Here’s the oddest element in this tale of Hollywood fine-tuning run rampant: the movie is pretty good — the summer’s most urgent, highest-IQ action picture.

The action is plentiful and thumping; Marvel-size thrills await you and the generations of kids who still believe in Superman. I just mean that the movie finds its true, lofty footing not when it displays Kal-El’s extraordinary powers but when it dramatizes Clark Kent’s roiling humanity. The super part of Man of Steel is just O.K.; but the man part is super.

It is intensely raunchy and silly and joyous and tapped right into my inner teenager in a glorious way.

Some moviegoers may opt for an easier cinematic pleasure than this carefully crafted, discomforting look at familial misery in hyper drive, but it is the most provocative movie about parenting I’ve seen since "The Kids Are All Right."

The slight but captivating indie-comedy The Kings of Summer has the ragtag look and feel of a movie made in some teenager’s basement

Running, or stumbling, only 90 minutes, After Earth may lack the neck-swiveling awfulness of Shyamalan’s "The Last Airbender," but it quickly sinks in its logorrheic solemnity. The movie makes "Oblivion" seem as jolly a romp as "Spaceballs," and gives neither Shyamalan nor Smith much to smile about.

Bravely and with penetrating intelligence, Before Midnight elevates instead the practical, a partnership: frayed by disappointment, worn by time, but for the very luckiest—which we sincerely and selfishly hope includes Jesse and Celine—durable for the long day’s journey into night.

The Hangover Part III gives off such a stench of creative decay that it hardly seems possible that even Phillips or his co-writers have any use for the movie themselves. If a movie can be self-loathing and self-destructive, it’s this one.

The collision of violent spasms and art-film ennui leave the viewer’s brain bloody but unfilled.

Furious 6 is even cooler and more aerodynamically delirious than its predecessor, if such a thing is even theoretically possible.

This series will survive as well, until 2016 — when, you can bet, there will be a third Star Trek to celebrate the TV show’s 50th anniversary. Here’s hoping that those three years will bestow a measure of maturity on all concerned: Kirk and his bright curators too.

The actors emote up a summer storm. Maguire’s otherworldly coolness suits the observer drawn into a story he might prefer only to watch. DiCaprio is persuasive as the little boy lost impersonating a tough guy, and Mulligan finds ways to express Daisy’s magnetism and weakness.

This Mafia tale doesn’t aspire to the heights of a "Godfather" or the epic sprawl of "The Sopranos." Vromen and cowriter Morgan Land are content to bring subtle shadings to the tale of a strange man in a dirty business.

Besides rehabbing a hero who overcomes anxiety to save the world and defeat the terror-industrial complex by the simple matter of cloning his body armor, the movie proves that there’s still intelligent life on Planet Marvel. As you’re propelled out of the theater on IM3′s hydraulic lift of pleasures, you’re likely to say, “That is how it’s done.”

Nair sleekly manages the story’s thriller aspects, especially the kidnapping. But this is a character study, and she has found some superb actors to fill it.

Glorious vision of youth and truth, love and loss, your name is Mud.

It's like a giant sculpture that is so strange and off-putting, it's instantly, intriguingly post-modern. Swept up in the film's pile-driving self-assurance, even Bay-haters may absorb the pain to enjoy the gain.

In space, Jack hopes, someone may hear you dream. But in a movie theater, no one will see you yawn.

Boseman is not a hugely close physical match to Robinson, except for perhaps in the power he conveys, but he’s a great choice to play the ball player, unfamiliar enough, despite a decade of small credits here and there, to feel like an athlete, not a movie star playing one.

A devious mind game, Trance is also the most entertaining smart movie so far this year.

The Place Beyond the Pines can’t be said to be anyone’s movie but Cianfrance’s. Structured as a triptych, the movie is novelistic, earnest and somewhat exhausting — an ambitious effort that tries to be many things. And it is definitely something: a sprawling, engaging study in fathers, sons and sins.

An action figure with a sweet core, Johnson can pump up the humanity of any franchise, whether he’s playing a stepdad who becomes a hero in Journey 2 or, as here, a stud soldier who treats Flint and Jaye like his grown children and shepherds them through peril. Following those younger Joes, the Retaliation audience is encouraged to clamber up on Johnson’s huge soldiers and go along for a pretty cool ride.

With a welcome mixture of juice and grit, the movie dramatizes the lingering conundrums of young people in the time of the Vietnam morass.

Maybe they’re all right. Or wrong. It can’t be settled. What matters is that people are still crazy about the beauty of a beautiful movie about going crazy.

It’s "Identity Thief" with flying piranhas, or Plains, Trains & Automobiles on foot.

While Admission remains the story of a woman who comes to question her past choices and jeopardize her career, the movie version is lighter, fluffier and dramatically inert.

Ginger & Rosa never matches the freshness of its young star.

Beyond the Hills may be the best movie no one will want to see in 2013.