Film Buff Musings

A creeping, old-world horror film with ghost story sensibilities, The Fog washes over its coastal setting like a curse biding its time. Antonio Bay, a picturesque California town, prepares to celebrate its centennial, unaware that its founding was built on murder. A hundred years earlier, six town leaders deliberately lured a ship of lepers onto the rocks to steal their fortune. Now, as an unnatural fog drifts inland, the vengeful dead return—not as mindless phantoms, but as spectral executioners, seeking six victims to balance the scales. This isn’t Halloween; there’s no sprinting through corridors, no masked killer lurking just out of frame. Carpenter shifts gears into something more like a gothic fable: creeping dread punctuated by eerie radio transmissions, spectral silhouettes in the mist, and quiet terror rather than outright mayhem. The plot unfurls as a mystery, with radio DJ Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) detecting the supernatural storm from her lighthouse perch, while others—including a visiting hitchhiker (Jamie Lee Curtis), a guilt-ridden priest (Hal Holbrook), and the town’s wary mayor (Janet Leigh)—stumble toward the horrifying truth. Not all of it gels. Some characters feel stranded in their own stories, and the pacing, for all its tension-building, drags in places. But Carpenter’s mastery of atmosphere compensates: the creeping fog is alive, oozing through cracks and keyholes, swallowing everything in an eerie glow. The ghosts don’t just appear; they manifest, standing in unnatural stillness before striking. The film’s restraint makes its sudden, brutal kills hit harder. A minor classic of the genre, perhaps, but one that still deserves to be told around campfires and whispered on foggy nights.

A lo-fi indie comedy that plays like Repo Man by way of a community theater acid trip. Set in 1997, Foil follows two longtime friends into the desert in search of creative inspiration—one a blocked writer grasping for ideas, the other a crass hanger-on with more opinions than filters. One briefly thinks he’s been recognized—until she asks if he was in Wayne’s World. Turns out she’s thinking of Dana Carvey. He says no, but you can tell he wishes the answer were yes. They’re headed to a supposed energy vortex—one of those off-grid desert spots where people talk about frequencies and stare at the sun. Almost immediately, they get separated and fall in with two eccentric strangers. One meets a man carrying a strip of foil that supposedly reacts to emotion—and insists he has more of it inside him, the result of an appendectomy he’s convinced was really an alien abduction. The other is nearly killed by someone who suddenly realizes he’s the director of an obscure VHS oddity called Watering Holes—a maybe-pornographic relic so embarrassing it was released under a fake name and quietly buried. And yet, here it is. Still being watched. Still being remembered. Shot on a shoestring, Foil is mostly four people pacing the desert and swapping conspiracies, regrets, and theories that sound better when dehydrated. The actors are competent if unremarkable, the filmmaking is functional, and the production value is basically sand. But the weirdness sticks. The dialogue has a cracked rhythm that mostly plays, and the comedy—dry, uncertain, lightly deranged—keeps it from drifting off. It’s small and kind of pointless. But it made me laugh.

A perfectly agreeable riff on the old opposites‑attract fable—proof that you can reheat ancient plot beats so long as your leads know how to keep the leftovers from tasting stale. Alex Whitman (Matthew Perry, nervous sarcasm and half‑buttoned formality) is a high‑end New York architect temporarily stranded in Las Vegas to shepherd the birth of yet another nightclub no one really needs. Isabel Fuentes (Salma Hayek), meanwhile, is a warm‑blooded local photographer with a sprawling, tight‑knit Mexican family. They meet. Sparks fly. One impulsive tryst later, she’s pregnant. And before either can fully process how little they know about each other, they’re standing before an Elvis impersonator trading vows that feel equal parts sincere and insane. The real complication—predictably—lies in the collision of families. Isabel’s parents size up Alex as culturally clueless and politely unwelcome; Alex’s parents, brushing off centuries of imperial conquest, mistake Isabel for the maid. For once, the meddling parents aren’t entirely wrong: neither half of this couple has a clue what the other truly wants. Their arguments crackle with just enough truth to sting. There’s not a fresh twist in sight—this plot has been recycled since the first two star‑crossed villagers scandalized the tribe—but Perry and Hayek keep the ship afloat. He’s jittery, she’s incandescent, and together they make you root for love in spite of the odds and the clichés. Hardly a great film—even in the realm of romantic comedies—but it’s pleasant, familiar, and recommended if you need a reminder that sometimes people clash because they’re meant to, and stick anyway.

Sprightly paced and shamelessly extravagant, Footlight Parade is a high-kick to the jaw of the early talkie era. James Cagney, all nervy charm and restless motion, plays Chester Kent—a Broadway director who pivots to staging “prologues,” live musical numbers performed before film screenings, once stage attendance starts drying up. It’s a niche business, and a competitive one. Someone keeps stealing his ideas, and with a massive contract on the line, Chester has to churn out showstoppers while keeping his staff in the dark and his nerves barely intact. The plot is a backstage scramble full of breezy patter and secondhand screwball. Joan Blondell, sharp as a tack, plays Nan—his secretary, watchdog, and unacknowledged romantic prospect. Cagney, still pre-musical career peak, already moves like a man choreographed by caffeine. The ending unspools three Busby Berkeley numbers in a row, stitched into the film with no pretense of realism and no need for it. Water ballets, tiered dancers, overhead kaleidoscope shots—Berkeley’s camera floats, swoops, and dives like it’s dreaming in patterns. The synchronized swimming sequence alone is hypnotic. The whole thing moves fast, hits hard, and exits like it has somewhere better to be.

A Chicago kid moves to a small town where dancing is illegal, and through sheer force of teenage rebellion (and a soundtrack full of ‘80s bangers), he sets out to change that. Kevin Bacon plays Ren McCormack, a city boy with a chip on his shoulder and a natural talent for grooving, who arrives in a Midwestern town that might as well have been designed to stamp out fun. Years ago, a tragedy led local minister Rev. Shaw Moore (John Lithgow) to convince the town council that dancing was a gateway to sin. The result became a community where joy is legislated away and kids blow off steam by racing tractors and screaming at trains. Ren, of course, is having none of it. His arrival immediately puts him at odds with Moore, especially after Ren takes an interest in the reverend’s daughter, Ariel (Lori Singer), a restless preacher’s kid with a dangerous streak. Between dodging her violent boyfriend and trying to get the town’s youth to push back against their repressed existence, Ren finds an unlikely ally in Willard (Chris Penn), a farm boy who wouldn’t know rhythm if it kicked him in the shins but who provides comic relief in the film’s best training montage. At its core, Footloose is an underdog story, and when it works, it works. The movie wobbles under its more melodramatic elements—the script wants to sell its premise as a deep philosophical battle, but it’s really about getting to the dance. The pacing drags at times, and the dramatics can feel overblown, but the music never fails. Loggins, Bonnie Tyler, Deniece Williams—the soundtrack is the real revolution here, sweeping up the characters and the audience alike in its fight for freedom.

This remake of the 1984 foot-stomping melodrama arrives buffed, respectful, and slightly over-serious about its own lore. The premise remains delightfully implausible: a small Southern town, still in mourning after a fatal car accident involving teenagers, has outlawed dancing. The ban isn’t symbolic—it’s codified. Curfews are enforced. Speakers are ticketed. Fun, in general, is frowned upon. Civic repression disguised as parental concern. This version fills in the backstory a bit more than its predecessor. The accident, which opens the film, sets the moral panic in motion, led by Reverend Moore (Dennis Quaid), a grief-stricken preacher who responds to tragedy by criminalizing movement. His daughter Ariel (Julianne Hough), naturally, is the town’s most committed rule-breaker—equal parts reckless and bruised, sneaking out to holler at trains and swing from moving vehicles like someone trying to shake off her own skin. Enter Ren (Kenny Wormald), the transplanted Boston kid with fast feet and no patience for Bible Belt authority. He gets a citation before he finishes unpacking his trunk—too loud, too confident, too wrong for the zip code. But he’s not here to assimilate. He’s here to get people dancing again. The choreography is clean, sharp, and mostly country-coded, heavy on line dancing and boot-stomp theatrics. If your nostalgia leans toward ’80s synth-pop, the musical shift might feel like a downgrade. Many of the original songs return in remixed form—tasteful, reverent, and strangely sedate. The film’s dramatic arcs, while more fleshed out than in the original, still veer into after-school territory: grief monologues delivered like audition tapes, righteous speeches about freedom disguised as pep rallies. Footloose plays fine. It just plays safe. It wants to honor the original while sanding off its weirdness. The result is polished, competent, and emotionally plausible—but missing the oddball energy that made the original click.

A grungy, gloriously disreputable Alien knockoff, but with enough goopy enthusiasm to keep it from being a total wash. The setting is a remote research facility on a distant planet, where scientists tinker with genetic mutations, only to be predictably undone by their own experiments. The result: a shape-shifting, slime-dripping abomination that begins working its way through the crew like a spacefaring exterminator. Jesse Vint, playing a battle-worn intergalactic troubleshooter, arrives to deal with the mess, but the only real solutions involve laser guns, screaming, and a distressing amount of bodily fluids. The actors mostly seem to have been hired for their willingness to lounge around the lab in various states of undress. The dialogue barely exists, and when it does, it’s just there to bridge the gap between monster attacks and slow-motion writhing. But no one watches a Roger Corman-produced B-movie for Shakespearean monologues. You come for the dime-store surrealism: bad actors emoting against flashing lights, eerily droning synths, and practical effects that glisten under budget-conscious lighting. The film is pure exploitation—sweaty, ridiculous, and aggressively uninterested in logic—but there’s a scrappy enthusiasm to the madness. It’s Alien on a beer budget, with the creature effects alternating between impressively grotesque and laughably rubbery. Not a good movie, but you get what you came for.

An old-school, grease-under-the-fingernails sports drama polished to a high corporate sheen. Henry Ford II, nursing a bruised ego after Ferrari snubs his buyout offer, decides the best way to get even is to humiliate them at Le Mans, a race Ferrari practically owns. But Ford makes cars for the masses, not for speed. To fix that, they bring in Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), a once-great racer turned designer, and Ken Miles (Christian Bale), a driver so skilled he makes everyone who hires him nervous. Miles is the kind of guy you want behind the wheel, not in the boardroom. The Ford execs, prizing brand optics over winning, fight Shelby every step of the way on putting him in the car. The racing sequences roar, the script hums along, and the leads—Bale all wiry intensity, Damon balancing good-ol’-boy affability with just enough steel—hold the road. The film isn’t breaking new ground, but it’s good at what it does: classic underdog-versus-suits storytelling, with engines that snarl and egos that collide. The history gets tweaked—Miles wasn’t quite the outcast he’s made out to be—but it’s all done to entertaining effect. At 152 minutes, it could use a trim, but the pacing is sharp enough that you don’t mind. A solid, rousing, big-budget take on the kind of story Hollywood once churned out with ease.

The premise of Forever Young relies on an improbable number of perfectly aligned circumstances, and the script doesn’t waste much energy trying to disguise that. But once the machine starts ticking, the result is unexpectedly affecting—intermittently funny, occasionally wrenching, and pitched just right for a movie that treats cryogenic suspension as a plausible form of grief avoidance. Mel Gibson plays Daniel McCormick, a test pilot on the eve of World War II whose girlfriend, Helen (Isabel Glasser), is left in a coma after a car accident. Unable to face the thought of watching her die—or live without her—Daniel volunteers for a classified military experiment involving human hibernation. He agrees to be frozen for a year, thinking it might spare him the agony of waiting and perhaps deliver him into a future with better answers. Instead, due to military misplacement and bureaucratic forgetfulness, he wakes up in 1992. What follows isn’t quite science fiction—it’s more like emotional fable with lightly worn sci-fi accessories. Daniel stumbles into the lives of a curious young boy (Elijah Wood) and his mother (Jamie Lee Curtis), who take him in after a few acts of decency and some well-timed intervention. Their kindness gives him an anchor as he tries to piece together what’s become of the life he left behind. His quest to find out what happened to Helen—not just whether she lived, but whether she moved on—is what drives the story forward. The film is built on contrivance, but the tone is warm enough that it rarely feels strained. Gibson walks the line between sincerity and dazed disbelief, and the performances around him strike the right notes. The film is rarely subtle, but it knows what it’s aiming for. Forever Young finds its tone early and holds to it—wistful, a little ridiculous, and surprisingly moving.

A romantic comedy with a neurotic pulse, an absurdly dark meet-cute, and an NBA ref caught between love and the technical foul of long-distance commitment. Billy Crystal, wearing three hats (writer, director, star), plays Mickey, a guy whose grief gets misplaced along with his father’s casket. France was supposed to be a solemn pilgrimage, but bureaucratic incompetence turns it into a farce. He rants, he fumes, he does what Crystal does best—boiling over like a pot left too long on the burner. Enter Ellen (Debra Winger), an airline rep with the rarest of qualities in a customer service employee: basic human decency. She not only helps him, she shows up at the funeral, standing beside a man she barely knows, just because it seems like the right thing to do. What starts as an act of kindness turns into something riskier. He’s an NBA ref who spends more time on the road than at home. She’s got a life in Paris that she’s not eager to abandon. Their relationship, stretched across continents, is both lovely and exhausting, with Crystal’s dialogue skidding between sentiment and wisecracks at speeds unsafe for the average viewer. The framing device—Mickey’s friends piecing together his love life over dinner—aims for a Rashomon effect but comes off as detours that no one needed. The real oddity, though: every side character speaks in Crystal’s rhythms, as if the entire world had been trained to punch up their banter. But when the jokes work, they work.

A Twilight Zone premise, gift-wrapped for anyone who enjoys watching Julianne Moore spiral into existential terror, before morphing into a disposable thriller that seems to have been rewritten on the fly by someone with a stopwatch and a love for sudden, pointless action sequences. At first, it works. Telly (Moore) is drowning in grief, haunted by the loss of her son in a plane crash. She rewatches old home videos, stares at photos, runs her fingers over the fragments of his existence. Until one day, she wakes up, and the fragments are gone. No photos. No videos. No proof he ever existed. Her husband (Anthony Edwards) swears she’s lost her mind—so does her psychiatrist (Gary Sinise), who explains it away as a miscarriage-induced delusion, finally correcting itself. But she knows better. And for a while, so does the movie. It builds slowly, tightening its grip, letting Moore carry it with her unnerving certainty, her growing frustration as she confronts other parents who have also mysteriously misplaced their children. Then she finds one—Dominic West, playing a washed-up alcoholic—who starts to remember. And at that precise moment, The Forgotten throws out everything that made it compelling in favor of chase scenes, unnecessary explosions, and twists that play like they were randomly drawn from a hat. Moore sells it to the bitter end, but even she can’t hold this thing together when it’s so determined to self-destruct. What starts as an eerie, psychological mystery is quickly revealed to be something far cheaper, something that wastes its premise on a reveal that feels less like a gut-punch and more like a scriptwriter scrambling to meet a deadline. So disappointing that it’s devastating.

A mockumentary so straight-faced it might fool your uncle, Forgotten Silver plays like a Kiwi Ken Burns Presents—if Ken Burns had a sense of mischief and a soft spot for cinematic tall tales. Peter Jackson appears as himself, solemnly recounting the “rediscovery” of Colin McKenzie, an obscure New Zealand filmmaker who, it turns out, accidentally invented cinema as we know it. Or so the story goes. McKenzie, we’re told, shot the first feature-length film, developed synchronized sound in the 1900s, and just happened to capture the world’s first powered flight—months before the Wright brothers, mind you. Jackson, flanked by co-director Costa Botes, treats each revelation with archaeological reverence. Film scholars fawn. Leonard Maltin gushes. Harvey Weinstein pops up, alas, like a moldy time capsule. But the crown jewel of this celluloid hoax is Salome—McKenzie’s never-finished biblical epic, filmed with thousands of extras in the New Zealand backcountry and presumed lost to history. Jackson & Co. mount an expedition to find the remnants, as if chasing the Ark of the Covenant, but with more sincerity and less Spielbergian sweep. It’s all clearly bogus, of course—but impressively so. The found footage looks genuinely aged, the performances are just stiff enough to sell the con. There’s an almost giddy pleasure in watching it double down on its own delusion. For those in on the joke, it’s a sly riff on the pretensions of film history and the myth-making that powers it. For the uninitiated, it plays like the greatest hoax the History Channel never aired.

A film that gallops through history with all the self-awareness of a parade float, a grand spectacle of American nostalgia that never pauses to ask why. Forrest Gump is a man with an IQ of 75 and the dumb luck of a lottery winner, drifting through the major events of the late 20th century like a Zelig, except he never even notices he’s in the frame. He takes orders well, and the universe rewards him handsomely. Ping pong prodigy? Just keep your eye on the ball. War hero? Just run fast and don’t ask questions. Shrimp tycoon? Just fish where they tell you. He doesn’t understand history, but history seems to understand him. Forrest’s narration—earnest, guileless, occasionally amusing—works best in the early stretch, where his wide-eyed retellings of absurd moments (the Elvis dance, the Watergate tip-off, the LBJ mooning) strike the right note of bemused detachment. But two-plus hours is a long time to listen to someone process life in simple declarative sentences, and the folksy wisdom starts to lose its luster. Meanwhile, Jenny (Robin Wright) follows a rougher path, drifting through the cultural upheavals of the ‘60s and ‘70s, chasing freedom and finding mostly trouble. While Forrest’s obedience builds an empire, Jenny’s rebellion pulls her in the opposite direction. The contrast is striking, though the film doesn’t seem interested in questioning it. Tom Hanks, fully committed, makes it work better than it should. Sally Field, playing his iron-willed mother, gives it more depth than it asks for. Whatever its philosophical blind spots, the movie is compulsively watchable, a high-calorie meal that tastes good even if you suspect it might not be good for you.

The first pairing of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and already they play off each other like a rigged deck of cards—one always coming up nervous, the other always playing the angle. Lemmon is Harry Hinkle, a sports cameraman blindsided during a football game by “Boom Boom” Jackson (Ron Rich). Enter Whiplash Willie Gingrich (Matthau), a personal injury lawyer who treats ethics the way a lion treats a steak. Before Harry’s fully processed the hit, Willie is beside his hospital bed, spinning the accident into a personal gold rush. Forget the minor injury—why not a catastrophic one? A few well-played moans, a little creative perjury, and they’re on track for a payout so big, it might even bring back Harry’s ex-wife. Only problem: insurance investigators with binoculars trained on his window, watching for a single wrong move. That, and Harry himself—a man fundamentally unsuited to fraud, struggling to keep up while Willie works the system like a magician yanking rabbits from an empty hat. Billy Wilder keeps the whole thing humming at a slick, knowing pace—never pushing too far into slapstick, but always keeping the characters just slightly out of their depth. Matthau, all nasal brilliance and unflappable opportunism, makes a sport out of squeezing every last cent out of human weakness. Lemmon, forever a mark with too much conscience, plays the perfect contrast. The laughs aren’t constant, but the ones that land come with a sting, and every so often, the film lets the con’s moral rot seep through. A comedy about American greed that never pretends it isn’t having a great time.

The godfather of the buddy cop movie and Eddie Murphy’s film debut—and still, arguably, the best of either. It didn’t just launch a genre; it gave it a pulse: mismatched leads, sharp insults, quick violence, and no time to explain. What sets this one apart is how raw it feels. There’s no gloss on the characters or the tension. This isn’t cute bickering—it’s a cop and a convict sizing each other up, both armed with attitude and not much patience. Murphy plays Reggie Hammond, a fast-talking inmate released for 48 hours to help Inspector Jack Cates (Nick Nolte) track down a pair of cop-killers. Cates drinks too much, growls too often, and doesn’t like asking for help—especially not from a guy who meets every bark with a smirk. The tension between them is real: racial, class-based, and personal. They trade blows before they trade trust. The plot’s straightforward—chase the bad guys before time runs out—but the energy never dips. The action is slick. The pacing is tight. And the dialogue hits like it’s been sandpapered. Murphy, just 21, is already magnetic. His shakedown of a redneck bar remains one of the film’s best scenes—not just because it’s funny, but because of how precisely he controls it. He plays the moment for dominance, not laughs, and the camera follows his lead. Nolte anchors it with bulk and burnout. He’s all grit and forward motion, a human hangover in a wrinkled trench coat. And while Murphy is clearly the future, Nolte is what keeps the film from spinning off into pure comedy. They clash, snap into rhythm, and somehow make it all work. 48 Hrs. doesn’t posture as prestige. It’s tough, fast, and smarter than it gets credit for. The jokes land. The stakes stick. And the chemistry, however volatile, is the real draw. It’s not just a prototype—it’s a high bar that most of its imitators never reached.

Less a sequel than a do-over, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged doesn’t bother with continuity—it just resets the tank, swaps out the cast, and nudges the tone a little closer to parody. This time around, it’s four teenage girls, some borrowed scuba gear, and a submerged Mayan ruin that doubles as a buffet line for unusually vindictive sharks. These ones are blind, scarred, and seemingly fueled by ancestral resentment. Subtlety, as ever, isn’t on the menu. The premise has potential: a confined underwater maze, where oxygen’s low and danger moves fast. Claustrophobia should do half the work. But the execution trades suspense for sludge. Everything’s wrapped in that muddy digital murk where nobody owns a working flashlight and the layout might as well have been sketched by a sleepwalker. The location could’ve given the film an eerie, sunken weight—something immersive, maybe even haunting. Instead, it just looks like bad lighting and guesswork. When the deaths arrive, they’re knowingly over-the-top—tongue-in-cheek, elbow-in-ribs, pausing just long enough to make sure we’re in on the joke. The problem is, the joke’s a little thin. There’s no real satire, no genre deconstruction—just a kind of reflexive self-awareness that plays like a shrug. It doesn’t send up the formula so much as avoid the work of pulling it off well. Still, there’s a weird kind of charm in how casually it goes through the motions. The movie isn’t aiming to transcend its setup. It just wants to flash some teeth and move along before the oxygen runs out. For shark movie completists, it might qualify as a snack. For everyone else, it’s the sort of rental you forget you watched—until it pops up again, half-remembered and algorithmically recommended, ready to strike once again from the depths of digital limbo.

A film called The 40-Year-Old Virgin ought to be a snickering bro-down of dick jokes and humiliation. And sometimes it is. But it’s also humane, charming, and surprisingly delicate in how it handles its premise—less a roast than a group hug from people who aren’t entirely sure how to show affection. Crude, yes. But also honest. And very, very funny. Steve Carell plays Andy Stitzer, a man whose life is equal parts habit and retreat. He bikes to his job at an electronics store, eats egg salad alone, and spends his evenings watching Survivor with the elderly couple upstairs. He’s not exactly unhappy—just untouched. Sex never happened, and somewhere along the way, he stopped expecting it to. That changes after one ill-fated poker night, when a stray comment about a breast feeling like “a bag of sand” outs him to his coworkers, who react like they’ve just discovered a lost city and immediately declared it a group project. The mission: get Andy laid. The approach: wildly inappropriate. The execution: predictably chaotic. Most of the film’s set pieces revolve around Andy’s collisions with women he has no business talking to, let alone seducing. A drunken bookstore encounter ends in projectile vomiting. A date with a speed freak spirals into a police chase. Every scenario is engineered for maximum discomfort, yet there’s no cruelty to it—just the comedic physics of someone wholly unprepared for the world he’s been avoiding. Enter Trish (Catherine Keener), composed but not unflappable. Their relationship follows the usual rom-com route, but with less gloss and more air in the margins. It works because they’re not symbols—they’re just people, cautiously improvising. The film’s secret weapon is its looseness. Apatow lets scenes breathe, overlap, veer off course. You can feel the improvisation, not in a showy way, but in the awkward rhythms of people trying to be clever and vulnerable at once. The ensemble—Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Elizabeth Banks, Jane Lynch—doesn’t just support; they orbit, collide, hijack scenes, and toss them back. No one is wasted. Everyone’s funny. And then there’s the chest-waxing scene—a moment so gloriously stupid it lands somewhere near genius. Carell, for reasons both method and masochistic, agreed to have his actual chest hair ripped out on camera. No prosthetics. No special effects. Just a man, a table, and several strips of hot wax. His screams are real. So are his co-stars’ horrified snorts. It’s not just a stunt—it’s commitment. And it’s perfect. What elevates the film above its premise is its refusal to humiliate Andy. He’s awkward, yes. Repressed, absolutely. But he’s not broken. The joke isn’t that he’s a virgin—it’s what everyone else projects onto that fact: the panic, the pity, the pep talks that double as therapy sessions. The film doesn’t want him to score. It wants him to connect. And when he finally does, it’s not a punchline. It’s a payoff.

For a film built to scratch the Indiana Jones itch—two estranged siblings stumbling through temples and sand in search of the Fountain of Youth—Fountain of Youth has an alarming shortage of pulse. The pacing limps along, the dialogue barely clears the bar for basic exposition, and whatever intrigue you’d expect from a story like this dissolves before the first torch is lit. A movie like this needs a plot worth chasing and a few secrets worth keeping. Instead, there’s sturdy production design—weathered tombs, a handful of traps, a polite nod to ancient curses—and not much else under the surface. I can’t really blame the cast. John Krasinski does what he can as Luke Purdue, a disgraced archaeologist dragged back into the field by a billionaire with one foot in the grave (Domhnall Gleeson, who at least seems awake). Krasinski has the right scowl for this sort of thing, though I still half expect him to glance at the camera and mutter something about Dwight Schrute every time the plot stalls. Natalie Portman plays Charlotte, Luke’s sister and a cautious museum curator, mostly there to be skeptical on cue. Luke’s re-entry into treasure hunting kicks off with a painting snatched from some Bangkok lowlifes—a setup engineered by Carver to nudge him back to work and lure Charlotte along for the ride. From there, it’s predictable: a few coded clues, some awkward family squabbling, and the standard crawl through half-lit tunnels until the fabled fountain appears, inconvenient moral price tag attached. It’s a letdown, mostly because globetrotting adventure is hard to ruin on paper. Someone clearly spent time on the locations and the props; the script, unfortunately, didn’t get the same attention. There are worse ways to spend two hours, but you won’t need to watch this one again to remember exactly what happens—or how little you cared.

A film that delivers exactly what it promises, right there in the title—four weddings, one funeral, and a whole lot of pleasant British banter in between. A rom-com that coasts on its own affability, never quite digging into its characters but keeping things lively enough that you hardly mind. Hugh Grant, in peak floppy-haired, stammering form, plays Charles, a perennial best man whose personal love life is a perpetual shrug. That is, until he crosses paths with Carrie (Andie MacDowell), an American wedding guest with whom he shares a night of impulsive intimacy. She leaves, he pines, and at the next wedding, she resurfaces—engaged to someone else. Grant does what Grant does best: fumbles through a haze of romantic longing while everyone around him gets married. The film’s charm is effortless, even if its characters are less so—less people than walking quips and glib observations, congregating only for matrimony and melodrama. But the humor lands, from the dry wit of the ensemble to the excellent sight gag of Rowan Atkinson’s flustered priest, turning a simple wedding ceremony into a verbal obstacle course. The funeral shifts the tone briefly, offering an emotional gut-punch, though the film remains more interested in breezy romance than deeper introspection. The ending arrives in an awkward, slightly improbable rush, yet somehow feels right in its own bumbling way. More wit than weight, more sparkle than substance, but so effortlessly watchable that none of that really matters. A fizzy, impeccably British rom-com that never outstays its welcome.

Cut-rate by Disney standards—the animation has that Xeroxed-flat look typical of the studio’s slump years—but the story underneath is sturdier than expected. Tod is an orphaned red fox raised by a kindly widow. Copper is a hound pup adopted by the gruff hunter next door. Foxes and hounds are natural enemies, or so the script reminds us. But when these two meet as kids, they don’t see any of that. Just another playmate. It’s a classic forbidden friendship setup, simple enough to double as allegory. Put any two children together—different races, classes, countries—and they’ll play like equals. Grown-ups hand them the rulebook later. The film doesn’t over-explain that, but it’s in there. A quiet parable with soft edges and some emotional charge. The kind that doesn’t hit you in the head so much as settle somewhere behind the ribs. The pacing gets uneven, and the comic relief (mostly a bird and caterpillar doing whatever they’re doing) doesn’t add much. There are moments of genuine action, but they sit oddly beside the moodier stretches. The tone doesn’t always hold. Still, the sadness sneaks up: the drifting apart, the betrayal, the long goodbye nobody really says. I could feel a few of those scenes in my chest. It’s not a Disney classic, and it doesn’t have the glow around it—but it’s absorbing. Made during one of the studio’s less inspired eras, it still manages to land as a good movie. Just not a great one.

Jane Russell gives one of the best performances of her career as Amanda, a New York socialite whose car breaks down in the Arizona desert—and decides, with alarming ease, that she’s home. She falls for Jonathan “Dart” Dartland (Jeff Chandler), a local mining engineer and half Apache, and marries him before the dust has even settled on her tires. It’s not exactly a slow burn. You suspect they’ve rushed into it, and the film spends the next ninety minutes agreeing with you. The romance holds, barely, thanks to Russell, who plays Amanda with a kind of poised curiosity—sharp, skeptical, and not quite built for compromise. Chandler’s Dart is harder to read, partly by intention, partly because Chandler seems more focused on solemn dignity than interior life. Their cultural gap is the film’s central tension, but it never builds into anything. Differences are observed, gently fretted over, and then left there—like plot threads that wandered off. Even Amanda’s interracial marriage—scandalous in theory—barely ruffles the surface. Her mother disapproves, but with the weary detachment of someone revisiting old mistakes; after all, she made the same one herself. There’s some vague gesturing toward prejudice and identity, but the film seems more interested in noting the conflict than sitting with it. It brings up hard things, then quietly changes the subject. Still, it looks terrific. The Technicolor shimmers. The sets are dipped in tasteful turquoise, all chrome and stone and sun-bleached elegance. The interiors glow like a department store ad, and the desert is just wild enough to register as exotic, but not threatening. It’s a beautiful film to look at—clean, composed, and just stylized enough to feel touched by fantasy. But that’s all it really has: aesthetics, and Russell. Once you’ve admired the surfaces, there’s not much left. It flirts with meaning, then backs away. It poses questions it has no interest in answering. Foxfire doesn’t implode or misfire—it just fades.

A tender, well-worn drama that drifts gently through themes of memory, loss, and the stubborn pull of home. Jessica Tandy, radiating quiet resolve, plays Annie Nations, a widowed Appalachian farmer who has no intention of leaving the land she’s spent her life tending. Her late husband, Hector (Hume Cronyn), has been gone for five years, yet she still sees him, still talks to him. A ghost? A figment of grief? The film never says, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s there for her, even if no one else can see him. Her son, Dillard (John Denver), is a country singer who made it big, left the farm behind, and now wants to move his mother to Florida, where she’ll be “taken care of.” He means well, but she bristles at the idea, as if uprooting would mean erasing everything she and Hector built together. Meanwhile, a land developer (Gary Grubbs) hovers, eager to turn her home into vacation properties. Hallmark Hall of Fame productions have a way of leaning into sentiment, and this one is no exception, but the performances cut through the melodrama. Tandy and Cronyn, with their decades of shared screen history, make Annie and Hector’s relationship feel lived-in, even from beyond the grave. Denver, playing a version of himself, gets a few moments to sing, his warm, plaintive voice filling the space between mother and son. The film moves slowly, but in a way that feels fitting—like the quiet persistence of someone refusing to let go.

James Whale directs Frankenstein like a conductor on the edge of madness—every shadow stretched long, every set jagged and looming, every line of dialogue spoken with the fervor of a last confession. Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein is gaunt and wild-eyed, pacing like a man who hasn’t slept in weeks, because he probably hasn’t. His creation is nearly finished, stitched together from corpses with the precision of a craftsman who lost the instruction manual but forged ahead anyway. He just needs a brain. Enter Fritz (Dwight Frye), his hunchbacked assistant, who sneaks into a university to steal one and promptly drops the only “normal” specimen. That leaves him with the backup: a mind that once belonged to a violent criminal. And with that, the experiment is doomed before it even begins. The storm rages, the monster rises, and Karloff lumbers into the frame, a vision of patchwork humanity: towering, lurching, his face locked in vacant sorrow. He’s fearsome but also strangely fragile—a man-sized infant trying to make sense of his own limbs. He kneels beside a little girl, enchanted by the way she tosses daisies into the water. He mimics her, delighted. And then the flowers run out. The water beckons. A single, terrible misunderstanding later, and the town is hunting him with torches. Whale shoots Frankenstein like a gothic nightmare where the true horror isn’t the creature but the world that rejects him. The cinematography—deep wells of shadow and stark beams of light—renders every frame a haunted memory. A horror film, yes, but also a tragedy. One of the great visual poems of early cinema.

It’s called a horror film, but the fear doesn’t come from the people on screen—it comes from how they’re seen. Freaks is remembered for its so-called shock value, banned in multiple countries on release, branded grotesque. Not for what it shows, but for who it shows. Little people. Conjoined twins. Bearded ladies. Individuals with microcephaly. Not prosthetics. Not effects. Real bodies. Real faces. That was the transgression. But the real reversal—the one that gives the film its quiet sting—is that it’s not the “freaks” who are monstrous. They’re the ones with loyalty, humor, ambition, even romance. The villainy belongs elsewhere: to Cleopatra, a haughty trapeze artist who plots to seduce and poison a wealthy little person named Hans for his inheritance. She preens, she mocks, she scorns the offer of communal kinship—“We accept her, one of us. Gobble-gobble.” It’s meant with warmth. She responds with cruelty. Tod Browning, who once worked in a traveling sideshow himself, doesn’t just gawk—he aligns us with the so-called outcasts. Their camaraderie isn’t sentimental or overstated—it settles in quietly, with familiarity and care. The horror arrives not from their appearance, but from what they’re pushed to do when betrayed. The ending is both justice and warning, filmed like a waking nightmare. This is exploitation, but not without conscience. There’s something almost radical in how it centers people who were usually sidelined—cast as villains, punchlines, or curiosities. Here, they’re the heart of the film. Perhaps the most unsettling thing about Freaks isn’t the cast. It’s how little progress we’ve made in learning to see them.

Somewhere in a Hollywood office, a cigar-chomping executive signed a check and unknowingly unleashed one of the most aggressively unhinged studio films ever made. Tom Green, fresh off the MTV circuit where he turned public humiliation into performance art, was handed a budget and a mandate to be himself. What came out is a film so gleefully disgusting, so committed to sheer lunacy, it feels less like a comedy and more like a nightmarish piece of outsider art that clawed its way into multiplexes by accident. Green plays Gord, an overgrown kid who claims he wants to be a cartoonist but mostly spends his days making everyone around him miserable. His father (Rip Torn, matching Green’s filth punch for punch) can’t stand him—and after five minutes with Gord, it’s hard to argue. Gord swings newborns by the umbilical cord, pleasures farm animals in broad daylight, nibbles on a friend’s open wound after a skateboarding accident—and drags polite society down a rung or twelve whenever the mood strikes him. He even keeps up a romance with a paraplegic rocket scientist (Marisa Coughlan) who is sexually pleasured when he whacks her legs with a bamboo stick. It’s all vile, but through some miracle, it’s also very, very funny. Green steers every revolting bit with dead-eyed conviction, and there’s a strange integrity in the way he drags each gag far past the logical punchline and holds it there until you’re either laughing in disbelief or (more likely) staring blankly at the screen. This isn’t so much a comedy as a gauntlet of filth and shrieking non sequiturs, flung at the audience with enough spite to make you wonder if you should march back to the box office and ask for a refund. Freddy Got Fingered offends, disgusts, and then circles back for seconds—just to see how low you’ll sink before you crawl away. It’s repulsive, brainless, and unmistakably one-of-a-kind. I laughed harder than I’d ever admit in polite company—sometimes so hard that I ran out of oxygen. This is pure arrested adolescence, and it clings to your brain long after you wish it wouldn’t.

Few crime thrillers still feel dangerous fifty years on—this one does. The French Connection is a bullet train of suspicion, stakeouts, and sudden violence, filmed like someone tossed a documentary crew into the back seat and told them to hang on. Even modern films strain to match its pulse. Gene Hackman is Popeye Doyle, a chain-smoking New York detective whose moral compass is best described as “flexible when convenient.” Alongside his partner, Cloudy (Roy Scheider, coolly exasperated), he spends every waking moment chasing a slippery Frenchman named Alain Chartier (Fernando Rey), who’s moving a then-record $32 million in heroin into the United States under everyone’s nose. Popeye doesn’t have time for paperwork or probable cause—he barely has time to reload. He’ll shake down stool pigeons in alleyways, snap open a bar’s back door mid-interrogation, or commandeer a stranger’s Pontiac to chase an elevated train through Queens because it beats filling out forms. It’s an ugly, smoggy New York—brick, grime, and the faint suggestion that if you fell down in a subway station no one would look twice. Friedkin shoots the city like it might attack back. The legendary chase scene—Popeye hammering a borrowed car under rattling train tracks while the suspect rides comfortably above—has been copied so many times it should feel quaint. It doesn’t. You watch it knowing he might plow through a baby carriage at any second and never stop. Hackman is the fuse that keeps sparking. His Popeye is part cop, part street bully, part lone wolf too proud to admit he might not be the hero here. He’s magnetic because he’s also alarming: you believe he’d break a suspect’s ribs if it got him closer to the dope. And if the badge objects? Tough. The film doesn’t slow down to explain whether any of this is worth it—by the time you’re done, you realize it probably wasn’t. But you’ll be too wired to care.

Marlon Brando revisits the silhouette of Vito Corleone—if not the soul of him—giving a sly, affectionate parody of his most famous role. Here, he’s Carmine Sabatini, a businessman of ambiguous legality whose presence alone makes people second-guess their life choices. Enter Clark Kellogg (Matthew Broderick), a film student fresh off the bus in New York, instantly swindled by Victor Ray (Bruno Kirby), Carmine’s slick and well-connected nephew. Clark’s attempt to reclaim his stolen belongings lands him an introduction to Carmine, who radiates the kind of benevolence that comes with a very thinly veiled sense of control. And then he offers Clark a job—a simple errand running gig for his import/export business. The first assignment is to transport a live Komodo dragon, a detail that spirals from curiosity to catastrophe with the inevitability of a sitcom plot, but with Bergman’s sharp script keeping it just self-aware enough. Clark, who still believes in the concept of free will, spends much of the film trying to untangle himself from Carmine’s grip, but Carmine isn’t so much a threat as he is a benevolent force of nature, nudging Clark toward an adventure he never asked for. The humor is light and character-driven, with Broderick playing the ultimate straight man to Brando’s larger-than-life presence. The plot, while occasionally unfocused, is a delightful mix of mob intrigue, dry wit, and reptilian hijinks. Call it The Godfather if it swapped blood oaths for exotic animal trafficking and existential dread for bemused bewilderment.

An effectively eerie slice of folk horror, Fréwaka conjures atmosphere with precision—even when it leans too hard on the genre’s more exhausted crutches. The house has a red door, which is never good, but why does it need to be red? There are nods to The Wicker Man, too—less clunky, but still visible through the fog. What the film gets right is tone. The house radiates the kind of unease that doesn’t need jump scares—it just sits there, watching. The visuals brood without fuss, and every so often the film slides into moments that feel genuinely cursed. There’s a psychological undertow pulling at it all, where memory frays, perception skews, and you start to wonder if the thing stalking her even exists outside her own mind. Trauma bubbles under the surface. Whether it’s real or inherited is part of the game. Clare Monnelly stars as Shoo (short for Siubhán), a home care worker sent to look after an immobile elderly woman named Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain). Shoo is assigned the job because she speaks Irish; Peig doesn’t speak English. When Shoo asks the bus driver for directions, he simply tells her to go home. Of course she doesn’t. It’s her job. But the house is already watching. Strange noises echo from behind doors. Screams pierce the quiet—only to reveal Peig asleep and undisturbed. There’s a basement that may or may not hold something malicious. And a social worker who might be helpful—or might be muttering curses behind a smile. Whether Shoo’s haunted, hallucinating, or just unraveling is never quite pinned down. The film toys with big ideas—language, legacy, mental collapse—but doesn’t stitch them into a shape you can hold. The dread is palpable; the payoff is vapor. Still, for horror fans—especially those who prefer unease over adrenaline—Fréwaka may offer enough to justify the visit. Just don’t expect every thread to tie off. Or every door to lead anywhere.