A certain kind of filmmaker strives for immediacy above all else, working to get on screen snatches of messy, delicate, uncooked experience. Robert Altman and John Cassavetes get at it through their intellectual agility and their fresh, open-field conception of performance. Maurice Pialat finds it through a cultivation of organic forms, a tough-love embrace of humanity, a marvelously unfettered intuition. Olivier Assayas orbits these luminaries, as does his wonderfully talented countryman Arnaud Desplechin, whose “Kings and Queen” bustles into the New York Film Festival tonight.

Divided into two chapters and an epilogue, “Kings and Queen” darts between two lives. Nora (Emmanuelle Devos), a young widow and mother, attends to her dying father (Maurice Garrel), a celebrated author recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her former lover Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), an unstable violist, has been committed to an upscale funny farm. (Life could be worse: His therapist is played by Catherine Deneuve.) As they grapple with quotidian doubts and stumble over moments of grace, these lives of quiet (and not so quiet) desperation come together in complex harmony.

A sprawling, tumultuous, vehement entertainment, “Kings and Queen” is jam-packed with incident yet neatly proportioned, indulgent of actors but never grotesque. Ms. Devos, with her large, handsome features, is both sympathetic and private, giving and withholding, a queen and a child – a Julianne Moore intelligence behind a Julia Roberts face. Her poise is balanced against manic Mr. Amalric, a young hipster Lear, wiry and avid in his controlled showboating.

In dreams, Nora is visited by her deceased ex-husband; in hospital, Ismael is visited by his wacko, pill-popping attorney. “Kings and Queen” mixes jumpy yucks with sophisticated psychodrama, underscoring both with subtle swells of orchestral music – the genre is an odd strain of melodrama. Mr. Desplechin’s sensibility is Mozartian; playful and precise, intimate and operatic. He is so assured in his mise-en-scenery that he can let the actors chew it up.

“Kings and Queen” is as formally rambunctious as it is emotionally expansive, inventing its means on the spot. Long narrative movements break up into ellipsis or flashback; handheld gregariousness takes pause for crisp, declarative dolly work. A whole catalog of transitions are employed to hustle time along: The picture is restless with jump cuts, dissolves, even an old-time wipe or two. At two and a half hours, everything remains fleet and keen.

One of the rock-solid pleasures of a rock-solid festival, “Kings and Queen” may not be groundbreaking, but it’s good, grounded cinema. Solid in craftsmanship, rich in savoir-faire, it’s the kind of movie easy to overlook. Kudos to adventurous distributor Wellspring (who also bring us “Tarnation” and “Notre Musique”) for picking it up during the festival.

– Nathan Lee

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While everyone was looking in the other direction, the greatest crime saga of the past 20 years came out of Hong Kong: “Infernal Affairs” parts one, two, and three. The most operatically staged and genuinely moving gangster films since “The Godfather,” they’re lean, mean thrill machines that keep your neurons as well as your adrenaline pumping.

The look of all three films is slick. Suits come in one color – black – and one style – sharp. Jackets – leather. Hair – cut close. Christopher Doyle, who put the color in “Hero,” was the visual consultant hired to take the color out of “Infernal Affairs”; the films exist in black, white, and a multitude of sick, chromium hues.

Also largely absent is action. By the time the credits roll on “Infernal Affairs,” the sweat-soaked audience can be forgiven for forgetting that the movie contains exactly two action scenes and that they last for less than two minutes each. Instead, directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak rely on understatement: The darkest moment in “Infernal Affairs 2” is the massacre of an entire family, depicted by a long shot of the exterior of a house and a few pistol pops. The effect is like being struck over the head.

The story of the first movie is high-concept simple. Yan (Tony Leung from “Hero”) is a cop who’s been living undercover as a triad (a member of Hong Kong’s mafia) for 10 years. Ming (Andy Lau) is a triad who infiltrated the police force and is now a high-ranking inspector. Both men are mental wrecks, lying to everyone they know and seduced by the temptations of their bogus identities: Ming thinks he actually wants to become a good cop; Yan wonders, after a decade of killing and stealing, if he’s actually a criminal.

When a drug buy goes belly-up, all the wrong people realize that not only is there an undercover cop in their gang, there’s a mole in the police force. Yan and Ming are ordered to investigate, and kill, themselves.

Tony Leung plays Yan, the undercover cop, with the kind of inwardly directed rage that Al Pacino used to specialize in. Andy Lau is the biggest male box office draw in Hong Kong, and his Ming is impacted with self-loathing and motivated solely by an all-consuming ambition. His face is hawkish and shadowed, with cheekbones so sharp they can cut cheese.

“Infernal Affairs 2,” a prequel, focuses on Yan and Ming’s bosses and father figures: the crime lord, Sam (Eric Tsang), and uber-cop SP Wong (Anthony Wong). Sam is a voluptuous, Buddhist sadist who looks like a happy marshmallow. Wong is an unreadable, jowly jerk. Both actors turn in startlingly good performances, and the film, like any good prequel, completely turns the first movie on its head. It also has genuine tragic heft.

“Infernal Affairs 3” takes place in the days leading up to the events of the first film, and in its panic-stricken aftermath, as the police department tries to clean house. Pouring itself into the cracks in the story of the first movie, this movie is an admirable effort, but like “the Godfather 3,” it’s over-written and kind of pointless. A hallucinatory mind-trip full of flashbacks, flash forwards, and dream sequences, it evaporates while you watch it.

Taking in “Infernal Affairs 1” and “Infernal Affairs 2” back-to-back is like jumping into an ice-cold pool: breathtaking, exhilarating, and something of a shock. Some audience members will want the postcoital, dreamy cigarette of the third film. Others will just want to head home and bask in the afterglow.

– Grady Hendrix