Andrew Niccols' latest film rolls out the carpet for its supposed antihero, illegal arms dealer Yuri Orlov (played by Nicolas Cage). When Yuri first appears onscreen, he's standing on countless glistening bullets, so many of them that they gleam like a sumptuous, golden rug. He's a true Lord of War , the image says, a dirty prince who has made his fortune by peddling death.

Niccols underscores that point by following the path of one of Yuri's bullets as it slowly wends its way from a case in eastern Europe to the muzzle of a gun fired in a street shoot-out in Africa to -- zingingly fast and thrilling now, arching over the dirt streets and through a tattered house -- bang, the forehead of a nameless young African boy.

The director and I are pattering away in a bizarre mélange of Thai and English, often within the same sentence. “Thai films can really have a sang son quality, that textbook preachiness, sometimes,” director Apichatpong Weerasethakul muses. “I didn't feel like papayon should be like that.”

The linguistic switch-hitting is apt, considering Weerasethakul has a penchant for rupturing boundaries in his films -- between documentary and filmic fiction in his first feature (Mysterious Object at Noon), and between politics and sexual escapism in his second (Blissfully Yours). His latest venture, Tropical Malady, opens with a tender romance between two men, before plunging into a mythic tale of a soldier hunting a shaman-turned-tiger.