What was a plodding parade of inert sci-fi pontificating, anchored by a largely awful cast, has become a real cinematic enterprise, one anchored by actors with genuine charisma and directed with an eye for the spectacular. You can have William Shatner’s James T. Kirk (who’s essentially been shilling for Priceline since 1966). I’ll take the agreeably cocky Chris Pine in a thrilling, high-speed space jump from one starship to another.

In 2009, Abrams gave us Star Trek, a slick prequel that stood as one of the better installments in the franchise (not that there was much competition). Star Trek Into Darkness is even better. Freed of baton-passing, energized by a formidable villain and even bolstered by a few ideas, Into Darkness may not be satisfyingly true – at least for purists – to the original Gene Roddenberry television series. But it’s true to good filmmaking, and that’s what matters.

The movie opens with Pine at the helm of the USS Enterprise, which has been charged with observing a primitive culture on a distant planet. The crew – including Vulcan science officer Spock (Zachary Quinto) and communications officer Uhura (Zoe Saldana) – learns that a volcano is about to erupt, which would wipe out life on the planet. Should the crew disobey protocol, which demands that they never interfere with other civilizations, or should they use their superior technology to save this culture? If they can prevent the volcano without ever being noticed by the locals, does that make a difference?

J.J. Abrams isn’t only resuscitating the franchise. He’s improved it.

A previous Star Trek film would have pontificated on these questions in endless dialogue scenes. (There’s a reason the deck of the USS Enterprise always had the feel of a lecture hall.) Into Darkness treats them as banter during a chase sequence that plays like some geek-dream mashup of Indiana Jones and Star Wars. The movie plants its ideas like seeds, then gets on with the action.

This works partly because Abrams has cast quick actors, especially Pine and Quinto as the leads. The yin-yang interplay of Kirk and Spock – the captain goes on instinct, while the Vulcan adheres to rule-abiding logic – has such crispness that the actors are able to evoke their characters’ philosophical differences largely via one-liners. One of the pleasures of Star Trek Into Darkness is watching the relationship between these two deepen.

This isn’t to say the other actors fall by the wayside. Indeed, each of them gets a showcase moment, from Karl Urban as the ship’s doctor, Bones, to Simon Pegg as Scotty to John Cho as Sulu, who gets his own shot at the captain’s chair. A recurring motif, from the start of the franchise, has been teamwork under pressure, and Abrams continues to emphasize that here.

As for the villain – renegade Federation officer John Harrison – British actor Benedict Cumberbatch takes on the part and gives a breakout performance. He’s hammy, but for good reason, especially if you’re familiar with Star Trek lore. More importantly, he brings an intimidating unpredictability – both physically and intellectually – that’s essential to maintaining the picture’s tension.

The Harrison character is also intriguing in the way he mirrors more familiar “evildoers.” A traitor who plans attacks on Federation targets, Harrison provokes a Federation response so merciless and fearful that it echoes the way the United States has responded to real-world threats. This other debate taking place within Star Trek Into Darkness – how to rightly pursue justice against alleged terrorists – surely existed early on in the screenplay by Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof, yet it carries added resonance following the Miranda-rights debates that surrounded accused Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Wait – isn’t this supposed to be the dumbed-down version of Star Trek? I guess it could seem that way. Save for an unfortunate speech at the end, Into Darkness treads on such contemporary implications lightly, preferring to emphasize the performances, action sequences and even things like production design. In other words, it’s a movie – not a talky TV show on a bigger budget.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. L’Avventura actually opens with Lea Massari as Anna, a temperamental woman disenchanted with both the vast wealth of her father and the half-hearted attention of her fiancé, Sandro, played by Ferzetti. The engaged couple, along with Anna’s friend Claudia (Vitti), embark on a yachting trip with a handful of well-off friends. When Anna disappears on one of the islands, Claudia and Sandro lead the search and fall for each other in the process.

L’Avventura is soap operaish on the surface. (Can you believe Claudia would do that to her friend! And Sandro? What a pig!) But director Michelangelo Antonioni, who made his international breakthrough here, is probing for something deeper. Carelessness – physical, emotional, intellectual and relational – is something of a virus in the film, so that the laissez-faire attitude the movie seems to be selling is ultimately exposed as a (perhaps literal) dead end. That’s why the final shot is perplexing, until you realize that it’s perfect in the way it captures two characters who have never been more alone, even though they’re together.

Carelessness – physical, emotional, intellectual and relational – is something of a virus in the film.

It’s the island sequence of L’Avventura that distinguishes the movie from other art-film exercises in existentialism. Using landscape as effectively as John Ford ever did, Antonioni lets the Aeolian outcroppings stand in as both threats and sympathetic figures. (“I don’t get them,” one of the boaters says of the islands. “Surrounded by nothing but water. Poor things.”) After Anna’s disappearance, the natural beauty seems to taunt the searchers. Waking up disillusioned after sleeping in a shack, Claudia opens the door to be greeted by one of the cinema’s most jaw-dropping sunrises. Yet the light reveals nothing.

When they leave the island, things get even murkier. Claudia and Sandro soon embark on an affair, though it’s as rife with guilt and regret as passion. The second half of the film traces their efforts to find out if Anna may have slipped away onto the mainland, and the motive for the searching gradually changes. After all, if they don’t find her, then they can pursue their affair in earnest.

If you find Claudia and Sandro detestable, consider that their tortured relationship is at least a form of remembrance. Everyone else in their yachting party seems eager to forget Anna (there’s a telling shot of one of them literally twirling an umbrella as they wait to leave the island). Posh gatherings soon resume, at which jokes about Anna’s disappearance are lightly made. When Claudia and Sandro reunite with the others at a hotel, no one seems to bat an eye at the fact that they’re now a couple.

Nevertheless, the prevailing mood of L’Avventura is not one of unaffected cool, but rather of sorrow. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it moralism, considering Antonioni’s camera is as eager to follow the freshest piece of flesh as Sandro. Rather, it’s a sadness that can be felt in even the most gorgeous of the movie’s compositions, a dissatisfaction that never quite leaves Vitti’s dark eyes. Don’t tell anyone on the yacht, but L’Avventura seems to understand that the pursuit of pleasure is not as consequence-free as we may like to pretend.

As played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Rotwang in Lang’s masterpiece, Metropolis), Mabuse may possess the cinema’s original evil stare. Dark circles surround his eyes, but the irises themselves are alarmingly light and fair, which may be why those who look into them become lost and hypnotized. Mabuse uses this power for trivial criminal purposes – his bread and butter involves donning elaborate disguises to attend gambling dens and manipulating the other players to his advantage – but he also has the grand plans of a megalomaniacal super villain. The movie opens with Mabuse’s scheme to manipulate the stock market, a sequence that ends with his triumphant, disembodied head superimposed over the tatters left on the trading-room floor.

Dr. Mabuse is a bit unwieldy in terms of structure, but it’s worth the sit for the eventual flashes of Lang’s visual genius.

It’s clear from the start that this isn’t going to be a standard crime melodrama, but rather a picture by one of the founders of film language (there’s an early action scene, involving the coordination of a train on a bridge and a car passing beneath it, of which a contemporary heist film would be proud). Originally released as two separate films and broken up into distinct acts, Dr. Mabuse is a bit unwieldy in terms of structure, but it’s worth the sit for the eventual flashes of Lang’s visual genius. Mabuse’s climactic comeuppance, in which a group of blind counterfeiters he employs morph into the ghostly forms of his murder victims, is enchanting and eerie, all the more so because of the silence of the film.

Dr. Mabuse the Gambler also gives you a sense of the discomfort, fear and even paranoia that may have been in the air regarding the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis (Freud would have been touring in Germany at the time of the movie’s release). Whereas Mabuse’s rival, state prosecutor von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke), represents a reliance on facts and proven science – good, old-fashioned forensics –  the doctor himself dabbles in this new field of psychotherapy, one the movie equates with otherworldly powers and even, in one creepy séance sequence, the occult.

In the end, Dr. Mabuse may be less noteworthy as a coherent whole than as a hugely influential crime drama. Just as it’s hard to imagine so many science-fiction dystopias without Metropolis, just about every criminal mastermind, from Dr. No to Dr. Evil, owes something to Klein-Rogge’s hypnotic fiend. His stare pierces through victims, and the years.

Baz Luhrmann has certainly helped with that. His adaptation of the Jazz Age novel puts things like costuming, makeup and production design at the forefront, and I don’t think that’s a quality that should be lightly (or derisively) dismissed. In its emphasis on this sort of ostentatious theatricality, this Great Gatsby captures the surface sheen that was such a crucial element of the book, while also allowing an air of real romantic tragedy to lurk under the surface. It is “superficially superficial,” to borrow a phrase from a far greater film that explores similar themes, The Earrings of Madame de…

I’ll confess that even for this Luhrmann fan, the movie took some getting used to. The first 20 minutes are frustratingly antic. As Luhrmann sets the stage for the tale of Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) – mysterious millionaire of West Egg, dogged pursuer of married socialite Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and curious friend of our narrator, aspiring stockbroker Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) – he seems to be intent on making up for the tameness of Moulin Rouge. With a camera that never rests, lines of dialogue interrupted with unnecessary cuts and a general, hurtling breathlessness, the early moments of the film feel as if they’re taking place inside some sort of domed Disney ride – Gatsbyland! Add to this the 3-D effects (unnecessary as usual), and it’s like having the novel shot out at you from a giant PEZ dispenser.

If you’re able to make it through the first party scene at Gatsby’s mansion, you’ll come out on the other side to find a film of surprising restraint and patience.

But then things settle down. If you’re able to make it through the first party scene at Gatsby’s mansion, you’ll come out on the other side to find a film of surprising restraint and patience. The grandiose quality is still there – as well it should be, given the story’s milieu – but the movie actually pauses for full scenes and slows down for uninterrupted performances. The Great Gatsby will be written off as an ADHD romp, but to do so would be to overlook some wonderful evocations of Fitzgerald’s best passages, from Gatsby’s nervously arranged afternoon tea with Daisy to his disastrous showdown with her boorish husband Tom (Joel Edgerton).

Edgerton, the Australian star of Animal Kingdom and Warrior, brings a class-obsessed menace to this supporting part, emphasizing the caste concerns at play. This is the first time I fully understood how Gatsby’s resorting to violence against Tom exposes him as a “lower” man. Also standing out is newcomer Elizabeth Debicki, whose aloofness is essential as Daisy’s statuesque, seen-it-all friend Jordan Baker. (To be honest, her performance succeeds in large part due to the fantastic hats chosen for her by costume designer Catherine Martin.)

The movie ultimately works, though, because of its three leads, each of whom is perfect for their part in their own distinct ways. Maguire has the awkward goofiness of an outside observer, while Mulligan gives Daisy a somber air that (dare I say it?) goes deeper than the flighty character we get on the page. As for DiCaprio, it’s a wonder he hasn’t played Gatsby before. A charming con man who’s pretending to be a playboy, Jay Gatsby is the sort of role that depends on DiCaprio’s gift for duplicity while also (appropriately) indulging his matinee-idol image.

Dare I also credit Luhrmann with exercising some self-discipline? Given his Romeo + Juliet past, it would have been expected that Luhrmann would contort The Great Gatsby into some sort of tragic romance, with Gatsby and Daisy as star-crossed lovers. But one of the haunting elements of Fitzgerald’s novel is that they cross their own stars. By allowing DiCaprio to emphasize Gatsby’s fatal flaw – his need for total control over Daisy – Luhrmann makes the tragedy here feel true.

Does this make his Gatsby the definitive adaptation of Fitzgerald’s book? Hardly. It’s more like a jazz improvisation on the original, one that goes off in its own, occasionally anachronistic directions. Some of those lead to blind alleys; most lead to interesting ones. “None of us contributed anything new,” Carraway observes early on, condemning the parasitic extravagance of his social circle. This Great Gatsby may not be playing your song, but at the very least you have to admire it for hitting new notes.

That has been something of a problem with these Marvel movies, in which characters make cameos in each others’ pictures and some of the films – such as Captain America – play like extended trailers for forthcoming installments. All of this is supposed to give us the sense of a richly imagined universe beyond the particular film we happen to be watching, but in Iron Man 3 it’s a distraction. It’s as if Stark keeps bringing up The Avengers because it’s part of his contract.

Not that the movie itself offers much to arrest our attention. In the wake of the climactic New York City battle of The Avengers, Stark has begun to suffer anxiety attacks. Meanwhile, an enigmatic terrorist know as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) has been hitting American targets, including Stark’s Malibu fortress. Left with only one, badly damaged Iron Man suit – and still suffering from those attacks – Stark goes underground to try and track the Mandarin down.

The anxiety angle never quite works. The movie isn’t really interested in the concept as more than a plot device and, anyway, the depiction of an emotionally crippled Stark is at odds with the snarky Stark that the picture emphasizes (for good reason; Downey’s wit has been the hallmark of the franchise). It’s hard to become too invested in the angst-ridden journey of the character when he’s constantly dismissing it with a one-liner.

For a movie that’s timely in so many ways, Iron Man 3 is also disinterested in pursuing any real ideas.

For a movie that’s timely in so many ways, Iron Man 3 is also disinterested in pursuing any real ideas. Even those it seems to be broaching – the Iron Man suits as metaphors for U.S. drones, say, or the fear of technology’s invasion of our everyday lives, a la Google glass – are quickly forgotten. And if you think I’m asking too much of an Iron Man movie, recall that the first film worked quite well as a reflection of American interventionism in the wake of 9/11.

Other quibbles? Aside from a giddy, mid-air rescue of plummeting Air Force One crew members, there’s little exciting action. (Downey spends a curious amount of time fighting his battles while not wearing the title suit.) The biologically enhanced terrorist agents, with their steely gazes and regenerative abilities, crib way too much from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. And while I was fine with previous director Jon Favreau stepping down (Shane Black takes over here), I didn’t realize he did so in order to bump up his screen time as Stark’s awkwardly unfunny bodyguard Happy Hogan.

It would have taken quite a finale to get me back on board after all this, and Iron Man 3’s climax is bombastic without being engaging. Set on a tanker ship with cranes and storage containers, its use of moving parts and multiple levels recalls a game of Donkey Kong more than anything else. By the time Stark calls in reinforcements – about a dozen independently automated Iron Man suits, each with its own look and weaponry  – I felt less like I was watching an action movie than the reveal of a new toy line.

I also kept wondering, given he’d been mentioning them so much, why didn’t Stark just call the Avengers?

This is all wonderful stuff, especially if – like me – you grew up reading the likes of The Hardy Boys and Huckleberry Finn, sought adventures in the woods with friends and have come to deeply appreciate the rural tragedies of writer-director Jeff Nichols. Mud follows Nichols’ Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, and like its predecessors the movie depicts grand drama as it plays out in forgotten American settings. Mud is another regional effort with universal implications.

It’s also a coming-of-age tale, centered on Ellis (Tye Sheridan, who played the youngest son in The Tree of Life). Living on a houseboat with his argumentative parents, Ellis is just beginning to negotiate the world of girls. But unlike his friend Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), who delights in the pile of Penthouse magazines found in the boat, Ellis seeks deeper connections. He wants to fall in love. Never mind that his main male role models are less than encouraging. Neckbone’s uncle (Nichols regular Michael Shannon, here in a bit part) lives a life of one-afternoon stands, while Ellis’ dad (Ray McKinnon), depressed over the state of his marriage, tells his boy that “you can’t trust love.” No matter. Ellis still believes in it, deeply.

Mud is a great yarn. But is it a great movie?

And so when Mud tells them that he’s hiding for romantic reasons, Ellis thinks he’s found a fellow believer. The story goes – and Mud is nothing if not a teller of tall tales, which makes McConaughey perfect for the role – that Mud is on the run after killing a man who had been beating up Mud’s lifelong love Juniper (Reese Witherspoon). With the boys’ help, he plans to reunite with Juniper and escape to a life of romantic bliss.

This is, of course, a fairy tale, something Ellis comes to realize in painful ways. He discovers that love, in fact, can’t be trusted. Hearts change. Other people get in the way. We often get in the way of ourselves. It’s heartbreaking to watch Ellis’ naivete fall by the wayside (all the more so because Sheridan, with his fresh, freckled face, is such a raw, authentic presence).

Mud, then, is a great yarn. But is it a great movie? I’m afraid not – especially if measured against Nichols’ previous features. Something’s off, and the most concrete element I can point to is the unwieldy structure. Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter both had a laconic inevitability to their pacing, whereas Mud is never quite able to find the right gear. Although Nichols wrote the original screenplay, it almost feels as if the movie has been laboriously adapted from a Great American Novel – one by Twain, maybe, or Faulkner. At more than two hours, Mud has more narrative offshoots than it knows what to do with. While they’re all thematically of a piece – you understand why Nichols wanted to include them – they also slow down the narrative momentum.

There are other problems. Witherspoon doesn’t work, and I’m not sure if it’s because she can’t dim her star wattage the way McConaughey does or because Nichols doesn’t give her any real knockout moments (it’s probably a combination). And while there are at least two stabs at cheap drama in the final third, for the life of me I can’t understand why nothing is made of the moment when the boat comes down from the tree. Nichols could have made something magical of that, but it inexplicably occurs offscreen. Still, I liked Mud. What’s frustrating is feeling as if I could have loved it.

Based on a true story – the movie cheekily pauses to remind us of this near the end, when things have reached a new level of absurdity – Pain & Gain centers on Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a Miami gym trainer who thinks of himself as a ripped Horatio Alger hero. Daniel describes America as the “most buff, pumped-up country on the planet” and he sees it as a land of opportunity for an ambitious, hard-working guy such as himself. It isn’t long before he has tripled the number of members at the gym and earned a promotion, but that still isn’t enough to support the lifestyle he desires. And so he concocts a scheme to kidnap one of his rich clients, deli magnate Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), and extort his fortune. For this he recruits a dim-witted fellow lifter named Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and an ex-con named Paul (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) who found Jesus in jail yet is fairly easily talked into riding shotgun.

It turns out that for all his bravado about working hard, Daniel takes shortcuts (before coming to the gym, he was convicted for his involvement in a finance scam). This kidnapping plot is his biggest shortcut – and ironically involves a lot of work – yet it’s still something decidedly different than the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps effort of American myth. It’s the easy way to the “top.”

This is the underlying theme to Pain & Gain, which was written by the team of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, previously known for their work on the Chronicles of Narnia franchise, of all things. Each of the main characters has been duped into believing that the American dream is easily attainable – if you’re willing to cheat here or there. Adrian is an Adonis, but steroids have a lot to do with that. Paul buys into religion as the quickest path to personal peace, but then he’s hit on by his priest (in one of the movie’s handful of homophobic touches). Even Sorina (Bar Paly), the stripper who plays a tangential part in the scheme, has come to the United States from Bucharest mainly because she saw Pretty Woman. Success in America is as simple as going shopping with Richard Gere. As it proceeds and Daniel’s perfect plan begins to ridiculously unravel, Pain & Gain deflates these myths one by one.

Pain & Gain speaks incisively and hilariously to the graveyard of dreams that is post-recession America.

What does Bay bring to all of this? Before he started banging robots around for a living with the Transformers pictures, Bay specialized in creating the sort of empty Hollywood dreams to which a guy like Daniel Lugo aspired. Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon – these were macho action fantasies that pushed cheap sex, fast cars and big explosions to eager, indiscriminating audiences. Does the fact that Pain & Gain exposes the shallowness of these things mean Bay has had a change of heart? I suppose that’s possible, but it really doesn’t matter. The movie doesn’t need his heart, just his huckster touch. He can sell the hell out of a hedonistic vision to the point of self-parody, thereby capturing the utter vacuousness at its center. Aside from The Island, I’ve detested Bay’s films, but Pain & Gain puts his particular skill set to such ironic purpose that I can’t help but wonder if this movie is the reason he was put on this earth.

That’s something of a back-handed compliment, so let me also give Bay some straightforward praise: Pain & Gain is very funny, and much of the laughs come from a camera zoom or a slow-motion riff at just the right moment. The movie opens with a shot of Daniel doing some insane sort of sit-up while hanging from a bar on the side of a building. As he urges himself on – “I’m hot! I’m big!” – Bay cuts to a camera that’s strapped to his chest so that we follow Daniel’s face as he swings himself up and down. Bay doesn’t just watch these fitness fanatics; he comically puts us inside the burn.

Of course that moment also works because of Wahlberg, who I’m starting to realize should be thought of as a comedian first (see The Other Guys and Ted for evidence). Johnson and Mackie have nice moments, but they hit their punch lines hard. Wahlberg is effortless. Daniel is a fast-talking con man who’s ultimately trying to pull one over on himself. It’s hilarious to watch Daniel whip himself up into a frenzy of self-confident hysteria or bizarrely bask in the spoils of his success. After they get their hands on Kershaw’s money, Adrian and Paul celebrate with women. Daniel nearly humps Kershaw’s speedboat, which he now owns.

This isn’t to say Wahlberg gives a strictly comedic performance. He brings a real darkness to Daniel as well, one that rears its ugly head when the kidnapping plot doesn’t quite go as planned. It’s very easy for Daniel to segue into murder because, after all, the victims are standing in the way of the dream he deserves. Early on, in a bitter speech of justification to Shalhoub’s kidnapping victim, Daniel reveals a perversely vindictive sense of righteousness, one that could also be felt in certain elements of the Occupy movement. “I don’t just want everything you have,” he tells Kershaw. “I want you not to have it.”

I know, I know. Why am I referencing the Occupy movement when writing about a Michael Bay movie? You may not believe it until you see it, but Pain & Gain absolutely hums with contemporary relevance. Like Daniel and his gang, many Americans in the pre-recession era were sold the line that their dreams were just a shortcut away. All it took was one great dot-com idea to become a billionaire. All we had to do to get that McMansion was sign on the dotted line. A quick way to win the war on terror? Take out Saddam. But the bills have come due – Iraq was $1.7 trillion, to say nothing of the human cost – and now we’re being forced to pay. The gain is gone. The pain is here.

Written and directed by Carruth, who also stars, Upstream Color opens on a shadowy figure (Thiago Martins) collecting strange bugs from the bottom of flower pots. They’re used to create a hypnotic drug of some sort, one that this mystery man uses to subdue and kidnap a woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) and put her under a spell. After a few days of having her sign over her bank accounts and drink lots of ice water, the man disappears, leaving Kris in a fog, unsure of what happened to her or where her money has gone.

Upstream Color is a cryptic drama in which nearly everyone lives under a vague suspicion of personal terror.

There’s more – let’s just say Thoreau’s Walden is a touchstone, pig surgery comes into play and Carruth eventually appears as a suitor for Kris who seems to live under a similar fog – but I’d rather not give away anything more. Not that further details would explain much. Like Primer, Upstream Color works on its own idiosyncratic wavelength, one that isn’t alienating, but isn’t quite approachable either. Carruth certainly leaves more room for interpretation this time around – much of the confusion over Primer came from the mechanics of its time-travel plot – yet Upstream Color is still one of those movies that’s more than content to leave its audience befuddled.

We’re left, then, to largely appreciate the movie’s form, which is an intricately elliptical collage of sound effects, lighting and, yes, color. As scenes and lines of dialogue begin to loop and repeat, along with sudden insert shots of blood rushing through veins and other biological functions, the film becomes downright experimental, as if a David Cronenberg film and a David Lynch one had been edited together.

That actually makes Upstream Color sound more intriguing than it actually is. I appreciated its audaciousness and creativity, but I can’t say those things compelled me to spend much time unearthing any layers of meaning. Certainly questions of identity and trust and reality are all at play, and in a fairly provocative way. But if Carruth is regarded as an enigmatic genius in some circles, his is a genius largely misunderstood by me.

Primer runs on the same sort of time-travel trippyness that drove 1985′s Back to the Future, but its inexplicability goes far beyond the pseudo science at its center. It’s not only that we don’t understand how time travel is supposed to work in the film (flux capacitors make no sense either). It’s that we also don’t understand things like the motives and objectives of the movie’s characters. Primer is inscrutable to the nth degree, and yet I still liked it.

The appeal, for me, has everything to do with the uncompromising way first-time writer-director-star Shane Carruth (working with a reported budget of $7,000) goes about his business. From its opening moments – of four friends chattering away over some home-made invention that’s laid out in a suburban garage – Primer proceeds without any obvious concern for its audience. Still wearing their white shirts and ties, as if they rushed directly from their day jobs to work on the project, these armchair scientists putter away and pore over data as if they’re on the verge of something big. And we believe they are, in part because of the portentous glow Carruth gives the most domestic of scenes. (The light streaming from the garage-door windows recalls nothing less than Close Encounters of the Third Kind, surely a touchstone).

Primer proceeds without any obvious concern for its audience.

All of this captures one thing: the excited hubbub of invention. Primer echoes the invention myth of Steve Jobs and Apple, yet keep in mind the movie came out in the wake of the dot-com bust of the early 2000s. Doom is in the air. Two of the friends – Aaron (played by Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) – break away from the others to pursue a promising new direction that suggests a form of time travel. Their invention works – I won’t even attempt to explain how – and at first they’re content to make a little money “predicting” the stock market. But who is ever content in a mad scientist movie?

This is where Primer becomes both more interesting and distancing. As things begin to unravel for Aaron and Abe, we understand this mostly from the general level of panic that seeps into their performances (as well as the occasional bleeding from the ear). We never quite understand how things have gone awry, or even what motivated Aaron and Abe to take on added risks. Primer tries to put the puzzle together with an explanatory ending – there’s a cryptic voiceover narration that comes in and out – but being pointed to a completed puzzle is not quite as fun as helping to complete one.

So yes, it rewards repeat viewings. And I’m OK with that, because unlike so many “mind-blowing” movie experiences, Primer never throws its audaciousness at you as a haughty challenge. This is the film it’s going to be – this is the conundrum Carruth wants to create – and there’s something admirable about that sort of commitment to one’s vision, no matter how convoluted. Not every trip back in time is a simple as hitting 88 mph in a DeLorean.

Would I feel the same way if I had seen the movie upon its 1957 release? Hard to say. Already a respected teleplay and stage production about a lone dissenting juror who methodically convinces his fellow citizens to acquit, 12 Angry Men was an immediate prestige picture that was nominated for three Academy Awards. But even then it must have felt, to some, like a harangue. Perhaps in 1957 it would have been even harder to admit to such a reaction. Perhaps the then-radical social message – which shouldn’t be dismissed – was valued over all else.

No matter the era, didacticism can often be the enemy of art.

No matter the era, though, didacticism can often be the enemy of art. When a movie insists on hammering a single point home, creativity falls by the wayside. Only volume matters. Everything in 12 Angry Men is loud. Fonda’s white suit, brightly marking him as the picture’s angel. Lee J. Cobb’s frothing racist, barking to the bitter end. The speech that the immigrant watchmaker (George Voskovec) gives about the meaning of democracy. In fact, 12 Angry Men has little dialogue or conversation. It’s mostly made up of exhortation.

Perhaps the stage is this story’s natural home (I haven’t seen it there myself). At least in live theater the drama could have some space, whereas director Sidney Lumet emphasizes the claustrophobia (notice the focus on the broken jury-room fan). Even an eye-rolling moment – like the one in which each juror slowly turns his back as a racist runs at the mouth – would likely work better on the stage, where such choreography is a more common part of the art form.

Mind you, I’m not calling for 12 Angry Men to be “opened up.” That’s hardly a guaranteed path to adaptation success. In fact, one senses that even if it became more cinematic, the movie would likely have been even more overbearing. 12 Angry Men opens with a portentous pan up the grand, exterior columns of the courthouse, and what follows is no less momentous. Watching the movie is like having one of those columns dropped on your head.