I look on this as a mood piece with a riveting score, maybe an homage to the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, with Benicio del Toro in the Javier Bardem role. Or it could be a domestic analogue to Zero Dark Thirty, with torture and extra-legal black ops producing the assassination of the Mexican drug kingpin. Looked at as a realistic plot, however, it made about as much sense as The Martian. There was also the continual question of what Emily Blunt – or more exactly, Emily Blunt’s character – was doing in this movie. I kept wondering what particular skill set she had that qualified her to be chosen for the “interdepartmental team.” When we learned that her job was to stay out of the way and keep quiet, it was even clearer that someone – whether the casting director or the estimable Victor Garber – had grossly miscalculated. Even more puzzling was what her (African-American) sidekick was doing on the team, especially since he had been expressly rejected – “No lawyers!” – at the outset. It was a kick to watch Josh Brolin and del Toro waltz through their tough-guy roles: I chortled with pleasure at their drolleries. But the more I thought about the movie afterward, the more annoyed I became. But what should I expect from a French-Canadian director’s take on an American anti-drug mission in Mexico?

A delightful road trip down to New Orleans with Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn, portraying, respectively, a natural winner and a born loser. The ending was not exactly what the story set us up for, but I won’t complain about a little fantasy. For all the gritty shots of Iowa, St. Louis and Memphis, this was still just a movie. Mendelsohn, especially, made us believe.

There are amazing stories in the life of Steve Jobs: how two kids in a garage took on one of the world’s most powerful companies, IBM, and came out on top; how Steve Jobs, after getting fired, came back to Apple and returned it from near-bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world; how he led the invention of two products – the iPod and the iPhone – that revolutionized two industries as well as the leisure-time activities of not only all Americans but so many citizens of the world. These are alluded to in this documentary by Alex Gibney, but not much more. Instead, we are given a scattershot of vignettes from Jobs’s career that seem to address, not the question posed by Gibney of why Jobs was so revered when he died, but a more general point of view: “Yes, but…”

The qualifications that Gibney harps on, furthermore, are presented without much context. Sure, Apple tried to minimize its tax liabilities, but what corporation doesn’t? Yes, he wanted his compensation increased, but what ceo doesn’t? Apple products are manufactured in China in working conditions below American standards – let’s see the list of companies you can say that about. He is not a warm and fuzzy human being – well, sorry, no one is worshiping Jobs because he is a saint, and so much of Gibney’s movie seems beside the point.

More generally, I was distracted by the constant cutting and mixing of Jobs at different ages, with vastly different appearances. There was no chronology to the film, just different chapters: the daughter he denied; the prototype phones that got lost in bars; his car; dealings with journalists; backdating stock options (confusing); his health. Subjects seemed chosen based on the availability of on-camera interviewees or grainy film clips. In all, the movie was fascinating just because the subjects – Jobs and Apple – are so fascinating and so much a part of our lives. It also helped to have read Walter Isaacson’s book that covered all the same ground. But as a movie, the lack of focus, lack of organization and lack of perspective left me feeling empty, if not annoyed, as I looked back and left me wondering, was this rushed into theaters to beat the next Jobs movie due out next month?

“I had sex today,” announces 15-year-old Minnie in the opening scene, and that’s pretty much all that happens. When we learn that the sex was with her mother’s slacker boyfriend, a certain uneasiness, not to mention creepiness, sets in, but even then the ultimate explosion we see coming is rather muted. Kristen Wiig is wonderful as the San Francisco 1976 free-spirit mother, but she seems as emotionally detached – drunk or stoned? – as we the viewer remain. Minnie’s compulsion to share her experiences with her tape recorder is a stand-in for the author’s urge to write this book, if not the (also female) director’s desire to make this movie.