LOOK past the award-season hype and the current bounty of decent, good, great movies, and one thing becomes clear: We live in interesting narrative times, cinematically. In “Cloud Atlas” characters jump across centuries, space and six separate stories into a larger tale about human interconnectedness. In “Anna Karenina” Tolstoy’s doomed heroine suffers against visibly artificial sets, a doll within an elaborate dollhouse, while in “Life of Pi” a boy and a tiger share a small boat in a very big sea amid long silences, hallucinatory visuals and no obvious story arc. In movies like these, as well as in “The Master” and “Holy Motors,” filmmakers are pushing hard against, and sometimes dispensing with, storytelling conventions, and audiences seem willing to follow them. The chief film critics of The New York Times, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, consider this experimental turn.

MANOHLA DARGIS Each year we review movies that teasingly or didactically, successfully or not, dispatch with either the whole or part of the mainstream storytelling playbook: they don’t seem to have three (or four) well-defined acts or characters who seem particularly motivated. They (movies and characters both) drift along rather than shift into drive; in other words, they look a lot or a little bit like art films. This fall, though, within a couple of months, there have been more than a few such movies — some released by small companies like IFC Films and others by big studios like Warner Brothers — that, in different ways, appear to aspire more to the art house than the multiplex. I don’t think we are witnessing the emergence of a lasting break with the old, durable Hollywood ways, but we are seeing an exciting level of playfulness.

A. O. SCOTT It’s funny how much people complain about spoilers, when so many plots are the same. This is partly because so many movies fit comfortably into established genres, and much of the time moviegoers seek out the comforts of familiarity. You know which rom-com characters are going to end up together, just as you know that the franchise hero — whether it’s Harry Potter, James Bond or Spider-Man — is going to withstand the dastardly attention of the villain, and that foreknowledge anchors the thrills and surprises you encounter along the way. Following genre conventions is not necessarily a sign of failure — some of the best movies ever are perfectly orthodox westerns, detective stories, melodramas and marriage comedies — and flouting them is not in itself a virtue. But it can be thrilling to see something that feels new, risky or unusual, and even to venture into the realm of the confounding.

For the past few months I’ve been collecting reactions to “The Master,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie about (in the sense in which “about” can mean both “having nothing at all to do with” and “obsessively concerned with”) the early days of Scientology. This may be the great polarizing puzzle-film of 2012, in no small part because it unfolds with what seems to be a total disregard for the audience’s expectations. The movie does not explain its characters, or offer any of them up for us to like or identify with. Instead of building to a dramatic climax it seems to taper off, to let go of the strange emotional intensity that had built up over more than two hours. The divide seems to be not between people who “get it” and those who don’t, but rather between those who are frustrated by not getting it and those (like me) who enjoyed it even though we didn’t get it.