Trance

If there?s any film that can be directly compared to Danny Boyle?s Trance, it would have to be Christopher Nolan?s Inception. Both films take elements from heist and noir genres and introduce a cerebral twist that takes audiences into the complexities of the human mind. Both films are visually fascinating and stacked with great performances orchestrated by brilliant filmmakers at the top of their game. But Boyle?s film ultimately falls short when it comes to executing those bigger ideas.

The story begins as Simon (James McAvoy), an art curator at an auction house, joins up with a group of criminals led by a man named Franck (Vincent Cassel) to steal Francisco Goya's "Witches In The Air.? The plan goes wrong, however, when Simon stashes the painting, suffers a head injury, then forgets where he put it. Without options, the thieves turn to Dr. Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson), a hypnotherapist who they hope can recover the art piece without getting wise to the reality of the situation.

Boyle is unquestionably one of the most talented filmmakers working today, and his visceral, intense style is on full display in Trance. While the film never reaches the intensity level of the arm cutting in 127 Hours, the director still make audiences squirm in their seats with sequences involving fingernails getting pulled out and characters buried alive. The dream states of the hypnosis also opens the doors to some incredible visuals, as we travel into the deep recesses of Simon?s mind and discovers what frightens, excites, and causes peace within him, from the violence and tension of a gunfight to extreme serenity of a drive through a meadow.

Forming the interesting ego, superego and id triumvirate at the story's center, McAvoy, Dawson and Cassel are stellar as Simon, Elizabeth and Franck. The mixed international backgrounds lends an interesting dynamic, as you can actually sense that all three are coming into the story from a very different place, but each actor also makes their characters so interesting and flavors them with subtlety that you could imagine the entire story being told from their singular perspective. Cassel successfully makes Franck both incredibly dangerous and accessible as the story moves forward - constantly presenting a threat to Simon while never being trapped as a one-note villain ? and McAvoy makes for an impressive moving target, making the audience navigate his complex and interesting character along with the plot. But it?s Dawson who winds up being the film?s greatest asset, playing the victim caught up in the criminals? plot while also always having a secret strength that keeps her ahead of her associates. It?s the best performance we?ve seen from her yet.

When dealing with subject matter as interesting and cerebral as hypnosis, with a cast like this and a director like Boyle involved, you expect the script to go the extra mile ? which this one fails to really do. Given the genre you can?t help but walk into the movie with an expectation of multiple twists and turns that keep you guessing about what?s actually happening at every moment, and while Trance does have them, they?re not as sharp, clever or deep as one would hope from a filmmaker as constantly impressive as Boyle. It?s hard to take too much credit away from Joe Ahearne and John Hodge?s screenplay, as it provides a solid base from which the director can work, but walking out of the theater you can?t help but wish it was more than that.

If it were any other director at the helm of Trance it would be a more impressive film, but instead it's one of Boyle?s more mediocre efforts. It?s a worthwhile ride for the performances and the director?s style, but those anticipating something on the level of the filmmaker?s most brilliant work will do themselves a favor by expecting a simple, cool heist noir.

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Wrong

Nothing forces any movie to be bound to the laws of reality. Part of what makes film such an incredible medium is that a story can be told in any way, shape or form. Most stories are set their work in the real world ? or at least something somewhat resembling the real world ? because it allows audiences to better relate to and understand what?s happening on screen. But reality isn?t a concern of writer/director Quentin Dupieux. Instead, the French filmmaker establishes his own rules and his own world where audiences have to be mentally prepared for the possibility that at any moment a house painter will show up and give a character?s car a fresh coat, or a palm tree will somehow turn into a pine. This is the way that his latest film, Wrong, operates, and it?s an absolute marvel.

On its most surface level, the movie tells the story of an ?ordinary? man named Dolph Springer (Jack Plotnick) who wakes up one morning to discover that his beloved dog Paul has gone missing, but really the film is an experiment that tests the boundaries of weird in every way imaginable. From the opening shot, which features a fireman casually pooping in the middle of the street and reading a newspaper while a white van bursts into flames behind him, the story takes moviegoers on a strange journey through a strange land that ranges from head-scratchingly confusing to laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Wrong is an impressive piece of filmmaking not just because of the way in which captures the absurd, but in how it?s able to maintain it for the entire runtime. Watching the film you worry that at some point it will hit some kind of threshold where the weird just becomes monotonous and boring, but that point never actually comes. Instead, it simply becomes more and more fascinating as you wait for the next bizarre left turn to be made (and it always comes as a surprise). The film doesn?t so much escalate as develops, constantly building a world where anything can happen and does.

To tell his strange story, Dupieux has assembled a great group of character actors, all of whom naturally fit in the weird world of Wrong-- in fact, they look all too comfortable within it (and that?s very much a good thing). As the lead, Plotnick has the hardest job in the movie, as he has to both play the role of the straight man while also avoiding feeling out of place, and he does so with aplomb. The audience is fully able to connect with his confusion about the plot that he?s been dropped into, but at the same time have no trouble believing that he wakes up to his alarm clock at 7:60 every day and shows up to a workplace where it?s constantly raining indoors. Of the supporting cast, William Fichtner is a standout, playing an oddball named Master Chang who burned half of his face off as a child to impress a friend (a decision he, understandably, regrets), but really there is no weak link in the chain. All of the actors, from Alexis Dziena (as an employee of Jesus Organic Pizza) to Steve Little (as a detective who is able to generate video from dog feces), are the perfect level of oddball and wonderfully contribute to the madness.

There?s no question that Wrong isn?t a movie for everyone, and there will surely be some who will have to tap out within the first ten minutes, but I?d urge anyone to at least try and take the ride. At the very least you?ll have a title to name-drop whenever you get into a conversation about the weirdest film you?ve ever seen.

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Oblivion

Every futuristic, dystopic sci-fi movie winds up struggling with the same hypocrisy. 1: "In this future, the robots/aliens/borgs have taken over and snuffed out humanity. 2: "I, the director, am way more interested in the glitzy robot tech than the actual people involved." Everything from the glorious Minority Report to last year's dreadful Total Recall remake walk a fine line between creating an impressive dystopic future world and falling in love with it; nearly all of these movies end with our heroes rejecting the sleek new technology in favor of a rougher, more human life, even if we've spent the entire film being dazzled by the future we're supposed to fear.

In Tron: Legacy and now Oblivion, architect-turned-director Joseph Kosinski has crafted immaculate sci-fi worlds that he seems to love far more than the characters that inhabit them. The images he gives us early on in Oblivion are breathtaking, from the gleaming glass space tower where Tom Cruise's Jack and Andrea Riseborough's Victoria live to the desiccated husks of landmarks back on Earth (the New York Public Library barely visible under sand dunes, the spire of the Empire State Building looking over newly formed mountains). Set a bit more than 70 years in the future, after an alien species has destroyed the moon and killed nearly all of humanity, Oblivion gives us a portrait of the future that's bleak and haunting and instantly intriguing, put together with the kind of attention to detail that so much recent sci-fi ignores.

And for a while the movie is what you imagine Kosinski largely wanted it to be: a tour of this world he has created. Jack is a futuristic blue-collar guy, a repairman for the spherical drones that prowl the Earth to eradicate the last of the alien colonizers (the remains of humanity have moved to a big triangular spaceship in orbit or to peaceful lives on one of Saturn's moons). Victoria guides Jack from the control tower while he gets his hands dirty, and at night the two of them watch some spectacular cloud sunsets, take sultry dips in the pool, and wear sharp gray and white clothes that match their modernist digs perfectly. They're supposed to head off to join the rest of humanity in just 2 weeks, as promised by their fearless leader Sally (Melissa Leo, with a criminal Southern-fried accent), but it's not just Jack's secret longing for life on Earth that will get in their way.

A mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko) crash lands on Earth in what looks like a NASA space craft sent out before the alien invasion. A group that Jack believes to be aliens are actually humans, led by Morgan Freeman in some steampunk goggles (though he's featured on every poster, Freeman's barely in the film, so don't get too used to him). Either conflict would be enough to propel Jack's story forward, but Oblivion awkwardly hangs on to both, dropping Freeman and his band of rebels out of the story for long periods, fostering a weird rivalry between Kurylenko and Riseborough, and then dropping in a series of twists in no particular order, changing Jack's purpose so many times it's difficult to keep track. Then again, if you're a sci-fi fan many of them will feel so familiar that it might not be a challenge at all. Oblivion may look fantastic and unique, but the story that actually drives it is infuriatingly derivative.

Cruise is in his Top Gun sweet spot as a pilot bent on breaking the rules and learning the truth, but he's less comfortable at the center of the flimsy love triangle, even though Kurylenko brings some genuine soulfulness to a badly underbaked role. Riseborough is initially fascinating as the steely and rule-abiding Victoria, but she too falls victim to a third act that moves too fast to twist itself into the requisite knots. And though Freeman's role is small but momentous, both Nijolaj Coster-Waldau and Zoe Bell are mystifyingly underused as fellow resistance fighters (Bell, also a stuntwoman, has zero lines and only one notable stunt). Kosinski first mapped out the story for Oblivion in a graphic novel, and even at longer than two hours it's too much story for this film to handle-- especially when the director seems to care more about the looks than the narrative anyway.

Large-scale, original sci-fi is a hard thing to come by these days, and despite its familiar story Oblivion does dream up some great ideas, like the bubble helicopter that Cruise flies over the Earth and the terrestrial havoc that would result from the moon's destruction. But as good as Kosinski is at dreaming up this world, he still makes you wonder what it would be like to visit this place under the guidance of someone who actually knew how to have fun with it.

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The Big Wedding

The premise at the heart of The Big Wedding is stupid. The story follows a groom (Ben Barnes) who convinces his divorced mother (Diane Keaton) and his divorced, now remarried father (Robert De Niro) to pretend they?re still together for the benefit of his deeply religious natural birth mother. See? So stupid there?s not even a point in having an is-it-or-isn?t-it debate. It just is.

That idiotic story, however, is not The Big Wedding?s big problem. Lots of great comedies have premises far more idiotic than that. The Big Wedding?s elephant-sized fuck-up is that it hasn?t the slightest idea what genre it is or who its target demographic might be. More often than not, it depends on what characters the story is actually following.

Sometimes, the audience is given a serious R-rated family drama staring those divorced parents and her ex-best friend/ his new wife (Susan Sarandon) who got in between them years ago. This movie feels geared toward HBO?s audience and is filled with frank sexual conversations and heartfelt commentaries about how love evolves. Other times, we?re hit with a wacky romantic comedy about two lovers (Barnes and Amanda Seyfried) trying to make it down the aisle before his Spanish-speaking mother finds out he?s been telling some fibs. This one seems catered to bored viewers who will watch twenty minutes stretches on TNT eighteen months from now. Then again, there?s also a raunchy Showtime comedy about Topher Grace trying to bed his adopted brother?s sister and an IFC dramedy about Katherine Heigl?s marriage/ infertility struggles.

You know that old phrase about not having too many cooks in the kitchen? Well, this is why you don?t have too many cooks in the kitchen. Writer/director Justin Zackham probably thought he hit the jackpot by landing so many A-list actors and actresses, but in actuality, he kind of screwed himself over. Sometimes characters need to be marginalized for the good of other characters. Sometimes it?s better for a character to just be someone?s sister rather than having her own plotline, but because there?s so much talent here, everyone has felt the need to push their character as far as possible to be memorable. Even the priest is played by Robin Williams, so he obviously does his damndest to earn as many laughs as he can during his limited screen time.

There are few things in a film more important than tone. The Big Wedding simply has way too many different ones, and they wind up completely fucking each other over. Characters can?t be treated as pawns and manipulated in stupid ways to get laughs in one moment and be expected to garner genuine sympathy in the next. They either need to be real human beings who act with real human common sense, or they need to be complete idiots who alter their marital statuses to please a super Catholic birth mother. Audiences deserve consistency, and with a plot like this, they deserve a hell of a lot more than the mediocre stabs at comedy attempted.

In a perfect world, this movie would have kept the R-rating, dropped the stupid plot about the Spanish birth mother and made an honest and interesting story about a divorced family all coming together to heel old wounds and forever put the past in the past. That film might not have grossed as much money, or attracted as much talent, but at least it would have had a clear vision. As it stands, everyone involved in this movie has given the world better work in the past and barring some bizarre downfall, will surely give the world better movies in the future.

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Starbuck

Later this year, Vince Vaughn will lend his characteristic sense of humor to writer-director Ken Scott?s high-concept comedy Delivery Man, about a loner who once donated to a sperm bank, only to learn he has fathered hundreds of children he?d now like to meet. Completists preparing for Vaughn?s take on the material will want to start, however, with Starbuck, Scott?s 2011 French-language comedy on which his Americanized reboot will be based.

Before Vaughn there was Patrick Huard, a scruffy bear of an actor who lends tremendous warmth and pathos to the role of David. David?s the prototypical cinematic fuck up. He?s irresponsible, immature but inherently likeable. He barely holds down his delivery gig for a local butcher, meaning he can?t pay off the bookies and bill collectors who are trying to collect roughly $80,000 in past debts. When David?s told by his off-again girlfriend Valerie (Julie LeBreton) that he has impregnated her, the look of disappointment that dances across her face tells us all that we?d need to know about his potential as a father and caregiver.

That ends up being really bad news for a large group of people. One afternoon, David is approached by a representative from the sperm bank to which he made several deposits under the name ?Starbuck.? Over time, our protagonist finds he fathered 533 children with an army of anonymous women. Now, 142 are suing the clinic in an effort to get them to waive the confidentiality agreement David signed years ago. Essentially, these fatherless folks want to know who ?Starbuck? is.

It?s a far-fetched premise, though one that?s brought down to Earth by Scott?s emotionally upbeat writing, his brisk direction, and Huard?s nimble, large-hearted performance as the deadbeat who finds new life in the individual existences of his surprise ?children.?

Handed a file folder containing information on the plaintiffs, David starts peeking in on the grown kids. Perhaps as expected, they show a few of his faults. Some are broke. Others are dreamers chasing an impossible goal. David starts to help wherever he can, though there?s only so much one man can do ? particularly when he?s trying to keep his true identity a secret.

Scott?s screenplay works well as a confessional on the hardships of parenting, as well as on the rewards that can come with sacrificing your own existence to benefit another (as most moms and dads happily do on an hourly basis). Starbuck broaches the ongoing ?nature versus nurture? debate by wondering how much of you exists in a person you might have fathered but never met. It?s often coincidental, but always incredibly sweet. It tackles all of its controversies with a light comedic touch that?s backed by an effervescent musical selection that lifts the mood.

And then there?s Huard, who doesn?t play the stereotypically imbecilic man-child Adam Sandler has defined over the years. The actor infuses David with compassion, humor and a tinge of regret as he?s given a chance to reverse his bad decisions, one prodigal child at a time. Thirty years ago, Bill Murray would have crushed this part. Tom Hanks might have attempted to fill Huard?s big shoes 20 years ago. Vaughn should do just fine.

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Upstream Color

I can tell you, with conviction, that I loved Shane Carruth?s Upstream Color. Explaining why is another story.

Upstream Color marks Carruth?s first directorial effort since his critically acclaimed 2004 drama Primer -- an intelligently constructed sci-fi experiment that, ostensibly, was about the dangers of time travel. And as with Primer, you?ll likely feel compelled to read as many opinion pieces as possible following an Upstream screening, requiring their help to noodle through the clues Carruth deliberately places along his refreshingly twisty narrative.

I might not completely understand Upstream Color, at least not after one pass. But I recognize it as a bold, imaginative, poetic and, admittedly, frustrating piece of filmmaking that?s always engaging and frequently beautiful.

The hauntingly gorgeous Amy Seimetz plays Carruth?s protagonist, Kris, who endures a series of hardships in this complicated, non-linear path. Her first chapter, if that's how you choose to divide her story, involves a kidnapping. Kris is abducted by a man we know only as The Thief (Thiago Martins). This criminal implants Kris with a mysterious worm, which boasts powers of mental manipulation that permit the Thief to con Kris out of her monetary possessions and leave her destitute. Kris is only saved when a mysterious sound engineer dubbed The Sampler (Andrew Sensenig) successfully transplants the work out of our heroine and into an innocent pig.

Trust me, the weird stuff hasn?t even really started yet.

Upstream threatens to start making some sense when Carruth himself arrives on screen in the character of Jeff, a wandering soul with a checkered past who?s both a love interest and a possible threat to Kris. But to imply that Carruth?s story almost achieves clarity makes the mistake in assuming that ?clarity? was ever a goal of the filmmaker in the first place. Gorgeous images and symphonic sounds move the story along with skill and grace. Carruth really is a talented visual director, and his Upstream score ? which he composed ? is a majestic hymn that stirs soulful, romance feelings ? even if you are scratching your jaw wondering what, exactly, is at play on screen.

Could the baby pig dropped in a burlap sack and dropped into a river signify Kris and Jeff?s inability to conceive a child of their own? Perhaps. Did The Thief once manipulate Jeff, explaining how these kindred souls eventually met on a non-descript train, forming an instant emotional connection? It?s possible, though never clarified. Do you need a simpler story that?s eager to spell out all of its intentions? Look elsewhere.

Upstream Color absolutely deserves a look, though, if you?re exhilarated by the graceful symmetry movement, sound and performance are able to create on screen. Carruth offers Upstream audiences a puzzle, a riddle, a brain tease with an emotional payoff. But hidden in the film?s DNA lies confirmation that the fledgling filmmaker is a unique mind with a striking voice who happens to see stories unfold at a different pace than the rest of us. He is a composer who layers his ?musical? measures side by side. Individually, they stimulate. And when they occasionally click together in harmony, the movie legitimately sings.

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Scary Movie V

Scary Movie 5 is not completely devoid of laughs. In fact, there?s probably the same amount of chuckles to be had in this sequel than in your average marginally funny, somewhat passable comedy. Unfortunately, the ones here are surrounded by so much shit (sometimes literally) that it?s hard to muster up anything more than a half-smile. Scary Movie 5 doesn?t just have some groan-worthy jokes, it has some gags so awful they barely qualify as attempts at comedy. DJs spinning pizza? Bananas filled with shit? Pool cleaners dressed up in tuxedos?

No single one of those aforementioned jokes is even a problem on its own. There are always going to be painful misses in slapstick joke-joke-joke movies. Even the all-time classics like Airplane and The Naked Gun don?t always get it right, but at least those movies bat over fifty percent. Scary Movie 5 maybe maybe touches base one of out ten times, which just isn?t enough to maintain likeability or forward momentum or a reason for existing.

Since it does exist, however, we might as well go over the specifics of the plot. The story follows a married couple named Jody (Ashley Tisdale) and Dan (Simon Rex) who are forced to adopt their nieces and nephews after a sketchy accident befalls his brother (Charlie Sheen). Thanks to months living alone in the woods, the children have turned into weirdos who answer to a supernatural force called Mama. In order to stop her, Jody decides to try and track down an evil book hidden somewhere in a cabin in the woods.

Mama was released earlier this year, and the Evil Dead remake is actually still in theaters. Based on these two films, it would be natural to think Scary Movie 5 is pretty current in what films it skewers. Unfortunately, that?s not actually the case. Much of the spoof?s plot is intertwined with Black Swan and Inception, both of which are now three years old. There?s also pretty clear shout-outs to The Help and Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, which weren?t exactly released yesterday either. Scary Movie 5 doesn't even use the time since these ancient targets left the theaters to come up with something original or even something funny to say, making the jabs feel even more dated and pointless

Scary Movie 5 is filled with gross-out jokes that push the boundaries of good taste. The film also lacks a coherent structure, isn?t edited particularly well, has some voice over problems and is filled with too many unnecessary cameos. Coupled with some less than stellar acting performances and a subject matter that doesn?t really push the envelope, this horror spoof has a ton of problems. None of those issues have anything to do with why this movie isn?t worth recommending, however. The only real problem of substance with Scary Movie 5 is that it?s filled to the brim with horrendous jokes, and those gags that do succeed (many of which involve Sheen and Lohan) just aren?t good enough to make up for the general malaise of failure that hangs over the rest of the production.

It?s not about the number of hits. It?s about the ratio of hits to misses, and Scary Movie 5?s is just godawful.

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Temptation

If the goal of Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor is to make cheating seem as emotionally disturbing and unnerving as possible, Tyler Perry succeeds in his quest admirably. If the more pressing aim is to make a good movie, the result is more of a mixed bag. The famed director?s latest carries quite an emotional punch and will likely turn the stomachs of more empathetic viewers. Because of some poor structuring decisions and a few reveals that feel a little too obvious, however, the film will likely be written off by most outside of Perry?s familiar target demographic, which is not altogether surprising but still a shame.

The basic story arc of Temptation follows a wannabe marriage counselor named Judith (Jurnee Smollet-Bell) who is working as an overeducated matchmaker. She and her husband Brice (Lance Gross) have fallen into a monotonous and unfulfilling routine, but the natural order is upended when a rich and extremely forward man (Robbie Jones) walks into her life. She?s been assigned to help him create matchmaking software for her company, but obviously, he?s interested in a whole lot more than the specifics to make his algorithm function at full capacity.

When Temptation is at its best, it exchanges glances and subtleties. It communicates without really saying and flirts without really crossing a line. The film works when it depicts all of the tiny decisions people make to neither give in to nor completely push away temptation. Behind the suitor?s fabulous wealth and some of the unnecessary entanglements and surprise reveals that will likely make more jaded viewers groan, there?s actually some keen insight into how the mind works and why little turns of phrase can be more important than grandiose gestures. Perry has insight into people, and he does know why they behave the way they do.

Disappointingly, however, Temptation doesn?t always live in those gray areas. Sometimes it feels the need to be as aggressive and overt about its overall message as possible, becoming as melodramatic and preachy as critics have accused Perry of being all these years. For example: there?s a scene in which Brice is upset about the state of his life while at work. Instead of just showing him looking all forlorn, Perry inserts a shot of him snapping a pencil like an angry second grader who missed recess. In the grand scheme of things, that might not seem like a big deal, but it?s often those ten second snippets that let certain viewers condescendingly act like he?s a hack.

Between the acting of former Friday Night Lights star Smollett-Bell, some nice musical choices and a dozen or so scenes that are very well crafted and surprisingly honest, there?s enough here to warrant the price of admission for Perry fans. Some day, there will be enough in a Perry movie to warrant the price of admission for everyone else too, but this definitely isn?t that film, especially given how fast and forward it is with a moral agenda.

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Star Trek Into Darkness

The future is still bright with color and lens flares in Star Trek Into Darkness, despite that ominous title. Even in moments of great crisis, Simon Pegg's Montgomery Scott can be counted on for a witty quip. Even when the U.S.S. Enterprise is facing immense peril, director J.J. Abrams will keep the action light-footed and graceful, and make generous room for each of his characters to take part. In its best scenes-- and there are plenty of them-- Star Trek Into Darkness is as fluid and energetic as Abrams' 2009 Star Trek, and by bringing in a more powerful villain and deepening the crew's central relationships, it often exceeds the original.

What it lacks, though, is the putting-the-team-together urgency of the first film, and when the darkness of the title comes in to replace it, it bogs the whole thing down instead of adding meaning. The stakes are high in Star Trek Into Darkness, with death and global destruction much realer than they were last time, but the film rarely feels like it has the time to really deal with them, especially when wrapping around yet another needlessly convoluted narrative from Damon Lindelof, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. When we're watching Kirk and Spock learn to work together and care about each other, or watching Benedict Cumberbatch's Harrison try to manipulate the Enterprise crew, we're golden. But when the story expands broader-- to conspiracies and power-grabs and potential war-- it gets tangled.

And yet, just like last time, Abrams makes the whole thing so fun that you don't even care. The movie is off like a rocket from the opening scene, with the Enterprise crew attempting to halt an exploding volcano on a faraway planet but without violating the prime directive-- that Starfleet members not interfere with the development of alien civilizations. Kirk (Chris Pine)-- still brash and overly confident-- violates it to save Spock (Zachary Quinto), and sets up a conflict between emotional Kirk and logical Spock that's familiar to Trek fans but still touching to see enacted all over again. Kirk is demoted for the violation, with Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) put back in charge of the Enterprise, until an explosion at a Starfleet archive in London is pinned on John Harrison, and everyone's priorities shift accordingly.

Though it takes a while to properly meet him, Cumberbatch's Harrison is exactly what fans have hoped for, deliciously malevolent and cunning and constantly indicating that he's the smartest guy in the room (he probably is). His role in the story has been closely guarded, and with good reason-- it's not just his true intentions that are a surprise, but the role he plays in the narrative, and it's satisfying to be as unclear about him as Kirk and company clearly are. But he's also not the kind of villain who eats up the rest of the movie; every key member of the Enterprise crew gets their major moment in the film, and even Alice Eve's newly added Carol Marcus becomes integral to the story (though the much-promoted moment of her in her underwear remains gratuitous nonsense). For all the knots they twist themselves in to tell the overall story, Abrams and his writers have an excellent ear for everything that happens among the Enterprise crew, and every scene in the film pulses with the same assurance that these beloved characters are once again in good hands.

2009's Star Trek was a wild gamble, a reboot that both wiped the slate clean and paid endless homage to the original, and watching it succeed felt like taking flight. Star Trek Into Darkness inevitably lacks a little of that marvel, and its nods to the original series feel clunkier, like kids insecurely clinging to mom's apron strings. At a time when the series ought to be completely forging its own identity, it instead leans even harder on the past, making parts of the film impossible to discuss without remembering how Shatner and Nimoy did it. Sometimes it even starts feeling nostalgic for its own first film-- when Kirk is about to make a daring leap into space, he reminds his companion of the similar jump he made on to the Vulcan drilling platform in Star Trek. This new series was supposed to be all about breaking away from the past, but large portions of Star Trek Into Darkness feel mired in it.

And yet, those take-flight moments of blockbuster bliss are frequent and consistently spectacular, as Abrams continues to prove his rare gift of combining character, plot, comedy and action into setpiece after setpiece, crafting a film that rushes along but never feels frantic. It takes until the walk out of the theater to start to feel frustrated by the clunky references or the mystifying character motivations, as if Abrams and company have put the audience in a trance-- a superpower that can't go underestimated in a world where blockbusters are longer and more maddening than ever. I'm still waiting for this new Trek series to get a story that feels intuitive, not grindingly complicated. But I'm still happy if this is what we get while we wait.

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