Most Marvel movies open like Robert Downey Jr.’s stand-up routine in “Iron Man” before it goes south. They deliver quips and silky come-hither nonsense, only to end up like a big green monster stuck on rewind: “Hulk smash!” again and again, ad infinitum. In between start and finish, there are moments of levity and discovery in the machined product, but too often you can’t see the movie for Marvel’s action plan. Its latest, the giddily enjoyable “Doctor Strange,” is part of Marvel’s strategy for world domination, yet it’s also so visually transfixing, so beautiful and nimble that you may even briefly forget the brand.

You don’t need to know Dr. Strange to know his story. A tale of hubris — with foolish pride and an inevitable fall — it opens in contemporary New York, where Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), is flying high as a supersurgeon. After a crippling accident, he abandons his old life (partly embodied by Rachel McAdams, dewy and funny) for a grand exploit, traveling simultaneously into his soul and to the misterioso Far East. He meets leaders and fellow travelers, studies books and unlocks secrets, in time becoming a superhero with magical powers, a dubious goatee and a flirty cape that dries his tears.

Dr. Strange first popped out of the glorious head of Steve Ditko, the comic-book visionary who brought him to life with Stan Lee (a pairing best known for Spider-Man). Dr. Strange’s travels east evoke the inner and outer magical mystery tours of the 1960s, summoning visions of head-tripping and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” In a, well, yes, strange bit of timing, Dr. Strange appeared in 1963, around the time Harvard fired Timothy Leary and a colleague for conducting experiments with hallucinogens. Five years later, in Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” the Merry Prankster Ken Kesey was downing acid and absorbed in “the plunging purple Steve Ditko shadows of Dr. Strange.”

“Doctor Strange” tethers its plunging purples, acid greens and altered states to a hero’s journey with its call to adventure, its mentor, its allies and its enemies. After his crisis, Dr. Strange lands in Nepal, where he meets a guide (Chiwetel Ejiofor, as brooding and sincere as Hamlet). There, he studies the way of the hero with the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), a Celtic sorcerer, who in the comics emerged from the Himalayas and the West’s long fascination with, and appropriation of, Eastern mysticism. (The screenwriter C. Robert Cargill has said that some of the changes involving the sorcerer, originally from Tibet, stemmed from concerns that depictions of Tibetans might anger China, a movie market powerhouse.)

Dr. Strange’s voyage of self-discovery is as old as the ancients and as familiar as Christopher Nolan’s 2005 “Batman Begins,” where men become near-gods while training amid hazy, low-key lighting. And just as Mr. Nolan borrows from the original Dr. Strange, this “Doctor Strange” borrows from Mr. Nolan. It owes a conspicuous debt to his delirious 2010 fantasy, “Inception,” and that movie’s vision of a city folding in on itself. In “Doctor Strange,” the director Scott Derrickson and his crew push the medium’s plasticity further, creating spaces that bend, splinter and multiply. A wall folds open like a spreading hand fan while cityscapes fragment into whirring, shifting fractal forms.

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These impossible visions at times evoke the work of M. C. Escher, who used perspective to destabilize otherwise realistic images. Elsewhere, the movie’s pinging-ponging characters seem caught in one of Rube Goldberg’s mischievous machines, like the witty chase in which Dr. Strange runs atop a platform while an enemy runs below him upside down, transformed into a gravity-defying doppelgänger. And, as with the dreamscapes in “Inception,” the special effects in “Doctor Strange” serve beauty and meaning rather than the grimly tedious destruction that drains energy out of most contemporary superhero movies. Here, you remember the wit, not the rubble.

The space-and-time warping and mirrored realities in “Doctor Strange” are a blast. They’re inventive enough that they awaken wonder, provoking that delicious question: How did they do that? At the same time, Mr. Derrickson resists the temptation to loiter. Drawn-out set pieces have become endemic in effects-driven vehicles and can stop a movie dead as filmmakers show off their cool toys (and budget) and ignore everything else, the story and restive audience included. In the modern-era superhero movie, this kind of grandstanding has nearly assumed the level of a genre prerequisite, especially in finales that never seem to end, but end and end and end (then die).

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Mr. Cumberbatch’s affable screen presence works up a strong, steady counterbeat to his character’s narcissism. As is the case when he plays characters like Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Cumberbatch comes across in this movie as at once supremely capable (it’s easy to accept him as a neurosurgeon) and more than a little goofy, with the kind of lopsided beauty and spring-loaded physicality that seem ready-made for silly faces and walks. Dr. Strange’s arrogance ruins his career, but Mr. Derrickson makes sure that it doesn’t weigh down the story. The character’s conceit is a mask that’s always in danger of slipping, which complicates his heroism with moments of bluffing, comedy and doubt.

Mr. Derrickson does a lot right, including with his lineup of strong actors (the cast also includes Benedict Wong and Mads Mikkelsen) who hold your attention even as the ground shifts below their feet. They help elevate the more generic beats in “Doctor Strange” because, for all the phantasmagoria and time-skipping, there is also much by the book, including the vaguely Christ-like, fallen and risen savior. The movie’s more lysergic sections are followed with carefully aligned narrative bricks and mortar and sometimes sealed with a quip, as if to reassure you that there’s nothing too far out about any of this. That’s hardly unexpected, and it also scarcely matters because when a good fantasy fiction like this opens that door of perception called imagination it’s a total trip.

“Doctor Strange” is rated PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned) for supernatural violence. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.

Review: ‘Doctor Strange’ and His Far-Out Mystical Magic Tour

Meet Count Olaf in the New ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ Teaser

Meet Count Olaf in the New ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ Teaser

The Touchbar is serious business. Apple’s interface guidelines warn against all kinds of fun things that developers probably started thinking about when the new MacBook Pros leaked earlier this week. No doubt some apps will find a way to be creative even under the stern eye of Apple’s party police, but it’s clearly discouraged.

Here are a few choice items from Apple’s guidelines telling developers how to create Touch Bar interfaces:

• Use the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard and trackpad, not as a display.
• The Touch Bar shouldn’t display alerts, messages, scrolling content, static content, or anything else that commands the user’s attention or distracts from their work on the main screen.
• Avoid animation. The Touch Bar is considered an extension of the keyboard, and people don’t expect animation in their keyboard.
• Use color tastefully and minimally. In general, the Touch Bar should be similar in appearance to the physical keyboard.
• In general, the Touch Bar shouldn’t include controls for tasks such as find, select all, deselect, copy, cut, paste, undo, redo, new, save, close, print, and quit.

Now, admittedly, some of these things could be annoying or pulled off poorly. And it’s clear that Apple wants developers and users both to think of the Touch Bar as an extension of the keyboard, not of the screen. But prescribing usage in that way often isn’t a good idea. The fact is it’s both, and ought to be used for both.

Who wouldn’t want a stock ticker there, or a Twitter feed, or a progress bar for downloads and file operations? There are plenty of possibilities to explore here, and it seems a disservice to insist that things remain monochrome, key-shaped and static.

I for one was thinking of what the first Touch Bar games would look like, or how it could act as a Rainmeter or MenuMeters-like at-a-glance view of my machine.

Even if we’re going to keep things boring, why not have copy, paste, save and all those on there? Sure, they duplicate shortcut keys, but so do a bunch of the things they showed onstage today.

Standardizing stuff so users know more or less what to expect is a good idea, especially with a new feature like this, but this is more stifling than standardizing. Experimentation with novel user interfaces has created all kinds of fun apps with intuitive and interesting controls. Apple is pretending it already knows everything about how this interface should be used, when it’s actually a wide open field.

Whether any of this matters depends a lot on how rigorously Apple enforces these design guidelines. Will it be satisfied with simply encouraging its own limited vision of what should appear on the Touch Bar, or will it actively discourage apps that step outside it? We’ll know soon. But it would be a shame to see this cool new feature fall short of its potential.

Apple says no fun allowed on the Touch Bar