Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain is about loathsome people doing loathsome things, and ordinarily it would be interesting to ask whether the movie recognizes that said people and things are loathsome – how it feels about them. I think that only Bay could render that question totally moot. The film is so inept and hateful that asking what it thinks about anything seems like dividing by zero.  It’s two hours and ten minutes of noise and violence and nonsense delivered with meathead swagger and a hefty dose of frat boy homophobia and misogyny. I hated almost everything about it.

I’ll give Bay this: unlike a lot of big-budget Hollywood hacks, his films are unmistakably his. Pain & Gain, made at a fraction of the budget of the Transformers monstrosities or even something like The Rock or The Island, is still immediately identifiable, at least visually: the low angles, the ostentatious slo-mo, the restless camerawork that feels more like aggression than kineticism, the endless parade of fake tits. The difference, apart from the budget, is that no one here is trying to save the world or win a war or solve a crime. Instead, we get the true story of three bodybuilders (Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Mackie, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) who decide to kidnap, torture and extort a shady businessman (Tony Shalhoub), with the end goal of stealing everything he owns. The plan is complicated when repeated attempts to kill the dude go awry, and he escapes determined to have his revenge.

There are a few laughs here, mostly courtesy of Mark Wahlberg becoming increasingly panicked. (The guy can really only operate at high energies, but kills it when given the chance.) But most of this is staggeringly incompetent, with an incoherent timeline, no attempt at pacing, and the constant sense that certain scenes shoved others out of the way to willy-nilly cram themselves into the film. At one point, our anti-heroes repeatedly attempt to dispose of their mark in more and more outrageous ways, but the fucker won’t die – the sequence should have pulsed with an escalating comic desperation before building to an absurd crescendo, but all Pain & Gain can muster is the same barrage of shrill vulgarity. The cumulative effect is wearying and, for me, depressing. I left the film feeling genuinely down.

Is there a “message” here? There’s a pretense of a mean-spirited one: the corrosiveness of the American dream; the effect of perceived meritocracy on people who can’t really cut it but are convinced otherwise.  But they’re just words, delivered in the film’s carousel of voiceovers. If Pain & Gain is about anything, it’s about itself: about how blatant a middle finger it can extend to art, cinema, and comedy, and get away with it.

Joseph Kosinski is a phenomenal designer. His movies look as sleek and tactile and efficient as Apple products. I don’t even mean that as a backhanded compliment, since his specialty is stylized futuristic landscapes: in the case of Tron: Legacy, surreal electronic ones; in the case of his follow-up Oblivion, haunting post-apocalyptic ones. The worlds he creates in both films do more than just gleam – they’re meticulous, fully-realized, and internally consistent; seemingly unrestrained by what the camera can see.

I’m not just talking about special effects; it’s the details, too. In Oblivion, Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, a repairman left behind on a deserted Earth after the rest of humanity has evacuated. His task is to keep an eye on the power generators that we’ve left behind, and to maintain the drone force that fights off the remnants of the alien invasion that forced us out. (Humans won the war, we’re told, but ravaged the earth with nukes to do it.) He flies around on a bulbous little glass airplane chasing the troublesome little robots and trying to bend them to his will. The desolate ruins of Earth he surveys look spectacular, but it’s the plane that caught my attention. It’s not just an arbitrary futuristic means of locomotion. It’s been thought-through. Kosinski takes the time to show how Harper steers it – his joystick controls one thing, and his foot pedals another. We see the engines give off an eerie, pulsing light as the thing takes off. The instruments Harper sees in the windshield glass seem designed to look like something a pilot might use, not just like something sci-fi suitable.

Kosinski’s attention to visual detail isn’t purely tech-geeky. He comes up with some genuinely memorable cinematic detail too: a dim backdrop coming alive with mysterious red lights as Jack is suddenly attacked in what had looked like an abandoned cave; a triangular space station that’s introduced in the opening voiceover and then silently lurks above the action. Shot by Claudio Miranda, who just won an Oscar for Life of Pi, the film is bright and expansive, set mostly in bright daylight, avoiding the money-saving murk into which ambitious projects like this often sink. It looks phenomenal.

All of which leads me to the conclusion that next time out, Kosinski needs to hold out for a better script. Early reviews have complained that Oblivion is derivative, and it is, with its central conceit ripped off wholesale from a far superior science-fiction film released earlier this year. But the real problem is just that it’s poorly written, with virtually no narrative momentum: Jack roams the planet, bickering with his minder back at home base (Andrea Riseborough), as the movie occasionally dispenses information about what’s really going on. Riseborough’s character is the only real emotional hook here, and her confusion and stubborn unwillingness to subscribe to the conspiracy theory rapidly unveiling before her eyes is for a while the only thing actually propelling the film forward – and then it inexplicably sidelines her for something far more conventional and dumb. (I haven’t yet seen To the Wonder, but I hope Malick made better use of Olga Kurylenko.) And the big twist lands with a thud, neither making much sense nor being of much interest – the huge “aha!” moment that Kosinski is aiming for just isn’t there.

As an audiovisual experience, Oblivion is peerless so far in 2013. (The soundtrack, by electropop band M83, bears a resemblance to Daft Punk’s work in Tron: Legacy, and I liked it – it’s grandiose, catchy, and memorable.) If Kosinski wants to keep making these elaborate techno-dystopias, I’m down. But he needs to find a better framework for his visual ideas. If J.J. Abrams wanted to hire him to revamp the look of Star Wars, I doubt anyone would object.

What can you do with a Jackie Robinson biopic? Not much, as it turns out. Robinson falls into a rarified category of historical figures concerning whom virtually no artistic license is permissible. He is, come to think of it, virtually in a class by himself. Even someone as beloved and canonized as (say) Abraham Lincoln is fair game for speculation and exploration, within reason. But add the slightest less-than-worshipful nuance to the accepted story of Robinson’s courage, grace, and talent, and you’ll be run out of town on a rail. He’s Jackie Robinson. What can you do?

If you’re ambitious but stolidly mainstream writer-director Brian Helgeland, you can make something like 42, which I’m half-convinced is as good a biopic of the trailblazing baseball player as it’s possible to make in Hollywood in 2013. It is completely devoid of anything you didn’t already know or couldn’t have guessed about Robinson, telling the story of his controversial ascent into the Major Leagues with the greatest of care to not so much as suggest anything that diverges in any way from the party line about his life, his motivations, or his character. It hits all the well-known highlights – the threatened boycott by the players, the embrace with Pee Wee Reese, the abuse from the Phillies – with impeccably calculated bombast.

So focused is Helgeland on embalming the Jackie Robinson legend as flawlessly as possible that virtually everything in the film drives toward those big moments. The Reese character, for example, exists solely to give us the aforementioned on-the-field hug, and every second he’s on screen is set-up for that payoff: he either has his arm around someone’s shoulders in a klutzy bit of foreshadowing, or he’s dutifully laying the groundwork for the speech he ends up giving Robinson on the big day. Everyone in the supporting cast exists to make some point or another. A few people are irredeemable, but most come around, each one getting his own moment to showcase his nobility.

Sometimes the movie’s single-mindedness gives it a sort of hard-nosed integrity. Alan Tudyk shows up as racist Phillies manager Ben Chapman, and in a bid to emphasize Robinson’s ordeal, the film lets him unload a long, merciless barrage of bigoted abuse that becomes genuinely painful to watch. It’s the one scene in the film that feels raw and human, emotional in a way that transcends the usual big speeches, making real the theme that Robinson’s heroism lies in his courage to simply absorb everything thrown at him with quiet dignity.

And for all that its quiet-this-is-a-museum approach can be suffocating, 42 is also engaging in a cheesy, old-timey way. Harrison Ford gives his canniest performance in years as heroic Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, who masterminds Robinson’s rise: abandoning all pretense to naturalism, he seems utterly delighted to be playing a myth rather than a character, growling lines like “Robinson! Find him! Bring him here!” with theatrical abandon. As the man himself, 30 year-old Chadwick Boseman takes the opposite approach, shrewdly painting Robinson as an ordinary guy who volunteers to put the weight of the world on his shoulders. And Helgeland keeps things moving at all costs, with a snappy polish that keeps the movie from feeling turgid even when it’s most firmly in greatest-hits mode. 42 won’t teach you a thing, but for a film that couldn’t have been very good, it’s not bad.

In The Host, aliens resembling little glowing spiders have crossed the galaxy to settle our planet by body-snatching all of its inhabitants, giving their previously human eyes an otherworldly grey glow. The aliens do their work by pacifying and assimilating the characteristics of their target species, changing Earth’s society into a gleaming, oppressive, unnaturally peaceful version of its previous self. But pockets of resistance remain — a small group of humans who have are determined not to be implanted with the alien “souls.” As the film opens, one such rebel, a teenage girl named Melanie and played by the talented Saoirse Ronan, is captured by the aliens and implanted with the “soul” of a recently-arrived alien that calls itself “Wanderer.” But, as apparently sometimes happens, a vestige of Melanie’s consciousness remained inside the body of the host, able to exert some amount of control (and to argue with its new inhabitant in voiceover). Before long, Melanie has persuaded Wanderer to escape the aliens’ facility and to join up with a group of rebels in their desert compound, where… Melanie falls in love with one young blonde hunk and Wanderer with another, and who will Melanie’s double-inhabited body end up hooking up with?

*record scratch*

Yes, The Host, based on a novel by Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, is as dumb as it sounds. This is an alien invasion movie that consists mostly of Saoirse Ronan and Disembodied Voice of Saoirse Ronan arguing with each other over whether and when and with whom the body of Saoirse Ronan should get it on. (Sample voiceover from the disembodied voice: “Why is he looking at you? Why are you looking at him?”)

To its credit, the story is not as weirdly prudish as Twilight, which conflated sex with the apocalypse, but it’s if anything even more ridiculous, especially since the two “love stories” at its core are purely theoretical: there’s no reason “Melanie” should fall in love with random blonde dude #1 and “Wanderer” with random blonde dude #2. And Meyer again proves that she has zero understanding of storytelling or drama. Once Melanie’s body is deposited with the rebels, absolutely nothing of interest happens — we’re told that Melanie is being hunted by the aliens, but the movie stops cold so that she can bicker with herself and contemplate kissing.

The film was written and directed by Andrew Niccol, who wrote The Truman Show and wrote and directed Gattaca and the underrated S1m0ne. He helps make The Host a minor triumph of production design, with the aliens’ metallic helicopters and sports cars contrasting nicely with the barren red expanses of the Utah desert setting. But everything else about the film is an embarrassment. This is the kind of movie where the plucky young heroine is named “Melanie,” the hunky love interest is named “Jared Howe,” the mysterious alien entity is named “Wanderer,” and the frontiersman rebel leader is named “Jebediah.” It’s the kind of movie where you can tell if someone’s an alien by looking in his eyes, and when they don’t want to be discovered they were sunglasses. It’s the kind of movie where the human rebels spend god knows how long on unsuccessful laboratory attempts to extract an alien from a host body, and then it turns out that the alien “can only be removed by kindness.” Stephenie Meyer is a curse on cinema and storytelling and science-fiction and horror and art, and Niccol here is not helping.

The Place Beyond the Pines is an epic, foolish, hugely contrived melodrama that nonetheless hits with the force of a locomotive. It is Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up to Blue Valentine, but where that film was so organic, its pain so steeped in experience, that it barely felt like a movie, Pines is a screenwriter’s creation through and through – not quite Guillermo Arriaga-level schematic, but close. That it still connects so strongly is a testament to Cianfrance’s deft hand with grand gestures, big themes, and credible characterization. Try to imagine Crash as written and directed by James Gray and you might come close to conceptualizing this beguiling film.

It begins as a weird combo of The Wrestler and Drive, with Ryan Gosling as “Handsome Luke,” a stunt motorcyclist who takes to robbing banks after learning that he has a son by a sometime fling (Eva Mendes) and deciding that he needs to provide for his family. We spend a foreboding 45 minutes watching him try to make good by being bad, and it’s a perfect representation of the film’s odd appeal: the set-up is awfully lazy, bordering on ridiculous (Luke immediately gets a job from a weirdly over-eager mechanic, played by Ben Mendelsohn, and is told “You’re good at what you do but I can’t pay you more — wanna rob a bank?”), but Cianfrance plows through the contrivance with such confidence that he practically wills the film into taking on the weight of tragedy. It helps to have a quintessential Ryan Gosling performance as another mysterious, intensely unironic young man who’s always a furrowed brow away from a fearsome explosion of violence. It also helps to have generous heaps of raw talent at your disposal. The first act ends with a motorcycle chase that’s genuinely shocking in its no-CGI immediacy. And Cianfrance is good at slowly turning up the pressure until something has to blow, as in a scene where Gosling passive-aggressively (and then aggressively) confronts Eva Mendes’ new boyfriend.

Later, other characters edge Handsome Luke out of the spotlight, and the film becomes one of those sprawling multi-generational tableaus with the characters’ fates intertwining, sons following in the footsteps of their fathers, and the screenwriter’s chosen themes weaving through all of their lives just so. It shouldn’t work, but Cianfrance and the actors sell the shit out of it: my biggest takeaway from The Place Beyond the Pines has to do with the power of avoiding sentimentality – or just hinting at it – in situations that seem to beg for it. This is the stuff of soap opera, but the emotional beats come in quick, powerful jabs (what Luke says on the phone after barricading himself in a stranger’s bedroom) or faint callbacks to something introduced earlier (Dane DeHaan’s character eating ice cream with his stepfather). Bradley Cooper plays a police officer with a wrenching ethical dilemma, but the way he deals with it is the opposite of what you might see coming, denying us the emotional payoff that most filmmakers would consider our due. Late in the film there’s an extraordinary performance from a young actor named Emory Cohen that is stunningly convincing without regard for likability, in a role that we’d otherwise expect to tug at our heartstrings. Cianfrance is so careful in weaving his weird tapestry that when he does get to a bona fide Big Moment in the final shot, it’s a very serious punch in the gut despite being something one might consider hopelessly hackneyed out of context.

And for all the improbable coincidence in which The Place Beyond the Pines traffics, it’s not a film about fate or karma or “connection” any of the other mystical or political bullshit we might get from Arriaga or Haggis or Inarritu, or any of the other usual practitioners of this sort of film. It’s a mournful meditation on how we affect the lives of others, and how we’re shaped in very real, very direct ways by where we come from and how we’re treated. The Place Beyond the Pines feels at once kind of ridiculous and entirely true. The ability to create something with those qualities is rare and should be treasured.

A few years ago, William Kamkwamba, a poor teenager from a rural village in Malawi, went to his tiny local library, found a textbook with a diagram explaining how a windmill works, and set out to build one himself. The resulting windmill looked ramshackle and fragile, made of wood and spare parts, but it worked. Word of this spread, and some prominent locals recruited William to give a talk at a TED offshoot gathering in neighboring Tanzania. There, one of the American conference organizers was moved by William’s story and decided that he would do anything he could to lift William out of poverty. With the help of various other American sponsors and do-gooders, the two of them set off on a speaking tour, which results in a book deal (with a co-author). Before long, William enrolls in a prestigious South African prep school, sells his life rights to Chiwetel Ejiofor, and enrolls in Dartmouth.

Without demonizing or condemning anyone, the new documentary William and the Windmill looks at this apparent dream scenario with biting skepticism. First of all, what exactly is everyone fawning over? The radio and talk show hosts we see interviewing William express surprise and delight that he was able to read a book and follow instructions. “Soft bigotry of low expectations” is putting it charitably. Second: it’s hard to prove a negative using a 90-minute documentary, but no one seems to ask William how much of this he actually wants. Oh sure, his benefactors lay out options and explain things, and make recommendations, but the outcome is always foreordained. William’s primary sponsor refers to himself as William’s “consigliere,” but there’s no doubt about who’s effectively calling the shots.

As his family and his village come to depend on his newfound fame and wealth, William starts to look not like the luckiest young man in Africa, but like someone who’s getting steamrolled. You can see the weight of destiny and responsibility visibly start to weigh down the taciturn, eager-to-please kid. On the other hand, it’s hard to deny that William is hugely lucky, and that these are incredible opportunities that he would be exceedingly unlikely to be afforded absent the help of these well-intentioned white people.

And, the film suggests, so it goes with Africa. At one point, William and his entourage return to his village to kick off construction of a new school. A village elder gets up and reassures his people that they are in charge – that if they wanted to tell these do-gooders to go somewhere else, they could. Well, yeah, I guess they could.  But they won’t. They’ll let these people build their school, according to their plans, with the funds they supply. And it’ll probably be a nice school. But when they’re done they’ll leave, and then what? And what about the village down the road?

On a more intimate level, the white westerners in the film feel great about themselves for rescuing William (his “consigliere” admits that it’s his way of working out personal issues), but is paying many thousands of dollars to ship an African boy to New England so that he can study at Dartmouth really the best mode of aid to the continent? Or is it just a smug (if benevolent) form of colonialism?  William’s prep for freshman year involves reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

William and the Windmill doesn’t confront its characters with these questions, which would just provoke an argument. Instead, it captures the cognitive dissonance and self-absorption of well-meaning people who want to save the world, but are mostly helping themselves.

After breaking up with his girlfriend of seven years, late-20s assistant book editor Doug (Brian Geraghty) decides to go on an adventure: he and his stock trader friend Mitch (Chris Marquette) will trek to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. But his asshole boss (Jim Gaffigan) is not about to give him a vacation, his busybody parents are crowing about “irresponsible purchases,” his ex keeps coming back for dinner and snuggles, and he meets an awesome new girl (Abigail Spencer) on his daily run. Will he tell his boss to fuck off, shed the affections of his ex, tearfully explain to his parents that he’s gotta live his life, and set off to Kilimanjaro with his new girlfriend in tow?

The answer to most of those questions turns out to be “no,” which is part of why Kilimanjaro is such a wonderful surprise. In his feature film debut, Walter Strafford snuck a smart and tricky movie about disappointment into the shell of a formulaic rom-com about chasing your dreams. So many films traffic in wish-fulfillment that it’s hugely gratifying to see one that has some of the same conventional rhythms but that also acknowledges that sometimes circumstances refuse to cooperate with one’s fantasies and grand plans. Kilimanjaro is funny and breezily enjoyable, but it also works to undermine clichés at every turn, ending up not on a mountain, but somewhere poignant and unexpected.

Before The Lords of Salem, I refused to sign on to the conventional wisdom that Rob Zombie is a hack and a poseur, a witless purveyor of ugliness and flaccid shock horror. This despite the fact that I’ve never actually been able to recommend any of his films, which have all been irritating and overindulgent t odifferent degrees. But they also have a exaggerated grimy aesthetic that I actually like, and a knack for imagery that’s, if nothing else, strikingly ugly; plenty of filmmakers spend their time in the gutter, but Zombie at least bothers to decorate. Giving Michael Myers an abusive white trash childhood in the Halloween backstory was a dumbass idea, but at least it was memorably rendered.

I’ve now seen The Lords of Salem, which is Zombie’s Rosemary’s Baby-style Satan-worshipping thriller, and… well, it has some striking images and an exaggerated grimy aesthetic that I actually like, and it’s also kind of irritating and overindulgent. It does have a remarkable number of ideas that are at once terrible and amazing, including a title card superimposed over a freeze frame of a goat, bringing about the apocalypse via an unsolicited vinyl submission from a mysterious rock band to a radio station, a climactic explosion of gonzo imagery that I pretty much unreservedly love, and making the whole thing a metaphor for drug addiction. One alluring thing about Zombie is that it’s hard to know how much of all this is a put-on. I spent a lot of time squinting at it, which is more fun than being bored.

Zombie still can’t or doesn’t want to tell a story, and The Lords of Salem doesn’t even really pretend to make sense, or to be paced in any rational way. But as a beautifully-composed piece of phantasmagoria with a phenomenal sound design, it’s actually worthwhile. So long as you know what you’re getting into.

When the most interesting thought in your documentary about one of the greatest scientists in the history of the world is expressed by Benedict Cumberbatch, you have a very serious problem. No disrespect to Mr. Cumberbatch, who seems smart and nice, but it seems to me that a movie about a genius whose body is wracked with ALS should have more than one throwaway line about how horrifying it must be for a mind like that to become gradually imprisoned in a body that won’t cooperate. It should also, preferably, say something of his work beyond maybe two total minutes of newspaper-headline summary of his various breakthroughs.

Narrated by Hawking himself, this is the shallowest puff-piece portrait of the man you can imagine, flitting through his biography with voiceover and talking heads interspersed with bullshit “reenactments” where an actor who kind of resembles Hawking looks sad or thoughtful or writes on a chalkboard out of focus. On my way out of the theater, I overheard a conversation between two women, one of whom asked the other if she had learned anything from the film. Her reply: “Well, I thought he was still married.” Yep – that’s about right.

Seen at the 2013 SXSW Film Festival.

A lavish house party and a college student’s attempt to reconcile with his estranged girlfriend are interrupted by a bad special effect from the sky in Plus One, a weirdly terrible sci-fi lark from Last House on the Left director Dennis Iliadis. The conceit is a flippant, comic take on what Sean Ellis and Christopher Smith treated with infinitely more care in The Broken and Triangle, respectively. Here, the time-traveling-doubles plot doesn’t actually make any sense: the film comes up with a complicated structure of overlapping timelines, but has a lot of trouble keeping them straight, and never manages to use them for anything fun. It also struggles mightily to give the film a horror veneer by occasionally turning characters homicidal for no good reason, and to retain an emotional hook by having its protagonist all but ignore the astonishing, apocalyptic events around him to plot an apology to his girlfriend. The result is profoundly strange, one of the most undercooked professional-grade films I’ve ever seen – like Iliadis (who has a story credit) and his screenwriter gave themselves a total of 90 minutes to think about their script, and then plunged ahead with the shoot.