Film Buff Musings

Chuck Norris, baby-faced, blond, and beardless, strides into Breaker! Breaker! looking like he wandered in from a high school drama production. This was his first starring role, and the film seems caught between showcasing him as a stoic martial arts bruiser and a reluctant, CB-radio-slinging heartthrob. Unfortunately, it does neither particularly well. Norris plays J.D. Dawes, a soft-spoken California trucker whose old friend is attacked and brother goes missing in a dusty little patch of corruption called Texas City (located in California). The town is overseen by Judge Joshua Trimmings (George Murdock), who runs things like a frontier fiefdom—one where the law is whatever gets the next truck impounded. It’s a decent B-movie premise: outlaw truckers versus small-town tyranny. But instead of delivering pulpy thrills, the film takes the scenic route—through dry exposition, limp tension, and an alarming shortage of actual action. What little combat we get is stretched out in slow motion, as if the primary appeal were Norris’ form rather than his impact. The fight scenes are often more like martial arts instructional videos, projected at half speed. Worse, J.D. spends much of the film trying to reason with corrupt officials instead of roundhousing them into submission. For fans hoping to see Norris clear endless strings of baddies with his one boot, this might feel like a bait and switch. Terry O’Connor appears as a local waitress-slash-love interest, in a barely developed and completely forgettable subplot. Even his younger brother (Michael Augenstein) gets more of a warning than a rescue. The film is short, but feels padded; earnest, but strangely bloodless. Even Chuck, when called “Blondie,” merely smiles and shrugs it off. That just might be the most aggressive move he makes.

Five high school stereotypes walk into a library. Eight hours later, they’ve cried, confessed, bonded, and performed a spontaneous dance number they’d probably deny by Monday. It’s detention as psychological excavation—group therapy with a synth soundtrack. The setup is suspiciously tidy: a brain (Anthony Michael Hall), an athlete (Emilio Estevez), a basket case (Ally Sheedy), a princess (Molly Ringwald), and a criminal (Judd Nelson), all corralled under the flickering gaze of Assistant Principal Vernon (Paul Gleason), whose most immediate offense is his wardrobe. “Does Barry Manilow know that you raid his wardrobe?” the criminal sneers—earning himself another Saturday. But when Vernon leaves the room, the real business begins. What starts as petty and combative slowly turns into something closer to soul-baring. It’s a leap to believe these five would even acknowledge each other in this setting, much less unpack their inner lives. But the film is so confident in its premise, and so sincere in its execution, that resisting it feels beside the point. What holds it together is the sharpness of the writing and the cast’s full buy-in. The tone swings from snide to operatic without much warning, but within the pressure-cooker confines of the library, it mostly works. Each character enters as a type and exits as something more—if not fully fleshed out, at least closer to human. Even Vernon gets his moment, courtesy of a pointed monologue from the janitor, who moonlights as a philosopher when the script needs him to. The film only stumbles at the end, when romantic pairings are hastily penciled in. But then “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” kicks in, and Judd Nelson throws a fist in the air. How can I stay upset with the end of a movie when it has iconography this strong?

Adapting Breakfast of Champions to film is like trying to paint a dream onto a concrete wall—some things just aren’t designed to hold a structure. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel wasn’t so much a story as a guided tour through the absurd, with Vonnegut himself as our smirking docent, pointing out the tragicomic ruins of American consumerism. The characters weren’t individuals so much as case studies, each spiraling toward their own brand of madness. Strip away that self-aware narration, that wry hand holding the audience’s head steady, and what’s left? A collection of eccentrics behaving eccentrically, with no guiding force to explain what any of it means. Alan Rudolph, to his credit, swings big. The film goes full tilt into surrealism, stuffing the frame with garish billboards, buzzing neon, and corporate detritus that would make Terry Gilliam proud. The characters, too, arrive fully charged: Bruce Willis, playing a used car salesman in the throes of an existential meltdown, somehow finds the line between deadpan and deranged. Nick Nolte, as a closeted transvestite, turns what could have been a gimmick into something surprisingly affecting. But it’s Albert Finney who walks away with the movie, inhabiting Kilgore Trout so fully that he might as well have walked straight out of Vonnegut’s typewriter. Gruff, weary, and vaguely disgusted by everything, Finney gives us a Trout who feels like he’s been waiting decades to be adapted—only to find himself in a film that forgets what to do with him. Which brings us back to the fundamental problem: the absence of a narrator, the absence of Vonnegut himself. The book didn’t just tell a story—it framed it, poked at it, helped us process this madness. The film, adrift without that guiding voice, just lets its characters bounce around like pinballs in a machine no one is playing. Had it given Trout the omniscient role, had it let him hold up a sheet of paper with three intersecting lines and invite us to behold something truly amazing, perhaps this would have worked. Instead, we’re left watching from the outside, waiting for the movie to tell us what Vonnegut did on every page—that it’s all ridiculous, that it’s all tragic, that it’s all true.

The premise sounds like the kind of darkly comic morsel you’d throw on before dessert: a great ensemble, a suburban farce, a body, a bag of cash. But Breaking News in Yuba County is such a confused, flavorless misfire it practically begs you to guess what tone it thought it was playing in. Allison Janney stars as Sue Buttons, a woman so invisible to the world she’s taken to reciting self-help mantras under her breath—though the panic in her voice makes it clear she’s not buying a word. On her birthday, which everyone forgets, she walks in on her husband (Matthew Modine) mid-tryst with a coworker. He drops dead on the spot. Rather than call for help, she buries him—along with his phone, wallet, and a duffel bag containing $3 million, not that she realizes—and spins a story for the police about his disappearance. Why? So someone will finally pay attention. There’s certainly a movie in that idea. Fargo already proved it could be done—with teeth. But the version we get doesn’t seem to know whether it’s a satire, a thriller, or a therapy session for repressed Midwestern rage. It wants to be a dark comedy about ordinary desperation. What it ends up with is a bunch of setups with no timing, and a tone that slips through the film’s fingers every time it reaches for it. Sue’s lie grows legs, then arms, then media coverage. Meanwhile, a few too many side characters—criminals, cops, relatives—skitter around the edges looking for the plot. The pacing’s slack. The jokes barely qualify. Even the violence feels tame. The cast is stacked: Regina Hall, Mila Kunis, Awkwafina, Wanda Sykes, Clifton Collins Jr.—all game, all wasted. No one knows quite what pitch to play, and the script doesn’t seem to care. There’s a trace of ambition buried under it all—a study of delusion dressed up as a caper—but it never gets sharper than that. You can see what they were going for. You just can’t believe how far they missed.

Faith-based dramas have a habit of talking at their audience, not to them—preaching, instructing, passing out neatly packaged life lessons like a church bulletin no one asked for. Breakthrough sidesteps most of these traps, not because it’s subtle (it isn’t) but because it understands that faith, at its most raw, isn’t polite, scripted, or easily explained. It’s messy, defiant, a woman standing over her dead son, refusing to accept reality. John Smith (Marcel Ruiz), a Guatemalan adoptee raised by devout Christian parents Joyce (Chrissy Metz) and Brian (Josh Lucas), struggles with identity, belonging, and the fact that his high school, much like his home, expects him to fit into a predetermined mold. His mother battles a different kind of frustration—one that comes with watching her church welcome a young, sneakers-and-sermon pastor (Topher Grace) who treats religion like a branding opportunity. Then, the accident. John and his friends, ignoring every parental warning about frozen lakes since the dawn of time, crash through the ice. His friends make it out. He does not. Submerged for more than 15 minutes, his lifeless body is recovered by a firefighter (Mike Colter) who credits an inexplicable voice for leading him to the exact spot. Forty-five minutes later, doctors declare him gone. And then Joyce walks in. She prays. She begs. And his heart starts beating. The film never questions how or why this happens. It presents the miracle and moves forward, investing its energy in Joyce, who refuses to entertain anything but survival. Metz plays her as a woman who believes so hard that even science bends out of her way. She isn’t patient. She isn’t polite. She is exhausted, desperate, furious. And that’s where the film finds its strength—faith not as quiet acceptance but as raw, unwavering resistance. Not every choice works. The medical sequences play fast and loose with realism, and a subplot involving resentment toward John’s survival never quite finds its footing. But as Christian dramas go, Breakthrough understands something most don’t: belief isn’t passive. It fights. It pushes. And, in this case, it wins.

I have a soft spot for this one—a comedy about a broke minor-league pitcher, Monty Brewster (Richard Pryor), who inherits a fortune with teeth in the fine print. Three hundred million dollars, but only if he can burn through thirty million in thirty days with nothing to show for it. No assets. No investments. No hiding the money with friends. The only people allowed to know the truth are Monty and the lawyers keeping score. Which means his financial adviser, Angela (Lonette McKee), and his best friend Spike (John Candy) are left to gape as he hurls money at doomed ventures, reckless stunts, and pointless extravagances—believing, of course, that thirty million is the whole prize. Their bafflement is half the fun, the other half being Pryor’s barely-contained mania as he tries to lose cash faster than anyone can hand it back. The film has its weak spots. The jokes could be sharper, and the tentative romance between Monty and Angela never convinces. But the premise is pure wish-fulfillment—an invitation to live vicariously through someone making catastrophically expensive decisions for sport. Pryor keeps it airborne, jittering between desperation and glee, and Candy is reliably game as the buddy who has no idea what’s really going on. It’s flawed, but there’s a certain satisfaction in the spectacle of it all. Few comedies make you root so hard for a man to fail—especially when failure pays better than winning.

Brian (David Earl) invents things. Not useful things. Not even particularly functional things. His creations include a pinecone bag and an egg belt, devices so impractical they seem designed purely to test the limits of human patience. And then, for reasons science will never fully explain, he builds Charles—a robot with a washing-machine torso, a mannequin head, and the personality of an overenthusiastic exchange student who just learned English. Against all odds, Charles works. He speaks. He learns. He develops opinions about cabbages. And Brian, a man not accustomed to success, suddenly finds himself in possession of something resembling companionship. This kind of deadpan quirk used to be the domain of early-2000s indie comedies, back when every film festival had to include at least one lo-fi portrait of an awkward man in a thrift-store sweater. Brian and Charles reaches for that tradition but doesn’t quite grasp it. The weirdness feels effortful, the kind of carefully arranged oddity that expects you to chuckle simply because a scene looks like something a Wes Anderson character might enjoy. The film’s logic wobbles most in its subplot about a local brute who wants to own Charles, presumably as some kind of oversized pet for his daughters. It’s one thing for Brian, an endearing loner with questionable life choices, to form an attachment to his laundry-powered son. It’s another for a seemingly normal bully to decide that yes, what his family needs is a sentient appliance. The joke lands sideways, neither quite funny nor menacing, just inexplicably there. But David Earl, to his credit, sells it. His Brian is the kind of man who looks perpetually five seconds away from apologizing for existing, and Charles—half toddler, half malfunctioning Alexa—somehow becomes lovable despite his blank expression and halting speech. The film never fully finds its rhythm, never quite transcends its own premise, but every so often, it stumbles into something sweet, something oddly touching. Chalk this up as a minor curio in the grand tradition of men befriending things they probably shouldn’t.

A comedy that barrels forward like a demolition derby, Bridesmaids plays out less like a wedding than a series of escalating public embarrassments, each more catastrophic than the last. Kristen Wiig, both star and co-writer, plays Annie, a failed baker whose life is already a mess when her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) makes things worse by getting engaged. As maid of honor, Annie assumes she’s top dog—until Helen (Rose Byrne) slithers onto the scene, exuding the kind of effortless wealth and polish that turns a friendship into a competitive sport. The movie thrives on humiliation, and Annie suffers gloriously. The engagement party devolves into an Olympic-level battle of toasts, the dress fitting ends in biohazard territory, and the Vegas-bound bachelorette trip crashes midair when Annie—looped on booze and tranquilizers—terrorizes first class. By the time she’s lost her job, totaled her car, and been officially banished from the wedding, her meltdown is so complete that you half expect her to just start lighting things on fire. The cast operates like a well-armed comedy unit. Melissa McCarthy, in a performance that functions like blunt force trauma, steamrolls her way into superstardom. Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper volley between barely concealed rage and deer-in-headlights panic, while Chris O’Dowd somehow makes romancing a human trainwreck look like a good idea. Not every joke flies, but the ones that do have the efficiency of a well-timed slap. Some of the gross-out moments feel like they exist to satisfy a quota, and at a little over two hours, the film takes its time getting to the altar. But Bridesmaids understands something rare: the best comedies aren’t just about being funny. They’re about watching people dig their own graves, climb out, and start laughing at the wreckage.

Bring It On understands cheerleading as both cutthroat sport and social currency. It’s fast, catty, and just self-aware enough to know that the pom-poms are ridiculous but the stakes are very real. The routines might sparkle, but underneath, there’s a jagged edge—competition as a survival instinct, all grins and backflips until someone gets dropped. Kirsten Dunst, all sunshine and stress, plays Torrance, a perky-but-not-clueless cheer captain who’s just inherited a championship squad and a mortifying secret. Their so-called original routines were stolen. Lifted wholesale from the Clovers, a predominantly Black high school team that has been perfecting their routines in broad daylight while the privileged Toros took home the trophies. Gabrielle Union, leading the Clovers with a coolness that could start a windstorm, makes it clear that their time of being pirated is over. Cornered and talentless, Torrance scrambles for a solution and winds up hiring a predatory choreographer who charges a fortune for routines that come with jazz hands but no exclusivity clause. By the time the fraud is exposed—again—there’s nothing left but to start from scratch. The Clovers, meanwhile, don’t waste time sulking. They have skill, they have drive, and what they don’t have in funding, they make up for in sheer determination. The competitions aren’t just about who flips higher but about the pecking order of teenage society, where popularity is an economy and the best acrobatics happen outside the gym. The comedy has bite, its throwaway insults sharper than most sitcoms’ best material. Not everything has aged well—the early-2000s script stumbles into some homophobic jokes—but when the film sticks to skewering cheer culture and class privilege, it’s as precise as a perfect basket toss. Dunst and Union make a flawless pair—one unraveling, the other unshakable—and the film moves with an energy that never sags. It might not have invented the high school comedy, but it perfected the cheer film, and to this day, nobody’s managed to top it.

The title is refreshingly honest. Bring It On Again does exactly that—again, and with the kind of shameless efficiency usually reserved for assembly lines. The story, the tone, even whole stretches of dialogue seem airlifted straight from the original, repackaged with a new cast and a fresh zip code. It’s Bring It On, but with the fizz gone flat, the carbonation siphoned out, the cheer spirit preserved only in the technical sense. Anne Judson-Yager and Faune A. Chambers, as Whittier and Monica, throw themselves into it gamely, and their routines still pop with enough well-rehearsed athleticism to briefly fool you into thinking the movie itself has energy. But the script moves with all the predictability of a high school syllabus. Whittier, a natural, dazzles at tryouts, impresses the current head cheerleader Tina (Bree Turner), and quickly outshines Marni (Bethany Joy Lenz), the anointed successor. Tina, loyal to her friend and determined to preserve the cheerocracy, works Whittier to the bone, hoping she’ll fold. Instead, Whittier does what all wronged heroines must: assembles a squad of lovable misfits and goes rogue. You know where this is headed. The filmmakers knew where this was headed. The movie itself looks faintly bored by where this was headed. It’s not terrible, exactly. The cast is likable. A couple of jokes limp across the finish line. The cheerleading routines remain watchable. But whatever sharpness, whatever genuinely funny, cutting little edge the first film had—gone, vanished, replaced with something flatter, safer, with the corners sanded down for straight-to-video consumption. You can copy a routine. You can copy a structure. You can’t copy what made it fun.

Hayden Panettiere, effortlessly watchable even when the material isn’t, gives this third Bring It On installment a bit more spark than it deserves. She plays Britney, a cheer captain at a wealthy, predominantly white high school whose life takes a sharp turn when her father’s job forces the family into a less privileged neighborhood. Suddenly, she’s the outsider, stepping into a school where metal detectors replace morning lattes, and teachers expect students to actually write their own notes. The class tension is as nuanced as a cartoon, but the fish-out-of-water comedy has its moments. Britney initially resists joining her new school’s cheer squad—loyalty to her old team, personal pride, a script that needs to stretch another 40 minutes—but of course, she caves, and soon we’re barreling toward a high-stakes showdown, because what’s a Bring It On movie without one? This time, the prize isn’t a championship trophy but a coveted spot in a Rihanna music video, a plot point so aggressively mid-2000s it might as well come with a Motorola Razr. The cheer routines have enough energy to keep things moving, though the rest of the film barely exerts itself. Bring It On: All or Nothing is a product through and through, an off-brand copy of a movie that once worked, missing whatever gave the original its bounce. Panettiere keeps it on its feet, the choreography does the rest, and the film drifts into the great, forgettable void of straight-to-video sequels.

Perhaps I’ve been too generous with the Bring It On sequels, but this one barely clears the bar of watchability. Like its predecessors, it aims for goofy parody, but parody—at least the kind worth watching—requires a flicker of cleverness, and there’s none to be found here. The previous installments at least delivered on athleticism—flashy, tightly executed routines that made up for the clumsy dialogue and sitcom-tier drama. This one skimps on everything. Even I, someone whose cheerleading expertise begins and ends with knowing Bring It On exists, could tell the routines were sloppily choreographed and filmed like an afterthought. And if Bring It On can’t bring it on, what’s left? The premise staggers in on the back of a Spirit Stick. Carson (Ashley Benson), leader of the Sharks, is handed this mystical baton with the warning that misplacing it will summon the “wrath of the cheer gods.” Meanwhile, her team faces off against their sworn rivals, the Jets, at a Florida amusement park. There’s a boy, naturally. He’s charming, flirtatious, and—whoops—a Jet. West Side Story gets a name-drop, but beyond a baffling moonlit finger-snapping cheer-off, the reference just sits there, unexamined, like a prop nobody knows how to use. If someone had sharpened the Spirit Stick into a makeshift weapon and settled this the real West Side Story way—maybe near the tilt-a-whirl, before the cops descended like jackals on fresh kill—I might have cared. Instead, Bring It On: In It to Win It shuffles through its runtime like it’s contractually obligated to exist. The script expects the franchise name to do the work, the actors look trapped in a cheer prison of their own making, and the choreography can’t even be bothered to try. Fun would have been nice. A pulse would have sufficed. This offers neither.

Four sequels deep, the Bring It On franchise has given up on satire, comedy, or any pretense of being about cheerleading. Fight to the Finish is a teen drama with pom-poms, a dance movie in a cheer uniform, an 89-minute montage of stock plotlines arranged with the artistry of an airport food court sandwich. It isn’t insultingly bad. It isn’t much of anything. Just a bland, frictionless swirl of recycled conflicts and cheer-adjacent choreography, floating along like a commercial break that never ends. This time, the fish-out-of-water story flips directions. Lina (Christina Milian), top cheerleader at her inner-city school, gets uprooted when her mother marries a rich guy and moves them into a mansion. Now she’s the new girl at an upscale suburban high school, unimpressed by the school’s official cheer squad, a clique of hyper-polished snobs. The solution: assemble a misfit team of underdogs and challenge them for the right to represent the school at the big tournament. Along the way, Lina struggles to connect with her overly eager new stepsister, who nearly starts a fight just by looking at the wrong person. The drama here is so artificial, so cleanly manufactured, that it feels like a middle school theater production performed by actors who have already mentally checked out. The routines exist in some limbo between dance battle and pep rally spectacle, cut together with the precision of a hype reel. They have energy, but no weight, no sense of skill beyond what editing software can manufacture. It’s all light, slick, choreographed distraction. There are no surprises, no characters worth caring about, and no reason for Fight to the Finish to exist beyond franchise inertia. But it moves, and it fills time, and for this series, that seems to be enough.

The sixth installment of the Bring It On franchise arrives as expected: underwritten, over-stylized, and cut so fast it seems afraid of its own dialogue. The jokes are painful, the plot lands somewhere between parody and promotional content, and yet—it’s not the worst Bring It On has ever been. There are glimpses of ideas here: a few clever hooks, a flash or two of self-awareness, and the occasional spark during the choreography. The cast is photogenic, if not especially well-directed, and the cheer sequences at least deliver what this series has always reliably offered—energy, rhythm, and unapologetic pageantry. It builds itself around Destiny (Christine Prosperi), the high-strung captain of an elite cheer squad called The Rebels. She’s polished, poised, and runs her team with the sort of iron will usually reserved for dystopian war generals. Her reign is interrupted by a masked group called The Truth—an Anonymous-style rogue squad that sends ominous video messages, speaks in distorted voiceover, and breaks into elaborate routines while wearing identical white masks. Think Mr. Robot by way of So You Think You Can Dance. The threat? A global cheer uprising. Squads from all over the world enter into what’s dubbed the “Worldwide #Cheersmack,” a virtual cheer-off that’s somehow both a competition and a referendum on Destiny’s leadership. It’s a ridiculous conceit, but not without its fun—especially in the rapid-fire clips of international teams flipping, tumbling, and posing like they’re trying to out-stunt each other from opposite sides of the globe. The script creaks, the tone swerves, and the narration barges in like a stage mom with a megaphone. Still, the energy is relentless. You won’t care what anyone’s saying, but the backflips don’t stop long enough to question it.

A symphony of near-misses, fast-talking lunacy, and social conventions crumbling like wet tissue paper, Bringing Up Baby doesn’t tell a story so much as send Cary Grant tumbling through one. He plays David Huxley, a paleontologist preoccupied with securing a million-dollar museum donation and keeping track of a crucial dinosaur bone—until Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) enters his life like a hurricane in silk pajamas. An heiress with an unnerving ability to turn minor inconveniences into full-blown catastrophes, Susan latches onto David with no regard for his protests, setting off a chain of events that steamrolls through stolen cars, mistaken identities, a buried bone, and two very different leopards. Hepburn plays Susan as a force of nature with a purpose—her chaos might seem accidental, but she knows exactly how to keep David in her orbit. Grant, stiff-backed and perfectly exasperated, starts the film as a man who believes in order and reason and ends it as someone barely holding onto either. They don’t fall in love so much as crash into it, their combined momentum sending them hurtling toward an ending where resistance is no longer an option. Howard Hawks keeps the film in constant motion, dialogue ricocheting like stray bullets, each mishap colliding into the next before the last one even has time to settle. Dignity is discarded early on, sacrificed for the sake of pure screwball precision. Bringing Up Baby doesn’t stop to explain itself—it just pulls you along, faster and faster, until the only option is to keep up or get trampled. One of the funniest movies ever made, and no matter how many times I’ve seen it, it never stops being effortlessly watchable.

The premise flirts with being a religious film, if not for a handful of PG-13 gags seemingly inserted as insurance. The script could have used a sharper edge, but Jim Carrey, fully in his element, keeps it afloat. He plays Bruce Nolan, a Buffalo newscaster stuck covering dog birthday parties while his insufferably smug rival, Evan Baxter (Steve Carell), walks away with the promotion he desperately wants. Bruce, a man whose professionalism has always been on a hair trigger, takes the news about as well as a toddler denied dessert—tantrum, public humiliation, firing. He howls at the heavens. God (Morgan Freeman, dressed for business) listens. The offer: omnipotence, no strings attached. Newly divine and spectacularly unwise, Bruce wields his powers exactly as expected—spite first, self-improvement later. Souped-up revenge pranks, cosmic-level self-indulgence, a few strategic tweaks to his love life. The bigger picture: Not his concern. He’s too busy flexing divine muscle until, naturally, his meddling catches up with him. The story moves exactly where expected, the moral wraps itself up with a bow, and nobody leaves without learning the value of selflessness. Not great, not even great Jim Carrey, but consistently watchable. If nothing else, it hammers home a lesson already made famous by The Rolling Stones: you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get what you need.

Some films sprawl because they can’t help it. The Brutalist is different—built with the precision of its namesake style: heavy, deliberate, and not designed to please. It tracks decades of compromise and survival, asking quietly but insistently how much of a life can be designed before it designs you. Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who survives the camps and emerges into postwar America with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), a daughter on the way, and a portfolio no one wants to see. The early years are clipped and brutal—he takes what he can get: furniture design, menial drafts, even a stint in the mines. He’s not chasing the dream so much as pawing at its hem. When his work is finally noticed, it’s by a wealthy patron (Guy Pearce, at his slipperiest) who wants a library designed and ends up offering a life. But nothing in this film comes clean. The patronage curdles into control. The house gets built, but at a cost that keeps growing. The structure is chaptered, episodic, and occasionally too refined for its own good. You feel the weight of time passing—visually, tonally, musically—but not always emotionally. Scenes come and go like installations: stately, stark, and a bit removed. Sometimes it’s haunting. Sometimes you wish someone would break a glass just to wake the thing up. But it’s a singular object. Corbet shoots like he’s etching into concrete, with symmetrical frames and chilly tableaux that suggest Kubrick by way of Béla Tarr. Brody underplays to great effect—quiet, clenched, a man always measuring angles—and Felicity Jones has one or two devastating monologues that do more damage than any of the film’s grander flourishes. It doesn’t always connect. But there’s something admirable—maybe even brave—about a film this austere refusing to sell itself as tragedy or triumph. It just unfolds: cool, harsh, architectural. A monument to the cost of making anything that lasts.

Jake Gyllenhaal, in one of the more inexplicable detours of early stardom, plays Jimmy Livingston—a sweet, sealed-off naïf raised inside a sterile dome by a mother (Swoosie Kurtz) who is so paranoid she isn’t sure which poses the greater threat: airborne pathogens or the outside world’s buffet of moral contamination. His world is plastic and gospel-sanitized, but not immune to longing. Chloe (Marley Shelton), the girl next door, actually likes him. Unfortunately, Jimmy—burdened by low self-worth and a mother who treats sabotage like a religious rite—pushes her away. Chloe moves on, and a wedding is announced soon after. And Jimmy, realizing he may have one shot at anything resembling a life, crafts a mobile bubble suit and rolls toward Niagara Falls. From there it’s a series of increasingly loud detours: a cult run by Fabio, a leather biker played by Danny Trejo wielding a knife and paternal instincts, Brian George as a Hindu hitchhiker prone to visions and vehicular panic, and a carnival worker (Ping Wu) whose entire function is to shout “five hundred dollah” with an accent and no context. The whole thing spirals before the twenty-minute mark. Gyllenhaal, to his credit, is weirdly endearing—playing Jimmy like a sainted Muppet with a head injury—and some of the early scenes (including one with a rule-obsessed Zach Galifianakis) suggest the possibility of coherent comic timing. But the movie doesn’t build, it collects: stereotypes, detours, punchlines in search of setups. For every gag that works, ten flail. The premise could’ve lent itself to something offbeat and smart. What we get instead is a noise machine and clown logic.

The TV series it birthed was sharp, sly, and deserved its cult. The movie? A glittery dud. Not unwatchable—just the sort of thing that plays like a failed pilot padded to feature length. The premise has bite: a Valley Girl chosen by fate to stake the undead, with room for satire on Southern California teen culture. On paper, it could’ve been fizzy and self-aware. On screen, the jokes barely draw breath, and the action scenes wouldn’t ruffle a blouse. Kristy Swanson is, at least, a solid choice for the title role. Her Buffy starts prissy, polishing her mall-queen crown, then stumbles into her destiny as the once-in-a-generation Slayer—and finds she’s better at killing vampires than planning pep rallies. Enter Merrick (Donald Sutherland), trench-coated, cryptic, and looking like he’s trained a few too many doomed Chosen Ones. There’s talent on the margins. Paul Reubens wrings every drop of camp from his fanged screen time, Rutger Hauer stalks through as the arch-villain with the amusement of a man who knows the material can’t touch him, and Luke Perry leans into laconic sidekick mode. But their efforts are stranded in a film that never figures out how to use them. What might have been a cheeky genre twist arrives undercooked and limp—misdirected talent, squandered potential, and a stake with no point.

A train hurtles through Tokyo, largely unoccupied except for a handful of elaborately dressed gangsters and contract killers who prefer quipping to seat reservations. They stab, shoot, and bludgeon each other with whatever’s at hand, but their reasons are mostly secondary to the film’s real obsession: hopping between past, present, imagined, and barely relevant like a caffeinated magician with a deck of mismatched cards. Flashbacks erupt mid-sentence. Flash-forwards interrupt before we’ve had a chance to process the last scene. Reality itself is up for debate, but the movie is less concerned with logic than with how stylishly it can flip through its Rolodex of narrative tricks. Somewhere inside this narrative loop-de-loop, Brad Pitt drifts through the carnage like a Zen tourist who booked the wrong ticket. He plays Ladybug, a weary assassin with an ironic codename and a self-help philosophy that doesn’t quite extend to getting off the train alive. The fast-talking gangsters around him—some dressed in three-piece suits, some in disguises that would offend the concept of subtlety—swap insults, trade blows, and recount personal tragedies mid-fight. The script wants every line to land like a Tarantino monologue, though mostly they bounce, some more gracefully than others. The real star is the scenery. Everything gleams—neon lights, sleek interiors, weapons polished to an almost reverent sheen. The fight choreography is balletic, the camera gliding through the violence with a smug confidence that might be irritating if it weren’t so entertaining. The film never quite finds a rhythm, instead skidding between action, comedy, and existential musings on fate, but there’s enough glitter and carnage to keep it afloat. If coherence was the goal, Bullet Train overshoots the station. If entertainment was, well—mission accomplished.

A buddy comedy with all the friction of wet cardboard, Bulletproof pairs Adam Sandler and Damon Wayans and somehow finds a way to make them both seem smaller. Sandler plays Archie, a petty criminal with a knack for bad decisions, and Wayans is Rock, his best friend—who also turns out to be an undercover cop. The big twist is that Archie shoots him in the head after the sting goes sideways. They reunite when Rock, now partially recovered and fully bitter, is tasked with transporting Archie across the country to testify against a drug kingpin played by a visibly disinterested James Caan. The setup wants to be Midnight Run but ends up closer to a long commercial for expired energy drinks. Every exchange devolves into bickering that’s meant to be zippy but sounds like two guys arguing over the last Hot Pocket. There’s no rhythm, no escalation—just noise and deflation. Wayans tries to play it cool. Sandler tries to play it loud. Neither gets anywhere. The movie flirts with action but doesn’t commit, and it drops any shot at emotional stakes before they’ve had a chance to form. What’s left is a series of set pieces that feel like sketches someone abandoned halfway through writing. Even the villain plot is a throwaway: Caan is barely given lines, let alone menace. This pairing might have worked with an actual script and fewer tire-screeching tonal shifts. But Bulletproof is so adrift in its own indifference it makes 84 minutes feel like probation.

It starts, as these things often do, with a fib. Or rather, a series of fibs that grew out of something undeniably true: Carla (Gina Lollobrigida) was sixteen and pregnant during WWII. She gave comfort to not just one American soldier, but three. And while she knows who the father is, she doesn’t know which one. It could be Phil (Phil Silvers), kind but passive, a little dopey; Justin (Peter Lawford), reserved, dignified, and vaguely aristocratic; or Walter (Telly Savalas), blunt, unrefined, and not entirely without tenderness. She wrote to all of them with news of her pregnancy. They all responded—with checks. Two decades later, Carla has parlayed the lie into a relatively comfortable life in an Italian village, raising her daughter Gia (Janet Margolin) under the name Campbell—an identity borrowed from the soup label. The fictional Mr. Campbell, she claims, died a war hero. That version of the story works just fine until the entire American squadron decides to reunite in town. Which means all three men. At once. The film is pure farce, but its secrets unravel slowly—like a sweater caught on a nail. Everyone comes away with a version of the truth, never quite the right one, but close enough to complicate someone else’s. It’s clever, occasionally muddled, and sometimes more dependent on coincidence than design, but the performances keep it afloat. Lollobrigida plays Carla like a woman who’s been improvising for twenty years and knows she’s running out of room. Silvers is a delight—endearingly dense, quick to react, and funny in that perfectly exasperating way only he could pull off. Not airtight, but funny, tangled, and surprisingly warm for a story built on forged names and good intentions.

What makes The ’Burbs so satisfying isn’t the plot—which is silly, by design—but the people marooned inside it. Tom Hanks plays the reluctant straight man, trying to enjoy a quiet staycation while his two neighbors—one a wide-eyed lunatic (Rick Ducommun), the other a war-addled paranoiac with binoculars (Bruce Dern)—insist the new family down the street are murderers. The kind who bury bodies in the yard and drag garbage bags to the curb with a little too much discretion. The fun isn’t in watching the mystery unravel—it’s in watching Hanks’ character get dragged, inch by inch, into their madness. Every time he pushes back against one of their wilder theories, something happens to make him hesitate. A missing neighbor. A suspicious noise. A basement that feels like it was built to hide more than just a sump pump. You can feel Hanks’ grip on normalcy slipping in real time. The visuals are phenomenal. Joe Dante shoots the suburbs like a haunted dollhouse—perfect lawns, weird shadows, streets that feel a little too quiet, even for the suburbs. It’s a little Rear Window, a little Scooby-Doo, and maybe a shade of Lynch, though friendlier. The horror isn’t gory; it’s ambient. The laughs aren’t loud—they creep in through the crawlspace. It’s a movie about suburban boredom curdling into suspicion, and how easily friendly smiles can twitch into grimaces when you’ve got nowhere to be and a lot of binoculars lying around. And it works—because Hanks is just grounded enough to keep the whole thing from flying apart. He’s the guy trying to take out the trash while everyone else is screaming about ritual sacrifice. Sometimes the neighbor really is digging a grave. Sometimes you’re better off not looking.

Where it counts, Burlesque delivers: the numbers are big, the vocals belt-your-lungs-out impressive, and the polish gleams like rhinestones under a spotlight. Christina Aguilera, in her feature debut, handles the singing with the force of a wrecking ball wrapped in tulle. Cher, playing the weary but glamorous club owner, purrs her way through “Welcome to Burlesque” like she’s seen it all and might just keep the lights on out of spite. The musical sequences—blending pop, jazz, and rock with unapologetic theatricality—are energetic and often thrilling. If this were a revue and nothing else, it’d be worth the ticket. But the movie insists on having a plot, and that’s where it trips in its heels. The small-town girl with big-city dreams. The smoky club with a financial crisis. The rival diva, the bland boyfriend, the conveniently timed real estate deal. It’s all Xeroxed from the genre’s most threadbare playbook. Worse, the editing hacks away at the musical interludes just as they threaten to lift off, dragging us back into the wheezing backstage soap opera. The connective tissue is pure filler. Still, if your idea of a good time involves wind machines, false eyelashes, and power ballads that could fog a mirror, Burlesque scratches the itch. It’s big and flashy and exactly what it wants to be during its best moments. Just don’t look too hard between the numbers.

I’m not just tolerant of movies about unlikable people—I often enjoy them. There’s something satisfying about collectively loathing someone in the dark, especially when the character gives you something to chew on. Adam Jones, the volatile chef at the center of Burnt, offers nothing of the kind. He’s not complicated. He’s just a jerk in a chef’s coat, torching every bridge within reach. Bradley Cooper plays Adam as a former two-star Michelin wunderkind who flamed out in Paris under the weight of ego, addiction, and spectacularly poor judgment. He spends three years in New Orleans shucking oysters and counting to a million, convinced this qualifies as penance. Then he turns up in London with a chip on his shoulder and a plan to bully his way back into culinary relevance—ideally with a third star to top things off. His management style consists of berating everyone around him, then sulking when they don’t call it leadership. The film gestures at redemption—growth, humility, hard-earned grace—but it never earns any of it. By the time Adam shows signs of softening, the movie’s already gone stiff. The cast is solid. The dialogue has snap. The food looks terrific. But Burnt isn’t about cooking or redemption. It’s about watching a man throw tantrums in a kitchen and calling it art.

A haunted house movie where the scariest thing is a man in a chauffeur’s uniform, grinning like a death mask and staring at Oliver Reed as if sizing him up for a coffin. The house itself is plenty eerie—grand, crumbling, too cheap to be anything but trouble—but the movie, in its sluggish, ponderous way, never figures out how to make any of it matter. Reed plays Ben, a well-meaning father who treats his family to a summer getaway in a Victorian mansion that practically advertises its malevolence. His wife (Karen Black) drifts into a trance, transfixed by a music box. His son Davey (Lee H. Montgomery) pleads for help fixing up the swimming pool, unaware that it might have its own homicidal tendencies. His elderly, spirited Aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) arrives cheerful and leaves in a state that can best be described as the opposite. Meanwhile, an unseen old woman allegedly resides upstairs, though she might as well be a plot device left on a shelf. The pacing drags like an exhausted pallbearer, mistaking inertia for atmosphere, offering long stretches of Oliver Reed staring blankly and perspiring. Perhaps the goal was Rosemary’s Baby—a slow-burn unraveling of domestic stability—but Burnt Offerings just sits there, waiting for something to happen, and when it does, it’s never worth the wait. The premise, in more capable hands, might have yielded something. Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017) runs a similar concept into full-blown madness, proving there was horror to be found in this kind of material. But Burnt Offerings misfires, stranding its cast in a film as stagnant as the doomed vacation it depicts.

Daniel Stern, finally promoted from bumbling crook to full-fledged leading man, deserves better than this. Bushwhacked plays like an extended Home Alone sidequest—except the script is allergic to cleverness, the gags hit like water balloons filled with wet concrete, and Stern is left flailing through a movie that seems to actively resist being funny. He plays “Mad” Max Grabelski, a package delivery driver with questionable hygiene and a knack for bad luck. Framed for murder and on the run from the FBI, he stumbles into an even worse predicament: being mistaken for a rugged Scout leader and tasked with guiding a half-dozen prepubescent hikers through the wilderness. The joke, of course, is that Max’s idea of survival skills begins and ends with not dying, while the authorities—already convinced he’s a homicidal lunatic—believe he’s taken the kids hostage. Nothing about the premise is unworkable, but the execution stares opportunity in the face and walks in the opposite direction. The humor isn’t just juvenile; it’s aggressively uninspired, cycling through slapstick, bathroom jokes, and shouting as a substitute for actual wit. A group of scouts peeing off a cliff while Stern bellows “shake your lizard!” could, under the right circumstances, be funny. Though it’s hard to imagine, exactly, how. Stern, ever the committed physical comedian, tries to salvage the material through sheer manic energy, but it’s like trying to build a fire with damp matches. His performance is watchable, but the movie wrapped around it isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with dumb comedy—done well, it’s an art form. Bushwhacked doesn’t even try. It just staggers from scene to scene, hoping that volume and mild gross-out humor will do the work. They don’t.

Alan Bates doesn’t play Butley so much as weaponize him. A literature professor with the soul of a vandal, he moves through the day knocking over anything still standing—marriage, friendships, professional dignity—just to hear the crash. His wife is gone. His male lover, following suit. His book on T.S. Eliot exists only as an excuse, a phantom deadline he’ll never meet, a failure he wears like an old coat. Trapped in his own office, he passes the time jeering at colleagues, humiliating students, and working through a personal stockpile of alcohol and cigarettes, all while recoiling from the consequences of his own mouth. The dialogue stings like it was dipped in vinegar. Upon learning his wife has run off with a simpleton, Butley takes the news the way only a man utterly convinced of his own superiority can: “I am a one-woman man, and I’ve had mine, thank God.” A perturbed colleague (Jessica Tandy) drops by, griping about some student’s critique of her teaching while breezily mentioning that she’s just finished her book on Byron. Butley, whose own book has been in a state of eternal deferment, registers this like a gunshot to the ego, hiding his misery behind another sneer, another drink. Nothing happens beyond the collapse of a man too proud to recognize his own ruin. One student, unfortunate enough to believe he might help her, gets her work flayed apart without warning. One by one, the people in his life slip through his fingers, not because he loses them, but because he pushes them away, gleefully, compulsively, just to prove he can. By the end, there’s no epiphany, no softening, no tragic redemption—just a man, still talking, still tearing into whatever’s left. The good news is you won’t have to feel sorry for him.

It’s not usually a good sign when a movie stages a suicide and my first reaction is to laugh out loud. Same goes for Ashton Kutcher attempting high-stakes drama—eyes squinted, face contorted, willing tears into existence like he’s trying to force a vending machine to cough up the last candy bar. I doubt that’s the effect they were going for, but as accidental comedy, it’s not bad. The premise, at least, is solid. Kutcher plays Evan, who grew up with a grab bag of childhood traumas and a knack for blacking out during the worst of them. He kept journals through it all. Years later, he discovers that reading those entries lets him drop back into those lost moments, change what happened, and return to a present that’s been rearranged accordingly. Each jump rewrites his life—and usually not for the better. The more he meddles, the stranger the outcomes—and the more his brain pays for it. His aim is straightforward: protect his childhood friend and sometime girlfriend Kayleigh (Amy Smart) and throw a wrench in the life of her pedophile father (Eric Stoltz). But every jump flings him in a reality warped just enough to make things worse. One lands him in prison. Another delivers the film’s most unintentionally hilarious reveal: Evan, in a fit of self-sacrifice, wakes to find he’s blown off both arms. Cue the Forrest Gump impression, uncut and unblinking. As drama, it’s overwrought to the point of parody. As a time-travel thriller, it’s at least watchable. And as so-bad-it’s-good spectacle, it’s often kind of a riot.

Everything the first film did badly, this one does without the accidental fun. Even the gimmick—the one thing the series has to trade on—shows up less often, as if the filmmakers got bored of their own premise. Nick (Eric Lively) is out in the mountains with his girlfriend Julie (Erica Durance) and two friends when a semi plows into them. Julie dies. Later, Nick learns he can stare at a photo of the two of them and slip back into the past, tweaking events to change the present. His first time-warp mission isn’t romance—it’s office politics. He works for a company of indeterminate purpose, where he’s been passed over for promotion in favor of a smirking brown-noser who’s tanking the place. Nick decides to fix both problems: save the girl, save his career. If you’ve seen the first film, you already know the pattern: time jump, ripple effect, unintended consequences, repeat until out of runtime. Only here, the loops are fewer, the stakes lower, and the storytelling flatter. The 2004 original at least earned “so bad it’s good” status; it had a kind of overheated, self-serious lunacy you could laugh at. This one’s just limp—shot like a made-for-cable thriller, acted like nobody’s buying it, paced like everyone’s trying to get to lunch. No matter what reality Nick tinkers into existence, none of them are worth watching.

A cinematic souvenir that plays like a national sugar rush—engineered, dyed, and lip-synced to death. Bye Bye Birdie adapts the Broadway hit musical with a tone pitched somewhere between satirical burlesque and network TV commercial break. The plot, barely worth summarizing, involves a pop idol—Conrad Birdie, a plastic Elvis proxy with chest hair and sideburns by wardrobe department decree—who’s drafted into the Army. To wring publicity from his departure, he’s made to kiss a randomly chosen teenage girl (Ann-Margret) live on The Ed Sullivan Show. She accepts. Everyone else panics. Dick Van Dyke reprises his stage role with professional cheer, while Janet Leigh looks like she’s trying to turn her subplot into a real movie. Jesse Pearson, as Birdie, smirks and thrusts on cue. But the gravitational center is Ann-Margret, whose presence is so disproportionate to the rest of the production it’s almost awkward. She doesn’t just steal the film—she makes it look like everyone else was working at half pay. The songs vary in quality. A few catchy holdovers from Broadway survive the transfer intact, while others fizzle on arrival. George Sidney directs with all the subtlety of a marching band—every frame is arranged like a showroom display, and about as personal. But there’s a watchability in how overproduced it all is. It’s not sharp enough to be satire, not sincere enough to be nostalgic, and not well-paced enough to justify its own attention span. But it moves and offers a tidy glimpse at how mass media once tried to manufacture hysteria by way of teenagers in matching skirts. Whatever else it is, Bye Bye Birdie is a reminder that sometimes it only takes one camera-loving redhead to turn studio fluff into something people remember.

Three divorced dads—Paul Reiser, Matthew Modine, Randy Quaid—shuffle through the wreckage of their love lives, swapping wry observations and half-baked wisdom like a sitcom that lost its laugh track. The cast is easygoing, the chemistry is fine, but they’re stranded in a script that mistakes banality for warmth and assumes an affable tone can stand in for real insight. The laughs come in handfuls, most of them so mild they barely register. The ending, never in doubt, arrives with the subtlety of a greeting card: families are messy, divorce is hard, love is resilient. Cue the orchestral swell. A movie designed to be comforting, and it kind of is, but what actually makes it fascinating—accidentally, unintentionally, hypnotically fascinating—is McDonald’s. A full third of the movie takes place inside the golden arches, where our protagonists gather, not just occasionally, but relentlessly, holding court over plastic trays like their lives depend on it. Mac and Me was another film where McDonald’s product placement was this aggressive, this relentless, this strangely mythologized. This is not just a fast-food restaurant. This is the heart of Bye Bye Love—a sanctuary for men in crisis, where fries and fatherhood go hand in hand. Wesley Willis told us McDonald’s was for rock music. This movie insists it’s for broken marriages. The effect is ridiculous, yet strangely nostalgic—back when the decor was still saturated in yellows and reds, the playgrounds felt endless, and every Happy Meal had a future collectible inside. A McDonald’s time capsule wrapped in a film that plays like a collection of discarded network TV pitches. The script is flat, the sincerity forced, the conclusions preordained. But if you’ve ever longed for a 90-minute glimpse into what fast food used to look like, this might actually be worth something.