After a week and a half, the big-tent offerings of the Tribeca Film Festival have a way of clumping and blurring together into identifiable little categories: ho-hum indie efforts, artist biographies and strife-torn documentaries, uplifting tales, indie efforts pegged to name actors, and the European tasting menu. But the several outstanding films that burst out of the cubbyholes share cinema’s basic, age-old ability to transport the viewer to another landscape and another sense of reality — movies, in short, that make monuments out of mind-sets.

For me, it was a blast from the past in the festival’s revival slate that helped bring these powers back into focus. The spectacular 1959 Soviet adventure “The Letter That Was Never Sent,” a feverish tale of four scientists scouting diamond prospects in Siberia, kicks off high on the fumes of grandiose, nation-glorifying ambition. They find gems but are marooned when their radio breaks down, transmitting only bombastic congratulations from home base miles away.

Thereafter, the frenzy of the scientists’ heady success, untempered by human contact, seems to drive the earth mad. Rippling forest fires and violent death strike the group, and under the expressionistic influence of cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, winter arrives instantaneously with a trippy cross-fade to snowy oblivion. In another iconic shot that might be called the horizontal “Rushmore” cam, an extreme close-up of a stricken scientist’s face as he’s carried along fills the entire lower half of the screen, wobbling against the desolate mountain background.

The near-Herzogian monomania and relentless disaster of the mission in “The Letter That Was Never Sent” must have terrified party faithful more than it inspired. Perhaps unsurprisingly, another work of terrible beauty at Tribeca, Jia Zhangke’s “Still Life,” concerns human endeavor amid the rubble of communism. The vision of a bewildering journey through the wilds also fits Mr. Jia’s latest look at China’s wild and woolly transformation into free markets, burgeoning industry, and consumer capitalism. There could be few more powerful symbols of massive upheaval and institutional ambition than the film’s sprawling backdrop: the Three Gorges Dam project, which will, among other things, tame the Yangtze River, submerge old towns, and allow ships to sail 1,500 miles inland.

Mr. Jia focuses more on the immobile rubble of demolished buildings on the slope down to the dam site than the plight of his protagonists, a man and a woman both seeking estranged spouses. With his high-def camera he paints the surroundings in shades of gray and blue edged with darkness, and often strands his characters in the greater landscape and logy, disappearing narrative. When the man, a rural migrant worker, finally tracks down his morose wife working on a boat, their encounter throbs with an aching disconnect far beyond simple exhaustion. It’s taken him years to come for her, as if he had been perpetually beaten back by the tides of change.

As in his previous film, “The World,” Mr. Jia crystallizes his realist canvas with one or two little flights of a fantasy, like animating an abandoned building in the distance into a rocket. But “Half Moon,” the latest film from the Kurdish-Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, embraces the fanciful and magical-mythical in windswept lands, pregnant with mystery, at the foot of mountains. The plot, set in Kurdistan, sounds like a story spun for generations of children over the fire: A famed musician journeys with his 10 talented sons to play music in another country, stopping only to collect a sole, harmonically necessary songstress.

This being the 21st century, Iraqi border guards cause them great anxiety, and they’re all piled into a minibus, but the prevailing mood is by turns genial and, despite the presence of laptops and cell phones, mystical. The old lead musician is close to death, and the movie sometimes swirls away with his visions of burial and departure. Almost as fantastical is a trip to a town of 1,334 exiled singers, who line up on terraced stone dwellings in bright-colored robes and beat buzzing drums to send off the band’s new chosen companion. As the film winds down to its conclusion (including the visitation of a ethereally beautiful woman that gives the movie its title), there’s a sense of the film as a melodic fiction finally about to be set free.

Musical subculture is at the heart of Shane Meadows’s “This Is England,” an excellent drama about a band of mostly teenage friends in the British Midlands. A real education for American viewers, the film, set in 1983, is a Polaroid snapshot of skinhead culture at its original nonviolent, music-loving, fraternal moment — before the poison of racism intruded. The rupture is related in a 12-year-old’s tutelage in hate at the hands of a recent returnee from prison who wants to push the group toward National Front leanings. Set against miserable block housing (where the kids go to play in a derelict apartment), the film has an almost unprecedented feel for the teens’ abiding respect and love for one another, and the actor playing the boy, Thomas Turgoose, is astonishingly natural.

“Maggie is a t—” reads the defaced wall of a wretched bunker-like church in “This Is England,” and that Thatcher-era howl helps bring it all back home to one final Tribeca highlight: the graffiti documentary “Bomb It.” Jon Reiss’s whirlwind tour of legible landscapes hits New York, Paris, Capetown, Sao Paulo, and Los Angeles, pumping to a can’t-stop eclectic soundtrack that spans electric funk and endearingly awful French lounge techno. Local artists, some masked, offer a panoply of international styles, architectural canvases, and street philosophies.

“Bomb It” also elucidates a dazzling irony. Graffiti’s organic urban culture, forged in the 1970s, has essentially been succeeded today by corporate billboards and screens, which also scrawl all over building surfaces. Here then is a landscape film that hands you a new model for looking at New York’s tangled mediascape — a fitting selection for a festival looking to make its mark on an ever-changing city.