Danny Boyle’s sci-fi extravaganza Sunshine is rather obviously intended to be a sharply distinctive, rivetingly dynamic, genre-busting film. It’s really much more representative of a couple of modes well embedded in contemporary cinema. Sunshine is shaped by a driving, explosively punctuated energy and it evidences considerable borrowing from the movies’ recycling bin.

The Simpsons Movie opens with an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon. As it draws to its predictably grisly conclusion, we see that it is being shown in a movie theater to an audience that includes everyone’s favorite yellow family. Homer rises and complains, “I can’t believe we’re paying to see something we can see on TV for free! If you ask me, everyone in this theater is a sucker,” at which point he directs his finger at us and says, “Especially you!”

If there’s a world filmmaker of any repute less likely to sell out to Hollywood than Werner Herzog, I can’t think who it might be. Most widely known for a series of films with the temperamental actor Klaus Kinski (including Aguirre the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo), the German-born director has long had a reputation for fearlessness and dedication that sometimes seems to border on insanity, all in search of what he likes to call an “ecstatic truth.”