Grade: A-

J.J. Abrams might not have been able to revivify Tom Cruise’s “Mission Impossible” series, but he works wonders with Gene Roddenberry’s forty-year old space franchise, which has been in the doldrums for a while. “Star Trek” is a fast-paced, witty prequel to the sixties show, a top-flight modern adventure that even the most die-hard, protective Trekkers will swoon over. (See, I know enough not to say Trekkies.)

In that respect it’s miles ahead of the first “Star Trek” movie, Robert Wise’s turgid 1979 yawner that featured the original television cast and nearly killed the golden goose. 1982’s “The Wrath of Khan” rescued matters, but through the eighties and nineties the series settled into a benign mediocrity on both the big screen and the small one, until as the century turned it reached a nadir with “Nemesis” on the one hand and “Enterprise” on the other.

That’s why it’s a pleasure to report that Abrams and his cohorts have managed the near-impossible—fashioning a picture that’s not only an affectionate tribute to the original show but a successful rebooting of the whole franchise, which promises to take it into uncharted territory rather than merely repeating what’s gone before and plugging in holes along the way. The only thing it really lacks is the sort of humanistic message that was always built into the old shows and films; it’s not preachy in the way they usually were, going for sheer visceral punch and even closing with a big celebratory medal-pinning moment that can’t help but recall the close of the first “Star Wars.” But in these times the lack of a heavy-handed moral is probably a virtue.

The solution of writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman is to go back beyond the beginning, as it were, briefly but skillfully sketching Kirk and Spock’s childhoods—emotionally difficult in very different ways—before depositing them both at Star Fleet Academy in the persons of Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, where they aren’t exactly natural friends. They wind up together aboard the fleet’s new ship, the Enterprise, commanded by Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), in response to a distress call from Vulcan. And along for the ride are the young Uhura (Zoe Saldana), “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban), Sulu (John Cho) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin).

The mission brings them all into battle against Captain Nero (Eric Bana), a renegade Romulan out for vengeance against the Federation and equipped with a massive ship that boasts technology that’s literally futuristic and capable of destroying not just starships but whole planets. After Pike’s taken hostage by him, Kirk and Spock joust over the proper way to proceed and Kirk winds up on a barren ice planet where he encounters not only master technician Scotty (Simon Pegg) but the older, wiser Spock (Leonard Nimoy), who effectively explains the plot to us via mind-meld.

To be honest, the procedure works better with young Kirk than it does with the audience; at least for this viewer—admittedly not a particular devotee of the previous franchise incarnations—all the discussions of time warps, black holes, red matter and the like are pretty impenetrable. But it doesn’t really matter, because Abrams keeps things percolating so excitingly that the action scenes and great effects will grab you even if you’re not entirely clear about why things are happening as they do. The prologue—in which Kirk’s father meets an untimely demise at Nero’s hand—is a smashing opening, and later there’s an exhilarating parachute drop by Kirk and Sulu onto a huge space drill, followed by an equally fine fight scene involving them and two fearsome Romulans. And the final act is a doozy, although one might question Kirk’s sojourn on that ice planet, which not only features an encounter with a creature that’s frankly the worst CGI idea in the picture but derives from a decision by Spock that’s not just illogical but frankly despicable.

Still, it does bring in Nimoy, who anchors the picture just as Alec Guinness did “Star Wars,” bringing a gravitas to the story that balances beautifully against the higher spirits of the younger actors. And against all odds they’re uniformly fine, channeling the old cast and toying with echoes of the characters’ established personas (Bones’s gruffness, Sulu’s swordplay, Spock’s catch-phrases, Chekov’s accent) without sending them up. Pine makes a stalwart hero, less stiff than the young Shatner was, and Quinto is just as good as a Spock who’s not yet fully mastered his human side. Urban, Saldana and Cho are all strong, and Pegg—who one might have feared would go too far over the top—adds humor without too much mugging. But the standout might be Yelchin, who gives Chekov an ebullience that’s infectious.

Among the others Bana is a solid villain—he brings a lot of Ricardo Montalban’s Khan to Nero—and Greenwood makes a stern but avuncular Pike. The supporting players deliver down the line, with Ben Cross and Winona Ryder (of all people) fine as Spock’s parents and Chris Hemsworth and Jennifer Morrison equally good as Kirk’s. And they’re all set within a solid technical production courtesy of designer Scott Chambliss and art director Keith P. Cunningham, set off by expert camerawork by Dan Mindel and sharp editing by Mary Jo Markey and Maryann Brandon, which helps the picture to actually seem shorter than it is. Even the costumes—discreetly updated by Michael Kaplan—are a plus. Only Michael Giacchino’s score seems a mite too bombastic.

But the success of Abrams’s “Star Trek” really goes beyond this movie, which remains essentially true to the wide-eyed spirit of Roddenberry’s vision while excising the geeky quality that clung to later installments of the series. The way it ends—with the young versions of the familiar characters facing a changed universe from the one their former incarnations did—can help insure that future additions won’t be mere remembrances of times past but genuinely new adventures with unexpected twists and turns. I think it’s fair to say there will be plenty of them, and if they maintain the quality of this initial outing, they’ll be voyages well worth taking.

Grade: A-

Guillermo del Toro has won renown for a succession of solid—and successful—genre pictures (“Mimic,” “Blade II,” “Hellboy”), but while they’ve been unusually stylish audience-pleasers, it’s his more personal work that’s been truly impressive. His 1993 vampire picture “Cronos” and even more his extraordinary 2001 ghost story “The Devil’s Backbone” have been among the most haunting and evocative films to come from any director in recent years.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” joins them. It’s an astonishingly inventive portrait of childhood fears and hopes, an eerily beautiful modern fairy tale that truly merits the overused adjective magical. But it’s not a fairy tale in the toothless Disney sense; it’s one of the true Brothers Grimm sort—dark, frightening and intense—a fairy tale for adults.

In a way the film is a feminine counterpart to “Backbone.” In the earlier film, a young boy must survive a stay in a Spanish orphanage during the Civil War of the 1930s—a place threatened by fascist forces and housing not only some cruel and avaricious staff members but vengeful spirits as well. But “Labyrinth” is also a hallucinatory variant on “Alice in Wonderland.” Here the time is slightly later (1944), when a young girl named Ofelia (solemn, serious Ivana Baquero), a devotee of fantastic tales, comes with her ill mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) to a remote outpost where her brutal stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), is leading a troop of Generalissimo Franco’s army trying to stamp out continuing guerrilla resistance. Exploring the area, Ofelia comes upon an ancient labyrinth, within which she meets the Greek god Pan (Doug Jones in an elaborate mask), who informs her that she is a princess who long ago left her underground kingdom for the realm above and died there, leaving her father grieving her absence and awaiting her return. Pan tells Ofelia that she must complete three tasks in order to return to her home and her father, and she embraces the challenge.

The tasks take Ofelia into a phantasmagorical world populated by extraordinary creatures (most notably a lean and hungry figure called the Pale Man, also played by Jones) and the intricately-designed and executed giants insects del Toro favors. But the fantasy elements are intertwined with several other plot threads, including Ofelia’s efforts to cure her bedridden mother, whose pregnancy is threatened by her illness, and by Vidal’s take-no-prisoners effort to trap the band of local resistance fighters—a mission that also involves his courageous housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdu) and the local doctor (Alex Angulo).

What’s most remarkable about “Pan’s Labyrinth” is the dexterity with which del Toro shifts between the “real” world and Ofelia’s fantastical one. Of course, part of the explanation is that the film’s portrait of 1944 Spain itself has the nightmarish quality of a dark fantasy, and in Vidal it has a figure as monstrous as those found in the girl’s underground world. The two realms merge and blend almost imperceptibly, so that the picture draws you effortlessly into its strange, bewitching ambience.

Of course, achieving that result is no accident. It’s to be explained not only by del Toro’s sensitive writing and carefully calibrated direction, but from the extraordinary work of production designer Eugenio Caballero, costumer Lala Huete, and especially visual effects supervisor Everett Burrell and special effects and makeup supervisors Ryes Abades and David Marti. Together they’ve achieved an otherworldly feel that suffuses not just the “fantasy” sequences—though they are amazing—but the entire film. Praise is also due Guillermo Navarro, whose cinematography uses soft orange and blue pastels to enhance the atmosphere of the different narrative locales, and Javier Navarrete and Martin Hernandez, whose score and sound design work together to complement the mesmerizing visuals.

And the cast fit beautifully into the whole. Baquero makes a sturdy heroine who easily earns the audience’s empathy, while Lopez creates an engrossing portrait of pure villainy. Verdu provides an energetic portrait of real-life courage, and Gil one of touching fragility. But perhaps the performer most integral to the picture’s success is the heavily made-up Jones, who exhibits the physical grace of a dancer in bringing his unusual characters to life.

In the final analysis, however, it’s the vision of Guillermo del Toro, and his uncanny ability to realize it onscreen, that are the keys to this “Labyrinth.” A visual feast that also carries surprising emotional weight, it’s an unsettling child’s fantasy that’s also an adult horror story, and a film of such stunning imagination that it leaves most mega-budget effects spectaculars in the dust.