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.

It came as a bit of a shock how much fun I found myself having as I watched the bronzed, gyrating man-tasy that is Magic Mike: XXL. It’s the follow-up to Steven Soderbergh‘s unexpectedly artful 2012 film Magic Mike, which starred Channing Tatum and was based on the teenage stripper chapter of his life. Like its predecessor, XXL takes a vocation that’s been culturally passé for about two decades and makes it fun again.

Director Gregory Jacobs goes even deeper (*ahem*) and gets to the heart of the matter, taking a look at the virtues of “male entertainment,” from its rejuvinative properties to its nature as an outlet of expression for its oily practitioners. The movie isn’t as fun when the studly cast members start spinning their wheels with the comedically impotent dialogue-driven segments, which take up too much of the swollen (*ahem*) two-hour runtime; the real “magic” happens when the guys start speaking with their bodies.

Take the first routine we see: Mike (Tatum) is hard at work, grinding not a blushing female, but some metal parts for his new furniture-making business. He’s alone at night in his tiny workshop when suddenly his jam, Ginuwine’s “Pony,” hits the speakers like a sticky handful of dollar bills slapped on a cleanly-shaven buttock. As if compelled by the stripper gods, he begins undulating, thrusting, and swinging around the cramped environment like a bulky, after-hours Gene Kelly. The choreography is so cheesy and so smooth that you can’t help but smile, and that pretty much sums up the type of enjoyment the movie offers. At the expense of their dignity, these bros just want to make you happy, by any means possible.

Sick of toiling away on tables and bookshelves, Mike rejoins his old troupe of stripper buddies on a road trip from Central Florida to Myrtle Beach, where they hope to blow minds at the annual stripping convention. Jacobs and returning penner Reid Carolin seem determined to make the road-movie schematic more than just a way to cart us from dance routine to dance routine, protracting the male-bonding scenes and stuffing them with idiotic banter that’s semi-charming and natural sounding but woefully unfunny. I would have preferred putting the story on the fast track.

Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello), Ken (Matt Bomer), Tarzan (Kevin Nash) and Tito (Adam Rodriguez) each have a certain charm, and the actors seem to be having a genuinely good time bickering and taunting each other, but they’re the kind of guys who are most interesting at parties. On their off time, they’re high-fiving morons, for whatever level of entertainment that’s worth. Watching them drink on the beach and ride around in a cramped ice cream truck (with their trusty chauffeur, Tobias, played by Gabriel Iglesias) is grating, though their travels introduce us to new characters like a young, cagey photographer (Amber Heard) and a bad-bitch stripper overlord from Mike’s past, Rome (Jada Pinkett Smith).

Mike hits up Rome for a favor after Tobias crashes the ice cream truck, leaving the burly outfit without transport. She runs a steamy establishment in Savannah, a sprawling Victorian mansion lit like a sexy haunted house of sorts and run like 24/7 strip show, where dry-humpy performances can pop up in any room at any given time. This section is the movie’s best showcase, seeing a slew of talented male dancers (including a ridiculously spry Michael Strahan) blow the minds of the hoards of black, female beneficiaries. To earn Rome’s help, Mike is forced to take up his former “White Chocolate” persona and put on the show of his life. He obliges, putting on a borderline pornographic display that’s unbelievably entertaining in its silliness.

It’s true that Magic Mike: XXL is a shameless excuse for women (and men) to whoop and holler at the hard bodies on screen, but that ain’t a bad thing, not at all. That’s the whole point of the story: these guys are here to please and make their audiences feel special. It’s one of the worst feelings in the world to feel neglected and invisible, and for a man to devote his entire body and attention to a woman for a dance or two is a beautiful thing. (Male onlookers aren’t left out of the equation, either; a delightful early segment sees the guys compete at a drag bar to see who can queen it up the most.)

It’s an honest-to-goodness good time, and on a cinematic level, it’s far from trashy (though he’s still “retired” from directing, Soderbergh is credited as a producer and cinematographer). The camera moves and lighting are great and show off the zany choreography perfectly. Tatum’s career as an actor has been a lot of fun to watch, and it’s nice to see him be so expressive with his body in a time when everyone seems to be clamoring for more “serious,” talky performances from him. He’s a tremendous physical actor, and he continues to evolve that aspect of his repertoire. Magic Mike: XXL is a perfect movie to unwind to after a long work week, and no one will judge if you doze off during the boys’ banal chit-chat.

Jason Sudeikis is primed this year to be our ’90s rom-com Tom Hanks if we let him. With two romantic comedies out, both of which played at Tribeca, he’s smoothly proving he is up to the challenge of being a leading, wooing man. With the upcoming Sleeping With Other People, he has the sexy friendship-turned-romantic bit down à la Tom Hank’s in You’ve Got Mail, (though decidedly more modern and with a lot more sex), and in Tumbledown he zones in on the hopeless widower meets potential enemy turned love interest like Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle—but with the roles reversed and more antagonistic. Ok, so he’s not as wholesome-sex-symbol as Hanks, but when it comes to melding the old rom with the new com, he does an excellent job. Unfortunately the sparse and rather predictable small-town comedy of Tumbledown isn’t much for Sudeikis to work with, and he’s not even this film’s leading role.

Rebecca Hall is the film’s lead, playing Hannah, the widow of an Iron and Wine-style folk musician named Hunter with a huge following. It’s been a few years since his death and, as a sometime writer and journalist, she decides to try and tackle writing his biography. She spends a lot of time in their wooden lake cabin in Maine, near the town she grew up in, hanging with her two pit bulls and occasionally getting it on with local meathead Curtis (Joe Manganiello). Almost immediately after delving into the biography, a new guy shows up in town, Sudeikis’s Andrew McDonnell, an academic with a passion for Hunter’s music. He’s been leaving Hannah messages, which, if she hadn’t ignored them, would have tipped her off that Andrew is also starting a biography of Hunter. Immediately defensive, and because people don’t act all that rashly in rom-coms, she steals Andrew’s writing journal from his hotel and begrudgingly realizes he’s a pretty great writer. But she sends him packing anyway, determined to do this herself.

Griffin Dunne plays her friend, a bookstore owner, and the local newspaperman. When she hands off her first few pages of the book, he gives her some honest feedback. She has a series of memories, but they don’t a good book make. So Hannah hires Andrew to write the book with her. He moves in temporarily to get to work, and there is immediate animosity between the two. Hannah isn’t quite sensitive enough to his ego and he’s a little too familiar and assuming when it comes to discussing her dead husband.

Together they (of course) discover a few new things about Hunter, and each other. The real lessons lie in Andrew’s assumptions about Hunter, entirely based on his own life hardships and the way he thinks a talented musician’s life should look. Hannah has the expected problem of letting go of her dead husband.

Hall and Sudeikis have a reasonable amount of chemistry in the film. Their characters play into a few devices, but there are enough outside revelations to maintain interest in their ongoing story. Hall, who seems best when playing endearingly difficult, is easy to like. But, as sometimes happens, her own personality is shadowed by the interestingness of her dead husband. If first timer Sean Mewshaw (along with screenwriter Desiree Van Til) had thought to include more back story about what brought Hunter and Hannah together, it may have helped round her out a bit.

Dianna Agron shows up as Andrew’s throw-away girlfriend, a useless character meant only to contrast with how different she is from Hannah. And Blythe Danner and Richard Masur are charming as Hannah’s parents, if only given about one scene apiece of meaty material.

Tumbledown is tender, but not compelling. It’s a comedy where the tension is far more interesting to watch than the eventual coming together. The more dramatic bits, focusing on Hunter’s death and the impact of losing the love of one’s life, provoke the most emotional response, whereas the romance playing out seems to pale in comparison to the one Hannah already had. The music of the film, sung by Damien Jurado, is sad, lilting, and makes Hunter an easily believable genius. All of the elements making up Hannah—her community, family, and past—make the film a cute watch. Her progressing relationship with Andrew doesn’t compel quite as much as the rest. Overall, Tumbledown is a pleasant and sweet tempered film, and Hall and Sudeikis are lovely though simple in it, but it certainly isn’t aiming to be one of the great roms or coms of the century.