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Serenity is the movie sequel to the much-beloved, ended much too soon US Fox television network science-fiction series "Firefly," with all the show's central characters, doing the same fine acting they did in Firefly.

And it's not just a sequel - it rises to the occasion to be a much better story than any of the individual episodes of Firefly.

Serenity's a luminous rebooting of Firefly, and you don't have to have seen a single episode of Firefly to enjoy it immensely. But those of us who knew and loved Firefly will love it more, because it's also more of what we loved and Fox took away from us.

Serenity, like Firefly, is a science fiction story with strong elements of westerns, spy movie intrigue, and lots and lots of spine-tingling action, and wry, irresistible humor throughout - the humor that comes from a cast that has incredible chemistry.

The plot begins with a half-western, half very high-tech bank heist which goes very much awry, then evolves into a cosmic spy drama centered on River Tam, the victim of terrible experiments on her brain committed by a secret, murderous agency of the tyrannical Alliance of Planets, which governs the colonies of a distant star settled by refugees from a dying Earth.

River Tam and her physician brother Simon are passengers on the starship Serenity, captained by Malcolm Reynolds, a Browncoat - veteran of the war between the Alliance and a confederacy of planets who resisted their overreach (along with his first officer, Zoe Washburn, who's also the wife of the Serenity's pilot).

Serenity's crew are the most entertaining bunch of smugglers and mercenaries in fiction, and why so many of us Firefly/Serenity fans wear brown coats. I won't spoil the plot for you - enjoy it for yourself. Then get a brown coat.

The idea behind this original film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's classic science-fiction novel "Solaris" is sound: the idea that humanity finds at the furthest end of its exploration of space... a mirror, so that people are forced to see themselves and stop avoiding the things they'd rather forget.

Once the viewer (my wife and I watched it together as we both speak Russian) gets past the tedium which the screenwriters inject into the plot to make it LESS interesting (what I meant by an "anti-adaptation" of the original novel), then yes, that point is made, and made very powerfully.

Nothing's wrong with Solaris that cutting thirty to fifty minutes of very boring footage couldn't fix. In that respect, it far outshines George Clooney's Hollywood remake of Solaris, which actually put me to sleep - something the Mosfilm original didn't do.

A fine example of what ought to have been cut from the movie is the drive back from the dacha into town over what was probably intended to be a futuristic highway. I thought that concrete, elevated highways were super cool the first time I saw them, too, but as an adult I can say that the whole scene adds NOTHING to the movie - it's just tedium for tedium's own sake.

Just ignore scenes like that and hang around for the good stuff, when the psychologist actually lands on Solaris. THAT is worth all the boredom that comes before.