Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013). The most successful animated feature in the traditional Disney mold (fairy tale structure, a bevy of Broadway-esque songs) since the studio’s nineteen-nineties heyday, Frozen is charming enough if a little flat. Like a lot of modern Disney fables, it’s more interesting for the ways it compulsively upends the legacy tropes–the “true love” with a man, the oversimplified villainy–than for the actual merits of what winds up onscreen freed from meta examinations. The songbook provided by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez may have launched a thousand (or more) YouTube videos on the strength of “Let It Go” alone (and the song admittedly is catchy enough to automatically lodge in my brain any time I hear those three words in succession), but it doesn’t stand up to the Alan Menken-Howard Ashman feats from back in the day. Besides, “Do You Want to Build a Snowman” is the real winner from the song score. Anyone should be able to hear that. I also don’t fine the human characters as ravishing as some, although I’m prepared to defend the Josh Gad-voiced snowman Olaf as one of the great comic relief characters in Disney’s formidable canon.

August: Osage County (John Wells, 2013). Surely a Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of a play deserves a better cinematic fate than this, even with the original playwright on board to pen the screenplay. I see so sins in condensing the material, nor does that writing suddenly ring false. Instead, it’s the borderline inept directing by John Wells that seems to be the culprit, especially his absolutely inability to develop a consistent tone or to stabilize the wildly varying quality of the performances of his all-star cast. He’s hardly the first filmmaker to display reticence in asking Meryl Streep to temper her worst tendencies (snapping off pieces of scenery like candy cane stalks as the malicious matriarch of the film’s dysfunctional clan), but he could have noticed that Ewan McGregor, Benedict Cumberbatch, Abigail Breslin, and Dermot Mulroney weren’t pulling their weight. The Oscar-nominated performance by Julia Roberts is solid and appealing (despite the “America’s Sweetheart” tag that accompanied her rise to stardom, she’s always been at her best when she’s been able to be a little mean and disagreeable onscreen), but the best work comes from the Chris Cooper and Margo Martindale, playing out a far more honest melodrama around the fringes of the story.

Hope Springs (David Frankel, 2012). Hope Springs makes an admirable attempt to wryly address the sort of late-in-life romantic problems that modern movies would rather do without. Well-meaning as the film may be, it can’t quite decided what it is. Is it a thoughtful consideration of the strain that develops in any relationship, especially one that has endured for years? Is it a light-hearted, semi-satiric romp about late-in-life sexuality? Is it a spiky comedy about a combative couple. Before it’s done, Hope Springs even betrays some of the tired crow’s feet of the modern rom-com. In not settling, the film winds up being a whole lot of nothing. As far as the performances go, Streep has some nice moments but her acting choices are all too obvious much of the time, and Steve Carell simply tries too hard to signal that he’s being serious now as a counselor who tries to help the central couple. Tommy Lee Jones fares best, mostly because he seems to grow more and more incapable of unnatural moments as he ages.

White House Down (Roland Emmerich, 2013). Maybe it’s the film’s happy, unashamed embrace of its own absurdity, but damned if Roland Emmerich’s woefully high concept Die–Hard-in-the-White-House doesn’t spring to delectable life like a popcorn kernel that’s spent just the right amount of time sizzling in oil. Channing Tatum is the everyman who winds up protecting the U.S. President (Jamie Foxx, thankfully lacking the embedded action hero knowhow that Harrison Ford conveniently possessed in Air Force One) when the White House is the target of fiendishly effective terrorist attack. The movie is enjoyably old fashioned (to the degree that eighties and nineties action movies are in the distant enough past to be termed old fashioned), right down to the obviously telegraphed “secret” bad guys peppered throughout the cast. It’s not high art, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013). In the always surprising land of Marvel movies, the third offering with the armored avenger as central star is notable for the ways in which it’s the unlikeliest elements–those that smack of cheap pandering–that are the unabashed highlights. Accordingly, I suppose, the pieces that should work like gangbusters are drab and muddled. There are cool ideas behind the various action set pieces, but the direction of Shane Black (presumably hired at the behest of Robert Downey, Jr, who worked with him on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) leaves them as largely incoherent mash. And yet the scenes in which a momentarily grounded Tony Stark (Downey) grouchily bonds with a Tennessee youth named Harley (Ty Simpkins) are as witty and winning as anything that’s been issued under the Marvel cinematic banner. Downey’s characterization of Stark is so spot on that even his hints of boredom with the role work for the character, and he does an interesting job with the character’s posttraumatic stress disorder following events in The Avengers. Like an unfortunate number of the Marvel movies, it seems apparent there’s a far better version that could be made with about twenty minutes carved out of it.