They have escaped from the provinces, saved up for cell phones, and found work in the Beijing tourism industry, but for the young Chinese of “The World,” the World is not enough.

Located on the outskirts of the thriving metropolis, World Park is a massive display of global kitsch, a knickknack Xanadu stuffed with miniaturized replicas of the world’s most famous sights – the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, the Pyramids and the Sphinx, London and Washington, Stonehenge and the island of Manhattan. “The Twin Towers were bombed on 9/11,” enthuses an employee, “but we still have them!”

This is the setting of “The World,” the beguiling new film by critics’ darling Jia Zhankge. For an artist interested in new millennial vexation and the ways in which young people are shaped by their media environment (cf. “Platform” and “Unknown Pleasures”), the World Park is a ready-made coup de decors. Baudrillard on the back lot with a blank check couldn’t dream up a better playground for the Society of the Spectacle.

With this tableaux at hand, Mr. Jia has conceived a brainy essay on modern life, a digitally altered postcard from the edge. “The World” is a series of images about images; a movie about the manufacture of experience into commodity and the poignancy of this condition for a young generation of Chinese recently snared in the world wide web of global inequality. The young World Park denizens eat “Mercedes Benz Hotpot” and text message their intimacy. When they dream, they dream in video.

In the film’s quintessential scene, Tao (Zhao Tao), a performer of World Park dance extravaganzas, and her security guard boyfriend Taisheng (Chen Tai sheng) are absorbed by a cheap special effect. Side by side on a bench, they wave to a camera, and their images mix in a monitor with prerecorded aerial views for a “flying carpet” video (available, for a fee, as a DVD souvenir). Going nowhere, a fake escape, the world simulacrum at your feet: All “The World” is a stage for a tragicomedy of the image.

“The World” is best in moments like these, when abstract ideas (and cliches) about the modern world crystallize into diamantine images. Mr. Jai joins comedy with commentary in the trenchant motif of tourists arranging themselves for fake mementos – pretending, for instance, to prop up a toy Tower of Pisa. In a searing visual invention, a frustrated Taisheng sets fire to his jacket, igniting complex overtones of political self-immolation and suggestive parallels with symbolic bits of costume worn by his equivalent in Mr. Jia’s remarkable “Unknown Pleasures.” The director’s image is heating up.

But the drama keeps cool. The brazen, quirky, analytical slideshow of the World Park background looms over the foreground, dwarfing the quotidian texture. I don’t remember a thing about a conversation between Xiaowei (Jing Jue) and Niu (Wang Yi-qun), but I can’t shake the memory of it taking place in synthetic Egypt. “The World” may be the “Royal Tenenbaums” of the Jia oeuvre; a movie of such baroque design, it requires multiple viewings to appreciate the emotional ardor.

This is the first of Mr. Jia’s films to be officially sanctioned by the culture thugs in Beijing, but it’s hardly the one to expand his reputation beyond the clutch of the cinerati. The demanding runtime doesn’t accumulate the same steady wallop of his epic “Platform,” though he does outpace the visual inventiveness of “Unknown Pleasures.” (His regular cinematographer, Yu Lik-wai, schools all comers on the lyrical capacities of digital video.) But of all the undistributed films entering and exiting the New York Film Festival, “The World” has the most to say about the world we live in, and deserves a place in movie theaters.

– Nathan Lee

***

Awarm, brilliantly observed road-trip movie, “Rolling Family,” Pablo Trapero’s third feature, chugs along with the emotional and mechanical breakdowns of four generations of a family traveling in a cramped caravan. Like fellow Argentine Lucretia Martel’s more ominous “La Cienaga,” Mr. Trapero’s film revels in the hothouse histrionics among kin.

The familial wanderlust is set in motion when Granny Emilia (Graciana Chironi), who’s just celebrated her 84th birthday in Buenos Aires with her brood, receives an invitation to return to her hometown to serve as matron of honor at a niece’s wedding. Daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren, a great-grandchild, and a dog shoehorn themselves into a dilapidated motor home, accompanying the mulish yet fragile matriarch on a journey of several hundred miles.

Mr. Trapero’s focus on the tedium of long drives – the lull of the car radio, the doze-inducing motion of a bobble-head puppy on the dashboard, grandson Matias’s (Nicolas Lopez) absentminded playing with his retainer – segues seamlessly into paroxysms, road rage, and amorous outbursts. Corpulent, shortfused Oscar (Bernardo Forteza) decks his dreadlocked daughter’s boyfriend and nearly slugs Ernesto (Carlos Resta) after he makes a move on his wife. Brash teenage vixen Yanina (Marianlea Pedano) pounces on her hunky cousin Gustavo (Raul Vinoles), who quickly turns his affections to Nadia (Leila Gomez), Yanina’s best friend.

When the motion sickness and claustrophobia – how is it possible that 11 humans and one canine can fit into such cramped quarters? – leave us gasping for breath, Mr. Trapero opens the space up, allowing the clan to tumble out into small towns. Oscar finds a new part for his 1958 Chevrolet; the grandchildren visit a vaquero museum. Just as Alfonso Cuaron’s peripatetic “Y Tu Mama Tambien” was part Mexican travelogue, “Rolling Family” is also a loving document of the lush countryside surrounding Argentina’s river coastal region.

Mr. Trapero’s multigenerational ensemble cast is composed mainly of nonprofessional actors, who ricochet off one another with graceful clamor; those under 18 are especially gifted at conveying both the languor and the excitement of a four wheeled adventure. This family affair is boisterous, but never cacophonous.

– Melissa Anderson