The third installment in the series that put Marvel as a standalone entity on the map picks up in the wake of Marvel’s biggest triumph, The Avengers. Tony Stark, played charmingly yet again by Robert Downey Jr., is trying with very little success to recede from the spotlight he seems so natural basking in. He has turned over much of the technology behind his trademark suits of armor to the military, more specifically Don Cheadle’s Col. James Rhodes. He has stepped away from Stark Industries, leaving the day-to-day operations to Pepper Potts, reprised by Gwyneth Paltrow, who is also his steady girlfriend, his committed relationship representing yet another departure from the old days.

Despite all those seemingly positive changes, Tony can’t outrun his past. He’s dealing with either severe anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder caused by that whole close-call-with-complete-annihilation that made up the climax of The Avengers. And despite his best attempts to get out of the superhero business, two villains emerge to pull him back in for another rodeo. There is Aldrich Killian, played by Guy Pearce, a deranged scientist whose “Extremis” virus can regenerate lost limbs but has some nasty side effects, and there is The Mandarin, played by Ben Kingsley, a mysterious terrorist with an ideology that is as unclear as his ethnicity.

Apparently, the only way to get to Tony Stark these days is to take everything he holds dear, and so that’s just what this duo and their minions does, putting his former bodyguard Happy (Jon Favreau) in to a coma, turning his Malibu mansion in to rubble and threatening Pepper’s life. With everything on line and little in the way of his usual tricks and tech, Tony is forced to get back to the basics — building things and rattling off snarky one-liners. There’s absolutely nothing disappointing about any of these developments. Downey’s quips are as snappy and satisfying as ever. The action sequences, particularly the destruction of his mansion, are breathtaking. There wasn’t a second of Iron Man 3 I didn’t enjoy.

But there wasn’t a second of it that will stick with me in any meaningful way, which means that it falls well short of the heights of this genre. You can see where director and co-writer Shane Black, who cut his teeth on movies like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout, tried to inject elements that would elevate the film, but it never sticks with any of themes for more than what seems like a millisecond. A better director or a more courageous studio might have tried to build an entire film around the Killian-Mandarin dynamic only hinted at in Iron Man 3 — the idea that capital-F Fear, perpetuated by an irresponsible and incompetent fourth estate, is part of a feedback loop that generates immense wealth for a few cynical profiteers. That didn’t happen here for whatever reason.

Instead, we got sketchy outlines of those more high-minded concepts. It left me feeling a bit like someone who goes in to McDonald’s, notes that they do actually have salad on the menu, and then opts for the Big Mac anyway. Sure, the salad would have left me feeling better after my meal, but Marvel’s got the secret sauce, and I haven’t gotten tired of it yet.

Screening Room Rating: 7 out of 10

Pain & Gain, his latest opus, is the sort of movie where we discover Anthony Mackie’s character has a thing for chunky women because Mark Wahlberg’s character says something along the lines of, “I know you have a thing for chunky women.”

But it’s impossible to deny that Bay is a master at crafting big, bombastic, over-the-top blockbusters, and P&G is a refreshing (not often a Bay-centric adjective) jaunt back to the mid-1990s, before the Transformers series and its soul-crushing reliance on CGI. This isn’t Bad Boys or The Rock, but it’s the closest we’re gonna get.

It’s a simple enough story on paper: Three muscly guys with no bucks and no plan decide to rob a rich businessman, and chaos ensues. Fortunately, it’s the kind of madness that’s tailor-made for the big screen; unfortunately, Bay has to pause the action near the 100-minute mark to remind us that “Yes, This All Really Happened.” Always with the lack of subtlety.

Anyone who’s seen the trailer probably assumes that it’s equal parts boobs, muscles and explosions, but one of the most enjoyable aspects about Pain & Gain is its pointed lack of focus on sex. Minus one moment where Wahlberg makes what appears to be reluctant outdoor love to a stripper (and Mackie’s romantic endeavors with Rebel Wilson, which are never taken seriously), it’s all weightlifting and scheming. The men of Pain & Gain are not interested in women; they’re into themselves.

If only that sort of relentless, narcissistic self-love could be maintained throughout the movie’s unnecessarily lengthy run-time (129 minutes).  For the most part, Pain & Gain is a dark comedy. But there are moments where it seems like Bay can’t give up the black-and-white world view of his cookie-cutter action films; we’re force-fed occasional reminders that Wahlberg and his crew are bad guys, namely Ed Harris’ arrival in the second half as a private detective that we’re practically ordered to root for.

It never feels earned. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is wonderfully endearing as a born-again meathead, until the movie needs him to start doing cocaine and dating a stripper. Wahlberg is pleasant and inherently likeable in every scene, except the ones where he pressures his friends to commit murder. A more competent director might let his movie bask in the shades of grey, but Bay can’t resist forcefully shuffling our interpretations for the sake of clarifying “right” and “wrong.”

It’s hard not to compare it to The Informant!, a film that practically bathed in the odd complexities of Matt Damon’s deceptive snitch while painting him as both sympathetic and horrifyingly incompetent. It also told an outrageous story with such seriousness that comedy effortlessly flowed from its veins.

Pain & Gain‘s finest scenes come close to that mountaintop. A man’s head is crushed under a stray weight after a tussle with Mark Wahlberg, who responds to the shocking event by doing a set of bicep curls. The Rock, while soothing his swole friend’s jangled nerves, can’t help but compliment his excellent form.

In those moments, Pain & Gain soars. In the hands of a legitimate filmmaker with a taste for gallows humor, it could’ve been something truly special. But even Bay manages to turn an embarrassment of source material riches into an entertaining romp that’ll play on a loop in dorm rooms and frat houses for eternity.

Screening Room Rating: 7 out of 10

Greetings From Tim Buckley sets out to reveal some of the mystery by parachuting in to Buckley’s life on the precipice of his rise to fame, following him as he journeys from California to Brooklyn to play in a tribute concert for his father Tim. I didn’t know that the Buckleys were a musical family, but, much as with athletes, I’m not surprised that this sort of talent appears to be genetic.

Jeff, played by Penn Badgley, is reluctant to play at the concert at all because he barely knew his father at all; Tim also met with an early demise, overdosing on heroin and alcohol in 1975. Needless to say, Tim’s absenteeism and untimely death has had a profound impact on the Jeff we see in this film, especially on the cusp of following in his father’s footsteps. Like many a burgeoning rock star before him, Jeff distracts himself from all the emotional turmoil this concert has stirred up by spending time with a young woman, Allie (Imogen Poots), who has helped to put the concert together. In between rehearsals, Jeff and Allie flirt (at a record store, on a train to Poughkeepsie, on a street in Brooklyn), and she gently nudges him toward coming to terms with his father’s legacy. Interspersed are vignettes of Tim (Ben Rosenfield) hustling from gig to gig in the 1960s, as if to try and explain why he was barely in Jeff’s life.

Director Daniel Algrant has openly admitted that the tribute concert, which serves as the film’s climax, is the only “true” part of the story, all the rest amounting to “conjecture.” I’m all for artistic license, but if you’re going to employ it, you might as well use it in an interesting way. This Jeff Buckley has daddy issues and a gorgeous muse in Poots. How, exactly, does that make him different from thousands of characters we’ve seen before on film or thousands of real-life artists, regular or otherwise, out there right now?

It doesn’t, of course, and that’s a shame because Buckley is such an enigmatic figure. His musical influences, as revealed in the the record store scene (by far the film’s best) when he belts out songs from various artists, are broad and diverse. His death was purely accidental, not the result of some destructive streak. His very place in pop culture — somewhere beyond indie sensation but just short of superstardom — is even rare. Unfortunately, by the end of Greetings From Tim Buckley, we don’t know much more about him than at the very beginning, other than that Badgley is a stunningly convincing vocal match for the man he is playing. There are some memorable nuggets here, but not enough to make it feel like a missed opportunity.

Screening Room Rating: 5 out of 10

Then a shocking moment changes everything, including the quality of the movie.

It’s difficult to discuss a film built around a twist, especially when said twist brings about a massive letdown. Suffice it to say that my first thought was of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, except a lot more boring. For whatever reason, Pines starts to veer in new directions, pretending all the while that the story’s bobs and weaves are natural and logical. It’s ambitious in its waywardness, but without any substance. Are we examining the seedy undercurrent of life in a small town? Is it meant to be a Crash-type situation, where unrelated people come together in jarring ways?

There’s no apparent rhyme or reason. Anything that makes sense feels lazy and tacked-on, as if it’s there because that’s what happens in movies.

For example, Bradley Cooper trudges forward on his Take Me Seriously Tour as the son of a judge who’s trying to make his way as a cop in a corrupt district. Sound familiar? Would it blow your mind if I told you that he also went to law school, and that makes him not only smarter than the other cops but also a whole lot more honest?

It’s as if Cianfrance had a Gosling-themed mini-movie in mind and then realized he had to fill 100 more minutes, so he slapped a bunch of clichés together and hired great actors and actresses to handle nothing parts.

Ray Liotta shines in his one big scene as Cooper’s law-enforcement superior who interrupts a family dinner … and then sort of disappears. Rose Byrne seems like she’ll be relevant in a few key moments as Cooper’s conflicted wife (my girlfriend: “Psst. It’s the girl from Bridesmaids!”) … but then she sort of fades away, too. Eva Mendes is more than capable as the mother of Gosling’s child, but then the movie doesn’t need her anymore either.

Nothing feels right or consequential after the first 45 minutes. It becomes a big meaningless void that tries in vain to tie everything together, with no reason to stay interested besides the $12 you paid for a ticket.

And when the final third of the movie begins, you can tell with glaring certainty that it’s all about to be wrapped up in a neat little package. Characters are introduced and forced together with almost embarrassing clumsiness; you can see events unfolding from a mile away. This isn’t always a bad thing (there are only so many ways to tell a story) but by the end every additional scene feels like a twist of the metaphorical knife. Just when you think you’re out, nope, here’s the kid from Chronicle stealing Oxycontin from a pharmacy.

Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine was brilliant because it examined a crumbling marriage in unflinching detail. It was hard to watch, but only because it was so honest and sincere. A Place Beyond the Pines is also hard to watch, but for very different reasons.

Screening Room Rating: 4 out of 10

I’ve never understood the adoration for Malick. He’s always felt like a very, very advanced film school student with an outsized trust fund to me. Maybe that’s why so many critics like him, and I, someone who comes at film criticism from a relatively pure fan/storytelling perspective, do not. Yes, he’s tremendously skillful on the purely artistic side of things. His shots are framed wonderfully. He captures natural beauty like few can (a scene with bison in this film stands out). His musical choices are impeccable. But to me he always come up short in the storytelling department, substituting vaguely poetic voiceovers and gorgeous rolling shots of fingers combing through stalks of grass for things like a plot and character development achieved in ways other than the whisper of a disembodied voice.

Perhaps To the Wonder is a caricaturesque amalgamation of all of Malick’s most grating ticks. If it is, I certainly couldn’t tell the difference between it and, say, The Thin Red Line or The New World. To the Wonder is a portrait of doomed love. Parisian Marina (Olga Kurylenko) falls in love with visiting American Neil (Ben Affleck) and makes the ill-fated decision to move her and her daughter Tatiana (Tatiana Chiline) to a nondescript slice of the U.S. heartland. Things fall apart soon after — the strain of the move on Tatiana, an unexplained emotional distance between Marina and Neil and another love interest, Jane (Rachel McAdams), conspiring to sour the romance.

I can’t say I wasn’t invested in the characters. Though Affleck has only a handful of lines and many of Kurylenko’s are spoken in, yes, that tiresome voiceover, the disintegration of their relationship, at roughly the pace of Chinese water torture, resonates. It does so mostly through the frigid stoicism of Affleck and the borderline unstable mood swings of Kurylenko’s displaced character. Unsurprisingly, very little that either says (whether to each other or when strolling through amber waves of grain) contributes to that emotional connection.

Despite that investment, I had had my fill of this turbulent love affair long before To the Wonder‘s 112 minutes were up, and the same would be true even if you scrubbed the non sequitur appearances of Javier Bardem as Father Quintana, a priest who resides in the same American town as Affleck’s Neil, from the film entirely. There’s probably some deeper meaning I’m meant to find, but, as with his other films, Malick makes it so obscure and abstract that it’s like looking for a needle in a wheat field. Hey, maybe that explains all those walks his characters take …

Screening Room Rating: 5 out of 10

Director Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead is pretty obviously caught between these two minds, so much so that there’s a jarring shift in tone over the final third (or so) of his film. Even if you haven’t seen Raimi’s campy original, you ought to be familiar with the basic premise. A group of twentysomethings head to a remote cabin in Michigan where they unwittingly unleash demons that inhabit the surrounding environs and torment the five unsuspecting interlopers.

There are plenty of nods to Raimi and co. — the cabin seems to be a carbon copy of the original, the book that brings about all this evil, the Necronomicon, has been freshened a bit but is still there, so is the car driven by Bruce Campbell’s iconic Ash character and shotguns, a chainsaw, and chains over a trap door. But for much of the film there are no corresponding winks. With The Evil Dead, you always felt in on the demented joke, thanks especially to Campbell and the writing of Raimi. Not so with Alvarez’s reimagining, which is an unflinching and mostly unhumorous gorefest for most of its 91 minutes. The fact that you’re more likely to jump out of your seat than chuckle should tell you all you need to know if you’re going to compare the two films.

Yes, Alvarez engenders genuine terror in his audience by what he is willing to show them — someone sawing off their arm with an electric carving knife or slicing their tongue in half with a razor blade, etc. But to fixate on that alone is to rob him of some cleverness. How do you make the kids-in-a-cabin trope fresh? Well, one way is to make the reason for them all being there to help one of their friends kick a nasty drug habit. Mia (Jane Levy) is trying to get clean, so when she starts to talk about demons in the woods, everyone else assumes she’s lying because, well, that’s what drug addicts going through withdrawal do. The evil spirits might not be so believable, but the reactions of Mia’s brother and friends to her hysteria sure are. There’s terror in people you trust not believing a word that you say.

Though it’s not immediately apparent, Mia is our stand-in for Ash, or at least the closest Alvarez comes to giving us one. She has her semi-humorous moments toward the end of the film (that’s the jarring shift I mentioned earlier), but mostly she’s representative of Alvarez’s darker twist on Evil Dead. I can’t say I enjoyed it as much as the original, but I also can’t say I didn’t enjoy it at all.

Screening Room Rating: 7 out of 10

As such, about 30 minutes in to Disconnect, I was ready to dismiss it altogether as an irrational Luddite screed about the dangers of Facebook and text messages and email on your phone, all wrapped up in a Crash-like construct. It is not this. Technology — social media, cell phones, etc. — is central to the film, but, to its credit, it is not about technology exactly. Better yet, it does not have a firm opinion on the impact of technology on all our lives, presenting itself instead as a Rorschach test. If you think Facebook portends the downfall of civilization, you will see what you want to see in this film. If you are more rational about the positives and negatives, you are likely to come away with a more even-keeled impression of the proceedings.

Ironically, considering the title, Disconnect tells a series of intertwined stories. There is ambitious TV reporter Nina Dunham (Andrea Riseborough), who, through an informal online relationship with Kyle (Max Thieriot), threatens to bring down an underage pornography ring. There is her lawyer, Rich (Jason Bateman), deals with the tragic fallout of cyber bullying when his teenage son Ben (Jonah Bob0) attempts to take his own life. There is the father of one his son’s tormentors Mike (Frank Grillo), an ex-cop now working as a cyber-security expert. And there is the grieving married couple — Derek (Alexander Skarsgard) and Cindy (Paula Patton) — who have turned to Mike after having their bank accounts cleaned out by a hacker.

Technology tears these people apart, but just as importantly it brings them together. (As director Henry Alex Rubin, best known for Murderball, said during a Q&A session after the screening I saw, “[these devices] amplify everything.”) The most compelling storyline belongs to Bateman. Cyber bullying played a role in his son’s suicide attempt, but he also uses Facebook to connect, desperately, with what his son might have been going through. This duality and nuance is what keeps the film from careening off the edge in to alarmist dreck territory.

If only the non-Bateman/Grillo storylines had been more compelling. The Derek-Cindy tale falls almost completely flat as they embark on a misguided chase of the person they think emptied their bank accounts, Skarsgard injecting little realism in to the role of war veteran who has shut himself off emotionally from his wife after the death of their child. The Andrea Riseborough storyline, meanwhile, felt tired and vaguely insulting. How many women journalists will filmmakers turn in to conniving, morally compromised ladder-climbers before this cliche is retired?

There is 40 percent of a good film here and enough of an interesting premise that the other 60 percent, had it been executed well, could have made Disconnect a true classic. It falls short of that lofty moniker, but that does not mean it isn’t worth a look all the same.

Screening Room Rating: 5 out of 10

It wasn’t very viable or fulfilling at the time (a modest profit at the box office, middling early reviews) but history has been very kind to the 1980 film. It’s become particularly ingrained in pop culture; I suspect most people under the age of 30 believe Jack Nicholson came up with (or at least popularized) “Here’s Johnny!”

And that’s about it. The end … right? Not according to Room 237.

Room 237 posits that The Shining is one of the densest pieces of cinema ever created. It’s practically an insult to take in the film as it seems, as the story of a father and husband who goes mad and tries to kill his family. Stanley Kubrick was too smart to tell such a simple story, they say. It has to be something more, something deep and serious and important.

A poster of a downhill skier on the wall is actually a minotaur, implying that Jack Torrance represents the mythical beast and the hedge maze is a labyrinth.

A lingering shot of a key in a lock is meant to point your eye towards the words “ROOM No” on the chain. Rearrange those capitalized letters and you’ve (kinda) got MOON, which mixes and mingles with Danny’s spaceship sweatshirt and 2001: A Space Odyssey to imply a great deal of things about Kubrick’s adventures in mock space exploration.

It’s also probably a commentary on the Holocaust and/or the destruction of the Native American way of life.

There are a startling amount of theories on what The Shining is, and Room 237 certainly lets them all breathe. With five commentators, nine segments and 102 minutes, there’s more than enough room to examine how hairpieces, floor plans and tricycle routes all factor into Kubrick’s ultimate message. Or messages.

This is a lot more enjoyable than it sounds, especially because even the most intriguing ideas eventually go off the deep end. More than a few times, I laughed outloud as several strong bits of evidence were followed by a very outlandish and irrational proclamation. And while director Rodney Ascher must believe that something besides commercialism fueled this movie, he tellingly did not edit out casual interruptions during conversations with his theorists. Is he humanizing the speakers, or just letting some of the air out of their increasingly extravagant rants?

But those sorts of questions are for post-film chats. Fans of cinema and/or craziness will find it best to let the suppositions flow like wine. As the opening credits come to a close, one theorist notes, Stanley Kubrick’s face is visible in the clouds. “That’s a tough one to see,” he admits, but trust him, it’s there.

It’s not, of course, but it’s kinda fun to look. And while not every movie should be deconstructed and analyzed for all eternity, Room 237 makes a potentially tedious mess of ramblings into something wholly entertaining.

Screening Room Rating: 8 out of 10

This silent war on RSS is not going completely unnoticed, nor are the motives behind it not understandable. RSS essentially enables a passthrough of content without the benefit of providing advertise-able space. On some level, the popularity of Reader probably left Google feeling like a sucker, providing the infrastructure overhead for a service that was connecting readers to content providers without leaving a dime for the middle man. Google, joining Twitter and Facebook, refers their Reader users to use social networking as their news aggregator.

Here is the part that I think these social networks are missing: who is going to seed the content? Content gets disseminated through the network, but it has to get there in the first place. How does that happen? The answer is that it comes from the “small minority” of RSS users who keep tabs on content producers, harvesting content for the social networks to consume and make viral.

So Google, Twitter, Yammer, et al. are destroying the means of the primary consumers that everything else feeds off of.

Sure. Content providers post their content to social networks, readers subscribe through the network, and content gets pushed through the social network plumbing. But a human being can only follow so many simultaneous Twitter feeds, and the intermix of Instagrams and friends’ internal monologues doesn’t quite have the simple, aggregated throughput that an RSS reader confines itself to. RSS subscribers fly through an order of magnitude more content, skimming off just the cream to feed the insatiable social net.

This war isn’t over, though.  The emergence of Feedly and the rebirth of Digg purport to be taking up the fight, and the Old Reader seeks to become the new Reader. Tell us what Google Reader alternative you will be seeking shelter in. And if you landed here from the social web, go fuck yourself.

Roger Ebert, who died last week, remains my favorite film critic. I didn’t always feel that way, but I do now, and I feel it with absolute certainty. You don’t get that feeling a lot when you’re an almost thirtysomething. Ebert’s legacy is immense — not just in the film world, but among many, many writers — and I won’t attempt to try to encompass it here. Others have done it and can do it better than I.

Instead, I’ll focus on the example Ebert has set for me as a professional and a great human. I think of many things when I think of him — that unmistakable voice, the way his reviews always read like his half of a conversation with me, the way he didn’t let his myriad health problems consume him in the final years of his life, but rather persevered to do what he loved and to enjoy the time he had with people whom he loved, namely his wife Chaz. Despite all those big, important things, I also think of Jay Mariotti, who occupied a surely miniscule space in Ebert’s life.

Ebert eviscerated Mariotti in an open letter when the troll-before-being-a-troll-was-a-thing sports columnist left the Chicago Sun-Times. He jumped from that paper to AOL FanHouse, a mostly-defunct site that I worked on for years. I can’t claim to have known Mariotti (or Ebert, for that matter) well. He was not particularly nice to the editorial staff — and I’m being charitable — but mostly I just don’t know enough for certain about him as a person to be too judgmental. I do know what kind of writers Mariotti and Ebert are, though, and there is enough of a lesson in that to render the rest of it moot.

I know that both of them are/were talented and prolific. Ebert would write five or six reviews in a week and Mariotti, at least when I worked with him, would churn out five or six columns in the same timespan. Those qualities, and their shared workspace in the Windy City, are where the similarities end, though. Because while Ebert approached writing and movies and life with genuine zeal, Mariotti (again, at least when I worked with him) approached all that stuff with extreme cynicism. While Ebert — having seen countless films — could still deliver an enthusiastic thumbs-up for The Cabin in the Woods, Mariotti spent most of his time calling for this coach to be fired, that athlete to go to jail — calling for anything that would be sure to upset the most amount of people.

The lesson, to me at least, is that with enough talent you can make something of yourself, but that doesn’t mean you are guaranteed to make something meaningful out of your talent. Ebert made something — many things, actually — meaningful out of his life. That all by itself is a tremendous legacy.