One-Liners: meh

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB (B) - I can watch Matthew McConaughey in just about anything, and there's plenty of Matthew here in his classic good-ol'-boy mode. But director Jean-Marc Vallee struggles to inject enough air into this balloon -- the real-life mid-'80s story of Ron Woodruff, a homophobic Texan suffering from AIDS who opens a "buyers club" to provide experimental drugs and natural products from Mexico to those desperate for treatment.

McConaughey is not hurting for one-liners to toss around. But even his shtick gets stretched thin over the course of a poky two hours. Jared Leto is wonderful as the cross-dressing druggie Rayon, a die-hard Marc Bolan fan who goes partners with Woodruff. Denis O'Hare is wasted as a bad-guy doctor who's in bed with the makers of AZT and with the FDA. Jennifer Garner just doesn't have the chops to pull off the role of the fellow doctor with a soft spot for Woodruff's endeavor; she seems to shrink with every role.

This is a strong drama in a lot of ways, but it too often comes off as preachy, with one-dimensional villains that don't rise above the level of those in an average TV drama. It's an enjoyable film, with a few powerful scenes -- mostly involving McConaughey and Leto (the heart of the movie), who both lost an incredible amount of weight to look positively skeletal -- but it falls short of must-see storytelling. 

THE ARMSTRONG LIE (B) - Entertaining but certainly not essential viewing, this documents the downfall of Lance Armstrong, who was done in by his 2009-10 comeback attempt (when filmmaker Alex Gibney began this project) and hit rock bottom with his confession to Oprah Winfrey earlier this year (when Gibney finally had his unexpected ending).

Armstrong is a tough subject to crack, and Gibney never really gets inside the mind of the disgraced Tour de France champ; maybe no one could. Armstrong ran his team like a mafia boss, spending years denying the obvious -- that he cheated with drugs and blood doping every year he competed and strong-armed others into doing the same. 

The hero of the story is the dogged Betsy Andreu, wife of a former Armstrong teammate, who heard the truth from Armstrong's own lips and, seeing the way her husband was batted around, was determined to see justice done. 

Gibney has fun poking fun at himself -- this started out as a bit of a fanboy celebration of the 2009 comeback -- getting caught up in the myth and then watching it get dismantled. He gets Armstrong to sit down after the Winfrey interview but we don't get much more drama or revelation. Maybe -- less than a year after that public confession -- we've already moved on from the Armstrong saga. The filmmaker is a victim of timing here.