Jia Zhangke films locally but thinks globally. In “Xio Wu,” “Platform,” and “Unknown Pleasures” – each shot in the Shanxi province of China, each suppressed by the country’s authorities – he analyzed the lives of young people who feel dwarfed by the past, unmoored from the present, and anxious about the future. Baffled by the national narrative and pressed by forces they barely understand, his disaffected provincials turn inward and go blank, even as they externalize their aspirations through song, dance, fashion, and crime.

Mr. Jia frames their condition through his cerebral, much celebrated style: meticulously designed master shots coupled to an intricate sound design that comments on the image. The meaning of any given shot becomes clear incrementally, modulates over time. Emotions smolder, shift register, and quietly overwhelm. His work bears comparison to the great history pictures of Hou Hsiao-hsien, but I like to think of him as an unconscious disciple of William Carlos Williams.

The films accumulate, elliptically, a set of hard facts; they have no ideas but in things. Like the poet of “Paterson,” Mr. Jia’s laser focus on regional particulars illuminates universal conditions. His entire project might profitably be understood, formally and thematically, as a gloss on Williams’s great directive to the modern artist: “Blocked. (Make a song out of that; concretely)”.

In Mr. Jia’s new film, his blocked provincials have escaped from the provinces, saved up for cell phones, and arrived in “The World.” Located on the outskirts of Beijing, World Park is monumental kitsch, a tourist attraction stuffed with miniaturized replicas of the world’s most famous sights. The global village has been translated from abstraction into plaster and plastic. Knickknacks, chockablock: the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, the Pyramids and the Sphinx, London and Washington, Stonehenge, and the island of Manhattan. “The Twin Towers were bombed on 9/11,” enthuses one employee, “but we still have them!”

With this ready-made simulacrum at hand, Mr. Jia has conceived a brainy essay on modern life. “The World” is a series of images about images. In the film’s quintessential scene, Tao (Zhao Tao), a performer of World Park dance extravaganzas, and her security-guard boyfriend Taisheng (Chen Taisheng) are absorbed into a cheap special effect. Side by side, they sit for a camera and wave, their image mixed in a monitor with prerecorded aerial views for a “flying carpet” video (available to World Park visitors, for a fee, as a DVD souvenir). Going nowhere with the illusion of release, the world simulacrum at your feet: All “The World” is a stage for a tragicomedy of the image.

The movie works best in moments like these, when abstract ideas (and cliches) about the modern world crystallize into images. Mr. Jia joins comedy with commentary in the trenchant motif of tourists arranging themselves for fake mementos – pretending, for instance, to prop up a toy Tower of Pisa. In one searing sequence, a character sets fire to his jacket in a fit of petulant frustration, igniting complex overtones of political self-immolation and suggestive parallels with symbolic bits of costume worn by his equivalent in Mr. Jia’s remarkable “Unknown Pleasures.”

All of this is interesting enough, if rather academic. As drama, “The World” is flat. It is fitting, perhaps, that a movie about inertia should be inert, that a story about people spinning in place should itself spin. Any given half hour of the film makes its point; at nearly two and a half, the point grows wearisome.

Mr. Jia’s formal prowess is undiminished. His signature move here is the pivoting tableaux: Fixing the camera on a striking composition, he’ll flow with the action then freeze the image into a new and equally arresting arrangement. I’ve never seen a movie congeal in quite the same way. Mr. Jia remains a fascinating talent, but “The World” is not enough.

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Another frustrating dose of ironic Chinese globalization arrives in “A Decent Factory.” Now playing at Film Forum, the documentary follows a pair of Nokia representatives as they investigate a supplier’s factory in Shenzhen. Hanna Kaskinen is responsible for overseeing the company’s ethical and environmental standards; Louise Jamison is an outside consultant brought on to help.

What they discover is provocative if scarcely surprising: a depressed, underpaid workforce regimented into a system exerting total control of their every social and biological need. Housed in clean but cramped dormitories on the factory grounds, the mostly young women are sustained on vats of bland food and wages equivalent to 20 euros a month. Sex is all but banned; pregnancy results in expulsion or forced abortion. The mind-numbingly repetitive work shifts range from eight hours to 12. None of the workers have contracts.

French filmmaker Thomas Balmes largely refrains from commenting on his material, allowing us to draw our own conclusions. Left inconclusive is whether Nokia’s ethical efforts are anything but a public-relations gesture. At the end of their investigation, the women scold the factory managers for their infractions, then jet back to Finland to give Power-Point presentations.