"Star Trek Into Darkness" has all of the components to be an awesome summer movie spectacular. It has J.J. Abrams, the energetic blockbuster director who revived the franchise back in 2009 and had one of the best summer movies just two years ago with "Super 8." The spirited cast hasn’t lost any of its fun liveliness since the first installment, and the special effects-driven action is still as breathtakingly intense as it is breathtakingly gorgeous.

With all of that in place, it would seem the sequel’s phasers would be all set to stun. But something’s off. There’s a sequence where the starship Enterprise is flying at warp speed when a big, clunky-looking vessel comes up from behind and nudges it off its exhilarating track. That’s pretty much "Star Trek Into Darkness" in a nutshell, except replace the big, clumsy vessel with a big, clumsy story.

Captain, I detect spoilers throughout the rest of this review.

After breaking the Prime Directive on a fun, frenzied and emotionally full-gear opening mission, Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) arrive back home to demotions. Their punishments are short-lived, however, as a Starfleet agent-turned-terrorist named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) attacks his former organization, killing Kirk’s captain and fatherly mentor (Bruce Greenwood) in the process.

The attacks leave Kirk and the rest of Starfleet hungry for revenge. They track Harrison to a planet deep inside Klingon territory, causing the head of Starfleet ("RoboCop" star and Stevens Point native Peter Weller) to send Kirk and company off to bring Harrison to brutal justice. However, hastily barging into Klingon territory would almost certainly ignite a war between the two tense intergalactic rivals. If this sounds vaguely similar to 9/11 and the War in Iraq, the pre-end credit dedication to post-9/11 war veterans would seem to confirm that the bizarre allegory is no accident.

While Kirk’s original orders were to carpet bomb Harriso…

Director Baz Luhrmann is an auteur of over-the-top excess. An overload of edits. An overload of camera tricks. An overload of flashy, colorful, loud melodrama. If the first 10 minutes of "Romeo + Juliet" (which I’d still argue are unwatchable) or the first half an hour of "Moulin Rouge!" prove anything, it’s that Luhrmann has never met a frantic zoom, edit, close-up or glittering flourish he didn’t like.

No, nuance or subtly isn’t really Luhrmann’s game, but in the past, his hectic, overblown grandiosity always seemed to match the overblown grandiosity of his film’s emotions. Say what I will about the craziness of the first half of "Moulin Rouge!," but by the end, it was damn difficult not to get caught up in the movie’s big, shamelessly heart-filled doomed romance.

Now there’s his rendition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s high school classroom classic "The Great Gatsby," done up as the big, loud extravagant 3-D summer blockbuster I doubt Fitzgerald had in mind when he wrote his time-honored critique of the vapid lifestyles of the rich and the growing emptiness of the American dream. The end result feels a bit too much like one of Gatsby’s parties: a whole lot of razzle dazzle with a hollow emotional core.

Beneath all the sparkle and 3-D pizzazz, the story, adapted by Luhrmann and co-writer Craig Pearce, is essentially the same from when you read it back in high school. Wide-eyed innocent Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) recalls his life amongst New York City’s filthy rich during the Roaring Twenties. In one of the few glaring deviations from the book, our mentally tormented narrator tells his story upon recommendation from a psych ward doctor, a clumsy frame story that rings awfully similar to "Moulin Rouge!."

He writes glowingly about his West Egg neighbor, the mysterious, enigmatic and ever-hopeful Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). After attending one of Gatsby’s legendary parties, Nick is recruited to reconnect his host with his long-lost love Dais…

The first question I had walking out of "The Avengers" last summer was, "How freaking awesome was that?" The second question – a bit more difficult to answer – was, "How is any comic book superhero movie ever going to be able to compete with that?"

After all, "The Avengers" pulled off the impossible, combining several characters, storylines and years of anticipation into a shockingly satisfying summer blockbuster that managed to be just as good as the sum of its costumed parts. Seeing all of our heroes fight and interact together on the big screen turned out to be just as wondrously nerd-gasmic as we hoped. How could audiences go back to watching just another superhero movie?

Pretty easily, as it turns out. "Iron Man 3" may not fly as high as its star-studded combo platter predecessor, but it makes for a great start to the summer, as well as to Marvel Studios’s dorkily named Phase Two.

Robert Downey Jr. returns as metal-encased billionaire playboy Tony Stark, fresh off of his dramatic rescue of New York City in "The Avengers." Though the heroics made for great cinema, he’s still haunted by his near-death experience, tinkering incessantly with his numerous Iron Man suits and suffering from occasional anxiety attacks. His continually evolving humanity – for better or worse – is also fraying his sweetly snippy romance with Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Memories of New York aren’t the only demons from Tony’s past making an unwelcome comeback. Aldrich Killian – once an awkward, crippled science nerd teased and taunted by Stark in an amusing ’90s prologue, scored by Eiffel 65’s "Blue" (Da Ba Dee)" – returns in the form of the handsome, slick-haired Guy Pearce, flaunting a new regenerative treatment called Extremis.

Meanwhile, a terrorist of by the name of the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley, half hilarious and half terrifying) is hijacking television signals for public executions and initiating suicide bombings across the U.S. leaving a frustrating lack of…

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance made a nice name for himself back in 2010 with his indie depression-fest "Blue Valentine." The film told the story of a collapsing married couple – mixed with flashbacks to their cute origins for maximum tragic effect – with such brutal honesty and intimacy that the MPAA almost gave it a NC-17 rating basically because it was too painful to watch.

His follow-up, "The Place Beyond the Pines," represents a massive leap for the young director. The movie still has the intimacy that made "Blue Valentine" so emotionally potent, but it’s also a big, bold crime epic, tracing its way across two generations through multiple storylines.

Its lofty aspirations come with their share of flaws, but they also come with a sense of exhilaration. To borrow a phrase from one of the film’s costars, it rides like lightning but avoids crashing like thunder.

"The Place Beyond the Pines" tells three intertwined stories of fathers and sons connected through the consequences of their choices. Cianfrance favorite Ryan Gosling stars as Luke, a star stunt motorcycle driver for a travelling carnival. While the carnival makes a routine stop in Schenectady, New York (the origins of the town’s name gives the film its title), he reconnects with a fling from the past (Eva Mendes) who, unbeknownst to Luke, is raising his child.

When he finds out about his secret son, he ditches the carnival in order to stay in Schenectady and support his son. Unfortunately, his only skill is driving motorcycles fast, an item that doesn’t impress on too many resumes. Under the tutelage of a loner mechanic (Ben Mendelsohn, continuing his streak of playing characters who don’t shower), Luke begins robbing banks, which sets him on a collision course with Officer Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper, who doesn’t show up until about the 45-minute mark).

Their dramatic meeting, thrillingly captured by Cianfrance, leaves Avery – the son of a politician – a shaken hero, as well as our …