By DENNIS OVERBYE

Somewhere out there, more elusive than a snow leopard, more vaunted in its imagined cultural oomph than an Oprah book blurb, is the Science Movie.

You know, the film that finally does for science and scientists what "The Godfather" did for crime and what "The West Wing" did for politics, accurately reproducing the grandeur and grit of science while ushering its practitioners into the ranks of coolness.

I went to the Tribeca Film Festival recently in search of that movie. I didn't find it, but I didn't expect to. Like some foggy quantum possibility still lurking beyond the limits of measurement, that movie doesn't exist — yet. The best you can hope for is a glimpse, like fragments of a not-yet-dreamed dream, of a genre slouching toward birth.

Scientists often say nice things about science-oriented plays, like "Copenhagen," "Arcadia," "QED" and "Proof" — to name a few that have been on Broadway in the last few years. But you get mostly silence when you ask about movies, except for imprecations about directors who get the curtains right while the science and the characters are loony. For my money, "Apollo 13" did a great job of showing the heroics of the everyday smartness of rocket scientists, but then again, that was a true story.

I was going to ignore Tribeca this year. But my wife, Nancy, noticed in an article in this newspaper that a Spanish movie at the festival, "The Mist in the Palm Trees," was being heralded by its makers as "the first quantum movie." How could I resist a movie whose sections are named for quarks?

Directed by Lola Salvador and Carlos Molinero, "Mist" is a presented as fictional documentary about a Spanish photographer and physicist, one Santiago Bergson. In it, the dead Bergson muses on his atomized life and lack of memory as old photographs and grainy home film clips shuffle past, over and over again, arcing from his childhood in Asturia, in northern Spain, to the cataclysmic climax of the Manhattan Project. In one much-repeated grainy clip, a man in a suit leaps headfirst over a row of chairs on the lawn and lands in a somersault.

Bergson, whose voice is done by a woman, complains at one point that he has no memories; they have been replaced by images, "dead photons."

Instead of becoming familiar the way they would in a conventional narrative, however, the people in these images become more mysterious, and their relationships become more confusing as the movie goes on.

When I asked Ms. Salvador and her colleagues what made this a "quantum film," I was braced to hear some new-age mumbo jumbo about art, consciousness and randomness, perhaps the destructive impact of modernism.

Instead, they began to lecture me about the famous and deeply subversive quantum physics exercise known as the double slit experiment, a staple of college labs and pop-sci books. In it, an electron or some other elementary particle is shot at a screen that has a pair of slits. In seeming contravention of common sense, the particle appears to pass through both slits at once and then interferes with itself, splatting into a pattern that looks like overlapping waves on the far wall.

It turned out that one of the screenwriters, Ricardo Enríquez, is a former particle physicist. Over coffee, he and his colleagues explained how he had prevailed on Ms. Salvador to forgo a classical narrative for one that enfolds quantum principles.

Films usually follow a narrative that unfolds in a straight line in accordance with cause and effect, he said, adding, "That's not true in quantum mechanics, and that's not true either in 'The Mist in the Palm Trees.' "

And so in the movie's conceit, Bergson, like the electron traversing two slits at once, does not have one life, he has many lives, which interfere with one another, like the conflicting versions of a fight on a childhood Thanksgiving told by quarreling cousins.

The result is confusion, a braided arc of love, memory and loss, whose details keep slipping through your fingers. That is to say, it really is a quantum film. But it's not about quantum mechanics, and there is no exam.

"It's not a scientific commentary," Mr. Molinero said. "It's just art."

Since being mystified is my normal state, I enjoyed "Mist." But it may not be for everyone.

At the other end of the scale at Tribeca was "Kettle of Fish," a screwball romantic comedy involving a frog biologist and a jazz saxophonist. That movie, directed and written by Claudia Myers and filmed in my very own Upper West Side neighborhood, was replete with polysyllabic jokes about pair bonding and the courting habits of frogs.

You could argue that every romantic comedy is about biology. Despite a sneaky plot that, among other things, has the biologist making the first pass, however, "Kettle" hews a little too closely to the stereotype of the scientist as socially inexperienced, if not inept. The most fetching relationship is between the saxophonist's fish, Daphne, and a frog named Casanova.

"Kettle" was one of several films and screenplays making its debut under the imprimatur of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as part of its program for the public understanding of science.

Every spring some of the foundation's flowers bloom at Tribeca in the form of staged readings of screenplays under development, and it is in these readings and the discussions that follow that one can perhaps most clearly discern the shape of the cultural beast still fighting to be born.

Two of these screenplays have now been signed to production deals. Just before Tribeca opened, the foundation announced that Peter Bogdanovich, best known for "The Last Picture Show," would direct "The Broken Code." Written by David Baxter, "Code" is based on the book by Ann Sayre about the genetics pioneer Rosalind Franklin, whose work led to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.

Last week at Cannes it was announced that David Strathairn, of "Good Night, and Good Luck," would star in a production of "Challenger," about the physicist Richard Feynman and his adventures investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

Doron Weber, who heads the Sloan program, noted that Nicole Perlman, the author of "Challenger," first received a Sloan grant years ago as a film major at New York University, adding, "I believe we're spotting talent (and exposing it to science) at a very early stage, and that this group of Sloan winners will be running Hollywood and indie films in the coming decades."

"Challenger" and "Project Mustard," a comedy about a British entry into the 1960's race to land men on the moon, were the subjects of a staged reading one morning by professional actors, including Judd Hirsch in the role of Feynman, during the festival.

A brunch and a panel discussion afterward devolved into a referendum on the direction of the nation's space program over the last 20 years and reminded me that the romance of space was an enduring and perhaps easier hook for people who might not be ready to embrace quantum mysteries.

That longing is at heart of "The Starry Messenger," a portrait of an astronomy teacher at the Hayden Planetarium in New York, by the writer Kenneth Lonergan.

Excerpts from the play, which has a date with Broadway next year and then Hollywood, were read by a group including Matthew Broderick at an invitation-only event one night during the festival. The title comes from Galileo's 1610 book "Sidereus Nuncius," in which he first reported his telescopic observations.

Mr. Lonergan, who was born in New York City, grew up going to the old Hayden Planetarium, which was closed in 1997 to make way for the new Rose Center. The play is set in the period leading up to its demolition.In a panel discussion after the reading, Mr. Lonergan made no bones about his dismay over the loss of the old planetarium building and his distaste for its successor. He joked that the movie version of his play would have to be shot at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

This clearly irked Neil deGrasse Tyson, the planetarium's director, who was on hand and said that he too had grown up with the old planetarium. Its night sky was his first night sky, he said, but by the time it was torn down, Dr. Tyson argued, the old planetarium wasn't appealing to young kids anymore.

He and Mr. Lonergan were able to agree, however, on the glories of the old Zeiss 6 projector they had both grown up with, which started every planetarium show with the skyline around Central Park.

Mr. Lonergan said that once upon a time he could not look at the sky without getting lost in the wonder and terror of it all, but that the day to day drudgery of life and teaching could dull those feelings. He reported sadly that he could look at the sky without that fear and trembling now. "Something has been lost," he said.

Something like this seems to have happened to the teacher in his play, who aspired to a career in research but, as a teacher, is only one of the low-level communicators of science, not unlike your faithful correspondent.

He has lost his faith, but I'm not giving up on him. I am a starry messenger too, and I am hoping for Mr. Lonergan's play to ennoble us all. It might be asking too much to make us cool.