Cyrus (Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass, 2010). After establishing themselves as slightly cheekier members of the mumblecore movement with the fun, cleverly self-referential Baghead, the Duplass brothers made their first venture into a film with actors carrying impressive resumes with them with the genially bleak relationship comedy Cyrus. John C. Reilly plays a despondent guy who begins to emerge from his post-divorce funk when he stumbles into a relationship with a beautiful woman played by Marisa Tomei. Matters are complicated, however, by her dependent son played by Jonah Hill, in one of his first real attempts at breaking the typecasting that rapidly descended on him. It’s an adequate enough effort, but the filmmakers seem uncertain as to how dark or broad they should take the material. It winds up coming across as slightly weirder Cameron Crowe movie, where he as a creator can’t quite bring himself to make these characters he’s created experience anything too awful. The result is a film that, while sometimes enjoyable, is oddly toothless.

Knock on Any Door (Nicholas Ray, 1949). Humphrey Bogart plays a lawyer who comes to the aid of a reckless youth accused of murder. Bogart’s character is partially inspired because of personal connection to the boy’s father, who he’d unsuccessfully defended years earlier. He argues that the boy never got a break because of the environment he grew up in and the movie darts back and forth to the young man’s progression through a punishing, hardscrabble life. Ray directs the gritty melodrama with some verve, but it’s hampered mightily by the wooden performance of John Derek in the central role. By the evidence here, he was as poorly suited to conveying internal strife as any number of Hollywood beefcake wanna-bes asked to prove their mettle in heady studio dramas. It’s nice to see Bogart in the role of a man who’s fairly intellectual, although he does occasionally lean too hard on his most familiar mannerisms.

Burlesque (Steve Antin, 2010). I so wanted this to be a beautiful disaster, and it has a promising beginning in that respect as Christina Aguilera’s dewy-eyed ingenue comes to the big city seeking fame and stumbles into the refined seediness of a modern, high-gloss burlesque club. There she encounters the seasoned owner of the club played by Cher (co-owner, actually, with her ex-husband, played by Peter Gallagher at the height of his unique brand of frantic agitation), her gay right hand man played by Stanley Tucci and the diva star of the show played by Kristen Bell. It even has Alan Cumming as a ticket seller and performer who’s practically channeling Joel Grey in Cabaret. All the pieces are in place for this a farrago of florid frippery: Showgirls with showstopping musical numbers in place of copious nudity. Instead, it winds up woefully bland. Antin’s direction is especially slack and a few sequences seem like they were assembled by randomly snatching up already rejected shots from the proverbial cutting room floor. It chugs along to an ending that ties up everything far too neatly, with a couple taps on the tinniest notes of a electronic keyboard instead of the glimmering, crashing cymbals the material theoretically deserves.

Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1973). A depiction of life growing up in the Fascist Italy of the nineteen-thirties, as only Federico Fellini could conceive it. It is discernibly based of personal experiences, but it’s also an autobiography of undependable memories tossed into a turbine to swirl and merge with restless dreams. Maybe the most remarkable aspect of the film is the raunchy sense of humor Fellini displays. His style is often reduced, in satiric efforts anyway, to forlorn circus performers and delicate dancers, but Amarcord offers evidence that the bawdier business of lusty youths, bedraggled prostitutes and fart jokes is equally characteristic of the Italian master. The film is undeniably vivid even if its constant high energy pressing can also get exhausting.

My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936). An utterly charming, deceptively wise comedy about a wealthy man living among the homeless who is snapped up by a callous, bumbling family of means to be their butler. The screenplay is based on a short story, but it surely has the perfectly polished feel of one of the many transplanted stage plays that helped fill the studio production slate in the first decade of the talkies. La Cava and his collaborators don’t really strike the built-in social commentary of their story as sharply as they could, letting the whole thing play out as the gentlest of farces instead. It’s all worth it, though, just for the deft, endlessly gracious performance of William Powell in the title role.