It’s Complicated (Nancy Meyers, 2009). It’s not, really. It is, however, inane, phony and empty-headed. What’s more, it’s borderline offensive in its complete detachment from the problems that most people experience, positing the height of stress that someone could face is planning a wildly expensive addition to the already sizable house. Some of this could be forgivable if the comedy was funny in the slightest, but there’s a barely a laugh to be found in the strained story that wants so desperately to be farce, but no involved wants to sully their hands with such crass entertainment. Meryl Streep may be having fun as the woman who unexpectedly finds herself in a torrid affair with her ex-husband, but there’s nothing whatsoever to her performance besides fluttering and occasionally beaming. Sadder yet is the sight of Steve Martin, completely neutered and bereft of energy as a potential beau.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (Werner Herzog, 2009). So much crazy packed into one little innocent movie, with Nicolas Cage clearly being urged by his director to go bigger and more unhinged at every turn. Much as the escalating over-emoting that characterizes the recent stretch of his career has turned Cage into an easy punchline, can there be any other approach when in a movie that includes vividly hallucinated iguanas and breakdancing spirits? Herzog’s whirling turbine of nutty ideas is unleashed full on in to film as he manages to take the details of William Finkelstein’s dark, dire script and turn them into crashing visual opera. It’s almost a shame that the film doesn’t share the same running commentary of accented narration that Herzog provides to his documentaries, though his voice is all over it anyway. There’s a plot about a murder investigation, but it’s basically negligible. This is a grimy, disjointed nightmare painted by a madman. It may not be fine art, but it’s surely entertaining.

Baby the Rain Must Fall (Robert Mulligan, 1965). Three years after working with Mulligan on the classic To Kill a Mockingbird, Horton Foote adapts his own play, The Traveling Lady, for this drama about a recently released convict unexpectedly reunited with his wife and daughter. Steve McQueen plays the man whose aspirations to develop a music career are compromised jointly by this revived responsibility and the continuing influence of the imposing caretaker who first took him in as a child. The movie is sometimes a little too solemn, lacking the smartly playful spirit of the previous collaboration. McQueen is quite moving, though, showing through a series of haunted expressions shows how the man never totally shakes the boy.

Paris Blues (Martin Ritt, 1961). For some reason, movies never seem to get the naturally seductive world of jazz music right. Could there be anything more romantic than expatriates plying their musical wares in dimly lit basement clubs in Paris in the early sixties? Especially when two of those musicians are played by Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier at the height of their charisma and dazzling handsomeness. There’s no life to the film, though. It’s a dull slog through a predictable story, leaning too much on the built-in charms of French city life. There are even scenes when the actors themselves look a little adrift, as if they’re waiting for something to happen, suspicious that maybe it won’t.

Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008). A troubled young man, played by Joaquin Phoenix, returns to live with his parents in their city apartment, putting on a veneer of happy stability in part to help his father broker the sale of his dry cleaning business. He begins dating the daughter of the prospective buyer at about the same time he’s intrigued by a lovely new neighbor. Gray’s approach is firm and sharp, heightening the anxiety of the situations he presents without every resorting to melodrama. Phoenix is quite good as a man who’s trained himself to approach the world with great care, but can’t help letting himself get caught up in the notion of grabbing reckless freedom the first time its within his reach. Eventually, Gray loses his own grip on the story, and most of the last act feels both false and predictable. The moody character study still works, but the plot falls apart around it.