“Atonement,” directed by Joe Wright and adapted from Ian McEwan’s novel, is a beautiful film. With cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, Mr. Wright has filled the movie with popping, liquid moments like a shot following a young girl (Saoirse Ronan) down an overgrown garden corridor, or the much-ballyhooed four-minute take on a war-worn beach. Given the revered source material and the visual sheen, the film should be an assured success. Yet I left “Atonement” with a sense of dissatisfaction I couldn’t place.

The story begins in 1935, in an English country house where no one seems to have anything to do but lounge about, most of all 13-year-old Briony Tallis, a precocious hopeful playwright whose endless tapping at the typewriter inspires Dario Marianelli’s score. Keira Knightley and James MacAvoy play Cecilia and Robbie, the stifled English equivalent of star-crossed lovers. Their reverie is broken by a series of misunderstandings that culminates in a lie told by Briony which separates Robbie from Cecilia and leaves him disgraced. The film is the story of Briony’s quest for atonement, but I think it also means to explore the power of language, the endless consequences of an action and the way fiction can both heal and wound.

I am told Mr. McEwan’s novel manages this meditation gracefully, but “Atonement” the movie convinced me of neither its underlying meaning nor the plight of its characters. It asks for sympathy with Cecilia, Robbie and Briony, but invests little in making them likeable, and it gazes forlornly at their woes but fails to plumb real intellectual pith from its source. The result is a kind of middling sensuality, the impression of profundity carried along on the gossamer wings of style and a few flashy narrative strokes from McEwan.

What is wrong with “Atonement” is embodied in the sensational single take at Dunkirk: Like we in the story, the camera floats through an impressive series of momentary conflicts, but it doesn’t invest in any of them long enough to create more than a hurried, stylized sketch of struggle and sorrow. The story as adapted, which is straightforwardly, is too sprawling. It has too many actresses playing Briony, it covers too much time in too few hours and it pins its emotional impact on an event which I found forgivable and even commonplace. As I was floated like the show-offy camera through Briony’s distress at each stage of life, I had only fleeting feelings of discomfort, like passing a great tragedy in a swiftly moving car.

Strange though it may sound, the same preoccupation with structure wounds the monster flick “Cloverfield,” though with more laughable results. If Mr. McGarvey’s flowery take at Dunkirk was the real star of “Atonement,” “Cloverfield”‘s centerpiece is the movie itself: an 85-minute gimmick that crosses “The Blair Witch Project” with “Godzilla” and has neither the ingenuity of the former nor…well, it’s about as bad as the latter.

“Cloverfield” is supposed to be the actual camcorder footage of one hapless group of New Yorkers on the evening when …something… strolls in and stomps the bejeezus out of the city. The dim-witted Hud (T.J. Miller) is our ostensible cameraman while he and his group of friends clamber around the city trying to avoid being gobbled, trampled or blown up. The shaky result has had people in theaters across the nation vomiting in their seats. I, for my part, only vomited intellectually.
“Cloverfield” aims for realism, but the story it has chosen to dress in documentary clothes is harder to believe in than the end of the writer’s strike. I don’t mean the giant lizard-octopus thing lumbering through Manhattan: that’s a movie mainstay by now. What I couldn’t believe was that as the entire city is fleeing and the Chrysler-building-sized creature is bearing down, Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David), our de facto hero, elects to trek back through the city to rescue Beth (Odette Yustman), not his bride-to-be, not his long-lost love, but a floozy he hooked up with a month ago. About the time his friends decide to go with him, you start rooting for the monster.
The movie does many things well. The special effects, disguised as not special at all because of the herky-jerky footage, are terrifically convincing. At least a dozen shots must have been technical nightmares (cuts are few and far between), yet they come off effortlessly. But I could not understand why the filmmakers thought they had so little plot to work with that they had to inject the contrived mission to save Beth. Having to escape from a burning island with a giant iguana that drops little scuttling velociraptors seems like plenty of material to me.

There are so few moments in the movies when a character is a step ahead of the audience (“I Am Legend” mercifully had a few of those). Woe it was to me to think that producer J.J. Abrams, whose characters on “Lost” were just launching an encouraging streak of not behaving like nitwits at the end of the third season, could have given us something more than the usual monster-movie drivel. Instead “Cloverfield” is at best a mediocre scare flick; at worst it’s the depressing announcement not only that the statute on movies not showing Manhattan under attack post-9/11 has run out, but that the bar of taste on that sort of spectacle hasn’t been raised in the least.