Baz Luhrmann has always had a flair for the operatic, sometimes literally so. The Australian writer-director-designer loves to tell stories on a grand scale. The bigger the emotions, the flashier the production values. Romeo and Juliet, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Great Gatsby have all made appearances in his films. Now his spotlight turns to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley. Well, partially, anyway.

According to the real-life paleontologists, dinosaurs disappeared from Earth 66 million years ago. To judge by the sixth entry in the Jurassic Park franchise, its fresh story ideas have been exhausted as well. The original wonder has waned.

If you’re a devoted fan of Downton Abbey, the global television phenomenon now back on the big screen, that line certainly rings true. Creator and writer Julian Fellowes, director Simon Curtis (the real-life husband of Elizabeth McGovern/Cora Grantham), a superb ensemble cast and composer John Lunn have crafted another period piece drama brimming with intelligence, emotion, wit and humanity. As with the first feature film incarnation, A New Era preaches eloquently to the choir. Even with a prologue offered by Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle) in which he recounts the plot of the 2019 movie, you can’t begin to appreciate the resonance of this storytelling without having your own history with these characters going back a dozen years now.

Sometimes a filmmaker tells a story so dense, so deliberately ambiguous, so deeply rooted in symbolic imagery that you realize you’re either intrigued by and invested in the narrative or you’re utterly defeated by the process. The memory of Men, a hallucinatory study in toxic masculinity, will linger long after the closing credits.