Weekend Movie Forecast: Star Trek Or...Oh, Just See Star Trek

J.J. Abrams's "reboot" of the creaky Star Trek franchise is currently rocking a 96% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and we're not dissenting. After catching a preview screening earlier this week, we've got to hand it to Abrams: the man knows how to make a solid action movie. Thrilling from the very first explosive sequence, his origins story is less concerned with fulfilling every little plot point on the Trekkie wish-list than it is with yanking audiences on a kinetic, deep space adventure. It's pure, well-crafted escapism on a level that Hollywood seems mostly incapable of delivering these days. Let's just say he had us at "Sabatoge." Or as Christopher Orr at the New Republic puts it: "In his daft, dizzy reinvention of a moribund franchise, Abrams has found a way to be referential without being reverential, to conjure nostalgia without being constrained by it. He may play fast and loose with the world he's been bequeathed, but at least the movie he gets out of it is itself fast and loose." — Gothamist

John Del Signore

Published May 8, 2009

Modified May 8, 2009

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Click on the film stills above for more on this week's new releases and repertory screenings, which also include Adoration, Rudo y Cursi, Julia, Next Day Air, Little Ashes, Outrage, Objectified, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, The Garden , After the Rehearsal, Some Like It Hot, and The Big Lebowski.