art film—a film intended to be a serious artistic work, often experimental and not designed for mass appeal:
- Because it was an “art film,” it probably reached the wrong audience.
artful film—a skillful, ingeniously crafted movie:
- Leni succumbed to every filmmaker’s dream—an unlimited budget to make an artful film and not just “a boring newsreel.”
Note: Neither expression correlates in meaning with the phrase arty film—a film characterized by a showy, pretentious display of artistic skill:
- As an arty film, it would have been acceptable. As a major, mainstream release, it was a failure.