In his latest movie, Knight of Cups, Terrence Malick asks us to join him, for the third time in a row, on a journey through the meandering thoughts of people lost in life, confessing their innermost moral quandaries to the cosmos as they stumble and crawl across god’s green earth and bask in heavenly sunlight. This time, the setting is Los Angeles, photographed in all its concrete, Art-Deco grandeur by trusted Malick collaborator (and Oscar darling) Emmanuel Lubezki. We follow and listen in on the thoughts of fading movie star Rick (Christian Bale) and, occasionally, his famous friends, as Malick lays out another unbearably thin narrative that’s as deviously frustrating as a 500-piece puzzle with 450 pieces missing. The eminently respected auteur clearly has a firm grip on the art of filmmaking—at his best, he’s one of the greats—but with his work becoming increasingly nebulous and less inviting to audiences, it’s come to the point where patience for his vagaries grows dangerously thin.

In an almost wordless onscreen performance (we hear his voice, but mostly in the form of narration), Bale drifts down the streets of L.A., occasionally jumping in thought to memories from Las Vegas, Century City and Santa Monica. Rick is in a perpetual state of punch-drunk spiritual crisis, surrounded by gorgeous women who glom onto his status, wealth and handsome looks until his emotional ineptness becomes too much to bear, at which point they make way for the next batch of girls to grab at his pants.

Rick’s fleeting romantic partners are played by a dizzying crowd of famous faces: Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Imogen Poots, Teresa Palmer, Freida Pinto, Isabel Lucas and more can now add a Malick film to their resume. The roles are thin—Blanchett plays his ex-wife, Portman plays a fling—but isn’t every role thin in a Malick movie these days? Antonio Banderas makes an appearance a Hollywood playboy who throws a swanky house party littered with real-life celebrities playing themselves (“Look! It’s Joe Manganiello! Nick Kroll! Danny Strong! Wait…Danny Strong? Huh?”). Banderas takes over narration duties for a bit, spouting twisted, misogynist philosophy. “Women are like flavors,” he says in his sumptuous Spanish accent. “Sometimes you want raspberry, but then you get tired of it and you want strawberry.”

Malick does a good job of laying out the monstrous, indulgent allure of showbiz that pulled Rick in and broke him down into the wandering, pulp of a man he is. He’s become a phony, just like all the other soul-sapped leeches overpopulating the trashy town that bred them (to be clear, Angelenos, I mean Tinseltown, or the idea of it, not L.A.). Similarly swallowed by the city is Rick’s brother (Wes Bently), a non-famous drifter whose short temper is inherited from his and Rick’s late father. The particulars of the family drama (and, in fact, most of the particulars of Ricks life) are left for us to imagine on our own, but the quality of Bale and Bentley’s performances helps to form some semblance of an emotional arc.

Some (this writer included) would consider it a duty of a true movie lover to meet the filmmaker halfway when a film’s concepts or ideas are challenging or obscure. But with Malick’s recent work, it feels like he’s not meeting us halfway. We can only give so much of ourselves over to him before his movies start to feel like tedious chores. What’s so tragic about this is that, on a cinematic level, he’s phenomenal: he and Lubezki’s imagery is sweeping, evocative and immaculately conceived. Some moments—like a ground-level shot of Bale taking a knee on the concrete as an earthquake shakes the buildings and people around him—are so exquisite you could cry. But without a deeper sense of cohesion, these cinematic feats start to feel hollow as they pile on top of each other for two hours straight. As with Malick’s last movie, To The Wonder, Knight of Cups topples over, leaving us to sift through a mess of pretty pictures in a desperate search of some morsel of meaning. Like his characters, maybe it’s time for us to wake the hell up.

For the past five years, the Hunger Games saga has been the preeminent young-adult fiction franchise on the big screen, with Jennifer Lawrence‘s Katniss Everdeen leading the charge not just for the people of Panem, but for a new wave of female-led action blockbusters. As the series has progressed, the American-Idol glamor and spectacle of the first entries has gradually fallen away, developing into a gloomy story about loss, misery, corruption and failure. The final film in the series, The Hunger Games: Mocking Jay – Part 2, directed by Francis Lawrence, is the grimmest and most depressing of all, with icky, gut-punch character deaths at every turn and a color palette so nocturnal and dreary you’ll be starving for sunlight—whether you find the movie entertaining or not is a question of taste, but I predict wide audiences will find Katniss’ final fight too irksome to enjoy.

On one hand, it’s heartening that a movie franchise aimed at teens has such a firm grasp on the devastation of war, both in the body count it leaves behind and the extent to which it ravages the mind. Half of the cast doesn’t make it out alive, and the film takes time to make sure we feel the weight of each death. It’s the nature of the story novelist Suzanne Collins and screenwriters Peter Craig and Danny Strong have been telling over the course of the series’ four movies—to put an end to the elder upper class’ corrupt regime, in which the olds keep peace by slaughtering children under the guise of a televised arena “game,” the younger generation must sacrifice everything in the name of a better future for their own children. In-your-face as the symbolism may be, these are compelling themes Collins and the filmmakers delve into.

The burden of Mockingjay – Part 2 is that it must, in all earnestness, embody that grand sacrifice in gory detail. In other words, the movie’s directive is to make you feel like shit, and for better or worse, it does just that. It’s a suffocatingly bleak story (especially given its target audience) that starts with Katniss rehabilitating severe throat wounds inflicted (at the end of the last movie) by her once-lover, the Capitol-brainwashed Peeta Malark (Josh Hutcherson). Romantic, right? Despite Peeta’s newfound obsession with killing Katniss, the two of them are smooshed together by the rebels’ leader (Julianne Moore, who plays a great weaselly, two-faced politician) to join a handful of other Hunger Games champions and military randoms in a strike team whose mission is to shoot propaganda footage as the rest of the rebels storm the Capitol and take fascist President Snow (Donald Sutherland) down for good. Katniss, of course, has other plans: she wants—needs—to take Snow’s life herself.

Snow and his cohorts are well prepared for the rebel attack, turning the Capitol into a giant Hunger Games arena, lining the streets with deadly booby traps (“pods,” they call them) designed to slaughter invaders in horrifically gruesome ways. One deathtrap sees our heroes nearly drowned in a city square quickly turned into a giant pool of black ooze; another finds them in the sewers, swarmed by a horde of fangy crackhead-zombies in close quarters. These two scenes are the only action-centric high points of the movie, and they’re well done, no doubt. The claustrophobic sewer skirmish is particularly excellent; Lawrence finds fear in the dark so well that the movie goes into full-on horror mode, which is awesome. That, unfortunately, is sort of where the movie’s awesomeness ends.

Pacing is a crippling issue for Mockingjay – Part 2. It starts slow, with the rebel troops mobilizing and Katniss wallowing in despair. Then, a surge of excitement in the city square and sewers as we watch our badass heroes finally kick some ass and, for some, go down in flames (literally). But the thrills are fleeting, giving way all too soon to the rest of the movie, which is even sadder and sappier than the first act. The action is abbreviated, sorrow is bulky, and the storytelling as a whole feels janky and numb. Lawrence’s Katniss is the most iconic heroine of the past couple of decades at least, and she’s able to, on occasion, give the movie a jolt with a piercing glare or a wail of anguish. She’s a savior in that way, though the movie’s dangerously close to being beyond saving.

It’s painful to see is our last glimpse of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, again playing Moore’s right-hand advisor. In a movie this dark, this layer of meta-mourning doesn’t help the experience at all. The Hunger Games series has been, in large part, a winning endeavor. The movies are solid sci-fi adventures (Catching Fire was terrific) with more brains than your average tentpole and a measure of love-triangle indulgence that never feels trashy. Most notably, the series made a bold statement in the face of Hollywood gender inequity, proving female-led movies can rake in just as much dough as any testosterone-pumped dude-flick. The last chapter in this landmark saga is an ugly one, but not so ugly that the magnificent Lawrence won’t live to act another day. For that, we’re fortunate.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is a chronicling of the civil rights movement through the eyes and ears of a black butler in the White House, based on a real man, Eugene Allen, who served 7 U.S. presidents from 1952 to 1986. Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong (Game Change) take “dramatic liberties” with Allen’s personal life here, but the events that transpire in the White House are apparently true-to-life. The film stars Forest Whitaker as the titular servant.

As a historical drama, the film fumbles; it’s a cameo-parade that reduces some of the most interesting and socially significant people in our nation’s history to diminutive sound bites and fleeting, trivial (and inaccurate) caricatures. It’s a biopic (one of my very least favorite types of films) that looks and feels familiarly “Gump-y”, but without the exhilarating sense of narrative movement or unforgettable riffs on key historical moments (Strong’s riffs are woefully unremarkable). However, if you wipe away all of the spectacle, age make-up, presidential impressions, and on-the-head historical allegories, there’s an eloquent, affecting father-son tale that miraculously breathes life into a narratively encumbered film.

The film opens in the 1920’s Deep South with a jab to the heart; a gruesome image of the very worst consequence of post-slavery mentality that I am choosing not to describe in detail here, even though the image is tasteful and vital to the story. Cecil Gaines (Michael Rainey Jr.) is a young cotton picker who enjoys spending time in the fields with his father, but when his old man gives the plantation owner the tiniest bit of lip, he’s gunned down right in front of Cecil’s eyes. The boy is promoted to house worker by the covertly sympathetic Vanessa Redgrave, and over the next few decades sharpens his skills and works his way up to being one of the most respected and beloved butlers in the White House (he’s now played by Whitaker.) The climb from dank to swank is told through uninspired montage with a few emotional nuggets sprinkled in.

Within the white walls, Cecil serves a slew of presidents that are played by loud, well-known actors that can’t be disguised by any amount of makeup you pile on. Robin Williams (as Eisenhower), Alan Rickman (as Reagan), and John Cusack (Nixon) are so miscast and awkward that they’re guaranteed to jerk you right out of the movie and even make you laugh in bewilderment. Their presence is showy and hokey and not worth your time. On the other side of the coin, there’s Live Schreiber (as Johnson) and James Marsden (as Kennedy) who actually do a great job and disappear into their roles. Still, it feels like these appearances are doubly-distracting double cameos. “And now…John Cusack as Richard Nixon! Applaud! Laugh!” Cringe.

Though Cecil’s career is going swimmingly and he’s able to provide a cushy lifestyle for his wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) and two sons, Charlie (Elijah Kelley) and Louis (David Oyelowo), home life isn’t so peachy. Gloria, a stay-at-home mom, grows weary and neglected as Cecil is constantly caught up with his work at the White House. Louis, however, provides the most disruptive element to the family dynamic, as he becomes actively involved with the Freedom Riders and the Black Panthers, opposing the government his daddy serves, the same government that puts food on the table and gave him the house he grew up in.

This enrages Cecil (remember, he lost his father due to a transgression that’s tiny compared to Louis’.) Louis is fighting for civil rights aggressively, tooth and nail, while Cecil is quietly subverting black stereotypes by being a humble example of a great African-American man in the most influential building on earth (this observation is highlighted ham-fistedly in a scene between Oyelowo and Nelsan Ellis, as Martin Luther King Jr.) Cecil and Louis’ violently clashing views on how to foster change in the nation splits the family in two. Their opposing philosophies finally implode their relationship in wonderfully intense family dinner scene. Watching the father and son’s paths sharply diverge and then eventually meet again on the other side (in the current time of Obama) is the film’s one true joy.

Whitaker is so good here that he’ll often fool you into thinking you’re watching a great film. His range is staggering: he can smile the warmest smile you’ll ever see and make you feel safe, or he can stab you in the chest with a venomous glare. Likewise, all the main players (in contrast to the presidential cast) put forth strong performances, from Cuba Gooding Jr. and Lenny Kravitz as Whitaker’s ribbing, chummy fellow butlers, to Winfrey, who handles her morally complex role eftly here, though her character’s arc feels somewhat superfluous.

Like I said, as a historical drama, Lee Daniels’ The Butler falls flat (though the filmmakers’ intentions are pure and good.) However, as a family drama, there’s something to it; the well-acted inter-familial relationships are undeniably effective and the moving father-son storyline unfolds elegantly. It’s a shame that the excellent central storyline gets so obstructed and mucked up by all the noise, spectacle, and pageantry (and that god-awful Cusack performance that I can’t seem to shake off. Yuck.)

Lee Daniels’ The Butler trailer