Glum emptiness rivets in “The Brown Bunny;” extravagant emptiness does so in “Hero.” Directed by Zhang Yimou and photographed by the peerless Christopher Doyle, this Chinese blockbuster hits the eye like a wuxia showdown staged in a Matisse retrospective. Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, and Tony Leung co-star with RED! ORANGE! YELLOW! GREEN! BLUE! INDIGO! VIOLET!

At the dawn of the Qin dynasty (he said in a deep, melodramatic voice), China remains divided into seven warring states. A nameless warrior (Jet Li) has defeated three deadly assassins who imperiled the ruthless King of Qin (Chen Dao Ming). Brought before the throne to recount his heroic deeds, Nameless genuflects in the glow of a super-cool candle arrangement and sets off into a maze of color-coded flashbacks.

Sky (Donnie Yen) is met on a rainy, slate-gray courtyard. A musician is ordered to accompany their combat while Nameless meditates on the affinities of the martial arts to music – both a matter of complex chords and rare melodies. A soundtrack to kick ass ensues, as “Hero” mounts the first of many delights for aficionados of multidirectional digi-fu.

For the showdown with Broken Sword (Tony Leung), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), and their young acolyte Moon (Zhang Ziyi), the color palate heats up to richest blood red. Qin archers mass on their calligraphy school-cum-hideout-cum-loveshack, unleashing a locust-storm of CGI arrows. Flip-twisting like a haute-couture tornado, Flying Snow bats them off with her billowy silk sleeves, while Broken Sword practices his ideograms with the total tranquility of a bulletproof monk. Nameless meditates on the affinities of the martial arts to calligraphy.

Things get complicated: Assassinations conceal conspiracies that conceal secrets of the heart that conceal murderous impulses – which lead to more assassinations and more conspiracies, and so on. The story of Broken Arrow and Flying Snow gets told from new angles, in fresh colors, as “Hero” adds glittering crustations to its crystalline structure. You’ll forget who vowed what to whom the minute you leave the theater, but you’ll never forget the cascade of pale green silk that flows through the climactic showdown.

“Hero,” the Beijing super-production, valorizes the ideal of personal sacrifice to centralized political power. “Hero,” the sensationally executed bit of pop art, valorizes an ideal of pure abstraction far more persuasively. Pattern and color are the true heroes of this movie, and deservedly legends in the making.

***

“The Brown Bunny” gets a big snicker right upfront, with a credit sequence announcing Vincent Gallo as writer, director, editor, photographer, and star. The funny thing is, he excels in nearly all five capacities. Don’t believe the hype: For strength of vision, sincerity of feeling, and stylistic integrity, “The Brown Bunny” hops over nearly every other American independent film this year.

If you aren’t hip to the hype, welcome to Earth, my interplanetary friend! “The Brown Bunny” publicity blitz has been so voracious I suspect Mr. Gallo’s buying lunch for potential ticket buyers. (Take him up on it if you get the chance: The man gives fabulous interviews.) It began with an infamous press screening at Cannes in 2003, at which the credit snicker soon escalated into howls of derision, catcalls, and bouts of ironic applause. To much of the assembled world press, this was the nadir of the “long, boring auteur film” – endless scenes of Mr. Gallo driving and staring out the bug-splattered window of his van.

Those who made it to the end were treated to a real climax: Chloe Sevigny performing graphic, apparently unsimulated fellatio on her co-star. (Rumors circulated that Mr. Gallo may have snatched a prosthesis from the set of Claire Denis’s “Trouble Every Day.”) On exiting, Roger Ebert put his thumb way, way down, pronouncing it the worst film ever shown in competition at the festival. Not to be outdone, Mr. Gallo parried back by calling him a “fat pig” with the “physique of a slave trader.” With the help of Kenneth Anger, he placed a black magic curse on the critic’s nether regions.

More recently, a massive billboard featuring the sex scene went up over Sunset Boulevard; its removal days later generated even more buzz. My local video store reports daily requests for bootleg copies. No such luck, Galloheads and Sevingettes: you’ll have to queue up with all the other curious cats at the Sunshine. And don’t forget your fake ID.

By all means stick it out for Ms. Sevigny’s notorious nuzzle: En route you’ll ride in close proximity to something far more exquisite. “The Brown Bunny” may be the one-note song of a one-man band, but Mr. Gallo’s got something gorgeous to get off his chest. As Bud, despondent motorcycle fanatic on a cross-country trip from New Hampshire to Los Angeles, Mr. Gallo communicates an unfathomable sadness, peering out of those piercing, deep-set eyes like some kind of emaciated, heavily depressed koala bear.

For the better part of an hour (the movie has been significantly trimmed from its original version), this wounded creature drives his big black van and stares out the window. Sometimes he will stare at his hands, sometimes he stops in motels to stare at himself in the shower or in bed. On one of his major adventures, he stops in a pet store to stare at some kittens (he knows how the caged kitten sings).

What there is of a plot is structured around Bud’s encounter with three flowers he meets along the path to Daisy (Ms. Sevigny), the girl he left behind in L.A. First plucked is Violet (Anna Vareschi), a gas-station attendant he convinces to run away with him, then abruptly abandons. Next comes Lilly (Cheryl Tiegs), encountered at a highway rest stop. They exchange a handful of words and share a long, strange kiss before Bud climbs back in his emo-mobile. Then there is fragrant Rose (Elizabeth Rose), a Las Vegas prostitute he treats to McDonald’s.

To this point, I was riveted by the moody auteur’s control of his material; watching the film is like mainlining melancholy. His succession of washed-out compositions, gorgeously pierced by lens-flares and his own stares, unspool like a bleary slideshow of the saddest summer vacation ever. His grungy, spaced-out, pseudo-1970s minimalism is as accomplished an invention as the pastiche maximalism of Guy Maddin’s “Cowards Bend the Knee.”

When Daisy turns up in his hotel room and unzips his pants, it’s not the exposure of Bud’s endowment that trips up the final reel, but the exposure of what’s been motoring his mopey voyage all along. Mr. Gallo sustains the most seamless fusion of emotion to form in any recent American film besides “Before Sunset,” but lacks the restraint – the imagination – to pull back from a conventional resolution. Were the Cannes cut sans the fellatio scene opening today, I might be heralding a masterpiece. As it stands, “The Brown Bunny” more than transcends its own hype.

***

Multiple puns abide in “Bright Leaves,” the title of Ross McElwee’s charmingly discursive essay on the entwined histories of his Southern family and the tobacco plant. When dried, rolled, sparked, and inhaled, the lustrous green tobacco leaf carries a toxic legacy – a brightness that leaves you dead. It was the shining fortune of Mr. McElwee’s great grandfather to harvest his tobacco crop into the famous Bull Durham brand; it was the phenomenal success of the rival Duke clan that stubbed it out in the ashtray of history.

Many years later, after relocating from North Carolina to Cambridge, Mass., raising a Yankee son, and rehabilitating the family name through his celebrated movies (“Sherman’s March,” “Time Indefinite”), Mr. McElwee received a call from a movie-mad cousin back home. The latest addition to his print collection: “Bright Leaf,” an obscure 1950 Michael Curtiz melodrama starring Lauren Bacall, Patricia Neal, and Gary Cooper as a tobacco magnate driven out of business by a rival clan. Was “Bright Leaf” the McElwees’ secret Hollywood home movie?

Stimulated by this tantalizing possibility, Mr. McElwee returned home to reckon with the contradictory emotions kindled by all these bright leaves from his past. With a lazy afternoon rhythm, he meanders through his native soil, digging up old acquaintances and cultivating new friends. He is interested in everyone and generous with all, and takes palpable pleasure in his ensemble of not-so-simple faces and voices of the South – smokers and doctors, farmers and film theorists, childhood buddies and beauty queens.

The journey is steeped in irresolvable ambivalence. How to reconcile the destructive nature of tobacco with its centrality to Southern culture? Surveying the McElwee oeuvre in Film Comment, North Carolina native Godfrey Cheshire notes that, “The South appears as Eden, which gains its idyllic glow only in retrospect, defined by the shadow of some enticing Serpent – be it slavery or war or even tobacco.” Southerners – transplanted or not – may find “Bright Leaves” something like a shadow chapter of their own autobiography.

But Mr. McElwee’s odyssey into the “Southern cosmology” illuminates more than regional concerns. So discreetly that it goes unnoticed at first, this cine-memoir looks to the future: What might this tarnished legacy indicate about his relationship to another leaf off the family tree, his teenage son Adrian? In a less ironic mood, he might have called his film “Fathers and Sons.”

***

What’s left to be said for “Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid?” Not much more than to salute the filmmakers for their honesty in using a stupid trick monkey as the audience surrogate. This mugging little beast serves as mascot for the boatload of greedy, subliterate morons questing in Borneo for an exotic life-extending orchid. Every time a gargantuan anaconda snatches one of these “characters” in a blur of cheap CGI, Kong covers his eyes and squeals. At least the mangy dude was rewarded with a scrap of banana for his antics. His counterparts in the theater are left begging for even the tiniest crumb of camp to relieve the inept tedium on screen.