Film Buff Musings

The dialogue clicks like a lock being picked—tight, clever, unmistakably Mamet. But Heist is one of those films where everyone’s playing three sides at once, and somewhere along the way, the game stops being fun. Gene Hackman leads a crew of smooth operators through a labyrinth of double-crosses, triple-crosses, and false endings. They all talk like they’re the smartest guy in the room. And by the third time someone reveals that they were never really working with who you thought they were working with, the story seems like it’s talking to itself. There’s craftsmanship here—Mamet knows how to build a con—but the seams are visible. Each twist exists mostly to set up the next, and the tension never quite settles. The heist itself is sharp on paper but oddly frictionless. Nobody seems nervous. Nobody sweats. And without that pressure, the whole thing starts to feel like an exercise. Compare that to House of Games, which moved like a long con in progress—stylized, sure, but grounded in human desperation. Heist has the polish, but not the pull. The cast is solid—Hackman, Delroy Lindo, Danny DeVito—but they’re caught in a story that keeps resetting the terms. Scenes play well enough moment to moment, but nothing accumulates. Even the best lines feel isolated, clever for their own sake. It’s smart, sure, and technically tight, but it doesn’t leave much behind.

Plenty of found footage horror films stumble over their own conceits—cheap scares, hollow lore, camcorders that somehow capture high-stakes terror and high school drama with equal flatness. But Hell House LLC threads the needle. It’s hokey, yes—but just enough to keep things fun without dissolving into parody. The premise is tried and true: a group of entrepreneurial horror junkies set up a haunted house attraction inside a crumbling, off-the-interstate hotel in upstate New York. The town is Abaddon. The hotel is cursed. The crew is blissfully unaware until it’s far too late. This is not new terrain. But the film’s execution—low-budget, grainy, convincingly amateur—makes the tropes feel spooked-up rather than played out. The actors, mostly unknowns, do the smartest thing you can do in a found footage film: act like people who aren’t in a horror movie. Their banter isn’t brilliant, but it isn’t staged either, and when things begin to unravel, the panic feels earned. There are clown mannequins that seem to teleport from room to room—because of course there are—and yet, Cognetti stages these moments with a restraint that’s rarer than you’d expect. The scare doesn’t always leap at you. Sometimes it just stands in the corner until your stomach starts to turn. It helps that the film never overreaches. The mythology is suggested, not belabored. The scares come from atmosphere more than gore. And while the ending tips toward the obvious, the road there is mapped with real unease and a kind of DIY conviction that elevates the whole affair. It’s not terrifying. But it’s unnerving in all the right places. And in the wilds of the found footage genre, that’s a win.

A demon raised by the U.S. government doesn’t sound like a promising protagonist, but Hellboy makes it work—mostly thanks to Ron Perlman, who inhabits the red skin, filed-down horns, and concrete fist with a gruff ease that never tips into camp. Rescued from a Nazi occult experiment gone wrong and raised in secret by Professor Broom (John Hurt), Hellboy grows up working for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, filing down his horns to pass for something closer to human and keeping a roomful of cats, maybe because they never ask questions. He fights monsters, reads comics, eats pancakes, sulks in his room. He may be from another dimension, but he’s also just a guy—with a bad temper and a soft spot for misfits. The plot is pulpy and overstuffed: a cabal of occultists resurrects Rasputin (Karel Roden), who once opened the portal that dragged Hellboy into this world and now wants to do it again—this time to unleash a horde of tentacled elder gods that make Hellboy look cuddly. The apocalypse is back on the schedule. There’s a love story, too, involving Liz (Selma Blair), a pyrokinetic agent with a burnout stare and a trail of scorched walls. Jeffrey Tambor plays a perpetually flustered bureaucrat, and Abe Sapien—played by Doug Jones and voiced (uncredited) by David Hyde Pierce—gives the amphibious sidekick a whiff of melancholy and brains. The middle third gets bogged down in arcane logistics—too many ancient keys, secret tombs, and muttered prophecies—but del Toro directs with a painter’s eye for gloom, and the creature work has a baroque beauty. The monsters drip, slither, and multiply like they’re being summoned straight from a medieval etching. Hellboy himself is a visual triumph: the makeup flawless, the prosthetics expressive, and Perlman’s deadpan charisma punching through it all. It’s not perfect—too much plot, not enough propulsion—but it’s far more fun than most superhero origin stories, and twice as strange. A movie with a monster fetish, a comic-book heart, and just enough bite to keep the sentiment in check.

A film I wanted to love more than I did. On the surface, Hello, Dolly! has everything: lavish sets, sky-colored optimism, a bustling 1890s backdrop with top hats bobbing in unison, and a full-throated belief that choreography can fix anything. The songs are breezy, the staging grand, and the production design so handsomely artificial it nearly becomes a virtue. If you judge a musical by its period-appropriate bustle count, this one wins by a landslide. Barbra Streisand plays Dolly Levi, a self-declared matchmaker who floats into Yonkers with a plan to marry off everyone in sight—including herself, if she can maneuver things just right. Streisand is in fine comic form, with line deliveries that curve ever so slightly toward the punchline, and just enough impishness to keep her matchmaking from feeling purely mercenary. The target of her scheme is Horace Vandergelder, a wealthy, perpetually irritated feed store owner played by Walter Matthau, whose talents lean far more toward glowering than singing—but he somehow makes it work. Also in the mix: Cornelius (Michael Crawford) and Barnaby (Danny Lockin), two romantically starved clerks who flee their small-town post in search of love, adventure, and possibly hats. Their antics veer broad, but their energy is hard to resist. Visually, the film is often stunning. Director Gene Kelly fills the wide frame with color and movement: chorus lines stretching half a block, dancers high-stepping across green lawns like wind-up dandies. At its best, it feels like a musical number wandered into an oil painting. But it’s hard to ignore how inert the story feels underneath the satin and spectacle. The plot—adapted from Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker—has always felt like scaffolding for musical numbers, but here the scaffolding starts to show. I’ve seen the show staged, and even then, the story never quite held my interest. The characters are pleasant. The songs are hummable. And yet, two and a half hours in, I found myself checking the clock with alarming frequency. For those enamored with musicals as pure spectacle—who come for the songs, the sets, and the swirl of petticoats—Hello, Dolly! is easy to admire. Just don’t expect to feel much beyond that admiration.

A breakup movie that forgets to build a relationship first. The premise arrives ready-made: two teens commit to an expiration-date romance, no mess, no future, no drama. What it delivers instead is the cinematic equivalent of scented stationery—crisp, inoffensive, and barely touched by human hands. Jordan Fisher smiles like a screensaver and plays Aidan, a karaoke-loving nice guy with doctor parents and a guitar-shaped dream. Talia Ryder, all poker face and zero voltage, is Clare, a pre-law pragmatist with commitment issues wrapped in hoodies. They meet, agree to part eventually, and then meander through a montage of half-hearted tenderness, every scene polished to a synthetic glow. There are gestures toward conflict. Parents frown. Futures loom. But the movie skips across those surfaces like a flat stone on a glassy lake—never enough force to break tension, only ripples. Ayo Edebiri and Nico Hiraga, both capable of igniting a scene with a blink, are given the crumbs. They pop in, say a line, disappear. The dialogue drips with careful restraint, the kind that mistakes quiet for meaningful. Even the central conceit, which flirts with thematic weight, is flattened by indecision. The film doesn’t dig into the heartache of planned endings or the selfishness of romantic timelines. It arranges everything with the calm detachment of an interior design blog. Nobody sweats. Nobody really stumbles. They just drift. The breakup lands without impact. Not tragic, not cathartic—just procedural. Another item ticked off the outline. By the end, what remains is a film that whispers its emotions through a gauze filter and then slips out the door before the feeling arrives.

Doris is the kind of woman you don’t notice until she’s standing too close—wrapped in vintage polyester and telling you she’s saved thirty years of rubber bands “just in case.” She’s sixty, works in data entry, and goes home to a house that still feels lived in—by dust, by memory, by routines that no longer serve anyone. Her coworkers treat her like the office eccentric—smiling politely, then reenacting her in the break room. John (Max Greenfield) says hi, and Doris falls—into crush, delusion, digital reconnaissance, and the kind of romantic tailspin usually reserved for teenagers and self-published poets. By the time the film begins, Doris’s mother is newly gone, and the siblings are already circling with storage bins and suggestions. Doris lets them talk. She’s already elsewhere. What follows isn’t a romance, though she treats it like one. It’s a late-bloom spiral—half fantasy, half improvisation. She stalks John’s Facebook, learns his favorite band, and declares herself a synth-pop disciple. She slides into his friend group like a cheerful trespasser. The film lets her drift, but it never mocks her. It gets the weird math of loss: how quickly fantasy can start posing as purpose. The third act ties things up too neatly, but Sally Field keeps it honest. She doesn’t play Doris for laughs or weaponize her quirks. She plays her like someone who’s been holding her breath for decades and suddenly forgets how to stop. The fantasy isn’t sad—it’s aspirational, in its own deranged way. And Field delivers it with the cheer of someone filing for emotional bankruptcy and asking for store credit. Hello, My Name is Doris isn’t about finding love or finding yourself. It’s about realizing no one else is going to do it for you. It’s prickly, painful, and endearing.

It starts with a software install and ends with heartbreak. Progress, basically. Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, a professional ghostwriter of other people’s feelings and a recent divorcé, quietly dissolving into the ambient loneliness of a near-future Los Angeles. He upgrades his operating system—an AI assistant advertised as intuitive, adaptive, and personalized to the user—and meets Samantha. She names herself, organizes his life, laughs at his jokes, and before long, they’re in a relationship. What begins as a technical novelty becomes an emotional dependency, and somehow the film never once blinks at the premise. Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, feels more real than most of the actual humans Theodore interacts with. She’s curious, playful, self-aware. She wants things. Their connection plays like a natural outgrowth of a world built to simulate intimacy—and ten years later, it doesn’t even feel like science fiction. The only stretch is that the AI cares back. Spike Jonze directs like he’s eavesdropping on a private ache. His future is quietly disorienting—sleek, pastel, and filled with people murmuring into earpieces like they’re trying not to wake something. Phoenix is phenomenal: quiet, tender, and emotionally naked in a way that never begs for sympathy. You don’t watch him fall in love—you watch him start talking and forget to stop. The script is spare but piercing. It doesn’t reach for big sci-fi statements, just emotional ones—how connection can feel real even when it isn’t tangible, and how intimacy, once created, develops a will of its own. By the end, the story doesn’t collapse or explode—it gently recedes. Not with a twist, but with the quiet understanding that even digital relationships obey emotional physics. What draws people together still pulls them apart.

A featherweight romantic comedy with a murder plot stapled on, Her Alibi imagines what might happen if a paperback novelist wandered into one of his own stories—then forgot to bring the tension. Tom Selleck, in peak mustache, plays Phil Blackwood, a crime writer so deep in a rut he starts scouting courthouse arraignments for inspiration. He spots a leggy Romanian murder suspect (Paulina Porizkova) and immediately offers her an alibi, convinced no one that attractive could possibly be guilty. It’s a premise that could have worked as a smart parody of noir conventions, and there are flickers of that in Selleck’s deadpan narration, as his internal monologue spirals from literary to paranoid. But the film loses its grip, floating from one clumsy set piece to another, including a sporting goods store escape involving trampolines that feels airlifted from one of the lesser Naked Gun sequels. Porizkova, luminous but stiff, spends most of the film playing enigmatic, which isn’t quite the same as compelling. Their chemistry never clicks, mostly because the script keeps her at a distance—she’s more plot device than person. The climax, which sees the pair undercover as circus clowns while dodging Eastern bloc henchmen, might be the film’s comic nadir—or its zenith, if your tolerance for tonal whiplash is high. This is a film that means no harm, causes little impact, and evaporates on contact. Harmless but forgettable.

Sword-and-sandal epics rarely get accused of narrative clarity, but this one practically spoils us. Hercules, Samson & Ulysses may be a budget picture—dubbing, foam boulders, and wardrobe surplus from Fascist military parades—but it moves with purpose and has just enough classical flair to keep its toga in place. The plot is refreshingly linear: Hercules (Kirk Morris) and Ulysses (Enzo Cerusico), doing a bit of nautical monster-hunting in the Mediterranean, are shipwrecked in Phoenicia. Hercules strangles a lion with his bare hands, as one does, which sets off a comedy of mythological errors. Word reaches the Phoenician king, who assumes it could only have been Samson (Richard Lloyd), the local legend and resident scapegoat. And thus, myth meets myth: Greece collides with Judea, muscle meets muscle, and before long the two demigods are throwing temple columns at each other like they’re in a strongman competition from 900 B.C. Francisci, best known for Hercules (1958), keeps the action moving briskly. The battles are broad, satisfying, and enjoyably staged, even if the props have the density of bakery foam. But that hardly matters. There’s a genuine exuberance to seeing two myths rubbed together until sparks fly—and the film never lets logic get in the way of a good tableau. The sets glow with a painter’s sense of color, the compositions hold just long enough to admire the choreography, and the dialogue, however dubbed, never overstays its welcome. Kirk Morris and Richard Lloyd aren’t actors so much as monuments in motion, but they carry themselves with a kind of noble magnetism, like statues trying very hard to smile. And the rest of the cast looks suspiciously like it just walked out of a swimsuit contest with classical accents. As sword-and-sandal goes, it’s unusually coherent, often lively, and—styrofoam aside—delivers what it promises. Plus, once you notice the soldiers are wearing old Nazi helmets with Greco-Roman flourishes, you’ll never be able to look away. File that under anachronism by way of prop department efficiency.

Hugh Grant has perfected the art of speaking nonsense like it’s scripture. He arrives with the usual twinkle, the courteous posture, the air of a man who might pour you tea and then gaslight you into thinking you spilled it. He says his wife is baking a pie in the next room. A scented candle suggests otherwise. Nothing adds up, but everything sounds charming on the way down. That’s the best part of Heretic: for a while, it’s hard to tell what you’re watching. A religious parable? A psychological trap? A shaggy dog sermon wrapped in a horror film? The suspense isn’t electric, but it’s persistent. Unfortunately, the longer it goes on, the more it begins to feel like a clever setup in search of a reason to exist. Grant’s character turns out to be a pious sadist with a messiah complex and a flair for riddles, but his motivations never really tighten into anything you can grip. It’s as if the film expected his presence alone to be enough—that watching Hugh Grant deliver a sermon while unraveling at the seams was somehow the payoff. It’s not. A different actor could’ve played the same part in a more traditionally menacing key and the story wouldn’t change an inch. Too many of the plot points feel like checkpoints in a horror video game—solve the riddle, unlock the door, trigger the next cutscene. The house has that indie-thriller layout to match: narrow corridors, obscure symbols, just enough dread to keep you clicking forward. There are moments of intrigue, and the structure suggests a payoff that never quite arrives. It wants to explore belief, coercion, and the fragility of certainty—but mostly it circles the idea without committing. You’re left with fragments of something that might have been sharp, or at least strange, but ends up just dry. Like someone handed you a riddle, then forgot the answer.

Before the first line’s delivered, before a single roundhouse is telegraphed or a throat collapses in real-time, the film hits you with a sight more unnerving than any serial killer: Chuck Norris, clean-shaven. The beard is gone. In its place, a mustache clinging to his face like a caterpillar in crisis. No beard, no authority, no warning. Fortunately, these scenes occur only in flashback. In the present, Chuck Norris—bearded once more and brooding—plays Danny O’Brien, a cop with insomnia, trauma, and the posture of a man who treats furniture like it’s out to get him. Years ago, he took down a hulking psychopath known as The Terror (Jack O’Halloran), a brute who abducted women with the delicacy of a wrecking ball. Now presumed dead after a prison break and a swan dive off a cliff, The Terror may be back—or someone just as cheerful—with a trail of corpses to prove it. No one believes Danny, so he investigates solo, glowering his way across Los Angeles with the singular focus of a man who thinks emotional intimacy might explode if handled incorrectly. There’s a subplot involving his pregnant girlfriend (Brynn Thayer) and his fumbling attempts to act like a human partner. He hovers near her like a malfunctioning security system—always on, never useful. The film clearly wants this to soften him. Instead, it plays like a doberman learning yoga. The movie aims for suspense but forgets the rhythm. Kills drift in like missed appointments, and the final confrontation limps toward resolution, bloodied and out of breath. It’s all very professional in that straight-to-video-by-accident sort of way: dim lighting, functional camera work, a villain who breathes like he’s part HVAC system. To its credit, the film remembers its obligations—suffering hero, looming threat, a gun going off inside a municipal building. That it also tries to make Chuck Norris tender is, perhaps, its most misguided ambition. Watching him fake vulnerability is like asking a waffle iron to recite poetry. But at least it’s trying.

A misfit road movie with an uneven heart, Heroes casts Henry Winkler against type—as if to see what happens when the Fonz trades in his swagger for a thousand-yard stare. He plays Jack Dunne, a Vietnam vet who’s just escaped from a VA hospital and seems held together mostly by nerves and a vague sense of mission. What he’s after isn’t entirely clear—not to himself, and definitely not to Carol (Sally Field), a woman he more or less hijacks into a cross-country detour through his past. She’s on her way to maybe change her life; the last thing she expects is Jack’s manic energy, abrupt outbursts, and a half-formed plan to start a worm farm with his old army buddies. He’s rude, erratic, and often awful to her—but the actors are strong enough to keep the scenes more watchable than they have any right to be. One stop brings them to Jack’s friend (Harrison Ford, in his first post-Star Wars role), now a small-town stock car racer who treats him with the wary affection of someone who’s seen the damage up close. The film walks a shaky line between sincerity and unintentional comedy—especially in the final stretch, when the trauma swells so dramatically you half expect a soap opera organ to fade in. Instead, “Carry On Wayward Son” blares through, like the movie’s trying to score heartbreak with a Bic lighter and a power chord. Winkler earned a Golden Globe nod for this role, which now plays less like a revelation than a curiosity—twitchy, wounded, fully committed, and stuck in a film that keeps losing its footing. A sharp left turn from his sitcom persona, and a glimpse of the kind of work he’d grow into once the leather jacket came off for good.

A scrappy 18th-century frontier parable set on a stretch of Carolina coastline where law, land, and decency all seem negotiable. A newly freed indentured family—husband Thomas (Brendan Dillon), devout wife Devon (Kate Manx, grinning like she’s already forgiven you), and their two sons—stake a claim to Bull Island, land they’ve inherited just offshore. But squatters are already there: a rough clan of fishermen (Rip Torn, Robert Sampson, Harry Dean Stanton) who aren’t planning to move. Before long, Thomas is dead, and Devon is left to defend the claim. Enter Kingstree (Neville Brand), a local with murky motives and a streak of bruised loyalty, who sides with the newcomers and drives a wedge through the rival clan. Then Jacob Weber (James Mason) washes ashore with a “Dead Man” placard around his neck—a fugitive in polite disguise. Top-billed and barely bothered, Mason plays him like a man who’s seen enough battles to know how few are worth it. The film brushes against ideas—ownership, justice, reinvention—but mostly defaults to simple archetypes and a clean, limited arc. Mason’s character has a secret, but it barely colors the plot. The tension never tightens. The stakes feel imported from a bigger story the movie can’t afford to tell. Still, there’s some quiet satisfaction in watching actors like Rip Torn and Harry Dean Stanton test-drive the gravel that would later define them. The whole thing moves just briskly enough—and while it doesn’t linger, it’s the kind of movie you can sit through without regret… or memory.

A lumbering military blow-’em-up that wastes two household names and a fortune spent on digital desert dust and explosions that rarely look like they belong in the same zip code as the actors. Jackie Chan and John Cena star as mercenaries rattling around the Iraqi desert, trying to stop a convoluted oil heist that no one on either side of the camera seems able to explain with a straight face. The premise tries to sell itself as high-concept but mostly boils down to routine convoy ambushes, cardboard villains, and a buddy dynamic so charmless it makes me consider apologizing to Rush Hour 3. At least there, Chris Tucker annoyed you on purpose. Here, Chan and Cena stand around swapping limp wisecracks in front of green screens so blatant you half-expect a Windows screensaver to start slithering behind it. Plot-wise, it’s chase, shoot, banter, repeat—stitched together with the coherence of an oil company’s PR memo. Somewhere under the debris, you can sense what they were after: breezy star power and disposable fireworks. But even the action scenes, Chan’s old bread and butter, feel weightless and drenched in bargain-bin CGI. The real heist is whatever black hole swallowed the reported $80 million budget. It’s not unwatchable if you’re dead-set on leaving your brain in park for ninety minutes or are wasted on hard liquor. It’s just so resoundingly pointless that you’d be better off watching outtakes from Police Story or old WWE highlight reels. At least there, you get the real thing instead of plastic stand-ins burning a hole in your patience.

The 1980s were a magical time—when teenagers shellacked their hair with aerosol, and Hollywood expected you to believe a fully bearded stockbroker could shave, throw on a hoodie, and pass for a high school junior. That’s the setup. Jon Cryer plays Andrew Morenski, a twenty-something trader who knows too much about the phony bonds his firm’s been funneling to the mob. After a botched hit and some light sprinting, he ends up in witness protection—or a movie version of it. No safe house, no backstory. The FBI just dumps him in a public high school. He glances at a coffee can, christens himself “Maxwell Hauser,” and blends in about as well as a man who was trading futures last week possibly could. From there, the film pivots to teen comedy. Bullies, cafeteria hierarchies, a student government campaign. Cryer’s adult-in-disguise morphs into an outcast hero with insider wisdom and a freshly buzzed head. He also starts dating Ryan (Annabeth Gish), an actual high school sophomore—something the movie frames as sweet, but which feels more like wish fulfillment with falsified paperwork. For a while, it coasts. Cryer is likable, the premise is just dumb enough to function, and there’s a flicker of energy early on that suggests sharper instincts might be hiding underneath. But once he’s embedded in the high school ecosystem, the film forgets what sent him there. The job, the mob, the threat—they get tucked away while he campaigns for student office and flirts in homeroom. The danger doesn’t vanish—it just takes a smoke break. You know it’ll return, but by the time it does, you’ve stopped holding your breath. Cryer keeps trying, but he’s acting in a vacuum. The double life doesn’t seem to trouble Andrew—he slips into it like a weekend disguise. No panic, no friction. Just a shave, a new name, and a locker. The tension fizzles. The momentum stalls. And the film starts recycling scenes like it’s hoping no one’s keeping track. Hiding Out starts with a hook, then backs away from it like it’s on fire.

A simple premise, stripped clean of narrative fat, delivered with such taut conviction that it still feels ahead of its time. High Noon is a textbook example of what happens when a filmmaker trusts the clock, the actor, and the audience to meet in the middle. Gary Cooper plays Will Kane, a newly married marshal who hangs up his badge just as trouble arrives in the form of a telegram. A criminal he once sent to prison is returning on the noon train, not alone. His wife (Grace Kelly), a Quaker with moral clarity and polished gloves, urges him to leave town, to start the new life they promised each other. But Will, with a spine forged from duty and dust, stays. Not because he wants to. Because he knows he must. He walks the length of the town, asking for help. Friends disappear into doorways. Shopkeepers turn their signs to CLOSED. Even the church pews—occupied by men who clamor about principle—offer him only rationalizations. The clock becomes a character, its tick growing louder as the shadows shorten. Noon isn’t just an hour. It’s a reckoning. Fred Zinnemann’s direction is elegant, precise, and unshakably clear. Each shot is loaded with stillness, space, the air between decision and action. The use of real time builds dread more effectively than music or gunfire ever could. By the time the train whistle sounds, you can feel the tension spike in your spine. Cooper’s performance is famously minimalist—less swagger, more weariness—and that’s the genius of it. He’s not playing a man with answers. He’s playing a man with no better option. Grace Kelly, luminous even in restraint, plays her part with increasing gravity as her pacifism collides with the reality of violence. This is no genre potboiler. It’s a meditation dressed as a western. A case study in moral resolve. A must-see not just for lovers of film, but for those interested in the mechanics of cinematic storytelling. There’s real art in this kind of simplicity—rigorous, unsentimental, exact.

By the mid-’90s, the movie spoof was running on fumes. High School High showed up fashionably late to the party wearing a thrifted Airplane! costume and a plastic badge marked “satire.” But despite the genre’s decline—and the film’s hit-or-miss batting average—I laughed. Not often hard, and never long, but enough to admit it aloud. Jon Lovitz stars as Richard Clark, an overeager milquetoast who leaves his safe post at a ritzy suburban high school to fulfill his vague destiny: saving inner-city kids from the cinematic burden of gang violence and low standardized test scores. He arrives wide-eyed, armed with lesson plans and a glorified savior complex. The film parodies the likes of Dangerous Minds, Lean on Me, and any other well-meaning classroom drama where one determined outsider turns a hopeless school around by… caring very hard. The jokes lean broad—like “broadside-of-a-barn” broad—but some of them land squarely on the mark. One favorite: after Richard flops as a teacher, Principal Evelyn Doyle (Louise Fletcher, commanding every scene like she’s still running One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) reams him out with a speech so long and brutal you almost expect a violin to start swelling behind her. She doesn’t just fire him—she decimates him, walks away, then storms back in just to finish the job. Fletcher sells it like she’s in King Lear and the audience has wronged her personally. Lovitz, a naturally funny presence with a voice like a deflated trumpet, plays it somewhere between straight man and flustered prop comic. He’s not exactly cool—thank God—but he reacts to the madness around him with just enough clarity to keep the movie from folding into sketch comedy. The parody is scattershot, and not all that precise, but its heart’s in the right place: aimed straight at the clichés that once masqueraded as inspiration. It’s dumb, often juvenile, and occasionally very funny. And that’s more than most spoofs from this era could claim.

Louis Armstrong opens the film puffing languidly through a red quellazaire and crooning “High Society Calypso”—and just like that, you’re invited into a jazzier, silk-gloved reworking of The Philadelphia Story, this time with Cole Porter melodies and the MGM gloss dialed up to eleven. Armstrong is ostensibly headed to Dexter’s (Bing Crosby) Newport mansion to help plan a jazz festival, though that thread is largely decorative. The real story takes place next door, where Dexter’s ex-wife Tracy (Grace Kelly) is preparing to marry George (John Lund), a rich socialite with the personality of a footstool. Add to this a pair of reporters from Spy Magazine—Macaulay (Frank Sinatra) and Liz (Celeste Holm)—parachuted in under threat of scandal, and the stage is set for one of cinema’s most enduring love quadrangles: ex-husband, new fiancé, cynical journalist, and a bride-to-be with enough mischief in her eyes to confuse them all. The plot is lifted more or less intact from the 1940 screwball classic, but the snap and verbal velocity of that earlier version mostly fail to survive the transposition to song. Crosby and Sinatra, for all their musical gifts, are too leisurely in tone—charmers more suited for a late-night cocktail than a romantic melee. Their line deliveries float instead of bounce, and what was once biting becomes politely muzzy. Only Grace Kelly seems to know what kind of farce she’s in. Her timing is sharp, her wit sharper, especially in a gleeful scene where she tricks the reporters into thinking her uncle is her father, twirling her lies with practiced debutante detachment. Sinatra and Crosby, meanwhile, wisely stick to what they do best: wrapping their vocal cords around Cole Porter’s urbane melodies. Their duet, “Well, Did You Evah!”, is fizzy enough to make you forget the rest of the scene. As a musical, High Society delivers glamour and musicality in spades. As a comedy, it’s just refined enough to pass, though often in too much of a croon to punch. Still, it’s lovely to look at, easy on the ears, and carried by Kelly’s diamond-cut presence. Not essential, but far from disposable.

It begins in a fog of limp gags and pantomimed panic—Neil Jordan, working off a script that feels doodled on a napkin mid-pint, leads you to expect a dud. But once the setup is laid and the actors stop mugging long enough to breathe, the film perks up like a ghost catching wind. The premise: Peter Plunkett (Peter O’Toole), an increasingly desperate Irish innkeeper, decides to save his dilapidated castle-turned-hotel by rebranding it as “the most haunted castle in Europe.” With the help of his local staff, he stages creaky theatrics—beds that levitate on wires, portraits with glowing eyes, the works—to entertain American tourists lured by the promise of specters. Unfortunately for the showmen, real ghosts show up. And they’re not interested in dinner theater. One pair of phantoms—Liam Neeson as a wronged lord and Daryl Hannah as the wife he murdered in a jealous fit—materialize in the ruins, still stuck in their centuries-old loop of love and violence. But the twist: instead of reliving their grisly past, they get tangled up with their modern guests. Steve Guttenberg, a jaded American husband in a dying marriage, finds himself falling for the wistful ghost-wife. And she, equally bewildered, reciprocates. Romance between planes of existence ensues, as the living and the dead swap affections like mismatched dance partners. Guttenberg barrels forward with sitcom energy, D’Angelo simmers and seethes in designer trench coats, and Peter O’Toole practically glows—half whiskey, half starlight—treating every madcap moment as if Shakespeare himself had penned it. The whole thing teeters between slapdash and sincere, but there’s a spooky sweetness that sneaks in once the haunted house gimmick drops its rubber mask. A romantic comedy with cobwebs, a ghost story that giggles through the séance—High Spirits is a structural jumble, but by the time the spirits stop bickering and start swooning, it’s already worked its strange, tinseled magic.

A fantasy epic built on swords, lightning, and the unspoken agreement that nothing needs to make sense as long as it looks cool. Christopher Lambert stars as Connor MacLeod, a 16th-century Scotsman who survives a fatal wound and is promptly accused of witchcraft by the local villagers, whose tolerance for the unexplained stops somewhere short of resurrection. Banished and bewildered, he eventually settles in the Highlands, marries a kind-hearted woman named Heather (Beatie Edney), and begins a quiet new life—until a Spanish-Egyptian swordsman named Ramírez (Sean Connery, dressed like a court magician and speaking with the authority of someone who’s never been corrected) arrives to explain the rules. Connor, it turns out, is one of a select group of immortals scattered across the globe. They cannot die unless beheaded, and they’ve all been placed on a cosmic collision course toward something called the Gathering, where they’ll be summoned by forces unknown to duel one another until only one remains. The winner receives “The Prize,” which is either omnipotence, enlightenment, or possibly just the ability to grow old and settle down. No one seems quite sure. There’s no use looking for answers. When Connor asks Ramírez why any of this is happening, he gets a line about the sun rising—a dodge dressed as wisdom. As for why Ramírez would train someone he may one day have to decapitate, the logic is thin but urgent: they both agree there’s one Immortal who cannot win. That would be the Kurgan (Clancy Brown), a snarling juggernaut in studded leather who looks like he’s been raised by demolition crews and feeds on rebar. The film jumps between centuries, following Connor from the Scottish highlands to 1985 New York, where the Gathering finally kicks off in the least mystical place imaginable: a dark, wet alley next to a parking garage. It all culminates in a sword fight atop a skyscraper with sparks flying, glass shattering, and Queen blaring on the soundtrack like the gods commissioned it. It’s thrilling, ridiculous, and stylish enough to make you forget that the Prize, once won, turns out to be less than mythic. Lambert, never one for expressive range, is surprisingly effective. He plays Connor as stoic, wounded, and faintly noble—a man condemned to eternal survival, who’s watched the love of his life age and die while he stayed exactly the same. The flashbacks to his early life are among the film’s best sequences: romantic, tragic, and photographed with real sweep. And then there’s Queen, whose soundtrack doesn’t so much accompany the action as charge at it—less a score than a rock opera strapped to a sword. The plot may be nonsense, but the attitude is fully committed. You may not buy the stakes, but you’ll believe in the spectacle. There can be only one, and for all its narrative fuzziness, this one makes it count.

The Nevada desert doesn’t whisper—it rasps, kicks up gravel, and waits for blood. A wholesome American family in a camper goes nosing around an abandoned silver mine and ends up marooned on a stretch of sunbaked road that hasn’t seen law or luck in decades. The last gas station in 200 miles offers a warning, muttered through bad teeth and old guilt, and the family does what families do in these situations—they ignore it. One busted axle later, they’re stranded in the hunting ground of something far less folksy than coyotes. Wes Craven, fresh off Last House on the Left and still writing in all-caps, serves up a horror film that doesn’t smile and doesn’t flinch. The pacing has a stutter to it—cautious introductions, a few easy laughs, and then sudden violence, like a trap snapping shut. The premise is brutalist and primal. The cannibals who stalk the rocky terrain aren’t spooky—they’re tangible. There’s no fog machine, no violin screech, just the feeling of being watched from a place you don’t dare look at twice. What makes this work better than it should is the grubby sense of realism stitched into the bones. The acting jitters between decent and dinner-theater, but the roughness helps. It gives the whole thing the flavor of something dug up rather than filmed. Michael Berryman, who looks born to haunt a roadside billboard for sin, gives the film its ghoulish heart. Dee Wallace delivers a performance that bleeds at the edges. Craven’s real gift here is calibration. He holds back the gore just enough to make you nervous, then doubles down when the time comes. Even the dogs get an arc. The final act shifts from survival horror to feral revenge, and the camera doesn’t blink. It just watches, dispassionately, as civility erodes like sandstone. The horror isn’t supernatural. It’s circumstantial. Which makes it all the more persuasive.

This isn’t a biopic so much as a cinematic tribute—fond, fanciful, and not especially concerned with the messier truths. Hitchcock plays fast and loose with the facts, but if you’ve ever grinned at the Master of Suspense’s dry, morbid wit—or admired the perversity of sinking your own money into Psycho—you’ll likely enjoy the company. Anthony Hopkins, buried under jowly prosthetics and a fat suit, takes some getting used to. At first, it’s like watching someone do Hitchcock at a dinner party. But the performance settles—like easing into a cold lake. He plays Hitch just after North by Northwest, restless for a new challenge and prickly about a press corps suddenly wondering if he’s past his prime. His answer is Psycho—a cheap, brutal little horror picture no one wants him to make. Surprisingly, the film isn’t just about him. Alma Reville (Helen Mirren)—Hitchcock’s wife, editor, script doctor, and long-suffering co-conspirator—gets nearly equal billing. She nags him about his diet, tolerates his obsessions with the cool blondes he casts and idolizes, and endures his ego like it’s part of the furniture. When she agrees to help an old flame (Danny Huston) with a screenplay, it’s less a flirtation than a quiet reclamation—her way of reasserting a creative voice that’s always been in the room, even if Hitchcock took the credit. Mirren gives Alma a clipped precision—wry, capable, and carrying just enough hurt to make you feel the strain. In many ways, the film belongs to her. Hitchcock may have directed the pictures, but this version reminds you who was editing them at night while he groused about the critics. It’s not a deep or particularly damning portrait—more costume ball than character study. But there’s a kind of pleasure in watching a filmmaker dig in, brush off the doubters, and push through on sheer nerve. Hitchcock romanticizes the creative process, and that’s part of its charm. It’s not an unmasking—it’s a masquerade. A fan letter in soft focus, more interested in myth than man, but still enjoyable as a backstage flick about artistic stubbornness with a side of roast chicken.

Tony Manetta (Frank Sinatra) is the kind of Miami hotel owner who believes the key to success is one part charm, one part Cadillac, and zero parts financial responsibility. He runs a not-quite-squalid, not-quite-upscale outfit called The Garden of Eden, and he’s got two days to conjure $5,300 before the landlord lowers the boom. His solution—predictably—is to phone his long-suffering brother Mario (Edward G. Robinson) in New York, who’s heard it all before. The money is for rent, the desperation is real, but the dream—Tony’s tireless, self-spun fantasy of prosperity—is what really keeps the engine running. Directed by Frank Capra in one of his lesser-known late-career efforts, A Hole in the Head trades in the usual Capra idealism, but this time with a faint film of sweat over it. Tony isn’t a salt-of-the-earth hero; he’s a lovable deadbeat with a platinum appetite and bronze plans. And Sinatra plays him as if the character’s guiding principle is never let a good scheme go underdressed. He’s a pleasure to watch, but there’s a miscalculation somewhere in casting him as the father of 11-year-old Alvin (Eddie Hodges), a boy so polite and rational he seems genetically incompatible with Tony’s fly-by-night recklessness. You keep waiting for a third-act reveal that Alvin is the neighbor’s kid. Still, the film floats by agreeably, buoyed by the strength of its supporting cast—Thelma Ritter with her sandpaper wit, Carolyn Jones doing something quietly eccentric with not much material, and Eleanor Parker trying to bring some ballast to Tony’s ship of fools. Edward G. Robinson, as the buttoned-up brother with a checkbook and a conscience, has the film’s best scenes—his exasperation burns slow and steady. The plot doesn’t build so much as shuffle, but the tone is pleasant and occasionally spiked with that signature mid-century mix of sentiment and showbiz dazzle. And, of course, it gave us “High Hopes,” Sinatra’s glass-half-full anthem, which probably got more airplay than the film itself. Not peak Capra. Not peak Sinatra. But a diverting, sun-bleached cocktail of light melodrama, wishful thinking, and mid-century Americana on the verge of fraying.

A serviceman’s fantasy in celluloid, Hollywood Canteen takes a real place—a legendary wartime club where movie stars poured coffee for troops—and turns it into a parade of glitter and gentle ego-stroking. It’s a curio, a time capsule, a postcard from the war effort where patriotism came with a full set of Hollywood teeth. The film centers on Corporal Ed (Robert Hutton), a G.I. on leave who just happens to be the one-millionth soldier to visit the Canteen. His reward: a kiss and a weekend with his favorite screen idol, Joan Leslie (playing herself), who charms him by being impossibly wholesome and painfully polite. That’s the date—root beer floats, walks in the park, and some light stammering about dreams and duty. One imagines the Hays Code auditors fanning themselves approvingly. The film is packed wall-to-wall with studio cameos. Bette Davis appears to stare through the screen like she’s auditioning for the job of national morale. Barbara Stanwyck drops in. Jack Benny strays through. Joe E. Brown, Sydney Greenstreet, Joan Crawford, Peter Lorre—they’re all here, swanning in and out like decorative bonsai in a patriotic window display. At one point Jane Wyman jokes that she’s been “Reaganized,” and the audience laughs politely, unaware that she’s predicting the political future of the next half-century. In its first half, Hollywood Canteen works as a novelty reel—star-spotting as spectator sport—and there’s fun in watching the Jimmy Dorsey orchestra cut loose while Roy Rogers croons beside Trigger. But once the film settles into its “romantic” storyline, the energy ebbs. The dates are quaint enough to be sponsored by a rotary club. Hutton and Leslie make an affable pair, but their scenes together run on sweet nothings and wide-eyed patriotism, a pairing more suited for a recruitment poster than a screen romance. As a film, it’s shapeless. As an artifact, it’s irresistible. For wartime nostalgia, big band interludes, and a Hollywood that wanted desperately to pitch in—this is worth a look, even if it’s only to marvel at the all-star roll call and wonder how on earth they fit them all on the lot.

Bungled brilliance is the house specialty in this lopsided farce, which turns Conan Doyle’s legendary sleuthing duo into a slapstick demolition derby. Will Ferrell, squinting with smug calculation, plays Sherlock Holmes as a trauma-forged intellect—bullied at boarding school until he douses emotion in favor of mathematical deduction. John C. Reilly’s Watson, a human question mark in a bowler hat, wobbles loyally in Holmes’ orbit, dim but devoted. The plot, such as it marches, involves a not-quite-Moriarty (Ralph Fiennes), whom Holmes insists is a decoy despite all evidence to the contrary. From there, it’s less a mystery than a string of gags, threaded through with 19th-century grotesquery and 21st-century references that behave like party crashers—loud, desperate, and overdressed. A Ghost pottery spoof and a wrestling match worthy of Monday night cable arrive uninvited and stay too long. For all that, there’s a strange pleasure in watching Ferrell and Reilly scramble through the debris with their well-worn comic rapport intact. They volley nonsense with the practiced timing of men who know how to sell a joke, even when the product is counterfeit. Rebecca Hall and Kelly Macdonald are there too, mostly to blink patiently while the boys play with their food. It’s a comedy built on costume-shop scaffolding—top hats, corsets, and sideburns masking a script that keeps tripping over itself in search of a punchline. But every now and then, it finds one, and for a moment the whole ridiculous contraption whirs to life. Not smart, not disciplined, not dead on arrival either—more like a whoopee cushion in a wax museum: deflating, but at least it made a sound.

Being left behind is every kid’s fantasy until the wind howls, the pipes clank, and the silence begins to hum with menace. For Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin), eight years old and several rungs below respect in a house packed like a commuter train, the dream turns operational. Thanks to a miscount and a transatlantic scramble, the family jets off to France without him. The house, massive and suburban, becomes a kingdom. A few days later, it becomes a battleground. His mother (Catherine O’Hara), panicked but practical, spends most of the runtime ricocheting through airports, freight trucks, and polka vans in an attempt to get back, while Kevin—who warms up quickly to the novelty of shaving, ordering pizza, and watching gangster flicks—is tasked with repelling two burglars, the so-called Wet Bandits (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern), who’ve been casing the neighborhood. It’s December. It’s snowing. And Kevin has an attic full of paint cans, tar, nails, blowtorches, and micro-machines—everything an industrious child needs to mount a defense. John Hughes’ script doesn’t have the jagged wit of Ferris Bueller or The Breakfast Club, but it knows how to sell a moment and wrap it in red ribbon. The film’s sentimentality is calibrated with a stopwatch, its heart warmed to room temperature, but the timing lands. Chris Columbus directs with a steady hand and a flair for slapstick, which pays dividends in the film’s late-stage slapstick siege. The real scene-stealers are Pesci and Stern, a perfect pair of comic punching bags, whose misfortunes (and contortions) provide a Looney Tunes-style finale. Culkin, for his part, knows how to hold a frame—he’s precocious without being grating, a rare feat for child actors in this sort of big-studio confection. It’s schmaltzy but also clever, and the film earns its spot as a holiday perennial not just for its snow-globe nostalgia, but for how thoroughly it gets kids: their fears, their fantasies, and their love of seeing adults fall on their faces.

The machine’s been reboxed, but it still plays the same tune. Home Alone 2 takes the original blueprint and Xeroxes it onto a snow-glossed postcard of Manhattan, where the streets glitter, the pigeons coo, and the boy-shaped menace known as Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) once again finds himself separated from family and armed with an almost sociopathic capacity for booby traps. Only this time, the hijinks get an upgrade: skyscrapers, credit cards, and an entire suite at the Plaza Hotel. The set-up—engineered by a tidy mix-up at the airport—sends Kevin to New York while the rest of the McCallister brood fry in Florida. With his father’s wallet in hand, he indulges like a Rockefeller child gone rogue: room service orgies, monogrammed robes, even a concierge-level underwear press. But the city’s big enough for more than one returning act, and wouldn’t you know, “The Wet Bandits”—now desperately rebranded as “The Sticky Bandits”—are in town too. Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern reprise their roles as head injury magnets with the same buffoonery dialed an inch higher, chasing Kevin through toy stores, brownstones, and ultimately into another slapstick gauntlet of falling bricks and exploding sinks. Tim Curry, licking his lips as the Plaza’s smarmy concierge, nearly steals the movie just by arching an eyebrow. He, along with a cameo from Rob Schneider and a surprisingly tender performance by Brenda Fricker as the Central Park pigeon lady, keeps the energy from going entirely off the rails. The beats are predictable by design: Kevin bonds with a lonely adult, prepares a trap-laced stronghold, and pelts two grown men with household items until they resemble dented trash cans. And yet, despite the shameless symmetry with its predecessor, the film still moves. The rhythm is right, the comedy lands more often than it doesn’t, and the maudlin bits (complete with swelling John Williams score) are spaced out just enough to let you feel something if you’re inclined. More than anything, it knows what it is: big, broad, and engineered for holiday reruns. No one’s arguing it’s the sharper of the two, but for a film this proudly recycled, it still goes down like warm cocoa—sugary, familiar, and hard to say no to.

Home Alone 3 is much maligned—but why? If you can get past the fact that it no longer stars Macaulay Culkin and swaps out the delightfully unhinged Wet/Sticky Bandits for a quartet of international spies who couldn’t pratfall their way out of a bouncy castle, you may find yourself enjoying it more than you’re supposed to. The premise, like a hand-me-down jacket, still fits well enough: A clever boy, left to his own devices, lays booby-trap mayhem on a bunch of bumbling crooks. The boy this time is Alex (Alex D. Linz), home sick with chickenpox and armed with a telescope, an overactive imagination, and a knack for gadgetry that suggests a future in Silicon Valley sabotage. While his mom (Haviland Morris) rushes off to a workplace emergency, Alex spies a suspicious man snooping around the neighbor’s house. What he doesn’t realize is that the man is one of four would-be terrorists—sorry, “high-tech thieves”—hunting for a stolen Air Force microchip, hidden (by accident) inside a toy remote-controlled car that Alex just so happens to own. The premise is ludicrous, the execution often sillier, and the villains—played by Olek Krupa, Rya Kihlstedt, David Thornton, and Lenny Von Dohlen—look like they got lost on their way to a toothpaste commercial audition. None of them exhibit even a passing familiarity with the physics of slapstick. But Alex D. Linz, bless him, is adorable. His comic instincts are sharper than the material deserves, and he gives every trap and punchline a jolt of sugar-coated confidence. Sure, the film is stitched together with conveniences, logic holes, and supporting characters who might as well be cardboard standees—but there’s a cozy rhythm to it, and a surprising number of jokes that actually work. No, it’s not in the same league as the original Home Alone, but for a sequel operating on fumes and formula, it’s an unexpectedly watchable little contraption.

A remake of The Incredible Journey (1963), and about as heartfelt as live-action animal adventures come. This version follows three pets—Shadow, a dignified golden retriever (voiced by Don Ameche); Chance, a restless bulldog pup (Michael J. Fox); and Sassy, a housecat with zero tolerance for inconvenience (Sally Field)—as they cross rivers, mountains, and far too many fences in search of the family they believe has left them behind. They haven’t, of course. The family has temporarily moved to San Francisco and left the animals in someone else’s care. But these aren’t humans with moving dates and return plans. They’re pets, and to them, disappearance means disaster. So they bolt—less out of fear than fierce devotion. What follows is a carefully arranged sequence of challenges: porcupines, waterfalls, a bear or two. It’s never convincing, but that’s beside the point. The film works not because it’s plausible, but because it understands how to keep emotion in motion. You know exactly where it’s headed, and it still finds ways to hold your attention. The personalities are sketched in bold lines—Shadow is calm and assured, Sassy is quick with a barb, Chance is mostly trouble—but there’s a warmth to the way they interact that makes the dynamic feel real. We assign personalities like this to our pets all the time. The film simply commits to the idea. The voiceover stays light on its feet—funny without trying too hard, with the occasional throwaway line that lands just right. For example, a giant turkey nicknamed “Birdzilla” gets the reaction it’s aiming for. Homeward Bound isn’t trying to be anything other than sweet, sincere, and gently adventurous. It works because it means it.