Film Buff Musings

Alan Partridge is an acquired taste—particularly if you’re American—but once acquired, it’s hard to shake. He’s a buffoon in a blazer, broadcasting delusion and desperation at a frequency only the British could fully invent. And if you’re on that wavelength, Alpha Papa might just kill you. Not with empathy, certainly, but with laughter. Steve Coogan has been refining this character for two decades by the time the film rolls in, and the precision shows. Partridge is petty, self-serving, preening—an absolute prat. But he’s also funny. So funny, in fact, that you almost don’t mind watching him sell out his colleague in real time. The colleague in question is Pat (Colm Meaney), a working-class radio DJ with actual principles and the misfortune of working near Alan. When new management threatens layoffs, Alan offers to plead Pat’s case—until he sees both their names on the chopping block. Cut to a whiteboard and the words “JUST SACK PAT” scrawled in Partridge-sized letters. Pat gets sacked. Alan gets spared. And just when he thinks the mess is behind him, Pat returns with a shotgun and takes the station hostage. He doesn’t know Alan sold him out—yet—so Alan becomes a kind of middleman: part negotiator, part mascot, part unintentional folk hero. The hostage crisis becomes a national event. Alan, of course, makes it about him. The brilliance of Alpha Papa isn’t the plot—which is part Dog Day Afternoon, part sitcom fever dream—but in the way it wrings comedy from self-interest under pressure. The laughs come fast, awkward, and merciless. And they hold up. Even on rewatch, I found myself wheezing. Coogan is a comic genius—slippery, shameless, and pathologically quotable. He makes a character this absurd not only watchable but compulsively rewatchable. You laugh at him, not with him—and that’s the point. Partridge has no arc, no growth, no redemption. He doesn’t need one. He’s the joke. And he’s magnificent.

A technically polished but frustratingly sedate biopic, Ali moves through the major beats of Muhammad Ali’s life with the air of obligation, not discovery. The biggest misstep is the casting of Will Smith. He’s competent—he mirrors the cadence, adapts the posture, they even pin back his ears—but there’s a cautiousness to the performance. You see the actor thinking. He doesn’t dissolve into the role so much as stand beside it, observing, like he’s playing tribute rather than sinking into the character. The film tracks the expected arc: the rise, the resistance, the exile, the return. We see the Liston fight, the embrace of Islam, the draft standoff, the Foreman bout. These are important events, but the film treats them like reenactments—sealed off and polished, with just enough prestige gloss to flatten them. Even the boxing scenes—long, impeccably lit, and choreographed to the inch—feel more like museum displays than anything raw or spontaneous. You can see the effort in every punch. Still, they’re sequences, not showdowns. Ali was impossible to contain—funny, combative, sly, prophetic. The man we see here is mostly a vessel for plot points. A few sparks of the real Ali break through—enough to keep it watchable—but not enough to make it feel necessary. A great biopic shows us something we couldn’t find in a highlight reel or a documentary. Ali doesn’t get inside the man. It builds the statue and politely walks us around it.

An experience like no other, Jan Švankmajer’s Alice is less an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland than a dream dredged up from some surrealist fever-state—a place where enchantment and grotesquery intertwine with astonishing ease. This is Alice stripped of whimsy and dipped into the uncanny, a world faithful in spirit to Lewis Carroll’s original yet reimagined through Švankmajer’s macabre, anarchic lens. The White Rabbit, for instance, isn’t the hurried, dapper figure you’d expect. Instead, he’s a fraying taxidermy nightmare, his buggy, unblinking eyes fixed in a death stare that feels both ridiculous and vaguely threatening. He eats bowls of wood shavings to keep his insides intact and stashes his pocket watch in the same gut cavity. It’s grotesque, but there’s also an absurd hilarity to it—a kind of mad logic that makes you laugh at the same time that you realize you’re also slightly horrified. And that’s the rhythm of Alice: shock, delight, unease—repeat. Alice herself undergoes transformations that blur the line between innocent and eerie. When she drinks the mysterious liquid—here replaced by ink—she doesn’t just shrink; she becomes a stop-motion antique doll, with glassy eyes and jerky movements that exude a fragile unease. From moment to moment, the film keeps you on edge, never settling for predictable visual choices. This isn’t Alice meant for children, at least not in the Saturday-morning-cartoon sense; it’s for the intrepid kid-at-heart who finds delight in the unsettling, who spots humor in the absurd and beauty in the grotesque. Alice doesn’t wrap you in comfort—it pulls you in, hypnotizes, unsettles, and dares you to confront the idea that wonder and the freakish are separated by the thinnest, most fragile line.

Disney adapting Lewis Carroll always seemed like a strange marriage—storybook sweetness meets linguistic nonsense. Carroll’s logic was circular, his characters barely tethered to reason. Disney, by contrast, liked its whimsy with morals. But the studio goes surprisingly far here, leaning into the weird and emerging with something unruly, vivid, and still unmistakably their own. It’s not a story—it’s a slow slide into delirium. Alice, bored stiff while her sister drones on about history, catches a glimpse of a rabbit in a waistcoat muttering he’s late for a very important date. She follows—through the hedges, over the lawn, into a rabbit hole that doesn’t appear so much as yawn open beneath her. Wonderland isn’t a destination. It’s a rearrangement. Scale warps. Time slips. Logic trips over itself and keeps going. The animation does everything it can to keep things off balance. Characters burst in—mid-song, mid-thought, mid-fit. The Mad Hatter and March Hare throw a tea party that feels like it was planned during a gas leak and staffed by lunatics on split shifts. The Queen of Hearts rules her croquet lawn like she’s trying to win by volume. The Cheshire Cat, smile first and conscience last, keeps drifting in to remind Alice she’s further from home than she realizes. Cause and effect barely shake hands. Events accumulate. Conversations derail. What holds it together isn’t plot but a kind of fevered visual logic: flowers with operatic voices, cakes that change your size, flamingos wielded like mallets. The songs behave like the characters—bright, insistent, and always in the way. “I’m Late,” “The Unbirthday Song,” “Painting the Roses Red”—each one arrives like a stray impulse no one stopped in time. This isn’t Disney at its most structured, but it may be the strangest, funniest, and most visually daring. It whirls instead of marches, forgets logic in favor of sensation, and spits Alice back out into daylight—dazed, unchanged… but wasn’t that the whole idea?

An early entry in the slasher canon and a cult favorite for good reason, Alice, Sweet Alice operates in a register somewhere between religious psychodrama and proto-slasher, with a pint-sized protagonist who may—or may not—be the killer. The film centers on 12-year-old Alice (Paula Sheppard), a sullen, sharp-eyed girl with a mean streak and a chip on her shoulder. Her younger sister, Karen (a preternaturally angelic Brooke Shields in her screen debut), is preparing for her first communion and soaking up all the parental attention. Alice doesn’t handle it well. Then Karen is murdered—strangled with a candlewick veil and stuffed into a church bench like she’s been staged for martyrdom. Suspicion falls immediately on Alice, who seems just unhinged enough to be capable of it. From there, the film spirals through masks, gaslighting, and Catholic guilt, all wrapped in a grainy East Coast atmosphere that gives it a particular kind of menace. Director Alfred Sole is all-in on mood: the sound design is cluttered with creaking staircases and religious murmurs, while the score—florid and faux-Baroque—spills across scenes as though trying to elevate them past their limitations. Some sequences are genuinely haunting, especially the ones that hold their shot a few seconds longer than is comfortable. Others just sit there, drained of tension. The atmosphere thickens, slips, then reasserts itself. It’s patchy, but when it’s good, it’s unnerving in a way few horror films from the era manage. The final twist functions more as clever misdirection than shock, but that ambiguity suits the film. This isn’t a scream-a-minute thriller—it’s slower, moodier, and stranger. For anyone mapping the DNA of American horror or digging for something grimy and devotional, it earns its cult status. Not a masterpiece, but close enough to touch one’s hem.

A well-meaning tribute that never quite escapes the museum glass. Alien Trespass aims to replicate the sci-fi B-movies of the 1950s—flying saucers, body snatchers, townsfolk sprinting toward the camera—but it’s so polished and self-aware it plays more like a theme night than a homage. The colors are distractingly crisp, the line readings too arched, the script so self-congratulatory you can hear the elbows being nudged. The original films—many of them ludicrous—at least understood dread. They had droning scores, strange shadows, and a poker-faced belief in their own hysteria. Here, a blonde picks up what she thinks is a local astronomer—actually an alien with a fresh meat suit—and the moment drifts by without even a flicker of tension. The film seems worried that sincerity might ruin the joke. As parody, it’s short on laughs. As pastiche, it’s dutiful but distant. There’s real admiration here, but not much drive. You can clock the references, you can sense the affection—but that’s not the same thing as being pulled into a story. The best of those old films may have been clunky, but they knew how to sell a straight face. Alien Trespass replicates the outline, then backs away from the punch. A decent salute to a genre I love. Just not one I’d fish out of the vault again.

A brutal, often arresting survival drama based on the true story of a 1972 Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes. The wreckage kills many on impact. The survivors—cold, starving, stranded for weeks—eventually do what most of us like to think we never would: they eat the dead. Alive doesn’t flinch from the physical horrors. The crash is staged with grim precision, and the snowbound ordeal that follows is shot with a kind of frozen clarity—wide frames of lifeless peaks, desperate figures huddled in wreckage, breath clouding in air that looks sharp enough to cut. There’s tension here, and even moments of grace, but the film keeps undercutting itself with dialogue so stiff it could snap in the wind. Characters speak in declarations, not conversation, and the result feels theatrical—like watching real people reenact their own trauma with lines written by someone who never heard how fear actually sounds. It’s not poorly made, just strangely misjudged. You feel the cold. You believe the hunger. But too often, the movie stops to explain itself out loud. For a story built on desperation, it’s missing the mess—the emotional disarray, the stammering half-sentences, the silences where belief starts to rot. Still, for those drawn to survival stories with real stakes and real corpses, it’s a watchable—if imperfect—telling. It doesn’t gawk at the cannibalism, but it never quite figures out what to do with it either. The story is powerful; the film just can’t stop interpreting it.

Bette Davis plays Margo Channing like she’s spent two decades holding court onstage and is just now noticing the applause starting to thin. She’s forty—or near enough to make it a sore subject—and the scripts aren’t written for women like her anymore. They’re for girls who fumble through line readings and get applause just for blinking on cue. Margo’s career has been built on control. Presence. That unnerving precision that makes a room quiet down without realizing it. But now the roles are shifting their weight. Not turning her down exactly—just drifting elsewhere. Enter Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), a soft-spoken fan with a tailor-made sob story and a gift for standing exactly where she’ll be seen. Margo, flattered and only half suspicious, brings her in—first as an assistant, then a fixture. Eve is modest. Helpful. Always around. But she’s not admiring Margo—she’s studying her. Picking up the habits, echoing the tone, rehearsing her ascent in someone else’s mirror. By the time Margo catches on, Eve’s already being floated for the parts that used to circle straight back to Margo. What follows isn’t a soap opera—it’s a chess match, and Margo starts three moves behind. Baxter plays Eve with a fixed smile and the composure of someone who already knows how this ends. Even her sincerity feels staged. She doesn’t reach for the spotlight—it just drifts her way. And when it does, she looks right at home. Davis, meanwhile, doesn’t blink. Her Margo is proud, sharp, theatrical—sometimes drunk enough to let the seams show, but never the core. She lashes out, reins herself in, and still owns every scene like her name’s carved in the proscenium. She’s not graceful about aging, but she’s not deluded either. Davis plays her with bite, not vanity—with the clarity of someone who knows exactly how show business treats women over forty and refuses to make it easier. George Sanders slips in as Addison DeWitt, a theater critic who treats the whole thing like a black-tie comedy staged for his amusement. He doesn’t hustle—he watches, waits, and lets the egos implode without his help. He isn’t pulling strings, just enjoying the view like someone who already knows how it ends. His lines drift out like smoke—dry, amused, and sharp enough to leave a scratch. Somewhere off to the side, Marilyn Monroe makes one of her earliest appearances, blinking through a few scenes with a sleepy magnetism the camera can’t quite ignore. All About Eve is a film about performance—onstage, offstage, and everywhere ambition might find a spotlight. Mankiewicz’s script doesn’t just sparkle—it slices. It’s dry, vicious, and surgically precise, especially when aimed at the vanity masked as confidence. Davis makes every line feel definitive, like it’s already etched in stone. Margo may be watching her legacy slip, but she’s not going quietly. She’s going heels-first, voice raised.

All About the Benjamins comes in loud, fast, and already tired. It wants to be a buddy comedy with teeth but keeps gumming the formula—action here, insults there, and nothing you haven’t seen shouted before. Ice Cube plays Tyson Bucum, a bounty hunter stuck in an endless loop—always chasing the same petty hustler who somehow keeps slipping away. That would be Reggie Wright (Mike Epps, wringing what he can from a paper-thin role), who’s skipped bail again. This time, though, the chase stumbles into something bigger: Reggie’s misplaced a $60 million lottery ticket—now tucked in the getaway van of a crew of diamond thieves. Tyson figures there’s more profit and less paperwork in tracking them than dragging Reggie back to county. What follows is noise on a loop: shootouts, foot chases, shouted insults. Epps does wide-eyed panic on cue. Cube grumbles like a man hired to intimidate but still waiting on his coffee. The chemistry helps, up to a point—Epps flails, Cube glowers—but the script keeps circling the same punchlines like it thinks the third time’s the charm. The action hits its marks: explosions, slow-motion standoffs, chase scenes cribbed from movies with more money and better instincts. All About the Benjamins doesn’t crash—it coasts. Loud, forgettable, and just amiable enough to keep you from checking the clock until it’s over. Then it’s gone, like it never quite finished arriving. Cube had one truly sharp comedy in him—Friday—and this mostly just reminds you how much better that one was.

A romantic comedy about two people falling in love while sharing the same body shouldn’t work, but All of Me makes the improbable feel not only possible but wildly funny. Steve Martin stars as Roger Cobb, a self-absorbed lawyer whose life takes a surreal nosedive when the soul of dying heiress Edwina Cutwater (Lily Tomlin) accidentally ends up in his body. Edwina, who had arranged to transfer her spirit into a healthy young woman (Victoria Tennant) through the services of a mystic with, shall we say, questionable credentials (Richard Libertini), finds herself trapped inside Roger’s head—and battling him for control of his limbs. Madness, of course, ensues. At first, they’re oil and water. Edwina’s imperious commentary clashes irreparably with Roger’s frazzled protests, but eventually a truce emerges. Neither can escape the other, so they learn to coexist. The film’s premise is absurd, but its execution is brilliant and believable, thanks largely to Steve Martin’s jaw-dropping physical comedy. Watching him portray a man whose right side is controlled by a prissy, aristocratic woman while his left side flails in protest is like witnessing a one-man Cirque du Soleil act. Every step, stumble, and grimace is choreographed to perfection, as though Martin’s body were a battleground. And Lily Tomlin is vocal dynamite. Even as a disembodied soul, Edwina is formidable—imperious one moment, exasperated the next, and surprisingly tender when it counts. Together, Tomlin and Martin craft an unexpected chemistry that sneaks up on you: imagine falling for the voice in your head—a voice that once drove you insane—and you’ll get the gist. All of Me juggles screwball antics and strange romance with a sweet, wistful grace, and it produces quite a lot of chuckles to boot.

Bob Fosse made a movie about dying, and cast Roy Scheider as his proxy—thinly veiled, chain-smoking, overworked, and trying to edit a film while rehearsing a Broadway show and ignoring everyone who loves him. Scheider plays Joe Gideon, a wiry cyclone of pills, charm, and self-destruction, staging numbers by day and coughing up regret by night. The film he’s editing looks a lot like Lenny, except the comedian isn’t funny. The show he’s rehearsing looks a little like A Chorus Line, if the chorus were terrified of the man behind the table. This is autobiography by way of hallucination. We drift through the dying brain of a choreographer as it reviews past sins—neglected daughter (Erzsébet Földi), weary girlfriend (Ann Reinking), ex-wife who still dances better than the ones half her age (Leland Palmer). Jessica Lange floats in and out as the Angel of Death, dressed like a Vogue editorial and smiling like she’s already booked the grave. Fosse isn’t afraid of excess—he laps it up. The film bends toward abstraction as Gideon withers, staging his own death like a Vegas sendoff. Fellini made films this indulgent too, but Fellini was looser, weirder, and more gifted at blurring the line between fantasy and self-flattery. Fosse, for all his precision, keeps sneaking glances at his own tragedy, like he wants credit for suffering in style. But when the film locks into rhythm—usually mid-number—it practically lunges off the screen. The choreography snaps like it’s out for blood. The camera weaves through bodies like it’s chasing something. And Scheider, gaunt and magnetic, sells every second like he’s got nothing left to lose.

At first, the break-in at Watergate, in which several Republican operatives connected with Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President were caught rummaging through the offices of their Democratic rivals, was a forgettable blip on the police radar—relegated to the back pages of the news cycle at The Washington Post. That is, until rookie reporter Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) caught the scent of something much fouler beneath the surface. When The Washington Post paired him with Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman)—a chain-smoking, sharp-edged veteran journalist—it wasn’t exactly a meet-cute. Their partnership begins like sandpaper against sandpaper but slowly makes its way to a semblance of professional alchemy, thanks to sheer necessity and an uncanny knack for tugging threads until entire tapestries unraveled. What they dig up is staggering—and, of course, history. The real marvel of this film is how it takes a story of meticulous journalistic digging and bureaucratic obfuscation and weaves it into a genuinely gripping thriller. There’s tension baked into every detail—even the sterile newsroom becomes a symphony of frantic typing and ringing phones. The interviews they conduct feel draped in paranoia, as if the walls might be listening. And then there’s Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), emerging from the shadows of parking garages like some kind of noir specter, disseminating breadcrumbs just tantalizing enough to keep them on the trail. What this film does, amazingly, is take a weighty, labyrinthine subject and make it sing. It’s not some dry civics lesson or procedural slog—it’s journalism as a contact sport, with stakes that can’t get much higher. Rendered with clarity and momentum that any thriller director would envy, this film turns political scandal into high art without ever slipping into self-importance. It’s a brainy, riveting knockout that’s exceedingly entertaining—investigative reporting with the pulse of a Hitchcock film and the wit to match.

Almost Famous cannonballs into the sweaty, glamorous, and gloriously seedy romance of 1970s rock and roll. It’s the kind of film that doesn’t just leave you high on its infectious enthusiasm—it plugs straight into your bloodstream. Writer-director Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical opus is a sweet, sharp, and deliriously entertaining coming-of-age saga, draped in denim and glimmering with vinyl grooves. At its core sits William Miller (Patrick Fugit), a 15-year-old with a precocious love of words and a knack for being in the right place at the wrong time. Rolling Stone magazine, oblivious to his inexperience, dispatches him to profile Stillwater, a fictional band straddling the precarious line between breaking big and breaking apart. His mother (Frances McDormand, whose maternal disapproval slices like a paring knife) sends him off with strict instructions, while her panicked, rapid-fire phone calls keep tethering him to home like a kite fighting gusty winds. On tour, William becomes a wide-eyed witness to the pandemonium of life on the road, where the beer flows faster than the egos crash. He falls in with the “Band-Aids,” a group of self-declared music devotees who insist they’re not groupies—even though they absolutely are. Their central figure is Penny Lane (a luminous Kate Hudson)—not just a muse but a walking contradiction: equal parts dreamer, casualty, and architect of her own heartbreak. Watching her dance on the edge of joy and despair is both enthralling and devastating. Crowe pulls off something miraculous here. He takes the backstage debauchery, the screaming fights, the almost-transcendent concerts, and spins them into a bittersweet love letter to growing up. The tension between the glory and the grime of the music scene is palpable—every laugh carries a shadow, every high comes with a low. And yet Crowe never turns cynical. The film’s greatest triumph is how it pulls you into its world—crammed onto the tour bus, belting out Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” with a ragtag family of misfits. Crowe captures the messy, euphoric pulse of youth, of discovery, of finding yourself in the gallimaufry—and he does it all with wit, charm, and a soundtrack that aches with soul. This isn’t merely a love letter to rock ’n’ roll—it’s a hymn.

A period farce with a leaky canoe and no one willing to steer it, Almost Heroes plays like a film that drifted into release out of habit. Matthew Perry and Chris Farley—both capable comedians in the right settings—share virtually no comic rhythm, which proves fatal for a buddy comedy built entirely on contrast. Perry seems like he should be the fast-talking pragmatist and Farley the human cannonball, but both characters stumble forward with the same dim grasp of frontier survival, like scouts hired purely for their ability to misplace a compass. Set in the Lewis and Clark era, the plot follows two discount explorers trying to beat the real ones to the Pacific. That’s the idea, at least. In execution, it’s a series of sketches strung together with loose thread, each more half-hearted than the last. The tone nods vaguely toward historical spoof, but the scenes have no shape—just beginnings that wander off and endings that give up mid-sentence. Farley throws himself into every scene like the set might collapse without warning, while Perry delivers his lines as if testing how little effort still counts as participation. There are a few scattered jokes that nearly work, mostly when the film forgets it’s supposed to be moving forward, but they vanish as quickly as they arrive. There was never a reason to expect much from this, but it’s still a sad note to go out on. Farley deserved a sharper sendoff than this flat misfire, which leaves both leads marooned in a comedy that forgot to pack the essentials.

The movie leans into Crowe’s worst instincts—breezy charm, canned sincerity, and a belief that a gentle guitar strum can solve anything. That sort of vibe worked for We Bought a Zoo, which was at least about, well, a zoo. But here we’re talking about the weaponization of space via a privatized satellite launch in Hawaii, and the tone never gets past soft-focus confusion. There’s a faint intention to explore the tension between native Hawaiian culture and American militarism, but it barely gets past the stage of well-meaning nods. Characters reference cultural importance, a few hula dancers glide through the frame, and someone mentions mana. But it all plays like research pasted to a corkboard rather than something lived or understood. Bradley Cooper plays Brian Gilcrest, a disgraced military contractor sent to negotiate with local spiritual leaders on behalf of an eccentric billionaire (Bill Murray, smirking like he lost a bet) who wants to launch a satellite from Hawaiian soil. Escorting him is Captain Allison Ng (Emma Stone, cast bafflingly as a part-Chinese, part-Hawaiian Air Force pilot), who’s supposed to represent both military precision and native respect—though she mostly comes off like an over-caffeinated mascot. There’s also a romantic B-plot, or maybe C-plot: Brian’s long-lost flame (Rachel McAdams) still lives on the island, now married with kids, one of whom may or may not be his. Meanwhile, sparks fly—sort of—between Brian and Ng, who is half his age and written like a manic pixie apologist. None of it works. The film keeps grasping for emotion, but nothing quite connects. The romance stumbles. The redemption arc drifts. And the film keeps tossing feeling into the air, hoping something sticks. It reaches toward geopolitics, cultural reckoning, second chances, regret—but stays on the surface, pulling back the moment things threaten to get complicated. When it nears something thornier, it softens, smooths, changes the subject. You can feel Crowe aiming for Jerry Maguire magic in a story that calls for something more pointed, less eager to please. The heart might be in the right place, but the head’s still somewhere above the Hawaiian cloud line.

Ben Stiller stars as Reuben Feffer, a man so rigidly risk-averse he probably irons his socks. His meticulously controlled life collapses in spectacularly humiliating fashion when, mid-honeymoon, he catches his new wife Lisa (Debra Messing) entangled with an aggressively bronzed scuba instructor. Shell-shocked and heartbroken, Reuben retreats into his tidy, spreadsheet-modeled bubble, convinced that love is just another liability waiting to blow up in his face. But then along comes Polly (Jennifer Aniston), a former junior high acquaintance who barrels into his life like a spilled margarita on an antique rug. She thrives on everything that would make Reuben cringe—spicy food, impromptu salsa nights, pet ferrets. He’s infatuated, but her freewheeling, bohemian ways send Reuben’s carefully calibrated existence into a full-blown tailspin. Nonetheless, opposites attract, as they always do in textbook rom-coms, with key plot developments arriving as predictably as planes landing on a runway. Stiller delivers his signature neurotic Everyman with his usual charm, but his chemistry with Aniston feels strangely undercharged. Aniston, glowing with breezy warmth, keeps Polly engaging, but the script traps her in a quirky-free-spirit cliché that rarely digs beneath the surface. But then there’s Philip Seymour Hoffman, who doesn’t so much steal the movie as crash through its flimsy set like a tornado in a thrift store. As Sandy Lyle, Reuben’s insufferably delusional best friend, Hoffman delivers a performance so gloriously, shamelessly over-the-top it becomes the movie’s main attraction. Sandy is a washed-up former child star still clinging to the fading glow of his one hit film. Now he’s playing Judas in a local production of Jesus Christ Superstar—a role he gleefully sabotages in his misguided quest to usurp the part of Jesus mid-play. Hoffman’s sweaty bravado and boundless energy make Sandy the film’s comedic lifeline, but unfortunately, he’s merely a side character—like the peas outshining the steak. Along Came Polly as a whole, though, ambles along amiably—competent, mildly amusing, but ultimately too wrapped up in a badly mismatched romance. Pleasant enough to have on in the background, but unlikely to linger in your memory—or inspire a second viewing. Unless, of course, you just want to fast-forward to Hoffman’s scenes.

A noir detective story spliced with sci-fi surrealism. This film shuffles through genres like it’s playing cards and discards the obvious. Eddie Constantine stars as Lemmy Caution, a trench-coated relic of hardboiled cinema, sent to the city of Alphaville—a sleek, dystopian nightmare where emotions are illegal, and Alpha 60, a gravel-voiced supercomputer, reigns supreme. The plot, deceptively simple on paper, unravels as a philosophical maze: Lemmy battles logic with poetry, love with defiance, and occasionally seems as baffled as we are. Godard turns mid-1960s Paris into the future without a single special effect. Alphaville’s architecture—concrete blocks, fluorescent-lit corridors—becomes the backdrop for a world where humanity has been scrubbed clean of feeling. This minimalist aesthetic is a masterstroke; the present, Godard suggests, is already dystopian if you strip away the illusions. The film’s strength lies in its contradictions. Lemmy’s gruff, deadpan demeanor clashing with the city’s eerie sterility, creates moments of absurdist humor amid the existential dread. Anna Karina’s Natacha, a woman conditioned to obey Alphaville’s cold logic, serves as the film’s fragile heart, her growing emotional awakening adding a touch of melancholy. Their “romance” feels like rebellion—tenderness in a world that’s outlawed it. Yet Alphaville isn’t an easy watch. The dialogue often feels like cryptic poetry—the film is more concerned with mood than clarity. Godard invites you to linger in its contradictions rather than to solve them. This is noir without grit, a sci-fi without spectacle—beautiful, confounding, and thought-provoking. For anyone dipping into art-house cinema, this is essential: a maddeningly clever puzzle that refuses to explain itself. Alphaville leaves you questioning not just its world, but our own.

A body-horror head trip dressed like science fiction, Altered States plays like someone dared Ken Russell to make consciousness itself look combustible. William Hurt—cool, cerebral, a little hollowed-out—plays Eddie Jessup, a Harvard brain who decides reality might be a group hallucination with tenure. He climbs into tanks, spikes his bloodstream with vision juice, and tries to claw through the membrane between thought and flesh—as if transcendence were just a matter of pressure and dosage. When that’s not enough, he heads to Mexico in search of tribal rites spoken about like rumors—visions, transformations, waking dreams. That sort of thing. The film begins unhinged and only gets more so. Russell lays it on thick: the twitchy edits, the molten color swirls, the sound design like your brain trying to escape your skull. And then comes the final third—which I won’t spoil, partly because it’s more fun that way, and partly because it sounds made up when you say it out loud. The twist isn’t so much a revelation as a commitment: the movie doesn’t flinch, even when it probably should. It’s not exactly scary, and its metaphysics are the kind that collapse under a second look. But as pure experience, it’s a lot of fun. The cinematography is stylized like a midnight noir on acid—shadows that flicker like thoughts, zooms that feel like confrontations. The music stabs at you. And the visuals—especially during the tank sequences—are bold enough to drag you under. If you like your science fiction strange and your horror wired tight, it’s worth a look. Maybe even two.

I have a soft spot for late-20th-century pop, but there’s a limit—and The Squeakquel finds it fast. Within the first five minutes, the Chipmunks have already cycled through multiple hyper-pitched karaoke covers, and that’s before we even get to the setup. These aren’t performances so much as musical interjections—half a chorus here, a shouted refrain there—breaking up whatever rhythm the movie might have tried to build. Jason Lee’s Dave Seville is injured during a concert in Paris and ends up sidelined in a hospital, clearing the way for his cousin Toby (Zachary Levi) to take over. Toby and Dave are functionally the same person, just with different hair and a fresh supply of hoodie jokes. I’m guessing Lee didn’t want to be in the movie all that much. With Dave out of the picture, the Chipmunks are enrolled in public school for vaguely defined socialization purposes. There’s a talent show with a $25,000 prize, which will apparently save the school’s music program. The math is never explained. Enter the Chipettes—counterparts to Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, complete with color-coded outfits and near-identical vocal stylings. They’re managed, naturally, by Ian Hawke (David Cross), last seen disgraced and now squatting in the basement of JETT Records, though still somehow equipped with professional lighting and a multi-city tour plan. The story keeps moving but never accumulates anything. Characters drift in and out. Emotional arcs hinge on who gets to cover Beyoncé. Scenes play like filler between musical licensing agreements. It’s bright, loud, and mostly designed to keep kids facing forward. The Squeakquel isn’t a movie—it’s a product refill, shrink-wrapped and piped through helium.

A film about envy so pure it curdles into theology, Amadeus reframes genius as a kind of divine insult. F. Murray Abraham plays Antonio Salieri, court composer to Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones) and a devout craftsman of competent music—tasteful, forgettable, and just good enough to keep him convinced he’s been blessed. Then along comes Mozart: a powdered imp with the laugh of a drunk hyena and the instincts of a god. He dashes off celestial symphonies between dirty jokes, giggling like the music’s just another bodily function. Salieri recognizes the brilliance immediately, and it hollows him out. Salieri’s own best work doesn’t come close to Mozart’s worst. Mozart’s music is undeniable, effortless, and seems to pour out of someone too frivolous to understand what he’s been given. For Salieri, this isn’t just professional jealousy—it’s betrayal. By God. Why would the heavens waste their gift on this? Salieri doesn’t want to outshine Mozart; he wants an answer. And when he doesn’t get one, he declares a quiet war—against Mozart, yes, but also against the God who made him redundant. The film isn’t biographical and doesn’t pretend to be. Its account is mostly apocryphal, drawn from Peter Shaffer’s play and reimagined as cinematic hallucination. But Amadeus isn’t interested in truth—it’s chasing something deeper. The ache of being ordinary in the presence of greatness. The quiet horror that talent and virtue might never share the same body. Abraham’s performance is a masterpiece of precision—resentful, wounded, and so restrained it gradually turns operatic. Hulce, all manic tics and pink-cheeked bravado, plays Mozart as a vulgar savant, one part prodigy and one part cautionary tale. One man has discipline without genius; the other, genius without brakes. The music—Mozart’s own, performed with reverence—is transcendent. But what really gives the film its charge is the structure beneath it. Miloš Forman directs like a conductor. The operatic sweep isn’t just style—it’s scaffolding for the emotional devastation beneath. Amadeus is sumptuous, theatrical, and often very funny. But beneath the wigs and waistcoats, it’s something colder—a requiem for a man forced to realize that eternity will never know his name. A film about mediocrity, told in the language of the divine.

Memory doesn’t tell stories. It drifts, stalls, skips the important parts, and fixates on things no one else would care about. Amarcord gets that. Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical portrait of life in a small 1930s Italian village doesn’t build—it meanders. Winter begins it, winter ends it. In between: sex, snow, fascists, funerals, parades, and a peacock. The nominal protagonist is Titta (Bruno Zanin), a restless schoolboy with a face built for mischief and a head full of unsorted urges. But he isn’t the center of the film. He’s just one of many faces in this chorus of cranks, dreamers, blowhards, gossips, and dramatists. What takes center stage is the town—wired like a switchboard and running hot. Scenes tumble one after another with the logic of recollection, not plot. A classmate blows raspberries at his Greek teacher, then mimics his accent so precisely it teeters into surrealism. A priest asks Titta if he touches himself; Titta replies that he does “a little,” as if moderation might earn him divine leniency. The boys obsess over the town’s women—some elegant, some earthy, all impossibly out of reach. One encounter, involving a famously bosomed shopkeeper and a comically overwhelmed young man, spirals into a sex scene pitched somewhere between eroticism and slapstick. (“Don’t blow! Suck! You have to suck, you idiot!” she shouts, with maternal exasperation.) There’s a structure, loosely. Time moves forward. Seasons shift. The air thickens with drifting seed puffs, soft and constant, like nature keeping time. A peacock slips out from the count’s estate and flares its tail in the middle of a snowstorm—brief, dazzling, and never explained. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s memory, not metaphor. Fascism is part of the backdrop—marches, salutes, slogans barked through megaphones—but the townspeople treat it like a pageant no one takes seriously: all noise and posture, mostly ignored. Not resistance, exactly. More like practiced indifference. What holds the film together is Fellini’s eye—curious, affectionate, and never quite still. The movie doesn’t tidy up memory; it follows its shape: fractured, vivid, lit from odd angles. No arc. No lesson. Just the past, unearthed and buzzing. It may not carry the weight of La Dolce Vita or the raw introspection of 8½, but it’s no minor work. Amarcord is bawdy, tender, and quietly enchanting—a film about remembering, made by someone who never really stopped looking back. In Italian with English subtitles.

The third Matt Helm film opens with a flying saucer crash, but don’t get your hopes up—it’s not alien. Just another Cold War contraption gone rogue, piloted by a woman in a silver jumpsuit and promptly stolen somewhere in the jungles of Central America. That’s the premise, though it’s mostly an excuse for Dean Martin to stumble through spycraft with a drink in one hand and someone else’s waist in the other. Martin plays Matt Helm exactly as you’d expect: half interested, half plastered, and always ready with a line that sounds vaguely like it was improvised between sips. The drinking becomes less a motif than a given. He ends up dunked in a vat of beer, tosses liquor jokes like confetti, and moves through the film with the gait of someone who might actually be nursing a hangover on set. As for the plot, it barely pretends to matter. Scenes shuffle in and out with the logic of a variety show—each one bringing a new location, a new woman, or occasionally both. At one point, Helm is on a dance floor in Acapulco when a maraca player turns out to be armed—literally. The maracas conceal tiny pistols, and Helm sidesteps the threat with the same casual indifference he gives everything else. Whether The Ambushers meant to spoof Bond or just tripped into that territory by accident is hard to say. The tone floats somewhere between parody and cruise-ship revue. It’s not good, exactly, but it is very 1967—campy, shapeless, and occasionally amusing if you’re in the right mood.

American Beauty is a dark valentine to the suburbs—written in passive-aggressive notes and delivered with a flat stare. Sam Mendes, in his directorial debut, assembles a portrait of upper-middle-class malaise that’s both overstyled and disarmingly sincere. The film might think it’s wielding a scalpel, slicing through domestic illusion, but it’s closer to doodling with a steak knife—crude, unfocused, and oddly compelling. Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a middle-aged executive who seems to wake up mid-life and decide, with little reason, that he’s finished playing along. He quits his job, buys a vintage car, and starts lifting weights with the goal of seducing his teenage daughter’s best friend. It’s a midlife crisis staged as performance art, and Spacey plays it with a smug detachment that mirrors the film’s own ironic distance. Annette Bening, as Lester’s wife Carolyn, offers one of the few performances that stays emotionally legible even as it veers into exaggeration. With tight smiles and unraveling control, she trims roses, chants affirmations, and eventually dissolves into panicked tears behind the wheel. Chris Cooper, as the repressed military man next door, provides a quieter portrait of bottled-up despair—his arc less flamboyant but no less tragic. The plot wraps itself around repression and projection: teenage desire mistaken for liberation, closeted longing misdirected into violence, and a picture of suburbia that’s less dreamscape than diorama. Even the film’s most iconic image—a plastic bag swirling in the wind—feels less like a symbol of beauty than a snapshot of self-importance. You can find meaning in anything, the film suggests, and then proceeds to test the theory. Still, there’s something quietly resonant in its insistence that all this niceness hides rot. American Beauty isn’t as sharp as it imagines, nor as profound. But it’s compulsively watchable: immaculately composed, well-paced, and full of characters just plausible enough to make you uncomfortable. Its satire may be broad, but it isn’t hollow. Its insights may be shallow, but they’re not dishonest. And while its final grasp at transcendence feels over-scripted, the discontent it sketches is all too real.

An ambitious mess, this comedy hurls itself at the zeitgeist of 2006 like a drunk dart player aiming for the bullseye but settling for the outer rings. It skewers everything: American Idol, the War in Iraq, suicide bombers, and the George W. Bush administration. The result is a beltline of haphazard satire that’s often hilarious, occasionally brilliant, and sometimes baffling. The filmmakers clearly overstuffed the script, struggling to weave this riot of hot-button issues—but who cares about coherence when you’re laughing? Even if the laughs come in bursts, not waves. The humor doesn’t build so much as ambushes—sometimes with a joke so sharp it feels like it came out of nowhere, other times with a dud that lands like a cow on a trampoline. But even the misfires have a kind of desperate charm. The ensemble cast is a patchwork of inspired lunacy. Hugh Grant is perfection as a venomous Simon Cowell knockoff—his smirking cruelty is reality TV distilled into a single, scathing persona. Dennis Quaid and Willem Dafoe, meanwhile, lean hard into Bush and Cheney caricatures: the former a clueless cowboy, the latter a lurking puppet master with a menacing grin. Mandy Moore channels a cutthroat sweetness as a pop star with big dreams and sharper claws, while Sam Golzari plays the film’s most surreal creation: a suicide bomber who’s supposed to detonate on air but discovers he’s more invested in winning the competition than carrying out his attack. It’s absurd, it’s tasteless, and somehow, it works. While this is very much hit or miss, the audacity of the film is intoxicating. This is satire with a sledgehammer—loud, messy, and unapologetically crass. It’s uneven, but there’s a wild joy in watching it try to juggle its absurd mix of big ideas and even bigger gags. For all its flaws, it’s an unruly little beast of a movie that dares to entertain with one hand and provoke with the other.

There’s a brief moment in late adolescence—after high school ends but before anything else begins—when the future hasn’t started and the present refuses to move. American Graffiti lives entirely inside that moment. The teenagers here aren’t chasing dreams or plotting escapes. They’re circling town in souped-up cars, loitering under streetlights, waiting for something to happen—though not too quickly. George Lucas doesn’t impose a story so much as let one drift into view. Four boys, one night, and a stretch of California pavement lit up like a jukebox. Richard Dreyfuss broods about college. Ronny Howard weighs a breakup. Paul Le Mat picks up a 12-year-old and pretends he’s too cool to care. Charles Martin Smith just wants to be taken seriously, by anyone. There’s no resolution, really—just movement and music and the sense that everyone’s about to be nudged out of their own life. The soundtrack, a wall-to-wall blend of early rock and roll, is half the movie. It pins the film to a very specific moment—post-Elvis, pre-Beatles—and turns background noise into mood. Wolfman Jack appears as himself, mythologized but not unreachable. Even the radio feels like a character. American Graffiti doesn’t go anywhere dramatic, but that’s the point. It’s a time capsule of a night when everything still felt possible and nothing had to happen just yet. Even if you’ve never cruised in a ’58 Impala with nothing but gas money and static on the dial, the film makes you think you did.

A film anchored in grim material, a handful of raw scenes that don’t fade easily, and a lead performance from Edward Norton that remains one of the most unnerving of his career. If only the script’s moral pivot showed the same discipline. At its center is Derek Vinyard (Norton), so saturated in neo-Nazi dogma he wears a swastika across his chest like chainmail. His younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong) trails close behind—he opens the film by submitting a reverent essay on Mein Kampf just to needle his Jewish history teacher (Elliott Gould). Their father’s murder at the hands of a Black drug dealer supplies an easy grievance for a local white supremacist network, led with reptilian calm by Stacy Keach. The film toggles between Derek’s past life as a violent enforcer and his sudden disillusionment behind bars—a reversal more tidy than credible, resolved by a handful of hard lessons that dismantle a worldview it took years to cement. But for all its dramatic shortcuts, the film sticks. Its portrait of young men channeling their anger and boredom into organized hate feels grimly familiar, and Tony Kaye’s stark, unblinking style does not offer safe distance. The curb-stomp scene alone leaves a mark, as does the quiet certainty that this version of America is not slipping quietly into history. The redemption arc it chases might not persuade, but the anatomy of hate it lays bare feels true enough to leave a bruise. It unsettles more than it soothes—likely on purpose—and you don’t have to buy its final note of hope to feel the cold draft left behind when it’s over.

American Hustle is a carnival of big-name actors draped in polyester and sequins, firing off dialogue so colorful it practically leaves a rainbow trail. It’s Scorsese-lite con-artist cool splashed with 1970s mania—where everyone talks too much, schemes too hard, and sweats just enough to sell the illusion. The first half roars with loud, gaudy fun, but then, somewhere along the way, the wheels wobble, and you start to feel like maybe this movie never quite knew where it was headed. Loosely inspired by the Abscam scandal, the story centers on Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), a small-time hustler dreaming big, with a combover that defies both physics and dignity. He’s partnered with Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), a con artist who perfects a fake British accent and wears a wardrobe always one gust of wind away from scandal. When the two get busted by the FBI, agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper)—a manic, unpredictable live wire—ropes them into a sting operation targeting Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), a man so earnest and charming you almost forget he’s dirty—almost. The performances are the heart of this loud, messy ride. Bale’s Irving is a tangle of nerves, with desperation pouring out of every pore. Adams turns seduction into a weapon of precision, while Jennifer Lawrence, as Irving’s explosive wife Rosalyn, barrels through scenes like a Molotov cocktail tossed into a crowded room. Meanwhile, Cooper’s DiMaso, so wired he feels like he might implode at any moment, seems to be in a movie all his own. Together, they form a combustible ensemble, bursting with tension and charisma. For all the film’s razzle-dazzle, though, the script stumbles in its ending, which aims for cleverness but lands like a missed punchline. Loud, messy, and just shy of greatness, the film somehow gives you too much and not enough all at once. But even when it falters, it remains quite a spectacle.

This is about as classy as the movie musical ever got. Gershwin in full bloom—George and Ira both—tied together by satin ribbons of color, choreography, and charm. It ends with a 17-minute ballet set to the tone poem An American in Paris, and by that point the film has already stopped pretending it needs narrative at all. It’s not a musical with a big number—it’s a big number that brought a musical with it. The plot, featherweight and confident, drifts on flirtation and postwar glow. Gene Kelly is Jerry Mulligan, an ex-GI trying to make it as a painter in Paris, where the sunlight hits every building like it’s in love with the architecture. He’s spotted by Milo (Nina Foch), a sleek heiress with an interest in modern art—and maybe the artist, too. She offers patronage with a side of suggestion. But Jerry’s already looking past her—toward a young woman in the crowd. Lise (Leslie Caron, in a luminous debut) moves like the camera’s waiting for her to catch up. Jerry falls fast. What he doesn’t know: she’s already spoken for. Henri (Georges Guétary), a French singer with nightclub polish and a wartime history with Lise, is more than just a boyfriend—he’s her protector turned fiancé, part obligation, part loyalty, and not quite a love story. That’s the triangle: not betrayal, not jealousy—just affection arriving out of order. Orbiting all this is Adam (Oscar Levant), Jerry’s neighbor and reluctant pianist, who daydreams himself into a concert hall where he plays every role—soloist, conductor, even the man shouting “encore.” A one-man audience, applauding himself like it’s the only part he trusts. The film floats. The dancing sparkles. The score glides. And then comes the ballet—bold, stylized, and utterly unbothered by realism. It’s Gershwin turned into architecture, color, choreography: Toulouse-Lautrec by way of soundstage. No dialogue, no plot—just design, motion, and mood. It won six Oscars, including Best Picture, and still stands as the genre’s most elegant detour into pure spectacle. A fantasy, sure. But precise. Controlled. And dazzling enough to leave footprints in the paint.

The opening of this film is so absurdly funny and whimsically charming that it feels almost criminal how quickly the rest of it derails. Seth Rogen stars as Hershel Greenbaum, a hapless Russian Jew who immigrates to America in 1919 with his doting wife, Sarah (Sarah Snook). Their love story—an endearing tale of Hershel buying Sarah a fish that she promptly bites into like an apple—is recounted with such delightful silliness that you’re certain you’re in for something special. Once they arrive in the U.S., Sarah is pregnant with their first child, and Hershel dreams of one day being rich enough to afford a cup of seltzer water. Dreams, of course, have a habit of curdling in comedies, and Hershel’s takes a tragic (or comedic, depending on your perspective) turn when he gets a job at a pickle factory. Fate intervenes, and Hershel tumbles into a giant vat of brine at the precise moment the factory shuts down for good. The vat is sealed, and, fast forward a hundred years—some kids break it open to discover Hershel alive, preserved, and miraculously well. Declared a medical miracle, Hershel is thrust into the media spotlight and tracks down his only living relative, his great-grandson Ben (also Seth Rogen). The fish-out-of-water premise seems irresistible. Hershel, already out of step with 1919 New York, is now plunged into 2019, where he must grapple with the absurdities of modern life—including social media and kombucha. While Rogen’s dual performances are solid—Hershel’s old-world stubbornness clashing amusingly with Ben’s millennial neuroses—the quirky charm of the opening act fades into tired slapstick and baffling missteps. What starts as a fizzy, laugh-out-loud comedy quickly loses its edge, the whimsy evaporating like seltzer left open too long. By the end, you’re left not with the tangy bite of something fresh but with something flat—a film that promises effervescence but delivers far too little.

This madcap romp is about four high school boys and their tragically misguided mission to lose their virginity before graduation. It’s crude but turns out to be a surprisingly charming blend of awkwardness and absurdity. Jim (Jason Biggs) is the group’s epicenter—a guy so profoundly incapable of sidestepping humiliation that you wonder if he was genetically engineered for it. Whether decoding scrambled cable channels under his parents’ horrified gaze or engaging in an ill-advised culinary encounter with a dessert, Jim’s ability to catastrophize the simplest situations is unmatched. Then there’s his dad (Eugene Levy), the well-meaning master of mortifying father-son chats—every earnest pause, every overly detailed explanation, pure comedy alchemy. Each friend adds their own spice to this teen syndicate. Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) is the self-appointed strategist who stumbles through his attempts at maturity with the grace of a drunk tightrope walker. Oz (Chris Klein) is caught in a quest for reinvention but trips headlong into sincerity and an unexpectedly sweet romance. Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is cloaked in pretentious detachment but discovers that his cultivated coolness is no match for the relentless slapstick of life. And then there’s Stifler (Seann William Scott), a walking hormone hurricane whose jaw-dropping antics are matched only by his karmic downfalls. Stifler’s mom (Jennifer Coolidge), though, is in a class of her own—stealing scenes with a single arched eyebrow and cementing “MILF” as a permanent fixture in the cultural lexicon. The comedy doesn’t pull punches—it swings for the fences. Not every hit lands, but when it does, it delivers the kind of gut-busting release that only adolescence’s messy theater can inspire. Beneath the outrageousness and the cringe lies something surprisingly tender—a story about friendship, insecurity, and the hilariously awkward stumble toward adulthood.

This movie delivers a scene so absurdly funny it left me laughing uncontrollably. As funny as the first film was, I can’t recall anything hitting quite this hard. The moment involves our perpetually flustered hero, Jim (Jason Biggs), somehow mistaking a bottle of superglue for lube—a blunder that leaves one hand stuck to his privates and the other glued to a pornographic VHS tape. Naturally, his perpetually well-meaning yet hopelessly baffled father (Eugene Levy) walks in, delivering deadpan attempts to salvage the situation with his signature hilariously awkward charm. By the time they’re sitting side by side in a hospital waiting room, the film unexpectedly veers into sincerity, delivering a tender father-son moment that feels like a soft pulse of humanity in an otherwise riotously crude circus. It’s moments like this, paired with a steady stream of chuckles and character-driven humor, that make this sequel far more enjoyable than it has any right to be. Even better, the film sidesteps the usual traps of “sequel-itis.” While it nods to a few jokes from the first film, it doesn’t merely rehash them—it builds on them, often taking them to stranger and funnier extremes. Case in point: we finally visit the infamous band camp Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) couldn’t stop mentioning in the first film. It’s every bit as gloriously dorky and weirdly endearing as you’d hope—a place where flute solos are sacred rites and awkwardness is an art form. The plot is serviceable at best, but it gets the job done. The core quartet—Jim, Oz (Chris Klein), Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas), and Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas)—emerge from their first year of college to reunite for a summer of misadventure in a rental house. The narrative exists mainly as a framework, but with characters this likable, you won’t mind the thin scaffolding. This is a sequel that doesn’t merely coast on the coattails of its predecessor—it takes a running leap, expanding its world with just enough wit and unexpected heart to feel refreshingly worthwhile.

A direct-to-DVD cash grab that feels like a bad karaoke rendition of a once-beloved hit, American Pie Presents: Band Camp shamelessly milks the franchise for every last drop. This time, the story follows Stifler’s younger brother, Matt (Tad Hilgenbrinck) whose grand idea of a prank involves spraying pepper mace into the high school band’s instruments, because subtlety and Stifler have never been on speaking terms. Instead of expelling him, the school’s guidance counselor Chuck “Sherminator” Sherman (Chris Owen, clinging to his cameo legacy from the original series) decides the best punishment is poetic irony: sending Matt to Band Camp for the summer. If that setup isn’t thin enough to see through, we’re also gifted the inexplicable return of Eugene Levy’s Noah Levinstein as the camp’s “morale officer.” How Jim’s dad ended up here, of all places—especially after his son once crashed one of their ceremonies with an improvised speech about “big balls”—is anyone’s guess. Penance? A long-delayed career pivot? Either way, Levy’s trademark bemusement isn’t enough to save this wasteland of recycled gags and flat one-liners. To his credit, Hilgenbrinck looks and sounds like a decent Seann William Scott knockoff, aping Stifler’s swagger and lewd bravado with unsettling precision. But therein also lies the problem: Stifler was never built to be a leading man. He was the chaos agent, the spice that enhanced the dish, not the main course. Stretching his shtick across an entire movie is like building a theme park ride that lasts for 90 minutes—exhilarating for three, exhausting for the next 87. About as necessary as a fifth encore at a middle school recital, this is one sequel that’s best left forgotten—a lifeless coda to a franchise that once knew how to make us laugh.

A trashy direct-to-DVD raunch-com that delivers exactly what it promises—if your only expectation is the titular “Naked Mile,” an annual streaking event at The University of Michigan, naturally rife with plenty of gratuitous shots of bouncing, bare breasts. Beyond that, the film is about as memorable as last week’s frat party hangover. The story centers on Eric Stifler (John White), one of the lesser and decidedly less charismatic members of the Stifler clan. His tragic flaw: he’s a virgin. That’s right—Eric, a Stifler, hasn’t punched his ticket to the family legacy of debauchery and is therefore treated as a pariah, both at school and during the Stifler family’s presumably booze-soaked gatherings. The reason for his abstinence is, of course, noble—he’s been faithful to his long-term girlfriend (Jessy Schram), who is saving herself for marriage. But recognizing his struggle (and probably hoping to spare him a lifetime of Stifler-related ridicule), she offers him a “free pass” for the weekend. What follows is a procession of limp gags, setups so uninspired they feel preemptively forgotten, and punchlines that don’t so much land as collapse under their own weight—moments so cringe-worthy they retroactively elevate even the most shameless antics of the American Pie franchise to near-genius. The humor hovers somewhere between painfully flat and actively embarrassing, stretching the runtime into what feels less like a movie and more like an endurance test. For franchise loyalists, this might be the equivalent of scraping burnt crust off the pie tin, a desperate salvage job. For everyone else, it’s a cautionary tale—a cinematic post-it note that reads, “Not all sequels are necessary.”

Michael Douglas, all polish and gravitas, plays U.S. President Andrew Shepard—the most powerful widower on the planet. Just as he’s getting deep into his re-election maneuvering and trying to pass a tepid crime bill that no one seems to care about, an environmental lobbyist named Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Bening) enters his life. Her disarming intelligence and nervy charm upend Shepard’s carefully managed world—and, more pointedly, his press briefings. A state dinner invitation ignites sparks; a White House tour fans the flames. Inevitably, their relationship becomes political fodder for Shepard’s Republican rival (Richard Dreyfuss, oozing smug villainy like a man born to run attack ads). Rob Reiner’s The American President rests on a premise so quaint it feels nostalgic: “President Dates Lobbyist, Nation Gasping for Breath!” But it’s precisely this gentleness that gives the film its intoxicating warmth. The scandal? Absurdly low-stakes. No blackmail, no corruption, no sordid secrets. Just two adults navigating an earnest courtship, peppered with the kind of sharp repartee Aaron Sorkin writes like he’s gunning for a Pulitzer in Charm. And oh, the zingers. Shepard proudly offers Sydney a “25-cent tour” of the White House’s “dish room,” only for her to correct him: it’s the “China Room.” She promises to send him one of the 700 books about the White House, to which he dryly responds with a shrug, “I’m more of a West Wing President.” These small, perfectly timed moments elevate the film from a conventional rom-com into something sharper, breezier, and undeniably clever. Douglas and Bening radiate chemistry, and Reiner’s direction threads the needle, turning what might have been another tedious rom-com into something closer to a fairy tale—spun sugar, but sturdy enough to hold its shape.

The boys are back in town, only now they’ve got mortgages, kids, and just enough mileage to make the hijinks feel more nostalgic than anarchic. American Reunion doesn’t try to shake up the formula—it just wants to check in. And for what it is, it mostly works—even when the jokes limp and the sentiment feels pre-chewed. They’re older, slightly puffier, still convinced they’ve got one more good weekend in them. Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) are married with a kid and a sex life that now gets penciled in between errands. Stifler (Seann William Scott) is temping at a soulless office job, harassing coworkers like he’s still in study hall and expecting applause. Oz (Chris Klein) shows up rich and famous but hollowed out, locked in a glossy relationship with someone who looks good in a photo but doesn’t blink much. Heather (Mena Suvari) still does it for him, and that’s enough to trigger a crisis. Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) breezes in with global anecdotes and cologne designed to prove he’s been somewhere. The jokes mostly recycle earlier bits, and there’s less sting to them now—what was raunchy at 18 plays a little sad at 30. Still, there’s some affection baked into the way these characters are revisited. The film rehashes much of American Wedding, which raises the question of whether this chapter was necessary, but it does find a few new emotional pockets to dig into. The best stuff, as usual, comes from Eugene Levy as Jim’s well-meaning, over-sharing father, now a widower and—thanks to some coaxing from Jim—tentatively re-entering the dating pool. Watching the parent-child advice dynamic flip is quietly touching, and Levy wrings every moment dry. Jennifer Coolidge pops in and walks off with her scenes, raised eyebrow in tow. This sequel isn’t as sharp or outrageous as the first two entries in the series, and much of the humor feels padded. But American Reunion coasts on enough residual goodwill to keep itself upright. It’s a soft retread, but not a wasted trip—less a party than a polite toast to something you mostly remember fondly.

A scrappily ingenious and wildly entertaining film about comic book curmudgeon Harvey Pekar, American Splendor is a panorama of self-loathing wit and aching humanity, stitched together with a style so unconventional it practically sneers at formula. Paul Giamatti doesn’t just play Pekar; he embodies him, hunched and grumbling through a world of endless irritations and minor triumphs. But here’s the kicker: the real Harvey Pekar, along with his equally idiosyncratic wife Joyce and oddball buddy Toby, shows up too—offering deadpan, documentary-style commentary alongside their fictional counterparts. It shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t. And yet, not only does it work, it’s magic. When we first meet Harvey, his voice is shot—laryngitis from years of yelling over every trivial frustration he seems to encounter. He gets a big idea: to immortalize his own humdrum life by writing it in a comic book. Sure, why not? Lucky for him, his pal, underground comic legend Robert Crumb, takes a shine to the idea and agrees to illustrate it. Pekar becomes a cult hero in the underground scene—though fame, in this case, is a far cry from fortune, as he still clocks in as a file clerk. And when he’s invited onto Late Night with David Letterman, you can practically hear the universe chuckling. Pekar uses the national stage not to charm but to roast the host—deadpan and unflinching. Then there’s Judah Friedlander as Toby, a “genuine nerd” with a delivery so hilariously bizarre it could belong in its own museum exhibit. Hope Davis plays Joyce, the fan-turned-wife whose correspondence with Pekar turns into a romance defined by equal parts tenderness and existential exhaustion. Davis imbues her with a simmering complexity: Joyce isn’t just a comic book wife, trailing in Pekar’s wake—she’s a person trying to carve out her own identity in a life that feels perpetually overshadowed. The film is fearless, not just in breaking the fourth wall but in smashing it, reassembling the pieces, and painting a mural on the rubble. It made me laugh out loud, broke my heart just a little, and left me weirdly inspired. American Splendor doesn’t just document a life; it celebrates the messy, ordinary miracle of it. Watch it. Seriously.

American Venus wants to say something about mental illness, control, and the fallout between mothers and daughters, but mostly it stalls. It opens on a figure skating meltdown: Jenna (Jane McGregor), mid-breakdown before a competition, and her mother Celia (Rebecca De Mornay), barking orders like that’s ever helped anyone calm down. Not long after, Jenna quits the sport and leaves home. The film jumps ahead to college life in Vancouver, where Celia decides she’s going to cross the border and drag her daughter back—into what, exactly, isn’t clear. Celia is written as an emotional wrecking ball—sharp-tongued, entitled, and completely incapable of self-awareness. De Mornay plays her like she’s been waiting to explode. There’s a certain bleak fascination in watching her unravel in public. She tries smuggling a handgun into Canada. She alienates everyone she meets. You keep watching not because you sympathize, but because you want to see how much worse it’ll get. The problem is, the film doesn’t seem to realize that’s what it’s selling. There are glimpses of something more lived-in—moments that feel pulled from someone’s actual experience of dealing with a volatile parent—but they get buried under a script that keeps drifting toward melodrama and then hesitating. It wants to feel personal, but it keeps talking in generalities. Celia’s arc doesn’t so much resolve as run out of road. Jenna’s story gets roughly the same treatment. The ending doesn’t arrive so much as give up. Whatever point the film was reaching for, it doesn’t get there.

In American Wedding, the third entry in the American Pie series, Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) are headed to the altar, but not without a series of detours that mix raunch with calamity. Jim’s first meeting with Michelle’s parents (Fred Willard and Deborah Rush) spirals into disaster, culminating in a set piece that feels like a sanitized punchline to the infamous “Aristocrats” joke—featuring Stifler (Seann William Scott), two dogs, and the spectacular ruin of a wedding cake. This film is very hit or miss, but every once in a while it stumbles onto something worthwhile. Eddie Kaye Thomas’s Finch, with his continued obsession with Stifler’s Mom (Jennifer Coolidge), quietly steals the spotlight with his deadpan sincerity and awkward attempts at celibacy. The central romance—Jim and Michelle—provides just enough grounding to keep the story moving, even when the gags around them falter. Stifler’s subplot, where he impersonates a refined prep-school gentleman to woo Michelle’s sister (January Jones), feels like a misstep, dragging on without delivering laughs. Worse still is an excruciatingly outdated gay bar sequence, aiming for humor but landing firmly in discomfort and highlighting just how poorly some of the series’ humor has aged. American Wedding isn’t the triumphant finale the series deserved, but it still manages to muster enough gross-out comedy to entertain fans. Uneven and sometimes painfully outdated, it’s a passable, if unremarkable, send-off for the franchise.

A horror movie with a sense of humor and a mean streak, An American Werewolf in London plays like a midnight movie that can’t decide whether to scare you or crack a joke. Two American backpackers are warned to stay off the moors. They don’t. One dies. The other, David (David Naughton), wakes up in a London hospital with night sweats—and a dead friend who won’t stay that way. Jack (Griffin Dunne) shows up looking worse each time: first bloodied, then mangled, then practically mulch, but always chipper. He might be a ghost, a guilt trip, or something stuck between. Either way, he’s got a message—David’s cursed, and the full moon’s coming. The device works, even if it spells things out a little too cleanly—it’s less dread than a recurring memo from the grave. The movie’s tone swerves rather than settles. Landis juggles gore, deadpan absurdity, and a few sharp jabs at English reserve, but the pieces never quite click into a rhythm. The famous pub scene—quiet, eerie, thick with suspicion—is genuinely unnerving. But the logic behind it falters. If the locals know what’s out there, why send two strangers walking straight into it? Still, when the film hits, it hits hard. The transformation scene earns its legend—drawn out, excruciating, and shown without flinching. Bones twist, joints pop, muscles convulse beneath the skin as it stretches and bubbles like molten rubber. It’s not just painful—it’s anatomical horror with a cruel sense of theater. There’s no cutaway, no mercy. Rick Baker’s effects don’t just impress—they crawl. The whole sequence plays out like a biology lesson hijacked by a sadist. The ending arrives fast and cold—more punchline than resolution. But by then, the film’s already done what it set out to do: unsettle, amuse, and stick in your brain like a splinter.

In theory, this movie shouldn’t exist. A found-footage knockoff of The Blair Witch Project made for the Lifetime channel, set in an Amish community haunted by the ghost of a recently deceased witch—it sounds like a Mad Lib no one finished. The result plays exactly as credible as it sounds. There’s no real tension, just jump scares that feel borrowed from a seasonal Spirit Halloween walkthrough. The camera shakes on cue, but not convincingly—it’s less “found footage” than “misplaced footage,” with ghost effects that wouldn’t cut it in a high school editing class. The story structure does vaguely resemble a horror movie, which is about the kindest thing that can be said for it. As for accuracy, don’t get your hopes up. It feels like the screenwriters skimmed a Wikipedia summary of Witness and forgot most of it. The Amish setting is mostly treated as a costume. Nobody seems quite sure how these people live, what they believe, or why they’d allow a Lifetime camera crew to document a haunting in the first place. Still, it’s not the full train wreck you’d expect. Just a minor derailment, coasting on the rails of a genre it doesn’t understand but can mimic well enough to qualify as content.

In 1839, a group of Africans took over a slave ship. They didn’t make it home—they made it to Connecticut. What followed wasn’t freedom but litigation: drawn-out, overheated, and fought in a country still undecided on whether they were men or merchandise. Steven Spielberg’s Amistad takes this sliver of history and runs it through the prestige filter: solemn score, sweeping crane shots, speeches carved from granite. It starts in chains, ends in oratory, and spends most of its runtime navigating the slow machinery of law. Not as lacerating as Schindler’s List, not as intricately constructed as Lincoln, but steady—part trial, part sermon, part pageant. Sengbe Pieh (Djimon Hounsou) is the film’s backbone—a Mende man who leads the revolt aboard La Amistad with a sharpened nail and a quiet fury. The ship is intercepted. The survivors are jailed. What follows is less a trial than a tug-of-war: Spain wants them back, the U.S. wants them punished, and two enterprising Americans claim them as salvage. Enter Roger Sherman Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), a scrappy abolitionist lawyer with good intentions, bad hair, and no idea what his clients are saying. The case winds its way to the Supreme Court, where John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins, mumbling through parchment) delivers a climactic monologue surrounded by busts and gravitas. The strings swell. The camera holds. You can almost smell the extra credit assignment. Spielberg doesn’t flinch. The flashbacks to the Middle Passage are short, but brutal. The courtroom scenes move briskly, even when the language doesn’t. John Williams’s score murmurs with the weight of capital-H History. It’s all tastefully mounted, handsomely lit, and just a little too composed. The outrage simmers, but the edges are trimmed. The pain is real, but the frame is calibrated. Still, it works. Hounsou gives the film its fire—furious, wounded, and unwavering. McConaughey, all sideburns and sincerity, mostly stays out of the way. And Hopkins, working through pages of rhetoric with practiced control, lends the final act a quiet, weary weight. Amistad doesn’t rewrite history, and it doesn’t pretend to. It dramatizes a sliver of it—tidily, respectfully, and with a reverence that sometimes flattens the edges. But the story is remarkable, and the film gives it room to be. One ship. One case. A country still working out its own verdict.

David O. Russell must have accidentally mass-emailed everyone in his address book offering them a role in his next picture, and he didn’t say “no” to anyone who RSVP’d. This is one of the most unruly ensemble casts I’ve ever seen. The result is a jumbled spectacle where every actor fights for attention, their lines piling up like an overstuffed closet that can’t close. Russell, who once made dialogue sing, now seems to drown in it—his trademark wit lost in a sea of overlapping voices and overambitious clutter. The narrative doesn’t fare any better. It’s like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box. Not only that, but half the pieces are from different puzzles. The film includes a World War I-era plastic surgeon grappling with his scars, a shrapnel-collecting nurse moonlighting as an artist, and fascists plotting to unseat FDR. The story doesn’t unfold so much as scatter, daring the audience to piece together its fragments. Whether it ultimately makes sense seems to be Russell’s least concern; the film is more interested in throwing ideas at the wall than ensuring they stick. And then there’s Taylor Swift. She makes only a brief appearance, but I feel compelled to mention her, as her role ends with her unceremoniously shoved in front of a moving car—far from a tender moment, considering she is clearly the weakest actor in the film. However, Russell does occasionally hit a vein of gold through all the overindulgence: a cutting one-liner, a striking visual, or a poignant glance. But these moments are rare—scattered like diamonds in a landfill. In the end, this film isn’t a catastrophe so much as a cautionary tale about ambition gone unchecked. The film weaves together big ideas and bigger performances, but the result is messy, bloated, and frustrating—all it does is make you wish it had been something far better.