Indeed, if the message of most classic Hollywood noir is that crime does not pay, one might say that the message of “Elena” is that crime is the only thing that pays, at least in the crude Darwinian universe of Putin-era Russia. While there are no overt politics in “Elena,” it’s a movie about the most pernicious forms of class warfare, made barely 20 years after the collapse of the regime that was supposed to end class warfare for good. That’s enough politics, and enough knife-edged Russian irony, for a dozen ordinary movies. I’m not claiming that Zvyagintsev feels this way, necessarily, but “Elena” put me in mind of the Russian witticism that’s been repeated in many varieties since 1991: Communism was a dreadful system, we had no food and no freedom. Nothing could possibly be worse than that — except maybe the way things are now.

Zvyagintsev isn’t an international art-house brand name the way Andrei Tarkovsky once was, and that probably isn’t possible these days. So I won’t pretend that “Elena” is likely to become a crossover smash. But it’s going to play quite a few North American cities (see below) and is a breakthrough movie after its own fashion, a mysterious existential thriller that’s brilliantly acted and masterfully directed, without a second of wasted screen time. There’s nothing especially cryptic or confusing or pretentious about it, and once you adjust to the long, hypnotic takes of cinematographer Mikhail Krichman and the almost wintry pace with which Zvyagintsev draws you in, this tale of a frumpy, heavy-set Mother Russia type in late middle age (the amazing Nadezhda Markina) who is driven to desperation becomes utterly absorbing.

Zvyagintsev’s previous two features, “The Banishment” and “The Return,” were staged in timeless, nonspecific settings that recalled Tarkovsky’s more allegorical works. “Elena” takes place in the 21st-century Moscow built by the post-Soviet Putin oligarchy, where the rich live in opulent, barren detachment and the poor are clustered in crumbling Brezhnev-era apartment buildings plagued by skinhead gangs and irregular electricity. In almost every indoor scene, some inane reality show is playing in the background, and while I know that sounds heavy-handed, it works perfectly here, both as realism and as a kind of symbolic shadow-play version of the main action.

Markina’s character, the eponymous Elena, has apparently risen in class late in life, after marrying a sour, elderly business tycoon named Vladimir (Andrei Smirnov, himself a well-known Russian director) whom she met when she was a nurse and he was a hospital patient. Both have children from previous marriages: Elena’s unemployed son Sergei (Aleksei Rozin) lives with his wife and two kids in grinding, despairing poverty, and her eldest grandson is on the verge of flunking out of school and ending up in prison or the army. Vladimir’s daughter Katya (Yelena Lyadova), on the other hand, is a decadent 30ish beauty who is only interested, as he drily puts it, in “the pleasurable things of life.” We meet her only briefly when she comes to meet Elena, but the character is so slinkily rendered that we can see it all: the parade of guys (and perhaps girls too), the drinking and drugs and long, long nights ending at dawn, the overwhelming boredom with herself and her rich dad and the world.

If you think you see where this is going, you’re both right and wrong. After suffering a devastating heart attack, Vladimir has a partial reconciliation with Katya and decides to leave her nearly all his fortune, despite her evident flaws as a money manager. Although he promises to provide for Elena with an unspecified annuity, he refuses her requests for emergency funds to save her errant grandson from the draft. (As we see in a terrifying interlude, by the way, said grandson may not be worth saving.) What happens next is, indeed, a series of noir-type plot points — but, again, that’s a bit like describing “Crime and Punishment” as a murder mystery. “Elena” absolutely has a plot, and one that will keep you guessing up to the last seconds, but the movie’s real point lies in the long and often wordless scenes that pull you along, stealthily, toward moments of revelation or coincidence.

When Vladimir goes to his posh gym for an afternoon workout, for example, we watch him ogling a younger blonde with that predatory rich-guy gaze. She notices, and returns his stare, and we know — because this is that kind of movie — that their paths will soon cross again. But how? Is she a gold digger? An upscale hooker? An entrapment device, placed by journalists or gangsters or government officials? In this world, no encounter is ever innocent of avarice or naked self-interest. Even stranger and more powerful is a scene aboard a train that Elena is riding, with many thousands of rubles in cash clutched nervously in her purse. The train bumps to a stop, and men in uniforms rush through the car. We see her visibly tense up — will she be the victim of a robbery on this voyage, above all others? — but what has actually happened is even odder, an almost dreamlike event that (I think) may actually be borrowed from a Chekhov or Tolstoy story.

“Elena” isn’t really a film noir, because those kinds of crime films always involve the iron application of Murphy’s law, in its most moralistic form: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, in order to punish the transgressor and restore the rightful order of things. In Zvyagintsev’s world, as in most classic Russian art and literature, the rightful order is non-recoverable. We live in a fallen world, and whatever could go wrong already did so, a long time ago. What Elena does is indefensible, certainly — but then, we don’t know what Vladimir did in the first place to become so rich that his daughter never has to work. Will Elena “get away with it”? I don’t know, but it’s not the right question. The truly terrible question asked by this quiet, haunting and magnificent film is: Dear God, isn’t there some better way to live?

“Elena” is now playing at Film Forum in New York. It opens May 25 in Los Angeles; June 1 in Boston; June 6 in San Jose, Calif.; June 8 in Miami, San Francisco, Portland, Maine, and Tallahassee, Fla.; June 15 in Portland, Ore.; June 22 in Houston and Washington; June 26 in Boulder, Colo.; June 29 in Wilmington, Del.; July 6 in Philadelphia; July 13 in Chicago, Denver and Seattle; July 20 in Minneapolis; July 27 in Salem, Mass.; Aug. 3 in Santa Fe, N.M.; and Aug. 10 in St. Louis, with other cities to follow.

It’s a fair description as far as it goes, but that isn’t nearly far enough. If anything, director Dominic Sena (best known, beyond directing Cage in “Sixty Seconds,” for Janet Jackson and Sting videos) is way too focused on borrowing shots, scenes and situations from the Bergman classic, to no evident purpose, rather than delivering any actual entertainment. Off the top of my head, I’m guessing that “Season of the Witch” claims a place in the top five all-time bizarre and pointless homages to art cinema. (No. 1 on that list, now and for all time, has to be the 2001 slasher flick “Jason X,” with its quotations from Tarkovsky’s “Solaris.”)

But there’s no escaping the fact that Sena’s got Nic Cage and Ron Perlman wearing “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” knight costumes, along with numerous fight sequences and a passel of evil witches and CGI demons, and utterly fails to make the movie any fun. Bragi Schut’s screenplay can’t decide whether to be idiotic or flat-out offensive and ultimately goes for both; if you believe that the big problem with the Middle Ages was that the Church didn’t burn enough witches and heretics, then this is the movie for you. I briefly wondered whether the producers of “Season of the Witch” were going for the Christian audience, à la the “Chronicles of Narnia” series, but then I remembered that this is a Nicolas Cage movie made in Hungary, and therefore everything that sucks about it should be ascribed to befuddlement and institutional incompetence rather than strategy.

In case you think I’m kidding about the “Seventh Seal” thing: Cage plays a 14th-century knight returning from the Crusades along with his wiseass sidekick (Perlman), to find Europe overrun with the Black Plague. (Exactly the situation of Max von Sydow and Gunnar Björnstrand in the Bergman film.) Superstition and a preoccupation with supernatural evil have come along with the pestilence, and the returning Crusaders encounter flagellants in the streets, preachers inveighing against the devil and a beautiful young woman accused of witchcraft — who never quite denies it — chained up in a wooden cart. (All of that’s in both movies.) En route to their ambiguous destiny, the travelers get lost in a mist-shrouded forest, where they are plagued by allegorical and possibly supernatural visions. (Ditto.)

But as Lucy once said to Linus after he explained a line of Shakespearean dialogue, “Now that I know that, what do I do?” Maybe Sena keeps ripping off a much better movie — and, more to the point, a vastly different movie — strictly for his own amusement, or to keep viewers like me awake. But it isn’t doing him any good. In its better moments, “Season of the Witch” is an unremitting schlockfest, full of blood and filth, bloated, purulent corpses, ghastly one-eyed witches and undead monks. If there were more such Corman-esque thrills and chills, and a whole bunch less ponderous Bergman references, we’d all be better off.

Our disaffected Crusaders, Behmen (Cage) and Felson (Perlman), meet a dying cardinal covered with horrible sores (it’s 88-year-old Christopher Lee, in a memorable cameo!) who commissions them to transport the sexy accused witch (Claire Foy) to a distant abbey. Supposedly a bunch of monks there who possess some Dan Brown-style super-secret exorcism manual will decide whether she’s responsible for the plague. At first Behmen assumes she’s not merely hot but also innocent, and that the intense young priest who “interrogated” her (Stephen Campbell Moore, more or less doing a young Nicolas Cage) is some kind of depraved religious sicko.

But oh no, my goodness no. As the chick-in-a-cage caravan proceeds across some admittedly spectacular Hungarian scenery toward the abbey, its members start to die off in predictable fashion — Sena has no particular gift for either action or suspense — while the witchy girl leers seductively at Behmen. Our final destination turns out to be a shoddy fight sequence involving some oddly effeminate computer-generated demons. There are a few guffaws in hearing Cage deliver thee-and-thou dialogue and in watching Perlman play yet another beefy fellow in a supposedly creepy yarn, but not nearly enough.

Especially when you consider that the semi-intriguing genre twist in “Season of the Witch” is to suggest that the medieval lunatics in the Vatican were right all along about murdering female herbalists by the thousands, and that the Black Death was the work of the Dark Lord and his lady minions. Germ theory, bah! That’s totally Satanic commie propaganda. Next you’ll be telling me that Barack Hussein Obama is an actual American. This isn’t a movie for today’s pussyfied Christians; it’s a movie that should be teleported backward and shown in the multiplexes of the 14th century, when men were men and smelled like month-old haggis. Maybe that’s not possible yet, but you know they’re working on it.

But I want to be honest, both about my own mixed feelings and about the aesthetic and, I don’t know, epistemological challenges posed by “The Snowtown Murders.” This is a beautifully crafted and largely non-sensationalistic film that captures the late-’90s, working-class decrepitude of its setting in intense detail: the cramped cinderblock houses and overgrown, rubbish-strewn yards; the flat, gray skies and flat, open landscapes. The real Snowtown case was first exposed, after all, when police found several plastic barrels full of decomposing body parts in an abandoned building.

Kurzel builds the movie around three memorable performances, two of them by nonprofessional actors he recruited in the Adelaide suburbs: Lucas Pittaway as Jamie Vlassakis, a sweet-tempered, lovely and fatally passive teenage boy, and Louise Harris as Lizzie, his unkempt, nearly desperate mother, who yearns to find a viable role model for her four boys. Best of all, or perhaps worst of all, is Daniel Henshall (familiar to British and Australian TV viewers from the series “Out of the Blue”) as John Bunting, a charismatic pug dog of a man who lures Jamie into his sociopathic schemes.

Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant (who based his work on two nonfiction accounts of the Snowtown case) create an intense and compelling psychological narrative that seeks to explain how an essentially normal kid like Jamie could be drawn into committing heinous crimes by someone as clever and duplicitous and profoundly deranged as John Bunting. Jamie grows up in an atmosphere of grinding poverty, casual cruelty and frequent abuse; he is molested by his mother’s boyfriend and repeatedly raped by his older brother, and accepts it all with an almost affectless sense of injury. This is just how the world is, apparently, if you’re unlucky enough to grow up in this dumpy corner of it.

When Bunting comes into Jamie’s family life (as Lizzie’s new, non-pedophile boyfriend), he presents himself as the opposite of all that, a churchgoing family man who cooks breakfast for the boys, encourages them at school, keeps them off drugs and away from undesirables. But from the outset Bunting’s impromptu neighborhood-watch meetings indulge in violent and grotesque revenge fantasies. If his impulse to punish the man who molested Jamie is understandable, its elements are disturbing: Painting “FAG” on the guy’s windows with soft-serve ice cream, and splattering his porch furniture with the brains and guts of slaughtered kangaroos. Bunting’s campaign against pedophiles morphs freely into a generalized persecution of any and all perceived loners, weirdos and homosexuals (all of whom amount to the same thing, in his worldview). As Jamie eventually learns, the people in Snowtown who have abruptly “moved away,” leaving behind tearful late-night phone messages, haven’t gone all that far.

Jamie is almost pathetically eager to please an adult man who professes to be morally upright and who doesn’t rape him, at least not in the literal, physical sense of that verb. In one of their first one-on-one conversations, Bunting asks him, “Do you like being fucked?” Jamie is shocked, but eventually says no, he doesn’t. “So why don’t you do something about it, mate?” Bunting asks in tones of fatherly concern. “When are you gonna grow a pair of balls?” In Bunting’s world, growing a pair means collaborating in a series of kidnappings, tortures and murders, first of those who have victimized Jamie, but ultimately of anyone in Snowtown who seems marginal or unloved or simply knows too much. (Bunting commanded a serial-killer gang that included Jamie and at least two other men, apparently something almost unique in criminal history.)

I’m guessing that to Australian audiences “The Snowtown Murders” carries a pungent element of social criticism, although you could certainly tell a similar story about America and set it in Philadelphia or Colorado Springs or west Tennessee. Without excusing the madness of John Bunting or the weakness of Jamie Vlassakis (if Jamie didn’t like being raped, he was nonetheless eager to be dominated), Kurzel and Grant make clear that their dysfunctional surroundings, in a derelict underclass town that mainstream Australia didn’t want to think about, nurtured them in critical ways. But now that I’ve built a case for “Snowtown Murders” as a thought-provoking work that’s well crafted and has a potentially edifying message, I’ve got to add the proviso that it’s extremely difficult to sit through, and doesn’t offer much in the way of conventional audience satisfaction.

Jamie is the inescapable object of our pity and sympathy, but he’s such a flawed and weak character, and does so many unforgivable things, that you really can’t root for him. And as for Bunting — well, it’s a breakthrough performance by Henshall, but this bland, bearded Hannibal Lecter of the Aussie ‘burbs has got to be one of the all-around worst human beings ever portrayed on-screen. Kurzel apparently grew up in a nearby town, and his portrait of Snowtown feels relentlessly authentic, from the crap houses to the junked cars to the overcast skies to the butchered kangaroos. (A little help here, readers Down Under: Do people really just go out and shoot those things for meat? Is it legal?) But relentless is the word: The place is portrayed here as a grinding, oppressive and essentially lawless circle of hell. It’s a testament to human goodness that there was only one band of crazed killers on the loose.

There aren’t many scenes of gore and violence in “Snowtown Murders,” but the ones that exist are definitely daunting enough. In fact, this is an exceptionally difficult film to market, in that it may seem too elliptical and fragmentary for viewers accustomed to crime thrillers and horror movies, and overly gruesome and exploitation-flavored for art-house patrons. As for me, I’m answering my opening question with a qualified yes: This movie took me into some very dark places, but the level of craft and integrity involved are so high that I felt the journey was finally worth it, and ended up convinced that the story was about much more than a gruesome murder case. I’m also grateful I don’t have to watch it again, at least not right away.

“The Snowtown Murders” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York, and March 15 at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, with other cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers.

Mind you, Harrelson is one of those actors who frequently upstages his material. His performance as Justin Timberlake’s ferociously gay co-worker is the only thing I can remember about “Friends With Benefits.” In fact, that role deserves special mention in the pantheon of straight actors playing gay, because Harrelson makes no effort to score political points or deliver messages. It’s a Woody Harrelson character, a slouchy, funny, irresistible horndog dude who chases guys rather than girls. When Timberlake’s character awkwardly informs him that he’d be happy to go out drinking but he’s not actually gay, Harrelson shrugs it off with an eager grin: “Means more pipe for me!”

I could go on: “Zombieland,” “Transsiberian,” “North Country,” “She Hate Me” — all movies that have pretty much been erased from my memory, except for the oddly sticky Harrelson moments. “Rampart” is quite a different matter, because Harrelson is in every scene of the film, and indeed almost every shot. Co-written by director Moverman (who also made “The Messenger” with Harrelson) and L.A. noir novelist James Ellroy, this is an ambitious voyage into the heart of darkness, LAPD style, that suggests both Abel Ferrara’s “Bad Lieutenant” and the intense, semi-improvised character studies of John Cassavetes. Some of it’s brilliant and some of it set my teeth on edge, but Harrelson gives a moving, terrifying, titanic performance as the most compelling dirty cop since Denzel Washington in “Training Day.”

If you live in Southern California or have otherwise followed the Los Angeles Police Department’s extensive history of corruption and abuse, you may remember the Rampart scandal of the late ’90s, in which an entire anti-gang squad of 70-some cops was implicated in numerous kinds of misconduct. (Typically, no cops were convicted of anything, and only a handful were fired, but the city wound up paying out more than $125 million in the resulting civil suits.) This movie doesn’t even try to tell that story, but the Rampart Division and the scandal serves as backdrop to the tale of Officer Dave “Date Rape” Brown (Harrelson), an old-school LAPD warrior who enforces a “military occupation” (his term) on the black and brown streets of East L.A.

I won’t explain the origins of Dave’s cop “monicker,” except to say that it isn’t exactly what you’re thinking. (Could be better, could be worse; that’s up to you.) Dave breaks the law every day and doesn’t care, but hews closely to his own private version of the cop code: He’s doing the “people’s dirty work,” and if you’re a bad guy who crosses his path, you had it coming. His home life is a bewildering semi-bohemian mélange involving his current, somewhat estranged wife (Anne Heche), his ex-wife (Cynthia Nixon), who happens to be the first wife’s sister, and two daughters, one of them a righteously pissed-off teen lesbian played by Brie Larson. None of this stops him from randomly hooking up with women in bars, including a steamy liaison with Audra McDonald and an even steamier one with a lying, slutty, drunken lawyer played by Robin Wright. (“You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” Dave tells her — one, two, three — “in this bar.”)

As you can tell, Moverman has assembled a terrific ensemble (also included are Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty, Ben Foster, Ice Cube and Steve Buscemi), and the intimate, eye-level cinematography of Bobby Bukowski and staccato editing of Jay Rabinowitz create a seductive, threatening atmosphere that pushes right to the edge between realism and total head-trip. But what “Rampart” doesn’t really offer is a story worthy of its tremendous antihero, who almost convinces us of his essential honor, until we notice that he’s actually a sociopath inflicting pain on everyone around him. Dave gets dragged into some kind of murky, sub-”Chinatown” conspiracy, and may be the LAPD brass’ designated fall guy for the entire Rampart snafu, but that’s about all I understand.

But if Dave’s slide into alcohol and drug abuse and worsening criminality seems a bit foreordained, Harrelson remains mind-bendingly magnetic, so much so that you’ll keep rooting for Dave to straighten things out long after that’s become impossible. Harrelson himself, of course, is a noted left-wing activist who would probably despise Dave Brown in real life, but that doesn’t stop him from infusing the guy with unquenchable humanity and his own brand of Sinatra-style doomed dignity. Moverman is an intriguing talent who may yet make a great film; if this isn’t quite it, it’s still a memorable and distinctive showcase for one of our greatest actors.

“Rampart” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, and Feb. 17 in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, with wider release to follow.

Wheatley’s debut feature, “Down Terrace,” was a bizarre, bleak and hilarious blend of genres, starting out as a Mike Leigh-style working-class family drama and ending up as an especially gruesome “Sopranos” episode, transported to the south coast of England. Let me introduce “Kill List,” Wheatley’s highly touted second film, by admitting that I’m infinitesimally disappointed that it’s not as funny as “Down Terrace” (though it definitely has its moments) and also that he’s gone so deep into the tradition of creepazoid British genre movies. (Rather than, you know, making the kind of depressing, no-audience films I like better.) But there’s no disputing the ingenuity and even the brilliance of this mind-bending mashup, which begins as a gritty recession-era marriage drama — the opening scene features a couple arguing about whether they have the money to get the Jacuzzi fixed — and then descends into ominous violence and finally total insanity.

I suppose you could say that the way Wheatley splices incompatible kinds of movies together into one story, like some demented mad scientist, has an Internet-age flavor to it. But that’s not something entirely new, and he actually comes off more as a hardcore fan of British independent and low-budget cinema, who loves the kitchen-sink realism of the ’60s and also loves a bunch of well-known horror movies and thrillers that I’d better not mention right now. Love it or hate it, “Kill List” is a definite widescreen cinematic experience loaded with delicious details, from the hotel clerk who holds a conversation without really listening to the sound of someone getting his brains beaten out against a concrete wall. He’s like a faux-Cockney Quentin Tarantino, passionate about the things he loves and also dedicated to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of “taking the piss” — and believe it or not, I mean that as a compliment.

The woman shrieking about the Jacuzzi money in the opening scene is named Shel (MyAnna Buring), the blond-bombshell Swedish wife of Jay (Neil Maskell), an unemployed ex-soldier who’s kicking around their suburban house outside Sheffield, in north central England. Jay at first seems like a hundred other unappealing husbands in British movies of this ilk — he’s a bit of a whiner and a bit of a drinker, he’s put on some weight around the middle, he’s much too hot-tempered and has a laddish London accent that seems halfway affected for a guy who has a Jacuzzi and a garage full of garden chemicals. It takes us a while to figure out that he doesn’t have some vague freelance I.T. gig, as he tells a friend’s visiting girlfriend. He was a private-security Mafioso during the Iraq war and is now a hit man, evidently suffering from the after-effects of a job that went wrong in Kiev a year ago.

Maskell is a well-known presence on British TV, and gives a fearless performance here, in the sense that Jay is the protagonist of “Kill List” and neither the actor, the director nor the screenplay (credited to Wheatley and his partner, Amy Jump, “with contributions by the cast”) ever tries to make him seem even remotely likable. As with “Down Terrace,” how you feel about this is likely to determine whether you can stand this movie or not. As you go deeper into the swirling maelstrom of “Kill List,” you’ll identify more and more with Jay’s struggle to remain afloat amid the bloodshed, madness and general atmosphere of malice. But you’re never going to admire the guy, and you’re always likely to conclude that whatever horrible fate befalls him is one he’s brought upon himself.

After eight months away from the game, Jay and his shaggy Irish partner in crime, Gal (the delicious Michael Smiley, who was also in “Down Terrace”), have received a mysterious commission from a sinister, leathery little man (only identified as The Client, and played by Struan Rodger) who seems to know way too much about what happened in Kiev. From the very beginning, this assignment seems loaded with mysterious significance, and wrapped in a feeling of unspeakable dread. Gal and Jay are sent to assassinate a Catholic priest in his church, and then a “librarian” who curates an especially repellent collection of pornography. What connects these two people — and why do they seem so eager to thank Jay, just before he kills them? And then there’s Gal’s ex-girlfriend, a wide-eyed brunette named Fiona (Emma Fryer), who keeps turning up in unexpected places — and who may not be the clueless corporate drone she appears to be.

Oh crap — I’ve almost told you way too much! But not quite. Here’s the key thing to understand: Every craft element of “Kill List,” from the acting to the cinematography (by Laurie Rose) to the cracked but seemingly inevitable downward progress of the narrative, is absolutely terrific. This movie is yet another testament to the thriving creativity of the British indie-film scene. It’s also the kind of movie designed to mess up your mind, like some unseen Nicolas Roeg or Ken Russell picture out of 1981, and it will. As Gal and Jay descend further into mayhem and madness, uncertain whether they’re going crazy or being lured into a dreadful trap, you may want to consider the surprise ending of “Cunning Stunt,” and to get ready for something even worse here.

Whether the shocker final scene of “Kill List” has been earned — and whether it can survive a logical interrogation — is a conversation we’ll have to have after you’ve seen the film. I have my own questions about that matter, but to think in fatalistic terms, Jay’s odyssey can only end badly, and without question there’s a terrible karmic justice to what happens. This is the kind of movie you’ll want to work over with friends after you see it, unless you want to go straight to bed and vow never to take my recommendations ever again. I halfway want to get Ben Wheatley on the horn and have him explain the ending, and halfway suspect that it’s supposed to stem from an evil logic so deeply rooted in human society that it defies all explanation.

“Kill List” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York and the Cinefamily in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers.

But I digress. Trying her best to act demure and ladylike — and it’s not too convincing — Mallory tells Frenchie she doesn’t want to see his famous outdoor maze. She’s drunk, she’s tired, she gets claustrophobic. “Oh, no,” says Kassovitz, giving her his best non-reassuring cat grin. “The whole point is to relax and lose yourself.” That’s a Soderberghian meta-statement, for sure (the script for “Haywire” is by Lem Dobbs, who also wrote “The Limey,” Soderbergh’s awesome actioner from 2001), and it’s extremely good advice when it comes to appreciating this supremely economical, pulse-pounding and undeniably bewildering thriller, which plays like a blend of mid-’90s Hong Kong action flick and mid-’70s European crime drama. Arguably this movie amounts to less than the sum of its parts — but hot damn, those are some parts.

There’s no question that Soderbergh is a supremely talented craftsman of cinema. Just to cite one element, his use of ambient sound in this picture to heighten drama and tension and comedy is superlative, from an overly loud cash register to the beep-beep-beep of a Dublin crosswalk indicator to the sudden fwump of a deer coming through the back window of an economy car. Yes, I said “back window” and “economy car”; this movie’s big motor-vehicle chase occurs in reverse, through the snow of upstate New York, in a carjacked Mazda. And he’s always better off when he’s not trying to make deep or meaningful works of art. He views his characters from a cold distance under any circumstances — the hero of his last thriller, “Contagion,” was arguably the killer virus — and seen through that perspective casting a purely physical performer like Carano in a shameless genre exercise is a brilliant choice.

“You shouldn’t think of her as a woman,” purrs Mallory’s treacherous boss and former lover (Ewan McGregor), late in the film. “That’d be a mistake.” I really didn’t mind Carano’s acting in this movie; her line readings are acceptably laconic (some reports have suggested her voice was digitally altered) and despite her protests to the contrary, she can certainly wear a dress. But she’s undeniably more like a cyborg than a human being, from her slightly plasticky centerfold good looks to her phenomenal aptitude for fight choreography. (Needless to say, if I ever meet her in person I will deny writing any of this.) We’ve had a rash of female action heroes lately (“Sucker Punch,” “Hanna,” etc.), but Mallory is without any doubt the most fearsome of all.

If you’ve seen the dynamite first five minutes of “Haywire” (available on Hulu and embedded below) you get the drift: Soderbergh literally drops us into the middle of the action, as Mallory and an unexplained acquaintance named Aaron (Channing Tatum) engage in a bone-crunching, glass-breaking throwdown in a rural New York diner. For trying to intervene in chivalrous fashion, a local teenager named Scott (Michael Angarano) gets dragged into a high-speed chase with Mallory, and gets to hear the story of exactly why she had to beat Aaron to a pulp, despite the hot sex they had after their supposedly successful mission in Barcelona. Then there was the subsequent mission in Dublin, alongside a too-sexy British superspy played by Michael Fassbender, the one where she didn’t go into Kassovitz’s maze. That one didn’t go nearly as well, and that’s when she found out that her shadowy employers were a pack of corrupt sleazebags who were trying to bump her off.

I wouldn’t waste too much time trying to sort out who’s good and who’s evil (hint: nobody and everybody, respectively) or what all the skeevy intelligence bureaucracies and even skeevier private contractors have to do with each other. “Haywire” is about enjoying the relentless and elegant action sequences, which culminate with an extended hand-to-hand fight scene in which Carano and Fassbender completely destroy a luxury suite in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel. The film’s interstices are mostly filled by clipped dialogue delivered by a fabulous list of male costars: McGregor, in an unflattering Marine Corps-veteran haircut, as Mallory’s private-sector boss; Michael Douglas oozing retirement-age grumble as their CIA contact; Antonio Banderas is a bearded State Department functionary who seems entirely composed, down to the molecular level, of expensive rum, Cohiba cigars and Viagra.

I’m tempted to say that “Haywire” is a summer movie exiled to the middle of winter, except that generally speaking the off-season months are when we see the most interesting action movies anyway. (Last year, for example: “Unknown,” “The Adjustment Bureau,” “Source Code,” “Kill the Irishman.”) With a budget of $25 million and a cast loaded with A-minus stars, this doesn’t feel much like an indie, but “Haywire” is a lean, clean production, shot and edited by Soderbergh himself and utterly free of the incoherent action sequences and overcooked special effects that plague similarly scaled Hollywood pictures. I’m not going to argue with you about the ethics or morality of this movie (since it doesn’t have any). But it’s ingenious, old-school, thrill-a-minute movie entertainment, effervescent eye candy for guys and gals alike.