On a dusty stretch of China’s northern Shanxi province (Jia’s birthplace), a disgruntled miner (Jiang Wu) goes around verbally abusing the corrupt village officials who have cost him his livelihood not until he arms himself with a rifle are his threats and accusations taken seriously. In any event, there’s a certain pleasure to be had in seeing a revered auteur go off the disreputable deep end, and there’s no denying “A Touch of Sin” packs a visceral wallop - particular in the first and bloodiest of its four loosely connected yarns. (Among the incidents either fictionalized or mentioned here are a deadly high-speed train accident in 2011 and the suicides of 18 Foxconn factory employees in 2010.) Allowing content to dictate form, he has adopted a pulpy and accessible realist style in order to tackle some of his country’s most notorious recent tragedies on a broad, panoramic canvas.

Others may argue that Jia has merely rendered explicit the convulsive undercurrents present in his work all along, exploring the extreme consequences of local corruption and neglect, rampant greed, poor labor conditions and countless other social ills fueled by China’s economic miracle. For them, the real sin will be that Jia has abandoned the docu-fiction experimentation of 2008’s “24 City” in favor of a relatively robust narrative, replete with the sort of balls-to-the-wall brutality more typically encountered in the work of Quentin Tarantino or Takashi Miike. Many of the purist auteurists who have made the writer-director such a celebrated figure on the international stage may well reject his seventh feature on aesthetic grounds alone.

A touch of ruins