Such imagination! Luc Besson's VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS arrives

For those of us who've loved Luc Besson's earlier work -- La Femme Nikita, The Professional, The Fifth Element and Lucy -- the chance to see this filmmaker bounce back with another imaginative gem is too good to pass up. Bounce he does, and then some. His new VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS is a delightful, if a little too lengthy, adventure that puts the leaden and repetitive garbage of the Star Wars franchise to utter shame. It's ever so light on its feet, full of amazing visual effects and wonderfully weird creatures, even as it leads us into and through a hugely involved narrative so easily and richly that we follow along, lapping it up like the happy puppies we moviegoers remain when confronted with a space-travel/kids-adventure movie this clever and enchanting.

M. Besson (shown at left), bless his naughty little heart, also has some fun for the more sophisticated adults on hand. Take his sequence featuring Ethan Hawke as a space-age pimp, and Rhianna (shown below) as his most special "girl." Here, the latter shape shifts into just about every good-old-fashioned heterosexual male fantasy -- from school-girl to nurse to bondage queen and lots more -- and yet the movie remains so good-natured and welcoming that it never comes near betraying its deserved PG rating. (The violence, too, is distanced and quick; no wallowing in blood and gore here.)

And if the movie's plot is the usual piffle, its theme -- protecting all species and living in harmony (that's what the titular "City of Thousand Planets" is all about) -- is always worth considering.

The leading actors -- Dane De Haan and Cara Delavigne (above) - are just fine as sparring partners and would-be lovers, while Clive Owen (below) makes a perfectly nasty, irredeemable villain.

But it's the vast and amazing array of those other "species" that makes the movie so much fun. As adapted by Besson (from the French comic book by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières), the screenplay introduces each of these bizarre wonders and then spends just enough time with them so that we understand what they're about and what they need to accomplish -- before moving on to the next delight.

This makes the movie bounce along with surprising energy and incident, and just at that moment prior to our saying, OK enough, we're already on to another bit of wonderment. There are so many of these oddball creations that I'll just mention a couple here: the greedy, talkative trio of know-it-alls (above) who land our hero and heroine in and out of trouble, and the aggressive, non-stop alien "attack dog" (below) who gives our twosome quite the clever chase.

Especially lovely is the planet and its inhabitants (two photos below) who set the movie in motion and help conclude it in the kind of feel-good fashion that will please the kids, while providing the lovely beach (shown at bottom) where our twosome may someday honeymoon, if they're lucky.

Interestingly enough, neither Valerian nor his Laureline are anything approaching super-heroes. They are simply very good at what they do, while making the best use of the current technology at hand.

Consequently, I fear, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is simply too smart and too creative for our current dumbed-down audiences (and critics, too), not to mention our cretinous Trump followers who will demand much more violence and hatred than is on display here. (Besson's film is clearly pro-immigration.) So the movie may come and go without making much of a splash now. But like so much of M. Besson's work, it will linger to find an increasingly appreciative audience over time.

From STX Entertainment and running 2 hours and 17 minutes, the movie opens just about everywhere tomorrow, Friday, July 21. To see about a location near you and/or tickets for same, simply click here.

Streaming: Luc Besson is back with something different and delightful: THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADÈLE BLANC-SEC

We've been hearing about THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADÈLE BLANC-SEC -- the 2010 film directed, written and associate-produced by Luc Besson -- for several years now, always wondering: Will it ever be released over here? I think it was shown at FIAF in New York City some time back, and of course distributed in most of the rest of the countries around the world. But not here -- until it finally hit DVD in the USA last fall and is now available via Netflix streaming. It's an odd bird of a film, especially for someone known so well for his action movies as is Besson. Yet it has been received rather well throughout the world, and now that we have the chance to finally view "Blanc-Sec," it is easy to understand why.

What this famous French movie-maestro, shown at right, has done is to take the very earliest reason that so many of us folk grew up loving film -- the sense of wide-eyed, childlike spectacle and adventure that movies can provide -- and hand it back to us as adults. This works surprisingly well and so we lap it up all over again.

Set in the early 1900s, the film is lavish in its use of sets and costumes that beautifully whisk us back 150 years.

If the basic story is pretty paint-by-numbers -- intelligent adventuress gets involved in Egyptian tomb robbing, romance (rather one-sided) and a pterodactyl (this is the film's pièce de résistance), the execution of that story is done with such sprightliness and charm (not what you would call M. Besson's calling cards up until now) that we are easily carried along.

Truthfully, this movie is such a very odd compilation of story, style, events and special effects that it resembles little else (certainly little in Besson's catalog). The film it most calls to mind is Belpheghor: Phantom of the Louvre, though  Adèle is better than Belpheghor in every way. Its oddness is actually what keeps us amazed and amused. From the outset, as we watch an event of phaux physics taking place that results in the hatching of said pterodactyl, then take a trip to the Folies Bergère (above), go off for some Egyptian mumbo-jumbo that may bring to mind a female Indiana Jones, events are so fast, furious and far afield that we can only watch, open-mouthed and chuckling.

In the lead role, Besson has cast an upcoming actress, Louise Bourgoin (above, from The Girl from Monaco and Black Heaven) and then surrounded her with some current icons of French cinema -- from an unrecognizable Mathieu Amalric (below) to a nearly unrecognizable Gilles Lellouche (center, further below), among others. Everyone gets into the correct spirit of foolish fun and delivers the right kind of performance to keep the movie's tone on track.

The film boasts two expert pieces of special effect cinema played for all they are worth. One is that pterodactyl, a remarkable piece of work that will keep you glued to the screen, breathless and laughing at the same time. This big bird is a marvel that will scare, charm and finally even move you a bit. (I could find not a single photo of him, either, so you'll just have to watch the movie to see him in action!)

The second "wonder" is a unwrapped mummy -- eventually, an entire horde of them -- who come to life and prove quite the intelligent tourists in the Paris of two centuries past. The mummies are played as much for charm and humor as for any fright factor, and this decision was quite the smart one. I think that the late Ray Harryhausen, bless his special-effect soul, would have loved both these wonderful creations.

What Besson has done is to pretty much re-imagine family entertainment, giving the kids plenty to gape at and laugh at, while their parents get spectacles of another sort: costumes, sets, wittier humor and irony. And all this is live-action, remember.

Even if much of the film does resemble a cartoon, the style, tone and movie-making skills on display render it all into this very odd mixture of goofiness, charm, beauty and child-like delight.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec is available to view now via Netflix streaming & via Amazon Instant Video or DVD/Blu-ray.