Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men is in the very loosest sense a science-fiction film, in that it takes place in the future, and is driven by a quandary both biological and scientific. Its bleak palettes, meanwhile, mark it as a dystopian drama. It’s also a political thriller, if a decidedly free-flowing and ramshackle one. Some of its action sequences, finally, rank among the year’s best, and certainly most flamboyantly staged.

After raking in just under $1 million during its limited Christmas holiday release, the film has enjoyed wide weekend frames of $10.1, $6.3 and $7.4 million — certainly nothing to sneeze at, but perhaps not quite the sort of breakout performance hoped for in the shadows of runaway family hit Night at the Museum and Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness. The good news is that with something approaching critical consensus (the film currently has an aggregate score of 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, compared to the 80 percent of this weekend’s number one advance ticket seller, the resurgent Dreamgirls), Children of Men has clearly lured a sizeable horde of filmgoers to the multiplexes. Once there, though, have they and will they be similarly wooed and moved by a movie that is a stylistic gem, but also one of deep thought, reflection and even denunciation? For the full, original review of the film, from FilmStew, click here. (Universal R, 109 minutes)