Don’t call his movie jazz. Hazily moving back and forth in time, Miles Ahead takes place during the legendary trumpet player’s self-imposed 5-year hiatus from making music during the 1970s, flashing back to memories of his tumultuous relationship with ex-wife Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). It’s a disjointed, bizarre, and oddly compelling structure that Miles himself may have admired. Don Cheadle—playing Miles, co-writing, and making his feature directorial debut—hones in non-musical moments from Davis’ life in creating this muddled biography, with at least one more gun-toting car chase than expected. As cool as Miles Ahead’s stylistic flairs are—bleeding Miles Davis performances into the middle of a boxing ring and elsewhere—Miles Ahead still falls victim to the stiffness of conventional biopics, hampered by its own ambition.

Cheadle has worked nearly a decade on Miles Ahead, co-writing the script with Steven Baigelman (story credit on last year’s James Brown flick Get On Up) and even turning to IndieGoGo for a final bit of fundraising. More than any other element, Cheadle the actor appears ready for the challenge of capturing the soul of Miles. He convincingly resembles Davis when tapping on his trumpet and donning the garish outfits Miles wore at the time. Sounding like a man in recovery from a weeklong binge, Cheadle’s Davis adopts a scratchy, apathetic tone somewhere between conversational dialog and a man mumbling under his breath. His performance brings the dynamic, unpredictable energy Miles Ahead needs, but the film surrounding him is too sparse to keep pace with his rhythm.

Miles Ahead’s frantic assembly loses sight of the characters in Davis’ radius. Though flashbacks (and flashforwards) transport the film back over a decade, the majority of the “present day” action occurs across two crazy days during Davis’ exile. He’s bothered by the unrelenting knocks at his door from fictional and inexplicably pursuant Rolling Stone writer Dave Brill, played by Ewan McGregor, who alternates between authentic and fake bafflement. Davis asks Brill if he can drive before using the writer as a chauffeur to Columbia Records, where he arrives gun-in-hand to demand a $20,000 payment. One of the executives (played by a mustache-twirling Michael Stuhlbarg) makes sleazy attempts to win over Miles before hatching a plan to steal Davis’ latest recordings—which he literally refers to as, “gold.” The subsequent chain of events involved in the losing, tracking, and re-acquiring of this unreleased recording borders on ridiculous, and would more appropriately belong to a Guy Ritchie heist plot than the Miles Davis story.

These distractions pull the film away from the music. Miles Ahead never plays like a greatest hits record, often turning away from the Kind Of Blue hits in favor of obscure cuts from Miles Davis’ career. Even when songs are heard, they are relegated to the background of scenes in which Davis fruitlessly searches for his new sound. In the beginning, pouring a session tape, Davis stares down his trumpet from across the room and mutters, “Fuck you lookin’ at?” Cheadle attempts to define the obstacles Davis had in returning to recording after taking time off, but in the context of his erratic vision, Davis’ inability to compose is reduced to a subplot.

Cheadle reaches for a lot of disparate concepts with his long-in-development Miles Davis biopic. He looks to articulate the impact of his music while focusing on the prolific musician’s least productive period. Cheadle tries to make a film about the essence of Miles’ work but offers an intentionally limited perspective on the man. Miles Ahead remains entirely watchable, yet the ways in which the film falls short of its target are frustratingly apparent throughout. When Cheadle trots out as Davis with #SocialMusic emblazoned on his vest during the film’s finale, it’s one final oblique maneuver that seems as confused as the rest of this incomplete portrait. Despite a tremendous performance at its center, Miles Ahead gets lost in its attempt to embody Davis’ artistic spirit.

With sleek packaging that would make the late Apple CEO proud, Steve Jobs is a biopic told in three extended scenes, over the course of three separate product launches. Alternately taking place in 1983, 1988 and 1998, the newest film from director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) begins in chaos with arguments bleeding into one another. An audience of eager techies waits outside the 1983 Apple Keynote while Jobs (Michael Fassbender) stands center stage demanding that the Mac on display say, “Hello.” He orders Mac developer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) to fix this problem while Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) pulls him backstage to handle other issues; he meets with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) as his estranged wife (Katherine Waterston) and daughter (played by Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo, and Perla Haney-Jardine during different time periods) wait for him in a dressing room; he balances all these tasks, never doing just one thing at a time.

Credit the breakneck pace to writer Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, Moneyball), whose wordy diatribes have been both the subject of praise (The West Wing) and scorn (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip). Few writers are as capable of making intelligent people sound smart, and here he’s once again demonstrated that ability. In Steve Jobs, Sorkin’s script sends the actors careening into one another. Their piercing verbal takedowns and cleverly dismissive retorts provide a staccato rhythm that remains humorous and enthralling for the duration of the movie. Steve Jobs cares about ego, and characters who demand or want credit for their contributions. “I’m tired of being Ringo when I know I was John,” Woz yells at his friend and collaborator. The script spends as much time building its characters up as it does tearing them down.

Imposing this 3-part structure requires Sorkin to reach for several storylines simultaneously. It’s a structural conceit that asks the audience to overlook that sense of “the gang’s all back together” each time its central characters are reintroduced for later scenes. Steve Jobs is more of an impressionistic portrayal of the tech innovator than all-encompassing biopic, but this assembly is far more entertaining than what the conventional treatment allows (looking at you, Jobs).

New chapters begin with an exposition dump through montage and dialog. The script maintains a high energy, which allows the actors’ emotive line delivery to cover up the expositional nature of some of their interactions. It gets messy during a section in the middle of the film, when editor Elliot Graham (21, Milk) jumps from flashbacks to the height of an argument between Jobs and his former boss, John Sculley (Jeff Daniels). More often, the film is electric, smoothly transitioning between its exciting moments.

Fassbender commands attention on-screen as Jobs. His magnetism transcends Sorkin’s depiction of Steve Jobs as an unrelenting asshole (who relents a bit too much by the end). He embodies the character’s unchecked sense of superiority through his disaffected saunter and casually spoken insults, delivering a well-timed, “Fuck you,” as if it were completely innocuous. It’s one of the actor’s most fascinating roles to date, elevated by the A-class ensemble around Fassbender. In particular, Kate Winslet nails Joanna Hoffman’s subtle Polish accent while serving as a sounding board and frequent scene partner to Fassbender’s Jobs.

Director Danny Boyle blends the dynamism of the script and the actors’ performances with his mastery for technical flairs. Shooting each time period in its own format—16mm for 1983, 35mm for 1988, and digitally for 1998—Boyle implies the technological progress through these periods. The filmmaker matches Sorkin’s rapid-fire dialog by condensing as much visual information into each frame as it will allow. He laces his scenes with the shortest of cutaways to a crowd stomping their feet in anticipation of Jobs’ latest unveiling or a brief glimpse of Jobs and Woz back in the garage.

The overwhelming display of craft makes Steve Jobs among the most stimulating biographical films in recent years. Any liberties Sorkin takes in adapting the famous Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs serves to accentuate the underlying conflicts in Jobs’ life. Its gripping first few moments ultimately prove to be the film’s best ones, as the momentum gradually slows by act three; however, Steve Jobs is nonetheless a highly entertaining look at an icon and the ways in which his hard-headed determination affected those in his radius. Lead by one of the year’s best performances, Steve Jobs is constantly compelling perspective on the shortcomings of a man who achieved greatness.

Watch the new trailer for the Liam Hemsworth-helmed film Cut Bank, directed by TV director Matt Shakman. The film involves a cast of characters in the tiny rural town of Cut Bank, Montana, known for its cold winters, the central lead being Hemsworth’s Dwayne, a young man sick of his surroundings and desperate for escape. His lucky break comes in the form of the murder of local postman Georgie (Bruce Dern), which Dwayne happens to catch on his handheld camera. The reward for information around the death of a postal worker? $100,000 dollars.

But Dwayne’s big break may have nothing to do with luck. In the meantime the sheriff, played with uncharacteristic meekness by John Malkovich, is on the hunt for a murderer and a motive, while a local recluse enacts his own violent search for a parcel carried by the “murdered” postal worker.

With Oliver Platt, Billy Bob Thornton, Teresa Palmer and Michael Stuhlbarg rounding out the rest of the star-filled cast, the first trailer reveals a very Coen-like noir feel. The trailer plays up the dramatic over the quirky that we recall when we caught the film at the LA Film Festival, but definitely manages to pique just the right amount of interest.

Read our Los Angeles Film Festival coverage of Cut Bank and look for it on DirecTV on February 26 and in theaters April 3.

A Serious Man is a dark comedy that comes off being; profound, pretentious, uncomfortable, simple and serious. It’s about actions and coincidences. It’s also about trying to find answers to life’s problems. Nominated for two Oscars this film written, directed and produced by the Coen brothers is worth watching. But be warned, it’s slow.

As the title suggests, it’s about a serious man named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) who has some serious life issues and begins to self-destruct. He desperately seeks for help and answers to his problems. A Serious Man opens with a meaningful quote “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” This is essentially what the entire film is all about.

Larry is an ordinary Midwestern physics professor. His life begins to slowly unravel when his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) tells him she wants a divorce. At the same time, a student who desperately wants a passing grade tries to bribe Larry with money. He looks for answers from everywhere he can including religion and lawyers.

A Serious Man is domestically simple. It has a small town feeling with plenty of routine and uneventful way of living. Overall it is slow moving but it also has sudden changes of events, makes for sort of paradoxal fast paced slow moving dialog heavy film.

The cinematography was stunning and each scene was beautifully shot. It’s no surprise it won Best Cinematography at the Independent Spirit Awards, it rightfully deserved it.

What I didn’t like about the film was how many things they could have went into more detail on. It’s like they present you all these sudden incidents but don’t go into full detail about them. Specifically, Uncle Arthur’s Mentaculus book. His book filled with equations and formulas, other than it broadly shows that both Larry and Arthur are trying to find rationality in life. It really doesn’t have major relevance to the story. I wanted to know more about it.

Due to its slow moving pace and somewhat uncomfortable dialog, I don’t believe A Serious Man will win over the majority of people’s hearts. While it certainly is no masterpiece, it is definitely a quality piece of work that shouldn’t be completely overlooked.