Film Buff Musings

Of all the Beach Party movies, Beach Blanket Bingo drifts by the smoothest. The plot is a stack of distractions: skydiving gags, a dopey beach bum falling for a 300-year-old mermaid (who doesn’t look a day over 21), Don Rickles riffing in a nightclub, and Frankie Avalon half-heartedly chasing a blond singer until a daredevil stunt girl swoops in to shake things up. Meanwhile, Annette Funicello plays the role she always seems stuck with—watchful, loyal, slightly exasperated. She spends most of the movie reminding everyone (including the movie) that she’s supposed to matter. There’s plenty of dancing—on the beach, in clubs, wherever a twist can be squeezed in. And while the songs are catchy enough, they’re hardly standouts; other entries in the series featured better music. Still, they bounce along just fine, like jukebox filler designed to keep the energy up. The editing is surprisingly spry in places, the jokes hit more than they miss, and the usual cheese is kept to a smooth, palatable sheen. It’s insubstantial, but not hollow. A little absurdity, a little flirtation, and just enough camp to pass the time without groaning. Beach Blanket Bingo plays like a cocktail with a paper umbrella: silly, oddly specific, and more put together than it needs to be. It won’t convert the uninitiated, but for the curious, this is the one that actually holds together when you look past the tans and tambourines.

I liked the idea of Beaches more than I liked being stuck inside it. The film traces a lifelong friendship between two women from wildly different worlds: C.C. Bloom (Bette Midler), a scrappy performer with big hair and bigger ambition, and Hillary Whitney (Barbara Hershey), an upper-crust lawyer’s daughter with a studied air of self-possession. They meet as children under a boardwalk in Atlantic City and strike up a pen-pal friendship that improbably endures into adulthood. When Hillary turns up years later at the rundown bar where C.C. is performing for glazed-over tourists, the story kicks back into gear: cohabitation, career envy, romantic overlap, icy estrangement, and a reconciliation scored with enough swelling music to scare off subtlety. And then—illness. The kind that wipes the slate clean and hands the movie its emotional finale on a silver platter. The film has its moments—Midler is funny when she’s allowed to be caustic, and Hershey, always luminous, gives her side of the story more grace than the script provides. But their friendship often feels written in shorthand: you can see the outline of something tender and complicated, but the texture isn’t there. The big moments arrive right on cue, but they feel more like a checklist than shared history. What hurts isn’t the melodrama—it’s how pre-packaged it all feels. The emotional signals are relentless: cue strings, cue tasteful tear, cue Midler howling through “Wind Beneath My Wings” like it’s a eulogy. The movie reaches for catharsis but settles for the Kleenex aisle. Beaches wants to be about love in its least romantic form—the kind that endures. And maybe, in flashes, it is. But the rest is coated in gloss, scored to the rafters, and delivered with a sincerity so slick it slides right past.

A made-for-television drama with a gentle tone and a historical footnote for a premise, A Bear Named Winnie dramatizes the origin story of the real-life bear who would later inspire Winnie-the-Pooh. Not the author, not the stories—just the bear. Specifically, how she got to the London Zoo in the first place. The film is set in Canada at the onset of World War I, where Canadian and British troops are mobilizing near Winnipeg. One of them—veterinary officer Harry Colebourn (Michael Fassbender)—buys a black bear cub from a trapper at a rural train stop. The trapper claims the cub’s mother has been killed. Colebourn pays twenty dollars, names her Winnie (short for Winnipeg), and brings her along as the unofficial mascot of his regiment. She’s cute, loyal, and extremely inconvenient. As you’d expect, the higher-ups aren’t thrilled with the idea of a bear sharing quarters with soldiers. The film leans into sentiment, and then keeps leaning—until it starts to sag. It’s sweet, sometimes disarmingly so, but everything’s cushioned to the point of weightlessness. Periodically, it drops in choppy slow-motion shots, hoping to stir emotion, but they mostly just slow things down. The movie doesn’t offend, but it doesn’t impress either—riding on the charm of fur and khaki without ever digging deeper than the surface. Animal-loving children may enjoy it. Adults, perhaps less so—except for those with a particular interest in black bears, Michael Fassbender in uniform, or the kind of lightly fictionalized history that doesn’t want to trouble anyone too much.

Beast can’t decide if it wants to be a grim survival saga or a cheerfully dumb excuse to watch Idris Elba punch a lion square in the face. It keeps flirting with B-movie glory, then acting like it’s too mature to enjoy itself. Elba plays Dr. Nate Samuels, a widowed dad guilt-tripping his two teenage daughters (Iyana Halley and Leah Sava Jeffries) into a South African safari he swears will bring them closer. Instead of giraffes and photo ops, they get a lion so fed up with poachers that it’s basically sworn revenge on all bipeds. When the film sticks to letting the lion stalk, maul, and rearrange the food chain, it’s great—Kormákur knows how to drag out that dread just long enough to make you squirm. The early attacks snap like a well-set trap. But then the film keeps stopping dead in its tracks so that dad and daughters can argue about feelings in the middle of a murder safari. Nobody’s playing a human being here—just the usual off-the-shelf survival kit: sullen teenager, fragile kid sister, dad with more unresolved guilt than ammo. Sharlto Copley shows up as a game warden who explains things no one asked about, then nobly volunteers to be lion chow. And the lion itself is decent CGI, but you keep waiting for the movie to unleash it with the mean streak it promises. When Elba finally squares up for a man-versus-lion bare-knuckle brawl, it’s everything this film should have been for ninety minutes—big, dumb, and glorious. Instead, Beast wants to have it both ways: soulful family drama and late-night creature feature. It never picks, so it whimpers where it should roar.

Beautiful Girls pretends it has wisdom to share about men, women, and missed chances, but mostly it’s a bunch of guys circling the same stale conversations they should have outgrown a decade ago. They stand around bars, half-drunk, pontificating about life and love and the kinds of women they don’t have but insist they deserve. It almost works for a while—the talk feels easy, the performances click, the lines sound deep enough if you don’t listen too hard. Then the signal fades. One by one, these men prove they’re stuck. They pine, they reminisce, they dissect the bartender’s cousin (Uma Thurman) like she’s some philosophical object lesson drifting through town to remind them they peaked young. Rosie O’Donnell cuts through the nonsense with a sharp monologue about how insufferable they are, but it’s a splash of cold water on a bonfire—they dry off and keep pouting. At the center is Timothy Hutton’s Willie, a man spending an unsettling amount of time locked in soul-searching banter with a thirteen-year-old Natalie Portman. It’s meant to be wistful—an innocent stand-in for the idea of an ideal woman—but plays more like a grown man hoping to pause his life on the edge of something inappropriate. Portman, luminous even then, is wasted as a pre-teen muse in training. The cast—Dillon, Sorvino, Rapaport, Emmerich, Gish, Holly—settles in like they’re crashing their own high school reunion: easy camaraderie but nothing new to say. Now and then a sharp line slips through, but mostly it’s the cinematic equivalent of listening to a guy at last call explaining his ex-girlfriend to the bartender. He thinks he’s interesting. He isn’t.

Schizophrenia is rarely handled well in movies. It’s either played for horror, with a string section screeching behind every psychotic break, or softened into something vaguely mystical, as though madness is just genius with better marketing. A Beautiful Mind avoids both traps, staying uncomfortably close to its subject. When John Nash (Russell Crowe) sees something that isn’t there, we see it too—fully formed, convincing, indistinguishable from reality. Until it isn’t. Most films about mental illness keep their distance, fixating on its impact on everyone except the person experiencing it. This one gets it right. It doesn’t just depict Nash’s hallucinations; it lets them settle in, become routine, making it clear how a man as brilliant as Nash could accept them as real. Crowe plays him with deliberate discomfort, as if his own body is betraying him in ways he can’t articulate. His later scenes, as Nash ages into a frail but determined figure, aren’t exaggerated—they feel correct, a man worn down but still present, still fighting his mind on its own terms. Jennifer Connelly, as Alicia, isn’t just the suffering wife, though a weaker script might have left her stranded there. She gives Alicia an interior life—her patience isn’t saintly, and her exhaustion isn’t self-pity. The film doesn’t overplay their romance or wallow in their struggles. It just shows her standing beside him, year after year, unwilling to let his illness erase him. Ron Howard directs with a steady hand, careful not to tip the drama into melodrama. If anything, the film is almost too polished, sanding off some of the harsher realities of Nash’s life. But what it does well, it does exceptionally well. It captures schizophrenia as a lived experience, not a plot device, making Nash’s struggle tangible without romanticizing it. His illness doesn’t make him special. It doesn’t make him wise. It makes his life difficult, relentless, inescapable. And the film, for all its Hollywood gloss, never forgets that.

Beauty and the Beast is where Disney stopped dabbling in greatness and fully committed. It’s the jewel of the studio’s so-called Renaissance—lavish, theatrical, and composed with the kind of precision that suggests no one involved was allowed to settle. Every frame looks hand-carved. Every gesture feels considered. It was the first animated feature nominated for Best Picture, and the fact that Driving Miss Daisy took the award instead feels, in hindsight, like a polite clerical error. The film unfolds like an illuminated manuscript with a Broadway pit orchestra tucked inside. Alan Menken’s score, paired with Howard Ashman’s sly, lyrical songs, threads through the film like a second script. “Be Our Guest” is showbiz excess in silverware form. “Gaston” is barroom bravado, built for clanking mugs, while the film’s centerpiece tune “Beauty and the Beast” arrives like it’s been there all along. These aren’t just nice songs. They drive the story, deepen the characters, and hold the film together with a kind of invisible magnetism. The film would still be engaging without them, but it wouldn’t glide the same way. The setup is pure fable, but the characters carry more than archetype. Belle (Paige O’Hara) is often called “bookish,” but that undersells her. She’s perceptive, quietly stubborn, and allergic to dullness. The Beast (Robby Benson) is the film’s real gamble—a snarling mass of horns, shame, and hair-trigger rage, gradually softened not by love, but by embarrassment, humility, and small, cumulative acts of decency. Their relationship isn’t sudden, and it doesn’t arrive in a straight line. Around them, a houseful of talking furniture does what it can to nudge things along, but even the enchanted cutlery knows they’re just supporting players. And then there’s Chip—a chipped teacup with a handful of lines and barely a backstory, yet somehow fully formed. He’s sweet, curious, and utterly memorable. And while he may be missing a piece, the film leaves no doubt: he’s complete. The original fairy tale dates back to the 18th century, but this is the version etched into cultural memory. The animation is sweep and candlelight, but the emotions are specific and often surprisingly complex. A cursed castle. A girl with nothing in common with her neighbors. A creature who has to relearn how to speak softly. These are big, strange ideas, and the film treats them with real care. It’s hard to overstate how well this plays, or how easily it could have gone wrong. But Beauty and the Beast threads the needle: theatrical without being campy, sentimental without turning syrupy. It holds up not because it was once beloved, but because it still works. You can outgrow a lot of childhood favorites. This one tends to outgrow you.

A Southern comedy-drama with training wheels, Because of Winn-Dixie wants to be a bittersweet coming-of-age story but can’t quite decide on its footing. It’s about a girl and her dog—but also her loneliness, her absent mother, her preacher father, and a town full of eccentrics one faint anecdote away from becoming metaphors. AnnaSophia Robb, earnest and wide-eyed, plays Opal, a preacher’s kid new to town and already fluent in solitude. Then comes the dog: a scruffy mutt tearing through a Winn-Dixie supermarket like it’s auditioning for Home Alone 4: Petty Theft. Opal claims him on impulse and names him after the store. The chase sequence, complete with knocked-over displays and clerks yelling “stop that dog!,” is one of the film’s livelier moments. The early scenes flirt with whimsy. There’s a bath montage, a sullen landlord threatening eviction, and just enough cutesy soundtrack music to suggest someone’s trying to sell you on lightheartedness. But the film loses that impulse somewhere around the halfway mark. The tone flattens, the pacing stalls, and every conversation starts to feel like a moral wrapped in a sigh. Conflicts are introduced just so they can be hugged away later. Sadness creeps in—and stays. Jeff Daniels plays Opal’s father, a soft-spoken preacher who delivers sermons from behind the counter of what looks like a converted convenience store. He’s gentle, a little distant, and seems to be doing most of his parenting through metaphors about grace and forgiveness. Their relationship is supposed to anchor the film, but it rarely deepens past quiet concern. Like the rest of the movie, it gestures at feeling without quite getting there. The problem isn’t that it’s sweet—it’s that it thinks sweet is enough. Coming-of-age stories this simple need a spark, some glimmer of magic or mischief. This one settles for pleasantness and fades.

The war is long over, and the handful of survivors aren’t exactly citizens anymore—more like Britain’s hallucinations. The Bed Sitting Room unfolds a few years after a nuclear mishap wipes out most of the population, leaving behind a landscape where sanity has eroded as thoroughly as the infrastructure. One man is worried he’s becoming a bed sitting room. A woman, more decisively, has turned into a wardrobe. Nobody sings “God Save the Queen” anymore, but they do sing “God Save Mrs. Ethel Shroake of 393a High Street, Leytonstone,” who, by virtue of proximity, is next in line for the crown. It makes the anthem less catchy, but at least there’s someone to hold down the fort—even if Buckingham Palace has disintegrated. Government, such as it was, has evaporated, though its rituals carry on—like a man switching on the TV each morning. Except there’s no signal, just a broadcaster standing inside a hollowed-out set, delivering the news as if the world hadn’t already ended. Richard Lester frames post‑nuclear London like a sketchbook left out in the fallout. Dudley Moore floats overhead in a gutted Volkswagen suspended from a hot‑air balloon, barking orders through a megaphone to whoever’s left below. Peter Cook, grounded and severe, plays the Police Inspector—less a lawman than a spokesman for rules no one remembers. Spike Milligan carries a clipboard and some vague sense of duty, wandering from wreck to wreck like bureaucracy’s last gasp. Michael Hordern, as Captain Bules Martin, parades through the rubble in a tattered uniform, reciting Army protocol to civilians too dazed to notice. Rita Tushingham is pregnant—not symbolically, not narratively, just inexplicably. Ralph Richardson, as Lord Fortnum, carries himself with fading grandeur—until he becomes the furniture. There isn’t a plot—just a series of surreal, unraveling vignettes. The comedy is bone-dry and arrives mostly by accident. It’s not trying to amuse so much as to report from a place where logic used to be. Civilization hasn’t collapsed; it’s just gone missing, left to a band of eccentrics wandering the wreckage. The Bed Sitting Room isn’t about survival or satire so much as the strange postures people assume when they’ve forgotten what they were standing for. It’s strange, stubborn, and deranged in a way that starts to feel oddly respectable.

Bedazzled is a sharply structured, dryly hilarious riff on Faust, reimagined for the swinging pessimism of 1960s London. Cook and Moore—co-writers and stars—build the premise around Stanley Moon (Moore), a shy, self-defeating fry cook hopelessly in love with Margaret (Eleanor Bron), a waitress who barely notices he exists. In a moment of romantic despair, Stanley considers ending it all—until he’s approached by a well-dressed stranger who introduces himself as the Devil, currently operating under the name George Spiggot. Spiggot offers Stanley seven wishes in exchange for his soul—an offer Stanley accepts without much hesitation, or much understanding of what he’s giving up. Each wish is granted, but always in the least satisfying way possible. Cook plays the Devil with unhurried elegance and a talent for quiet sabotage. His Spiggot isn’t a cackling villain; he’s a professional with a quota. Moore, meanwhile, brings real desperation to Stanley’s bumbling hopefulness, and his mounting exasperation becomes the film’s emotional throughline. Their comedic rhythm—quick, dry, and carefully honed—gives the movie its bite. The wish sequences function like miniature morality plays with a satirical slant. In one, Stanley becomes a hyper-masculine womanizer, only to discover his love interest is repulsed by his boorishness. In another, he’s reincarnated as a nun in a hilariously severe convent where joy is outlawed, casual conversation is met with corporal punishment, and self-flagellation is routine. It’s one of the film’s most sustained bursts of comic invention, escalating from farce to near nightmare. Stanley’s tour through the Devil’s lair brings a more surreal touch, as he’s introduced to the Seven Deadly Sins—each embodied with varying degrees of menace or absurdity. Raquel Welch, as Lust, has barely a line of dialogue but still makes one of the film’s most enduring impressions. Bedazzled works both as character comedy and social satire, ribbing the British class system, Catholic guilt, male fantasy, and the existential futility of getting what you want. Not every vignette hits the same high, but the structure allows the film to reset and pivot before any idea wears out its welcome. Cook and Moore were never more in sync onscreen, and the result is a comedy as crisp as it is cleverly constructed.

The original Bedazzled (1967) had the devil handing out wishes with a smirk and a raised eyebrow, the kind of movie that played like a private joke between Peter Cook and Dudley Moore—dry, droll, and just the right amount of wicked. This remake, on the other hand, believes humor works best when lobbed at the audience like a rubber mallet. It isn’t enough for a wish to backfire; it has to backfire with a gag about a tiny penis, a cringeworthy caricature of a “flaming homosexual,” or, inexplicably, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Maybe that last one could be funny, but this movie wouldn’t know how. Brendan Fraser, to his eternal credit, gives the material more than it deserves. He plays Elliott Richards, a socially stunted IT worker with the personality of a damp paper towel, hopelessly obsessed with his coworker Alison (Frances O’Connor), a woman he barely speaks to but somehow considers his destiny. Enter the Devil—Elizabeth Hurley, slinking through the film in an endless series of outfits seemingly designed by Maxim magazine’s editorial staff. She offers him seven wishes in exchange for his soul, and Elliott, who has never once considered the metaphysical implications of such a trade, signs away his eternal essence as if agreeing to a new data plan. What follows is a series of personality overhauls for Fraser, who cycles through various wish-granted versions of Elliott with an almost heroic dedication. He’s a Colombian drug lord, a basketball prodigy, a power-hungry mogul, a poetic sensitive type—the gag, of course, is that every wish comes with a devastating flaw. Fraser gamely throws himself into each incarnation, delivering performances far funnier than anything in the script, but no amount of commitment can rescue a joke that wasn’t worth telling in the first place. Hurley, meanwhile, vamps through the proceedings with a knowing smile, an arched brow, and dialogue that never quite matches her energy. The Devil should be seductive, sly, maybe even fun, but here she mostly feels like a slightly bored model doing a shoot for a peculiarly themed calendar. By the time the film reaches its big moral revelation—that Elliott didn’t need wishes after all, he just needed to believe in himself—it starts slipping into greeting-card territory, all warm platitudes and soft landings. If selling one’s soul is supposed to come with fire and brimstone, Bedazzled barely musters a flickering match.

A film that never runs out of things to show you—macabre flourishes, grotesque sight gags, production design that looks like Edward Gorey joined a sketch comedy troupe. There’s no shortage of invention. What’s missing is a story to hang it on. The setup is terrific. Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin play a sweetly square couple who’ve just settled into their dream home in rural Connecticut when a car accident kills them on the way back from town. They return as ghosts—polite, confused, and still very much attached to their house—only to find it has been overtaken by a living family with a gift for bad taste and postmodern sculpture. Attempts to spook them fail. In desperation, the ghosts turn to Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), a freelance bio-exorcist who makes up in volume what he lacks in hygiene. Keaton, buried under makeup and channeling something between a lounge act and a pest control spokesman, is the film’s most chaotic element—unhinged, unsanitary, and strangely underused. He vanishes for long periods of time, as if the film can’t quite figure out what to do with him once he’s been introduced. What follows plays more like a grab bag than a story: some light haunting, a detour through the afterlife DMV, a séance, a sandworm, another haunting. The highlights are there—chief among them, the dinner scene, where the new homeowners burst into the “Banana Boat Song” mid-forkful, possessed by something unmistakably Caribbean and never explained. It’s funny. It works. But it also sums up the film’s approach to logic: don’t ask, because it’s not interested. Beetlejuice plays like a haunted house built for spectacle and held together with impulse. Scenes lurch forward, strung together by mood swings and leftover props. The visuals are flawless. The tone won’t sit still. It jerks from farce to satire to sketch comedy, trying on personas it doesn’t quite know how to wear. By the end, you’re left with a glittering pile of gags still waiting for a story to hold them together.

The third (and, let’s assume, final) film in Richard Linklater’s Before series finds Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) not so much walking on air anymore, but trudging—still talking, but now with the kind of verbal footnotes that pile up after years of shared history. They’ve aged into their forties, and with them, their conversation has accumulated weight. The backdrop this time is Greece, the kind of place built to remind you that time marches forward, that civilizations rise and crumble, and that love—however grand—can start to feel like an empire in decline. It starts differently, with a dinner party, a handful of articulate friends tossing around thoughts on relationships like philosophers passing a wineskin. It’s a fresh dynamic—Jesse and Celine aren’t in a bubble anymore, and they don’t own the monopoly on interesting dialogue. The banter is rich, but even as they laugh, you can sense something coiled underneath, a tautness that wasn’t there before. And then, the roast: Celine’s merciless, pitch-perfect impression of Jesse’s fantasy woman—young, beautiful, and just vacant enough to inflate his ego without ever puncturing it. He takes it, grinning through the burn, but there’s something in his face that suggests a man who has been given this dressing-down before. It’s a joke, yes, but jokes, in relationships, are often just old wounds with better timing. Soon, they slip away, as they always have, walking through ruins—fitting, given the architecture of their relationship has started to show cracks. The conversation, still as fluid as ever, is different now. Less flirtation, more excavation. This is no longer about the rush of falling in love, or the thrill of reunion, but about maintenance, about upkeep, about what happens when romance has been stretched and worn into something that resembles real life. And when the shift happens—when warmth cools and the dialogue turns from playful to pointed—there’s no mistaking it: this isn’t a lovers’ quarrel, it’s an audit. Every choice, every sacrifice, every compromise dragged into the light, examined under an unforgiving sun. It’s messier than expected, less lyrical than the first two, but truer, in its way. Before Sunrise was all about promise, Before Sunset about possibility, but Before Midnight is what happens when the poetic notions of love get their final exams. Do I adore it the way I do the others? Maybe not. But it’s essential. If this is the last we see of them, then it’s a sendoff that acknowledges love is no single moment, no sweeping gesture, but something more like an ongoing sentence, half-finished, waiting for a reply.

A film about two strangers meeting on a train and falling in love sounds like a premise best left to well-worn paperbacks abandoned in airport lounges, yet Before Sunrise manages to take this most threadbare of setups and spin it into something delicate, hypnotic, and electric. Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American killing time in Europe before heading home, and Celine (Julie Delpy), a French student returning to Paris, lock into conversation the way two people sometimes do—effortlessly, as if their words had been waiting for the right ears. By the time the train pulls into Vienna, it’s settled: they step off together, surrendering the next few hours to the city’s streets, as if time had nothing better to do than stretch itself around them. There is no plot, not really—just movement and words, but words so natural, so unforced, they feel like the air Jesse and Celine breathe. They talk about life, death, Quaker weddings, the afterlife, art, and the architecture they pass as if they’re composing the world as they go. Conversations loop, evolve, derail, reform. They touch hands, trade theories, forget to ask each other’s names until they’ve already asked everything else. Hawke and Delpy give performances so seamless, so perfectly calibrated to the rhythm of the dialogue, that they practically disappear into it. The line between performance and presence vanishes. Vienna, glowing with late-night possibility, drifts along with them. It’s there, but only when they choose to notice—a ferris wheel turning slowly above them, a poet spinning lines for a few coins, a café chair pulling itself out just as they need it. Every shot has the soft buzz of something fleeting, something borrowed. And yet, for a film so driven by talk, it understands the weight of silence. Not in the grand, dramatic sense—no swelling music, no pause laden with meaning—but in the casual quiet of two people falling into each other’s rhythm. A stray glance, a pause just long enough to wonder if the moment should be kissed, a second too long held between parting and not parting. Love stories are usually all plot—grand gestures, sweeping conclusions. Before Sunrise has no patience for that. It’s the space between moments, the feeling of a day so perfect it hurts, the certainty that it will be replayed forever by the people who lived it.

A direct sequel to Before Sunrise, and this film series feels like tending a garden—stepping away for a time, then returning to find the flowers have bloomed in ways you never predicted. Nine years have passed, both for Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) and for those of us who followed them through that fleeting night in Vienna. Time hasn’t paused for nostalgia, and neither have they. They walk again, they talk again—this time through Paris, but the air between them is heavier, thick with the weight of things left unspoken, as if the past were an unseen third party trailing just out of frame. Before Sunrise was buoyant, giddy with the thrill of possibility. Before Sunset watches as that weightlessness is tugged back to earth. They’re older now—wiser, perhaps, but in the way that makes them hesitate more. Life has pressed into them, left indentations, made them cautious where once they leapt. The conversation still flows, but now there are pauses where certainty used to be, words that come out carefully, deliberately, as if they’re afraid of what might slip through the cracks. They still talk about love, philosophy, art, but there’s an edge to it—an awareness that youthful idealism doesn’t always survive its collision with experience. It’s mesmerizing, and at times, quietly devastating. If there’s anything painful about this film, it’s that it captures—almost too well—the slow erosion of romanticism. It’s how age dulls the brightness of certain dreams, and watching Jesse and Celine feel that shift feels very much real. The first film was about a perfect moment in time; this one is about what happens when time refuses to hold still. But as before, the magic is in the dialogue—crafted so meticulously that it disappears into the rhythm of their movement, their glances, the way they interrupt each other, double back, shift tones mid-sentence. Conversations are less about what’s being said and more about what’s being carefully avoided, what hovers between pauses. And then, just as it all seems to be slipping through their fingers, the film delivers a final moment like a sigh that catches in your throat—one that doesn’t so much answer a question as invite you to ask it over and over again.

Being John Malkovich doesn’t so much unfold as it convulses—an electrified high-wire act of existential comedy and lunatic farce. It has the nerve to keep moving when most films would stop to explain themselves, the recklessness to throw in an extra trick before the last one has even landed. It’s a sleight-of-hand routine performed by a maniac: the rabbit comes out of the hat and immediately starts questioning the nature of hats, rabbits, and reality itself. John Cusack’s Craig Schwartz is a tangle of bad posture and worse decisions, a stringy-haired, basement-dwelling puppeteer who looks like he’s spent too much time trapped inside his own head. Unfortunately for him, the world doesn’t care about puppetry, and neither does his new office job, a corporate absurdity housed on the 7½ floor—a place where the ceilings hover just above four feet, reducing employees to scuttling, bent-kneed worker ants. There, he meets Maxine (Catherine Keener, tossing off insults with the precision of a dart thrower), who swats away his romantic advances with the effortlessness of someone batting away a gnat. Meanwhile, at home, Craig’s wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz, transformed into a jittery ball of frizz and misplaced maternal energy), runs an unofficial animal rehabilitation center in their cramped apartment, a cacophony of parrots, primates, and an iguana that looks perpetually on the verge of escape. Then, the kind of discovery that cracks a movie open: Craig finds a portal behind a filing cabinet, crawls in, and gets swallowed whole—shot through a tunnel and into the consciousness of John Malkovich. Yes, that John Malkovich, playing himself. For fifteen minutes, Craig is no longer Craig but living the actor’s life in real time. And then—bam—he’s spit out onto the New Jersey Turnpike, stunned, ecstatic, and already scheming. He brings the discovery to Maxine, who sees the hustle immediately. They start charging for access. People line up. The office portal becomes the hottest ticket in town, a carnival ride into someone else’s life. And then, somehow, it all gets stranger. Craig stops wanting to leave. Lotte gets in and starts rethinking her entire identity. Maxine gets tangled in a love triangle where one participant isn’t even present in their own body. The film keeps twisting itself into new contortions, bending its own logic until it loops back into something startlingly sincere. Charlie Kaufman’s script is a glorious machine of ideas, clicking and whirring at a relentless pace, never waiting for anyone to catch up. The jokes aren’t just jokes; the weirdness isn’t just for show. It’s exhilarating, unsettling, and unexpectedly moving. What begins as a surreal prank on Hollywood morphs into something trickier—a film about the gnawing desire to be someone else, or maybe the creeping horror of discovering that being someone else doesn’t fix a damn thing.

Bell, Book and Candle is a film about witches that’s afraid to get its hands dirty with magic. It tiptoes into the occult with all the caution of someone trying not to spill their martini, gliding through a bohemian Greenwich Village where broomsticks have been swapped for bongo drums and sorcery is just another charming eccentricity. Kim Novak, all feline elegance and sleepy-eyed mystery, plays Gillian, a chic witch who, on a whim, hexes her buttoned-up neighbor, Shep (James Stewart), into falling in love with her. It should be deliciously wicked, but the movie never quite stirs the cauldron. Novak is mesmerizing to look at, but she plays Gillian like a woman who’s already halfway out the door, coolly detached even when she’s supposed to be swept up in romance. Stewart, meanwhile, gamely bumbles through the proceedings, though you can’t shake the feeling that he’s wandered in from the wrong movie. Their chemistry is polite rather than intoxicating—when they kiss, you half expect her to hand him a receipt. Jack Lemmon, on the other hand, gets it. As Gillian’s impish, bongo-playing warlock brother, he seems to be operating on his own private frequency, winking at the audience as if to say, Can you believe we’re getting away with this? His scenes have the playful mischief the rest of the film keeps misplacing. Elsa Lanchester, as an older witch, also has some fun, but she’s barely given time to cackle before the movie returns to its somber love story. That’s the problem: Bell, Book and Candle never quite decides if it wants to be darkly seductive or light and frothy, so it lands in the middle—charming but weightless, a cocktail without the kick. You can see the bones of a better movie beneath the surface, one where the spells are stranger, the wit sharper, and the romance less inhibited. Instead, it settles for being an amiable curiosity, a love story that’s allergic to passion, a supernatural comedy that forgot to bring the fun.

Jerry Lewis doesn’t just perform comedy—he reconstructs it in his own peculiar, restless logic. The Bellboy isn’t a traditional comedy—or even a typical Jerry Lewis comedy; it’s a playground for gags, a controlled explosion of silent-era slapstick and mid-century absurdity. If Mr. Hulot’s Holiday is a patient study in visual humor, The Bellboy is its hyperactive cousin, moving in unpredictable bursts, stretching jokes past their natural breaking points, then yanking them back just in time. Set in the gleaming, labyrinthine Fontainebleau Hotel, the film exists in a world where time is incidental and reality bends to the needs of the next gag. Stanley is a bellhop so at odds with his surroundings that even inanimate objects conspire against him. Luggage develops a mind of its own, chairs refuse to stay put—even his own reflection seems to be more competent than he is. Every routine task—holding a door, escorting a guest, carrying a suitcase—turns into an elaborate farce, a carefully orchestrated failure, performed with the precision of a man who senses disaster coming but never quite manages to sidestep it. Like Tati, Lewis finds humor in space, silence, and the physics of mischief, but where Hulot’s Holiday ambles, The Bellboy accelerates. There’s no story, only a framework: Stanley, a mute enigma, stumbling his way through one escalating misadventure after another. And then, the final joke—after a film’s worth of wordless fumbling, he speaks effortlessly, revealing that his silence was never the point. No arcs, no sentiment, no concern for resolution—just Lewis, a master of controlled chaos, refining slapstick until it becomes something near-musical, a symphony of perfectly timed disasters.

By 1934, Mae West found herself toe-to-toe with Hollywood’s moral enforcers, her brand of innuendo forced through the fine-toothed comb of the newly fortified Hays Code. A year earlier, she had coasted through She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel with the kind of audacious, unbothered charm that made dialogue seem like a formality—her delivery did the work, her presence sealed the deal. Now, the script had to be careful, the suggestiveness reined in, the double entendres softened to the point where the second meaning had to fight for air. And yet, Belle of the Nineties survives—not as her most unrestrained work, but as a film that still knows exactly what to do with Mae West, even if it’s occasionally glancing over its shoulder for approval. West plays Ruby Carter, a nightclub star whose romance with a prizefighter is unceremoniously upended by deception, sending her straight into the arms of New Orleans, a city she wastes no time in conquering. The plot is little more than a scenic route to get her from one diamond-draped tableau to the next, but she doesn’t just step over it—it gives her just enough room to strut. The usual Mae West ingredients are here: the parade of eager suitors, the jewel-toned gowns that seem to materialize out of thin air, the amused detachment of a woman who has already made up her mind long before anyone else in the room has caught up. The jokes, though softened, haven’t been entirely wrung out. If anything, there’s something even more deliberate about West’s delivery, her pauses stretching just long enough to remind the audience that something is still there, whether or not the censors want to admit it. She doesn’t bulldoze her way through dialogue the way she once did, but she still knows how to plant a phrase, let it hover, and watch it work. McCarey, fresh off Duck Soup and on his way to The Awful Truth, keeps things moving with the ease of a director who understands rhythm, even if this isn’t one of his more distinctive efforts. He lets West be West, framing her with enough elegance to make her every entrance feel like an event. And when Duke Ellington’s band makes an appearance, the film seems to sit up a little straighter—his presence isn’t a game-changer, but it’s a welcome shot of energy in a film that, at times, plays things a little too safe. Even at half-strength, West still operates on a different frequency than anyone else in 1930s Hollywood. The barbs may not cut as deep, the script may avoid saying the quiet part out loud, but none of it changes the fundamental truth: she remains untouchable, a woman who doesn’t need to chase after the joke because she is the joke, and the audience is always in on it.

Bells Are Ringing has energy, color, and a strong central performance, but very little punch. For a film that leans so hard into whimsy, it stays strangely earthbound. The setup—a switchboard operator who meddles charmingly in the lives of her clients—ought to work like gangbusters. But the execution feels labored, like a light romantic comedy that got workshopped into something slightly soggy. Judy Holliday stars as Ella Peterson, a big-hearted busybody who falls for one of her callers (Dean Martin, relaxed to the point of inertia) while juggling a string of misadventures and mistaken identities. The film presents itself as quirky, but the quirks feel imported. A dentist who moonlights as a songwriter? That’s not really a punchline—just a résumé tweak. The script seems to think eccentricity is its own reward. It isn’t. The songs are fine. Not grating, not especially memorable. That said, “The Party’s Over” and “Just in Time” have had a longer shelf life than the film itself, which tells you something. The same goes for the staging. As a musical, it hits the notes. As a movie musical, it mostly just fills the frame. The costumes are more striking than anything else—bright, detailed, and carefully styled, they add the kind of visual lift the rest of the production lacks. The sets, while aiming for New York authenticity, come off as drab and overly cluttered—serviceable more than cinematic. Holliday, to her credit, gives the whole thing more buoyancy than it probably deserves. Her comic timing is sharp, her delivery unforced, and there’s an easy warmth to her screen presence. You root for her, even when the plot doesn’t seem sure what it’s doing. The film isn’t bad. It’s just uncertain—about its tone, its pacing, and even its structure. The result is a musical with plenty of parts but no clear center. You can feel the effort behind every scene, which is rarely a good sign for a film that’s supposed to glide.

Overwrought—but gloriously so. Ben-Hur isn’t long; it’s seismic. Three and a half hours of sand, steel, and righteous fury, staged with the solemnity of scripture and the confidence of a studio that knew exactly what it had. Even the overture—just a static title card and Miklós Rózsa’s musical avalanche—is a prelude to reverence. You’re not here to watch a film. You’re here to undergo one. Charlton Heston—bronzed, clenched, carved like a tribute to himself—plays Judah Ben-Hur, a Jerusalem aristocrat whose tranquil life under Roman rule is about to implode. Enter Messala (Stephen Boyd), his boyhood friend turned imperial hardliner, now demanding names of local dissidents. Judah won’t give them. Then: a few roof tiles fall, the wrong man nearly dies, and Messala cashes in the grudge. Judah is shackled and shipped to the galleys. His mother and sister vanish into the shadows of a prison cell. What follows is both pilgrimage and vendetta. Judah rows through blood, survives shipwreck, nearly expires under the desert sun—only to be revived by a silent stranger with outstretched hands and unknowable calm. It’s Jesus, of course, though the film keeps his identity at a distance until it matters most. Adapted from Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, the film uses Judah’s story as a kind of shadow gospel, brushing it against the margins of the New Testament until they merge at Calvary. And then, somewhere in that sweep—twelve minutes that crack like a starting pistol—the chariot race. No score, no speech, just pounding hooves, collapsing wheels, and the sharp geometry of survival. It doesn’t just hold up. It still outruns most modern action sequences by several laps. The quieter moments hold too. Courtroom scenes, desert conversations, arguments whispered with teeth showing—Wyler doesn’t rush them. They stay tight and deliberate. The dialogue feels less spoken than handed down—grand, measured, just this side of liturgical. But that’s the current running under the whole film: this isn’t realism—it’s ritual. Visually, the film is outrageous in the best way. Painted skies, colonnaded arenas, costume design that treats togas like armor. Even the wind has dramatic timing. When Judah returns to his abandoned home years later, the place has aged into a haunted monument—gray stone, tangled weeds, silence like a held breath. The film moves like scripture set to celluloid—heavy with omen, loaded with consequence, and carved from the elements. A time-suck, maybe—but the kind that reminds you why time was invented in the first place.

If at first you don’t succeed, send out another spaceship and try again. That’s more or less the plan behind Beneath the Planet of the Apes, in which Brent (James Franciscus), an astronaut from the same era as Taylor, is dispatched to figure out what went wrong. Charlton Heston reprises his role in flashbacks and brief appearances, but the focus this time shifts to Brent, who crash-lands on the same planet and begins retracing Taylor’s steps. A big part of the original film’s appeal came from the slow reveal of the strange and hostile world the astronauts had landed on. This sequel can’t replicate that—it arrives with the premise already in hand—but it does an effective job picking up where the first film left off. Brent’s search leads him underground, where he finds a society of mutated humans who communicate telepathically and worship an active nuclear bomb. The anti-nuke message was already present in the original, but here it’s stripped of any ambiguity. The film doesn’t hint—it declares. Much of the first half is familiar: Brent exploring ruins, Nova tagging along silently, and the ape society once again at odds over how to handle the human question. The novelty is gone, but what replaces it is stranger and more apocalyptic. The mutants are introduced late but make an impression, and the imagery—religious, violent, and occasionally surreal—feels like the franchise starting to spiral. There’s a rough energy to this sequel that ends up working in its favor. It doesn’t build tension the way the first film did, and the messaging isn’t exactly delicate, but it moves with conviction and takes the premise to a weirder, darker place. The ending is abrupt, bold, and just self-serious enough to be effective. It’s not subtle, but it’s not dull either.

Paul Verhoeven, known for his spectacularly lurid sci-fi and erotic thrillers, takes on quite a subject here—loosely adapting Judith C. Brown’s Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. It’s a volatile setup, and while there are flashes of exploitation, the sex scenes aren’t especially sensual or over-the-top. What the film is more interested in is the psychology—specifically Benedetta’s visions of Jesus and Mary, her apparent possession by Christ (complete with stigmata and a lowered voice), and her seemingly miraculous ability to hold off a plague. It’s all played with a surprising degree of control. The title character (played with unnerving calm and sudden intensity by Virginie Efira) arrives at a Tuscan convent as a young girl and rises through the ranks as a visionary nun who claims to experience intimate encounters with Jesus, complete with stigmata, prophetic insight, and—on occasion—His voice speaking through her in a deeper register. The film doesn’t try to validate or refute her visions. It operates in the space between belief and invention, leaving room for both faith and performance to coexist. Verhoeven is no stranger to exploitation, and the setup practically invites it. But while there are sex scenes, they aren’t framed with much eroticism. If anything, they feel clinical, matter-of-fact—more about possession and control than desire. The real charge of the film comes from its religious imagery, which veers between the sublime and the surreal: a bleeding Christ that embraces Benedetta like a lover, a statue used as a sex toy, and plague victims writhing in the street while the convent’s gates remain suspiciously untouched. The central tension isn’t just whether Benedetta’s gifts are real, but how much it matters. Her growing influence unnerves the Church, not because she might be lying—but because she might not be. The threat is less spiritual than political. Efira carries all of this with eerie precision. She plays Benedetta as someone constantly performing belief, but not necessarily faking it. Her serenity is unshakable, even when her claims start to border on the messianic. She may be sincere, delusional, manipulative—or all three at once. It’s a fascinating performance, and the film never settles on an answer. Benedetta isn’t easy to classify. It’s sharp-edged, ambiguous, and willing to leave its most pressing questions unresolved. But as a character study—and as an examination of faith, power, and spectacle—it’s consistently absorbing. In French with English subtitles.

The Benchwarmers is what happens when a studio wants an underdog sports movie but settles for fart gags and stale skits. Nobody strains themselves here. The film flings pratfalls, wedgies, and Rob Schneider at the screen like it’s clearing out the fridge before vacation. Now and then it stirs up a laugh, but mostly it feels like watching a kid try the same knock-knock joke a dozen times, convinced he’s getting warmer. The premise limps in wearing someone else’s jersey: three stunted man-children (Schneider, David Spade, Jon Heder) patch together a backyard baseball team to humiliate the local Little League tyrants, hoping public defeat will stop the swirlies and name-calling off the field. It gestures toward Bad News Bears for adults, then shrugs and tosses the plot in the gutter for a heap of half-connected sketches. A few hit the sweet spot of dumb fun—Amaury Nolasco’s “ringer” Carlos, towering over actual 12-year-olds with a birth certificate scribbled in crayon. Or the vampire-like shut-in who eats sunscreen straight from the bottle like a guilty snack. But for the most part, these jokes feel like they’ve been microwaved twice and forgotten on the counter. Spade tosses out wisecracks as if to remind you he’s awake. Heder wanders through a half-speed Napoleon Dynamite. Schneider squints and pretends to be the responsible one while Jon Lovitz crashes in with a Batmobile and Terry Crews stands around waiting for someone to hand him an actual punchline. There’s nothing lurking under the slapstick except more slapstick. The Benchwarmers parades its idiocy like a prize ribbon from the county fair—loud, lazy, and faintly proud of itself for never growing up. It knows what it is: a pie in the face over and over, sometimes good for a cheap giggle if you’re not expecting anything more than a metaphorical pie in the face.

Benji (2018) is a stray dog threads his way through New Orleans traffic, dodging feet and fate, until he finds Carter (Gabriel Bateman), a quiet kid still learning how to navigate life without a father. The connection is immediate. Carter and his younger sister Frankie (Darby Camp) bring him home, name him Benji, and do their best to hide him from their mother (Kiele Sanchez), who isn’t in the mood for surprises. She sends him away. The kids reluctantly let him go, and Benji disappears—at least for a while. Then Carter and Frankie are taken during a robbery gone wrong, and the film shifts. Benji reemerges, trailing the situation from a distance, picking up on things no one else does. While the adults panic and procedure stalls, he’s already closing in. This is a reboot with more gravity than you’d expect. Directed by Brandon Camp—son of Joe Camp, who launched the original Benji in 1974—it moves with a kind of hushed confidence. There’s no forced whimsy, no padding. The tone stays measured, even when the logic gets a little elastic. It’s a movie that asks you to take it seriously, and mostly earns the request. You’d expect a movie like this to lean cute—turn Benji into a furry punchline or wrap the danger in gauze. Instead, it plays it straight. The dog doesn’t perform tricks; he watches, calculates, and acts. The restraint is deliberate, and surprisingly effective. Still, the film can feel too muted for its own good. A little more light, a little less gravity, and it might have found a sharper register. But it stays the course. The sincerity isn’t performed—it’s built in. Not reinvented, not softened—just steady, clear, and confident in what it’s doing.

This was Disney’s one and only foray into the Benji-verse, and since I was five when it came out, it’s also the one I actually remember seeing. That might be nostalgia talking, but the film holds up surprisingly well—for what is essentially 88 minutes of beautifully shot animal footage loosely structured into a survival narrative. There’s barely any dialogue. Benji was never a talking dog, and this isn’t the kind of movie where a sidekick raccoon cracks wise. It’s mostly silent, observational—Benji alone in the Oregon wilderness, separated from his owner (who, conveniently, has access to a helicopter but not much urgency). He moves through thick forests and fogged-over ridgelines, eventually stumbling across a mountain lion who’s just been shot by a hunter. The cubs survive. Benji, being Benji, decides to raise them. That’s really the whole film: a dog navigating the woods and trying to keep four mountain lion cubs alive while evading bears, hunters, and the occasional cliffside. It sounds slight—and it is—but the simplicity lets the visuals and emotion do the telling. The cinematography is striking, the editing unfussy, and the emotional turns are more precisely timed than you’d expect. A few moments hit harder than you’d think, especially for a movie aimed at kids with a soft spot for animals. Benji the Hunted doesn’t overreach. It’s quiet, a little sad, and entirely sincere. And in a strange way, that gives it more integrity than most movies about dogs, which usually involve more dialogue and far less dignity.

Benny & Joon offers a fantasy version of mental illness—where symptoms read as quirks, consequences rarely land, and everyone’s hiding a charming eccentric under their sleeve. The film doesn’t ignore pain exactly; it just redirects it into whimsy. Joon (Mary Stuart Masterson) is a young woman with a loosely defined but clearly serious psychiatric condition. She lives with her brother Benny (Aidan Quinn), a mechanic and reluctant caretaker who’s been quietly restructuring his life around her for years. She’s volatile, sweet, unpredictable. When her latest in-home aide finally quits, Benny scrambles for a solution. Enter Sam (Johnny Depp), a near-silent oddball who channels Buster Keaton, makes grilled cheese with a clothes iron, and floats through life like a well-dressed question mark. He arrives almost by accident—then stays, by sheer force of peculiarity. Depp, at his most endearingly physical, delivers one pantomime set piece involving a runaway hat that’s as graceful as it is mannered. The film clearly adores him, and he earns it. But like Joon, Sam is left undefined—teetering on the edge of metaphor but never quite developed enough to be more than a curated effect. The movie edges toward seriousness, then pulls back. Group homes are mentioned. Boundaries are brushed. But the film ducks depth in favor of detours, sidestepping discomfort like it might smudge the frame. It’s not lying to you—it just doesn’t want to get messy. What it offers instead is mood: that early-’90s indie haze where pain comes softly lit and everything sad looks slightly curated. The film isn’t interested in diagnosis or realism. It sees its characters not as problems to be solved, but as lonely people trying to connect. That generosity counts for something. Benny & Joon wants to be tender, and mostly is. It gestures at insight, flirts with pain, and drifts along on charm. Not a cure, but a kindness.

Berlin Express isn’t much of a thriller, but it’s a remarkable document. The story is standard-issue postwar intrigue—coded messages, suspected assassins, a peace-minded German statesman marked for death by a pocket of Nazi holdouts. Robert Ryan plays the American who stumbles into the plot and gradually gets involved. The suspense is mild, the twists mild-mannered. What isn’t mild is the setting. Shot on location just two years after the war, the film uses real bombed-out buildings, real train depots with collapsed ceilings, real streets still sifting through ash. No set design could recreate this. The destruction is simply there, unadorned and unavoidable, giving the film more weight than the script ever musters. Director Jacques Tourneur shoots it all with a steady, unblinking eye. He’s not embellishing; he’s pointing. The rubble isn’t symbolic—it’s Berlin, 1947, still in pieces. Even the most routine scenes take on a quiet power when they play out beside craters or through shattered walls. The plot—protecting a man trying to unify a broken country—ought to pulse with urgency but never quite does. The characters do their jobs, the mystery clicks forward, and the train keeps moving. It’s not badly made, just inert. And yet, the setting won’t let you look away. Even when the narrative drifts, the surroundings hold you. You’re watching people walk through history that hasn’t finished happening yet. For that alone, it’s worth seeing. The thriller may forget to thrill, but the ruins don’t forget to haunt.

Christopher Guest’s mockumentary about competitive dog shows treats its subjects less like punchlines and more like creatures who’ve been selectively bred into sentient neuroses. The dogs are just the straight men. It’s their owners—the brittle, tightly wound, tennis-ball-clutching owners—who look like they were assembled from delusion and decorative throw pillows. The cast, mostly improvising, snaps into character like they’ve been this way since birth. Guest himself wanders in with a deadpan Southern accent as a bloodhound owner and amateur ventriloquist who seems barely aware of how conversation works. Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock play a couple whose barely concealed marital collapse finds an outlet in their Weimaraner, who’s clearly wondering why he got roped into this custody battle. Michael McKean and John Michael Higgins go full peacocking as the owners of a Shih Tzu and likely the only pair at the competition enjoying themselves. Jennifer Coolidge—channeling nouveau-riche desperation—and Jane Lynch—armed with a competitive glint—pair off as the handlers of a meticulously fluffed poodle and maybe each other. And then there’s Fred Willard, as a rogue dog show commentator who behaves like he’s wandered into a golf tournament sponsored by Prozac. His tangents—delivered with the bluffing confidence of someone misreading every cue card—are so precisely off they practically reroute the movie around them. But the real joke is that none of these people think they’re jokes. Guest doesn’t craft punchlines—he lets the characters talk until their neuroses float to the surface, bloated and bobbing like forgotten pool toys.

A neo-noir that wants to be seductive, twisty, and morally fraught, but mostly just lies there waiting for the plot to kick in. Reese Witherspoon plays the femme fatale with the casual menace of someone doing a trial run—her character is introduced mid-seduction, mid-scheme, and mid-sentence, though none of it quite clicks. Josh Brolin, in good-old-boy mode, wakes up post-hookup to find himself threatened, blackmailed, and increasingly out of his depth. His solution? Chain her to a pool table and call his best friend (Alessandro Nivola) for help. That would be enough to power a tight little pressure cooker, but the film keeps pulling back to reveal more twists, more angles, more motivations layered like wet tissue. The double-crosses stack, but they don’t build. Instead of ratcheting tension, the script just reshuffles its pieces every ten minutes and hopes the audience mistakes motion for escalation. It’s not incompetent. The lighting knows what genre it’s in, the score hits its marks, and the structure is technically sound. But the characters have no real presence—just vague intentions and a lot of first-draft dialogue. By the time the final reversal clicks into place, it’s hard to care who outplayed whom, since nobody ever seemed particularly alive to begin with. The title promises something calculated. The movie delivers something closer to improvised paperwork.

A little dry around the edges but still worth the watch, The Best Man is a backroom political drama penned by Gore Vidal, where ambition is greased with compromise and everyone’s spine gets a stress test. The setting is a national party convention—back when conventions actually decided nominees and weren’t just balloon drops with TV coverage. The party isn’t named, but the positions click neatly into place—just familiar enough to make you wince. Henry Fonda plays William Russell, a former Secretary of State with the right pedigree, the right policies, and just enough conscience to trip over. His rival is Joe Cantwell (Cliff Robertson), a slick populist with a war record, a chip on his shoulder, and a playbook scrawled in red ink—he’s practically an avatar of Joe McCarthy, updated with a better tailor. Cantwell plays to the crowd with simple slogans and pointed threats, and it’s clear early on he’s willing to shoot first and justify later. “Fires a cannon to kill a bug,” someone mutters, and it sticks. Hovering over the whole circus is a dying former president, played with plainspoken venom by Lee Tracy, who holds the power to sway the nomination. At first, he leans toward Cantwell—Russell, he complains, is too squeamish to win. But Cantwell overplays his hand, trying to deploy a weaponized psychiatric report against Russell in front of the wrong man. “I don’t mind a bastard,” the ex-president finally declares. “I mind a stupid bastard.” It’s a film more interested in maneuvering than momentum. Vidal’s dialogue is sharp, his understanding of political theater even sharper. But the pace is procedural—candidates giving speeches, making trades, cashing in favors—more civics lesson than thriller. What keeps it afloat is how close it still cuts. Cantwell rants about abolishing the income tax, hiking defense spending, balancing the budget—and never once explains the arithmetic. That was 1964. You’ve heard it since. The Best Man doesn’t push for suspense. It lets the rot seep in slowly. It’s not about who wins. It’s about what’s left of them after they do.

Most movies about war like to show men at their most heroic—storming beaches, dodging bullets, making noble sacrifices with the kind of certainty that only exists in screenplays. The Best Years of Our Lives starts after all that, when the ticker tape has been swept up and the war heroes step off the plane into a life that doesn’t quite know what to do with them. The battles are over, but the war hasn’t quite stopped. Three men come home to find that whatever they thought they were returning to has rearranged itself in their absence. Al (Fredric March) returns to a comfortable home, a good banking job, and a family that hasn’t suffered while he was gone, and yet something doesn’t sit right. The rituals of suburban life feel smaller now, his wartime experiences shaping him in ways that don’t translate to cocktail parties and balance sheets. His job is still his job, but he’s less willing to pretend it’s just business when he’s approving loans for fellow veterans who don’t have a safety net. Meanwhile, Fred (Dana Andrews), who went from soda jerk to decorated captain, is back where he started—only now, he’s got a chest full of medals and nowhere to use them. His return isn’t an immediate freefall, but a slow erosion of dignity, one rejection letter at a time, until the only job left is the one he thought he’d outgrown. And then there’s Homer (Harold Russell), who lost both hands in the war and finds himself performing normalcy for the people who insist nothing has changed. His family embraces him without hesitation, but it’s his fiancée he can’t stop second-guessing—does she still love him or just the memory of him? He needs her devotion, but the last thing he wants is her pity. Wyler directs with unshakable confidence, trusting the material enough to let it move at its own deliberate pace. The film takes its time—not out of indulgence, but because rebuilding a life isn’t something that happens in clean, efficient scenes. The weight of readjustment sits in the quiet spaces between words, in glances, in pauses that last just a second too long. There’s humor here, warmth even, but no illusions. War has made these men harder but not necessarily stronger, and the country that sent them off with brass bands and banners now offers them handshakes and polite nods before getting back to business. The performances never announce themselves as performances, which is why they stay with you. March’s Al wears his restlessness like a suit one size too tight, fitting in just enough to function but never fully at ease. Andrews, all controlled tension, plays Fred as a man who has spent years making quick, decisive choices, now stuck in a world that only offers dead ends. But it’s Russell, a non-actor cast because he lived the role, who delivers the film’s most staggering moment—removing his prosthetic hooks in front of his fiancée, his face caught between fear and defiance, as if bracing for the thing he’s spent months avoiding. If the film has a thesis, it’s this: war is a clean, noble story; what comes after is messier. The country knows how to send men off with fanfare, but welcoming them back is trickier, and The Best Years of Our Lives knows better than to tidy up the edges. Instead, it settles into the uncertainty, watching as three men figure out what’s next—not in the big, sweeping moments, but in the way a hand rests on a shoulder, in a glance across a dinner table, in the way a man walks into his old life and finds it doesn’t quite fit anymore.

A fairly standard pop-star biopic, except for one detail that yanks it from routine to just plain strange: Robbie Williams is portrayed by a well-rendered CGI chimpanzee. Not a cameo, not a fantasy dreamscape—an actual digital monkey on stage, backstage, and in hotel hallways, singing “Angels” while everyone around him acts like nothing’s unusual. The film never explains it. The point, apparently, is that Williams has long described himself as a performing monkey, and here he means it literally. It’s not really a satire—more a running joke that keeps the whole thing from feeling too dignified. From a practical angle, it’s smart enough: Williams provides the voice and performance capture, which saves everyone from pretending a man near sixty can pass for twenty-something without question marks hanging in the air. The music scenes blend his biggest hits—Take That anthems and solo ballads—into a half-real, half-daydream version of his life. It’s closer in spirit to Rocketman than the sober hero-worship of Bohemian Rhapsody: splashy, sometimes goofy, not too worried about neat timelines. Does the monkey make any big artistic point? Not really. But it stops things from getting too earnest when the script slips into the usual pop-star confessions about fame’s bright side and the hangover that comes later. The songs work, the fantasy flourishes keep the pace up, and the whole experiment lands somewhere between odd stunt and decent musical memoir. It’s weird, but never dull—exactly the space Robbie Williams always seemed to occupy, monkey or not.

The third entry in the Beverly Hills Cop series is cleaner than the second, but just as uninspired. The original had grit and attitude, but by this point, that energy has been replaced with high-concept clutter. Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) is back on the job, this time tracing a counterfeiting operation to a sprawling Southern California theme park called Wonder World. That’s the joke—or at least it’s supposed to be. The movie opens with a warehouse sting gone wrong, leading to the death of Axel’s boss and setting him on the trail of the criminals responsible. His investigation leads him to the park, which is run by a Walt Disney-type named Uncle Dave (Alan Young), who may or may not be aware that his operation is being used as cover for a high-end forgery ring. Park security is handled by a jittery private firm with too many radios and too little oversight. Bronson Pinchot returns as Serge, now the proud owner of an upscale boutique that specializes in avant-garde home décor with hidden firepower—he calls it “personal protection with panache.” It’s ridiculous, but at least someone’s having fun. Murphy is more subdued than in the second film, which helps, but the jokes still feel half-formed. Action sequences arrive on cue and hit their marks, but rarely with purpose. The result isn’t terrible—it’s just shapeless. A sequel made out of obligation, less interested in continuing a story than in propping up a franchise that had long lost its spark.

The Clampetts strike oil, strike it rich, and tumble into Beverly Hills, where the air is thick with money and thin on common sense. The show ran for nine seasons on this fish-out-of-water setup, always making sure the joke wasn’t just on the hillbillies but on the self-important city folk mistaking their simplicity for ignorance. The movie forgets this. It plays the Clampetts broad, the high-society villains broader, and the jokes like they were bought in bulk, prepackaged and ready for use. Jim Varney’s Jed Clampett is steady, unhurried, perfectly comfortable in his own skin. A better film might have let him work his quiet magic, but here he’s saddled with a plot as flimsy as an old porch swing. Newly rich, newly single, and vaguely determined to “get hitched,” he attracts gold diggers like moths to a burning trust fund. Lea Thompson, arriving with a phony French accent and a con artist’s gleam, sets her sights on him, posing as an etiquette coach to buff some refinement into his wild-child daughter, Elly May (Erika Eleniak). The scheme is thin as paper, but the movie treats it like high intrigue. The humor lurches between inspired and exasperating. Some moments work, others don’t. Lily Tomlin, a perfect Jane Hathaway in theory, gets tangled in a joke so miscalibrated it barely qualifies as one. Standing outside the Clampett mansion, she doesn’t say buzz me in—she announces I’m trapped inside the wall! Jethro (Diedrich Bader, playing human wreckage) responds by grabbing the nearest statue and smashing straight through the mansion wall like a man who thinks comedy is measured in drywall dust. Then comes Cloris Leachman. Her Granny swings, swipes, and cackles through scenes, rolling pin in hand, upstaging everyone with the ease of someone who knows she’s the best thing on-screen. The movie, broad and uneven, gets by on occasional laughs but mostly coasts on nostalgia. It’s a slick production, but one that mistakes shine for sharpness.

Credit where it’s due: the writers at least tried to do something weird with Bewitched. Instead of a straight remake of the classic sitcom, this version spins a Hollywood meta-conceit: a washed-up movie star (Will Ferrell) is cast in a network reboot of Bewitched as Darren, opposite an unknown who seems perfect for Samantha. The twist: she’s not just playing a witch—she is one. Real spells, real nose-twitching, the whole broomstick. It’s an oddball idea, and not a terrible one. There’s potential in the premise—a metaphysical sitcom about a show about a witch pretending to play a witch. But the film doesn’t know what to do with it. The satire never lands, the magic stays ornamental, and the romance comes pre-flattened. You’re left watching a movie that keeps gesturing at cleverness without ever pulling off the trick. Ferrell does what he can. He mugs, flails, leans hard into his usual comic tics—but without much to bounce off, it starts to feel desperate. He’s funnier when the madness has something to push against, when there’s friction. Here, he’s acting into a void. Kidman plays Samantha with airy charm but gets little help from the script, which seems more interested in being clever than coherent. There are flashes of life—chief among them a brief, delirious cameo from Steve Carell as Uncle Arthur. It’s the one moment where the film feels as light and strange as it wants to be. For about ninety seconds, it almost levitates. But then it’s back to autopilot. The rest plays like an overdeveloped pitch: high-concept, undercooked. What should’ve been a playful update ends up just another forgettable entry in the Will Ferrell canon—a near-miss that hides its conventionality behind a layer of winking artifice. Bewitched wants to enchant, but it barely casts a shadow.

Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls doesn’t so much unfold as it detonates, blasting rock ‘n’ roll debauchery, softcore titillation, and melodrama so overheated it practically melts through the screen. The Carrie Nations, an all-girl rock band, tumble into Hollywood and get caught in the usual highs and lows—fame, excess, betrayal, and, eventually, a climax so unhinged it practically leaps genres. The film moves with the restless energy of a runaway carousel, spinning through plot points as if afraid to stay in one place too long. Meyer directs like a man who just won a bet that he could fit every exploitation trope into a single movie, and Roger Ebert’s script matches that energy. Characters transform overnight, relationships combust on impact, and dialogue spills out in pronouncements rather than conversations. Z-Man, a flamboyant impresario, begins as a cryptic puppet master and ends somewhere so removed from his introduction that his arc feels less like a progression and more like a different character walked in wearing the same outfit. Rated X upon release, the sex is electric, the nudity functions as decoration, and the violence plays out with a theatricality that makes death look like a wardrobe malfunction. The real provocation, though, isn’t just the lurid content—it’s the film’s unapologetic embrace of female pleasure—something American censors have always treated as a greater threat than on-screen bloodshed. More spectacle than film, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls doesn’t build toward anything so much as it accelerates, cramming in melodrama, betrayal, and groovy musical numbers. Meyer pushes forward at full speed, and when the film can’t sustain itself any longer, it simply stops—spent, exhausted, and gleefully unconcerned with whether the audience has followed along.