After turning it over in my brain a bit, I think I've come up with an analogy for why Star Trek Into Darkness proves so disappointing as the second entry in J.J. Abrams's rebooted Trek film franchise. Bear with me a moment while I set this up: (Warning: Spoilers Follow)

There are many ways to describe Baz Lurhmann's directing style, but "restrained" sure as hell isn't one of them. From Strictly Ballroom to Australia, each of the Aussie auteur's films embrace emotional and cinematic excess in grand, borderline ridiculous ways. That makes him an unlikely, but also inspired choice to tackle an adaptation of a Great NovelTM like F. Scott's Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a text so revered that movie versions can become ossified by their own self-importance. That's what happened to the last Gatsby flick, the 1974 Robert Redford/Mia Farrow tour-de-boredom that was so respectful of Fitzgerald's text that it transformed his vibrant novel into a pretty, but inert soap opera.

Over the course of building Phase 1 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Studios developed a house style for their blockbuster comic book movies that included a bright color palette, a light tone (particularly compared to their Distinguished Competition's more somber wares like Chris Nolan's Batman trilogy and Bryan Singer's self-serious Superman) that made room for plenty of humor amidst the derring-do, villains with a lot of firepower (but not much menace) and straightforward stories that lobbed few curveballs at the audience. What's interesting about Iron Man 3, which kicks off Phase 2 of the MCU, is that it very deliberately goes about blowing up Marvel's house style... along with the house of its signature hero, Tony Stark -- played, as always, by Robert Downey Jr. That particular point isn't a spoiler, since it's been heavily featured in the movie's many trailers and teasers. However, in order to really get into why IM3 represents such a departure (at least for a little while) from the Marvel status quo, I'm going to have to get into more specific detail about what incoming writer/director Shane Black (taking over from franchise starter, Jon Favreau) has in store for Tony and his armored alter ego without, of course, giving the whole game away. So here's a Spoiler Warning for anyone who has an ironclad resolve to go into the theater without hints of any kind.

Serious question: When was the last time John Cusack smiled in a movie? Hot Tub Time Machine? High Fidelity? Grosse Point Blank? Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was as far back as One Crazy Summer. It's surprising -- not to mention more than a little sad -- how one of the most charismatic actors from my generation's formative moviegoing years has grown up to become a middle-aged grump who sleepwalks through lackluster thrillers with generic titles like The Raven, The Factory and, now, The Numbers Station. Cusack's glum visage immediately lays a wet blanket over Danish director Kasper Barfoed's English-language debut, scripted by former video game producer, F. Scott Frazier, and keeps it firmly in place until the final fade-out.

As improbable as it might sound, Pain & Gain is Michael Bay's attempt a Coen Brothers picture -- his Fargo or Burn After Reading if you will. Like both of those films (which rank amongst my own personal favorite Coen-made movies), Pain & Gain is a dark comedy about a group of very dumb, very greedy, very selfish and all-around not very nice people who apply their distinct lack of smarts and skills to crime and wind up failing spectacularly. But where the Coens were only kidding about Fargo being based on a true story, Pain & Gain's claims to legitimacy aren't manufactured. The crime dramatized here really did go down in Miami in the mid-'90s and while details have almost certainly been altered to fit Bay's glossy, hedonistic vision, Pain & Gain is, funnily enough, probably more historically accurate than the director's recreation of Pearl Harbor.

Ten years ago, French filmmaker François Ozon scored an art-house hit with Swimming Pool, a supremely entertaining thriller and still one of the best movies about novelists and authorship in recent memory. After a decade of highs (Ricky) and lows (5x2), Ozon makes a successful return to similar territory with In the House, which again uses the act of writing as the launching pad for a thoughtful, deftly plotted mystery.

Two movies into his feature filmmaking career, Joseph Kosinski has yet to establish a signature visual style or set of themes, but between TRON: Legacy and now Oblivion, he has provided us with a pretty good idea of what his dream house would look like. Trained as an architect before moving over into movies, Kosinski lavishes attention on the designs of his various worlds and has an obvious affection for structures that sport clean, sharp lines, have lots of open space (with plenty of glass windows) and are bathed in a harsh white light -- think Bauhaus meets a Williamsburg rave. Actually, your best reference point is probably the hotel room from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie that's stylistic impact on Oblivion is profound and all-encompassing. It takes brass balls to ape the various environments and props from Stanley Kubrick's seminal science-fiction favorite and act like it ain't no thang, but Kosinski goes about his extended homage with an obvious confidence that stems from his design background. And the results are there on screen: Oblivion looks fantastic, immersing audiences to a distant, post-apocalyptic future that's more authentic than most movies of its type. I like to imagine that Kosinski had his own Monolith positioned just next to the camera throughout the shoot, which he could occasionally reach over and touch for inspiration.

It's not fair to spend an entire movie comparing it to another film on the same subject that was never actually made. But as I sat there watching the new Jackie Robinson biopic 42, I couldn't help measuring it against the version of the Robinson story that Spike Lee and Denzel Washington spent years trying to get off the ground before they were relieved by writer/director Brian Helgeland. Knowing Lee's penchant for provocation, his Jackie Robinson movie almost certainly would have been more confrontational -- and less commercial -- than the studio funding it would have liked. And, to be honest, there's no guarantee that it would have succeeded artistically; after all, as terrific a talent as Lee is, his stats are inconsistent with big wins like Do the Right Thing and He Got Game sitting alongside such heartbreaking losses as She Hate Me and Summer of Sam. But, win or lose, Lee's 42 would almost certainly have been more interesting than Helgeland's 42, which takes a crucial piece of sports and social history and treats it with kid gloves, substituting Hollywood gloss for real-world grit.

If you're not already a card-carrying member in the cult of Terrence Malick, I'm not sure that I'd use To the Wonder as a recruitment tool, as this slender wisp of a romantic drama represents both the director's simplest, yet strangely most complex work to date. Gone are the beautifully rendered period backdrops that defined Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The New World, as well as the grand cosmic questions that fueled his last, most divisive film, The Tree of Life. Instead, much like his debut feature, Badlands (recently re-issued in a must-own Criterion Blu-ray edition), Wonder is the small-scale story of two people in love, whose affair is destined to end badly. But where Badlands recounts a relatively straightforward narrative (for Malick, anyway), Wonder pushes his late-career trend towards abstraction and ellipticism well past what may be the breaking point for most viewers, even amongst his most devoted fans. It's not necessarily a difficult film to watch, but it does prove somewhat difficult to love.

I don't have much to say about the Evil Dead remake that's opening in theaters today. It's a film that Hollywood has been threatening to produce for years and finally did and the final result is... fine. Neither an epic fail nor a bold reimagining that tops the original, Evil Dead 2.0 is content to go about its business with minimal fuss and maximum gore for its slender 91-minute runtime. And I suppose that's all Sam Raimi -- who produced the film along with fellow Evil Dead veteran Bruce Campbell and personally handpicked its director, Fede Alvarez -- really wanted from this unnecessary remake of the 1981 bloodbath that launched his career: a movie that kept the brand name alive without taking any significant creative risks that might scare away mainstream audiences and studios. I walked out of the movie moderately entertained, but also wondering "Is that all there is?"