The new Scarlett Johansson movie, “Ghost in the Shell,” is upon us, sheathed in controversy. Rupert Sanders’s film is adapted from the anime work of the same name, directed by Mamoru Oshii, in 1995. Fans of anime are ferociously purist and loyal, and for them, I suspect, the very notion of converting Oshii’s masterpiece (as it is deemed to be) into a live-action Hollywood remake smells of both travesty and sellout.

Such scorn is as nothing, however, compared with the wrath that has greeted the casting of Johansson. In the original, which started life as a graphic novel, her character was called Major Kusanagi, but in Sanders’s movie she is referred to mostly as Major. In other words, although the tale is still set in an Asian city, the heroine has been Westernized. Why not hire an Asian performer? The brutal answer to that, I imagine, would be: A production this vast and costly demands a name from the top rank, and there are currently no English-speaking Asian actresses on the A-list. And the indignant answer to that would be: Yes, that’s the point—only by placing an Asian star in the spotlight will you buck the system, break the habit, and right a persistent wrong.

And so the rumpus fumes on. Meanwhile, in the middle of it all, we have a movie. It unfolds in the future—a less convincing future, it must be said, than that foretold by “Blade Runner,” with its jostling cityscapes. The exteriors of “Ghost in the Shell,” by contrast, don’t feel dramatically lived in. They feel like sets. It is behind closed doors, rather, that the film stirs. We learn that the frontier between people and machines has collapsed. Major is a human brain housed in a synthetic body; when she strips, you can see the faint joins between panels of skin, like state lines on a map. There are sockets in the back of her neck, allowing a scientist, such as Dr. Ouélet (Juliette Binoche), who designed Major, to download the contents of her consciousness. I would love to report that these consist of things like “Must buy milk,” or “Call Jeff re: Thursday lunch?,” but no. Major is part of a government security outfit, Section 9, which requires her to launch herself from the crests of high buildings, crash exquisitely through windows, slaughter enemies of the state by the roomful, and turn invisible at will, as if she had stolen a cloak from Harry Potter. In short, a busy schedule.

One thorn in Major’s side is Cutter (Peter Ferdinando), a corporate villain, and a dull one to boot. Also causing trouble is a hacker known as Kuze (Michael Carmen Pitt). More enticing are her comrades, not least her boss, Aramaki, who is played by Takeshi (Beat) Kitano—the fabled star and director of pared-down Japanese thrillers, who, toward the end of the film, spins the chamber of his revolver and provides “Ghost in the Shell” with its sole flourish of indisputable cool. Then, there’s Batou (Pilou Asbæk), Major’s partner in Section 9, who, after losing the use of his eyes in an explosion, is soon kitted out with a replacement: two little metal roundels, complete with X-ray vision. He seems pleased, and the story is littered with these touchingly plausible moments, as men and women reveal, or rejoice in, their technological ease. One of them unclips part of her face, the better to lock into some gizmo. Becoming part cyborg, or having memory implants, is no big deal. Think of it as a nose job for the soul.

Oshii’s movie was, like its protagonist, a hybrid. The firefights and chase sequences made way for unhurried ruminations on the malleable fate of the self. No surprise, perhaps, since the title echoes “the ghost in the machine,” a phrase deployed by Gilbert Ryle, the British philosopher, to cast aspersions on Cartesian dualism. The idea of Descartes settling down with a tub of Gummy Bears to watch Scarlett Johansson is certainly appealing, and he might well approve of the new film, which is modelled—sometimes shot for shot—on the 1995 version, and which proposes that minds can indeed be popped in and out of bodies like batteries in a flashlight. Sadly, as the plot proceeds, Sanders begins to duck these bothersome concepts. He picks a more sentimental path, which leads Major, following the example of Jason Bourne, on a quest to discover who she truly is.

It is this rage for authenticity, more than the leading lady, that transforms “Ghost in the Shell” into an American product. Here’s an irony: if anything preserves the unnerving quiddity and strangeness of the Japanese movie, it is Johansson. Major slots into other recent roles of hers, in “Under the Skin,” “Lucy,” and “Her,” to create a buzz of impatience with the merely human. Lay aside racial identities for a second: think alternative species, digital personalities, and robots—otherness of the most radical variety. Such is the zone that Johansson patrols, and nothing is more haunting, in “Ghost in the Shell,” than the scene in which she picks up a woman—tall, black, and stately—on the street, and takes her home. Each is unsure whether the other is false flesh or the real thing. “What are you?” the woman asks. That is the question.

A hole is dug in the hard ground, and a stone is thrown through a window. With those two actions, neither of them explained, “Graduation” gets under way. The scene is a housing project in a provincial Romanian town. A doctor named Romeo (Adrian Titieni) lives there with his wife, Magda (Lia Bugnar), and their daughter, Eliza (Maria Dragus), a student at the local high school, who has won a scholarship to a British university. She still needs to gain top grades in her final exams, but that’s not much of a stretch for Eliza: she is clever and determined, though not quite as determined as her father, who has spurred her on for years, even paying for private tuition, so that she can do what her parents never managed to accomplish—fly the nest and land in a better place. Behind every turn of the plot lies an overwhelming plea: How do you get the hell out of purgatory?

Near the school, with the exams looming, an unknown assailant tries to rape Eliza at knifepoint. She fends him off, but hurts her arm—her writing arm—in doing so, and the ordeal leaves her woefully shaken. No allowance, however, is made for her distress, and she duly falls short in her first exam. Her grades, and therefore her entire future, are jeopardized, and Romeo, in desperation, lends assistance. On the advice of an old friend, now the chief of police, he meets with Bulai (Petre Ciubotaru), the deputy mayor, who is sick, and bumps him up the list for surgery. In return, Bulai has a word with Eliza’s principal, who agrees to arrange for her papers to be, let us say, generously marked. We see at once how the system works, and how its wheels are greased; we realize, too, that Romeo will be trapped inside it, and chewed up.

“Graduation,” written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, is a mirthless farce. All that can go wrong does go wrong, and the process is both compelling and close to unwatchable. The bitterest joke is that Romeo is not very good at corruption, and, in his job, he suffers from the terrible burden of honesty. “Oh, you’re the kind of doctor who tells his patient the truth,” Bulai says, adding, “Don’t tell me you live off your salary.” Later, he proffers him an envelope of cash. Everyone but Romeo, it seems, is on the take, and Mungiu is careful not just to plant evidence of that norm—the Volvo S.U.V., for instance, that the principal drives—but also to insure that we don’t, for a minute, mistake Romeo for a paragon of virtue. In private, the guy is a perjured soul. He’s sleeping with Sandra (Malina Manovici), a tattooed teacher at Eliza’s school, although Sandra has already had enough of the subterfuge, and, when he finally spends a night at her apartment, she gives him a bowl of soup and makes him bed down on the couch. Romeo, bespectacled, potbellied, and bone-weary, is not much of a Romeo.