Harvey and Bob Weinstein have left the building, and Miramax, under the supervision of parent company Disney, is cleaning house.

``The Warrior,’’ a British film completed in 2001 and seen at the Boston Film Festival, deserves more than a bum’s rush release after languishing on the shelves.

A saffron-tinted, feudal-era fable about a warrior who has a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus-type change of heart, the Hindi-language, British-financed film was Great Britain’s entry for the 2003 foreign-language Academy Award. But it was shot down by a discredited, obsolete Academy committee still holding sway over the category because it was not ``foreign’’ enough.

Asif Kapadia, a British-born writer-director of Indian ancestry, has fashioned an expressively visual fable about a Rajput warrior who gives up a life of violence and bloodshed in exchange for a religious pilgrimage. Lafcadia (Irfan Khan, who could be this generation’s Toshiro Mifune), Kapadia’s archetypal hero, will remind many of the virtually silent gunslinger Clint Eastwood played in Sergio Leone’s landmark westerns. And in a sense ``Warrior’’ is an ``eastern’’ complete with horses, wagons, a journey from the desert to the mountains and a correlative progression from darkness to enlightenment.

Kapadia has that unmistakable, almost magical ability to tell a story with his camera and locations. Opening images of Lafcadia practicing his swordsmanship beside a gnarled, ancient tree in the cruel Rajasthan desert speaks to something basic within human nature.

After a public decapitation and a raid on a village, Lafcadia throws away the sword that was his identity, has his head shorn, a symbolic beheading, and sets out on a treacherous path to another life against his vicious warlord’s wishes.

On the way to the Himalayas, Lafcadia encounters a blinding sandstorm, picks up a symbolic son whose parents Lafcadia had in fact murdered and adopts an ancient, saintly fellow pilgrim.

Magnificently shot by Roman Osin (the upcoming ``Pride & Prejudice’’) and featuring an evocative score by Dario Marianelli, who has since gone on to ``Pride & Prejudice’’ and ``The Brothers Grimm,’’ ``The Warrior’’ is the most engrossing ``new’’ film in town. Since completing it, Khan has become amajor leading man in India, while Kapadia is currently shooting a supernatural thriller with Sarah Michelle Gellar.

(``The Warrior’’ contains violent scenes.)