THERE ARE DIFFICULT BOOKS and there are difficult films, but the difficult films scare me more. At school you learn to peer inside books to see how they work. Only a tiny number of people ever receive a similar education in film. If you've grown up on the zippy charms of television and Hollywood, adapting to slower, stranger styles takes time.

Standing before the Tower of High Cinematic Art, the doors marked "Ozu" and "Tarkovsky" look particularly forbidding. The former represents an exquisitely subtle aesthetic, apparently inaccessible to those whose total experience of Japanese culture amounts to a few Murakami novels and occasional sushi. The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky — known for long, portentous films like Andrei Rublev (1966) and Solaris (1972) — is no less formidable. The DVD of his 1979 classic Stalker sat on my shelf unwatched for 18 months after my initial purchase. The only reason I finally got round to it was because of this review, which I pitched partly to corner myself into having to watch Tarkovsky's film.

But here, casually mooching their way over the horizon, come two guides offering totally non-scary journeys into these rarefied cinematic worlds. Geoff Dyer's Zona is a scene-by-scene analysis of Stalker. Adam Mars-Jones's new book, Noriko Smiling, is an equally detailed essay on Ozu's film Late Spring (1953).

Both books are short. Both are smart and funny. Both are written with a gatecrasher sensibility (to borrow one of Dyer's favorite self-descriptions). They are attempts by self-declared non-experts to steal these works of art back from overly protective critics, and to bring them down to earth for the rest of us to appreciate. Dyer has no time for "the reverence that Tarkovsky tends to invite from his admirers." Adam Mars-Jones is even more forceful. He pays his respects to critics better versed in Japanese culture, and then kicks them in the ribs. His defense? "Sometimes works of art need to be defended against their advocates, and great films rescued from their reputations."

¤

Geoff Dyer has had a good year. His work appeared for the first time in the New Yorker, he began a monthly New York Times column, and his essay collection Otherwise Known As The Human Condition won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He gave interviews, tapped out reviews, and generally pootled along in his prolific slacker way. His response to this year of plenty is to publish the most unmarketable book of his career: a "summary of a film that relatively few people have seen."

The Dyer brand is built upon contrarianism. He followed a book of eccentric travel writing with a book on photography, and then in 2009 served up a couple of loosely-linked novellas under the, let's face it, terrible title of Jeff In Venice, Death in Varanasi. Add in Dyer's pre-2000 offerings on jazz, D.H. Lawrence, and World War I, along with several novels, and you have an oeuvre that resembles a messy and ever-expanding Venn diagram of the author's obsessions. Even so, a 200-page book about a Russian film from 1979 takes commercial indifference to heroic lengths.

As Zona's subtitle says, it is "a book about a film about a journey to a room." The eponymous Stalker guides two characters (Write...