‘THE SQUARE’

2:22 ★★ ★★

The Swedish filmmaker Ruben Ostlund possesses an exceptionally crisp, legible way of creating images. His frames are simply but elegantly composed, and he choreographs bodies within natural and built environments with superb attention to rhythms and detail.

All of those gifts were on ample display in Ostlund’s breakout film, 2014’s “Force Majeure,” a satire of gender politics set in a Swiss ski resort. Ostlund’s new film, “The Square,” evinces the same cool, cleanly delineated visual style and mordant humor, but in service to a film that’s less a narrative than a collection of clever but ultimately facile vignettes. “The Square” may be one of the most timely films of this season, but it squanders its own relevancy by shooting fish in the world’s most shallow, painfully obvious barrel.

The barrel, for the most part, is the contemporary art world in which theoretical jargon has taken the place of emotion, and where the pretentious language of the academy has superseded such passe aesthetic concerns as technical prowess, pictorial beauty and pleasure.

Christian (Claes Bang), chief curator at a swank museum in Stockholm, personifies the values of his time and culture, affecting trendy suits, whimsical red eyeglasses and an air of concerned but easily distracted humanism. When Christian is robbed outside the museum, the episode sends him down

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