“Elektra” is about a deadly assassin (Jennifer Garner) who decides to protect her latest targets rather than impale them with a three-pronged dagger. They are precocious young Abby Miller (Kristen Prout) and her hunky father Mark (Goran Visnjic), residents of an isolated Pacific Northwest island and guardians of a secret: Magical Abby is a budding warrior in the eternal battle of good versus evil.

Naturally, this presents problems to the Hand, a shadowy organization of evil Asians, so they have hired Elektra to kill them. Spiritually exhausted, not to mention recently brought back from the dead (cf. “Daredevil” – if you dare), Elektra takes a liking to them both, seeing in Abby a force to mentor and in Mark a total babe. After fending off a ninja assault, our heroes flee to a cow farm and are set upon by a clutch of elite Hand forces led by Kirigi (Will Yun Lee), a white-robed wuxia type whose last known address was the cutting room floor of “Hero.”

Kirigi’s minions include Stone (Bob Sapp), a burly giant with impenetrable skin; a dreadlocked weirdo named Tattoo (Chris Ackerman), who can make the animal designs on his body come to life and attack; and Typhoid, a goth bitch with blue fingernails who exhales pestilences and trails dead flowers in her wake. Joining the fight against them is blind, ornery Stick (Terence Stamp), Elektra’s estranged sensei.

Maybe it’s because I was slightly bored, maybe because I previewed the film in the Fox screening room, but “Elektra” struck me as essentially a movie about a highly skilled, highly successful single white woman who abruptly decides she’s unsatisfied with her independent life. Naturally, the next phase of her womanhood will be to form a nuclear family unit with some other white people, whom she must then defend against the Oriental conspiracy, big black men, grubby counterculture freaks, and diseased lesbians.

But why talk politics when I can talk ninjas?

Fleet, sneaky, and semi supernatural, the ones in “Elektra” glide soundlessly over rooftops in their split-toe booties and are inscrutably cloaked in ninja-doorags. When confronted, they hurl ninja stars at their foe, prance like monkeys, and unload clips from their ninja-dart machine guns. When killed, they implode in a cloud of pale green smoke and a bright swirl of sparks, the final exhalation of their brilliant ninjatude.

In the B-movie guilty pleasure department, the only thing I dig more than a good ninja is a Hollywood actress with ginormous collagen lips. As the prong tossing, red-leather-bustier-wearing, crypto-xenophobic heroine of the title, Ms. Garner is what happens when you cross Penthouse with a platypus.

I suppose that makes Tattoo a cross between Doctor Doolittle and Charles Manson. When we first meet him in the boardroom of the Hand, the camera zooms in on his exposed shoulder and settles on the eagle tattoo, which sprouts an avid, angry, animated eye. It’s a fantastic little detail, expertly done, full of weirdness, surprise, and promise. “Elektra” doesn’t sustain that level of invention, but as dead-of-winter popcorn movies go, it’s passably diverting.

***

That sound you hear? Buckets of saliva dropping from the collective techno-geek mouth. First the release of the Mac Mini-Me and now “Appleseed,” the long-awaited feature-length anime of the classic Japanese manga. If you just said “what’s a manga?” let me translate: comic books featuring dystopia, robots, and gigantic breasts.

The latter are attached to Deunan, a wide-eyed, sex-kitten super-soldier who roams the post-apocalyptic landscape of 2131 looking for things to shoot. Nabbed by a squadron of black helicopter types, she wakes up in a (seemingly) utopian megalopolis next to her cyborg ex-lover. But things in Olympus are not what they seem!

From there it’s your basic Wizard of Oz scenario, as rewritten by a Baudrillard newbie with a boner for scantily clad, heavily armed cyborg babes.

***

Five images by Abbas Kiarostami:

1 A handheld camera follows a scrap of driftwood as it meanders along an ocean shoreline. Destined for who knows where, it is pushed, pulled, and tossed about by the tide. There is drama and even suspense in its reckless foray to the very edge of the known universe – the frame. Contemplated over time, the image assumes the confidence, elegance, and humility of Agnes Martin’s geometries. Fade to black.

2 The next image – a seashore by Andreas Gursky – is divided into four bands of more or less equal shape: sky, sea, metal railing, pedestrian walkway. People and sea birds traverse the lower two sections of the image. Time passes. Fade to white.

3 Another seashore, this time by Rothko. Three zones (sky, sea, sand) are viewed from a much greater distance than the landscape in the second shot, and there is a cluster of dark shapes at the “horizon” line of the bottom two sections: a pack of wild dogs, lazing by the sea. The animals get up, stretch, pace, then settle and nap. It is either dawn or the camera operator is slowly adjusting the exposure levels: blue drains from the sky and sea until they merge into a single field of shimmering white. Eventually, the sand loses its color as well, and the dog forms deliquesce into the monochrome. Fade to white.

4 The composition of the image is as before, but in a closer view. Nothing but the tide until a pack of ducks emerges from the left and wobble off screen to the right. The duck exodus goes on and on. Two white birds suddenly stop; from the look of the waves behind them, the image has been slightly slowed down. Suddenly, they turn around and head back off screen to the left, their entire entourage in tow. Fade to black.

5 Moonlight on blackest water. Ripples pattern and scatter the reflection. Occasionally the full moon comes into absolute focus, wreathed in fog. On the soundtrack, frogs croak, insects chirp, water music. The scale of the universe has been distorted; the image communicates deep space, solitude, and wonderment. The symphony quiets, and light seeps into the void. A placid body of water, blue-green in the foreground, shaded pink toward the horizon, emerges. We assume this is the ocean, but the final image suggests a limpid pond. A bird glides through the background and a text appears on the screen: “November 2003.” Fade to black.

These images are bridged by a short passage of music. Together they comprise “Five,” an exquisite experiment that screens at MoMA January 17 at 7 p.m. Admirers of Mr. Kiarostami’s celebrated features may find it a puzzle, or a snooze; its methods and themes, however, are of a piece with his oeuvre. There are five dozen ways to look at “Five,” but the place to start is to treat the five images as a kind of net to pour your intellect through and see what gets caught.

“Five” will screen January 17 at 7 p.m. (11 W. 53rd Street, 212-708-9480).