Once in a while, even the most tried and true narrative formula needs repackaging for retail-friendliness. Or so it must seem at least to those bottom-line minders who cut checks to Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford.

So let’s do this: a thing and another thing…but not the other thing you expect! And the thing is cool, and the other thing is differently cool, so as to convey a vibe of maybe just being plum crazy enough to work. This being a delicate art, it’ll involve some trial and error. Like so.

Spaghetti and meatballs: Classic.

Spaghetti and glass shards: No thank you!

Spaghetti and Gummi Bears: Keep talking….

And before we know it we’re in the Old West, but with invading extraterrestrials. “Cowboys & Aliens” may sound conceptually obvious, but in fact it is obvious in every other way, too. For instance, Craig and Ford don’t play the aliens. And if this is not exactly what you expect from director Jon Favreau and an original movie-ready property by comic book industrialist Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, it must be because you’re not sure who those guys are anyway. No matter.

The stars look great, but unfortunately that’s no matter either. If anything could redeem this, it would be the sense of a kid gathering all his random toys together, non sequiturs be damned, into one sincerely urgent, internally logical superstory. What “Cowboys & Aliens” lacks, aside from the better execution we’ve already seen more than once in Pixar’s “Toy Story” franchise (not to mention Ford’s own frolic with Gene Wilder in “The Frisco Kid” some 30-odd years ago), is an attitude of abandon.

All the cheerfully winking genre enthusiasm Favreau brought to such fun romps as “Elf” and the first “Iron Man” is not readily apparent here. “Cowboys & Aliens” feels like a perfunctory, mercantile exercise — sagging misshapenly under the weight of its way too many producer and writer credits, which include some big shots whose demands may well have simply worn Favreau down.

Neither homage nor satire, quite, it’s more like a brainstormed shorthand checklist of plot points and payoffs. The characters got sketched in at some juncture, and since then everyone seems to have just decided to leave them sketchy, letting stereotype pose as archetype. There’s the loner hero (Craig) with no past, and no fear. The crusty rival-cum-ally (Ford) with a heart of gold. The irksome whelp (Paul Dano) on whom the hero puts a beating, to comic effect. There’s the hero surrounded: by thugs, by Apache, by aliens, and the surprise cavalry-arrival rescue(s) just when all seems lost. There’s the creature all up in your business, with body parts within its body parts. The uncertain but timely weapons proficiency. The boy and his dog. The manly speech. The humbling. The vision quest. The warrior honor bullshit. The woman (Abigail Spencer) who gets to make out with Daniel Craig. The other woman (Olivia Wilde) who gets to make out with Daniel Craig. There’s the blah blah and uh huh and whatever.

Some scenes begin promisingly but most just tend to stall out. We’re invited to do the dramatic (or occasionally comedic) legwork ourselves, but not at all required to, so it’s doubly insulting. If you’re sick of cowboy cliches, Favreau seems to be saying, just wait for the space-invader cliches. If you’re sick of those, it’ll be over soon.

Sam Rockwell brings some less contrived humanity to his tagalong supporting part as a docile shopkeeper, and the movie seems happy to have him, so that’s nice. But of course it’s a movie whose principal achievement probably is the stoic array of straight faces it has managed to gather under its own silly circumstances. Just about everyone who appears here does seem wholly convinced that he or she populates and Old West being invaded by extraterrestrials. There is some squinting, what with the scorching southwestern sun and the interstellar trespassers’ probing beams, but winking at the audience? Next to none.

That leaves us and the bottom-line minders standing glumly in a pile of packaging. “Cowboys & Aliens” really is just a hooky premise in search of a paycheck. Don’t let it abduct yours.

He was young when he made it, but he was always young: Having died at 37 from overdoing drugs and work, he completed more films than years of life. And it is dated, but there is fresh delight in the correlation of datedness to its endurance: Not just because it has been unavailable all these years, accumulating mystique, but also for being so clearly ahead of its time to begin with.

It is “World on a Wire,” the rarely seen 1973 TV movie by New German Cinema mainstay Rainer Werner Fassbinder, newly restored, making the rounds in limited release, and worth catching even if you don’t think you have three and a half hours to spare. What makes you so sure it isn’t really a matter of time having you to spare?

Here’s what you should know. Derived from Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 novel “Simulacron 3,” it involves a sinister corporate-controlled virtual-reality situation, with related metaphyiscal questions. In the filmmaker’s own words, “Perhaps another, larger world has made us as a virtual one? In this sense it deals with the old philosophical model, which here takes on a certain horror.”

It’s as you always suspected: The movies had a dystopian Euro-chic cyberworld rabbit hole long before “The Matrix,” and also a grubby sardonic preemptive rebuke to the moneyed hokum that was “Avatar.” Now at last, instead of the glum self-seriousness of “Blade Runner,” warmed over once again, we have the glum self-seriousness of Fassbinder, cryogenically frozen for a while but still so fresh!

Our hero here, played by Klaus Löwitsch, is a cybernetics engineer working on what he calls “the most exciting research project in the entire world,” not wrongly, but not quite comprehendingly either. With dubious help from a small array of blank-faced blondes (Mascha Rabben, svelte; Barbara Valentin, buxom), he finds himself negotiating the variously expressed sudden nonexistence of several colleagues.

“World on a Wire” is willfully dense, a noirish sci-fi puzzler with a hint of James Bond and occasional soap suds bubbling up from its glassy concourse into the air of grainy fluorescence. Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” also was a model, for taking an available actual world to be plenty ominous and science-fiction-like as it is, and Fassbinder gets much power from the blunt, quaint aesthetic of ’70s-style futurism, with its plasticky furniture, its ties and sideburns of formidable width, its groping zooms.

He does well by his own usual style, too. It’s all so flatly lit and acted as to seem somehow invitingly morose. Supporting players don’t really support so much as lurk and pout. Quite often the whole ensemble seems like some vast, ambitiously arty punk band, having a (deadpan) laugh at the expense of the rest of us market-driven “identity units.”

Obviously alienated by his country’s post-fascist “economic miracle,” and accordingly hostile to West German complacency, Fassbinder took interest in oppression as both a topic and a practice. An imperious yet sensitive soul, he could make Hollywood genre deconstruction seem at once like seething and like picking lint. And so he recognized the potential of a liberatingly perfunctory plot — which is to say he knew things going in to this latent existential classic that the rest of us have since taken many movies to figure out. Wise beyond his years, and ours.

Actually, yes, the United States did flirt with eugenics for a while, and Nazi Germany did try to vaporize whole populations, but of course those scenes played out a lot less wholesomely than do the plot points in “Captain America: The First Avenger.” Even having the word “avenger” in its title at all seems bold for the movie in question, whose emotional baseline is so safe, so neutral, that for a while there he might as well be Captain Switzerland. (Consider also the perforated cheese of the plot.)

Just have a little faith, avers director Joe Johnston, with writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, for maybe you can get a good summer blockbuster from a comic book based on a 70-year-old propaganda trope. Just like maybe you can get a metabolically enhanced “super-soldier” from a puny and sickly but brave and eager kid.

Chances are better than average if the kid’s played by Chris Evans, who got into superhero movies as the man on fire in “Fantastic Four” but now at last inhabits his more suitable element. Here he is as Steve Rogers, the willing World War II enlistee who actualizes a pronouncement made by Stanley Tucci’s sagely-schmaltzy German scientist: “A weak man knows the value of strength.” However weird it is to behold those early scenes with Evans’ head digitally grafted onto somebody else’s much less brawny body, his face and voice seem durable and reassuring. Swerving away from self-pity and into plausible humility, passing tests of character with declarative pluck, his Rogers is as ready for this particular promotion to captain as anybody can be — ready to stand up and sacrifice himself, if necessary, for the privilege of luxuriating in chastely spiffy, square-jawed Americana.

This is twice-filtered nostalgia, really, as Johnston draws much from the vintage Lucas-Spielberg playbook, itself a study of the pulp serials those directors grew up with. But moral reductiveness affords a certain popcorn-compatible clarity of presentation. In “Captain America”’s world, every Allied soldier is a decent guy, every woman a pin-up-worthy beauty, every authority figure an avuncular wit and every villain a faceless monster — be he a bondage-hooded foot soldier or, well, the aptly named Red Skull. Sebastian Stan, Hayley Atwell, Tommy Lee Jones and Hugo Weaving pose very naturally in these respective categories, each enjoying and enlivening the proceedings considerably. Meanwhile Toby Jones gives a glimmer of intelligence to a sub-par supporting role in just such a way as to suggest we’d all be better served had the role been reduced to a single scene.

Affability can’t last forever, and doesn’t, in a film so willing to neutralize its own personality for the sake of humdrum plot. But overall it does compare favorably with recently reviewed YouTube snippets of the draggy 1979 “Captain America” TV movie, which plays like educational-film-strip kitsch, and the 1990 attempt, which appears to have just plain sucked.

Determinedly, this one works as another component of a now familiar franchise kit. Iron Man’s father is here, and the inter-dimensional portal that brought us Thor, and so on. As to that bold extra bit of title, it too obviously sets up next summer’s “The Avengers” — cleverly encouraging us to wonder just how the good captain’s super-square valor and virtue will play in (the comic book movie version of) the America of now.

Last month, when Andrew Rossi’s documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times opened in New York, Michael Kinsley reviewed it in the New York Times. A veteran journalist, Kinsley is not a movie critic, but more importantly for the sake of his assignment, nor is he a Times insider. So it was with particular authority, and without a conflict of interest, that he could sum Rossi’s movie up as “a mess.”

Particular authority is of the essence here. There’s something in the spirit of the Times, as it were, that has allowed this sequence of events to occur: Taking so very seriously the task of reviewing a documentary about it is part of what makes the paper seem documentary-worthy to begin with. Kinsley’s right; the movie is a mess, and it isn’t a matter of partisanship to think that on some basic level untidiness just doesn’t suit the subject.

“It’s hardly breaking news that the newspaper business is in deep trouble,” some broadcaster says early on in Rossi’s obligatory, expository cable-news montage. So why should Page One presume that news worth repeating? Why, of course to reveal how the mighty Times, still America’s “newspaper of record,” has been coping with the trouble. And it should be instructive to review what happens when particular authority is particularly challenged — mostly by the Internet, with its revenue-siphoning, allegiance-shattering cacophony.

Having shrewdly looked in on the Times’ still-young Media Desk, but only managed to characterize it as an in-house abettor of hand-wringing and chin-stroking, Rossi soon finds himself scrambling for substantiation, and he’s all over the place. Reasonably enough, he posits a generational conflict between ornery old-school columnist David Carr, an equal-opportunity condescender and an oft-imitated newsroom type, and blogger-cum-reporter Brian Stelter, whom Carr imagines as a robot sent to destroy him. But glimpses of these men’s inner lives seem not so much considered as search-engine optimized: Yes, Carr was a crack addict, and yes, Stelter tweeted his diet and lost 90 pounds. Meanwhile the film can’t muster enough critical distance to comprehend something essential to its theme of particular authority and challenges thereto: that each generation has its own manner of entitlement.

This peculiar provincialism is abrasively self-propagating. Kinsley, in his Times review, seemed miffed that Rossi didn’t explain what Vice magazine is. But Kinsley should know what Vice magazine is, or at least not pretend he doesn’t just to seem scolding. Of course, the only evident reason that the founders of Vice appear in the film at all is so Carr can be seen scolding them.

Page One has too few scenes of news judgment articulated, whether it concerns war coverage, battles between media conglomerates, or executive editor Bill Keller’s succinct appraisal of public trust as a function of leaked government documents: “Wikileaks doesn’t need us; Daniel Ellsberg did.” (It seems worth noting that Keller’s hair appears to have grayed a lot during the time Rossi spent with him.)

There are other tactical errors. Rossi makes an insufficiently nuanced equation between discredited reporters Jayson Blair and Judith Miller, two reputation-tarnishing disseminators of false information with importantly different motives and consequences. And it might seem like due diligence trotting out Gay Talese to read from The Kingdom and the Power, his extraordinary 1969 book about the inner workings and outer influence of the Times, but in context it comes off as a miscalculation, showing this movie up for the comparatively sloppy exercise it is.

Rossi pays homage to what we can understand as traditional newsroom values — curiosity, conscientiousness, critical thinking — but his own attention span seems tellingly ruined. His film had three editors, and it’s hard to know whether it should have had only one or three more. Page One feels like and gives off about as much useful insight as an unruly, time-killing panel discussion at some preening journalism conference.

Journalists eat this stuff up, of course. You may notice that Page One is not the only movie playing this week, but here it is being reviewed. Simultaneity with the weird public spectacle of contrition from Rupert Murdoch does at least go to show that nonfiction films about media culture still can be vital and useful — and that it’s too bad Errol Morris’s Tabloid isn’t yet available at a theater near you.

Before Chris Weitz was the director of “The Golden Compass” and “New Moon,” he was the grandson of Mexican silent movie star Lupita Tovar. Does that entitle Weitz to a pet project updating the Italian neorealist classic “Bicycle Thieves” as noble-immigrant melodrama in today’s East L.A.? Well, sure. This rather pat but nicely acted and nicely location scouted film, written by Eric Eason from a story by Roger L. Simon, concerns an undocumented single-dad day laborer (Demián Bichir) struggling to keep his teenage son (José Julián) in school and out of a gang. At its best when father and son forgo trite-tending Spanglish dialogue in favor of more genuine nonverbal communication, Weitz’s movie does get across its sincerity and sympathy for their fragile standing within the community and each other’s lives.

Each of director Michael Winterbottom’s films seems exhilaratingly or maddeningly like a departure from the last. His new mockumentary, a BBC TV series here condensed into a movie, follows a friendly but antagonistic pair of self-centered comedians on a week-long road trip through England’s Lake District. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play pitiless exaggerations of themselves, touring tony restaurants so Coogan can write a Sunday newspaper article. Really it’s so he and Brydon can bore and annoy and enjoy each other, riffing up a willfully meandering comedic jam session whose highlight has to be the dueling Michael Caine impressions. Other impressions vary, as impressions do (accent-wise, Brydon’s Woody Allen seems much more on target than his Al Pacino, weirdly), and the general question of just where the tedious-hilarious threshold lies will be a rich vein of post-viewing debate, but all parties probably will agree it does get crossed.

This week affords a unique opportunity to come in from the cold of the multiplex. You know what’s playing on the big screens. Did you also know that Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” the top-prize winner at last year’s Cannes, has arrived on DVD?

Even with that title, you don’t know where this is going. Dying of kidney failure, the titular Thai farmer (Thanapat Saisaymar) spends his final days among visiting relatives. Not all the relatives are alive themselves, necessarily, or even human. And actually, not all of the visitors are clearly his relatives, except maybe in the cosmic sense that we’re all related.

The cosmic sense is sort of a specialty for Weerasethakul, who also goes by “Joe,” and excels — effortlessly, it seems — at mystification. Just when you think this loitering, all-accepting movie might become a flat-affect bore, one of those “nothing happens” affairs, Boonmee’s long-dead wife materializes out of thin air at the dinner table. Then his long-lost son, now a wookie-like creature with glowing red eyes, slinks up the stairs and joins them. “I couldn’t have experienced this if I hadn’t mated with a monkey ghost,” he says, not exactly explaining. “There are many beings outside,” he also says. “Spirits and animals. They sense your sickness.” Yet somehow the prevailing mood is not ominous but rather lively. There is palpable comfort in the steady chorus of insects, the dusky shimmering jungle.

Later Boonmee concludes that his illness is a karmic reciprocation for having killed too many communists. “But you killed with good intentions,” says his sister-in-law. “And I’ve killed a lot of bugs on my farm,” he replies. This reads neither as a political peeve nor a glib prank. It just is. Likewise the later sex scene with the princess and the talking catfish. A sense has been established that to try shoehorning this into a familiar narrative vector — as folklore or dream logic or surrealism — is to miss out on it. It helps to know that Cannes jury was presided over by Tim Burton last year.

Especially in the context of a midsummer DVD release, “Uncle Boonmee” has the aura of a cultural-studies think piece, something you might watch with mild resentment in a class but then, say an hour or ten years later, be blown away by and forever grateful for.

Annotative DVD supplements include an interview in which the filmmaker allows that he doesn’t really know what the movie is about. Well, it takes a special kind of knowledge, and confidence, to make a film seem almost terminally lulling on purpose. With proximity to death as its most apparent frame of reference, “Uncle Boonmee” seems to ask, “Isn’t being alive just so weird, though?” Weerasethakul, or Joe if you prefer, has tapped into the purest essence of cinema, a simultaneousness of banality and enchantment in which everything is superfluous, and so nothing is.

This must begin with a shameful confession, which is that the trailer for “Larry Crowne” made me want to punch Julia Roberts in the face. Look, I know it’s terrible. I barely even know how to punch a person, let alone a balloon animal like the one Roberts appears to be in “Larry Crowne.” But if Tom Hanks movies have taught me anything, it’s that sometimes there is the matter of the right thing to do.

“Larry Crowne” is a Julia Roberts movie — just look at her on the back of that scooter, pouting away under her cute little helmet! — but more than that it is a Tom Hanks movie. He’s the one driving the scooter. He’s the director, too, and a co-writer, with “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”’s Nia Vardalos. Also, it is Hanks who plays the character named Larry Crowne. Roberts plays the character named Mercedes (or “Mercy”) Tainot, and I’m glad I didn’t know that when I saw the trailer.

Larry, a peppy box-store middle manager, loses his job. It’s because he didn’t go to college. So he goes to college. His first class, in public speaking, puts him at Roberts’ Mercy. In one of many limp gestures of phony chivalry, the movie pretends she’s a Shakespeare scholar. And for reasons only of plot propulsion, she’s supposed to be a jaded crank. She mugs her dissatisfaction into an edgeless pulp. Maybe I’m just mad because I want my Julia Roberts to be smiling and moony. I mean, that’s her thing, right? Disliking her life still is not something she can play convincingly.

There is a Mr. Tainot: useless, combative, and soon to be gotten rid of. He takes the form of Bryan Cranston, here apparently doing penance for having dared to transcend sitcom shtick in “Breaking Bad.” But so it goes for “Larry Crowne”’s small battalion of secondary caricatures. We like to imagine Hanks as a generous director, but his way of slathering everyone with benevolence seems almost bullying. As Larry’s next door neighbor, Cedric the Entertainer does not entertain. As his economics professor, George Takei nearly squanders his cheeky viral-video-fueled career renaissance. As a flirty fellow student who fixes up Larry’s house and wardrobe, Gugu Mbatha-Raw beams so brightly that I had to look away for her dignity’s sake. As her nonthreateningly threatening boyfriend, Wilmer Valderrama gets gradually emasculated. The other kids in class with Larry have good comedic instincts, like Hanks did when he was their age, but this clobbering material seems only to punish them for it. This is comedy so broad it expands like a cloud of gas in all directions simultaneously, dissipating right before our eyes.

Well, what about the romance? What about the trusty tag-team sweetheartism of Hanks and Roberts together? For a moment, yes, they have it — she’s smiling and moony, he’s genuinely gallant, and the ticket-buyer’s heart is sufficiently warmed. But there sure is a lot of junky clutter around that charming bullseye. As severely ingratiating as the “Larry Crowne” trailer is, the film itself is worse.

All lousy movies remind us of the brevity and inescapable wastefulness of life. This one rubs it in. This one is so benign it’s malignant.

“I’m sorry that he has to see that,” a friend said, gravely, when informed of my obligation to witness the Hanks ’n’ Roberts happening. Her tone implied that resigned yet protective feeling we have for children when they’re no longer protectable from the evils of the world. As if just setting eyes on this thing could shatter one’s innocence.

If only. It puts me in mind of Alfred Hitchcock, turning our beloved Jimmy Stewart into a stalker creep and killing off Kim Novak in the lurid melodrama of “Vertigo.” That could be an instructive paradigm for “Larry Crowne,” given the latter’s natural talent for clammy desperation. But to embrace the Hitchcock view of movie-star mania as a weirdly elaborate function of impotence and necrophilia? Alas, Hanks wouldn’t do that to himself on purpose, no matter how deadening his (and Vardalos’) writing inadvertently is.

As for Roberts, well, if I can’t do any punching, I cry Mercy.

Just another Tuscan love story. Does that sound mundane? Consider these exotic elements: a voluptuous Frenchwoman (Juliette Binoche), an intellectual Brit (opera singer William Shimell, in his film debut), and a genius Iranian director working outside his native country, with a palpable sense of liberation, for the first time (Abbas Kiarostami).

Still not enough? Here’s the Certified Copy setup: She runs a gallery in an Italian village, and is the mother of a ten-year-old son; he’s the visiting author of a book about the value of authenticity in art, the rarity of newness. “Certified Copy” is the name of the book. They fall into a leisurely day together. It’s a flirtatious, combative first meeting, full of possibilities. One of which is a chance that in fact they’ve been married to each other all along.

“In fact” is no easy proposition with Kiarostami, whose fans should curl with glee at this latest of his poetic dispatches from the fact-fiction frontier. Imagine the phrase less as assertion of certifiable truth than as obligatory preface to a needling narrative contradiction. The couple is playing at a marriage, as couples sometimes do. But is the playing a way of mocking, or of discovering anew? Like any meaningful relationship, theirs will be a puzzle of loving and gaming and sometimes getting hurt. Resolution per se will remain elusive, as if to affirm an idea that aesthetic and philosophical satisfactions may be more important than narrative ones.

And so, with its flow of half-seeable reflections gliding along the woman’s windshield while she drives the man around, Certified Copy likewise shimmers with the flashback-glints of other cinematic precedents. The same fans, and the film encyclopedists, will think of Last Year at Marienbad or L’Avventura, among others. Just another Euro-modernist art film. Does that sound unnecessary? Yet the romance is real enough, if the caress of Mediterranean light and the chorus of persistent birdsong can be any indication. Besides, Kiarostami demands more of himself than merely a self-enclosing gimmick for its own sake. There is generosity here; the coyness is a come on. It is the rarest of moviemakers who gets the head and the heart swimming at once.

Such delicate sophistication — both freewheeling and well controlled — might not work but for the astonishing aliveness of Binoche, longstanding muse to many a great director, who seems to get more beautiful and maturely sensual with every performance. Once again her vitality and command are revelatory. Meanwhile Shimell, an accomplished and charismatic performer here rendered sometimes awkward by an unfamiliar medium, seems precisely plausible as an aesthete whose intellect ironically has thwarted his receptivity to sensual pleasure — the very man who might fail to appreciate this woman. Early on, he explains that he wrote the book to convince himself of his own idea. “There’s nothing simple about being simple,” he later says, with a telling combination of weariness and self-satisfaction. Later still, she asks: “If we were a bit more tolerant of each other’s weaknesses we’d be less alone, don’t you think?”

Although a display is made of this relationship, Kiarostami also honors its privacy. There are some exchanges to which only the players themselves are privileged. Thus does the display become even more intimate, more ambiguous — and just another of those ephemeral roaming-couples films, one long enchanted walk-and-talk. Does that sound great or what?

Buck Brannaman is no ordinary horse trainer, and that’s unfortunate because thanks to Cindy Meehl’s film about him, ordinary horse trainers now have a lot to live up to.

They already did, of course: Brannaman was an essential influence on both Nicholas Evans’ book “The Horse Whisperer” and the Robert Redford movie it became. But now “Buck,” Meehl’s debut documentary, makes it very easy for very the rest of us to see why. If people ever still say they need to see a man about a horse, and the man is Brannaman, well then all involved tend to be the better for it.

Persuasion is essential to his technique (it can seem like communion), but so is his subjects’ innate majesty and intelligence. Meehl has recognized that a big part of what Brannaman does is allow animals to make up for human failings.

He has a wife and a teenaged daughter, both evidently beloved, but he doesn’t see them much. He’s on the road for most of each year, giving clinics all over the country for troubled horses and their troublers — as Brannaman puts it, “A lot of the time I’m not helping people with horse problems. I’m helping horses with people problems.”

Usually he’ll begin lightly, perhaps by pointing out that our urge to strap the hides of other dead animals on horses’ backs and then crawl up on them with our hands around their necks might require some prefatory diplomacy. Then he’ll continue into the nitty gritty, also lightly. Lightness of touch is the Buck Brannaman way.

Although straightforwardly a fond profile of this man and his obvious calling, Meehl’s movie is predicated on the notion that the humane treatment of an animal, when productive, can and does seem to us like some dazzling display of magic. It’s sort of a depressing testament, but that doesn’t make Brannaman’s accomplishments any less profound.

As kids, Buck and his brother enjoyed a spell of minor celebrity for their rope tricks on the rodeo circuit. They did not enjoy the constant and intense abuse from their alcoholic tyrant father. The brother’s absence from Meehl’s film is not accounted for; the father’s feels like a relief. Horsemanship, Brannaman tells his human clients more than once, is about controlling your emotions. That qualifies it as a spiritual discipline. “There’s a difference between firm and hard,” he also tells them, and, “You have to be a parent,” which might further qualify his own horsemanship as a way of working out his own issues.

Meehl for her part doesn’t much discern between horsemanship and a kind of lifestyle salesmanship, so “Buck” sometimes gives off a slightly hectoring vibe, like, “You know, Robert Redford, who is handsome and famous and outdoorsy, really likes this guy, and you should too.” Well, it seemed to work at Sundance, where Redford reigns and “Buck” won the Audience Award for documentary this year.

This film isn’t exactly long on story, and structurally it seems like little more than just an 88-minute trailer for itself. But Meehl has summoned a powerful formula: the disarming pleasure of taking in touchy-feely platitudes from such a no-nonsense fella. Brannaman’s rough upbringing and cowboy laconicism cuts nicely against the inherent cuddliness of his craft. Most importantly, perhaps, nobody needs to get broken for him to get results.