Film Buff Musings

There are bad movies, and then there’s Anaconda, a film that wears its incompetence as though it were the Crown Jewels. This isn’t just bad; it’s gloriously, stubbornly, almost offensively bad—less a movie than a loud, slithering dare to keep watching. The plot is simple: a documentary crew boating down the Amazon River in search of a mythical tribe stumbles upon a giant, man-eating anaconda that starts picking them off one by one. Among their ranks is Paraguayan snake hunter Paul Serone (Jon Voight), whose reliability as a guide falls somewhere between “untrustworthy” and “actively plotting your demise.” Voight’s performance is a masterclass in deranged overacting—complete with a cartoonishly bad accent and a grin that suggests he’s savoring every ounce of this cinematic trainwreck. The rest of the cast isn’t so much acting as existing. Ice Cube glares his way through the movie like he’s already planning a diss track about it. Owen Wilson sticks around long enough to say “Wow” (metaphorically, if not literally) before becoming snake food. Jonathan Hyde gamely tries to add a touch of class, but it’s about as useful as adding lace curtains to a burning building. Jennifer Lopez, meanwhile, looks like she wandered into the wrong movie entirely, appearing more confused than charismatic. And Eric Stoltz spends most of the runtime unconscious, doing his best impression of a Madame Tussauds wax figurine of Eric Stoltz. Then there’s the snake, the star of the show—or so it was meant to be. Unfortunately, this CGI disasterpiece is about as intimidating as a screensaver. When it’s not rubbery and mechanical, it’s shiny and weightless, slithering around like it’s auditioning for an early-2000s video game. At a merciful 89 minutes, Anaconda moves quickly enough that you don’t have too much time to dwell on its failures—even the ones that were supposedly intentional. For all its comedy (intentional or not) and Voight’s scene-devouring lunacy, this is a film that substitutes stupidity for charm and incompetence for camp. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a rubber snake at a cheap carnival: you might laugh, but only because you can’t believe someone thought it was worth the price of admission.

Analyze That begins with Robert De Niro butchering the song “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story. The film ends with Billy Crystal joining in for an equally off-key encore of the same tune. As bad as these renditions are, however, nothing hits as many bad notes as the movie in between. The first film’s premise—grizzled mob boss Paul Vitti (De Niro) baring his soul to neurotic shrink Ben Sobel (Crystal)—was flimsy at best. Here, it’s dragged out, wrung dry, and flopped onto the screen like a fish gasping for relevance. This time, the FBI inexplicably decides that Paul’s bad singing is reason enough to release him from prison into Ben’s custody—because apparently, psychiatrists can’t make prison visits? What follows is less a story and more a series of disconnected sketches: Paul tries and fails to hold down a string of legitimate jobs (car salesman, restaurant server, you name it) before landing a gig as a consultant on a gangster movie. Too bad he couldn’t have used that expertise to consult on Analyze That itself—it desperately needed the help. De Niro, one of cinema’s most magnetic presences, wilts under this material, phoning in his performance with all the enthusiasm of someone stuck on hold with tech support. Crystal, usually a reliable comedic presence, is stranded with sitcom-grade dialogue and left reacting to jokes that barely qualify as such. Lisa Kudrow is relegated to the thankless role of Ben’s long-suffering wife, while the rest of the cast fills the runtime like set dressing in a bad high school play. The film’s worst offense, though, is how little it does with its premise. A mobster consulting on a gangster movie should have some potential for good laughs, but the script settles for lazy gags and tired clichés, seemingly allergic to creativity. The original Analyze This might have been a weak but ultimately watchable diversion. This sequel feels like a cash grab so terrible that it borders on avant-garde.

Imagine Robert De Niro, the eternal symbol of mobster menace, not breaking kneecaps but breaking down—on a psychiatrist’s couch, no less. The concept of Analyze This practically sells itself: De Niro’s Paul Vitti, a mafia kingpin with crippling anxiety, and Billy Crystal’s Ben Sobel, a tightly wound shrink roped into untangling the neuroses of a man who solves most problems with a .38 special. It’s a setup that promises a five-course feast, but the film serves up microwave leftovers, never trusting its premise enough to let the flavors fully develop. What could’ve been a riotous clash of worlds instead gets watered down into a comedy so safe it might as well be wearing a seatbelt. The film gets stuck repeating the same joke—“Ha, a mobster in therapy!”—hammering that same nail until the head is flat and dull. Still, Analyze This isn’t entirely without merit. One standout gag finds Sobel offering Vitti a pillow to “work out his aggression,” only for Vitti to calmly pull out a gun and shoot a few rounds into it—an inspired moment so sharp it cuts through the mediocrity like a breath of fresh air. In the end, Analyze This is a comedy that feels like it’s constantly hedging its bets. It’s a film too timid to dive headfirst into its own concept, leaving its humor stranded in a purgatory of mediocrity—neither bold enough to be memorable nor bad enough to be fascinating—before retreating into that hazy mental bin where all the other forgettable comedies you’ve ever seen go to collect dust.

The title makes a promise the movie barely remembers. And Now the Screaming Starts! should be a carnival of gothic filth—high collars, low morals, and enough B-movie misbehavior to drown out the decorum. Instead, it limps along—more fussy than feral, more fog than fear. Set in 1795, the story follows Catherine (Stephanie Beacham), a newlywed who arrives at her husband Charles’ (Ian Ogilvy) countryside estate and is immediately greeted by visions: a corpse with a missing hand, a birthmark, a leer. The setup hints at something savage—a family curse, a spectral rape—but the execution is strangely mild, like the film is too timid to own it despite seemingly having full license to do so with a full-on R rating. The visuals are textbook Amicus: crumbling manors, haunted paintings, hands that skitter across the floorboards. There’s a certain dated charm to the artifice—the cardboard tombstones, the prosthetic gore, the ghouls that look like wax figures accidentally left out in the sun—but charm can’t fill in for imagination. What should feel lurid ends up oddly polite, like a séance hosted by someone’s nervous aunt. Peter Cushing drifts in halfway through, playing a psychiatrist with a medical degree in exposition. He’s good, of course—Cushing always is—but he’s mostly there to parse the plot. Herbert Lom, seen in flashbacks as the cursed patriarch Sir Henry, has the only real menace in the film, and even he feels stuck inside something too neat to unnerve. There are a few scattered moments flirt with delirium: portraits that leer, ghostly faces at the window, a disembodied hand that strangles on command. But they arrive like stray pages from a better pulp novel and vanish just as fast. For a movie with screaming in the title, it barely raises its voice.

A strange, creaky, and quietly affecting morality tale, The Angel Levine plays like a theological fable that wandered into a kitchen sink drama and decided to stay. Zero Mostel stars as Morris Mishkin, a down-and-out tailor in New York—jobless, penniless, and tending to a dying wife (Ida Kamińska). Then things get weird. After reporting a Black man for stealing a fur coat, Mishkin watches him get hit by a car. Hours later, the same man is waiting in his kitchen—alive, unbothered, and claiming to be a Jewish angel named Alexander Levine. He’s played, with a lot of nerve and almost no celestial refinement, by Harry Belafonte. This isn’t the Cary Grant model of divine intervention. Levine curses, sulks, and seems only vaguely aware of why he’s been assigned to Mishkin. His task: convince the old man that angels exist—at which point he’ll earn his wings and presumably vanish. The premise is a hard sell to Mishkin, and the film treats it accordingly. The whole thing moves like it was written for the stage—long patches of philosophical argument and spiritual irritation, the sort of metaphysical back-and-forth that feels adapted from a play, even if it wasn’t. Not necessarily a complaint, but it does give the film a certain stiffness, like it’s pausing now and then for the curtain that never comes. The themes—faith, doubt, race, divine bureaucracy—don’t always fit neatly together, and as such, the message feels scattered. But the performances do help pull it all together. Mostel is pitch-perfect as a man whose belief system has eroded to dust, and Belafonte plays the celestial visitor like someone who might’ve taken a wrong turn en route to heaven. The film never fully settles, but it’s sincere, distinctive, and worth watching—if only to see what happens when belief is asked to knock on the door of someone who’s already stopped answering.

The picture and sound quality of Animal Crackers mark a leap forward from the creaky The Cocoanuts, but the two films are about equally funny—which is to say, it’s intermittently brilliant, though occasionally dragged down by a supporting cast that feels like they wandered in from a high school production of Drawing Room Farce. The film revolves around an elegant soirée hosted by socialite Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont), who endures the madness with her usual air of impervious decorum, as Captain Spaulding (Groucho Marx) arrives freshly back from Africa, armed with a fresh stock of insults. Meanwhile, an overeager artist hatches a harebrained scheme to swap a famous painting with his own forgery—not to steal it, but to dazzle the puffed-up art crowd into recognizing his brilliance. Unfortunately for him, though, he enlists Chico and Harpo—the architects of comedic bedlam—to pull off the switch, which means, naturally, everything must go spectacularly wrong before they somehow stumble into going right. The Marx Brothers were never about plot, of course, and Animal Crackers barely pretends to care. Instead, it strings together scenes of escalating absurdity, with Groucho tossing off one-liners like a man who knows he’s the smartest person in the room and wants to punish everyone else for it. The film immortalizes one of his most famous zingers: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.” That’s Groucho’s comedy in a nutshell—logic bent until it breaks, and then broken again for good measure. Meanwhile, Chico and Harpo spin in their own skewed gravitational field. Harpo is a silent whirlwind of anarchy who communicates through honks, winks, and exaggerated eyebrow gestures. Chico, with his fractured Italian accent and boundless confidence, at one point takes a piano solo and turns it into a Möbius strip—forgetting a verse and endlessly circling back to the last one he remembers. The brothers function like agents of entropy, and the more pristine the setting, the more satisfying it is to watch them dismantle it. But the film isn’t all mayhem. Sometimes it stops dead in its tracks to let the supporting cast steal time better spent on the brothers. Margaret Dumont, as always, plays Groucho’s foil with unwavering dignity, but the rest of the characters are dead weight—stiff, humorless obstacles who seem to believe the plot actually matters. It doesn’t, of course. When the Marx Brothers take center stage, Animal Crackers springs to life with the kind of anarchic energy that feels like an assault on good taste—and thank God for that.

It’s not every day you come across a Christmas zombie musical comedy, and Anna and the Apocalypse takes that premise and sprints with it—at least at the start. It kicks off with a devil-may-care attitude and a sly parody of zombie films. But unfortunately, the glee is abruptly smothered as it veers wildly into playing its zombie horror tropes straight by the end. That said, the film’s opening is undeniably delightful. Anna (Ella Hunt) cheerfully belts out “Turning My Life Around” in a sprightly musical number, blissfully unaware of the zombie apocalypse unfolding behind her—undead impaled on fence posts, windows smeared with arterial spray. Its macabre whimsy is sharpened to a fine point—a chipper show tune colliding boldly with carnage. And then there’s the bowling alley scene, a moment that made me laugh out loud, where a zombie meets its grisly end at the end of a lane and its head rolls serenely through the ball return. But somewhere along the way, the film loses its steam. What begins as a giddy mashup of genre clichés and musical theater bravado inexplicably decides to take itself seriously. The bright, zippy energy grinds to a halt, replaced by characters mourning their dead and philosophizing about the apocalypse. The problem isn’t that Anna and the Apocalypse reaches for emotional depth—it’s that it ties itself in knots trying to decide what it wants to be. It’s as if Blazing Saddles suddenly handed the reins to John Wayne halfway through, who promptly declared, “Enough of this foolishness,” and turned it into a straight-faced Western. And yet, despite its stumbles, it’s hard not to root for this scrappy, bloodstained oddity. The songs—pop-rock confections dripping with theater-kid enthusiasm—are catchy, and the film itself, while messy and lopsided, is irresistibly weird. If the premise intrigues you even slightly, it’s worth a watch. It’s not a consistent experience, but it still dances and sings—blood-spattered and unbothered.

The doll Annabelle, briefly seen lurking ominously in The Conjuring, had a past, we are told. Once clean, once prim, and perhaps even inviting—though her glassy-eyed stare suggests she’s never been anything but trouble. This spin-off, set in the late ’60s, we are introduced to Mia and John (Annabelle Wallis and Ward Horton), a suburban couple who are expecting their first child. Mia, an avid collector of dolls (never a great hobby when you’re living in a horror film), gleefully adds Annabelle to her collection. But even as a freshly minted trinket, the doll gives off a vague, creeping menace, as if it’s already plotting its escape. The plot kicks into gear with a scream that cuts through the stillness of the couple’s quiet, idyllic home. Mia is drawn to the window where she witnesses the brutal murder of their neighbors. This is what sets off a chain of violent and supernatural events brought on by that malevolent doll. Director John R. Leonetti clearly understands the polished aesthetic of the Conjuring Universe: the lighting is moody, the set pieces atmospheric, and the shadows deep and deliberate. Yet, while the visuals earn high marks, the characters fail to leave any lasting impression. Mia and John feel less like fully realized people and more like props, reacting convincingly to jump scares but little else. The story itself doesn’t fare much better. Many of the scares are effective, but they feel rote and mechanical. Where The Conjuring evoked an unshakable sense of dread, Annabelle operates more like a checklist: flickering lights? Check. Creaky floorboards? Check. A resolution that ties things up neatly while leaving room for future installments? Check. Still, for fans of the Conjuring Universe, it’s worth a watch. The doll has a nasty, unsettling charisma, and the film, while lacking originality, is a polished diversion. Annabelle doesn’t haunt you—it creeps a little and then slips away. Serviceable but forgettable.

If you thought the first Annabelle film explained how a demon spirit ended up in that malevolent porcelain doll, think again. Annabelle: Creation rolls the clock back further—to the 1940s, when the doll was fresh off the workbench of Samuel Mullins (Anthony LaPaglia), a doll maker with a knack for craftsmanship and a tragic blind spot for supernatural consequences. Samuel and his wife, Esther (Miranda Otto), live in a farmhouse that seems plucked out of a gothic nightmare—where the wind howls, the floors creak, and the word “haunted” is practically scrawled into the dust collected on their porch. Their world shatters when their golden-haired daughter, Annabelle, is killed in a freak accident. She leaves behind a grief so cavernous that the Mullins try to fill it with what can only be described as a bad decision. Twelve years later, the Mullins, still steeped in sorrow, open their haunted halls to six orphaned girls. During an ill-advised game of hide-and-seek, one of the girls stumbles across Annabelle—the doll—awakening a horror that should have stayed undisturbed. This is where Annabelle: Creation flexes its horror muscles. To its credit, the film introduces characters who feel scrappy and likable, and the Mullins, consumed by grief, radiate just enough humanity to make their descent into terror land a bit harder. These aren’t mere cardboard cutouts waiting for a jump scare; they feel real enough to make the film’s eerie set pieces genuinely involving. But here’s where the film falters: subtlety is jettisoned before the opening act even has a chance to settle. The scares barrel in with the force of a freight train, tossing aside the slow-burn dread that The Conjuring so masterfully cultivated. Instead of creeping unease, the film dives headfirst into supernatural bedlam. By the time the doll is performing gravity-defying antics, it feels more like spectacle than terror—less spine-tingling, more pyrotechnic. As a prequel, Annabelle: Creation works hard to expand the cursed doll’s mythology. While it never achieves the suffocating dread of The Conjuring (2013), it’s an earnest, polished attempt to deepen the lore. Flawed but effective, it’s a solid, if not particularly haunting, addition to the franchise. Call it competent, but ultimately lacking in chills.

A nostalgia fest in more ways than one. Little Orphan Annie began as a Depression-era comic strip about grit, optimism, and treating poverty like a personal quirk. By the time it hit Broadway—and then the screen—it had become a full-volume musical about the healing power of money, grins, and a billionaire with time on his hands. Annie is played by Aileen Quinn, all freckles and forced cheer, topped with a red mop of curls and a smile that could cut glass. She lives in a run-down girls’ orphanage run by Agatha Hannigan, a perpetually pickled tyrant played by Carol Burnett, who doesn’t so much chew the scenery as unhinge her jaw and swallow it whole. When Grace Farrell (Ann Reinking), the secretary to tycoon Oliver Warbucks (Albert Finney), selects Annie for a brief visit, it’s less a publicity stunt than a hopeful attempt to thaw her boss. Warbucks isn’t thrilled—at first. It plays like someone tried to bottle the American musical from memory. You’ve got your plucky heroine. Your cartoon villain. A late-breaking crisis to inject some third-act peril. And a character arc so abrupt it feels less like redemption and more like a scheduling error. Warbucks starts out barking orders and eyeing Annie like a clerical mix-up. Within a few scenes, he’s clearing his calendar for bedtime stories. What saves it—really, what gives it any staying power—are the songs. “Tomorrow,” “It’s a Hard Knock Life,” “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile.” They’re catchy to the point of inevitability, and they’ve clung to the culture longer than the film that housed them. The Depression here is scrubbed so clean it barely qualifies as history, but that’s the point. The fantasy isn’t just that Annie gets adopted. It’s that the world tilts in her direction the moment she grins at it. One of the best sequences, “Let’s Go to the Movies,” hits that note perfectly—an extravagant Busby Berkeley homage that knows exactly what people were escaping into back then. The story creaks, and the sentimentality is prepackaged, but Annie still works as distraction. Shallow, bright, occasionally irritating—but easy to watch. And in a musical built on wish fulfillment, that might be the only measure that matters.

A film so quick-witted and structurally playful that calling it a “romantic comedy” almost sells it short. Annie Hall rolls out like a Christmas stocking emptied one surprise at a time—each oddball detail, sly gag, and narrative trick more rewarding than the last. It’s often credited with inventing the modern rom‑com blueprint, but that feels like a footnote compared to everything else Allen slips in: a restless, self-questioning confessional tucked inside a featherlight love story. Alvy Singer (Allen, in peak form as the neurotic New Yorker he’d replay endlessly) talks us through his fizzled relationship with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton, all warmth and flustered charm that never feels forced). The story hops around—first dates, good days, blow-ups, wistful afterthoughts—held together by Alvy’s tireless, half-endearing overthinking. Allen peppers it with surreal gags, direct-to-camera commentary, sudden animation, and stand-up bits that don’t break the film apart so much as add more bite. There’s a split-screen family dinner that says more than a monologue ever could, a hilarious moment where everyone’s inner thoughts are subtitled, and the unforgettable cameo where Marshall McLuhan is yanked in just to settle an argument on the spot. This is Allen at his sharpest: anxious, self-deprecating, annoyingly perceptive, but also surprisingly tender. He undercuts his own ego just enough that all the chatter turns charming. Keaton matches him perfectly, giving Annie a looseness and sweetness that makes the whole thing feel real, not scripted. A modern classic that still feels nimble in how it skips structure and needles every sentimental cliché about romance. It doesn’t pretend to have the answers—just the jokes, and just enough sting to keep them from sounding cute. If you ever bother with just one Woody Allen film, this is the sensible place to start.

Another Simple Favor, a sequel to 2018’s A Simple Favor, is exactly what it sounds like: a follow-up that’s clever enough to know why it exists, but not quite sharp enough to justify the second favor. The original film worked as a kind of camp-glazed Hitchcock riff, with Blake Lively striding through suburban noir in pinstripes and attitude, and Anna Kendrick trailing behind her with wide eyes and a camera-ready sense of panic. It was stylish, twisty, and surprisingly fun. This one? Still stylish. Still twisty. But the fun’s a little thinner this time around. We rejoin Stephanie (Kendrick), now a bestselling author milking her memoir of murder for book deals and bookstore Q&As. Just as she’s recounting the dark mystery that made her famous, in walks the subject herself: Emily (Lively), the “faceless blond” at the heart of it all, resurrected yet again and casually crashing the reading like she missed a lunch date, not faked her death. Stephanie, rattled but still susceptible to her gravitational pull, accepts Emily’s invitation to her wedding in Capri. Yes, the wedding is real. Yes, it’s on a private jet. And yes, even though Stephanie suspects Emily might kill her, she goes anyway. The setup promises another round of velvet-gloved mayhem, and the movie half-delivers. There are murders, double-crosses, and enough red herrings to justify a seafood allergy warning. There’s also a lot of visual indulgence—Capri looks stunning, the actors look expensive, and Lively’s wardrobe has leveled up from chic sociopath to runway absurdist. One sunhat in particular could double as a tent awning. Somewhere under all the silk and satin, there’s a mystery trying to wriggle free, but it’s never as gripping—or as funny—as the first time around. The real problem is momentum. The first film knew how to hook you and keep tugging. This one just spins more plates. Everyone looks like they’re having fun, and occasionally you will too, but the pacing stutters and the self-satisfaction creeps in. It’s not exactly smug, but it thinks it’s cleverer than it is. The jokes don’t land as cleanly. The twists feel workshopped. And by the end, you’re watching less out of intrigue than inertia. Still, for fans of the first film, it’s not a waste. It looks great. The cast commits. There’s some charm in watching these characters bump into each other again, even if the spark’s not quite there. Another Simple Favor isn’t a disaster—it’s just a second glass of something that tasted better the first time.

Antebellum is a showman without a show, a magician fumbling through a trick while the audience watches the wires dangle. It gestures toward something grand—a mind-bending spectacle of race, history, and identity—but delivers little more than a labored sleight of hand. The film opens with a striking yet brutal image: a Confederate plantation where Veronica (Janelle Monáe), a slave with an unshakable spirit, is forced to take the new name “Eden” and forced into submission. Her spirit, however, burns too brightly to extinguish. Then, in an abrupt pivot, we’re in the present day, where Veronica is a polished sociologist dissecting systemic racism for enraptured crowds. Is the plantation a dream? A metaphor? Or something worse? It’s a setup that promises the tension of a Hitchcock thriller or the eerie moral weight of The Twilight Zone. But what unfolds is a flat, self-satisfied exercise in misdirection. The “big twist”—the moment expected to detonate the narrative—is not a revelation but a deflation, a clumsy payoff to a buildup that never earns the suspense it demands. Worse, the script seems oblivious to its own inadequacies, indulging in a bloated, pointless dinner scene so inert it might as well come with “intermission” printed on the screen. The film offers flickers of life—an escape sequence charged with genuine suspense, and Monáe’s luminous presence. The film aspires to confront America’s darkest truths, but it crumbles like a parlor trick gone wrong. This isn’t thunder and lightning—it’s a matchstick that barely sparks before dying out.

It’s remarkable this even works at all. A mid-level paper-pusher lets the office bigwigs use his apartment to sneak around behind their wives—pure sleaze on paper, spun into a sly, bruised gem by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. The Apartment is half cynical workplace comedy, half cautionary tale about what people trade away when they want to be liked more than respected. Jack Lemmon, at his best, plays C.C. “Bud” Baxter—a nobody in a sea of desks who figures out that lending his key to philandering executives is the quickest way up the corporate ladder. He’s not quite proud of it, but he’s too lonely to stop. Then along comes Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine, all soft edges hiding hard bruises), the sweet elevator girl who makes him want to be something better than a doormat with a lease. Trouble is, she’s tangled up with Bud’s boss, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray, smarm dialed down to a chill simmer). Bud, more or less invisible in his own life, becomes the bystander to his own worst nightmare when he comes home one night and finds Miss Kubelik half-alive in his bed, heartbreak and pills scattered everywhere. The ladder he’s been climbing turns out to be propped against a wall he can’t stomach anymore. Lemmon keeps Bud from turning into a sad sack cliché—he’s light, funny, and quietly wrecked underneath. MacLaine brings such worn-out hope to Kubelik that it’s impossible not to root for her, even when she clings to Sheldrake’s empty promises. Wilder keeps it quick, clever, and unsentimental. A corporate fairy tale with a grim little moral tucked inside: there’s always a cost for playing along, and sometimes it’s your own spine. For a film built on infidelity and backroom favors, it stays weirdly sweet—like watching a tarnished silver coin get polished back to something worth pocketing again.

Prequels to horror classics are rarely necessary, and Apartment 7A doesn’t change that. Earnest but unfocused, the film explores what happened in the building before Rosemary’s Baby—and manages to dilute both. Julia Garner plays a down-on-her-luck dancer who twists her ankle during a performance and winds up under the care of an elderly couple whose nurturing instincts mask something ritualistic. She starts waking with strange bruises, hallucinating horrors, and—eventually—pregnant with something unexplained. It’s a setup that invites dread, but the film never manages to build any. The tone is more dazed than menacing, and the scares arrive as disconnected gestures rather than escalations. Stranger still are the musical interludes: part hallucination, part character study, staged with theatrical flair but dropped into the film like fevered detours. They’re impressively mounted but feel like relics from a different project entirely. Garner commits, giving the role more focus than the film earns, but the atmosphere stays murky without ever becoming tense. There are ideas here—a half-baked commentary on women’s bodies as vessels, perhaps—but they’re swallowed in stylistic drift. Apartment 7A wants to unsettle, but mostly it wanders. A curiosity, but not much more.

War has never looked this hypnotic—or this deranged. Apocalypse Now doesn’t just take you into the jungle—it drags, suffocates, swallows you whole—a humid nightmare that leaves you sputtering for air. Striking most of all is its hallucinatory cinematography, each frame a delirious tightrope walk between beauty and agony. Napalm stains the sky like a second sunrise, soldiers fling smoke bombs with the dead-eyed ease of men long past caring, and the sprawling jungle—vast, ancient, and hungry. Martin Sheen plays Captain Willard, a man hollowed out by war and sent on an insane mission: track down Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a rogue officer holed up in the jungle, playing god to a tribe of entranced followers. Stripped to its bones, the story is simple, but Coppola inflates it into a hallucinatory epic, turning a straightforward manhunt into a surreal, slow-burning descent where reality and insanity blur. It’s a slow, sweaty spiral into moral oblivion, and Sheen, quietly unraveling, pulls us right along. Yet beneath the suffocating heat and brutality runs a streak of dark humor, surfacing in moments so surreal they feel less like comic relief and more like war’s deadpan absurdity. Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore delivers the infamous “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” line with a swagger that’s both ridiculous and chilling. But the soldiers aren’t heroes—they’re burnt out, broken, and bizarrely funny, their numb detachment the only thing keeping the horror from swallowing them whole. The Redux version stretches the deranged adventure even further, stuffing in scenes that meander but never quite lose their grip. The French plantation sequence, in particular, is a ghostly detour that lingers like a bad omen, confronting the viewer with the remnants of colonial arrogance and the illusion of control. The original cut barrels ahead with more urgency, but Redux lets the madness marinate, making Willard’s journey feel less like a mission and more like an initiation into madness. It’s indulgent, unwieldy, and exactly the kind of excess that makes the film what it is. Coppola didn’t make just another war movie. He made the war movie—terrifying, gorgeous, exhausting, unforgettable. This is a film you surrender to, and by the end, you’re as dazed and haunted as Willard—staring into the abyss and wondering what just happened.

The title is a bit of a fib. Paris is more a punchline—reduced to postcard stock footage and a painted soundstage façade that only appears in the final act. Most of the film floats aboard a cruise liner, bobbing somewhere between slapstick and showcase. Still, it’s amiably packaged fluff, carried by Doris Day’s relentless perk and Ray Bolger’s gangly precision. Day plays Ethel “Dynamite” Jackson, a showgirl plucked from the chorus line by bureaucratic blunder. A cultural attaché (Bolger), entrusted with inviting a great stage actress to represent America at a Paris arts exposition, accidentally mails the offer to Ethel instead of Ethel Barrymore. By the time he shows up to rescind the invitation, her colleagues have already thrown a going-away bash. His superior, in a fit of post-hoc genius, declares the error a stroke of populist brilliance—why not send an unknown hoofer to stand for American artistry? Bolger’s Winthrop is the sort of character who seems to have been born flustered. He’s also engaged to his boss’s daughter (Eve Miller), which complicates things once he starts mooning over Ethel. Their chemistry doesn’t exactly spark, but they make up for it with footwork. Day dazzles in a kitchen-set number that turns cookware into choreography, while Bolger’s rubber-limbed routines remind you just how rare it was to see dancers who looked like they enjoyed being human. The plot is thinner than cruise-ship soup, but the film is dressed up in Technicolor distraction. You won’t remember much about it, but you’ll remember Doris Day with a tray in her hand, spinning to the beat like she’s got somewhere to be and a song to get her there. A trifle, but a reasonably enjoyable one.

An adaptation of Judy Blume’s well-loved 1970 novel that sensibly stays in its original era—back when it was gently scandalous for a children’s book to admit that parents might not have all the answers and that kids might notice. Margaret’s parents (Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie, both restrained and just flaky enough) promise she can pick her own religion when she’s ready—a freedom that sounds generous but mostly leaves her to wander through Sunday services and temple visits, whispering polite prayers to see if anyone’s listening. Nobody answers, of course, but we’re allowed to eavesdrop. Most of the narration is Margaret confiding to God about the new house in New Jersey she doesn’t want, the first period she desperately does, and the grandmother (Kathy Bates, so comfortable in this role she could do it from a recliner) she hates leaving behind. This is an unassuming, lightly mischievous coming-of-age story about eleven-year-old Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson, all awkward honesty) who’s dragged from her Manhattan apartment to a too-tidy suburban neighborhood. She recovers fast: an unstoppable adolescent ringleader (Elle Graham) snaps her up, inducts her into a secret club, and before long they’re swapping theories about kissing, testing dubious bust-growing exercises, and betting on who’ll need a sanitary pad first. It’s silly, frank, and pitched at exactly the right scale—where any new hair or rumor can feel like an earthquake. Margaret is the glue. I never read the book, but it’s clear the film doesn’t try to make her more complicated than she is—which is exactly right. No big moral, no contrived epiphany. Just a watchful, sweet-tempered glimpse at a girl talking herself through the business of growing up, and discovering that sometimes God is just a convenient name for your own private thoughts.

Downright filthy, sporadically thrilling, and exactly the kind of cheap, sweaty spectacle you’d expect from an exploitation film that crams Pam Grier and Margaret Markov into gladiator rags and throws them to the lions—figuratively, at least. The Arena is Ancient Rome by way of the grindhouse, a sword-and-sandals brawler where enslaved women are forced to fight for the entertainment of leering nobles until—wouldn’t you know it—they decide to flip the script. If Tarantino didn’t have this one rattling around in his brain somewhere, I’d be shocked. Grier and Markov, last seen chained together in Black Mama White Mama, carry over their yin-and-yang chemistry, now with sharper weapons but just as much grit. Grier simmers, Markov smolders, and together they carve their way through a plot that barely holds itself together but knows exactly where it’s going—straight to that fist-pumping, blood-soaked reversal where the captives stop playing along and start running the show. It’s all rough edges and raw energy, unpolished in a way that makes it feel like you stumbled into some lost artifact of disreputable cinema. The dirt and sweat are practically baked into the film stock. No one is here for historical accuracy, of course—this is about the primal thrill of watching the oppressed rise up, of seeing chains broken and blood spilled. You don’t watch The Arena for art. You watch it because it swings hard, aims low, and lands just right.

Set in the year 4038, Arena is what happens when someone takes the Star Wars Cantina scene, stretches it to ninety minutes, and builds a scrappy underdog boxing movie right in the middle of it. Most of it takes place on a grubby star station—a neon-lit cross between a fast-food court and an interplanetary dive bar—where half the patrons look ready to brawl or belch fire, or both. Paul Satterfield stars as Steve Armstrong, a short-order cook who swaps flipping patties for throwing punches. He’s the first human in fifty years to sign up for “The Arena,” a galactic fight circuit where the competition isn’t exactly human-shaped—and usually comes with extra limbs, exoskeletons, or a chitinous carapace that laughs at your standard left hook. The plot is about as serious as a ring announcer with a kazoo. It’s Rocky by way of Flash Gordon: Early on, Steve goes toe-to-toe with a giant grasshopper, and the monsters only get weirder from there. His corner man, conveniently equipped with four arms, can multitask motivational speeches and rubdowns without breaking a sweat. The creature effects are half the fun—practical suits with just enough sloppy charm to look delightfully grotesque but never break the goofy spell. The dialogue aims more for corn than poetry, leaning on bad puns and slapstick quips, yet somehow this fits. Nobody on screen pretends this is high art; they just punch, wince, and wisecrack until the next round. If you have a taste for the offbeat and the proudly rough-around-the-edges, Arena is ninety minutes well spent. Earnest, weird, and proudly second-rate—exactly the sort of off-center B-movie you’d find on late-night cable and wonder if you dreamed it the next day. I had a ball.

Justice doesn’t always arrive with a bang. Sometimes it shuffles into court, late, uninvited, and still the only option left. Argentina, 1985 turns the Trial of the Juntas into a courtroom reckoning—part history lesson, part moral audit. You’d think it would be better known. That it isn’t says something about the world’s appetite for post-dictatorship justice: lukewarm, if we’re being generous. Nine former military leaders—faces once stamped on currency and broadcast through state propaganda—are charged with murder, torture, and kidnapping, all sanctioned under the guise of national security. The prosecution falls to Julio César Strassera (Ricardo Darín), a weary civil servant suddenly tasked with holding the country's recent past up to the light. The threats arrive quickly. The allies don’t. Judges squirm. Lawyers flinch. Everyone else looks the other way. So Strassera builds his team from the only group without reputations to protect: young lawyers barely old enough to rent cars, let alone challenge the nation’s former rulers. What they lack in experience, they make up for in nerve—and access. Some are already working inside government agencies, and that proximity proves useful when the paper trail starts to vanish. The film plays as both civics lesson and courtroom thriller, pulling tension from testimony and red tape instead of car chases. It’s not above dramatizing a few things for effect—compressed timelines, composite characters—but it’s smart enough to know where to keep the emphasis: the voices of survivors, the bureaucracy of cruelty, the quiet terror of going on record. Darín plays Strassera as a man who’s tired before he begins, fueled less by outrage than obligation. It’s a restrained performance in a film that understands what restraint costs. Justice arrives late, and limps. But it arrives.

Arizona wants to be two things at once—a blood-soaked comedy and a foreclosure fable—and it can’t manage either. The film juggles the fallout from the housing crash with horror-thriller conventions, but it’s never clear whether it’s skewering suburban rot or just wallowing in it. Danny McBride plays Sonny, a loud, impulsive homebuyer whose mortgage—and temper—have both gone underwater. After a fistfight with his realtor (Seth Rogen, uncredited), the realtor ends up dead, and when Cassie Fowler (Rosemarie DeWitt) stumbles into the mess, things spiral from bad to worse. She wants to call the cops. Sonny ties her to a chair instead. From there, the plot unravels like a bad decision on repeat, each choice stupider than the last. The film bounces between Coen Brothers-lite farce and limp thriller, never quite knowing which direction it’s headed. McBride falls back on his usual shtick—loud, clueless, desperate—while DeWitt’s dry exasperation is the only thing that keeps the film from flying completely off the rails. The laughs are few and far between, and when they hit, they land with the sharpness of a sucker punch. There’s potential here, buried under layers of random chaos: a grisly image, an unexpected gag, a line that almost works. But these moments are scattered, floating in a sea of plot that never decides whether it wants to grimace or grin. The film tries to take aim at the rot beneath suburban life, but it’s more noise than insight. The social critique is there, buried in the backseat, shouting over the tonal seesaw. Arizona wants to be sharper, but instead it just keeps spinning its wheels.

A globe-trotting treasure hunt in the Indiana Jones mold—if Indy traded the bullwhip for windmill kicks and a tolerance for blunt-force trauma. Jackie Chan stars as “Jackie,” a self-employed adventurer sent to recover a stash of Nazi gold hidden in a desert fortress before it winds up in the wrong hands. He’s joined by three mismatched women, some cartoon-level villains, and just enough connective tissue to get him from one action sequence to the next. The story is perfunctory at best—less a narrative than a relay race—but it moves. That’s fine. As with most of Chan’s films from this era, the plot is just a delivery system for stunts, slapstick, and intricately staged martial arts. He treats every object on screen like a potential weapon or springboard. A marketplace foot chase unfolds like a kinetic riddle; a fight involving ropes, ladders, and swinging crates feels like a demolition derby choreographed for laughs. The dialogue may be flat and the humor hit-or-miss, but Chan’s physical inventiveness is the main event. The tone shifts between spy spoof and desert pulp, but the real language here is movement. The dialogue drags, the villains blur, and the plot runs on fumes. But once the fighting starts, the film finds its rhythm. Chan turns stairwells, scaffolding, and sliding doors into choreography—brawls built on timing, precision, and impact. The wind tunnel showdown is the crown jewel: bodies flung sideways, gravity on pause, every move timed to the blast. It’s martial arts as spectacle, and when Jackie’s in motion, the rest fades into the background.

A three-hour victory lap for the Hollywood dream machine—parading its lavish sets, eye-popping Technicolor, and every logistical nightmare money could buy. The story, loosely adapted from Jules Verne’s 1872 novel, follows Phileas Fogg (David Niven, the human embodiment of an upturned nose) as he wagers that he can circle the globe in 80 days, because what else is an absurdly wealthy Englishman supposed to do with his time? His newly hired valet, Passepartout (Cantinflas, effortlessly outshining his boss at every turn), tags along as the actual problem-solver of the expedition, navigating one improbable mode of transportation after another—hot air balloons, elephants, steamships, trains, and, at one point, an ostrich-drawn carriage. The film is a feast—of color, of excess, of mid-century Hollywood’s blissful indifference to realism. We’re not witnessing a real journey so much as a meticulously curated tour through the studio’s elaborate backlots, dressed up like an around-the-world theme park, where every country is an extravagant set piece and every cultural representation is boldly, eye-pleasingly inaccurate. The film’s resounding pageantry treats history with the same reverence a Vegas showroom treats Shakespeare. Some of it plays, some hasn’t aged well, but all of it is wrapped in such grandiosity it practically conducts its own overture. The film has its detractors—particularly those still salty that it won Best Picture over Giant (and fair enough, Giant probably deserved it). But what this film lacks in depth, it makes up for in sheer, breezy momentum. Niven’s Fogg remains unflappable as the universe hurls every conceivable obstacle in his path, while Cantinflas, flipping and grinning his way through the journey, gives the film its pulse. This is a grand, lumbering, often joyous film that coasts on sheer spectacle—and for the most part, it works.

If Jackie Chan or Steve Coogan ever worried they’d taken too many liberties with Jules Verne, they can relax. This French animated version clears the bar for irreverence—then buries it somewhere in the sand. It takes about two minutes to realize what you’re in for. The pacing is frantic, the designs are aggressively stylized, and the humor is pitched like it’s trying to distract a roomful of sugar-rushed toddlers with finger puppets. It’s not unwatchable, exactly, but it’s the kind of film where you start syncing with its rhythm less out of enjoyment and more out of resignation. The Jules Verne novel is treated less as source material and more as a loose prompt. Passepartout—here reimagined as a wide-eyed monkey in safari gear—is desperate to see the world, while his overbearing mother insists he stay put in their seaside village, which appears to be populated almost entirely by grotesque-looking shrimp. Then Phileas Frog drifts ashore, literally—a green, board-riding grifter in a Hawaiian shirt who bets he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. Passepartout joins him, of course, and off they go: chased, slapped, and hurled through a series of loosely defined locations. The animation looks cheap, though not entirely without effort. The reported $20 million budget raises more questions than it answers. Character movement feels rushed and unpolished, like a rough cut no one circled back to. There’s a faint Rango-like ambition to the design, if you squint and set your expectations to 1998. As for the comedy—some of it’s just strange. The tone veers between grating and just off-kilter enough to keep you watching, though not necessarily enjoying. Not unwatchable, but not particularly rewarding either. It’s a world tour in the way a screensaver is a vacation.

Arsenic and Old Lace is a comedy that practically dances on its own grave, packed with playfully morbid twists and some of the funniest screwball antics Hollywood ever put on screen. Frank Capra, the patron saint of sentimental Americana, lets loose here, directing with a kind of madcap glee—crafting a film that’s having far too much fun to slow down. Cary Grant, in peak befuddled form, plays Mortimer Brewster, a newlywed drama critic whose honeymoon takes a detour to his childhood home to share the happy news with his doting aunts (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair). He happens to lift the lid of a window seat and finds—what else?—a dead body. Shock turns to outright hysteria when he learns his sweet, unassuming aunts put it there. It seems they’ve made a cheerful habit of dispatching lonely old men with poisoned elderberry wine as a form of charity. To them, it’s a kindness. To Mortimer, it’s an express ticket to a nervous breakdown. And the insanity doesn’t stop there. His brother Teddy (John Alexander) thinks he’s Theodore Roosevelt and has spent years happily digging these strangers’ graves under the delusion that he’s excavating the Panama Canal. Then there’s his other brother, Johnny (Raymond Massey), a fugitive with a botched plastic surgery job and a towering sense of menace. His sidekick, the ever-sketchy Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre), slinks around with the expression of a man who’s just realized he left something important on the stove. The brilliance of Arsenic and Old Lace isn’t just in its premise—it’s in how playfully the film keeps twisting itself into knots. Every time Mortimer thinks he has a handle on things, another revelation sends him reeling. Grant, usually the essence of suave composure, is at his most wildly physical here, flailing, double-taking, and looking seconds away from tearing his hair out. The whole film is a tightly wound spring of escalating absurdity, and Capra keeps it bouncing with expert timing. Even its darkest jokes land with a featherlight touch. I love this movie to death. It’s morbid, manic, and packed with more darkly comic twists than a funhouse mirror maze. Arsenic and Old Lace is a delirious joyride—one that somehow makes serial murder feel like a screwball sport.

If romantic comedies had a gold standard, Arthur would have its face stamped on the coin. This film isn’t just charming—it’s downright intoxicating, and not just because its hero is a barely functional drunk. Dudley Moore, in a career-defining role, plays Arthur Bach, a billionaire who drifts through life in a perpetual champagne haze, cracking himself up far more than anyone else and laughing so hard he nearly wheezes. He’s the happiest of happy drunks—until his family drops an ultimatum: marry a wealthy heiress, Susan (Jill Eikenberry), or kiss the fortune goodbye. By Arthur’s side, offering a steady stream of withering remarks, is his ailing butler, Hobson (John Gielgud). Hobson’s insults are a masterclass in razor-sharp wit, and though Hobson feigns irritation, it’s clear he adores Arthur through every last barb. Their relationship is the film’s heartbeat—a perfect push-pull of affection wrapped in dry British disdain. Enter Linda (Liza Minnelli), a shoplifter with a gleam in her eye and enough mischief to match Arthur’s own. Their meet-cute unfolds in a department store, where Arthur watches, delighted, as she attempts to swipe a tie. “It’s the perfect crime,” he tells Hobson. “Girls don’t wear ties! Although some do. It’s not a perfect crime, but it’s a good crime.” Hobson, bone-dry as ever, replies, “Yes, if she murdered the ties, it would be the perfect crime.” It’s this kind of quicksilver dialogue that makes the film sparkle. Arthur, charmed beyond reason, uses his wealth to smooth things over when Linda gets caught, and before long, he’s smitten. The problem, of course, is that canceling his marriage to Susan would mean losing his family’s obscene wealth—and Arthur rather enjoys being rich. Moore delivers a performance so infectiously lovable that he accomplishes the impossible—making you feel sorry for a billionaire. His chemistry with Minnelli might not be the film’s strongest draw (his bond with Gielgud is the real show-stealer), but it’s still sweet and convincing. One of my personal favorites through the years, even when I was too young to fully grasp all its nuances. That relationship with Arthur and Hobson, though, captivated me even then. Arthur isn’t just a comedy that holds up—it’s one that somehow gets better with age, like the finest liquor. And much like its hero, I’ll keep coming back to it, glass in hand, laughing harder than I probably should.

The film poses as satire, but satire without factual ballast is just noise with posture. Yes, the VA hospital system has a long history of bureaucratic failures and budget-starved neglect. But Article 99 acts as if those problems aren’t slow-moving and systemic, but theatrical and conspiratorial—just waiting for a few morally indignant surgeons to smash through a filing cabinet and fix everything with forged signatures. It opens with a serviceman denied care for a terminal condition. His response is to return with a gun and shoot up the hospital. This sort of scenario has become grimly familiar in the years since, but it wasn’t funny then either. Still, the movie behaves like it’s landed the perfect opening jab—when in fact it’s already stepped in something it can’t scrape off. That’s the pattern: exaggerate, moralize, flatten. Administrators aren’t mismanaged—they’re cartoon villains. The VA isn’t flawed—it’s a machine built to grind people down on purpose. The doctors, meanwhile, are painted as rule-breaking saviors, navigating the institution like it’s a wartime bunker. They steal supplies, rig surgeries, shout at the ceiling. They’re angry, which the film treats as the same thing as being right. What keeps this from total collapse is the cast. Liotta brings the right heat, even if the script leaves him pacing in circles. Sutherland aims for gravity. Whitaker manages to inject some human nuance into a movie that seems allergic to it. You want to follow them. The problem is where they’re going. The film clearly believes it’s delivering righteous pathos. What it delivers instead is a parade of flailing gestures that misrepresent the problem it claims to care about.