Lucky (Jeffrey Blitz, 2010). After a middling sidetrack into fiction filmmaking, Blitz returns to the sort of quirky documentary that first earned him attention. Lucky is about lottery winners. Blitz follows the trajectories of several different individuals that became instant millionaires when a few kinetic ping pong balls bounced their way. While some of the asides are good, especially those that consider the incredible unlikelihood of actually striking it rich this way, Blitz struggles to find a clear narrative to give the film some structure and cohesion. It winds up instead as a smattering of human interest studios. Some are a little sad, some are a little ironic, none of them are especially gripping.

Choose Me (Alan Rudolph, 1984). Alan Rudolph’s moody love triangle plays like a film noir that doesn’t have the energy to get off the couch and engage with the world. Keith Carradine portrays a mysterious stranger with a penchant for cryptic honesty who becomes romantically entangled with both a world-weary bar owner and a withdrawn radio sex therapist, played by Lesley Ann Warren and Geneviève Bujold, respectively. There’s a stiffness and formality in the dialogue that’s at odds with Rudolph’s interest in the twisty hold sexual attraction has on people. It doesn’t have a strong enough pulse to portray obsession. Contrived terseness is the overwhelming tone of the film. It needs heat. It has murmured discussions of heat instead.

Nick Nolte: No Exit (Tom Thurman, 2008). Initially the construction of Thurman’s documentary seems just crazy enough to suit its subject. The director sits Nick Nolte down on two different sets and stages the consideration of his life and career as a interview that the actor is conducting with himself over a laptop video feed. It’s theoretically mean to convey some sense of Nolte’s duality, the way that his considerable talent sometimes conflicts with the reckless self-destructive streak evident in his personal doings. Or maybe its just trying to posit that the height of narcissism is Skyping with yourself. Either way, Nolte doesn’t really engage in different personae or outlooks, proceeding with the same gruff, cantankerous vibe on each side of the webcam, so it eventually starts to seem like a trick with no payoff. Cards are being shoved up sleeves, but never emerging. What’s more, the “interview” falls into a film-by-film march through Nolte’s career, making it seem like a low-rent version of Inside the Actor Studio, a show that’s not exactly the height of glossiness in the first place. Whether it’s a choice or a lack of funds to secure the rights, the absence of any illustrative clips of Nolte’s acting blunts the impact even further.

Fanboys (Kyle Newman, 2009). This film about a group of devoted Star Wars fans taking their terminally ill friend on a cross-county trek to break into George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch so he can see The Phantom Menace before it’s officially released was a bit of a geek cause célèbre when The Weinstein Company delayed its release and took it out of the director’s hands to tinker with the story. Newman eventually got control of it again, but I’m not sure how much his original vision was compromised. The resulting film certainly plays like it had an overabundance of distracted cooks toiling in its messy kitchen. It has a few playful gibes at the wild enthusiasm of Lucas acolytes, a couple effective inside jokes, and cameos that wink at the audience with such aggression that they almost count as harassment. It’s a cute, clever idea, but it takes more than that to make something that actually feels like it deserves to be a movie.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (Rebecca Miller, 2009). Miller adapts her debut novel to the screen, and winds up with a surprisingly flavorless affair. Robin Wright Penn plays the older version of the title character, and Blake Lively plays the younger version, though it’s hard to detect much personality or depth regardless of who’s speaking the lines. The film examines Pippa’s journey with special attention given to all the ways she’s exploited, emotionally and otherwise, by the various people in her life, an attention that’s presumably meant to give extra meaning to the moments when she’s able to break away and declare her freedom. The film is a dull, serious trudge with the occasional forcefully quirky moment that indicates that Miller can’t quite figure out what she wants the film to be.