Wes Anderson is one of our finest young directors, his films flawlessly crafted and sprinkled with inventive dialogue – a man talented and smart enough to surround himself with equally talented actors and collaborators. So why does my stomach do a tiny little back flip when I see the trailers for his new movie?

Again it is time to celebrate little boys, or little boys in Owen Wilson form, with big, megalomaniac dreams. It is time for velvet suits and forgotten 1970s songs and a meandering story that curls along, wrapping itself around our legs and gazing up with big open-hearted eyes just dying for a rub on the belly. Who but a cranky film reviewer could resist such an appeal?

But the Young at Heart routine has grown less endearing in the eight years since Mr. Anderson made “Bottle Rocket.” It’s like watching a friend get off the hook for bad behavior with the same helpless-scamp act he’s conned everyone with for a decade. Repeat performances of open-hearted lovability overwhelm one not with affection, but with the feeling we’ve been had. No con is more insidious, more dastardly, than the great, big, open-hearted one.

Much of the blame for the creeping sense of creepiness these virtuoso auteurist performances are starting to evoke does not belong with Wes Anderson. Rather, Mr. Anderson is very much a victim of his imitators and his failure to break pace with them. The Anderson style, with its retinue of grandiose dorks and play-school soundtracks, has gelled into the leading school for today’s generation of filmmakers.

The New Quirky has become a bag of tricks for any young auteur seeking a ready-made voice of edgy-innocence with a direct line to the heartstrings of every child of the 1970s and 1980s. Where previous generations of young cinematic voices sought to break through the collective consciousness with stark portrayals of reality, through experiments with storytelling or shock-the-bourgeoisie content, this generation seeks to leave its mark through quirkiness.

The marks of the New Quirky are everywhere across the cinematic landscape – from Scarlett Johannsen’s cotton-candy wig in “Lost in Translation” to the alternative universes quoted in “American Splendor” and “Ghost World,” to the performances of John C. Reilly. What unites these works is an overarching desire not to shock but to tousle, to muss the viewers’ hair, letting things get a tiny bit askew but always waving its heart of gold decorated in neon colors, plain to see a mile off.

Like the French New Wave and the American cinema of the 1970s, the New Quirky comes in a variety of forms. Leading among the Quirky Caucuses:

The Soundtrack School

Movies like “Garden State” are essentially vehicles for off-the-beaten-path mixed tapes. “I Am Sam,” featuring Sean Penn as a retarded man fighting for custody of his daughter, was instantly and mercifully forgotten in its screen incarnation. But the soundtrack, a compilation of Beatles covers by nouveau artists from The Vines to Sheryl Crowe, lives forever.

The Truth – Speaking Moron School

Perhaps the official dialogue voice of the New Quirky Era, these films feature characters telling simple truths in a drooling drawl. Lifted from Sissy Spacek’s voiceover in Terrence Malick’s serial-killer-son-the-run classic “Badlands” (“He was the killingest guy I ever knew.”). Great performances in the category include Jennifer Anniston in “The Good Girl,” Mark Ruffalo in “You Can Count on Me,” Billy Crudup in “Jesus Son,” Mark Wahlberg in “I Heart Huckabees,” John C. Reilly in “Magnolia,” and every third supporting character in a Coen brothers film.

The Languid School

Led by Sophia Coppola in “The Virgin Suicides” and “Lost in Translation,” and recently imitated in Zach Braff’s “Garden State. “The languidites build their stories around characters whom, if they haven’t just inhaled a hankyful of chloroform, find virtue in acting as if they had; lost souls drift, mouths agape, through their films, spending hours staring out windows while wistful-alternative or trance music plays. Call it Antonioni Goes to Summer Camp.

The Geek Hero School

To this generation, there is no story more heroic than that of a hopeless dork squishing his or her way through a world un prepared to embrace his creativity. The annals of losers with great big dreams has been explored in films including “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Rushmore,” and “Ghost World.” An offshoot of this school, the Geek Hero in a Grown Man’s Body subgenre, has been the subject of exaltation in “Chuck and Buck,” “Crumb,” and “American Splendor.” Nothing says quirky (and geeky) like a fascination with comic books or animation, especially when expressed by a nearly middle-aged man and his film crew.

The Meta-Quirksters

Given some class by Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s film-within-a-film-about-a-film explorations, “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation,” this formally quirky faction actually got its start with Kevin Williamson’s “Scream” films, the chronicle of a group of teens so versed in horror-movie cliches that they think they can avoid becoming one. Meta is always the last redoubt of the otherwise witless would-be quirkster. When you’ve got nothing to say, you can always talk about how you’re saying it.

In these films’ finest moments, they rise out of the mossy cloak of the New Quirky and for brief shining moments, looking the audience in the eye without a funny velvet suit, wacky soundtrack, or playfully tossed pop-culture reference to stand between us. But uniting all these filmmakers is a dedication to view the world through a bemused detachment, which – seen from a thousand angles through a thousand quirky young lenses – becomes more of a posture than a vision, more of a style than a sensibility.

In an age when design is king, when – apart from their common wardrobes, musical tastes, and bathroom accessories – the philosophic underpinnings of today’s avant-garde are so vague they reign under the generic name of “hipsters,” is it any wonder the cutting-edge film movement should be more a costume party than a critique?

Mr. Rushfield is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.