For the grownup movie-going set, fall means more than pumpkin spice: it means a hearty sampling of films aimed at their intellect and emotions—a relief after weathering yet another summer season crammed with comic book spectacles and horror film retreads.

Here in New York, we’re fortunate enough to get a glimpse of what is to come at the annual New York Film Festival. The lineup for this year’s festival, now in its 52nd year, includes films by underappreciated and overlooked directors from overseas (Hong Sang-Soo and Oliver Assayas) and films by established American auteurs (Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher). The festival also does an excellent job introducing newer American voices, and this year seems to be the year of Alex Ross Perry and brothers Ben and Josh Safdie.

The first feature I caught was Jean-Luc Godard’s dazzling 3D film Goodbye to Language. Since Breathless, his firecracker of a film that marked the young director as a dominant figure of the French New Wave, Godard has been bending and changing the “rules” of film grammar for over 50 years. In Breathless he broke with traditional norms of shooting and editing, challenging the values of “craft” and “quality” in the name of immediacy and spontaneity.

Not surprisingly, over the years his techniques—especially the now ubiquitous jumpcut—have been codified and assimilated into the kind of filmmaking he once wanted to break free from. Godard’s tendency to reject accepted filmmaking practices stems from a desire to understand the ontology of the moving image.

So it should come as no surprise that Godard’s latest is an essay (and somewhere in there a narrative, too) of sorts on the “evolution of the language of cinema”—to borrow a phrase from Godard’s mentor, Andre Bazin. Godard’s film not only asks us to consider the way image-making has changed in an era in which we all carry motion-picture cameras in our pockets, but it also asks us to consider the ways we use and manipulate images, not to mention the way we now relate to each through these self-made images.

Early in on in the film Mr. Godard makes this intent explicit by foregrounding characters who mediate their everyday experiences by shooting footage on their iPhones. Yet in his montage he juxtaposes these images and others like them with found footage, digitally enhanced footage, and what we might consider more traditional narrative feature-film scenes. It’s a smorgasbord of formats and ideas.

Ah, yes, let us not also forget those 3D images here too. Godard manages to make some of the most beautiful and jaw-dropping images this reviewer has seen on a big screen. Working against the grain of using 3D as a “made you jump” gimmick, Godard considers the format’s possibilities for beauty and emotional insight. This is difficult to articulate, but to see 3D image such as the one he creates of a woman dipping her hands in a pool of water—this is to behold a fleeting moment of the ineffable.

Typical of late Godard, the director wraps these images around his usual obsessions—hence the references to Solzhenitsyn, Frankenstein, Rilke, the Holocaust, Old Hollywood, et al. We also get bathroom humor and a dog in the lead role.

If you think I’ve painted Goodbye to Language as batty and impenetrable, you’re right. It often is. But if your kneejerk reaction is to skip it because its seems too esoteric for your tastes, you’ll have to trust me that it doesn’t have to be. If you give yourself over to rhythm and splendor of the images you just might find yourself in a place of wonder, possibly searching for the language to explain it all.

Another early feature that has me buzzing is Hill of Freedom. The film, from South Korea’s Hong Sang-Soo, could be lumped into the puzzle-film genre as its plot turns on a woman, Kwon (Seo Young-hwa), trying to piece together a coherent narrative out of letters that her lover, Morie (Ryo Kase), has written her while they were apart.

The problem of understanding just what happened while they had gone their separate ways arises when Kwon drops the packet of letters shortly after receiving them—the letters scattering to and fro. This forces her to read Mori’s letters out of order and gives the film the conceit on which it is hinged.

Relayed to Kwon and us in this way, Mori’s exploits away from Kwon only come in fragments, rendering them temporally and spatially difficult to understand. We’re never quite sure how to take Mori’s nonchalant attitude towards his one-night affairs and easily forged alliances with strangers.

But putting together the puzzle here is somewhat beside the point. Hong Sang-Soo—both highly acclaimed and wildly prolific—has little concern for simply whipping up a nifty narrative. Instead, he’s bent on exploring the nuances of memory and the way men and women relate to one another through honesty and confession.

Formally, Sang-Soo counters the patched-together epistolary story with long sequences shot in long extended takes that provide the individual scenes with an integral wholeness. This is in fact the inverse of the Hollywood approach which pieces scenes together out of fragments of shots in the service of narratives that are linear. Sang-Soo’s method invites us to be present to the individual, autonomous moment and less concerned with trying to fabricate a narrative onto these privileged moments the film presents. It feels like a lesson for the way we watch films in the dark and the way we live our lives in the light of day.

In the end, however, the film’s rigorous formal qualities go down easier than it may appear on paper. The film is both funny and warm, owing in large part to Ryo Kase’s goofy charisma and charm. But it’s also Sang-Soo’s handling of the material that imbues the film with a lightness that frees us to revel in the here and now.

Bearden Coleman is assistant professor of English at The King's College, where he teaches writing and film. You can follow him on Twitter at @OZUsCamera.

Alissa's note: This reflection is part of a series on "Watch This Way" called "Rewind," in which movie critics and film buffs reflect on a film from the past and what it means today.

Carousel was famously cited by Time magazine as the best stage musical of the 20th century. Composer Richard Rodgers allegedly called it his best work. The film version earned nominations for its director (Henry King) and writers (Phoebe and Henry Ephron) from the Directors Guild and Writers Guild respectively. It has a lofty 7.0/10.0 rating from nearly 4,000 viewers at IMDb. In other words, it is one of the most esteemed musicals of all time and one of the most beloved films from the 1950s.

Huh?!

Watching Carousel today, at a time when football players are being suspended for domestic violence and documentarians are striving to give a voice to our some of society’s most vulnerable members, is a bit like taking a Shakespeare class and trying to convince yourself that The Taming of the Shrew is not misogynistic or that The Merchant of Venice is not anti-Semitic. One wants to avoid charges of ethnocentrism at all costs, but it is hard to look at the film and feel anything but embarrassment that our society once countenanced such tripe.

The film opens with Billy Bigelow (Gordon McRae) at a way-station outside of heaven. He has not been judged too harshly for a life lived beating his wife, Julie (Shirley Jones), and sponging off her aunt or for dying while attempting to rob a rich man at knifepoint. If I didn’t have larger complaints, I might be tempted to examine more seriously the theological implications of this purgatorial setting, but other than a brief mention that Billy’s partner-in-crime Jigger didn’t even make it “this far,” the film doesn’t invite us to take seriously the notion that our status in the afterlife contains any sort of judgment of our life on earth.

One of the rules of this way station is that each person has the “right” (odd word, that) to return to earth for one day. Billy long ago waived that right but now he has heard that the wife he left behind and the daughter he never met are in need of his help. (She never needed his help in the 18 or so years he’s been lounging about polishing stars?) Before he can go, though, he needs to tell his story, so we flashback to the beginning.

The story, while long in the telling, is pretty thin. Billy, a carnival barker, woos a pretty girl from the mill. She impulsively agrees to marry him—did they just meet?—and he is fired by his jealous boss. Despite Julie’s best attempts to be a submissive, cheerful, and supportive wife, Billy does everything in his power to make her (and everyone around him) miserable. He refuses a job on a fishing boat because he doesn’t like the smell and thinks the work beneath him.

He protests that he doesn’t “beat” Julie, he only “hits” her.

When asked why he strikes his wife, he says that there comes a point in every argument where he realizes she is in the right, so that’s when he hits her. He hesitates to join his pal, Jigger, in a larceny plan, but then he promptly gambles away his stake in the robbery over five minutes of blackjack.

When he finds out his wife is pregnant, Billy burst into song about how great it will be to have a son. Then it occurs to him that the kid might be a girl. Oh, no! A son can be a playmate and a source of pride. A daughter is just one more burden; the reason you have to embark on a life of crime so that you can afford to give her pretty things.

The most common defense of Carousel is that while the story may be dated, the music is beautiful. Certainly the dance around “June is Bustin’ Out All Over” is great as a showpiece, right up there with some of the routines from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

But to the extent that they are actually integrated into the narrative, the songs either reinforce the problematic themes (“What’s the use of wondering / If the ending will be sad? / He’s your feller and you love him / There’s nothing more to say”) or are ironically undercut by them. The film’s anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” is inspiring outside of the context of the play, but the reality is that Julie is left alone, both to walk and to care for her daughter.

Okay, Billy is a jerk, fine. What’s a redemption story without a hero that has been brought low? But the last act of Carousel is the most mind-boggling. Billy returns to earth to find his daughter, on the verge of graduation, unhappy and looked down upon by her rich neighbors. He appears to her—he is visible only when he want to be—long enough to try to give her a star and (yep, you guessed it) pop her a good one when she refuses to accept it.

By the time his daughter comes out of the house with Billy’s widow, he has retreated to invisibility. His attempts to alleviate his family’s distress have failed miserably, but it’s okay because Louise reports wondrously to her mother that when the mysterious stranger struck her, it didn’t hurt at all. “Is [that] possible?” she asks her mother.

“It is possible dear, for someone to hit you, hit you hard, and it not hurt at all.” That’s the film’s thesis, delivered by Julie to her daughter, and it’s hard today not to see the results all around us, every day, of young girls being taught that physical pain and humiliation is an acceptable price to pay for a little attention from (I won’t say “the love of”) a not so good man.

You’ve come a not-so long way, baby. We no longer think it is your fault if he beats you. It’s only your fault if it hurts.

Kenneth R. Morefield is an associate professor of English at Campbell University. He is the editor of Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Volumes I & II, and the founder of 1More Film Blog.