do not bring the little ones to “Safe,” unless they’re sick bastards who’ve gotten bored with your VHS copies of “Death Wish II” and “The Evil That Men Do.” This is a nonstop barrage of indiscriminate killings, beatings and bone-breakings, much of it inflicted by Statham’s Luke without him even changing expression. From its implacable hero and thoroughgoing cynicism to its electrified pace and fairytale conclusion, “Safe” is both a slavish imitation of cinema gone by and a movie for our time. I found it wickedly entertaining and perversely refreshing in its total lack of contemporary piety. But maybe that’s just me.

“Goodbye First Love” is a pretty good title for this film, but it sounds a bit more wistful and personal than the more detached French original, “Un Amour de Jeunesse.” It has almost no plot developments in the conventional sense, simply tracing the life of moody, soulful Camille (Créton, who does indeed resemble a younger Hansen-Løve) from age 15 to about 22, as she loves and then loses and then temporarily regains the slightly older, somewhat dumber but undeniably gorgeous Sullivan (Urzendowsky). While there is no explicit sex in the film and only a little nudity (especially by French standards), the whole thing — the bees and flowers and rivers, the lovers’ bodies, even the Parisian snow — virtually oozes libidinal energy. Hansen-Løve is trying to recapture that exaggerated, labile emotional state of the first love that changes you forever, but without mythologizing it or draping it in sentimental nostalgia.

What’s so striking about this movie from its very first frames is that Hansen-Løve has a fluid and dynamic command of the camera and a highly refined eye, and also that she views this avowedly autobiographical tale with an iron-willed resolve. You definitely can’t say she is cold toward her characters or actors — she bathes them in promiscuous, almost worshipful light — but one feels no intention to render Camille as the victim, or Sullivan as the perpetrator. Hansen-Løve just wants to show us how it was: They loved each other so intensely and burned so hot that it just wasn’t going to work out, and while her story is entirely specific, if you’ve lived on this planet long enough then you’ve had that feeling too.

Mostly she skips over the big dramatic moments, or underplays them. When Sullivan is leaving for the airport and Camille refuses to speak to him or even to look up from her face-down sobbing on the bed, he doesn’t know what to say or do, and simply walks out. I felt like I hated both of them at that moment, but what I was really feeling was a surprisingly intimate connection to how they both felt. I could tell you more about what happens in the movie, but that part doesn’t matter much. What matters is that the experience of watching it is so absorbing, from moment to moment, that I felt myself carried into Camille’s world and at the same time carried back into my own memories. One might add that if you’ve watched as many classic French films as Hansen-Løve clearly has, one may also feel carried, moment by moment, into the palace of Parisian love stories built by Truffaut and Rivette, Agnès Varda and Eric Rohmer, Philippe Garrel and André Téchiné.

Camille seems to want to devour Sullivan, body and soul, and partly in reaction to that and partly out of standard young-man wanderlust, he runs off to South America with his buddies and stops writing. She mourns for him, OD’s on sleeping pills, gets better, and moves on. She takes an architecture class, discovers a vocation, and moves in with the raffish Norwegian professor and star architect (gracefully played by Magne-Håvard Brekke) who’s at least twice her age. When Sullivan returns to Paris years later, Camille finds that her feelings haven’t changed, although her behavior certainly has. As Sullivan tells her, she is now an adult and an adulteress, cheating on a man she loves and who loves her.

Just in case you’re not up on French film-world gossip, much of this indeed seems to be drawn from life, and the resulting suppositions have set Parisians abuzz. Hansen-Løve broke into movies as the teenage star of “Late August, Early September,” a 1998 film by leading French director Olivier Assayas (now best known for his international hit “Summer Hours” and the explosive miniseries “Carlos”). Not long after that she became Assayas’ lover, despite their 26-year age difference, not to mention the fact that he was married to Chinese actress Maggie Cheung (who had starred in his “Irma Vep”) at the time. Hansen-Løve and Assayas have lived together for years and are reportedly engaged — but if Assayas is the real-life Norwegian-architect role model from “Goodbye First Love,” does that mean that Hansen-Løve cheated on him, early in their relationship, with a no-account but remarkably handsome former boyfriend?

It’s only human nature to wonder about that stuff, but I don’t know the answer and it makes no difference in watching “Goodbye First Love,” which is a gorgeous, commanding work of poetic realism that suggests Hansen-Løve may outdo her boyfriend. (At her age, Assayas had made only one feature, which wasn’t widely seen.) Haters gonna hate, as we say on this side of the Atlantic, and I’m sure some people suspect that Hansen-Løve got her chance because of her personal connections. But it’s what she’s done with that chance that matters, and she’s made a glorious, hot-cold Romeo and Juliet fable, one that conjures up the sweet agony of youthful romance with almost alchemical force.

“Goodbye First Love” is now playing in Los Angeles and New York, with a national rollout to follow. It will also available on-demand, beginning April 27, from many cable and satellite providers.