Is Issey Ogata the greatest actor in Japan? It’s entirely possible, but as he mostly works on the stage, we’d have to go there to find out. Unlike his potential rivals on the big screen (Takeshi Kitano and Yakusho Koji are the only names that immediately come to mind), he has appeared in few movies, and fewer still that have made it to America. Most will remember him, if at all, from his minor but crucial supporting role as a soulful Japanese businessman in “Yi Yi.” That was world-class scene-stealing, but just the tip of an iceberg now towering into view.

A Cannes Film Festival screening of “The Sun” provided by my first glimpse of Mr. Ogata’s full capabilities. In an ideal cinematic universe – beam me up! – Alexander Sokurov’s eccentric masterpiece would escape the film-festival orbit and propel Mr. Ogata to stardom. As Emperor Hirohito, Mr. Ogata makes plausible, and weirdly poignant, the incremental process of a fallen demigod divesting himself of divinity. His extended monologue on the geopolitical implications of hermit-crab anatomy is one for the ages, and his sustained upperlip tic constitutes a bizarre physical masterpiece all by itself.

Things being what they are, his wry, fastidious, intricately wrought portrayal is the most astonishing feat of acting you probably won’t see this year. Fortunately, “Tony Takitani,” which opens today, permits a New York audience their first extended look at the elusive Mr. Ogata.

Imagine the melancholy offspring of Dustin Hoffman and a plump, dark-featured koi: a compact, middle-aged everyman whose vaguely aquatic aspect, topped in a bowl cut, retains a hint of boyish mischief beneath the slight, generalized jowl. Mr. Ogata commands this physiognomy down to the very pore.

His chief talent is an ability to draw up heat from a remote hearth of feeling and suffuse it into his cool, collected surface. He does this without any maudlin effect, almost imperceptibly, and with absolute authority. You could sooner critique the persuasiveness of a fern’s photosynthesizing than find fault in Mr. Ogata’s organic characterizations.

“Tony Takitani,” closely adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami, is a small-scale mood piece of singular delicacy and slow-burning sadness – an ideal vehicle for this subtlest of actors. In the title role, Mr. Ogata plays a man so accustomed to solitude that when a woman finally enters his life, “this lack of loneliness felt slightly so odd.” Her name is Konuma Eiko (Miyazawa Rie), and she is the first significant woman in Tony’s life since his childhood, when his mother died.

Tony was raised, if you can call it that, by a father perpetually on tour with a jazz band. He exhibited impressive skill as an art student, rendering subjects with terrifically tactile detail but bloodless indifference to their life force/inner energy. He makes a very good living as a technical draftsman and is content, in his melancholy way, to hunch over the worktable in his luxuriously minimal apartment.

Eiko arrives one day to retrieve a drawing for a client, and everything changes. He falls instantly in love. Tony’s efforts to court her are unsuccessful at first, but in a wonderfully bittersweet capitulation, she finally relents to this kind, lonely man. For the first time in his life, Tony is truly happy. Eiko settles comfortably into an uneventful domestic life, her one indulgence a taste for designer clothing. As time goes on and her racks of couture grow, walls must be torn down to make way for huge walk-in closets.

Eiko’s upscale shopping sprees are mise-en-scene as Jil Sander might fashion it: luminescent fragments soft as cashmere, expertly cut and assembled into simple, elegantly mobile forms. “Toni Takitani” nails the rarified pleasures of the fashion sophisticate: the sensibility of a woman for whom a Balenciaga handbag costing several thousand dollars is not so much an expensive accessory as a relatively inexpensive piece of sculpture.

Scoff at that notion if it suits you. But neither Mr. Murakami nor director Jun Ichikawa (nor Tony Takitani himself) condescends to Eiko’s obsession. Indeed, the husband takes great pleasure in his wife’s tony habit. When the time comes to plead that she ease up on the credit cards (Murakami: “He almost worried that the raised digits … might wear down.”), he does so in the least reproachful of tones.

Tony’s request precipitates a crisis I’ll not spoil here. Suffice to say, this is a story about a lifetime of loneliness thrown into greater relief by an exquisite interlude of companionship. Mr. Ichikawa has called his film a “fable of isolation,” and he has invented a number of gentle artifices to abstract the verisimilitude. He reduces the chromatics to soft, powdery tones and arranges his compositions into suave, self-conscious geometries.

Repeatedly, he positions the camera on the right of the frame, then pans or tracks left, duplicating the eye’s movement across text and sustaining a sense of drift over events. That gliding narrative momentum is reinforced by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s haunting, repetitive piano score, which complements an even-keeled voice-over throughout. All this emphasizes an awareness of text; a calculation to distance the emotion and let it well incrementally.

The calculation pays off. “Tony Takitani” creeps up on you, accumulating plaintive harmonies. It haunted my tear ducts for hours once gone, but under its spell I saw perfectly clear: a lovely film, a surpassingly sensitive adaptation, and further acquaintance with a supremely gifted actor. If Mr. Ogata is not the greatest actor in Japan, “Tony Takitani” brings him one step closer.

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Damon Packard’s flabbergasting underground freak-out is the most scathing blast of cinematic irreverence since “Team America,” an avant-garde epic to put on the shelf with “The Chelsea Girls,” “Star Spangled to Death,” and “Mahagonny.”

The plot – if you can call it that – follows a portly, vomiting, obscenity spewing lunatic as he staggers around Hollywood trying to sell cheap watches and locate his sister, long lost to an LSD trip gone horribly (and hilariously) awry. Edited like a muscle spasm and shot in multiple low-end formats, “Reflections of Evil” is essentially a series of spectacularly irrational confrontations, the definitive odyssey of pedestrian road rage and a masterpiece of lysergic loathing.

Everything climaxes in a mind-boggling night vision fever dream shot on the sly at the Universal Studios theme park – from which Mr. Packard has now been banned for life – with a coda staged on “Schindler’s List: The Ride.” Along the way you’ll be treated to masturbatory bootlegging at a screening of “The Phantom Menace,” a visit with young Spielberg on the set, and the eruption of ingenious found-footage montages.

What To See This Weekend

“Evil Dead 2” (Landmark Sunshine, 212-330-8182) Totally nuts from first frame to last, Sam Raimi’s classic horror freak-out is required viewing for anyone wasted in the Lower East Side this weekend at midnight.

“The Conformist” (Film Forum, 212-727-8112) Gorgeous from first frame to last, Bernardo Bertolucci’s art deco spectacular is required viewing for anyone with functioning eyesight.