George is all surface, so much so he's hard to get a read on: a smooth, unabashed liar, but also a befuddled, nearly helpless figure, drifting from one woman to another as if caught in the currents of history (the film is set in 1968 – the height of the free love era – and portrays the election of Richard Nixon). We're left to decide for ourselves whether he's ultimately a sacrificial lamb or whether, as an emblem of male complacency, he gets exactly what he deserves.

A decade on in fictional time and a million miles away in spirit, Charles Burnett's 1978 Killer of Sheep is confined to the mainly African-American neighbourhood of Watts in South LA, where the hero Stan (Henry G. Sanders) struggles to maintain his humanity while performing the depressing slaughterhouse job he relies on to support his family.

The film was shot over the course of a year, and the piecemeal approach works to its advantage: scenes develop in unexpected directions, and are filled with poetic details that sometimes border on absurdism, like the rubber dog mask worn by Stan's young daughter (Angela Burnett). A line can be drawn between Burnett's procedures here and the similarly grim playfulness of Donald Glover's current TV show, Atlanta, set in the lower reaches of the East Coast rap scene, where the chance of financial security is visible but just out of reach.

In both cases, the inconclusive vignette format bears a political meaning in itself, refusing the conventional heroic narrative of triumph over adversity – and implying, as the director Michael Tolkin sharply put it, that "poverty deprives people of a third act". Maybe the films in this season do, after all, have a connecting thread: the city is the System, and the hapless individuals who go up against it nearly all look like losers in advance.

The American Essentials film festival runs in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane till May 20. See americanessentials.com.au