I saw “Oslo, August 31st” last year at Cannes and found it powerfully affecting, but I never would have guessed that this small movie from a small country would have touched an international nerve the way it apparently has. In the wake of a breathless profile of doctor-turned-actor Lie and his supermodel wife, Iselin Steiro, in the New York Times’ style magazine — which made the film sound rather like a fashion accessory, or a handbook to Oslo architecture — I almost feel the need to dial back expectations a little. Yes, there are drugs and dance clubs and traveling shots but, honest to Pete, we’re not talking stylish, scenic, lovable hipster romp here, people. While “Oslo, August 31st” definitely has the dynamism and street-level energy of, say, an early Godard picture, and may indeed leave you eager to visit Norway, it’s first and foremost an intimate tragedy about a likable young man who has wandered off the path of life into some very dark woods, and isn’t necessarily finding his way back.

As in Trier’s equally wonderful first film, the 2006 “Reprise” — I’m pretty much the president of the cult on that one — the director is interested in exploring the existential dark side of Scandinavian social democracy, with its largely homogeneous character and devotion to equal opportunity. When I talked to Trier about that film, which featured Lie and Espen Klouman-Hoiner as a pair of arrogant, doomed aspiring novelists, he observed that in Norway “there are a lot of people with a lot of choices. It sounds wonderful but there’s a darker side to that. Lots of people are not dealing with those choices very well.” Anders in “Oslo, August 31st” is something like the worst-case outcome for Lie’s character in “Reprise”; he’s a guy from a loving, middle-class family who’s got looks, health, intelligence and education, but for unknowable reasons finds himself on the edge of middle age as a penniless, unemployable, supposedly recovering junkie.

Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt adapted their central premise from “Le Feu Follet,” a 1930s novella about alcoholism by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, but “Oslo, August 31st” could really be set anywhere at any time. It’s about the painful necessity of adapting to change, every single day that we’re alive, and if we identify with Anders even as we rage against his despair, it’s because every living human has at some point considered the possibility that it’s just too much and the struggle isn’t worth it. Anders is doing well in drug rehab, and has cautiously been granted a one-day leave to visit Oslo friends and apply for a job. But we can tell from the first moments of the film that his agenda is more complicated than that; Anders is in the position of a certain Danish prince, evaluating the reasons for being against the reasons for ceasing to be. (Trier, by the way, is cousin to another famous Dane, “Melancholia” director Lars von Trier, and one could argue their visions of the world are related as well.)

“Oslo, August 31st” runs a lean, mean 95 minutes, and not one second seems unimportant. Anders moves through the streets of Oslo looking for reasons to live and reasons to die, and even though we don’t know those streets as he does, we can tell that they’re haunted with memories and private agonies. The city is dotted with construction cranes and demolition sites, remorselessly regenerating itself while he appears to stand still. Indeed, Anders’ family home will soon be sold, and one of his personal missions is to pay a final visit. (The fluid, poetic cinematography is by Jakob Ihre.) He insults a prospective employer, refuses to make peace with his alienated sister, falls off the wagon — at first tentatively, and then enthusiastically — and leaves increasingly pathetic messages for his lost love, a woman who’s now in New York. (It’s the voice of Steiro, Lie’s real-life spouse.) On the other hand, he flirts with a younger girl who seems affectionate and charming, and who seems to open for him the promise of a new beginning. Their scene together at an Oslo swimming pool that has just closed for the season, so suggestive of both death and rebirth (and, literally, of baptism) is so gorgeous I wanted to cry. OK, I did cry, and that wasn’t the only time.

But none of that, not even the scenes where we feel that Anders is in imminent danger of taking his own life, are quite as painful as his visit with Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), an old friend and veteran of long literary discussions and booze-and-drug sessions. Thomas has a wife and a kid now, and his vices involve an occasional bottle of beer. In the manner of one-time bohemians who’ve more or less grown up, he’s kind of an ostentatious jerk about it — but then admits to Anders, when they’re alone, that he’s desperately unhappy. Perhaps that’s the “ordinary unhappiness” Freud wrote about, the unhappiness we all have to accept to get from the last day of August into the first day of September, in Oslo or anywhere else. But is that enough? Is that ever enough, for anybody? And can we forgive those who decide that it isn’t?

“Oslo, August 31st” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York, and June 1 at Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 and Laemmle’s NoHo 7 in Los Angeles, with more cities and DVD release to follow.

Yet, as usual with an Anderson movie, this meticulous and convincing detail does not add up to realism but — depending on your perspective — to something either much less or much more than that. Something that could be described, and has been, in all kinds of ways: As fantasy or fairytale; as a whimsical miniature under glass; as a diorama created by a brilliant, obsessive-compulsive child. All reasonable descriptions, at least up to a point — and I’m on board for all of it. I’ve pretty much been on Anderson’s wavelength from Day One — or at least from “Rushmore,” which isn’t quite Day One. That’s not the same thing as saying that I think all his movies work equally well, or that he doesn’t occasionally lapse into laziness or self-indulgence. (I’ll have to give “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” another chance one of these days, but I feel pretty confident that was a misstep.)

I understand why Anderson’s films drive some viewers nuts, in fact, and I would simply respond that it should be clear by now that his vision of cinema and the world is idiosyncratic and not to everyone’s taste and that there’s no point sitting around hoping he’ll become more normal. But here’s what I reject completely: The idea that the artificiality or hyperrealism (a better word, I think) of Anderson’s worlds — which is admittedly cranked up pretty high here — is fundamentally pretentious and insincere, or that it reflects some kind of “kidult” refusal of grown-up emotion. Yes, Anderson’s principal subject, and arguably his only subject, is the collision between the emotional lives of adults and children and the paradoxical tragicomedy it can so often produce. But if Anderson’s adults yearn for the comparative simplicity of childhood while his children long for the big, important feelings they believe (wrongly) go with growing up, that in itself is a distinctly adult perspective.

“Moonrise Kingdom” takes place at the tail-end of summer — that season which is more charged with a rueful sense of passage than any other. Its preteen lovers, Sam and Suzy (played by newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, respectively), most certainly aspire to the grand passions of Tristan and Isolde or Abelard and Heloise, and it’s entirely possible they’ve heard of them. They first met backstage during a performance of Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde” at the island of New Penzance’s only church, when Sam was in his Khaki Scout uniform and coonskin cap, and Suzy was wearing a bird costume. (The use of Britten, of all possible composers, as this film’s musical muse is wonderfully unlikely, and totally Andersonian.) After a hot and heavy epistolary romance, they conspire to run away together — as it happens (so we are told by on-screen narrator Bob Balaban), just three days before a major hurricane will hit New Penzance.

As irresistible as our young lovers are — Sam with his corncob pipe and camp-tested scouting skills, Suzy in her saddle shoes and with her dangerous pre-Lolita sexuality — this isn’t a movie about kids, and they are Potemkin protagonists. Against the certainty and clarity of the childhood world, we see the real heroes of New Penzance: Norton’s upright Scout Master Ward, who confesses his secret fears to a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the depths of the night; Bruce Willis’s Captain Sharp, the island’s only cop, who’s in love with Kara’s artsy, bespectacled mother, Laura (McDormand); Murray as the gentle, lawyerly Walt (Laura’s husband and Kara’s dad), who knows he is being cuckolded but can’t quite bring himself to do anything about it. All these lonely people are portrayed with wonderful delicacy and sensitivity, right in the middle of an artificial construction that contains plenty of shtick. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen Norton and Willis, in particular, be better than they are here.

Sam and Suzy’s tempestuous love affair, along with that looming act of God that’s boiling up out there in the Atlantic, will not merely bring all these people together but will give them an excuse to escape their everyday routine and their ingrained fears. In that sense, and in others too, “Moonrise Kingdom” is a deeply romantic film, perhaps the sweetest and most compassionate Anderson has ever made. What has evidently confused some viewers is the fact that it’s also an obsessively curated re-creation of an era that never quite existed, a meticulous storybook version of 1965 that’s more perfect than the original. In real life, Boy Scout tents of that era were made of canvas but were never yellow, and government social workers never wore Salvation Army-style uniforms, as Tilda Swinton’s officious character (whose only name appears to be “Social Services”) does here. And so on.

I suspect that people conflate the artificiality of Anderson’s movies with inauthenticity or insincerity (different things, to be sure) because his artificiality is obvious and worn on the surface, whereas the highly mannered films of, say, Martin Scorsese masquerade as realism. I’m not picking that example at random, by the way; Scorsese has identified Anderson as his favorite among younger American directors, I suspect because he sees a kindred spirit. The two men have very different aesthetics, but both are visionaries who see the world through a personal lens, and both are technical virtuosi concerned with managing every detail of their created universes. You’re free to prefer one director’s work to the other’s, of course, but “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas” are every bit as obsessed with style and production design as any Anderson film. (The cinematography in “Moonrise Kingdom” is by Robert D. Yeoman, who has shot all of Anderson’s live-action films. The production designer is Adam Stockhausen, the art director is Gerald Sullivan and the spectacular costumes are by Kasia Walicka-Maimone.)

To the extent that “Moonrise Kingdom” can be described as nostalgia, it isn’t personal nostalgia, since Anderson himself was not born until 1969. Very likely it’s an attempt to create a fantasy version of the lost world of his own parents. I wonder whether Scout Master Ward, when the magical summer of ’65 fades into memory, will get married, move to Texas and have a son. The island cabin of Walt and Laura feels like a creation out of a classic children’s novel, but it is imbued with the sadness of a failing adult marriage. In the third act, it feels like Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola get a little lost in plot shenanigans, and they introduce several extra characters (Jason Schwartzman, Harvey Keitel and Swinton all show up in small roles) to little effect. But all of “Moonrise Kingdom” — from Sam’s miniature stolen canoe to the Benjamin Britten excerpts to Captain Sharp’s heartbreaking bachelor trailer home — is a labor of love, as pure and sweet as the lovelorn letters of its young runaways. Wes Anderson can fool some people, maybe, but he’s not fooling me.

“Moonrise Kingdom” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.

Indeed, if the message of most classic Hollywood noir is that crime does not pay, one might say that the message of “Elena” is that crime is the only thing that pays, at least in the crude Darwinian universe of Putin-era Russia. While there are no overt politics in “Elena,” it’s a movie about the most pernicious forms of class warfare, made barely 20 years after the collapse of the regime that was supposed to end class warfare for good. That’s enough politics, and enough knife-edged Russian irony, for a dozen ordinary movies. I’m not claiming that Zvyagintsev feels this way, necessarily, but “Elena” put me in mind of the Russian witticism that’s been repeated in many varieties since 1991: Communism was a dreadful system, we had no food and no freedom. Nothing could possibly be worse than that — except maybe the way things are now.

Zvyagintsev isn’t an international art-house brand name the way Andrei Tarkovsky once was, and that probably isn’t possible these days. So I won’t pretend that “Elena” is likely to become a crossover smash. But it’s going to play quite a few North American cities (see below) and is a breakthrough movie after its own fashion, a mysterious existential thriller that’s brilliantly acted and masterfully directed, without a second of wasted screen time. There’s nothing especially cryptic or confusing or pretentious about it, and once you adjust to the long, hypnotic takes of cinematographer Mikhail Krichman and the almost wintry pace with which Zvyagintsev draws you in, this tale of a frumpy, heavy-set Mother Russia type in late middle age (the amazing Nadezhda Markina) who is driven to desperation becomes utterly absorbing.

Zvyagintsev’s previous two features, “The Banishment” and “The Return,” were staged in timeless, nonspecific settings that recalled Tarkovsky’s more allegorical works. “Elena” takes place in the 21st-century Moscow built by the post-Soviet Putin oligarchy, where the rich live in opulent, barren detachment and the poor are clustered in crumbling Brezhnev-era apartment buildings plagued by skinhead gangs and irregular electricity. In almost every indoor scene, some inane reality show is playing in the background, and while I know that sounds heavy-handed, it works perfectly here, both as realism and as a kind of symbolic shadow-play version of the main action.

Markina’s character, the eponymous Elena, has apparently risen in class late in life, after marrying a sour, elderly business tycoon named Vladimir (Andrei Smirnov, himself a well-known Russian director) whom she met when she was a nurse and he was a hospital patient. Both have children from previous marriages: Elena’s unemployed son Sergei (Aleksei Rozin) lives with his wife and two kids in grinding, despairing poverty, and her eldest grandson is on the verge of flunking out of school and ending up in prison or the army. Vladimir’s daughter Katya (Yelena Lyadova), on the other hand, is a decadent 30ish beauty who is only interested, as he drily puts it, in “the pleasurable things of life.” We meet her only briefly when she comes to meet Elena, but the character is so slinkily rendered that we can see it all: the parade of guys (and perhaps girls too), the drinking and drugs and long, long nights ending at dawn, the overwhelming boredom with herself and her rich dad and the world.

If you think you see where this is going, you’re both right and wrong. After suffering a devastating heart attack, Vladimir has a partial reconciliation with Katya and decides to leave her nearly all his fortune, despite her evident flaws as a money manager. Although he promises to provide for Elena with an unspecified annuity, he refuses her requests for emergency funds to save her errant grandson from the draft. (As we see in a terrifying interlude, by the way, said grandson may not be worth saving.) What happens next is, indeed, a series of noir-type plot points — but, again, that’s a bit like describing “Crime and Punishment” as a murder mystery. “Elena” absolutely has a plot, and one that will keep you guessing up to the last seconds, but the movie’s real point lies in the long and often wordless scenes that pull you along, stealthily, toward moments of revelation or coincidence.

When Vladimir goes to his posh gym for an afternoon workout, for example, we watch him ogling a younger blonde with that predatory rich-guy gaze. She notices, and returns his stare, and we know — because this is that kind of movie — that their paths will soon cross again. But how? Is she a gold digger? An upscale hooker? An entrapment device, placed by journalists or gangsters or government officials? In this world, no encounter is ever innocent of avarice or naked self-interest. Even stranger and more powerful is a scene aboard a train that Elena is riding, with many thousands of rubles in cash clutched nervously in her purse. The train bumps to a stop, and men in uniforms rush through the car. We see her visibly tense up — will she be the victim of a robbery on this voyage, above all others? — but what has actually happened is even odder, an almost dreamlike event that (I think) may actually be borrowed from a Chekhov or Tolstoy story.

“Elena” isn’t really a film noir, because those kinds of crime films always involve the iron application of Murphy’s law, in its most moralistic form: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, in order to punish the transgressor and restore the rightful order of things. In Zvyagintsev’s world, as in most classic Russian art and literature, the rightful order is non-recoverable. We live in a fallen world, and whatever could go wrong already did so, a long time ago. What Elena does is indefensible, certainly — but then, we don’t know what Vladimir did in the first place to become so rich that his daughter never has to work. Will Elena “get away with it”? I don’t know, but it’s not the right question. The truly terrible question asked by this quiet, haunting and magnificent film is: Dear God, isn’t there some better way to live?

“Elena” is now playing at Film Forum in New York. It opens May 25 in Los Angeles; June 1 in Boston; June 6 in San Jose, Calif.; June 8 in Miami, San Francisco, Portland, Maine, and Tallahassee, Fla.; June 15 in Portland, Ore.; June 22 in Houston and Washington; June 26 in Boulder, Colo.; June 29 in Wilmington, Del.; July 6 in Philadelphia; July 13 in Chicago, Denver and Seattle; July 20 in Minneapolis; July 27 in Salem, Mass.; Aug. 3 in Santa Fe, N.M.; and Aug. 10 in St. Louis, with other cities to follow.

As those who have seen Kore-eda’s wrenching 2004 near-masterpiece “Nobody Knows” are already aware, he has a remarkable ability to work with children, and also to capture the geographical and psychological landscape of childhood, where objectively minor events can have enormous significance. (Other titles from Kore-eda’s exceptionally varied oeuvre to check out: “Still Walking,” “After Life” and his 1995 feature debut, “Maborosi.”) In “I Wish” he captures the different worlds of two separated brothers, who both yearn (at least officially) to get their parents back together and reunite as a family. Koichi (Koki Maeda), aged around 12, is an introspective kid with a permanently stunned expression who’s on the edge of teenage alienation. He lives with his mom and grandparents on the southern tip of the island of Kyushu, in the shadow of the ash-spewing volcano Sakurajima. (A major eruption, he imagines, might be just the catastrophe required to undo the divorce.) His younger brother, Ryu (played by Koki’s real-life brother, Ohshiro Maeda), is an ultra-cute, gregarious kid who hangs with a posse of platonic girlfriends and lives with his kind but irresponsible indie-rock dad in the city of Fukuoka, about 175 miles to the north.

Kore-eda is often celebrated in international film circles as a throwback to the Japanese Golden Age of big-name directors like Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa — he has said his favorite is the lesser-known Mikio Naruse, director of “Late Chrysanthemums” and “Floating Clouds” — but there’s nothing forbidding or ascetic about the precise, bittersweet childhood world of “I Wish.” Indeed, according to Kore-eda, the initial inspiration came from the new bullet-train line (or “shinkansen,” in Japanese) that opened last year on Kyushu — and the first image that came into his head was that of the kids walking along the railroad track in “Stand by Me.” Indeed, “I Wish” possesses the tender intimacy, mixed with the slightest tinge of grown-up irony, of some of the very best tales of childhood adventure, from Stephen King to E. Nesbit to Truffaut’s “Small Change.”

Koichi and Ryu, you see, have heard about a piece of shinkansen folklore: When a new train line opens, if you can observe the precise moment when two trains pass each other at high speed for the very first time, wishes can come true and miracles become possible. They’d like to believe this, and maybe partly do, but Kore-eda clearly sees that the imagination of children (and adults too) is not constrained by questions of logic or plausibility. The two boys’ convoluted (and surprisingly expensive) scheme to run away overnight, along with several friends and all their wishes, becomes its own kind of miracle, and the magic it yields — including a fairy godmother! — is even more precious because it requires no suspension of disbelief.

Arguably, the quest for a bullet-train miracle is something of a MacGuffin in “I Wish.” It’s a good one, because it pays off in the end, but the real point of the movie is watching the way Kore-eda and the Maeda brothers (who also work as a kid-comedy act in Japan) capture the competing worlds of Ryu and Koichi with heartbreaking specificity. Koichi, the older of the two, is in many ways less worldly; he can’t quite see that his desire to reunite the family is about as likely to happen as one friend’s desire to become the next Ichiro Suzuki, or another’s to grow up and marry the leggy middle-school librarian. (Like a true romantic, he doesn’t notice or care that she’ll be pushing 50 by the time he’s legal.) As we regard Koichi through Kore-eda’s sympathetic but slightly detached camera — the cinematographer is Yutaka Yamazaki — we both cling to his last moments of innocence and root for him to grow up and reach a more mature understanding of the world. On that knife edge of yearning and longing is this whole film balanced.

Koichi’s only sustaining adult relationship is with his garrulous, chain-smoking grandpa (Isao Hashizume), who was once famous for his traditional sponge cake but now can’t get the recipe right. His mother Nozomi (wonderfully played by Nene Ohtsuka) is lost in booze and self-pity after her breakup with indulgent wastrel Kenji (Joe Odagiri), who’s raising Ryu in a household of benign rock ‘n’ roll neglect. Perhaps the most devastating scene in the entire movie is a wordless interlude when we watch Nozomi coming home from an evening out drinking with friends. Momentarily giddy, she buys an electronic flashing duck from a street vendor, but by the time she reaches her bus stop she doesn’t think it’s so funny anymore and gazes at it in puzzlement and anguish: Why did I buy this, and how did I get here?

Children, of course, will forgive the grown-ups in their lives almost any degree of lameness and irresponsibility if they feel loved, and Kore-eda takes somewhat the same attitude with his adult characters. Even in a slightly darker subplot involving Ryu’s aspiring actress friend Megumi (Kyara Uchida) and her embittered bartending mother (Yui Natsukawa), what we see is a parent doing the best she can, who has lost the ability to see the bigger picture. (If you have kids too, you’ve been there and done that.) When the kids make their pilgrimage to the mystical bullet-train spot, it may not bring Ryu and Koichi back together permanently, or launch a baseball superstar’s career, or bring a beloved family dog back to life. But those aren’t the only forms of magic, and this marvelous work of all-ages movie craftsmanship has magic aplenty.

“I Wish” is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It opens May 25 in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington; June 1 in Chicago, Honolulu, Palm Springs, Calif., San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.; June 8 in Atlanta, Denver and Phoenix; June 14 in Bloomington, Ind.; June 15 in Minneapolis and New Orleans; and June 22 in St. Louis and Seattle, with other cities and home video to follow.

There’s no doubt that Burton’s “Dark Shadows” has issues, and it will probably be considered a misfire in many quarters. It’s so incredibly specific — in its detailed recall of the original late-’60s “Dark Shadows” soap opera (truly one of the strangest series in television history), its finely honed hambone acting by Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer and Helena Bonham Carter, and its campy but affectionate treatment of its Nixon-era setting — that it’s hard to tell who the intended audience is. Me, evidently, along with other relics of that era and longtime “Dark Shadows” fans who’ve been waiting — and waiting, and waiting — for Barnabas Collins to be exhumed yet again, along with his lugubrious extended family. (We’ll talk about the doomed 1991 series some other time, OK?) But I honestly don’t know what sense it will make to people who show up because Johnny Depp and Tim Burton made a vampire comedy and that sounds cool. This “Dark Shadows” clearly leaves the sepulcher door ajar — nay, gaping wide open — for potential sequels. But it’s such an odd movie and it’s facing the triumphalist superhero tidal wave of “Avengers.” Disaster is definitely possible, so I’m not holding my breath.

Anyway, here’s the principal issue I see with Burton and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith’s (he of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”) strange blend of nostalgia, farce and spooky-loo: Total delicious goodness! Oh, sure, it all comes unglued in the final 15 minutes, when like all Hollywood movies the story devolves into CGI fight scenes and stuff blowing up. But “Dark Shadows” offers potent atmosphere and delirious ’70s fashions and hilarious gags and some really terrific performances, none better than Pfeiffer’s triumphant return to the screen as a pitch-perfect family matriarch. This film seems to engage Burton’s attention and imagination as no movie has since — well, a very long time ago. You can definitely make a case for his 2007 version of “Sweeney Todd,” and the animated “Corpse Bride” is more enjoyable than most of Burton’s live-action films, but so much of his career — like that of Depp, his good friend and muse — has been expended on stylish resuscitations of moribund pop-culture properties that look great but just go through the motions, storytelling-wise.

That Schwinn bike outside Collinwood is a good way of explaining the delicate balance Burton and Grahame-Smith try to strike here. This “Dark Shadows” seeks to be just as melodramatic and claustrophobic and ridiculous as Dan Curtis’ original series — which only introduced its supernatural elements out of desperation, in an effort to raise abysmal ratings — but not exactly in the same way. Yes, the self-aware camp factor has been turned way up, and that will no doubt displease some original fans. When Depp’s Barnabas, an 18th-century gentleman vampire, is first loosed from his 200-year imprisonment by a road construction crew, he marvels at the towering luminescence above him, clearly the work of Mephistopheles (the golden arches of a McDonald’s). Later, upon glimpsing Karen Carpenter on TV, he is disturbed and beguiled: “What sorcery is this? Reveal yourself, tiny songstress!” Curtis’ show certainly never contained internal gags of that sort, but from the audience point of view, it was a camp object even at the time; its goodness and badness and creepiness and sex appeal were always intertwined and inextricable.

If you’re too young to have seen the original “Dark Shadows” — which remained a daytime staple, in reruns, well into the 1980s, and is now available on DVD in (almost) its 1,245-episode entirety — or just aren’t wired that way, explaining its importance may not be possible. The main thing to point out is the immensely different cultural context in which the show emerged. Barnabas Collins predates not just “Twilight” and “True Blood,” but also Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire” and the entire rise of the Goth sensibility. In the 1970s, vampires were something that only marginal weirdos who went to science-fiction bookstores and watched Hammer films like “Dracula: Prince of Darkness” knew about. People like the teenage Tim Burton, in other words. (Christopher Lee, who played Dracula in seven Hammer movies, has a cameo role here, at least his fifth performance for Burton.)

Many of us unlucky enough to be conscious during the 1970s were desperate for markers of cultural difference, and “Dark Shadows” offered a big one in the years before punk rock. If you were into that show, you probably listened to records by Alice Cooper and the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground. You read Tolkien, and Harlan Ellison. You also watched “Star Trek,” an extremely different kind of show with some odd similarities. (Each became more popular after their cancellation; each starred a Canadian Shakespeare actor — William Shatner and Jonathan Frid, respectively — who took a low-paying TV gig that would define the rest of his life.) You probably knew the guy in your town who sold Acapulco Gold and Panama Red.

But I wouldn’t make an argument for “Dark Shadows” purely on context and significance, and Depp and Burton don’t either. Curtis’ show made a virtue out of poverty, and while that might not have been entirely new in pop culture, it sure felt that way. Wobbly sets, flubbed lines and wandering stagehands became part of its live-to-video appeal (nothing was ever shot twice), but the zero-tech effects, stilted dialogue and noodly score (by Robert Cobert) were often surprisingly powerful. After Barnabas was loosed from his coffin about a year into the series, the storytelling became increasingly unhinged and improvisational — there were werewolves, zombies, witches and time travel — and the show’s long arc featured two long detours into two different past centuries, along with parallel and contingent universes that might befuddle Stephen Hawking. It was all made up on the fly, of course, and didn’t necessarily make sense, but there’s no question it fired the imagination of a generation: Burton and Quentin Tarantino and Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams and countless others.

Burton and Grahame-Smith essentially build a series of affectionate riffs on the characters and situations of the original series, and personally I can only wish there were a lot more of it. The aforementioned Vicky Winters bears an uncanny resemblance to Barnabas’ long-ago lost love, Josette, who was driven to suicide by Angelique (spectral French actress Eva Green, still awaiting her moment of Hollywood stardom), the comely witch he spurned who then sought gruesome revenge. Indeed, when Barnabas returns to 1972 Collinwood and divulges his secret to the resolute Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Pfeiffer) and then to drunken, zaftig New York psychiatrist Julia Hoffman (Bonham Carter, hilariously mimicking the mannered performance of the late Grayson Hall in the original), he soon discovers that Angelique has endured into the 20th century as well — and, like all women, still wants him.

Is it inherently bizarre and pointless that Burton has spent millions of dollars on a studied, postmodern attempt to both emulate and parody something that was made on the cheap, and that essentially parodied itself at the moment of its creation? I dunno. If you rely on Susan Sontag’s famous definitions of camp, the original “Dark Shadows” would count as naive or “Pure Camp,” whereas Burton’s film can only be “Camp which knows itself to be Camp,” which Sontag says is less satisfying. I’m not sure these distinctions hold up, personally, and I see no moment of innocence in pop culture’s past. Burton and Depp have made this film out of a pure, deep passion for something that was created 40 years ago for entirely pragmatic reasons — a desire to keep a TV show on the air and get paid for it — and then fed on its own nuttiness and the public’s almost erotic appetite for something new. In so doing, they may have created a movie that’s meant for a mass audience, but that only a few people will enjoy the way they do. (The “Cable Guy” of vampire movies, perhaps.) A mistake, and a failure? Maybe. But isn’t that a wonderful twist to the tale?