Folks, I cannot tell a lie: I thought it was a pretty mediocre movie summer. Up was overrated. Star Trek was deeply flawed. So maybe it’s no surprise that Inglourious Basterds was just one more bitter letdown for me.

Inglourious Basterds (The Weinstein Company/Universal Pictures)

In their own way, Quentin Tarantino’s movies are as critic-proof as Michael Bay’s – and for some of the same reasons. Complain that QT is stuck in a perpetual adolescence – that he’s just fooling around and not being a serious artist – and you’ll be greeted with accusations that you’re a fuddy-duddy who’s not hip to what Tarantino is after. I think that particular criticism of Tarantino can be a bit simplistic – he doesn’t have to be “serious” to be an artist – but as with the Kill Bill films and Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds convinces me of the man’s immense talent and, simultaneously, my immense indifference to it. He can put together a bravura sequence. He can write snappy dialogue. His enthusiasm for the genres that he’s pillaging is obvious and somewhat contagious. He is extremely ambitious. But for all his creative spark and inventiveness, I can’t get past the fact that I rarely care about the people on the screen. In Inglourious Basterds, they’re colorful, but I don’t get wrapped up in them in any meaningful way. (Tellingly, Brad Pitt is in ham mode here, which has its pleasures, but when his Ocean’s Eleven character is comparably richer and more layered, we’ve got problems.) And for all the accolades Christoph Waltz has received for his turn as a Nazi detective, I’m at a loss for what’s so special about the performance beyond the very impressive opening sequence. Structurally, Inglourious Basterds recalls Pulp Fiction a bit in that its seemingly unrelated chapters eventually connect, but Tarantino continues his recent trouble of being so enamored by his set pieces that the emotional connective tissue between them goes wanting. I realize, of course, that the more I complain about his weaknesses the more I’m playing into the hands of the “Stop being so uptight” crowd: “He likes mixing comedy and drama and his film-geek obsessions together in unconventional ways,” goes the argument, “what’s your problem with that?” My problem is that if that’s all it is – and, the longer his career stretches, that seems to be the case – then it’s hard to get that excited about his body of work. So where does that leave him? An expert genre filmmaker hamstrung by massive pretensions? That’s not the kind of artist I think any of us wants.

Funny People (Universal Pictures)

The complaints I’ve had about Judd Apatow in the past – his willingness to indulge his actors’ on-screen improvisations, his inability to write about anybody other than immature men, his trouble with finishing his films as strongly as he sets them up – are mostly solved with Funny People, which is the first of his movies to actually feel like a fully intelligent, emotional, satisfying experience. Even at 146 minutes – just seven minutes shorter than Half-Blood Prince! – the movie rolls along with a steady pace I never would have guessed he’d be possible of achieving. Funny People has been called Apatow’s “James L. Brooks movie” but unlike Brooks at his best, Apatow doesn’t have anything particularly profound to say about his 40-something hack comedic movie star (Adam Sandler) and the aspiring 20-something schlub (Seth Rogen) who becomes his personal assistant. But what Apatow does know is the world of Los Angeles stand-up comedians – where they hang out, what their lives are like, how they bang out their material. The authenticity of the film’s milieu is such that part of Funny People’s considerable appeal is that it shows a world with such clarity and accessibility that it’s not just another inside-baseball Hollywood story. As for Sandler, he’s never done anything quite like this role before – it’s like he’s playing the real guy behind the goofy-bozo persona he’s done to such commercially successful effect in so many of his movies. But unlike Punch-Drunk Love or Reign Over Me, he’s not doing “dramatic” – this might finally be the Adam Sandler movie for people who are sure they will never see an Adam Sandler movie. Apatow still loves his immature men, but the shtick quotient has gone way down. Funny People takes real narrative risks, and I wish that its last third worked better. But even if he isn’t profound, Apatow clearly loves these people – and he knows their flaws and isn’t afraid to be honest about them.

Amreeka (National Geographic, opening September 4)

Odd as it may sound, writer-director Cherien Dabis made her smartest creative decision with her semi-autobiographical tale of a Palestinian single mother coming to America by making her protagonist an occasionally frustrating fool. Muna (Nisreen Faour) is a nice-enough woman – she’s got a good heart – but because she makes occasionally boneheaded decisions during the course of Amreeka, Dabis keeps her from being another saintly immigrant sent into the lion’s den of American racism and intolerance. Instead, we judge Muna and her Americanized family members as regular people, not political statements, which helps make Dabis’s political commentary go down a hell of a lot smoother than if she tried to ram her message down your throat. This is just one of the modest, common-sense creative decisions that grounds Amreeka in reality, and the movie’s all the better because of it. Her small-town Illinois setting yields the expected bigots, but it also breeds kind and sensitive people, and even when you think Dabis might be turning her story into an outcasts-have-to-stick-together parable, she understands that such feel-good triumphs have to be tempered by the facts on the ground. Her movie may not be terribly memorable, but neither are her characters’ small but important lives – that’s what makes them so special.

Lorna’s Silence (Sony Pictures Classics)

At a loss for any comparable filmmaker who could match their unbending stylistic consistency and steady level of quality product, I decided that the Dardenne Brothers were the art-house equivalent of Sonic Youth. The New York indie-rock veterans pump out a new album every few years to an eagerly awaiting cult audience while naysayers complain that it sounds like all their other stuff. Likewise, the Dardennes’ Lorna’s Silence is not a radical departure from L’Enfant or Rosetta – an impoverished young person considers doing disreputable things to get a better life, all shot with handheld austerity – but the pleasures come from experiencing the filmmakers’ latest variations on a well-made style. With that said – and I don’t mean to downplay the unfailing skill of the Dardennes – I did find myself able to predict the contours of Lorna’s Silence’s story early on. And while there are still surprises to be had, there was less overall pleasure in the telling this time around. So if you’re new to these brothers, start with La Promesse or L’Enfant. Once you get hooked there, you’ll want to sample the rest of the oeuvre. And then you’ll know that Lorna’s Silence is great, solid work – and that they can do even better.

Humpday (Magnolia Pictures)

One of the real gifts of an artist is the ability to see clearly, whether it be the dynamics of a relationship or the inner workings of a subculture or the mindset of a society at large. Writer-director Lynn Shelton’s Humpday is remarkable for many reasons, but what sticks in my mind right now is how deeply she understands her three characters – the young married man (Mark Duplass) slowly realizing that impending fatherhood could, like, really change his life; the young married woman (Alycia Delmore) who will never fully understand her husband no matter how much they love each other; and the married man’s drifter friend (Joshua Leonard) who has to decide if he wants a regular life or prefers clinging to the notion that he’s a free spirit. Movies like Old Joy and Sideways have grappled with questions about distant friends; films like Y Tu Mama Tambien and Chasing Amy have teased their audience with issues of sexual fluidity – I don’t think any film has combined the two themes so well as Humpday. Advertised as “that movie where the straight guys do it with each other,” Humpday has a Sundance-worthy hook, but at its heart Shelton’s film is one of the richest, warmest, smartest comedies in many a moon. Beyond the question of whether or not Duplass and Leonard will go through with their bizarre dare to have sex on tape for an artsy film festival, Humpday pierces the surface of marriage in its early, restless years, and it’s fair-minded enough to see the two men as not mere symbols of Conformity and Rebellion but real guys struggling between those two poles. There are a thousand ways this slowly, deliciously building narrative could have gone wrong, could have taken the cheap way out for laughs. So thank the stars Shelton found perhaps the one way to do it right – brilliantly, poignantly, nearly perfectly. I was expecting to laugh, but I wasn’t expecting to be as moved as I was. 

Steely Dan (live at the Gibson Amphitheatre, August 22)

The album-in-its-entirety live show may be a novelty, but it has its artistic values. A few years ago, catching Brian Wilson’s live Pet Sounds amplified the album’s fading-summer melancholy, which was in no small part due to Wilson’s fading vocal range. Steely Dan are playing different albums on tour currently – The Royal Scam, Aja and Gaucho, which were the three records before their amazing ’72-’80 run came to a close. I caught the Gaucho night, partly because I figured of those three records, Gaucho’s weaker tracks beat the other two albums’. Now I’m reevaluating the album entirely. Depending on who you’re asking, Gaucho is Steely Dan’s weakest or most Steely Dan-ish effort – the album where the band’s penchant for smooth jazz-rock fully embraced eternal torpor. Maybe that’s true on disc, where studio sterility was becoming a major hindrance, but live Donald Fagen and Walter Becker made the album both warmer and meaner, its seven songs a very drugged-out tour of Los Angeles failure. The rest of the show – a more conventional here-are-the-hits tour of fan favorites – pinpointed precisely why these guys were the great rock band of the ‘70s. It wasn’t because of their singles – although they’re as distinct and evergreen as any comparable classic rocker’s – but because that each ‘70s album was its own thematic vision, which is partly why I don’t think they have a masterpiece. They’re all the best of their kind – Can’t Buy a Thrill does rock radio, The Royal Scam eviscerates the sex-and-drugs ‘70s, Aja exudes quiet desperation – and hearing Gaucho reminded me that beyond all their other accolades, Steely Dan is a band that demands to be heard album to album straight through. And despite the consistent excellence of their hits in the concert setting, I don’t think I’ll need to see them again until they do another full-record show – and may I suggest the mighty Pretzel Logic as their next target?