JIA ZHANGKE'S THE World is a melodrama, a musical, a comedy, and another example of what high production values and the words "Office Kitano" in the credits can do. But most obviously for me, as the film that officially opened my Vancouver International Film Festival experience this year, The World is a metaphor. A cast of characters whose heart-aching humor faced with China's calamitous capitalist rush recalls Jia's Unknown Pleasures (2002) in doomed outlook and Platform (2000) in occupation are performers-employees at a Beijing suburban "world" theme park – with people-size exhibits of the major cities, a World Trade-towered New York City, a Paris – that mocks its cast's ambitions to leave the country. Paced with Kitano-style chapter breaks, and lit up with musical numbers that feel more Fashion Week hip than Broadway ironic, the film builds to a climax that vividly, sickeningly captures what it feels like to be a prisoner of one's country.

I recognized the feeling, having escaped mine for a long weekend over the border. No matter how much underground radio I run through my cortex, it's still generally a shock to cross this seemingly inconsequential North American divide and realize – in one 15-minute scan through the TV channels – just how much fear and trembling this government's blood lust is causing abroad. I came for the movies, but given what wonders electronic deprogramming was doing for me, I wanted to stay for the TV.

Other revelations came outside the box, in the form of nonfiction films like The Ister, three amazingly compelling hours on Heidegger and a German hymn on the Danube, not to mention the small joys and major tragedies of everyday anarchy seen in Baghdad Blogger/Salam Pax – Video Reports from Iraq. Doc features, we were warned, were going to be controversial, and screenings of the most likely candidate for that award, Robin Scovill's The Other Side of AIDS, engaged audiences in marathon Q&A sessions that, at least once, clocked in at more than an hour and spilled out to the lobby. The film mixes a formal talking-heads strategy with eerie indie music to discuss HIV skepticism from scientific perspectives as well as fascinating and excruciatingly personal ones.

You could say that logging hours in movie-theater seats at an international film festival – like strolling through Beijing's world theme park – is a sad way to travel the world, but I couldn't really build much of an argument for that point, given the high quality of films I paid passive witness to. Amir Muhammad's The Big Durian, which brings comedy to the service of history as it recalls an incident Malaysians have been too happy to forget – a soldier's 1987 murderous rampage through a section of Kuala Lumpur – signals a powerfully quirky new filmmaking voice. As does Green Hat, a debut feature whose screenplay wit (director Liu Fendou previously wrote Shower) and technical skill bode well for Chinese commercial filmmaking, and maybe even a Landmark theater near you. (Susan Gerhard)

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Before the first screening of Jem Cohen's new film, Chain, at the Vancouver International Film Festival, the director took the mic and admitted he got a kick out of seeing it unspool at a multiplex, "because it will never end up in one ... it's not a normal movie." True, Chain would be out of place at, say, the Metreon, but Cohen (Benjamin Smoke) doesn't need car chases or bullet-time to convey his message. Not quite experimental, not quite a narrative, Chain – the aptly chosen title references everything from chain stores to economic and social food chains – follows two women treading capitalism's choppy waters. A young woman (Mira Billotte) thumbs a ride on the highway and tells the driver to take her to the nearest mall; buoyed by memories of a long-ago job working at a mall back home, she spends all day window-shopping, avoiding security guards, and eating meals left behind at the food court. Her deadpan commentary and gradual rise out of homelessness both contrast with and mirror the saga of another young woman (Miho Nikaido), a Japanese business exec perpetually traveling to different parts of the world, enthusiastically researching theme parks for her employer. Throughout, Chain is densely packed with images – filmed over a six-year period, in six countries and 11 states – that illustrate the depressing sameness that has already spread across the United States and is now starting to consume the planet.

But even if the United Sates is poisoning the world with Wal-Mart and McDonald's and lord knows what else, at least most global cinema remains relatively untainted. Alex Yang's Taipei 21 follows a young couple who're at a crossroads after seven years together; she wants to buy an apartment and settle down, while he's still resisting maturity. The resulting breakup is shot through with family troubles and career dramas, belying the idea (oft-floated by Hollywood) that relationships exist in a vacuum without the distractions of real life.

Real life doesn't get harsher than the based-on-true-events Nobody Knows, by Kore-eda Hirokazu (After Life, Distance), about children hidden away, Flowers in the Attic-style, by their irresponsible mom. After she ends up ditching them for good, things slowly deteriorate, but Nobody Knows never feels emotionally manipulative, nor does it offer easy solutions. For a movie about the plight of cute, sad-eyed abandoned kids, that's no small accomplishment.

Those seeking more lurid entertainment need look no further than Takashi Miike's Izo. Reincarnated into modern Tokyo, a seemingly indestructible samurai annihilates besuited businessmen, schoolgirls, cops with assault weapons, wide-eyed families, a pair of vampires, and all others who cross his path. Lest you think that description makes it sound awesome, I should add that dozens of audience members scampered into the lobby mid-movie, never to return – and I have a feeling Izo's puzzling, weirdly convoluted plot, not its copious ultraviolence, was to blame. Izo isn't the best introduction for first-time Miike-goers, but it has its charms, in particular a sequence that sees the grungy warrior slice and dice his way through a jaunty phalanx of baseball bat-toting gangsters. (Cheryl Eddy)