Film Buff Musings

The Graduate remains the definitive film about upper-middle-class paralysis—about what happens when a life built around success, safety, and swimming pools suddenly offers no real reason to get out of bed. Dustin Hoffman plays Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate who returns home to celebration, confusion, and the slow horror of other people’s plans for his future. The family friends are full of suggestions. Mrs. Robinson has one of her own. Anne Bancroft, in a role that weaponizes detachment, plays Mrs. Robinson as a chain-smoking sphinx—coiled, predatory, and half-daring Benjamin to say no. He doesn’t. Their affair begins as a joke with no punchline and becomes something harder to define once Benjamin finds himself drawn to her daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross). The entire second half is powered by that unease—how quickly a messy secret starts bleeding into real life. This was Hoffman’s first major role, and he plays Benjamin like someone caught between privilege and panic. There’s not a false beat in it. You’ve met this guy—somewhere between anxious prodigy and permanent guest. What makes the performance great isn’t just the disaffection, but how precise the comic timing is. Hoffman finds gags in the margins: a stammer, a blank stare, a way of answering a question with a blink. But credit also belongs to Mike Nichols and writers Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, who knew how to weaponize silence and pull comedy out of a well-timed toaster pop. The tone is seductive and vaguely sour. Nichols shoots the suburbs like a showroom floor—clean lines, glass walls, rooms that echo. There’s an emotional vacuum around everything, which gives even the smallest gestures a strange clarity. A glance lingers. A joke deflates. The soundtrack, thick with Simon & Garfunkel, turns Benjamin’s inertia into something operatic. None of this is pleasant, exactly. The affair is sleazy. The romance is tangled. Even the ending—ecstatic, then instantly uncertain—feels like the emotional version of cold feet. Benjamin and Elaine run off together, victorious. Then they sit in the back of a bus, saying nothing, the adrenaline wearing off in real time. It’s not a twist. It’s the truth catching up.

It started as a marketing stunt: Nissan and Sony wanted to show that racing on a console might actually prepare someone to do it for real. The result was GT Academy, and from it came Jann Mardenborough—a gamer-turned-driver whose career now reads like the kind of press release no one expected to age well. Gran Turismo turns his story into a solid, well-calibrated sports movie. Archie Madekwe plays Mardenborough, a retail worker with fast thumbs and faster reflexes. By night, he’s glued to his console, memorizing tracks most people only ever see from the grandstands or a highlight reel. He’s soon swept into GT Academy—a corporate experiment disguised as a talent search—backed by Nissan executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom, corporate-enthused) and helmed by Jack Salter (David Harbour), a disillusioned ex-driver whose approach to coaching involves yelling, sulking, and the occasional pep talk when no one’s looking. Jann isn’t handed a car and told to go win. He trains. He qualifies. He fails and restarts. The film is surprisingly methodical about the transition from virtual to actual—braking, risk tolerance, spatial awareness. It doesn’t pretend a racing sim teaches you how to feel G-forces or survive a spinout, but it does make the case that obsessive familiarity with racing lines and split-second judgment might count for something. The usual narrative checkpoints are all here. There’s the arrogant rival who treats Jann like a trespasser. The skeptical gatekeepers. The concerned parents. A brief romantic subplot with just enough screen time to remind us Jann is still a teenager. But the race sequences—rendered with a lot of glass and horsepower—are genuinely tense. You can feel the weight of the car, the blur of risk. The style is measured, the thrills functional—less showboating, more grip. What I kept wondering was why Jann’s background is treated like a scandal. He trains in real cars, under real supervision, and meets the same standards as anyone else on the grid. The suspicion seems less about merit than optics—a kind of cultural immune response to someone entering the sport through the wrong door. Still, it works. The underdog arc plays clean, the tech angle feels slightly less silly than it should, and Harbour injects just enough gravity to keep the movie from floating off into marketing fluff. It’s a well-built machine. Turn the volume up.

A stoner comedy built on the principle that if you throw enough gags at the wall, something might stick—even if most of it slides off and collects near the floor. Grandma’s Boy doesn’t do much you haven’t seen before, but every now and then it manages to stumble into something genuinely funny. One highlight: a group of baked losers end up at a vegan restaurant and recoil in horror as their server (a glassy-eyed David Spade) pitches wheatgrass shots instead of booze. “That’s cool if you want to be sober and vomit,” one of them says. The rest is looser. Alex (Allen Covert), a video game tester in his mid-30s, gets evicted and moves in with his grandmother (Doris Roberts) and her two elderly roommates (Shirley Knight and Shirley Jones), who spend the movie toggling between quaint and cheerfully unhinged. Whether watching these seasoned actresses play dim-witted stoners is fun or depressing will vary by viewer—I found it mostly amusing. Linda Cardellini shows up as the new project manager at the gaming company, which means she’s technically the adult in the room. Joel Moore lurks as a monotone coworker who dresses like a Matrix reject and talks like a self-programmed AI. The whole thing’s lazy by design. It doesn’t escalate, and it barely finishes. But it has just enough weird detours and half-committed jokes to keep it from total dead air. A waste of time? Mostly. But I won’t jump out from behind your couch and slap the remote out of your hand if you decide to turn it on.

The Gray Man sees Netflix throw a mountain of money at the screen, hoping to mint a franchise, but all they end up with is a generic spy flick where the explosions have more personality than the people setting them off. The film isn’t a disaster—there’s enough polished action and competent mayhem to pass a couple of hours—but the script, loaded with half-baked banter and a plot stitched together from the genre’s leftovers, ensures that nothing sticks. Ryan Gosling plays Sierra Six, a convicted murderer recruited into the CIA’s black ops division and given a get-out-of-jail-free card in exchange for a lifetime of government-sanctioned killing. Flash forward 18 years, and he’s the agency’s most capable assassin, now in possession of a hard drive filled with evidence that could expose his corrupt handler (Regé-Jean Page). Naturally, the powers that be decide he needs to be eliminated, so they unleash the rabid, sadistic Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans, grinning like a man who just discovered how much fun it is to play a sociopath) to take him out. What follows is a world-hopping chase where every landmark is either shot at, blown up, or turned into collateral damage. The film’s biggest crime isn’t its predictability but its complete lack of tension. The action sequences—choreographed within an inch of their lives—feel more like expensive tech demos than actual stakes-driven confrontations. Gosling remains a mostly blank slate, all deadpan efficiency with little to latch onto emotionally. Ana de Armas gets to hold her own in the action, but her character never quite escapes the sidekick zone. Even Evans, clearly having the most fun of anyone, never pushes his villain past smug menace. Somewhere in the wreckage, there’s a film that could have been fun—something leaner, meaner, with a bit more personality—but The Gray Man plays like it’s too focused on looking expensive to figure out why it exists.

A candy-colored memory of the 1950s, filtered through the polyester haze of the late ’70s, Grease doesn’t bother much with coherence so long as the hips are swiveling and the bassline’s popping. The plot is paper-thin, but it hardly matters—the movie runs on vibe, not logic, and it’s got enough adolescent adrenaline to skate past its clunkier moments. John Travolta walks off with it as Danny Zuko, the greaser heartthrob who’s all pomade and posturing until his summer fling with goody-two-shoes Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) shows up at his high school and threatens to puncture his cool. Travolta plays the part like a kid who knows he’s being watched—loose-limbed, peacocking, occasionally sincere. Newton-John does what she can with the film’s central contradiction: her character’s only arc is a wardrobe change. The musical numbers are the real draw—peppy, overproduced, and staged with enough flair to make you forget you’ve heard most of these songs at weddings, karaoke bars, and theme parks for decades. “Greased Lightnin’,” “You’re the One That I Want,” and the title track still carry a jolt, even if the choreography sometimes looks like Broadway by way of gym class. Nobody looks remotely like a teenager. Half the cast could plausibly rent a car without a co-signer. But the movie doesn’t care, and maybe that’s part of the charm. What’s harder to forgive is the ending, which decides Sandy needs to rebrand in black spandex and a smoky exhale just to hold the attention of a boy who couldn’t be bothered to like her as-is—as if self-worth can be fast-tracked with a makeover and a wiggle. It’s framed as confidence but plays like concession, a calculated swap of personality for packaging. Then again, the movie ends with a flying car and a singalong, and by that point, protest feels beside the point.

A sly little riot of pratfalls and mockery, The Great Dictator jabs at fascism’s puffed-up chest and has the nerve to laugh while doing it. Decades later, it still rattles the nerves—not a solemn history lesson but a reminder of how ridiculously small tyranny can look when poked hard enough. Chaplin doubles up here—Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomainia, a parody so frothing it veers from buffoon to tyrant on a single syllable, and a nameless Jewish barber, the gentler echo of his Tramp, who fought in the Great War, lost his memory, and drifts back into a homeland he no longer recognizes. He finds his little barbershop branded “Jew” and tries to scrub the word off, blithely unaware this simple act might cost him his life—an act both naive and quietly brave. Between ghetto raids and goose-steps, Chaplin jams in deliciously timed gags: Hynkel tangled in microphones, balloons, sycophants. The famous globe dance—Hynkel waltzing with his own ambition, fingers tracing the continents—is so enduring it’s outlived countless history textbooks on the men he mocks. It’s easy to forget how bold this was—mocking a genocidal regime before the world knew how deep that horror ran. Chaplin didn’t yet know about gas chambers; his barbs hit vanity and cruelty, not mass murder. And yet, the film’s last pivot still humbles: the Barber, mistaken for Hynkel, climbs onto a stage and, with Chaplin’s real voice—normally mute—delivers a raw plea for human decency, liberty, and sanity in the face of mob madness. It shouldn’t hold together: slapstick against dictatorship, balloon gags beside genocide’s edges. But it does, miraculously—Chaplin’s audacity stitched to his moral clarity. Even now, that final speech can make cynics squirm.

It’s made clear to the German officers early on—by a British colonel—that Allied POWs will attempt escape. Not out of spite. Just standard procedure. The Great Escape runs nearly three hours, though you wouldn’t guess it. The structure is so quietly compulsive, the execution so assured, that the minutes seem to file themselves away. What starts as a war film gradually reveals itself as something closer to a heist movie—only the vault is a fence, and the prize is open air. Steve McQueen may grab the poster space (and the motorcycle), but this is an ensemble operation. McQueen’s Captain Virgil Hilts, the lone American, handles his solitary confinement with the swagger of someone who treats incarceration like a side hustle. But the real architect is Roger Bartlett (Richard Attenborough), a British officer with a plan so elaborate it requires its own supply chain. He doesn’t just want a few men out. He wants hundreds. Three tunnels—Tom, Dick, and Harry—each with their own design team, resource needs, and failure potential. The thrill isn’t in the actual escape—it’s in the prep. Every scene is a study in logistics: forging papers, tailoring civilian clothes, disposing of tunnel dirt with absurd discretion. There’s a whole subplot involving socks and trousers rigged to shake soil out while walking. The film turns tedium into theater. What’s always stuck with me—rightly or wrongly—is how enjoyable it all looks. Which is probably the wrong takeaway from a film about POWs tunneling their way out of a Nazi camp. But that charge is there: the pleasure of pure problem-solving, of minds locked in sync, of collaboration under pressure. It’s not the danger that energizes them—it’s the project. The shared focus. The inventiveness. And then, as it must, reality crashes through the blueprint. Not everyone makes it. The tone turns. But by then, the film has already done what it came to do. The Great Escape isn’t about triumph—it’s about audacity, and how far human ingenuity can go before the world reminds you where you are.

As a page-to-screen exercise, The Great Gatsby is dutiful. The narration is lifted straight from Fitzgerald, the wardrobe budget appears to have been limitless, and every third shot finds a new excuse to admire a martini glass. All the parts are in place. They just don’t do much when assembled. Robert Redford, sunlit and inscrutable, plays Gatsby like he’s modeling the idea of longing rather than feeling any of it. He’s handsome, distant, and emotionally fixed in place. Mia Farrow, as Daisy, flutters around him like a decorative lampshade—whispery, nervous, and never quite channeling the gravitational pull Gatsby spends the film orbiting. The romance stays abstract. You understand it’s supposed to matter, but it registers mostly as narrative paperwork. Production-wise, the film tries very hard. The mansions are enormous, the garden parties tastefully gaudy, and the color palette politely insists on its elegance. But for all its visual sprawl, the film feels oddly static. The endless closeups are meant to evoke intimacy but mostly trap the actors in their own stillness. No one moves. They pose. They sigh. They stare. It’s not unwatchable. It’s just inert. Glossy, literate, and deeply reluctant to take any risks that might complicate its source material. As a cinematic experience, it functions best as a visual companion to the novel—helpful if you’re cramming for a quiz, less so if you’re hoping for a movie that breathes.

It’s the kind of movie that makes you question how dark Disney’s “dark age” really was. Not a lost classic, not a buried gem—but fun, fast, and proof that the lights never fully went out. The Great Mouse Detective swaps Holmes and Watson for mice and keeps everything else intact. Basil of Baker Street (Barrie Ingham) is Sherlock in miniature—neurotic, brilliant, violin-prone. Dawson (Val Bettin), his biographer and companion, is a genial Watson stand-in with a mustache and a medical past. They live beneath 221B, unnoticed. The case arrives in the form of Olivia (Susanne Pollatschek), a young mouse with a missing father and the kind of wide eyes that only exist in animation. Her dad, Mr. Flaversham (Alan Young), is a toymaker—clockwork genius level—and he’s been snatched by something big, shadowy, and clanking. Basil glances around the toyshop and names the culprit: Professor Ratigan (Vincent Price), a rat who insists he isn’t one, with the ego of a monarch and the manners of a snake in formalwear. He’s building a robotic version of the Queen to hijack the throne. He also keeps a cat on hand for executions. It’s that kind of villainy. The animation doesn’t quite match the ambition. Character outlines are thick, movement can be stiff, and the style never fully settles. But the setting works—London by gaslight, with foggy alleys, crooked rooftops, and pubs that feel traced from a penny dreadful. The climax—set deep in the gears of Big Ben—is surprisingly tense. One of Disney’s earliest forays into computer-assisted animation, and it still holds. Not because of the technology, but because the sequence is built for impact: turning cogs, high stakes, and real momentum. Basil and Ratigan go after each other like it’s a grudge—and it is. It’s a lesser Disney, but not one to skip. Quick on its feet, stylish in its own right, and bolstered by Vincent Price playing each line like a threat wrapped in ribbon. Not quite a turning point, but a reminder: even in the off years, they still had bite.

I adored The Great Muppet Caper as a kid. As an adult, the affection mostly lingers out of habit. The film is bright, chaotic, intermittently clever—and very clearly straining to replicate the charm of its predecessor. This time, the gang is in London for reasons never fully explained. Kermit and Fozzie play identical twin journalists (a gag that gets repeated often and never once works), chasing down a jewel thief who has robbed fashion designer Lady Holiday (Diana Rigg). Miss Piggy, posing as Lady Holiday to impress Kermit, finds herself framed for the crime. It all escalates to a chase through the Mallory Gallery involving bicycles, disguises, and the entire Muppet ensemble in synchronized action mode. There’s a lot going on, and yet very little of it seems to follow any internal logic—not that it needs to. But even by Muppet standards, this one feels more patched together than The Muppet Movie. The decision to set it in England adds some visual variety but doesn’t do much else. Aside from a dinner scene with John Cleese and Joan Sanderson that mines some very dry British absurdity, the film doesn’t get much mileage out of its setting. The humor isn’t British, and the Muppets are still unmistakably American. Most of the human characters are too. Charles Grodin, playing Lady Holiday’s brother and the primary villain, seems to be operating out of a parallel universe—possibly one only he can see. But he’s committed, especially in a dinner scene where he attempts to seduce Miss Piggy with full sincerity and a lot of eye contact. Diana Rigg does her best to elevate things, though her screen time is oddly minimal. The musical numbers are fine, if not especially memorable. There’s even a bluegrass interlude when the Muppets check into a London hotel inexplicably staffed almost entirely by Americans. Like much of the film, it’s mildly amusing without ever quite clicking. Still, this is the Muppets we’re talking about, and even their off-days coast on residual affection. The Great Muppet Caper may be the weakest of the original trilogy, but it rides on enough goodwill to make it watchable—though not quite enough to hide how uneven and patchwork it all feels.

The Great Outdoors should have been a layup. A summer getaway, a rustic cabin, John Candy as the affable everyman trying to enjoy some peaceful, outdoorsy family bonding. But then Dan Aykroyd shows up as the uninvited, obnoxiously wealthy brother-in-law, and the whole thing slides into an uneasy mix of slapstick, forced hijinks, and half-baked set pieces that never quite find the right rhythm. Candy plays Chet Ripley, a good-natured working-class dad whose plans for a serene lakeside vacation with his wife (Stephanie Faracy) and kids are ambushed by Aykroyd’s Roman Craig, a smirking, motor-mouthed stock trader with a bottomless expense account and an ego to match. Roman arrives with his status-obsessed wife (Annette Bening, in her film debut) and their twin daughters, immediately sucking the oxygen out of the room with a mix of condescension and unwanted advice. Tensions simmer, competitions arise, and family values, predictably, triumph in the end. But getting there is the problem. John Hughes, who penned the script, had a knack for threading sentimentality through broad comedy, but The Great Outdoors never balances the two. The physical gags—an enormous steak challenge, a chaotic water-skiing mishap, an overgrown bald-headed bear—fall somewhere between undercooked and overplayed. Candy, ever the consummate pro, wrings as much warmth and likability out of his character as possible, but even he can’t make some of these scenes work. Aykroyd, meanwhile, pushes Roman to the edge of caricature, an exaggerated collision of yuppie arrogance and salesman bravado that never quite becomes fun to watch. The ingredients are there, and the film occasionally finds its footing in quieter moments, but as a comedy, it rarely clicks. Candy and Aykroyd deserved a sharper script; instead, they got a collection of gags that land with all the force of a mosquito hitting a windshield.

The Great Race is a lavish, old-school farce dressed up as a grand adventure, taking the simplest of premises—a long-distance auto race—and stretching it into an overstuffed, three-hour spectacle of slapstick, sight gags, and theatrical villainy. It’s a vaudeville routine played on an epic scale, a road movie that veers wildly into all manner of comedic detours, with a cast game to sell every ridiculous moment. The race in question: a global contest from New York to Paris, inspired by real-life daredevil competitions of the early 20th century, though played here strictly for laughs. Tony Curtis is The Great Leslie, a gleaming, heroic stunt driver whose immaculate white wardrobe stays pristine no matter how many explosions he walks away from. His arch-nemesis, the hilariously theatrical Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon), lurks in perpetual failure, designing elaborate schemes to sabotage Leslie’s chances—assisted, or possibly hindered, by his bumbling henchman Max (Peter Falk). Natalie Wood, as fiercely independent journalist Maggie DuBois, refuses to be left out, crashing the boys’ club and insisting on proving her own mettle behind the wheel. The journey spans continents, with every possible complication along the way: mechanical mishaps, thinly veiled cheating, a Bering Strait crossing, and a detour into a small European kingdom where Lemmon—now pulling double duty—plays a drunken, buffoonish prince who has no business running a country. By the time the film arrives at its famous climactic pie fight, the slapstick has escalated to near-operatic levels, with food flying in quantities that could have stocked an entire bakery for a year. It’s all pure, broad, unrestrained fun, built on cartoon logic and larger-than-life performances. Curtis and Wood play it relatively straight, but Lemmon—practically bouncing off the walls as both Fate and the hapless Prince Hapnick—steals the show with an exaggerated bravado that turns failure into an art form. Falk, gleefully dopey as his sidekick, makes every line land even when the script wanders. At 160 minutes, the film takes its time, but it moves with a sense of playfulness so consistent that the excess barely registers. Blake Edwards directs it like a love letter to silent film comedians and dime-store adventure serials, where every gag is bigger than the last, and every stunt is executed with winking theatricality. A romp through and through, it may not be streamlined, but it’s never anything less than entertaining.

The shadow that The Great Santini casts comes mostly from the force of Robert Duvall, radiating a swagger that swallows the room whole and spits it back full of tension. As Lieutenant Colonel Wilbur “Bull” Meechum—a Marine fighter pilot stuck peacetime-side in 1962—Duvall crafts a walking storm front: hero to his comrades, tyrant to his family, and so tangled up in his own myth that he can’t stop swinging even when there’s no fight left to win. Among the men, the nickname “The Great Santini” floats around like a campfire ghost story—part affectionate ribbing, part grim warning. A warrior with no war, Wilbur fills the void with drink, brags, and whatever test of dominance might remind everyone—especially his eldest son Ben (Michael O’Keefe)—that he’s still the toughest in the room. Their dynamic curdles into one of the more bruising father-son rivalries ever stuck on film: love barely recognizable beneath the barking orders and clenched fists. Nowhere is it clearer than on a driveway basketball court where Ben, for once, wins. Watching Wilbur choke down that loss—and then spit it out as a demand for a rematch, growling, “You gonna cry?”—tells you everything about this man and what he can’t admit to himself. Blythe Danner, luminous even under the weight of cigarette smoke and whiskey fumes, plays Lillian, the wife who smooths over Wilbur’s storms with half-lies about how all he wants is for Ben to toughen up. She says it like a prayer, and Ben pretends he believes her, even as he wonders what it would feel like if winning his father’s respect didn’t hurt so much. Around this clash of iron wills, the film loops in smaller tremors: Ben’s friendship with a local Black boy who stutters through slurs and fists hurled by neighborhood racists; his siblings—a bright spot of rowdy warmth, with Lisa Jane Persky stealing scenes as a sister who’s nobody’s shrinking violet. These threads bend back to Ben, whose arc is the slow, ragged process of deciding whether the father he fears might still be the man he hopes to become. Lewis John Carlino directs it all with a patient eye, never sanding off Wilbur’s edges or padding Ben’s pain with easy answers. It’s an unhurried study in contradictions: a man too big for the peacetime he’s stuck in, a son big enough to face him, and a family learning the hard truth that sometimes loving a hurricane means boarding up the windows and bracing for the worst.

A big, dumb blockbuster—but not a dead one. It thrashes, it flashes, and it’s got just enough spine to keep from folding in on itself. The premise is halfway deranged: two European mercenaries (Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal) stumble into a centuries-old war between the Chinese military and a horde of alien lizard-dog monsters that descend from a mountain every sixty years to snack on the empire. Their mission was gunpowder. What they get instead is front-row seats to a monster siege. Apparently, this is what the Great Wall was really built for. Attila the Hun, I guess, was just the scapegoat. The story barely expands past that. But it holds together—just—and takes its nonsense with a straight face. Damon, not exactly a regular in the kaiju genre (or anything with a green screen), growls and slashes his way through clouds of digital ash like he’s honoring a bet. Pascal, looser, funnier, behaves like a man who knows better and showed up anyway. Willem Dafoe is there too, doing… something. Mostly lurking. The design is more PlayStation 4 than prehistoric terror, but the battle choreography is ornate enough to work on its own terms. Armies leap from towers in synchronized stuntwork. Spears fly in spirals. A drum line cues the archers. It’s nonsense, but it’s nonsense with a budget—and an eye for dazzle. Then the spectacle pauses, and the movie tries to talk. That’s when it stalls. Conversations stretch like they’re waiting for another monster to arrive and save the scene. Characters speak of honor, trust, loyalty—the usual—with the urgency of a hotel check-in. It’s not exactly a movie worth seeking out. But if you’ve burned through the MCU and want something equally stupid with better architecture, it plays. You might not finish it. But maybe you won’t be mad you tried.

A Southern-fried noir with a mean streak and a crooked grin, Greedy People plays like a discounted Coen Brothers flick—less idiosyncratic, but still brimming with bad choices and worse people. The catalyst is Will (Himesh Patel), a rookie cop with a fresh badge and a nervous stomach. On his first day, he’s paired with Terry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a swaggering, wildly inappropriate officer who seems more interested in playlist curation and hookups than community policing. While Terry’s otherwise engaged—shirt half-off, music blaring—Will responds to a radio call he mistakes for a burglary. It’s not. It’s a complaint about a sex act in a parked car. By the time Will realizes the non-seriousness of the situation, he’d already panicked and pulled his gun. The woman is dead. Terry catches up with Will finds a basket stuffed with cash—$1 million, tax-free—in the house. They pocket it, fast, and start working on their alibis. Unfortunately, the money wasn’t hers. It was a murder deposit—left by her husband to pay a hitman to kill the very wife Terry accidentally killed. The hitman shows up, puzzled to find the job done. But despite the dirty work being finished, he still intends to collect on that $1 million. The plot unspools from there—tense, bloody, and occasionally hilarious. The tone walks a line between grim and farce, never taking itself too seriously to enjoy itself. Gordon-Levitt, in particular, makes a meal of his role—firing off lines in a drawl thick enough to fry. Anyone who likes their comedies dark and gruesome, this is a good pick. The movie doesn’t always cut as deep as it thinks it does, and it lacks the peculiar detail that might have made it something more. But as a pulpy spiral into greed, guilt, and terrible improvisation, it moves fast and ends on the right kind of wrong note.

Green Ice suggests something exotic, maybe even dangerous—smuggled jewels, cutthroat deals, jungles thick with betrayal. Instead, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a resort brochure left out in the rain, the colors running, the promises smudged. Ryan O’Neal, wearing the expression of a man who booked the wrong flight but decided to make the best of it, plays Baxter, an electrical engineer with no visible interest in engineering but a sudden enthusiasm for emerald smuggling. His involvement begins as an investigation into a friend’s suspicious death, but the film wastes little time before nudging him into full-time adventurer mode. Anne Archer, at least, is present and engaged—her character Holbrook isn’t just there to provide soft-focus romance but gets involved in the action, proving more dynamic than the film deserves. Omar Sharif, suave as ever, plays crime boss Meno Argenti, a man who handles his own affairs rather than outsourcing all villainy to underlings. He’s got the presence, but the script gives him little more to do than issue threats and look vaguely displeased when things don’t go his way. The film moves, technically speaking, but mostly in the way a lazy river moves—scenic, directionally correct, but never in a hurry to generate excitement. There are chases, shootouts, betrayals, all arranged with the efficiency of a checklist. Everything unfolds as expected, yet never with the energy to make any of it feel necessary. The emeralds are the real stars here, not because the cinematography worships them, but because they’re the only thing anyone on screen seems remotely excited about. For those who will watch anything that faintly resembles a James Bond knockoff, Green Ice at least delivers exotic locations and sun-drenched escapism. Everyone else may start wondering if the real smuggling operation here was the plot escaping before the film even started.

The Green Years is a story about an orphan, a miser, and a great-grandfather who looks like he’s been drinking since the day he was born. It unfolds with the stubborn warmth of an old radiator—slow to heat up, but by the end, you’re tucked in, whether you meant to be or not. Dean Stockwell, fresh-faced and wide-eyed, is Robert Shannon, shipped off from Ireland to Scotland to live with a family that sees him less as a relative and more as an accounting error. His grandfather (Hume Cronyn, counting pennies like they hold state secrets) barely tolerates his existence, let alone the possibility of funding his future. The boy’s bed is already occupied—by Charles Coburn, whose Alexander Gow is a walking contradiction: a bearded, bedraggled drinker with a sharper mind than anyone in the house, a teller of tall tales who somehow delivers more truth than the practical men around him. A surrogate father by default, if not by intent. The boy learns, grows, stumbles. The years pass. Tom Drake steps in, suddenly Robert is nearly a man, and the question of medical school looms over him like a dinner bill he wasn’t prepared to cover. The grandfather, consistent in his stinginess, refuses to part with a single coin. A fortune hoarded is a fortune never spent, after all. Coburn, meanwhile, gives one of those performances that sneaks up on you—boozy, blunt, unpolished in the best way. He isn’t playing a kindly old sage with a twinkle in his eye; he’s a man who’s seen life from the losing side enough times to know that sometimes the only thing worth passing down is belief. The Green Years doesn’t press too hard. It doesn’t beg. It just unfolds, its heart beating under layers of dust and stubbornness. A sentimental film, but not a soggy one. The kind of movie that might not look like much at first glance, but by the time you’ve settled in, it’s already got you.

Greenfingers takes a handful of ex-cons, drops them into an English garden, and waits for the transformation. It happens, of course. The film was never going to let a good metaphor go to waste. Clive Owen, all quiet brooding and barely disguised reluctance, plays Colin, a convicted murderer who gets plucked from his usual prison routine and replanted in an experimental facility where rehabilitation is measured in flower beds, not years served. He doesn’t ask for this. He doesn’t even want it. But one patch of violets later, he’s knee-deep in horticultural destiny. A small crew of fellow inmates gathers around him, each discovering a previously dormant passion for pruning, planting, and occasionally waxing poetic about chrysanthemums. Soon, the hardened men with softened souls are off to compete at the Hampton Court Flower Show, because why stop at redemption when you can aim for first prize? The film gets a lot of mileage out of the visual contrast—the tattooed brute carefully arranging a floral display, the ex-thief trimming hedges with the concentration of a Renaissance sculptor—but it never quite figures out what else to do. It’s pleasant, certainly. It even gets the job done. But it rarely digs deeper than its premise, treating its big ideas—prison reform, second chances, human resilience—like decorative mulch. Helen Mirren sweeps in as a gardening doyenne who takes an interest in the inmates, delivering every line as if she’s the only one here who knows how to make things bloom. She’s right. Her presence alone nearly tricks the film into thinking it’s sharper than it is. There’s warmth, there’s humor, there’s something undeniably satisfying about watching hardened criminals fuss over begonias. But Greenfingers stays in its flowerbed, content with the easy growth. No pruning necessary, no real cultivation required. Just water it, let it bloom, and hope the audience makes the right noises.

The creature feature gets a holiday twist in Gremlins, Joe Dante’s genre-scrambling blend of horror, comedy, and Christmas detritus. A well-meaning but wildly impractical inventor (Hoyt Axton) stumbles upon a strange creature in a Chinatown shop—a wide-eyed furball known as a Mogwai—and gifts it to his son Billy (Zach Galligan) with only three rules: avoid bright light, keep it dry, and under no circumstances feed it after midnight. Two out of three are ignored, and what begins as a warm, fuzzy gift turns into a full-blown infestation. Water produces a litter of new Mogwai. Food after midnight turns them into something far less cuddly: gremlins—scaly, manic, and gleefully destructive. They overrun the town in elaborate set pieces that mix slapstick with real menace, tossing darts, slashing wires, and turning a quiet bar into a cabaret of mayhem. The tone jerks from mischief to menace and back again—one moment playing like a kids’ cartoon with sharper teeth, the next teetering into genuine horror. A monologue about a chimney-related death lands like an icicle through the mood, but Dante never lets things settle for long. The gremlins themselves are the draw: twitchy, stylized, and individually sketched, some with mohawks or trench coats, others just wide-eyed with destruction on their minds. The human characters, for their part, mostly drift through. Pleasant enough, but easy to misplace amid the noise. Gremlins is nasty fun—mechanical, chaotic, and weirdly festive. It’s the kind of Christmas movie that wraps its message in tinsel, bites the hand that opens it, and laughs on the way out.

More incantation than narrative, Gretel & Hansel casts a spell it never quite finishes. The tone is narcotic, the visuals precise, but story slips through your fingers like smoke—pretty to watch, hard to hold. It’s not incoherent, exactly. The question is more basic: what, exactly, are we following? The title reorders the siblings and so does the film. Gretel—sixteen, sharp-bobbed, with a stare that looks older than she is—is played by Sophia Lillis. Her little brother Hansel (Sam Leakey), maybe eight, trails behind, mostly hungry and increasingly irrelevant. They’re forced out of the house by their mother—who, in a rage, grabs an ax and tells them not to come back. It’s not neglect; it’s eviction by threat. So they walk. Into the forest, out of context. They stumble across a house that smells like cake. It belongs to a witch named Holda—played by Alice Krige, under uncanny prosthetics and with the gait of something reptilian and wrong. Her face looks like it’s been stretched and reset by someone with an unreliable concept of youth. Her eyes are voids. Her voice is syrup poured over bones. Everyone else in their world is worse, so her hospitality almost passes for kindness. Gretel, as it turns out, isn’t just hungry—she’s powerful. Holda senses it, cultivates it, encourages it. Soon Gretel is levitating staffs, cooking with incantations, and slipping into visions that smell like rot and resolve. The magic isn’t metaphorical. It’s real. And it’s hers. The film is gorgeously composed. Shadows slide across faces like ink in water. The frame stays still, but the atmosphere writhes. There’s a slow-drip soundtrack and some genuinely striking imagery—meals that twitch, dreamscapes lined with geometry and gore. It’s a feast, but not a story. Once Gretel begins embracing her power, the moral fable dissolves into aesthetic. What’s left is mood in a vacuum. Beautiful, elaborate, and inert—like a cautionary tale embalmed in wax.

If the 1966 Grinch was a slinking, sinister fable narrated by a voice that could chill a winter’s night, this one is a candy-colored sprint, its every movement dialed up, its edges sanded down. The core remains: the Grinch, a walking, talking allergy to joy, sets out to rob Christmas blind, his mission as efficient as a department store sweep. But this time, he’s more exasperated than mean, a fussbudget with seasonal fatigue, less a menace than a man inconvenienced by his neighbors’ enthusiasm. Benedict Cumberbatch gives the Grinch a voice with no rasp, no growl, just the mild irritation of someone who didn’t get enough sleep and now has to watch everyone else have fun. He scowls from his mountaintop lair with his dog, Max, the real MVP of the operation, who fetches coffee and operates machinery like a seasoned butler stuck in the wrong household. Whoville, below, is as bright and bustling as a toy commercial, its inhabitants glowing with the kind of relentless goodwill that could put a weaker soul into hibernation. Cindy Lou Who (Cameron Seely) isn’t just a wide-eyed ornament this time—she has a plan, a full-scale, elaborately orchestrated Christmas wish, and she moves through the film like someone determined to make things happen, with or without the plot’s permission. The animation is plush, glossy, the colors so rich they feel sugared. The physical comedy comes in bursts—big, swooping gags that play like test footage for a theme park ride. The sentimental core has been stretched out, softened. The Grinch isn’t so much a misanthrope as a misunderstood loner, his bitterness more about childhood neglect than anything truly rotten. His change of heart, when it comes, feels less like a revelation and more like a slow, expected thaw, the kind that starts with small talk and ends with an invite to dinner. Illumination has made a career out of translating mischief into marketable sweetness, and The Grinch is no exception. It barrels forward on pure visual momentum, bound to delight children, amuse their parents, and leave no lasting footprint once the last ornament is back in the attic. A Grinch designed for the background of a Christmas morning, as visually appealing as wrapping paper, and just as disposable.

A metaphysical comedy built on repetition, Groundhog Day somehow avoids ever feeling repetitive. It’s a loop movie, yes—but also a perfectly circular showcase for Bill Murray, who turns cynicism into a kind of art form. He plays Phil Connors, a Pittsburgh weatherman with the warmth of a wet sock, dispatched to Punxsutawney to cover the annual Groundhog Day festivities—a gig he clearly thinks belongs to someone with a smaller ego and worse hair. Phil sneers through the assignment, shrugs off the locals, and retreats to his bed-and-breakfast with the air of a man who thinks he’s only passing through. Then it happens. He wakes up the next morning to find Sonny and Cher still on the clock radio, the same snow falling, the same people saying the same things. It’s February 2nd. Again. And again. And again. Time has broken its contract, and Phil is stuck—no consequences, no exit. What begins as a cosmic joke—one man trapped in a day that won’t quit—gradually becomes something closer to a moral biography. Murray doesn’t play it as a grand transformation, just a slow erosion: first the thrill of consequence-free living, then the drift into boredom, then the quiet horror that nothing changes no matter what he does. He robs armored trucks, eats stacks of pancakes like a man trying to fill the void, and dies more times than the film bothers to count. But the real pleasure is watching the edges wear down. Gradually, imperceptibly, the smirk softens. He starts noticing things. Other people become more than furniture. It’s the same day, over and over, but Murray finds the variations. Chris Elliott and Stephen Tobolowsky, as Phil’s cameraman and former classmate respectively, operate like satellite dishes for his worst behavior—receiving the abuse and, on occasion, reflecting it back with unexpected precision. Andie MacDowell, as Rita, the producer and eventual romantic interest, floats through it with poise and an expression that says she’s seen men like Phil before and mostly learned not to encourage them. Whether the love story sticks is debatable—one could argue the film doesn’t need it—but it’s handled with such restraint that it feels like part of the larger arc: a man learning, slowly and hilariously, how to be tolerable. The movie’s secret isn’t just its clever premise or Murray’s gift for deadpan—it’s how quietly profound the whole thing becomes. The laughs don’t stop, but somewhere in the middle of all that self-improvement, you start to believe this could be a blueprint for redemption: no magic fix, just repetition and time. Lots and lots of time.

Eight Vassar women throw their caps in the air, and the film traces what happens when they come down. The Group opens in 1933 with a graduation full of high-minded ideals—progress, purpose, the belief that intelligence guarantees a better world. Then it moves forward, not in arcs, but in fragments. Marriage, work, breakdowns, dead ends—the paths don’t so much diverge as dissolve. Adapted from Mary McCarthy’s novel, the film divides its attention with near-clinical evenness. Kay (Joanna Pettet) marries a temperamental playwright who treats their life like rehearsal space. Dottie (Joan Hackett) trades innocence for disillusionment and handles it better than most. Priss (Elizabeth Hartman) is steered into motherhood by a husband who treats her body like a science project. Lakey (Candice Bergen), aloof and unreadable, returns from Europe with a companion no one mentions—and no one quite knows how to. The movie skips ahead without warning. Years vanish between scenes. Characters disappear and reemerge altered. Major events are delivered mid-conversation, without windup or aftermath. And yet it holds together—not tightly, but with purpose. The ensemble—Pettet, Bergen, Hackett, Hartman, Jessica Walter, Shirley Knight—maintains a shared balance. No one grandstands. That’s the design. This isn’t about standouts; it’s about intersection. The film doesn’t explain its subjects—mental illness, marital rape, abortion, class, closeted sexuality—it simply folds them in. Not themes, exactly. More like weather. Sidney Lumet doesn’t press on the material—he gives it room, then lets the tension surface on its own. The drama isn’t heightened; it’s allowed to settle, uneven and a little raw. Nothing gets tied up, but nothing feels abandoned either. It just unspools the way life does when no one’s narrating. The Group isn’t trying to grab you. It builds slowly, scene by scene, until you realize how much it’s been tracking. At 150 minutes, it asks for patience. But what it gives back is a broad, faintly unsettling snapshot of what it looked like to be smart, female, and unprepared for the kind of decade that won’t stay on course. The film doesn’t end with resolution. It ends with a glance—at what’s changed, and who’s still around to notice.

A comedy in theory, a vacation in practice. Grown Ups assembles a roster of seasoned comedians, drops them in a lakeside setting, and lets the cameras roll on whatever happens between catered meals. The result is less a movie and more a loosely supervised hangout, stitched together with the narrative urgency of a backyard barbecue that got out of hand. The cast is a Happy Madison family reunion, each member playing an approximation of their usual persona. Adam Sandler, as always, is the relatable nice guy whose success is never explained but always implied. Kevin James, whose character development begins and ends at his waistline, is the designated punchline for weight-related gags. Chris Rock, noticeably disengaged, delivers his lines as if waiting for someone to write him better ones. David Spade smirks his way through single-guy jokes, and Rob Schneider, trapped in a subplot about his three daughters—two statuesque, one short and quirky, the horror—absorbs the script’s most desperate attempts at humor. What passes for comedy is an endless loop of body-shaming, lazy bickering, and extended gags that wear out their welcome on arrival. Maria Bello’s character breastfeeds a preschooler because someone, somewhere, thought that was worth repeating. The water park sequence divides the sexes with almost clinical precision—the men race down slides, the women lounge in chairs, exchanging lines that barely qualify as conversation. A climactic basketball rematch, featuring Colin Quinn holding onto a decades-old grudge, is meant to tie everything together, but the film never builds to anything because there’s nothing holding it up in the first place. A single moment lands—Schneider, warbling Ave Maria at a funeral, selling it like the rest of the movie wasn’t happening around him. The rest is vacation footage someone mistook for a script.

The first one was a vacation disguised as a movie. This one is a tax write-off disguised as a dare. Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, and David Spade return, their characters less relevant than their willingness to show up. The plot, such as it exists, is that they continue being themselves while the film arranges a loose collection of incidents around them, none of which resemble jokes so much as the rough sketches of things that could have been funny if anyone had bothered to finish them. A CGI deer introduces itself by urinating on everything in sight, and from there, the film follows its lead, marking its territory in the cheapest, laziest ways possible. Sandler commandeers a bus from a driver who is too mentally unstable to be behind the wheel. Kevin James worries that his children are turning into spoiled brats, but the film never pauses long enough to show what that actually means. Chris Rock has an anniversary subplot that barely registers. David Spade has a long-lost son, fully grown, fully enraged, fully capable of delivering physical harm. Meanwhile, Nick Swardson is unleashed upon the set like a daredevil with no concept of self-preservation, filling the Rob Schneider-shaped void with an energy that can only be described as present. The movie doesn’t escalate so much as it persists, throwing bodies, objects, and Shaquille O’Neal at the screen in place of comedy. There’s a climactic ‘80s-themed party where everyone is in costume, though the film has already been in disguise the entire time, pretending to be a real movie when it is, in fact, just footage of famous people wasting time.

The first film gave Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon the ultimate playground: a small-town Minnesota grudge match with ice-fishing, insult comedy, and just enough sentimentality to pass for a real movie. This one gives them less. They still grumble, still take lazy swings at each other, but their hearts aren’t in it. The feud is friendly now, their jabs softened into routine, like old vaudevillians who’ve played the act too many times to make it sting. With no war left to fight, the film hands them a new one. The bait shop, their sacred clubhouse, has been sold. The new owner, Maria (Sophia Loren), plans to turn it into an Italian restaurant—a concept so radical for these two that sabotage is required. A guinea pig is smuggled in during a health inspection, the logic being that one rodent would suggest an entire infestation. But sabotage turns to infatuation the moment they realize Maria isn’t just a business threat—she’s a widow, available, and a woman so glamorous that her arrival in this town feels like an administrative error. By sheer luck, she happens to live in a world where Walter Matthau is considered a viable prospect. Burgess Meredith, the true master of the Grumpy franchise, delivers his lines like they were collected from a long and reckless life, improvised between sips of something stronger than coffee. His subplot—wooing Maria’s mother (Ann Morgan Guilbert) with the enthusiasm of a man unbothered by time—outshines the central romance. Elsewhere, the film follows its predecessor’s structure: old men griping, old men flirting, one final push for emotion. But where Grumpy Old Men used its last act to deepen the friendship, this one drops in a tragedy, wipes its hands, and moves on. The actors are legends, the banter is still warm, but Grumpier Old Men is less a movie than an encore, performed at half-speed.

Sixty years of feuding, and the best they’ve got is “moron” and “putz”? Lemmon and Matthau have sharpened their knives on better scripts, and yet here they are, two of the greatest onscreen grumblers, tossing out grade-school taunts like it’s their first fight instead of their thousandth. The insults don’t cut, but the chemistry still carries them—two old pros knocking around in the snow, still getting in each other’s way, still refusing to admit they’d be lost without someone to grumble at. John Gustafson (Lemmon) and Max Goldman (Matthau), next-door neighbors and lifelong aggravations, treat their mutual loathing like a part-time job. Then Ann-Margret moves in across the street, and suddenly they’re punching the clock with renewed enthusiasm. A woman—vivacious, elegant, inexplicably single—has arrived, and rather than questioning why someone like her is even entertaining the idea of romancing these two frostbitten combatants, the film assumes that this, of course, is the natural order of things. The romance, such as it is, flutters around like a wayward holiday decoration—nice to look at, but misplaced. Ann-Margret, as radiant as ever, is given little to do beyond coaxing and giggling, as though the real plot is simply waiting for these men to collapse from exhaustion so she can pick a winner by default. Elsewhere, an IRS subplot barely registers, and John’s daughter (Daryl Hannah) debates leaving her cardboard husband (Christopher McDonald), though the film shows no real interest in whether she does or doesn’t. And then, like a gust of inappropriate wind, Burgess Meredith enters. A 90-something force of nature, arriving like he’s just stumbled out of a bar where the drinks were strong and the conversation stronger. He delivers his lines like a man with nothing left to lose, hurling dirty jokes and unsolicited wisdom with the kind of reckless abandon the rest of the film could’ve used. Even at half-strength, Lemmon and Matthau run circles around the material. The movie, though, mistakes goodwill for inspiration, forgetting that a snowball fight only works when someone actually throws the first shot.

Marvel finally cracked a smile. The story’s still there, ticking under the surface, but Guardians of the Galaxy is more interested in banter, blasters, and a perfectly timed pop song than following the blueprint. The plot moves, sure—but the movie doesn’t march. It skips, spins, fires itself out of a cannon, and yells something sarcastic on the way down. Chris Pratt plays Peter Quill, a self-appointed outlaw who goes by “Star-Lord”—a nickname met with near-universal derision. He’s cocky, clueless, and coasting on charisma—just enough to avoid getting spaced. His fellow misfits include Rocket (Bradley Cooper), a bitter raccoon with a love of explosives; Groot (Vin Diesel), a tree who says one thing and somehow becomes the emotional core; Drax (Dave Bautista), a pink-skinned brute who treats every metaphor like a factual error; and Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), a green-skinned assassin with a conscience and a complicated family tree. The object of desire is a glowing orb, which they circle like pigeons around a lit firecracker—drawn in, clueless, ready to scatter. Inside is an Infinity Stone: universe-breaking, temperamental, and the kind of thing you don’t hand to someone like Thanos (Josh Brolin), who talks in scripture. He wants it badly and lends an army to Ronan (Lee Pace), a genocidal zealot who promptly keeps both the troops and the stone, then sets his sights on Xandar—the sanitized capital of a galactic peacekeeping force called the Nova Corps. That’s not what Thanos had in mind, but it does clear his schedule. Technically, it’s franchise setup. But the movie’s real interest lies in how these characters bounce off each other. Sincerity slips between the jokes—not as contrast, but as cadence. The humor keeps the engine running. When the plot wheezes or the fights turn to noise, the dialogue pulls it back on track. James Gunn directs like someone raised on Flash Gordon and worn-out cassette tapes. The retro soundtrack—’70s and ’80s pop—isn’t just flair, it’s propulsion. These songs are all from the past, but they drive the present, dragging the story forward even when the characters would rather stall. The stakes never quite hit the ground—they hover, threatening to matter later. But that’s fine. Guardians runs on rhythm and rapport. For the first time in this franchise, I wanted to stick around—not because I was promised something bigger, but because I liked who I was stuck there with.

A former First Lady and a Secret Service agent locked in a battle of sheer stubbornness—this is the kind of premise that works when the performers know how to dig their heels in. And Shirley MacLaine and Nicolas Cage dig. They snap and sneer their way through a movie that starts as a wry tug-of-war and ends as a procedural exercise in forced sentimentality, the transition less organic than contractual. MacLaine, all regal exasperation, plays Tess Carlisle, a political widow who treats her protection detail less as security and more as a personal staff. Cage, a clenched jaw in a government-issued suit, plays Doug Chesnic, an agent who doesn’t find Guarding Tess nearly as amusing as Tess does. He treats protocol like scripture. She prefers creative interpretations. He wants to be transferred. She refuses to sign off on it. The whole setup is a power struggle disguised as workplace friction, and for a while, it’s fun watching these two sandpaper each other down, neither willing to admit the game is more interesting than the victory. And then, the shift. The film, unable to resist, decides it needs higher stakes. Enter a kidnapping subplot, a detour into dramatic urgency that not only fails to enhance the relationship but distracts from what worked in the first place. The elegance of MacLaine’s barbed delivery, the way Cage’s controlled rage simmers just below his clipped professionalism—both reduced to function rather than flavor, the story pulling them toward something more formulaic when it was already working just fine. This is a movie that glows brightest when it does the least—just two pros circling each other, locked in verbal combat. The trick was never forcing them to bond. The trick was letting them keep fighting.

Guess Who takes the premise of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and flips the casting. The 1967 film featured a white liberal family thrown off guard when their daughter brought home a fiancé—and failed to mention he was Black. Guess Who flips the setup: this time it’s Theresa (Zoë Saldaña), a young Black woman, introducing her white boyfriend, Simon (Ashton Kutcher), to her family. The cultural backdrop may have changed, but the film doesn’t seem especially interested in what that change adds up to. It skips the commentary and heads straight for sitcom protocol. Percy (Bernie Mac), Theresa’s father, isn’t grappling with anything—he just doesn’t want his daughter marrying a white guy. No introspection, no pretense. Just flat rejection, mined for laughs. Never mind that he lives in a neighborhood where the air practically hums with sprinkler systems and beige stucco. The film gestures toward tension, then quietly excuses itself. What it really wants to be is Meet the Parents, and that’s exactly where it parks. Kutcher stumbles through a series of contrived humiliations. Bernie Mac watches, judges, and delivers each line like it’s closing a case. The one scene that actually crackles—Percy baiting Simon into reciting every Black joke he knows—is queasy, uncomfortable, and the only moment that threatens to go somewhere unplanned. Kutcher and Saldaña play well together, and there are a few scattered laughs, but the arc—grudging hostility giving way to forced respect—is telegraphed from minute one and lands with all the ceremony of a checkout receipt. The opportunity was there—to push into discomfort, to show what progress looks like when it knocks on your front door and wants to marry your daughter. But Guess Who sidesteps it. Race is treated like set dressing, conflict like a scheduling hiccup. The resolution shows up right on time, smiling politely. Whatever truth might’ve been hiding under the jokes stays there—uninvited, unexamined, and entirely avoided.

The news couldn’t be better. Joanna Drayton (Katharine Houghton), fresh off a Hawaiian vacation, is getting married. Her fiancé, Dr. John Prentice (Sidney Poitier), is brilliant, accomplished—the sort of man any reasonable parents would be thrilled to welcome into the family. But this is 1967, and Joanna’s parents, Matt (Spencer Tracy) and Christina (Katharine Hepburn), who consider themselves politically progressive, are about to find out just how flexible their progressivism really is. She never mentioned on the phone that John is Black. Joanna, radiant and oblivious, doesn’t see the problem. John does. Matt and Christina, who raised their daughter on the principles of tolerance and equality, have never considered that they might one day be asked to practice what they preach. Christina, caught first in the headlights, blinks back her reaction, teetering between maternal warmth and momentary panic. Matt retreats to his study, where FDR’s portrait looms like a reminder of what an evolved man is supposed to do. He doesn’t rant, doesn’t rage, just stares into the abyss of his own discomfort and realizes it might be staring back. Stanley Kramer doesn’t stack the deck. There are no brutes or bigots, just two well-meaning intellectuals who thought they had conquered their own biases until reality exposed the weak spots. The script—sharp, knowing, and more interested in social hypocrisy than melodrama—lets the tension build without artificial fireworks. Tracy plays Matt as a man in slow-motion freefall, knowing his argument is hollow but clinging to it anyway. Hepburn turns Christina into an emotional referee, flickering between defense and surrender. The film does them a favor, though. John Prentice, flawless on paper and in person, makes their internal struggle easier. He’s a doctor, a gentleman, a man who handles the situation with unwavering patience. He is, in short, unimpeachable. Imagine if Joanna had brought home a firebrand, a Black man unwilling to negotiate his place at the table. The film doesn’t go that far. The subject was already radical for 1967, when interracial marriage was still illegal in parts of the country, so it keeps the shockwaves contained. This is a film about boundaries being tested but never fully breached, about progressive ideals held to the flame but not quite burned. It flatters as much as it challenges, but the questions it raises still sting. Tracy, in his final performance, delivers a closing monologue so weighted with truth that it nearly upends the film’s careful diplomacy. The resolution might be tidy, but the hesitation lingers, unspoken yet undeniable.

The film opens in the dead of night, where Michael Bannon (Michael Sarrazin), a man whose greatest joy in life seems to be breaking speed limits in the most flamboyant way possible, unlocks a safe, plucks out a lone gumball, and rolls it between his fingers like a gambler sizing up his last lucky chip. Then, with the confidence of a man who’s made this call many times before, he picks up the phone and speaks a single word: Gumball. That’s all it takes. Across the country, garage doors lift, engines cough to life, and drivers abandon their better judgment with the urgency of someone dodging a debt collector. The Gumball Rally is on. No prize, no trophy, no fanfare. Just a wild-eyed dash from New York to Los Angeles in whatever machine you trust to get you there. Raul Julia, playing an Italian racer whose love for speed is matched only by his appreciation for the finer things in life—namely himself—treats the road as a stage and his Ferrari as the scene partner who never misses a cue. A motorcycle rider, blessed with more enthusiasm than skill, ricochets through the race like a pinball without flippers. Some cars barely make it out of the garage. Others see their fate sealed in a spectacular, physics-defying farewell before the starting line has even faded into the distance. One man refuses to be left in the dust: Norman Burton’s police officer, a man who doesn’t just want to catch the racers—he wants to defeat them. He plots, he fumes, he pictures himself in a different ending where order triumphs over anarchy. The movie has no intention of giving him that satisfaction. He’s an irritation, an inconvenience, a speed bump in a road designed for straightaways. The racers barely acknowledge his existence, except to laugh as he falls further behind. The film keeps moving because stopping would mean second-guessing, and that’s not on the itinerary. The jokes fire off with the same reckless abandon as the cars, some of them sticking, others veering off into the unknown. The score, all ragtime bounce and syncopated insistence, practically dances on the hood, reminding everyone that this is all meant to be very, very amusing. And for the most part, it is. The Gumball Rally doesn’t ask why—it just presses the gas and trusts the road to hold.

Three British soldiers, theoretically responsible for upholding the crown’s authority in colonial India, march through the terrain with the discipline of overgrown schoolboys let loose in a playground. Cutter (Cary Grant) chases buried treasure, MacChesney (Victor McLaglen) chases battle, and Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) chases the respectable life he keeps meaning to settle into. Their latest assignment—investigating a telegraph station gone dark—starts as military routine and ends somewhere between a battlefield and a circus act. A regiment is lost, a weapon recovered, and the worst-case scenario realized: the Thuggee cult, long thought eradicated, has been sharpening its blades in the hills, waiting for the right moment to strike. Along for the mission is Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe), a water bearer with the soul of a soldier, a dreamer with no rank to his name, trailing behind them like an overeager recruit hoping to prove himself. He watches, listens, absorbs. His instincts don’t belong to a man of servitude; they belong to a man who sees what’s coming long before the officers do. The temple of gold isn’t just gold, and the cult’s leader (Eduardo Ciannelli) isn’t just a fanatic. The trap has already been set, and by the time the three soldiers realize it, they’re already inside. The film moves like it’s being chased. George Stevens directs with a precision that lets action and comedy collide without tripping over each other—screwball rhythms one moment, a cavalry charge the next, a knife fight before the dust settles. Grant, limber as ever, vaults and tumbles through it all, a rogue with a grin that suggests he’s three thoughts ahead but still happy to let fate roll the dice. McLaglen bellows and bulldozes, Fairbanks Jr. holds it together, and the whole thing barrels forward with the kind of reckless momentum that defines the best adventure films. There’s baggage, of course—Jaffe, a Jewish actor in brownface, playing an Indian character; the colonialist perspective running through the story—but Gunga Din doesn’t stop to justify itself. It’s too busy putting its characters in peril, pulling them out, and hurling them back in again. When the stakes finally settle, the fight isn’t about empire or orders or medals. It’s about the one man no one saw coming, the one man who saw everything.

Juan Degas, Jack of Diamonds (Erik Estrada, radiating the menace of a man who treats silk shirts and a smirk as power moves), runs a weapons smuggling operation stretching from Hawaii to Arizona. The only real obstacle: Donna (Dona Speir) and Nicole (Roberta Vasquez), undercover government agents who seem convinced that crime-fighting is best done in bikinis. His solution—wipe them out. His hit squad, a hulking brute and a sultry assassin, goes for subtlety. Instead of eliminating the targets, they kill the wrong person, sending the investigation into chaos and buying Degas some time. Donna and Nicole, thoroughly unimpressed, put together a counteroffensive. Their reinforcements: a Vegas showgirl, a government agent disguised as a lounge act, and a team of impossibly sculpted gunmen who look like they should be flexing on the cover of Muscle & Fitness. The strategy, as always in Sidaris films, involves explosions, heavy artillery, and an unwavering commitment to maintaining perfect hair under enemy fire. Sidaris operates by a strict cinematic philosophy: Guns, Grenades, and Gratuitous Nudity. The script is a loose framework, a means to shuttle the cast between shootouts, hot tub rendezvous, and midriff-baring reconnaissance work. The women take as many showers as they do gunfights, and the film treats clothing as an optional accessory. Then Degas moves operations to Lake Havasu, and the movie grinds to a halt to admire the scenery. Boats glide across the water, villains lounge on luxury decks, and the pacing slows to a crawl as the camera indulges in what feels like a promotional video for Arizona tourism. Barely watchable as an action film, Guns exists purely for those who thrive on high camp and late-night cable aesthetics. It builds no tension, develops no characters, and cares little for anything that doesn’t involve gunfire or swimwear. It does, however, make sure that no one, at any point, is overdressed.

Andy Milligan’s idea of medieval justice plays out in a crumbling monastery where Guru (Neil Flanagan), a self-appointed executioner with a messiah complex, sentences sinners to gruesome deaths while engaging in his own quiet brand of corruption. With a loyal hunchback and a sadistic enforcer at his side, he dispenses righteousness with knives, ropes, and whatever rusty instruments happen to be lying around. Meanwhile, a gravekeeper falls for a condemned woman, jailed for allegedly killing her newborn. She insists the child was stillborn, but Guru needs bodies for his cause, and the truth is inconvenient. Desperate to save her, the gravekeeper strikes a deal with a local potion-maker to fake her death. The plan holds promise, but the price—like everything in Guru’s world—will be paid in suffering. The first half is Milligan at his most gleefully deranged. Limbs drop like mannequin parts, the violence is staged with the enthusiasm of a dinner theater massacre, and Gregorian chants blare like the film is daring you to take it seriously. The second half trades spectacle for desperation—betrayals mount, secrets unravel, and Guru’s reign tightens into paranoia. A scuzzy, low-budget pit of medieval squalor, Guru, the Mad Monk is half torture show, half morality play, and fully committed to its own unhinged energy. It’s cheap, brutal, and borderline incoherent. It isn’t very good, but for those with an appetite for grime-coated exploitation, it delivers.

The musical where Marlon Brando got the role Frank Sinatra wanted, and where Sinatra, stuck playing second fiddle, had to listen as Brando—Brando—sang Luck Be a Lady. The sting must have been real, because Sinatra later took the song for himself and made it a concert staple, as if reclaiming stolen property. Instead of playing the smooth-talking high-roller Sky Masterson, he’s Nathan Detroit, a hustler on the ropes, scrambling to find a venue for his illegal craps game while dodging the marriage-minded Miss Adelaide (Vivian Blaine), whose patience ran out somewhere around the five-year mark. Brando, whose screen presence is usually more brooding than buoyant, plays Masterson, a gambler who trusts his instincts until he doesn’t. When Detroit bets him he can’t convince a straitlaced missionary (Jean Simmons) to go on a dinner date to Havana, Masterson—never one to turn down a wager—sets out to prove him wrong. The premise is pure Broadway contrivance, but the production carries it off with enough color and movement to make it feel like part of some larger-than-life fable. The sets are enormous, painted in hues so rich they might as well be glowing, and the musical numbers keep the momentum rolling even when the story threatens to stall. As a film, it’s glossy, extravagant, and not entirely necessary, but for lovers of classic movie musicals, there’s enough spectacle to make it worth the gamble.