And why put Soderbergh on a list of important filmmakers when he hasn’t made a paradigm-shifting, spotlight-grabbing conversation piece since 2000, when he released “Traffic” and “Erin Brockovich” and won fistfuls of awards for both?

I have a definite answer to that last question: Because Steven Soderbergh is, in every conceivable sense of the phrase, state-of-the-art. He’s a total filmmaker, with all the splendor and baggage the adjective and noun imply.

The other questions I can’t answer because I can’t get a handle on Soderbergh. I’m not sure anyone can. To rework a great line from “The Limey,” in some ways his vision seems less a vision than a vibe. And the elusiveness of every aspect of this multifaceted filmmaker — the question mark at the center of his 20-year career — seems inextricably bound up with the way that changes in technology and distribution have made filmmaking (now more often videomaking) a part of daily life.

From the high-profile output of some of Soderbergh’s nearly-as-workaholic contemporaries (Clint Eastwood, Spike Lee, Michael Winterbottom and Takashi Miike are also lifetime members of Filmaholics Anonymous) through the rarely distributed microbudget indies cranked out by the thousands each calendar year on down to the home movies and amateur music videos and cartoons and found-footage mash-ups that dominate YouTube, we’ve become a society of filmmakers — people who instinctively view life as if it had a frame around it, even if we’re not consciously aware that we’re doing so. Life and movies, documentary and drama, virtual and real have become a big blur.

Soderbergh anticipated all this in his semi-autobiographical 1989 debut, “sex, lies and videotape.” That breakthrough indie was built around a drifter named Graham (James Spader) who punished himself for sexual and romantic sins by withdrawing into a voyeuristic cocoon, videotaping women’s rawest sexual confessions and presumably jerking off to them. (I say “presumably” because Graham frankly admits that he’s “incapable of getting an erection in the presence of another person,” and he’s never seen pleasuring himself while watching the videos — just staring blankly at the screen as if hoping some cathartic meaning will emerge.) Many of Soderbergh’s subsequent films were likewise concerned with the allure and consequences of voyeurism and self-deception — with the thrill that comes from watching and the fear of being watched, and every person’s daily struggle to present themselves as they wish to be seen and avoid confronting what they are. This fascination flowered in the aughts as the director embraced video (from consumer-grade digital to hi-def) and became a one-man band.

Soderbergh’s semi-improvised 2002 feature “Full Frontal” could have been titled “more sex, lies and videotape,” for its hand-held mini-DV visuals, its exploration of how the clichés of movie romance distort our expectations of the real thing, and its fascination with lonely and deluded people writing self-flattering autobiographies in real-time via monologues. To quote critic Daniel Kleinfeld, “The question ‘Full Frontal’ worries at obsessively is: If we imagine love through an unreal medium, does that threaten the reality of our love?”

This year’s “The Girlfriend Experience” might have been the third panel in this unofficial triptych. It shows how social media have not just made people’s constructed selves seem more real — almost tactile — and empowered individuals to enforce boundaries on friendship and intimacy, creating their own little alternate realities and denying entry to those who can’t or won’t validate it. (The movie’s title refers to what a high-class prostitute’s johns all want: not a girlfriend, but the girlfriend experience — not intimacy but a carefully circumscribed, mutually agreed-upon imitation of intimacy.)

The TV series that Soderbergh coproduced with frequent collaborators George Clooney and Grant Heslov — HBO’s underrated “K Street” and “Unscripted” — dug into this phenomenon as well. The former showed how legislators, consultants and lobbyists were all performers in a drama titled “Washington, D.C.” The latter explored the world of actors, and showed how the act of committing imagination to fiction could falsify offstage emotion and distort perceptions of life.

Another one of Soderbergh’s fruitful blurs is the interaction of art and entertainment, underground filmmaking and Hollywood. Whether he’s working with $50 million budgets or pocket change, you never know which part of the spectrum he’ll emphasize. And his directorial decisions are usually as interesting (often more interesting) than the action on-screen.

Soderbergh gave “Erin Brockovich” touches of grubby, Cassavetes-like spontaneity that grounded the film’s give-the-star-everything screenplay and made the whole thing bearable. Soderbergh’s canny strategy is exemplified by that early moment where Erin stands in her kitchen late at night eating pineapple out of a can. She hears her infant stir awake. Rather than drop everything and run to check on him, she listens to see if he’ll go back to sleep of his own accord, and when he does, she continues eating her pineapple.

Soderbergh’s pan-national, multi-character social drama “Traffic” was natural Oscar bait. But Soderbergh mostly avoided pandering, and instead balanced the film’s commercially required “big” scenes with smaller moments of disappointment, ambiguity and paralysis, and gave it the look and feel of a hit-and-run indie (with jagged cutting and photography that Soderbergh, working as his own cinematographer for the first time, freely admits was pretty crude). He shot his no-budget neorealist experiment “Bubble” in a very classical style, nearly Kubrickian in its coldness, at a time when most directors working at that level (including Soderbergh) reflexively worked in the hand-held hokey-pokey mode. He seems to want to keep surprising people, most of all himself — an admirable desire.

When Soderbergh engages head-on with film history, the results are spottier. His reworking of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” was considered as brazen an act of effrontery as Gus van Sant’s “Psycho” remake, but even though it was too unfocused (narratively and visually) to be as devastating as it plainly wanted to be, it was fascinating and altogether defensible, because it was as intuitive as the original was analytical. (It’s probably Soderbergh’s second most moving film after “The Limey” — still his masterpiece, and one of the most formally audacious commercial features of the last quarter-century.) “The Good German” was a disaster from which everyone involved was lucky to escape — shot with old movie equipment but not fully cognizant of old movie grammar and texture, and sullied by modernizing touches that seemed more glib and crude than shocking or revelatory. “Che,” while honorable and serious in its determination to be an anti-biopic biopic, left me cold; it felt too dry — too much like homework, or a Ken Loach film without the spark of righteous fury that makes Loach so valuable.

But I’ll give Soderbergh this much: He fails big. His missteps are more fascinating than most directors’ successes. And even when he’s selling out, he’s not really selling out.

He gave the super-slick “Oceans 11” personality by putting the project’s express-train-to-the-box-office shamelessness at the center of the story; it’s a faintly postmodern heist picture that presents its thief characters as actors grabbing a ton of money by putting on a great show. Its first sequel, “Oceans 12,” was a dissection of the original, a deconstruction of a deconstruction that denied nearly every satisfaction people took from the first movie. Its masterstroke was having costar Roberts play a character who looked so much like Julia Roberts that she ended up being enlisted by the crooks to impersonate Julia Roberts. A more prankish summation of movie stardom is hard to imagine, and thanks to Soderbergh’s interest in the intent and mechanics of role-playing, the fact that Julia Roberts was rather boring playing Julia Roberts seemed not like a failure, but the whole point of the exercise. (The movie’s stubborn determination to piss off everybody who had fun watching the first one was a statement, too — the post-Godardian intellectual filmmaker’s version of what Martin Scorsese did in “Cape Fear,” punishing the audience for wanting that sort of movie, and perhaps expressing his disgust with himself for being able to give it to them.) The third “Oceans” film pulled the franchise into the headspace that birthed “sex, lies, and videotape,” “Full Frontal” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” showing a bunch of old dogs learning new technological tricks. The result was a weightless but clever time-killer that might have been as autobiographically driven as Soderbergh’s smaller films, considering it showed hardheaded experts adapting their skills to prosper in a changing world.

Soderbergh should be insufferable, yet he and his films are charming, sometimes outright self-deprecating. This is the man who titled his quasi-memoir “Getting Away With It: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw,” devoted much of the book’s page count to transcripts of conversations with one of his filmmaking heroes, Richard Lester, and adorned the book’s cover with the most hideously clownish photo ever taken of anyone, ever. This is the man who invited the writer of his 1999 film “The Limey,” Lem Dobbs, to sit in on that film’s DVD commentary track and ream Soderbergh for altering his script. To act like this, you have to be supremely arrogant, supremely masochistic, or so devoted to your craft that you have no ego to bruise.

I find him frustratingly opaque and half-baked a lot of the time — too obscure in his motivations, too much a slave to the adrenaline rush of process, and although I’ve praised some of his work this decade (particularly the HBO series), I’ve beaten up on him, too, giving “Full Frontal,” “Oceans 12,” “The Good German” some of the harshest reviews I’ve ever published. At the same, time, though, I’ll admit that revisiting Soderbergh’s output while researching this series made me see patterns I’d overlooked, and wish I could take back some of the negative things I’ve written about him. It’s hard not to appreciate his grounded attitude and be grateful that such an idiosyncratic and decent filmmaker can prosper in a mostly vicious, stupid industry. And wouldn’t you know it: Just when I was ready to say that he hadn’t made a truly great film since “The Limey,” along comes “The Informant!” a satire on business ethics and self-delusion that’s as corrosively funny as the best of Billy Wilder.

Soderbergh is cinema in the aughts. That statement, like so many Soderbergh films, can mean whatever you want it to mean. But he should take it as a compliment. 

And taken together, they tell us a quite a bit about the state of the auteur in the age of digital technology. Cinema, like every art form, has always had an aspect of omnipotence. Art lets man play God — or at the very least return to a childlike state of openness that lets the imagination run free. And many of the technological changes that marked this decade in film were all about building a bigger and better train set. From the use of CGI to create fairy tale landscapes and grotesque monsters in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and the “Star Wars” prequels, to David Fincher adding and subtracting years from Brad Pitt’s face in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” flights of fancy don’t seem so fanciful anymore.

I’ve just given myself a natural segue to start bashing Zemeckis as a soulless high-tech noodler — a label hung on him by hostile critics who miss the 1980s showman who directed “Used Cars” and “Back to the Future” and think he’s lost touch with his artistry, and maybe his soul. I can understand their dissatisfaction — I loved the old Zemeckis, too. But I’m impressed with what Zemeckis has become. The three films he shot in the 3-D motion-capture process — “Polar Express,” “Beowulf” (2007) and this year’s “A Christmas Carol” — strike me as the most technologically, stylistically and tonally radical blockbusters to appear on U.S. screens since the heyday of Stanley Kubrick.

I’m not suggesting the two directors are philosophical birds of a feather or that they’re equal in artistry — in the cinematic firmament, Zemeckis is a star, Kubrick a galaxy — but that they share a pioneer’s mind-set. Kubrick was an inventor and an explorer as well as a storyteller, and so is Zemeckis. Kubrick was famous for coming up with a stunningly ambitious idea for a scene or image, being told by crew members that it couldn’t be done because the technology didn’t exist, then having them invent it, and even supplying them with sketches and reading material to get them started. From the groundbreaking miniature and optical effects in “2001: A Space Odyssey” through the dinners lit by candlelight in “Barry Lyndon” and the stunningly elaborate and expressive Steadicam shots in “The Shining,” Kubrick didn’t just make movies, he changed how movies were made. And whatever he didn’t invent he improved. Part of the appeal of his films was that whether or not you liked the film as art, you could depend on Kubrick to surprise you — by showcasing a fresh way of creating, photographing or manipulating an image, or by applying a risky tone to a tricky subject (think of the corrosive black humor of “Dr. Strangelove,” which dares to see the absurdity of Armageddon, or the subjectively distorted visuals of “A Clockwork Orange,” which externalizes the demented worldview of its sociopathic hero). Zemeckis shares Kubrick’s determination to tell old stories in new ways.

He also shares with Kubrick — and the great model-train aficionado Welles — a world-builder’s mentality. Zemeckis has spent much of his adult life creating or perfecting new devices, processes and even shots. You can see his restless curiosity at work in the dazzling optical effects in the “Back to the Future” trilogy and the integration of live action and animation in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” through the innovative, digitally assisted camera angles in “What Lies Beneath” (the most astonishing of which starts very low, looking up through a seemingly transparent or nonexistent floor, then slowly rises to an overhead view that shows the floor fully intact). Now, thanks to motion capture, which can reproduce a moment from any angle the director wishes, Zemeckis is able to create whole worlds in his hard drive. He’s no longer confined to stitching bits and pieces of reality and fantasy together and cleverly hiding the seams, as he did in his ’80s and ’90s movies. He can treat reality as if it were sculptor’s clay. If he can visualize it, he can put it on screen.

While the motion-capture technology used by Zemeckis has improved with each new feature, the early complaints lodged against “Polar Express” — that the world seemed too slick and inorganic and the characters too rubbery or PlayStation-like — still resonate. And it’s true that when Zemeckis’ Beowulf leaps around the mead hall, there’s no density to his movements. It’s like he’s being controlled by joystick (or by invisible marionette strings). One wonders whether Zemeckis made a tactical mistake that the chess master Kubrick would have avoided. Did he throw his artist’s vision behind a technology that wasn’t ready to achieve what he wanted it to?

Perhaps. But if we buy that reading of Zemeckis’ career, we have to first accept that the whole point of the exercise was photorealism. And I don’t think it was. I suspect instead that Zemeckis digs motion-captured imagery not in spite of its unreality but because of it. The “people” in his last three films are emblematic, archetypal, like puppets or figures in a mural; their “illustrated” look syncs up perfectly with the subject matter, which is dramatically very basic and general.

He’s a mythmaker now.

“The Polar Express” is an enveloping (some would say oppressive) parable about the limits of rationality and the necessity of faith. “Beowulf” is a stark fable about the long-term consequences of sin, depicting its hero as a warrior-pillager who’s both the figurative and literal father of his troubles; Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary’s screenplay spikes the ancient poem with a dash of “Oedipus Rex” (“What caused this infernal plague on Thebes? Oh, wait a second, my bad — it’s me!“). His latest opus, “A Christmas Carol,” is his most visually arresting movie since “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” It’s a heartfelt and in some ways demented fusion of finger-wagging morality tale, up-to-the-minute social satire (the movie foregrounds the Cratchit family’s economic deprivation and lack of decent healthcare, and pointedly shows Scrooge realizing his responsibility not just to the Cratchits, but to people like the Cratchits) and overscaled, psychedelic amusement park ride (the Ghost of Christmas Present hauls Scrooge from location to location in a disembodied flying room with a transparent floor; it’s like a glass-bottomed Victorian hovercraft). And it continues the Zemeckis tradition, begun in the “Back to the Future” trilogy and continued in the motion-capture features, of enlisting a handful of actors to play multiple roles. (Tom Hanks in “Polar Express” and Jim Carrey and Gary Oldman in “A Christmas Carol” made like Peter Sellers in “Dr. Strangelove,” appearing in multiple roles under digital makeup.) Zemeckis is the ultimate example of new-millennium moviemaking — a total filmmaker who hasn’t touched film in years; a sorcerer with an eyepiece, making his dreams come true.

But as is so often the case with Zemeckis, pre- and post-2000, the presentation in the recent movies is so overwhelming, such a spectacle in itself, that it simultaneously amplifies and undermines the subject. The movies are structurally very conservative — linear in their storytelling, unambiguous in their symbolism, strikingly classical in their compositions and camera movements and sense of pace. It’s the package that’s revolutionary. And Zemeckis is only the most dramatic example of this kind of filmmaker; we’ve seen many of them this decade, from Peter Jackson (the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “King Kong” and “The Lovely Bones” ) to George Lucas and Steven Spielberg (who resuscitated both the “Star Wars” and Indiana Jones franchises, digitally rebooting them in ways that alienated fans of the analog originals) to Fincher (who applied digital world-building technology to the blockbuster adult drama in “Button” and “Zodiac”). All these directors have a touch of Welles about them; all directors do, granted, but digital technology has turned every movie, even medium-size ones, into opportunities to dream really, really big, and exercise near-absolute control over every scene, frame and pixel.

What’s missing from all these movies is an awareness of the limits of control — a self-aware, self-critical sense of what God complexes can do to an artist, or to anybody. You can sense of a bit of this temperament at work in Fincher’s last two films — which makes sense given the subject matter, namely the mystery of evil and the inevitability of death — but for the most part Fincher’s self-reflection is coded, at times deliberately camouflaged. It’s there if you want to look for it, but it never comes looking for you. That’s a defensible approach, but in an era of control-freak visionary filmmaking, a more challenging, confounding and emotionally intense vision is necessary.

That’s where Wes Anderson comes in. The director of “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001), “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” (2004), “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007) and this year’s Roald Dahl adaptation “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is as much a train-set filmmaker as Zemeckis, Jackson and Lucas, and like Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson (“Punch-Drunk Love,” “There Will Be Blood”), Zemeckis and Spielberg, he’s one of the few prominent Hollywood filmmakers working in the ’70s auteur tradition — and doing it with a style so distinct that it can never be stolen, only imitated. He’s notorious for fretting over every aspect of his movies, from the texture of the clothes to the precise geometric motion of each shot and camera movement to the choice of on-screen font (he prefers variations of Futura). Detractors describe his style as fussy, overcomplicated, even airless — and if one prefers a messier, more spontaneous kind of filmmaking, or a more “invisible” style of direction, Anderson is almost certainly the opposite of fun.

I won’t mount a defense of Anderson as an exciting, imaginative and important filmmaker in this article, because I’ve already done it in a series of video essays. I mention him in this piece because of two particular aspects of his art. One is his commitment to analog moviemaking. He shoots on film and prefers to do everything, special effects included, on the set rather than create them after the fact. Even when he employs digital effects or processes, he calls attention to their artificiality; think of the obviously stop-motion sea creatures in “Aquatic” — or, for that matter, the unruly, roiling fur on the creatures in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” — which the director insisted be fabricated with hard-to-manage animal hair rather than more controllable synthetic hair, because he just liked how it looked.

Even more significant, in the context of Zemeckis and company, is Anderson’s interest in depicting the emotional and social consequences of the control-freak, God-complex behavior that most directors (including Anderson, I’m sure) possess. Think of Max Fischer in “Rushmore” (1998) learning to redirect his self-aggrandizing talent into a poignant gesture of reconciliation, by dedicating his Vietnam play to Herman Blume, a Vietnam vet, and then contriving to have him sit next to his sometime lover and Max’s unrequited love object, Miss Cross. Or the entire once-great family of geniuses coming to grips with their personal and professional failures in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” specifically the major role that their charismatic but deeply selfish patriarch, Royal, played in the catastrophe.

Better yet, consider the title character of “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” a visionary stoner who designed his own boat and his crew’s technology and uniforms, and runs a little movie studio producing documentaries that record his exploits and glorify his image. Zissou responds to his partner’s death-by-jaguar-shark by vowing, à la Captain Ahab, to hunt down and destroy the animal, only to lose another loved one in the process to a random accident. The shock makes him realize that the shark attack was random as well, and realize that one can’t survive and be happy without learning to accept the limits of control over everything in life — especially death, no matter how senseless or unfair it may seem. (The moment in “Aquatic” when Zissou stares through the mini-sub porthole at the shark and asks, “I wonder if it remembers me?” might be the definitive big-screen statement on post-9/11 grief.) As my colleague Adam Nayman said in an e-mail exchange: “Anderson hit upon a brilliant notion: Moby Dick doesn’t care a whit about Ahab. This particular Ahab has to learn to accept that the object of his obsession is utterly indifferent, which hurts — and everyone else in the sub seems to recognize this.”

One can also derive renewed vigor and strength from the trauma of loss and the fear of death — a point made visually, and amusingly, by the great moment in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” where the Fox family pauses on a road to regard the mysterious figure of a lone black wolf on the hill. Mr. Fox raises his arm and gives the Black Power salute, and the wolf returns it. It’s not just the director reassuring fans that making a kid’s movie didn’t defang him; it’s also a reminder that the flip side of destruction is creation, and that Mr. Fox’s creativity and wildness (like everyone’s creativity and wildness) come from the same place.

Anderson explored the limits of control even more pointedly in “The Darjeeling Limited,” in which three rich, hyper-intelligent but estranged brothers embark on a “spiritual journey” through India. The eldest micromanages every minute of the journey through laminated itineraries provided by his personal assistant, and all three seem reluctant to really give themselves over to the experience because the very prospect scares them. (Told that the train stopped because it got “lost,” one brother cries, “How can a train be lost? It’s on rails!”)

The film is all about learning to accept, even embrace, the randomness of existence and the omnipresent threat of death, incarnated by a legendary man-eating tiger. The beast appears at the end of the most conceptually daring of Anderson’s beloved dollhouse shots — a slow pan through a passenger train of the imagination whose riders include significant characters from many different times and places. The sequence’s final camera movement is a left-to-right whip-pan from Bill Murray’s businessman (who missed a train in the opening scene) that reveals the tiger in the bushes, patiently keeping watch over all of them.

The final shot of the entire movie is a mirror-image, right-to-left pan, moving from the brothers (who’ve had their adventures, experienced a couple of almost-epiphanies and then gotten back on the train) to a shot of the Darjeeling Limited stretching off into the distance (the camera is mounted on the side of the train). The wide screen is divided into perfect halves. On the right is the sleek metal train, man’s creation, moving along a predetermined track. On the left is the landscape rushing by, a blur of green hills perpetually revising itself. Control and chaos: You can’t have one without the other.

Thanks to Sarah D. Bunting and Aaron Aradillas for their invaluable assistance with this series.

The poignancy of that quote comes from the implication that the novel’s hero, Binx Bolling, is so alienated from his existence that films feel more real to him than life. But certain filmmakers — I call them sensualists — go Walker Percy one better. Through boldly expressive shots, cuts, sound cues and music, they suggest that we experience movies as moments because we experience life that way, too.

Michael Mann, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien — the decade’s great sensualist filmmakers — accept this proposition as a given. Read a cable channel’s one-paragraph schedule-grid summary of Mann’s “Ali,“ ”Collateral,“ ”Miami Vice“ and “Public Enemies“; Malick’s “The New World“ (all three versions, each of which is a different and equally valid film); Wong’s “In the Mood for Love,“ ”2046,“ ”The Hand” (a segment of the omnibus “Eros”) and “My Blueberry Nights“; Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive“ and “Inland Empire,” or Hou’s “Three Times“ and “Millennium Mambo,“ and you would never guess that the films’ directors had anything in common.

But they share a defining trait: a lyrical gift for showing life in the moment, for capturing experience as it happens and as we remember it.

The sensualists are bored with dramatic housekeeping. They’re interested in sensations and emotions, occurrences and memories of occurrences. If their films could be said to have a literary voice, it would fall somewhere between third person and first — perhaps as close to first person as the film can get without having the camera directly represent what a character sees.

Yet at the same time sensualist directors have a respect for privacy and mystery. They are attuned to tiny fluctuations in mood (the character’s and the scene’s). But they’d rather drink lye than tell you what a character is thinking or feeling – or, God forbid, have a character tell you what he’s thinking or feeling. The point is to inspire associations, realizations, epiphanies — not in the character, although that sometimes happens, but in the moviegoer.

You can tell by watching the sensualists’ films, with their startling cuts, lyrical transitions, off-kilter compositions and judicious use of slow motion as emotional italics, that they believe we experience life not as dramatic arcs or plot points or in-the-moment revelations, but as moments that cohere and define themselves in hindsight — as markers that don’t seem like markers when they happen.

The major phases of the hero’s life in “2046″ are circumscribed by the time he spent with a handful of lovely and amazing women, but he doesn’t know this until he’s reminisced; the film is itself an act of remembrance, a transcription of the contents of the hero’s head. Wong’s sublime re-creations of moments from each relationship have the elasticity of memory; Wong takes his cues from the hero’s emotions, stretching or compressing time depending on whether the hero wants to gloss over a moment, scrutinize it or revel in it. Similarly, Pocahontas’ life in “The New World” can be subdivided into birth/childhood (distilled into shots of Powhatans swimming in the ocean, then rising to the surface), the pre-John Smith years, the John Smith years, the life-after-John-Smith years, the heroine’s marriage to John Rolfe and assimilation in England, and her death. The last event symbolically returns Pocahontas’ spirit to its origin point in tandem with the ship that brings her son and husband to North America. The ship is photographed against bright sky that turns it into a cut-paper silhouette — an iconic image that evokes the ferryman’s boat crossing the Styx.

None of these associations or delineations jump up and announce, “Here I am!” while you’re watching “2046″ or “The New World” — or “Miami Vice” or Hou’s “Flight of the Red Balloon” — for the first time. The films give you the pieces. You put them together. Sensualist films are composed of moments and fragments of moments — bits of journeys, traumas, arguments, separations, romantic interludes; mysterious yet evocative shots of buildings, clothes and objects; images that seem like dream fragments, but which you’re reluctant to classify as such because the whole film has a dreamlike feel. The fragments cascade across the screen. They don’t reveal their significance until you’ve contemplated the whole film afterward — and then only if you’ve reimagined the fragments not on your terms but through the eyes of the films’ spiritually questing heroes. (The yearning, sometimes purplish voice-over monologues in Malick’s last two films are all about trying to define the indefinable, describe the indescribable. They’re about the inadequacy of words.)

Sensualists excel at composing images and moments that seem to stand apart from the films and be about nothing but their own beauty. Yet when you look at such images and moments in the context of the film as a whole they seem hugely significant, because they distill the film’s preoccupations with haiku-like precision.

The shots of flowing waters and tall trees that end “The New World” aren’t just pretty images of nature; they suggest the ebb and flow of personal and national history (the water) and the way that individual lives (the trees) derive nourishment from it and then root themselves in the memories of loved ones. Early in Wong’s “In the Mood for Love,” there’s a shot of the married heroine, Su Li-zhen, briefly crossing an empty room dominated by a door frame. We don’t get a good look at any part of her except her hand, which hangs briefly on the door frame before she leaves the room, and after she’s gone, Wong holds on the empty frame. Like the final montage in “The New World,” that shot from “In the Mood for Love” seems affected, pretty for the sake of prettiness, until you realize that the film tells the story of two married people who fall in love with each other’s spouses. The most important thing in the shot is the wedding ring on the heroine’s finger. The brevity with which it appears and disappears in the shot (maybe two seconds) tells you everything about these characters, this story, this director.

The sensualists are sometimes rapped as navel-gazers — filmmakers who spotlight the ephemeral while ignoring or downplaying the basics: what happened, to whom and to what end. And their kind of filmmaking is not a route to box office glory. Hou is virtually unknown to American moviegoers; his films get brief theatrical releases, often on the coasts, if they play here at all. Wong is better known, but by the standards of Hollywood filmmaking still a curiosity. His great works of the past decade were probably seen by fewer people than saw “Live Free or Die Hard” on opening day, and his first English language feature, 2008′s “My Blueberry Nights,” was deemed a disappointment by U.S. critics – a misstep that prompted disillusioned fans to revisit his earlier Chinese movies and ask if they were as wonderful as they seemed or if they were graded on a curve because they weren’t in English. (“My Blueberry Nights” is indeed minor Wong, small in scale and light in tone, but it’s still major; it’s the film equivalent of a great symphony composer dropping into a nightclub one Friday night and sitting in on piano.)

David Lynch is a brand name, a synonym for “weird,” but he hasn’t made a commercially successful film since 1999′s “The Straight Story.” His two masterpieces this decade, 2001′s “Mulholland Drive” and “2006′s “Inland Empire,” induced rapture among certain cinephiles but bafflement among casual moviegoers. They continued the off-putting arc of Lynch’s career, post-”Twin Peaks,” which saw the director grow increasingly unsatisfied with merely being surreal and subversive, instead actively undermining, even attacking, narrative itself. Lynch’s last three features (including 1996′s “Lost Highway”) are the closest viewers may ever come to having someone else’s dream. The films change emphasis and direction and fuse (or swap out) characters without warning. They flow through the mind like water.

Michael Mann’s only hit this decade was 2004′s “Collateral,” a thriller that was technically innovative (and sometimes eerily beautiful) but structurally tame. His other films — the 2001 biopic “Ali,” 2006′s “Miami Vice” and this year’s “Public Enemies” — were in every way more adventurous; they met with wildly mixed, often harsh reviews, made squat at the box office and were derided by many viewers as obscure, meandering, indulgent and worst of all, artsy. Those words were likewise applied to Malick’s “The New World,” a film that has grown in popularity since its 2005 release, but which is still viewed (like Malick’s other films) skeptically by those who distrust movies that aren’t fueled by plot — particularly films that show characters interrogating themselves via internal monologue and turning cartwheels in the grass. “What’s the point of such silliness?” the skeptic grouses. “Let’s get on with the story. Let’s hear it for the good old missionary position.”

Then again, let’s not. To Binx Bolling’s images of Orson Welles in the doorway and John Wayne in the street, let’s add the ones cited above, plus more culled from a decade’s worth of great sensualist filmmaking: the hero and heroine of “In the Mood for Love ” passing each other on the stairwell and feeling the charge of forbidden attraction; the transitions to the neo-noir “future ” in “2046″ that reveal a sleek elevated train system, a special effect rendered so simply, even crudely, that it’s unconvincing, yet which is somehow more dreamlike, more powerful, because it’s unconvincing; the demon-man behind the dumpster in “Mulholland Drive,” and the rabbits on the couch and the tiny couple and the heroine’s nonsensical, nightmarish rushing-about in the disorienting final sequence of “Inland Empire”; the shock cut that reveals the black-painted Death figure sitting in the chair near Pocahontas’ bed in “The New World”; the Holly Golightly-esque heroine of Hou’s “Millennium Mambo” standing up through an open car roof as she rides through a tunnel at night, arms out, grinning, techno pulsing on the soundtrack; the shots of lovers’ hands tentatively touching for the first time in Hou’s 2005 triptych of shorts “Three Times.” Of the latter, Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek wrote, “Hou is less interested in strictly defined plots than he is in mapping the way time unfolds, exploring the varied, shifting textures of the hours of the day as they move along.”

Mann, maybe the best-known practitioner of this type of filmmaking, produced countless indelible sensualist moments in the past decade. My favorites include Muhammad Ali sitting by himself in a subway car at night in “Ali,” contemplating his true self before he steps into the ring or on TV and shows the world his constructed self; the assassin and the cabbie in “Collateral” watching a coyote lope across a Los Angeles street; the high-angled shot of Crockett and Isabella sailing to Cuba in a go-fast boat in “Miami Vice,” and the subsequent cutaway, during their conversation in the bar, to a shot of children’s legs running in front of a car’s hubcap — an image that hints at the domestic future that the lovers can’t have because they’re loners at heart. While we’re at it, let’s add three images from Mann’s uneven but fascinating “Public Enemies”: the streetlamps reflected in the hood of John Dillinger’s sleek black car; the granite determination in the eyes of lawman Charles Winstead as he interrogates Dillinger’s girlfriend, Billie Frechette, and his bemused respect as he realizes she’s tougher than he thought; and Dillinger’s awed and amused expression as he watches “Manhattan Melodrama,” seeing his reality in the film’s fiction, finding himself in the moment.

Commitment to the moment is the reason Mann’s camera in “Miami Vice” creeps so slowly toward the face of drug cartel henchman Jose Yero as he watches Crockett and Isabella dance in a nightclub and realizes from their body language that they’re not just having sex, they’re in love. The moment isn’t just about Yero realizing that Isabella’s judgment and the security of his boss’s operation have been compromised; it’s about Yero’s humiliation and rage at realizing that Crockett has won the heart of a woman who would never give Yero the time of day. Most filmmakers would duly note Yero’s epiphany and get on with it. Mann stays inside the moment as long as he can, feeling Yero’s rage build and crest like a wave. Yero’s feelings are the point of the scene, just as the “Mulholland Drive” lovers’ scorching desire to lose themselves — their very identities — in a moment is the point of the first lesbian tryst in Lynch’s film, and just as the experience of being John Dillinger is the point of that sequence in “Public Enemies” where the gangster brazenly walks into a police station, looks at the evidence laid out against him on a squad room wall, and sees himself as others see him — as a legend, a menace, an abstraction.

Village Voice critic J. Hoberman nailed the sensualist ethos in his review of Hou’s 2007 reimagining of the classic French short “The Red Balloon” when he described Hou’s version as “a movie that encourages the spectator to rummage … contemplative but never static, and punctuated by passages of pure cinema. A medley of racing shadows turns out to be cast by a merry-go-round. A long consideration of the setting sun as reflected on a train window that frames the onrushing landscape yields a sudden flood of light.”

In a sensualist film, the shape, color and pace of the world on-screen is informed, sometimes formed, by what the characters are feeling — and by the filmmakers’ determination to present those feelings as vividly and cinematically as possible. Which necessarily means that sensualist films often disregard or downplay elements that “good” movies are expected to prize: snappy dialogue; a three-act structure with a cause-and-effect plot that “raises the stakes,” as hack screenwriters say, every 20 minutes or so, and a pop-Freudian sense of characterization that shows characters with a single overriding flaw identifying the cause of that flaw (moral compromise, a grim childhood) and struggling to heal, or win, or whatever. You know — the shopping list.

Sensualists have no use for lists. They flip them over and write poetry on the back. They’re quite comfortable with viewers asking, “Why did the character decide to do that?” or “Why did the film end where it ended?” or “What is this movie trying to say?” In fact, the opportunity to provoke such questions is a big part of why they make films. They want to spark identification and subjective response. They want to put you inside another time, another place, another life.

Thanks to Sarah D. Bunting and Aaron Aradillas for their invaluable assistance with this series.

Yet Bay never respects the rhythmic integrity of any image, rarely holding a shot, any shot, no matter how lovely or functional or potentially powerful, for longer than three seconds, dicing hundreds of thousands of feet of 35mm film into celluloid shrapnel and firing it at the audience’s face. One is tempted to say that you can’t fast-forward through Bay’s films because they’re already on fast forward, but that’s not accurate. They don’t so much leave out what immature viewers call the “boring parts” (characterization, exposition, atmosphere) as destabilize and disorient the viewer by investing the “boring parts” with the same trashy momentousness as Bay’s set pieces. The apple-pie-scented flashbacks to the heroes’ childhoods in “Pearl Harbor” are staged and edited with the same apocalyptic brio as the titular act of infamy — hyped-up orchestral cues, jumpy editing, swooping crane shots, lens-against-the-tonsils mega-close-ups. The first quarter of “Transformers,” which establishes the hero and his dull suburban existence, recalls the analog era, Cheerios-and-Huffy bikes Steven Spielberg for about two minutes, after which point the charm vanishes and Bay brings in the editing WeedEater, the bathroom humor and the eardrum-rattling Dolby FX (not just for the noise of robots transforming, but for such ostensibly mundane sounds as doors closing and feet running up stairs).

The film theorist David Bordwell classified these tics as aspects of “intensified continuity,” a type of commercial filmmaking that sacrifices classical Hollywood values — meticulously staged camera moves, judicious edits, a build-and-release approach to pacing — on the studio-hallowed altar of “energy.”

But such academic classifications, however accurate, don’t capture Bay’s relentlessness. The man doesn’t do intensified continuity; he does pregnant-women-and-people-with-pacemakers-shouldn’t-ride-this-ride continuity. His films go to 11.

Bay’s student thesis film was a Coke commercial set on the deck of an aircraft carrier. After a few years of making music videos and ads, he became a protégé of producer Jerry Bruckheimer (“Top Gun,” “Days of Thunder”). For a while he seemed just another purveyor of Bruckheimer’s cocaine/silicone/gunpowder aesthetic. Reviewing Bay’s debut feature, 1994′s “Bad Boys,” New Yorker critic Anthony Lane worried that Bruckheimer had opened a directing school. If so, the pupil has become the master.

Bay’s first three hits, “Bad Boys,” 1996′s “The Rock” and 1998′s “Armageddon,” foretold the string of box-office triumphs he would enjoy in the first decade of the new century. The five features he released from 2001 to 2009 made $1 billion at the North American box office and twice that in foreign ticket sales and home video revenue. Even “Pearl Harbor,” the film Bay-haters prayed would break his streak, earned $450 million worldwide. The aughts saw Bay evolve from a threat (critic Peter Rainer used the chop-chop style of “Armageddon” as the linchpin for a 1998 rant titled “All Climax”) into an institution. Glossy action hacks like Simon West (“Lara Croft: Tomb Raider”) would not exist without Bay. Nor would Fox’s long-running counterterrorism drama “24,” with its comic book sadism, epileptics-beware cutting, and gee-whiz appreciation for guns, cars, choppers and explosives. Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass, the directors of the “Bourne” franchise, revolutionized the espionage adventure with an unacknowledged (and probably unconscious) assist from Bay; with its wind-sprint pacing and “What the hell just happened?” approach to fight choreography, the trilogy’s style is Bay with dirty fingernails. The increasingly glitzy, nervous, hyped-up filmmaking of Ridley Scott (“Gladiator,” “Black Hawk Down”) and Tony Scott (“Man on Fire,” “Déjà Vu”) throughout the aughts seems, in retrospect, driven partly by a desire to seem hipper and wilder than Bay.

And then there’s the Michael Bay parody, practically its own subgenre. YouTube has become a hotbed of Bay spoofs; standouts include “Michael Bay Eating a Bowl of Cereal,” “Michael Bay ‘Pulp Fiction,’” and “If ‘Titanic’ Were Directed by Michael Bay.” “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz,” the first two features by writer-director Edgar Wright and his co-writer and leading man, Simon Pegg, are embroidered around loving sendups of Bay’s style; their frantic editing, pointlessly busy camerawork and ominous “WHOOSH!” noises italicizing each shift in the hero’s attention are spot-on mockeries of Bay’s “No small moments” ethos.

Bad-boy satirists Trey Parker and Matt Stone also love to tease Bay. Their 2004 marionette spectacular “Team America: World Police” mocks the glossy-chaotic visual language that Bay speaks so fluently: ostentatious 360-degree tracking shots; promiscuous slo-mo; casual USA-centrism (one establishing shot tells us we’re in “North Korea: 5,945 miles west of America”). It even name-checks Bay in a ditty titled “Pearl Harbor Sucks (And I Miss You).” Parker and Stone’s 2007 “South Park” episode “Imaginationland” is ruder still. A stymied Pentagon asks three popular filmmakers — M. Night Shyamalan, Mel Gibson and Michael Bay — for outside-the-box ideas on how to stop terrorism. Bay contributes subliterate descriptions of action set pieces, all of which end in immense explosions. “And this huge tanker full of dynamite is all BrrrrSSHHHHHH, RAHHH! RAWWRRHHHH!!” Bay babbles. “Those aren’t ideas!” a general shouts. “They’re special effects!”

Bay’s career isn’t just a career. It’s an issue — the decline of cinema craft and the replacement of poetry by intensity. Every time a new Bay film comes out, the issue must be hauled out and discussed. But the arguments against Bay are purely theoretical. His movies make Everest-size piles of money. “Transformers 2″ was one of the worst reviewed films of the year, perhaps the decade; as of this writing, it has earned $834 million worldwide.

To dismiss his decade-long winning streak is to deny a fundamental truth about what it means to be an American skipping through the ruins of what cultural theorist Fredric Jameson has called “late capitalism.” It’s a landscape dominated by mass-produced products, images and notions — many of them militaristic and/or materialistic in nature, all consciously or subconsciously reinforcing our bone-deep faith in bigger-newer-shinier-cooler-faster and lead-follow-or-get-out-of-the-way. This mentality — a distinctively American hybrid of latent fascism and ingrained consumerism — is the air we breathe, the blood that flows through our veins. It’s our true national religion. The individual, told from birth that he’s the captain of his own ship and not a slave pulling oars down in the galley, is unlikely to recognize the reality of his predicament, much less define himself against it.

Bay would never define himself against it. He recognizes it, then embraces it — and his work gives everyone else permission to embrace it, too. Bay teases out the unacknowledged reality of our modern lives — the distortion of individual psyches by a lifetime of exposure to consumerism and militarism — and puts the distorting forces front-and-center in his films, not so that we can decry them, or even critique them, but so that we can revel in their power over us and worship them.

Snaking through each Bay film like a supercharged electrical cord is an intertwined faith in brute force and technological wizardry. In this regard, Steven Spielberg’s championing of Bay — he executive produced “The Island” and both “Transformers” films — is strange. Bay is Spielberg’s thug-jock doppelgänger, openly embracing values that Spielberg has traditionally regarded with distaste or skepticism. The latter spent much of his career either deflating machismo (Indiana Jones clonking his head on that shipboard mirror in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”) or painting it as a desperate sort of playacting, a panicked inversion of male insecurity (see the great bit in “Jaws” where salty sea dog Robert Shaw crushes a beer can and fast-talking college boy Richard Dreyfuss responds by mashing a paper cup). And, “Saving Private Ryan” aside, Spielberg has always displayed a complex and altogether healthy attraction/repulsion to both high-tech voodoo and military swagger (the supposedly foolproof DNA manipulation gone horribly awry in “Jurassic Park” movies; the flying monkey-like troopers terrorizing private citizens in “Minority Report”; the corporate-trademarked trucks that hide a military/government conspiracy in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”).

Bay, in contrast, digs gadgets, thinks guns are awesome and never saw a skyline he didn’t want to blow up. And he looooves a man in a uniform: a deep-core driller’s jumpsuit, a Marine’s dress blues or a SWAT team member’s shiny black body armor — he doesn’t care what the uniform’s owner is doing as long as there are photogenic flames or sparks behind him as he does it. He isn’t just intrigued by force. He adores it. His fetish for manly men is a half-step removed from the mind-set that birthed the Village People and Kenneth Anger’s “Fireworks” — but, hilariously, Bay doesn’t seem to realize it. There’s no irony in his swagger, only iron. He’s got a 19th-century sense of manhood — one in which physical bravery and the willingness to inflict pain equal goodness.

His heroes, however verbally and intellectually nimble, cannot earn their fictional world’s respect unless they’ve first stood tall alongside jock figures — and on the jocks’ terms. Super-soldier John Mason’s admonition to bureaucrat Stanley Goodspeed in “The Rock” (“Losers always whine about their ‘best.’ Winners go home and fuck the prom queen”) is played out on a pop-mythological canvas in the first “Transformers.” Geeky suburban motor-mouth Sam Witwicky, a loser whose relationship with his parents consists mainly of denying that he’s jerking off in his room, hooks up with a bitchy tomboy in a prom queen’s body (suh-weeeet!) and earns the respect of square-jawed soldiers in the film’s climactic showdown by tucking the film’s McGuffin, the Cube, under one arm like a football and running it down a rubble-strewn avenue for a game-changing cosmic touchdown. The scenario would dazzle if “Flash Gordon” hadn’t done it with more charm back in 1980 — and if Bay didn’t present Sam’s end zone run not as a sendup of machismo, but as proof that the kid has a twig and berries.

On the eve of the release of Bay’s 1998 smash “Armageddon,” USA Today published a profile of the director that began, “He was just 13 when he copped his mom’s Super 8, torched his train set with firecrackers and filmed the burning disaster. ‘A little glue, the models burning, breathing in all those plastic fumes,’ says a grinning Bay, sitting in his slate-and-glass bachelor pad.” The flow of imagery in that last sentence — a smoldering diorama morphing into a slate-and-glass bachelor pad — has a cool inevitability, like the opening panels of a comic-book hero’s origin story. Bay is a juggernaut clomping through our imaginations, his iron boots leaving footprints emblazoned with his initials. You cannot escape his awesome destructive power. Surrender or die.

Thanks to Sarah D. Bunting and Aaron Aradillas for their invaluable assistance with this series.