‘Criminal,” a sun-drenched noir with a circuitous plot from first-time director Gregory Jacobs, is another example of a low-budget movie that’s worth the price of regular admission.

Like the well-crafted teen drama “Mean Creek,” “Criminal” is surprising for many reasons – number one being that late-summer indie flicks usually fail to deliver on their promise and potential.

These anti-blockbusters are marked by casts of up-and-coming or overlooked Hollywood talent, feature first time directors, and are intimate stories devoid of exploding cars or musical montages featuring today’s hot single.

Starring the vastly underused John C. Reilly, whose bulldog puss and intelligent gentleness has been memorable in so many movies, “Criminal” is a grifter-eat-grifter odyssey that takes place over 24 hours – and, from the get-go, you never know who’s going to stab who in the back.

Mr. Reilly plays Richard Gaddis, a fast-talking con man with a car salesman mouth and a soccer dad’s swagger. He’s looking for a new partner after the disappearance of the mysterious, and oddly named, “Jew.” The film starts with a small-time hood, played by “Y tu Mama Tambien’s” Diego Luna, getting busted by Gaddis posing as a cop. From the moment that the pair fall into each other’s life, you never know who’s the mark. The best scenes are at the beginning, as the plot slowly unfurls, where the two show off the tricks of their trades, ripping off old women and families for a few bucks here and there.

But once the plot starts rolling, there’s no stopping it. Gaddis is called out of the blue by his estranged sister, played by thinking-man’s sex kitten Maggie Gyllenhaal, to console a lowlife who’s taken ill in the lobby of the hotel where she works. Once there, Gaddis is seduced into a once-in-a-lifetime score: to sell a near-perfect counterfeit Treasury note that’s worth millions to a wealthy collector staying at the hotel. From there, the plot swerves wildly but never careens over the edge.

The stars all turn in terrific performances full of nuance, sexiness, and passion – something happens when you watch a movie performed by actors who are having a great time playing make-believe.

Diego Luna is particularly good, in that way that critics get when they think they’ve discovered the Hot New Thing. He’s charming, mischievous, and credible, carrying his weight against a seasoned actor like Mr. Reilly, who’s at the top of his game here. So, you heard it here first: Diego Luna will be huge. I should get a percentage.

I miss noir, tales of deception and crime with strange moral hearts. “Criminal” is the perfect diversion for those who like their plot-bending whodunnits, full of flawed heroes, final scores, and scams gone wrong. Sometimes you’re not in the mood for sweeping epics or special-effect tsunamis, and the indie scene, which has been hibernating for too long, is slowly filling in the cracks with full done genre films like “Mean Creek,” “Garden State,” and “Criminal.”

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, George Lucas was a starving film school student. (An injury had forced him to give up his dreams of becoming a racecar driver.) While in school, Lucas made a short film that would become a prize-winner, earning him an internship in Hollywood and introducing him to mentor Francis Ford Coppola (a whole five years his senior).

The short film, an inventive, if derivative, tale of crushed love in a dystopian future, would then go on to become Mr. Lucas’s first feature film, “THX-1138” (1973), which is being re-released in a special director’s cut. Not that the awkward and occasionally brilliant first film doesn’t deserve a re-release – in fact, the minor digital tweaking of scenes in the film reflect Mr. Lucas’s obsessive perfectionism but do not improve on what is already worthy.

Ripping off decades of classic sci-fi, from Bradbury to Heinlein to Kubrick’s sterile masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Mr. Lucas spun a tale of a vast subterranean civilization where human emotion is smothered by sedatives and empty consumerism. It’s an Orwellian set-up that still resonates today, as good science-fiction does, dealing with the core struggles of humanity and the question, “Who are we?”

The cold, vulnerable performance from a young Robert Duvall, one of the masses who dares to fall in love and is punished for it, gives the movie a human anchor. Using all the tricks of guerrilla filmmaking, Mr. Lucas turns tunnels, blinding white light, and extreme close-ups into an environment that’s both alien and familiar.

And although much of the film has the stink of film school pretension, it’s also dripping with passion. It’s ironic that a filmmaker who would grow up to help introduce America to mega blockbuster popcorn flicks – outpacing by leaps and bounds the gritty, artistic filmmakers of that era like Coppola, Friedkin, or Scorcese – would have started his career fashioning a personal, low-budget polemic like “THX-1138.”

Mr. Lucas’s had an amazing eye, telling his stories in images both grandiose and intimate, and it’s unfortunate that he’s abandoned the world of steel and sinew in order to make lifeless films comprised of pixels and computer memory. Nothing he’s created in the last 25 years has the emotional power of Mr. Duvall waking up in an institution that’s like the inside of a florescent tube.

The director’s cut does feature some digital improvements, but nothing that either adds or distracts, so it’s a curiosity as to why it was reworked in the first place. The trend toward adding new frames, narration, or other elements to classic movies seems a craven way to bilk film fans for a few extra bucks – the director’s cut of “Apocalypse Now” added 20 minutes of plot maiming twaddle. It can’t be for artistic reasons, and if it is, it’s akin to adding hip-hop vernacular into the works of Charles Dickens, a cheap ploy to recast the timeless as the contemporary.

Not that “THX-1138” is a classic, but it’s a clever, cautionary tale that’s worth seeing for a young Duvall, and to marvel at an iconic filmmaker who was at the top of his game right out of the gate. Perhaps even Mr. Lucas will watch this and want to make a movie this raw, creative, and individualistic again.