The Fairmont Hotel’s Summer Dive-In series resumes with a poolside screening of the animated feature Wreck-It Ralph (2012), 8:30pm, May 25, at the hotel pool on the terrace level. Details

Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) interrogate John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) in ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’.

The latest entry into the long-running Star Trek franchise finds the series still boldly going, though not quite where no one has gone before. When the reboot movie Star Trek was released in 2009, it re-invigorated the franchise and  left its future wide open; Star Trek Into Darkness sees it backtrack a bit a recover what some may consider hallowed ground.

The gist of it — and that’s really all that can be provided without  spoiling the plot — is this: Shortly after the previous film, Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) is relieved of command of the Enterprise after violating the Federation’s sacrosanct Prime Directive. Almost immediately after, rogue Starfleet officer John Harrison (Sherlock‘s sublime Benedict Cumberbatch) commits a series of brazen attacks on Starfleet in their own backyard. Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) reinstates Kirk’s command and sends the crew of the Enterprise on a mission to kill Harrison.

This is the arguably the film series’ biggest departure to date, and it’s not the only one of many in STID that are likely to divide fans. Abrams’ take is a more militant take that is out of step with Roddenberry’s shiny, optimistic vision of the future, one that sets up a moral quagmire for the crew. It’s no coincidence either; substitute the super-secret photon torpedoes with drone strikes and the Enterprise‘s incursion into Klingon-controlled space with the black op that bagged Bin Laden, and you have roughly a post-9/11 allegory.

Which is not to say it’s an overbearing message movie; his is a megaplex morality play with an emphasis on action and adventure, not  the science fiction version of Zero Dark Thirty with lens flares instead of night-vision POV shots. Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof keep the emphasis on the characters, carrying on with the crew’s growing pains and clash of egos — though it often retreads the character beats from the previous installment: Kirk is still arrogant and cocky, Spock (Zachary Quinto) still has anger issues, he and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) still have relationship problems, McCoy (Karl Urban) is still cranky, Sulu (John Cho) is still stoic, Scotty (Simon Pegg) is still the comedy relief, and Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) is still underused. They haven’t quite established the level of repartee of the original cast, but this is such a fine collection of performers with chemistry to spare.

For the most part the rest of the cast fares well, also. Cumberbatch is chilling as Harrison, a man who always seems to be in utter control of his surroundings, even when imprisoned, and the actor brings the combination of eloquence and ruthlessness so often found in a classic Trek villain. Weller follows close on his heels as Marcus, a crusty officer with a few dark secrets. Alice Eve is largely in the background as the admiral’s daughter and Kirk’s underdeveloped love interest, Dr. Carol Marcus; one gets the feeling she’s there just to establish the character for later installments

Like its predecessor, Into Darkness is fast-paced almost to the point of frenzied; which makes its only real flaw all the more pronounced. An adrenaline-fueled race across the cosmos full of space battles, shoot-outs, betrayal, and startling revelations, it concludes with an anti-climactic brawl where the story began.  It’s a whimper of a conclusion for a movie with a lot of bang. Nevertheless, the movie as a whole stands as one of the best Trek movies to date, and as one of the summer’s must-sees.

Central 214 at the Hotel Palomar continues its Sunday Sunset Movie Nights on the Patio series with a screening of My Fair Lady (1964), 9pm, May 12; and Gladiator (2000), 9pm, May 19, at the hotel. Details

Cinemark Theaters and Paramount Studios’ Reel Classics series continues with Mel Brooks’ comedy Western Blazing Saddles (1974), 2 and 7pm, May 15, at select Cinemark theaters. Details

The Nasher Sculpture Center presents an outdoor screening of the Academy Award-winning adaptation Life of Pi (2012), with live music at 7pm and movie at 9pm, May 17, at the  Center. Details

, sThe Dallas Museum of Art presents teases its upcoming summer film series Love, War, and Myth in Ancient Greece with free screenings of Clash of the Titans (2010) at 10pm, May 17, in the museum’s C3 Theatre; and Hercules (1997) at 10:30pm, May 17, in the Horchow Auditorium. Details

The Inwood Theatre’s Midnight Madness feature for this week is Stanley Kubrick’s classic Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove (1964), May 17 and 18, at the theater. Details

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). The sequel to an episode of the original series, the first Trek sequel provided the quintessential combination of character-based melodrama, humor, and action that had been missing from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. William Shatner’s over-acting is actually dwarfed by the massive pecs of Ricardo Montalban, whose performance still stands as the best Trek villain ever. Director Nicholas Meyer deftly handles a literate sci-fi adventure-thriller and caps it with the unthinkable: the death of a lead character.

2. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). Meyer also wrote and directed this, the last outing of the original cast, and in the process managed to redeem the franchise after the fiasco of Star Trek V (see below). Nimbly touching on themes tied in to the then-recent end of the Cold War, it’s a tense political thriller full of references to Shakespeare wrapped in the guise of gaudy space opera; the result is a graceful swan song for the original crew and the last truly satisfying Trek for the better part of 20 years.

3. Star Trek: First Contact (1996). The Next Generation cast gets to stand on its own for the first time (with actor Jonathan Frakes doing double duty as director), with nary a cameo or bit part from other installments to be seen. Time travel is used for the umpteenth time, but in a more satisfying way as the crew is for to save the future as trekkers know it from fan favorite villains, the Borg. The shiny new Enterprise-E is sleek and sexy, as is Alice Krige as the Borg queen, a space babe hotter than a green-skinned Orion pole dancer.

4. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). Roddenberry and Co. opted to go more cerebral with the first big-screen Trek — perhaps an attempt to avoid comparison to Star Wars by veering closer to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It wasn’t what fans wanted at the time, but that’s no reason for it to go underappreciated. It’s stately (read: slow) and the “villain” — a nigh-omnipotent being with a cryptic mission — leaves little room for narrative movement; but, Jerry Goldsmith’s score is a classic and Dalton Trumbull’s visual effects are eye-popping, including the gruesome transporter malfunction scene and Spock’s “It’s full of stars” spacewalk sequence. Still not convinced? Check out the touched-up DVD release of the expanded version.

5. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984). Tired of donning pointy ears and playing Spock, Leonard Nimoy stepped behind the camera for most of this one, and he does an admirable job, though the series’ most dynamic character is sorely missed. The numerous well-staged set pieces — the crew busting Bones out of the brig, committing grand theft starship, and an old-fashioned brawl on a disintegrating planet, and the “death” of the starship Enterprise herself — plus Christopher Lloyd’s scene-chewing turn as the main villain make this a much under-appreciated flick. The murder of Kirk’s son, though hammed-up by Shatner, is heart-wrenching.

6. Star Trek: Generations (1994). The plot is hokey but the thrills deliver, and this first big screening outing for the Next Gen crew proved to be an adequate torch-passer. It’s not exactly compelling, but the stakes (and characterizations) are kicked up a notch, and Malcolm McDowell makes for a scene-stealing greatness as the main villain as he goes about torturing, killing, quoting Delmore Schwartz, and committing the unthinkable as he effectively murders James T. Kirk.

7. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). Considered the best in the “classic” series of movies for some unfathomable reason, as it is bland beyond belief. Nimoy directs again, returning to the overused time travel plot device (achieved by going really really fast and then flipping a U-turn around the sun). The bulk of the story is set in contemporary San Francisco, it what feels more like a cost-cutting measure than anything else, and the clash of heroes from the future with 20th-century urban America has been done death before and since. The eco-friendly save-the-whales plotline is intriguing, but the movie is just too precious as a whole.

8. Star Trek: Insurrection (1998). A decidedly mixed outing that attempted to inject a little more life into the now-creaky franchise with a very appropriate, light-hearted plot that has the middle-aged Next Gen crew protecting a Shangri-La planet and its ageless inhabitants from a renegade Starfleet admiral (Anthony Zerbe) and a devious madman (a scenery-chewing F. Murray Abraham). Only the humor keeps it from feeling like a routine episode of the original series puffed-up for the big screen.

9. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). The movie that brought forth the question “is this the end of Star Trek?”. By this point, there had been nine feature films and six TV series, and the cracks were beginning to show. Plodding, uninspired, predictable, and over-familiar to even passing fans, Nemesis brought nothing new to the table, despite the intriguing premise of a young clone of Picard leading a rebellious off-shoot alien race. “Hell is dark” intones Commander Riker at one point, and one wonders if he was referring to the auditoriums that screened this dog.

10. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989). William Shatner writes for and directs himself in a feature for the first time. The result: Kirk, Spock, and Bones sing campfire songs, a 60ish Uhura does a very unkinky fan dance, and Spock’s unhinged Vulcan brother hijacks the Enterprise and goes looking for God. Any one of the above is enough to earn this one the bottom slot. Proof positive that in space no one can hear you yawn.

From left to right: Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, and Joel Edgerton star in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of ‘The Great Gatsby’.

Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce’s gaudy adaptation of The Great Gatsby hits all the high points but plumbs few of the depths of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel. It’s a cartoon take on the  classic novel of one man’s collision with the American dream during the Roaring Twenties, and much like its characters it indulges in a glut of glamour  but has no real soul.

It remains a simple yet elegant story, with aspiring author and would-be bond salesman Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) arriving in New York from the Midwest in 1922, at a time of postwar euphoria and Prohibition-era rebelliousness, morals are looser, optimism is more abundant, and the crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression is barely a speck on the horizon.

While staying in Long Island he reconnects with his cousin Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) and is quickly drawn into the restless world of the rich and privileged, where he becomes a not-so-innocent bystander in a love triangle involving Daisy, her priggish old-money husband Tom (Joel Edgerton), and Nick’s mysterious neighbor Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio).

It’s no surprise that Luhrmann chooses to dress up Fitzgerald’s delicate prose with digitally composed 3-D tracking shots, anachronistic pop music, and style with a capital “S” — this is, after all, the man who transported Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to ’90s-era southern California and cross-pollinated Moulin Rouge!‘s bohemian French sitting with  jukebox musical aesthetics.

To a certain degree, those experiments succeeded; with Gatsby, not so much. Luhrmann usually tries to keep his finger on the pulse of the story; here, he skims the surface while burying it under an avalanche of style that makes the entire thing feel artificial when it should come across as elegant.

Luhrmann and Pearce hew impressively close to Fitzgerald’s novel, hitting all the major beats, shuffling just a little of the plot, and lifting whole sections of dialogue. It’s a slavish interpretation though, one that seems satisfied to merely lift the story from the page without really illuminating it. Most of the changes are small and debatable, though at least one — the removal of the parallel romance between Nick and Jordan — robs the story of a key subplot and necessary contrast.

Overall, it comes across as an ironically appropriate form of conspicuous consumption, and it’s not much of an actor’s vehicle. Maguire’s Nick is recast as an alcoholic headcase and reduced to a passive observer, Mulligan as Daisy fails to make us understand Gatsby’s infatuation, and the talented Jason Clarke and Isla Fisher are wasted in one-note roles. DiCaprio tries to elevate his character as best he can, but Gatsby as interpreted by Luhrmann and Pearce is stripped of his turmoil and rendered as a needy obsessive instead of the tragic, enigmatic, and lovelorn figure he is meant to be. Edgerton is the only one comes out unscathed, delivering a solid, nuanced performance as the loathsome Tom.

It’s certainly watchable in a detached sort of way, although the uninitiated are likely to wonder what all the fuss over the novel is about. Fitzgerald wrote his novel as a critique of what he saw as a shallowness in American society that increased in direct proportion to its prosperity. Luhrmann fails to see that; ironically, he’s content to simply make a shallow movie about shallow people. At least Fitzgerald got the sad, sorry punchline to the joke.

Cinemark Theaters and Paramount Studios’ Reel Classics series continues with the science fiction classic Alien (1979), 2 and 7pm, May 8, at select Cinemark theaters. Details

The Texas Theatre presents a 35mm print of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), various showtimes, May 10-12, at the theater. Details

The Inwood Theatre’s Midnight Madness feature for this week is the cult-classic comic book revenge flick The Crow (1994), May 10 and 11, at the theater. Details

Central 214 at the Hotel Palomar continues its Sunday Sunset Movie Nights on the Patio series with a screening of My Fair Lady (1964), 9pm, May 12, at the hotel. Details

Robert Downey Jr. returns as the Man in the Can in ‘Iron Man 3′.

A rare threequel that finds new ground to till rather than a rehash of what came before, Iron Man 3 proves that not only is there life after The Avengers, there’s still plenty of mileage left in the tanks of superhero-themed movies. The early buzz has proclaimed it to be the best Marvel movie yet; that’s a bit much, but it is the best of the Iron Man series.

It benefits greatly from a change in directors, with Jon Favreau taking on a producer role and being replaced by writer Shane Black (The Long Kiss Goodnight, Lethal Weapon). Black’s take on the material is less four-color comic book and more pulp espionage novel with a superhero twist. Think The Dark Knight Rises with less plot and more humor. Much like that Batman movie, IM3 strips our hero of everything he holds dear and places him in a position of extreme and relentless vulnerability.

After a brief prelude set in Switzerland in 1999, the movie skips ahead to six months after the events of The Avengers. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is living with girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) in a swank ocean-side Malibu home and upgrading his Iron Man armor to new levels of capability.

All is not well with Tony, However; his near-death experience in New York has saddled him crippling anxiety attacks and left him so worried about his ability to protect himself and his loved ones that he obsessively modifies and redesigns his armor (he has close to four dozen stashed in his vault.) Pepper is running the company in his absence, and their relationship is suffering.

Enter former flame Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), a biologist working for rival Aldrich Killian (a perfectly oily Guy Pearce), who wants Stark Industries to invest in his limb regeneration technology. Naturally, there are hidden sinister motives to all of this. Someone whose sinister motives are less hidden, however, is the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), a mysterious bin Laden-esque mastermind whose  campaign of terror has the whole nation on edge.

When one of the Mandarin’s schemes leaves Tony’s friend and bodyguard Happy Hogan (Favreau) in critical condition, he publicly announces his intentions to kick ass and take names; the Mandarin responds with a helicopter attack that obliterates Stark’s home and leaves him for dead. Stark goes underground, forced to rely solely on his wits and a busted up suit of armor as he pieces together clues to the conspiracy.

Black’s sole directing credit until now was 2005′s overlooked and under-rated buddy detective action-comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (which also featured Downey), but he proves himself capable handling big-budget gonzo action spectacle. More importantly, his well established flair for snappy banter, light character development, and clever set-pieces is in full effect and well-used here. Oddly enough, if there is a blatant flaw to the movie it’s that the sequences of heavy metal mayhem sometimes bog down the story, especially the protracted and disappointingly generic finale in an automated Miami dock.

The role is shaping up to be the one that defines Downey’s career, and it’s one that he has worn like a second skin from the beginning. The ego and need for attention shared by both men are writ large, which makes it all the more satisfying and impressive to see both actor and his character yanked from their respective comfort zones. Black gives him room to maneuver while toying with genre conventions, especially when Tony has to accept assistance from an 8-year-old boy (Ty Simpkins); his verbal smacks keep the cuteness at bay, and he unceremoniously ditches the brat before things get too cute. Take note of this, Mr. Spielberg.

Downey also benefits from his supporting castmates. Paltrow is brought into the foreground and given more to do than operate as superhero girlfriend/kidnap fodder, especially in the two main action sequences. She even saves Stark’s ass — twice. Black’s flare for buddy-cop antics comes in handy when Downey is placed opposite Don Cheadle, who returns as James Rhodes, enough to make us wish the two had been given more screen time together. Kingsley gives yet another brilliant turn as a flamboyant villain, but he is under-used. Pearce delivers even though his character is formulaic, as does Hall even though she is stuck in the thankless role of a romantic cypher.

Downey’s contract with Marvel is fulfilled with this film, and whether or not he will return for Avengers 2 is anyone’s guess.  If not, Iron Man 3 brings a satisfying close to ol’ Shellhead’s first story arc.

Cinemark Theaters and Paramount Studios’ Reel Classics series continues with Mike Nichols’ adaptation of The Graduate (1967), 2 and 7pm, May 1, at select Cinemark theaters. Details

The Inwood Theatre’s Midnight Madness feature for this week is Steven Spielberg’s adventure sequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), May 3 and 4, at the theater. Details

The Texas Theatre presents a 35mm print of Terence Malick’s acclaimed  feature Days of Heaven (1978), various showtimes, April 21-28, at the theater. Details

Cinemark Theaters and Paramount Studios’ Reel Classics series continues with Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award-winning biopic Raging Bull (1980), 2 and 7pm, April 24, at select Cinemark theaters. Details

The Inwood Theatre’s Midnight Madness features for this week are Tommy Wiseau’s cult-classic Z-grade drama The Room (2003) on April 26; and the classic rock musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) on April 27, at the theater. Details

Abstract, mesmerizing, allegorical to the core, and willing to forge its own structure for the sake of telling a story the way the director needs to tell it, Upstream Color is what Terrence Malick often aims for but usually misses.

It’s difficult to sum up the movie’s three threads in just a couple of paragraphs, but here goes: In the ultimate act of identity theft, a young woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) is drugged with a concoction derived from worms and orchids, kidnapped, and brainwashed by a shadow-cloaked thief (Thiago Martens) into signing over her money, home, and possessions.

Released back into the world afterwards, a devastated but also empowered Amy is approached by Jeff (Carruth), an unemployed financial-sector employee who claims to have had the same experience, as well as some of the same thoughts, as her. The two begin a rocky romance, hampered by their respective baggage.

Lurking on the periphery of all of this is a pig farmer (Andrew Sensenig) with a penchant for experimental sound recording, who increasingly begins to figure into the story.

Carruth, a Dallas-area native, drew much attention when he won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance with his 2004 debut film, the mind-bending time-travel tale Primer. This is his first feature since then, and not only has his unwavering insistence on telling his story in his own way endured (he’s credits on the film also include producer, editor, cinematographer, and composer), they’ve been refined. Like the best surrealistic works, it is both unnerving and compelling, full of enigmatic imagery.

Carruth has confidence and conviction in his vision, enough to insist that the audience experience it on his terms rather than pandering to mass appeal. Upstream Color is a movie you feel rather than see, and the feeling penetrates to the core of us all.