In traipsing Old-Hollywood comedy Hail, Caesar!, sibling duo Joel and Ethan Coen reflect on the cyclonic nature of showbiz, much like its spiritual predecessor, Barton Fink. That movie (which, my god, is now 25 years old) is nastier and more idiosyncratic, skewering the film industry with voracious (and incredibly funny) disdain. The Coens’ 2016 offering is more relaxed and lighthearted, but what it lacks in crackling energy and forward momentum it makes up for with finely tuned, detail-oriented jokes and an overabundance of charm.

The charm factor is in effect no more than during one of the film’s several movie-within-the-movie, genre-parody scenes, in which Channing Tatum (playing Burt Gurney, a Gene Kelly-like hoofer) performs a jaunty tap number in a sailor suit. (Few current screen actors can move like this man, and the Coens don’t squander the chance to let him tear up a song-and-dance routine.) The movie’s set in 1951, predominantly unfolding on the grounds of Capitol studios (the same fictional studio from Barton Fink), and Gurney’s ditty is one of the many movies being filmed on the sunny studio grounds, including a glittery synchronized-swimming production (starring an Esther Williams-channeling Scarlett Johansson) and “Hail, Caesar!,” a Ben Hur-style epic starring self-involved, strong-chinned leading man named Baird Whitlock (played by George Clooney in the vein of Charlton Heston).

While most of the characters we see are cleverly-packaged homages to the stars of Dream Factory heyday, one is taken straight from the Hollywood history books. Capitol is absolutely bustling with chaotic activity on a daily basis, and one man is responsible for holding the whole operation together: Eddie Mannix, a real-life, legendary studio exec who put out fires at MGM for years. He’s embodied by Josh Brolin, who leads the charge as the main focus and anchor of the otherwise scattered story. Mannix is a bulldozing man on a mission, zooming around the lot and around town making unblinking threats and using cool-headed negotiation tactics to keep all of his pictures running on schedule and in harmony. There’s no one better, and a lucrative job offer from Lockheed has him considering leaving the loopy microcosm of Capitol to make a bigger buck, albeit for dirtier work.

Much is made of Mannix’s soul searching; the film opens with him repenting in a confessional, a place we see him return to twice more as he considers the Lockheed offer and reflects on the more questionable facets of his moral make-up and career choices. Brolin and the Coens have always had a fruitful partnership, and while Mannix isn’t as monumental a creation as Llewelyn Moss, for instance, he’s still interesting enough to stand out amid the crowd of larger-than-life personalities running around the rest of the film.

One such personality (my favorite, in fact) is Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), a singing cowboy star who can perform eye-popping, impossible feats on horseback and has a gift for lasso acrobatics, but can’t read proper dialogue for squat. When he’s shoehorned into a production that calls for him to wear a tuxedo and walk into a room full of aristocrats speaking in Mid-Atlantic accents, it makes for one of the funniest scenes I’ve seen in recent memory (watching the baby-faced buckaroo do his involuntary cowboy strut in a tuxedo nearly killed me). The comedy’s all in the details, like how the stuffy production is under the hilariously named “Laurence Laurentz Presents” banner. Hobie isn’t a mere caricature, though; later on, he plays a key role in the film’s plot that shows us that he’s a true hero (which explains why he’s so awkward on a proper movie set; he’s too genuine to fake anything).

The dilemma at the center of the story that keeps the movie from being a randomly arranged series of unrelated scenes involves the kidnapping of Baird Whitlock by a stable of scorned communist screenwriters. As Mannix tries his best to handle the situation, he’s bombarded by a litany of on-set issues: Johansson’s starlet is looking to avoid a pregnancy scandal; the great Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) refuses to tolerate Hobie’s atrocious line-reading skills. On top of that, he’s stalked by the film’s resident Hedda Hopper-esque columnists, persistent twin sisters played by a fantastic Tilda Swinton.

Mannix’s plate-spinning is involving enough, but I couldn’t help but yearn for more time with the rest of the cast. Johansson, Swinton and Tatum are super entertaining and part of me thinks it would have been nice to make Hail, Caesar a true ensemble piece, downsizing Mannix’s screen time a bit to give the others more room to do their thing. The Coens seem to be having a lot of fun stepping into the shoes of filmmakers from classical Hollywood and drinking in its grandiosity all while skewering the absurdity and silliness of its inherent artifice. They’ve become such assured storytellers and filmmakers that, even when they take it easy, we’re on the edge of our seats, grinning from ear to ear.

Francis Ford Coppola, who has been on an experimental kick with films like Tetro and Youth Without Youth, returns to the horror genre with Twixt. Directed, written, produced and financed by Coppola himself, Twixt is clearly a personal project right down to its shooting locations on Coppola’s own estate. While seeing Coppola make a return to form after his apparent banishment from Hollywood would have been ideal, Twixt is baffling throughout.

The film starts with a narrator (Tom Waits) introducing the small town setting and storyline. The town has several distinct features, including a broken clock tower with seven faces and a mass murder that no one likes to talk about. Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a writer who is described as “third-rate” and a “bargain basement Stephen King,” arrives to sell copies of his newest book. Baltimore is trying to think of a new idea that’ll put him back on top but keeps coming up short until the town’s sheriff (Bruce Dern) shows him the corpse of a girl who was staked in the heart. The same night Baltimore has a dream involving a young girl named V (Elle Fanning) and Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin) that convinces him to stay and try to write a new novel.

Anyone going into Twixt expecting an easy time is setting themselves up for disappointment. There are at least three storylines going on in the film involving the mystery behind whoever staked the girl, the dreams that explain the town’s history and the novel being written by Baltimore in the film. Twixt switches back and forth between all three of these, with the only distinction coming in the form of the black and white imagery of Baltimore’s dreams. Distinguishing reality from fiction seems easy at first, but by the final act everything blurs together so much Twixt becomes a tangled mess of a film.

The confusing nature of the plot isn’t even the worst thing about Twixt either. Coppola, shooting the film on what appears to be consumer grade cameras, makes everything look cheap and inept. The use of colour in the black and white dream sequences (mostly reserved for reds) looks hokey, and a subplot involving a boy who might be a vampire (Alden Ehrenreich) is downright laughable. Some of the worst examples are when Edgar Allen Poe’s face is superimposed on to the moon and when Ehrenreich rides a motorcycle with a CG background that would look impressive over 20 years ago.

Val Kilmer luckily has enough talent to pull off a good performance as Baltimore, but the same can’t be said for others in the cast. Elle Fanning mostly looks lost at sea, but it’s understandable why she’d have a hard time considering how bizarrely awful the rest of the film is. Alden Ehrenreich doesn’t say much outside of one scene but he does manage to show off some seriously stilted delivery before driving off on a motorcycle. Ben Chaplin and Bruce Dern manage to walk away mostly unscathed, with Dern’s hammy performance heightening some of the film’s similarities with David Lynch’s work.

The incompetent way that Twixt is shot might have been done intentionally by Coppola to match the pulpy B-movie storyline, but the result is laughable. It’s unsurprising that Coppola shot the majority of Twixt on his own estate because, for the most part, it feels like someone messing around in their backyard. A few interesting moments here and there don’t salvage the messy, amateurish quality that runs throughout the film. If this is Coppola experimenting, then the result is a complete failure.