Like any large festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, which hits its stride this weekend, can be a crap-shoot when it comes to sniffing out hidden finds, even with the help of a special series titled “Discoveries.” So there’s something to be said for covering the basics and following the sure thing: namely, who are the major filmmakers whose latest exciting work will grace screens this week? Call it the auteurist’s guide to (reasonably) safe bets.

The no-brainer must-see is “Still Life,” the latest from Jia Zhangke, one of China’s greatest filmmakers and one of the foremost chroniclers of that country’s ongoing human upheaval — an artist for and of his time. “Still Life” plops us riverside at the mammoth Three Gorges dam project, where a bullet-headed migrant worker arrives to seek not just a job but, we learn, a long-lost wife amid the ruins and razing. The passage of time and Mr. Jia’s precise, wrung-out digital work are wrenching, and it’s a more grounded experience than his draining, on-point last film, “The World.”

While you may have seen “The World,” chances are you haven’t caught much of Pascale Ferran’s sensitively observed but woefully undistributed oeuvre. But her new film, “Lady Chatterley,” an acclaimed adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence novel, receives its American premiere at Tribeca, ahead of its June release by Kino. Leave it to the 19th century to supply the source for an eloquent 21st-century work of manifest intelligence and sensuality.

Kurdish-Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi made his mark most recently with “Turtles Can Fly,” about a resourceful mob of Kurdish refugee children at the onset of the Iraq war. With “Half Moon,” he returns to the same unforgiving home turf for an equally evocative tale of rousing musicians and stubborn borders. Just as powerfully anchored in its setting (not too far away) is the village family drama “Time and Winds,” the fourth feature from the rising Turkish director Reha Erdem.

One of America’s own age-old exports, the gangster, comes reworked with the requisite comical midlife crisis courtesy of John Dahl. “You Kill Me,” about a faltering hit-man fired after his boozing sends a crucial shot astray, may not fully restore the director to the famously overdue promise of 1994’s poisonous “The Last Seduction.” But if Ben Kingsley in the lead can muster anything like his last gangster role in “Sexy Beast,” the result should be diverting at worst.

The British director Shane Meadows, on the other hand, is definitely aiming for another level with “This Is England.” Set in his customary working-class Midlands milieu, the semi-autobiographical film follows a pre-teenager doing what kids do, or at least some kids in 1983 Britain: hanging out and navigating rival skinhead gangs.

Speaking of violence, Györgi Pálfi’s “Taxidermia” has been called a peerlessly grotesque assault on the senses. After the nearsilent wonders of the inscrutable cosmic symphony “Hukkle,” Mr. Pálfi serves up a multigenerational family of freaks engaged in lurid, fantastical sordidness and allegorical oddity. Cataracts of vomit, copulation with inanimate objects, and more occur across three periods of Hungarian history. Sort of a conversation-stopper, isn’t it.

Less messy historical fare comes courtesy of Italy’s popular comic filmmaker, Paolo Virzi, who was honored last December with a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The hardworking Mr. Virzi casts his humane satirical eye back on history’s most famous Elban exile with “Napoleon and Me.” As a costume drama, it might not have the contemporary resonance displayed in his most recent film to reach American shores, the Rome-set “Caterina in the City,” but the “operetta-like” froth should compensate.

On the documentary front, Alex Gibney has found a subject to match the audacious crimes of the century he chronicled in “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.” “Taxi to the Dark Side” bluntly addresses a 2002 case of torture at the American military base in Bagram, Afghanistan, long before Abu Ghraib broke. Mr. Gibney’s nose for evidence seems a perfect match for a story that no one wishes existed, but which remains to be confronted properly even now.

Lastly, Tribeca’s “Restorations and Revivals” sidebar again offers some crucial finds. Besides a rare film by enduring French icon Gerard Blain, the cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky might actually be the auteur of this selection. “The Forty-First,” a war romance, and “The Letter That Was Never Sent,” a Siberian adventure, reel with his muscular compositions and dynamic camera-work, famous from these and other films by Mikhail Kalatozov (“I Am Cuba,” “Cranes Are Flying”) and Grigori Chukhrai (“Ballad of a Soldier”). Tomorrow’s screening of “The Forty-First” will be introduced by its biggest fan, none other than New York’s own homegrown auteur, Martin Scorsese.