Film Buff Musings

An overstuffed bauble of a mystery, The Honey Pot plays like someone gave a whodunit a Venetian vacation and told it to luxuriate. Rex Harrison stars as Cecil Fox, a wealthy eccentric with too much time, too many servants, and one idea: fake his death to lure in three ex-lovers and watch them squirm for inheritance. The setup is cribbed from Volpone, but with the gender flipped, the satire thinned out, and the tension replaced by high-thread-count mischief. The guests arrive like characters from competing films: Dominique (Capucine), a broke princess with icy restraint; Merle (Edie Adams), a fading screen star still chasing spotlight; and Lone Star Crockett (Susan Hayward), a Texan tycoon with legal paperwork and a tongue sharp enough to draw blood. Lone Star claims to be Fox’s common-law wife. She also ends up dead. Enter Maggie Smith as her nurse—prim, observant, and slowly realizing she’s the only one in the room with both a conscience and a clue. There’s pleasure in the details: the rustle of expensive fabrics, the glint of chandeliers, Rex Harrison pirouetting through the plot like he’s auditioning for operetta. But the mystery folds in on itself until resolution feels beside the point. It’s not so much solved as set aside. What begins as a darkly comic puzzle turns metaphysical, then opaque. The film mistakes convolution for cleverness and mood for meaning. Still, the performances are crisp, and Maggie Smith walks away with the movie in her handbag.

Willie Nelson plays a fictionalized version of himself—road-weary, ponytailed, magnetic, and a little scummy. That last part is baked into the plot. He’s Buck Bonham, a country-western singer who’s spent most of his life in motion, touring small towns with a band that doubles as his second family. He promises his wife (Dyan Cannon) he’s settled down, no more on-the-road romances. Enter Amy Irving, playing the fresh-faced bass player who also happens to be the daughter of his longtime guitarist (Slim Pickens). Guess how that promise holds up. It’s a familiar arc—wanderer tempted, home life shattered, stage lights still calling—but the film gets by on texture. Nelson’s songs are everywhere, including On the Road Again, which was written for the film and now carries more myth than melody. There’s a loose rhythm to the concert scenes, which feel more like captured performances than staged interludes, and Nelson is, unsurprisingly, most convincing when he’s behind a mic. As a story, it’s passable. As a glimpse into a specific lifestyle—endless highways, green rooms, and the slow erosion of domestic promises—it holds some interest. But this isn’t a probing character study. It’s a glossy, agreeable vehicle for Nelson to play Willie-with-the-names-changed, flanked by capable actors and wrapped in a haze of Texas dust and twangy guitars. Willie fans will find plenty to enjoy. Non-fans might wonder what the fuss is, or wish the whole thing came with a little more bite. But then again, it’s not trying to convert anyone.

A mockumentary with its crosshairs squarely on the gold-plated pulpit, Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. aims at the bloated excess of megachurch culture and the carefully curated brand of performative piety that comes with it. That target is ripe, maybe even overdue, but the film fires soft pellets where it might have gone for something sharper—funnier, riskier, weirder. What it delivers instead is a slow simmer of satire, with the occasional bubble of real bite. Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown give committed, sometimes wonderfully off-kilter performances as Trinitie and Lee-Curtis Childs, a televangelist power couple knocked from their pedestal when allegations—of the headline-ripping variety—surface against him. Their empire, once a carnival of wealth and sermonized swagger, is now a derelict stage set, awaiting redemption via a flashy relaunch timed to Easter Sunday. The church doors are closed, the faithful have fled, and what’s left are desperation and designer suits. The format is part faux-documentary, part standard narrative, and the structure occasionally wrestles with itself. Scenes meant to be candid are intercut with more traditional dramatic beats, and the tonal shift doesn’t always feel seamless. One minute you’re watching a puffed-up charlatan pose in front of his Bentley; the next, you’re in a quiet moment of sincere reckoning—or at least what seems like one. Hall, in particular, is the film’s anchor of pathos and comedy, navigating Trinitie’s role as the dutiful wife, cheerleader, and PR machine with a tense grin and the occasional slow burn. Brown, meanwhile, plays Lee-Curtis as a man who mistakes volume for conviction, spouting salvation with the cadence of a TED Talk and the energy of someone who’s selling something—and trying to believe in it himself. The satire never cuts as deep as it promises, as if worried about offending too many sensibilities. There are laughs, but few that cause real damage. And when a film holds back this much, the teeth go blunt. It flirts with insight but settles too often for the gag that’s been test-marketed for safety. What could have been an indictment ends up feeling like an extended skit with too much empathy and not enough nerve. It’s not a bad film, just a hesitant one. And when your subject is spiritual fraud and institutional rot, hesitation rarely preaches.

A romance, a melodrama, a redemption arc—*Hope Floats* wants to be all of them, but mostly ends up a soft-focus exercise in brooding. People sulk, stare, and speak in softly delivered wisdom-nuggets meant to suggest healing, though it’s never quite clear what they’re healing from—beyond the general ache of existing in a screenplay like this. Sandra Bullock plays Birdee Pruitt, a disgraced prom queen whose life implodes on national television when her best friend (an uncredited Rosanna Arquette) reveals she’s been sleeping with Birdee’s husband. Cue public humiliation, one-way ticket to small-town Texas, and a mandatory life reboot. Birdee moves in with her mother, played with welcome sharpness by Gena Rowlands, and tries to regain some measure of identity while parenting her young daughter Bernice (Mae Whitman), who’s still clinging to an idealized version of her absent father. A second-chance love interest arrives in the form of Harry Connick Jr., tan, unhurried, and emotionally fluent in a way that suggests he’s spent a lot of time near porch swings. The movie expands with sorrow, reconciliation, and a light dusting of maternal illness, but it’s all handled like fine china—careful, hushed, and just detached enough to keep anyone from getting too upset. The film is gorgeously lit and emotionally inert, less a story than a scrapbook of pensive stares and soft rock montages. Whitman holds herself tight—watchful, wounded, carrying more in her quiet than most actors try to say with speech. Then in one devastating moment near the end, she breaks it open—her voice cracking, her grief specific. That single scene doesn’t feel performed. It leaves a bruise the rest of the movie merely hints at. *Hope Floats* isn’t terrible, just sedate. It wants to be heartfelt, but settles for polished restraint. A story of healing but with most of the bruises left untouched.

Bruce Willis is always better when he’s miserable, and Hostage knows this—it puts him in the starring role as Jeff Talley, a former LAPD hostage negotiator who’s retreated to a quieter post as police chief of a sleepy Ventura County suburb after a botched standoff left a child dead. He doesn’t stay retired for long. When three teenagers break into a fortified hillside mansion and take the family inside hostage, Talley is dragged back in. Complicating things further: the home belongs to an accountant for a criminal syndicate, and the syndicate has Talley’s wife and daughter under surveillance to ensure he handles the situation “correctly.” He’s soon stuck negotiating both hostage cases at once—neither of which he’s officially allowed to touch. There’s enough variation in the formula to keep it moving. Ben Foster plays Mars, the most unpredictable of the teen intruders, and he doesn’t so much act as simmer. Gaunt, soft-voiced, and lit like a horror movie character, he paces the house with theatrical menace—singing lullabies, lighting fires, and escalating every encounter like he’s preparing for something much more elaborate. It’s a performance that pulls the movie off-axis in the best way. The script wants to be about guilt and redemption, but often just settles for plot. It’s overlong and crowded with moving parts—some more useful than others—but the whole thing holds together with surprising coherence. And when it clicks, it’s the kind of mid-budget thriller that reminds you why these used to be weeknight staples.

John Candy’s one and only directorial effort premiered on television just a month after his death, which gives it a certain historical curiosity—but not much else. The film is, unfortunately, exactly what you’d expect just by glancing at the dopey-looking box art: a sputtering farce that mostly amounts to 90 minutes of watching George Wendt try to stay afloat in a script that keeps dragging him under. Wendt plays Warren Kooey, a 41-year-old doormat whose life is unraveling at home, at work, and in the mirror—where his own reflection has started talking back, delivering insults like a sitcom Gollum. His wife (Robin Duke) bulldozes him. His boss, who also happens to be his father-in-law (John Vernon), manages to make every interaction feel like a disciplinary hearing. Warren isn’t spiraling. He’s idling with purpose. On a camping trip, he tells his best friend he’s finally ready to pursue his dream of moving to Alaska. Not long after, he runs into a childhood sweetheart—now in a wheelchair, recently single—and announces his plan to leave his wife, marry her, and relocate. She doesn’t argue. Meanwhile, a pair of broadly sketched Russian criminals are roaming the area and taking the occasional hostage. When Warren discovers his wife has stolen his hidden $50,000 nest egg, he stages a fake hostage situation to get it back. It’s meant to be a comedy, but the pacing is uneven and the scenes drift rather than escalate. You don’t laugh so much as wince. Wendt does what he can—he’s steady, even generous—but there’s only so much he can do when the film never quite decides how it’s supposed to be funny. Hostage for a Day isn’t a complete failure, but it’s a long way from a discovery. You watch it out of curiosity, or inertia, or because it’s the last John Candy credit you haven’t crossed off. There’s no real payoff. Just a reminder that some curiosities are best left untracked.

The Hot Chick is the cinematic equivalent of a whoopee cushion on repeat. Rob Schneider, never accused of subtlety, throws himself headlong into a premise that wasn’t exactly gold the first hundred times we saw it. Body-swap comedies are old hat, and this one feels like it was stitched together from the leftover gags nobody wanted from Freaky Friday, Big, and Vice Versa. Schneider plays Clive, a petty crook with the hygiene of a truck stop and the fashion sense of a gas station lighter. Through a pair of enchanted earrings—naturally—he ends up switching bodies with Jessica (Rachel McAdams), a high school cheerleader with a trust fund attitude and a wardrobe that could blind a telescope. Cue 90 minutes of Schneider in halter tops and pleated skirts, giggling about having boobs and flailing every time a urinal comes into frame. The central gag—Schneider acting like a teenage girl—is given the sort of reverence you’d expect from a middle school talent show. There’s a scene where “Jessica” flashes her penis to her friends with the sort of giddy abandon usually reserved for bad improv classes. And while some of the jokes land—on a banana peel, mostly—many arrive with the soft thud of a failed dive. Racist punchlines, homophobic zingers, transphobic one-liners, and the occasional fat joke all parade through like it’s 1989 and nobody told the script supervisor we made progress. McAdams, for her part, gives the kind of bright, buoyant performance that suggests she might one day be in better things—and within two years, she was. Anna Faris plays the bubbly best friend, once again doing more than the movie deserves. And somewhere beneath the comedy rubble, there’s a half-hearted moral about empathy and identity, though it’s hard to hear it over the sound of Schneider screaming in a miniskirt. A few dumb laughs slip through—maybe three—but most of it plays like a prank pulled by a movie on its own audience.

Hot Shots! is a dart launched directly at Top Gun’s aviator shades, and it sticks the landing somewhere between the cockpit and the ego. Directed and co-written by Jim Abrahams—one-third of the triumvirate that delivered Airplane! and The Naked Gun—it arrives already dipped in that same helium-light logic, built from spitball gags, genre clichés, and surgical strikes on ‘80s action-movie testosterone. Charlie Sheen plays Topper Harley, a stoic, gum-chewing ace with daddy issues, panic attacks, and a romantic past that includes violin interludes and synchronized horseback riding. After a period of spiritual decompression living in a teepee (he goes by “Fluffy Bunny Feet”), he’s summoned back into active duty for a covert mission known as Operation Sleepy Weasel—a name so perfectly stupid it feels like a government cover-up for a spelling bee. Sheen’s performance is perfectly deadpan, but the film’s not-so-secret weapon is Lloyd Bridges as Admiral Benson, a walking liability whose war stories sound like concussed haikus. Every scene he’s in is its own comedy sketch. His delivery isn’t just funny—it’s deranged poetry. The romance subplot pairs Topper with Ramada (Valeria Golino), a military therapist with a French accent, a tragic past, and a cooking technique that involves rubbing raw fish on her lover’s chest. That love scene, set in a kitchen, is pure spoof transcendence—equal parts erotic and deli-counter grotesque, like Tom Jones filtered through a Slim Jim commercial. Of course, some gags fizzle—when you’re firing one every five seconds, a few are bound to miss—but enough of them hit their mark with such lunatic precision that you hardly mind. Jon Cryer shows up as a legally blind pilot, Ryan Stiles gets a few sneaky laughs, and Kristy Swanson plays the ingenue who exists mostly to blink and cheer. The film runs a brisk 84 minutes and doesn’t waste a second of it on plot that matters. It’s a comedy tuned to the frequency of spit-takes, and if it doesn’t quite reach the hallucinatory heights of Airplane!, it flies close enough to give you altitude sickness.

What made Hot Shots! zing was its bullseye target: Top Gun, a high-gloss, joyless testosterone pageant begging to be turned into a flying circus. The humor, stitched from pilot bravado and military rigidity, landed because it was poking a film that didn’t know it was a joke. This sequel, Part Deux, sets its sights lower—namely, the Rambo sequels, which already played like self-parodies. It’s tricky to lampoon a franchise that beat you to the punchline. And yet, the film delivers its share of gut-laughs, many courtesy of Lloyd Bridges, back as the marvelously unhinged Admiral Benson—now promoted to president and barely aware of what continent he’s on. Bridges floats through the film like a helium balloon with impeccable comic timing, turning nonsense into something close to brilliance. Charlie Sheen returns as Topper Harley, now a reclusive bodybuilder coaxed back into service to rescue hostages and—because why not—singlehandedly take down Saddam Hussein. His beefed-up physique becomes a running gag, and Sheen plays it with the kind of vacant-eyed seriousness that makes spoof work sing. Valeria Golino is back, now saddled with a love triangle subplot and more slow-motion hair flips than strictly necessary. Richard Crenna shows up doing a parody of himself, and in one inspired moment, Martin Sheen drifts past his real-life son on a river, both men locked in a shared Apocalypse. There’s no throughline sharper than “more of the same,” and this time around, the punchlines come with more filler and less sting. Still, when it hits, it hits—chicken arrows, thermal imaging gags, a laughably high body count ticker. It’s broad and often cheap, but not indifferent. The jokes are sprayed in every direction, and enough of them stick to keep you chuckling through the closing curtain. It’s far from essential, but for lovers of the genre, it delivers the necessary nonsense in mostly digestible doses.

Peter Cushing cuts such a sharp and formidable Sherlock Holmes that it’s a small tragedy Hammer didn’t build a whole series around him. He’d eventually return to the role for the BBC, but this stands as his lone turn in Technicolor Gothic, with fog machines and tarantulas standing in for deductive reasoning. Hammer, best known for its bloodied corsets and baroque horror, steps into mystery with one foot still firmly in the crypt. The result is a fog-draped, velvet-curtained Holmes adaptation that’s as much about mood as it is about motive. Christopher Lee, towering and slightly less spectral than usual, plays Sir Henry Baskerville, heir to a family estate cursed by legend and apparently targeted by a beast of mythic proportions. A scene with a tarantula creeping toward his bedroom pillow is more Hammer house style than Doyle’s drawing-room deduction, but it’s entertaining all the same. Dr. Mortimer (Francis de Wolff, all eyebrows and backstory) arrives at Baker Street to report on the death of Sir Charles Baskerville and the local lore of a murderous hound supposedly unleashed generations ago by a sadistic Baskerville ancestor. Holmes, ever the rationalist, sniffs out superstition with the disdain of someone asked to do math at a séance. The film front-loads most of its jolts, and the back half never quite lives up to its pulpy prologue. Still, Cushing carries the proceedings with clipped authority, Andre Morell plays Watson as a dignified straight man without resorting to oafish comic relief, and the moor is all cobwebbed elegance and ruddy menace. The mystery itself plays second fiddle to the décor, but in this setting, maybe that’s forgivable. You don’t watch this Hound for plot mechanics. You watch it for Cushing’s bone-dry precision, for Christopher Lee managing to look noble while fleeing spectral dogs, and for a studio trying to cross-pollinate its monsters with a bit of pipe and logic. It’s Doyle by way of Dracula’s tailor—and that’s not nothing.

A Sherlock Holmes spoof by way of an open bar at a British variety show, The Hound of the Baskervilles is what happens when Peter Cook and Dudley Moore are given Arthur Conan Doyle and left unsupervised. It’s not an adaptation so much as a comic detonation. The jokes are relentless—some clever, some idiotic, many delivered with the air of men entertaining themselves first. Holmes and Watson, as played by Cook and Moore, are barely characters at all—more like delivery systems for non sequiturs and slow burns. If Holmes and Watson weren’t so thoroughly embedded in pop culture already, you’d struggle to tell what they were spoofing. Still, there’s a weird delight to the film’s barrage. One minute it’s dry wordplay, the next it’s pratfalls and background gags, all moving with the logic of a sketch revue duct-taped to a mystery plot. You don’t watch for coherence. You watch to see what the hell they’ll do next. It helps to be a fan of British humor—particularly the deadpan and the deeply silly. And it helps even more if you’ve read The Hound of the Baskervilles, or at least pretended to at some point in your life. That said, the movie works on its own wavelength: silly, irreverent, occasionally brilliant, and totally disinterested in whether you’re keeping up. It’s not for everyone. But if you’re in the mood for a spoof that behaves like it’s being told by someone who forgot the punchline halfway through and just improvised a funnier one, this is a worthy curiosity.

A dumb comedy, proudly so, but not without its surprises—chief among them Anna Faris, who plays the entire thing like she’s balancing on stilettos over a minefield and somehow doesn’t blow it. The jokes rarely hold up on paper and only occasionally improve in execution, but Faris brings an almost cartoon buoyancy to the role. You’re not laughing constantly, but you’re probably grinning—and in a film this broad, that counts for something. She plays Shelley Darlingson, a 27-year-old orphan turned Playboy Bunny, living a silk-lined fantasy until a jealous rival evicts her from the mansion. Lost, pink-clad, and barely functional, she stumbles across a failing sorority and decides—via logic that barely qualifies as logic—to become their house mother. The girls of Zeta Alpha Zeta are played as a who’s-who of mid-2000s misfits—socially awkward, fashion-averse, allegedly unlovable—until a Bunny-shaped makeover montage teaches them how to flirt, strut, and apply eyeliner in a moving vehicle. Emma Stone, barely out of the starting gate, plays the group’s reluctant alpha nerd, and even this early, she’s visibly punching above the material. The love interest is Colin Hanks, rom-com starter kit: sincere, safe, vaguely principled. Shelley tries to impress him by sounding smart, which goes about as well as you’d expect. When a passerby recognizes her from a pictorial titled “Girls with GEDs,” it’s less a joke than a mission statement. A few gags land. Many don’t. But the film has an airy optimism that’s hard to resent. And Faris, floating just above the script’s limitations, is practically her own special effect.

A film about confidence men that doesn’t condescend—David Mamet’s House of Games hooks you early and draws you deeper into its layered maze of deception, never once letting the tension slacken or the mood crack. It’s noir without cigarettes or alleyways, a slow seduction of logic and language, all couched in clinical precision. Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse), a well-to-do psychiatrist with a face that doesn’t flinch and a wardrobe that means business, finds herself pulled from her ivory tower and into the dark corners of the confidence racket. One of her patients is deep in gambling debt, and in trying to rescue him, she crosses paths with Mike (Joe Mantegna), a smooth-talking hustler whose poker face reads like a textbook of manipulation. She offers help. He offers education. Just watch the mark for a tell, he says. It starts with one con—then two. Then the rug, the floor, and most of the building are gone. Mamet, directing from his own screenplay, trims the fat off every sentence until the dialogue resembles chess—strategic, cold, exact. It’s a world where everyone’s playing a part, and the thrill is in trying to figure out when the script switches hands. The film is as much about performance as it is about crime. Every conversation doubles as an audition, every gesture a bluff. Crouse plays Margaret like a woman who’s spent years analyzing others and is finally getting the chance to analyze herself—unwillingly, and in real time. She doesn’t crack so much as quietly shatter. Mantegna is all affable menace, offering seduction as instruction, a masterclass in behavioral misdirection. The supporting cast—Ricky Jay, J.T. Walsh, Mike Nussbaum—move through Mamet’s world like shadows you half-suspect are looking back at you. It’s a chilly film but not a cold one. The intellectual pull is so tight, so relentless, it almost tricks you into forgetting you’re watching a tragedy unfold in slow motion. The payoff is worth the disorientation. Mamet might traffic in games, but he never plays fair, and that’s precisely the pleasure.

Wealth, handbags, and the slow spiral of marital homicide—Ridley Scott doesn’t so much direct this film as he curates it, like a lacquered family album full of silks, grudges, and badly kept secrets. Adam Driver plays Maurizio Gucci as a recessive heir with a shy gait and a gaze that registers somewhere between bored and baffled. Lady Gaga, in full basilisk mode, is Patrizia Reggiani, an office manager with aspirations taller than the Gucci tower itself. Together, they start as a couple who flirt over espresso and end as strangers speaking through lawyers and bloodlines. The arc is familiar—poor girl meets rich boy, poor girl marries rich boy, poor girl plots assassination of rich boy—but the film takes the scenic route. And by scenic, I mean generously padded with corporate infighting, boardroom showdowns, and entire subplots involving Cousin Paolo (Jared Leto, doing a performance that might’ve been better left in rehearsal). Leto, painted like a pastry and dressed like upholstery, seems to think he’s in La Cage aux Folles, and it’s impossible to look away. The film drifts—two hours and thirty-eight minutes of costume changes and real estate deals—but there are stretches of glorious, head-snapping trash. Lady Gaga spits lines like she’s carving initials into a champagne flute, and Al Pacino struts through his scenes with the subtlety of an opera singer ordering lunch. It’s overwrought, overscored, and overlong, but there’s a brutalist fascination in watching taste and money devour each other. The best scenes are practically catfights wrapped in velvet. You may not learn anything about fashion, but you’ll walk away knowing exactly how much drama fits inside a luxury brand.

This adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth moves with the solemnity of a funeral procession, and not always to its advantage. One scene drifts into the next like it’s being handed off by gloved attendants. But Gillian Anderson gives it a pulse. She plays Lily Bart, a socialite admired everywhere but welcome nowhere. There’s precision in her restraint, a quiet sharpness that keeps the character from dissolving into melancholy. Lily wants the lifestyle but recoils at the terms. She’s drawn to refinement, repelled by compromise, and allergic to the kind of transactional marriage that would keep her in silk. The result is a slow unraveling—of reputation, of opportunity, of credit accounts and social standing—accelerated by poor decisions and worse luck. It’s not a film that courts casual interest. The pacing is deliberate, bordering on punishing. But there’s an ache beneath the surface, and Anderson locates it without drowning in it. The film may sputter as cinema, but it’s held aloft—just barely—by the shape of Wharton’s tragedy and the precision of its lead. A difficult watch, and a harder one to recommend—unless you already know the story and want to see it performed with a kind of solemn intelligence. Otherwise, it’s a long way down with very little breeze.

It begins with a clerical error, the kind that arrives in the mail and dismantles a life. Jennifer Connelly’s Kathy is evicted from her family home—not because of malice or misdeed, but a misfiled notice about business taxes she never owed. By the time the bureaucratic machinery is stalled and reversed, her home has already changed hands. Sold, in all legal correctness, to Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley), a once-high-ranking Iranian colonel now living in quiet exile and desperate reinvention. He plans to fix it up, flip it, and carve out some semblance of the dignity he lost in fleeing Tehran. The transaction is over; the consequences are just beginning. House of Sand and Fog unspools like a slow-motion collision—precise, inexorable, and far more devastating than you think it will be. It’s not about real estate, though the contested property becomes the gravity well around which grief, identity, and pride orbit until they collapse. Vadim Perelman, in his directorial debut, shows a startling command of emotional tectonics—how pain simmers beneath civility, and how the American dream, when denied, can calcify into tragedy. This is not a morality play. The film has no interest in easy villains. Kathy is adrift, self-destructive in quiet increments, yet dogged in her belief that losing the house has unraveled the last thread of who she was. Behrani, in contrast, is all surface control and ritual—he dresses impeccably, performs small tasks with the precision of a man trying to convince the world (and himself) that he still matters. His wife (Shohreh Aghdashloo, superb) and teenage son watch him teeter between nobility and delusion. Both Kathy and Behrani are right. Both are catastrophically wrong. That’s the brilliance. Kingsley, coiled and exacting, delivers one of his finest performances—Behrani isn’t a villain, but a man who has resolved never to be humiliated again. Connelly plays Kathy as a woman cracking along invisible lines—her grief arrives not in wails but in quiet collapse. When their worlds tangle, the film becomes less a story and more a reckoning. Ron Eldard’s character, a cop who grows entangled in Kathy’s crusade, arrives as a possible solution and quickly becomes another complication. The final act is brutal not because of what happens, but because there’s no other way it could have ended. The title feels like prophecy. Sand shifts. Fog obscures. The house was never just a house. It was everything they thought they could still hold onto. And by the end, the cost is incalculable.

A house sits quietly on the English countryside, unassuming in architecture but cursed in occupancy. Two police officers discuss it in murmurs, their conversation acting less like a framing device and more like a whispered dare. People move in, people don’t move out—at least not intact. What follows is a quartet of horror stories, stitched together with a kind of giddy morbidity, each tenant another chapter in the house’s long, bloodless body count. There’s no actual dripping blood, mind you—but dread seeps from the walls like rising damp. This is the work of Amicus Productions, a sort of Hammer clone, except specializing in portmanteau horror—films composed of short, sinister vignettes linked by a common thread. Here, that thread is location, but the tapestry varies delightfully in tone and texture. Denholm Elliott kicks things off as a horror writer whose fictional killer refuses to stay confined to the page. His descent into madness is twitchy and literate, a nice warm-up. Then comes Peter Cushing in a quietly tragic tale about a wax museum with one too many familiar faces in the window. It’s the slowest of the bunch, but Cushing lends it gravity even when the script begins to wobble. But it’s the third segment, starring Christopher Lee, that burrows deepest. He plays a steely father with a gaze like a bayonet and a daughter he treats less like a child than a volatile artifact. She’s kept from toys, from friends, from warmth of any kind—and for reasons that become chillingly clear. Chloe Franks, as the girl, gives a performance far more eerie than any prosthetic or fog machine could summon. The payoff here doesn’t scream; it whispers, which is far more unsettling. Finally, Jon Pertwee arrives in a broad, theatrical finale as a horror actor who scoffs at the supernatural until it smirks back. It’s the comic capstone to a film that’s otherwise content to brood in the shadows, and it works—barely—because Pertwee understands how to wink without deflating the tension. The House That Dripped Blood isn’t exactly terrifying, but it’s deliciously macabre, like reading ghost stories by candlelight during a power outage. Its pleasures are rooted in mood, performance, and that unmistakable British knack for making horror feel both mannered and malevolent. No segment overstays its welcome. No character is safe. And the house, ever patient, simply waits for its next story.

The ghosts are bored. That’s the problem. They waft about the tatami mats, peek around shoji screens, make the occasional face—but they’re not here to scare so much as supervise. This is a haunted house movie where the hauntings wear loafers. An American couple—both suspiciously photogenic and underdressed—moves into a centuries-old Japanese home freshly scrubbed of its triple murder past. The daughter tags along, wide-eyed and mostly forgotten by the script. The price is suspiciously low, which is realtor-speak for “this place has a poltergeist and a past.” But nobody flinches, because these are the early ’80s, and exorcisms were practically a line item on the moving budget. The ghosts, when not holding eerie séances with mirrors and windchimes, slip into their tenants like butter into toast. And here’s where the film finds its peculiar flavor: two bickering American men, previously limited to barfight choreography and brooding postures, suddenly start hurling fists with the finesse of Tokyo dojo royalty. Ghosts, apparently, come with black belts. One scene away from a horror picture and into a body-swap martial arts comedy without changing the wallpaper. The real attraction—if one is feeling generous—is not the plot, which telegraphs its own demise with the confidence of a psychic with a megaphone, but the cultural backdrop. Japan isn’t set dressing here so much as misread instruction manual. The lacquered architecture, the lacquered performances, and a few too many close-ups of Noh masks trying their best to act. It’s rarely frightening, occasionally clever, and paced like it knows you have laundry to fold. But there’s a strange novelty in watching this East-meets-West ghost story stumble toward something watchable. Not successful, exactly. But possessed of a certain accidental curiosity, like finding a Victorian dollhouse wired for Wi-Fi.

There’s a quiet ache to this film, like the kind that settles in behind the ribs and refuses to announce itself. Housekeeping begins with abandonment, circles grief, and eventually finds something gentler—though not necessarily safer—in between. A mother walks into a lake and leaves her two young daughters with their elderly grandmother in a sleepy Idaho town that seems suspicious of anything not cataloged in its local paper. Years pass. The girls grow up. The grandmother dies. And in her place arrives Sylvie (Christine Lahti), the family’s wayward aunt and a kind of vagabond philosopher in secondhand shoes. Sylvie does not shriek or self-destruct. Her oddities are quieter: she hoards newspapers, hops freight trains, disappears for afternoons without explanation. She sleeps in the park and leaves doors open. In this town, that’s enough to inspire side glances and whispered pity. One niece, Lucille (Andrea Burchill), absorbs that judgment with the eager precision of someone who plans to outgrow her zip code. The other, Ruth (Sara Walker), doesn’t so much reject it as forget to care. Sylvie, she realizes, is not broken—just oriented toward a different kind of life. And perhaps, so is she. Forsyth directs with the patience of someone dusting off family photographs, careful not to smear the corners. There’s no rush to the storytelling, no crescendo of revelation—only the slow accumulation of character and mood, filtered through Ruth’s poetic narration, which floats above the narrative like breath on glass. The world here feels not cinematic, exactly, but remembered: soft-focus, slightly askew, emotionally precise. Christine Lahti is magnificent in a key that most actors avoid—playing not mystery, but opacity. Sylvie isn’t trying to be understood. She simply is. And that’s what makes her fascinating. Housekeeping doesn’t fight to be profound, which is perhaps why it is. It leaves you not with drama, but with a sense of hush. Like finding your own reflection in someone else’s shadow.

Even as someone who often finds Jim Carrey’s particular brand of rubber-limbed mayhem pretty thrilling, this one’s a tougher sell. The face—the twitching, elastic, microsecond-morphing face that does half the work for him—is mostly buried under yak-hair and prosthetic rage. What we get instead is compensation: hips swinging, feet skipping, voice turned up to eleven and pitched somewhere between vaudeville and allergy attack. He’s doing his job, and then some. But the performance, loud as it is, never quite cuts through the noise. The rest of the film follows suit. The production design is enormous, detailed, and practically screaming at the audience to admire it. Whoville looks less like a town and more like the inside of a candy wrapper after it’s been melted and reshaped by a glue gun. The camera never quite settles—it spins, juts, rushes, peers too close—often through a fisheye lens, as though the lens itself were catching a cold. It’s a visual strategy that might work in short bursts, but sustained for 105 minutes, it starts to feel more like a theme park queue than a movie. And that’s too bad, because underneath the clutter is a perfectly sound story. Seuss already nailed the shape of it: short, snappy, sharply observed. The feature-length version stretches things, as these things must, by expanding the role of Cindy Lou Who (Taylor Momsen), who’s now the only Whoville resident with the emotional intelligence to recognize that the Grinch is less monster than misanthrope. She’s charming and used well, though she functions more as a narrative device than a fully drawn character. The message—about community, loneliness, generosity, and all that—is still present, just shouted through a megaphone. Occasionally, the noise clears, and a well-timed line or clever visual lands. Christine Baranski is doing something faintly deranged, and it works. But for the most part, the film feels like it’s been overclocked—more spectacle than spirit. As a children’s film, it’s functional. As holiday tradition, it’s a lot. Best viewed in small doses, possibly with the sound at half-volume and a distraction nearby.

Inflation anxiety, filtered through shag carpeting and fluorescent lighting. How to Beat the High Cost of Living tries to be a caper comedy for the economically exasperated—three suburban women in Oregon, fed up with maxed-out cards and ex-husbands with better lawyers, decide the only reasonable solution is mall-based larceny. Jane Curtin, Susan Saint James, and Jessica Lange make a sharp trio, or at least they would if the script gave them something to do besides blink in disbelief and scheme at kitchen tables. Curtin floats the idea of going into porn (quickly vetoed), and from there it’s a hop, skip, and moral slide into theft. Their target? A revolving glass globe full of cash spinning in the middle of a shopping center like a sad disco ball for capitalism. Naturally, it’s surrounded by a battalion of security guards and a live audience. The plan is idiotic. The film, less committed than it should be, barely notices. The dialogue occasionally snaps into the right farcical rhythm, but it rarely follows through. The romance subplot between Curtin and Dabney Coleman trudges along dutifully, like a network TV B-story nobody asked for. The pacing drags. The tone shifts between mild satire and sitcom logic, without ever really picking a side. It’s a movie with a setup that wasn’t beneath being fun, but it keeps flinching from its own premise. By the time the heist actually kicks in, the energy has long since gone missing—possibly siphoned off by the same inflation it’s trying to mock.

Three models—Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, and Lauren Bacall—team up to rent a swanky Manhattan penthouse, all with the same goal: find a rich husband. Love optional. It’s not hard to see the appeal. The film opens with a musical overture like it’s inviting you to a gala, then parades out three of the most charismatic women of the era in gown after gown, each one more Cinemascope-optimized than the last. But the charm stays on the surface. For all its gloss and timing, the story never moves past window-shopping for husbands. The men show up—older, pompous, clueless, or just conveniently wealthy. William Powell, too distinguished for the part, plays a soft-spoken tycoon who courts Bacall with dry martinis and a yacht. Rory Calhoun flirts with Grable like he’s on loan from a Western. David Wayne, cast opposite Monroe, spends most of the film squinting at her as if trying to decide if she’s real. The script calls it courtship. It plays more like a sales demo. Monroe, playing a glasses-averse innocent with a pratfall problem, gets the broadest gags. Bacall, as the ringleader, does what she can to add spine. Grable mostly drifts. There’s a last-minute nod to love over money, but it feels like a correction—a half-apology the film doesn’t mean. The color pops. The clothes sparkle. The script glides. But it all feels pinned in place—elegant, watchable, and faintly embalmed. A light comedy with nothing on its mind but what’s in the bank.

Apologies to aspiring murderers—there are no helpful pointers here. The title’s a red herring. This is a mid-’60s black comedy about a bachelor who wakes up from a bender to find he’s been married off without his consent—or recollection. Like most domestic comedies from the era, it arrives with some dust on it. The opening narration casually suggests that women belong in the kitchen, and even I—someone who watches vintage films like they’re part of a balanced lunch—wasn’t entirely sure whether to wince or shrug. This is a film you’ll have to meet on its own terms. It’s not self-aware enough to satirize gender roles outright. It makes plenty of arguments about how men are better off single—as if marriage is a favor extended to women—but it toys with those ideas in a way that’s too tongue-in-cheek to take literally. And it’s often funny while doing it. The premise walks a shaky tightrope, but the film benefits from a sharp script and even sharper casting—Jack Lemmon as cartoonist and lifelong bachelor Stanley Ford, and Terry-Thomas as his appalled butler Charles, who narrates the whole thing like he’s filing a formal complaint. The setup is pure farce. Stanley attends a bachelor party that begins as a mock wake for lost freedom—until the groom announces the wedding is off, and the mood flips into full-blown celebration. (Max Showalter’s face, caught somewhere between joy and devastation, deserves a spot in the supporting-actor reaction shot hall of fame.) Then comes the cake. Out pops Virna Lisi, covered only in whipped cream. She sees Stanley. Stanley sees her. The next morning, they’re married. Charles is horrified—as if someone’s dug up his grandmother’s bones and hung them over the mantel. Stanley, still piecing it together, takes a moment to realize his new bride doesn’t speak a word of English. Not even enough for him to call her anything other than “Mrs. Ford.” She, meanwhile, is thrilled—radiant, affectionate, rapid-fire in Italian, and oblivious to the idea that any of this might be a mistake. Lemmon plays the panic with his usual precision—coiled, clipped, just on the edge of a breakdown. Lisi meets him with wide-eyed warmth and the perfect shade of cheerful confusion. She’s a firecracker dropped into a man’s carefully ordered life. The two spark off each other easily—her presence stoking his exasperation, his resistance sharpening her charm. From there, the film slides into marital satire—not with teeth, but with enough of an edge to scratch. Marriage, domesticity, masculine panic—it’s all there, softened for comic effect. Most of the jokes land somewhere between a grin and a chuckle, but the pacing never drops. Lemmon moves like he’s afraid the film will stall if he stands still, and the script hands him just enough material to make it look effortless. It’s not a highlight of the decade, but when it works, it works—because everyone involved knows exactly how ridiculous it is, and plays it straight to the finish.

A candy-colored missile launched at the skyscrapers of mid-century ambition, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is at once a musical, a satire, a love story, and a slyly manic cartoon about careerism so rapid it might qualify as science fiction. Robert Morse, cherubic and twitchy and perfectly cast, stars as J. Pierrepont Finch, a window washer whose career takes off the moment he stumbles across a self-help paperback and decides to follow it like scripture. The company he picks—almost at random—is the World-Wide Wicket Company, a name that sounds like it came from a can of alphabet soup. Within days, he’s gone from mailroom nobody to executive darling. Nobody blinks. This is the kind of movie that knows exactly how absurd it is and has no plans to apologize. It’s soaked in kitsch—wall-to-wall mod hues, rotary phones, and boardroom nonsense—but also in sheer comic precision. Everything in this world is exaggerated, from the promotion-by-flattery office politics to the helium-filled romantic entanglements. And yet it moves with such breezy confidence that you barely have time to notice how sharp the jokes really are. The songs are punchy and shined to a gloss: “I Believe in You” lands like a whispered confession to a mirror, while “A Secretary Is Not a Toy” somehow manages to be simultaneously catchy and squirm-inducing. Nelson Riddle’s orchestrations are as intricate as a high-rise blueprint, and Bob Fosse’s choreography—tight, angular, coiled like a sneeze—keeps the whole film teetering on the edge of delirium. Yes, it’s dated. Yes, the gender politics are miles past quaint. There’s a running current of sexism that, while intended as satire, still carries the sourness of the real thing. But the target is clear: it’s the entire machine, not just its gears. The film ridicules everything—ambition, hierarchy, phony sincerity, even the genre it occupies. It doesn’t ask you to believe it. It just wants to keep things bouncing. Morse, especially, is a marvel—his Finch is innocent and calculating all at once, a man who lies with the enthusiasm of a choirboy. Michele Lee, as his romantic foil, radiates good sense even when saddled with some of the script’s more dubious lines. Rudy Vallee, as the company’s stiff-collared president, practically plays himself into fossil form. The whole film feels like it’s running on tonic water and caffeine. It wants to be liked, and it is—easily. If the satire doesn’t always cut deep, it at least cuts clean.

Everything you’ve heard is true. Maybe not all of it, because words often fail this particular specimen, but enough of it to serve as warning. Howard the Duck is a disaster—not flamboyantly, cultishly, show-it-to-your-friends bad, but sad, heavy, dull bad. The kind of bad that starts with a talking duck and somehow gets worse from there. Howard lives on a planet just like ours, if ours were populated entirely by anthropomorphic ducks who bathe in lava lamps and read issues of Playduck. No explanation, no satire, just feathers and confusion. Without warning, a space vortex opens, and he’s launched through the cosmos and spat onto Earth. First thing he sees: a gang of punks assaulting a rock singer named Beverly (Lea Thompson), who looks like she fell out of an Aqua Net commercial and into a rewrite of Streets of Fire. Howard, despite being two feet tall and dressed like a bored tourist, beats them all up using “quack fu,” a phrase the screenplay not only invents, but repeats with enthusiasm. Duck puns. Duck puns everywhere. If there’s a sentence to be said, this movie will find a way to web-foot it. And when the jokes aren’t about waterfowl, they’re about…nothing. Or maybe everything. It’s hard to tell, because narrative logic here functions less like a spine and more like a buffet. Howard crashes at Beverly’s place for the night because it’s raining and, according to the film’s own internal nonsense, ducks hate getting wet. Somewhere, a six-year-old with a picture book could’ve waved a hand and reminded the writers that ducks are, in fact, known for the whole water thing. But the film never lets zoological accuracy interfere with its efforts to confuse. Enter Tim Robbins as a jittery scientist who sees Howard as a once-in-a-lifetime specimen and shouts every line like he’s auditioning for an infomercial about atoms. Enter Jeffrey Jones, later, as a possessed physicist who becomes a creature of pure electricity. The movie is not above zapping people with lightning and calling it science. But none of that—not the rubber suit, not the 1980s laser effects, not the tonal wobble between sitcom and shriek—compares to the moment where Beverly tries to seduce Howard. The camera lingers. The duck quivers. It’s supposed to be funny, but it plays like someone accidentally aired the wrong reel. For anyone disturbed by Back to the Future’s infamous mother-son flirtation—this will make it seem like a quaint misunderstanding. There is no salvaging this. Not as camp. Not as curiosity. Not even as George Lucas trivia night. The film is 111 minutes long, and each one asks politely if you wouldn’t mind checking your brain at the door.

Humoresque takes its time, this one. A slow-bubbling soap with violins, sweat, and Joan Crawford entering rooms like a storm system with perfect eyebrows. For a while, it walks the line between classy and starchy—until a moment arrives, uninvited and glorious, that tilts the whole movie toward something more fevered. Crawford, seated in a theater balcony, is gazing down at the stage. She’s not blinking. The object of her stare is John Garfield, deep in violin rapture, pouring everything into a solo that’s doing more than stirring the audience. In the crowd, Joan Chandler—Garfield’s more age-appropriate flame—catches the look, sees what’s unspoken, and flees. But Crawford stays. The camera pushes closer. Her eyes are wild. She strokes a rolled-up program like it’s contraband. The scene is electric, deranged, unspeakably erotic—and not a word is spoken. It bypasses the script entirely and hits something messier, more cinematic. How this got past the censors is anybody’s guess, but we’re better for it. The rest of the film doesn’t quite scale that same height. Garfield plays Paul Boray, a gifted, tortured violinist from modest means, determined to break into the concert world. He’s intense, watchful, self-possessed in that Garfield way—grit balanced by grace. When he captures the attention of Helen Wright (Crawford), a boozy society widow with money and time to spare, the story pivots into benefactor-romance territory, full of attraction, jealousy, and the occasional martini-throwing meltdown. It’s melodrama, but performed with a kind of arched solemnity. The classical music sequences—of which there are many—are gorgeously arranged, a mixture of the familiar and the unexpected, and they give the film an extra dimension, something to anchor the swelling emotions to. Oscar Levant floats in and out, glowering and wisecracking, like he wandered in from a smarter movie and decided to sit at the piano until someone caught up. It’s not a consistently thrilling experience, but it never fully fades, either. There’s an elegance in its staging, a sharpness in its best moments, and a streak of psychological perversity that slips through whenever Crawford is given room to burn. You don’t watch Humoresque for realism—you watch it to see lust, class anxiety, and creative ego swirl together over a Steinway.

It begins with a hacked-up lover and a party that ends in blood—a macabre little curtain-raiser, surprisingly graphic for 1965. Then we’re in the house—rotting, resentful, and thick with the kind of Southern mildew that breeds secrets—and Bette Davis is already pacing the halls like a woman on a first-name basis with her ghosts. She plays Charlotte Hollis, a decaying heiress holed up in her family estate, decades after her married lover was murdered under conditions best described as suspicious and theatrical. The townspeople whisper, the staff winces, and Charlotte shouts into the void. Then Cousin Miriam arrives—Olivia de Havilland with a valise full of silk blouses and ulterior motives—and the cracks in Charlotte’s sanity start to look less like grief and more like strategy. This is Davis’s second walk through Aldrich’s house of theatrical dysfunction after What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and while Charlotte is pitched in a softer register, the contours are familiar. But where Baby Jane ran on venom, this one favors drift. Davis plays Charlotte not as a monster but as someone who might’ve once been whole—long enough ago that even she can’t quite remember. There’s madness, but it’s mournful, and it doesn’t know where to settle until the final act gives it a landing strip. The supporting cast operates like a well-dressed coven. De Havilland plays sweetness with just enough iron to bruise, Agnes Moorehead scorches the screen with sheer velocity, and Joseph Cotten mostly glides through like a man hoping not to be recognized. The script gives them plenty to chew, but its structure keeps pulling the tension sideways—dialogue that clicks, scenes that stall, then a sudden jolt of violence to wake everyone back up. It’s engaging, occasionally gripping, but misfires. There are betrayals, manipulations, chopped limbs, long-lost guilt—but they never quite coagulate or crescendo. What’s left is atmosphere, perfectly tailored performances, and Davis holding the screen with a kind of haunted precision. The film flirts with madness but backs away before the bite. It wants to curdle, but settles for simmering. Still, there’s pleasure in watching it circle the flame, even if it never quite gets scorched.

Hustle proves that after years of flinging throwaway comedies into Netflix’s deep void, Adam Sandler still has a pulse for serious acting. Maybe the buzz from Uncut Gems reminded him what a good script feels like, or maybe this was just the right lane at the right time. Either way, Hustle is the best use of his talents in years—measured, quietly funny, and surprisingly heartfelt. He plays Stanley Sugarman, a longtime Philadelphia 76ers scout who’s just been promoted to assistant coach—only to be bumped right back onto the road by the team’s new owner, Vince (Ben Foster), who has the charm of a locked briefcase. Stanley’s back on the circuit, running on caffeine, airline peanuts, and decades of unrealized ambition. In Spain, what’s meant to be a box-checking trip veers off course when he stumbles onto Bo Cruz (Juancho Hernangómez), a construction worker moonlighting as a phenom in a pickup game that feels like it was lit by fate. Bo is raw, defensive, soft-spoken—but electric when he moves—and Stanley decides, with a little push from his own conscience, that this is the one. Not just a prospect, but the kind of player who could make everyone who ever ignored Stanley eat their clipboards. It’s a classic sports setup, but one that actually works because the film slows down long enough to let the relationships breathe. Sandler’s funny in a low-flame way—his side comments slide out like they’re meant for no one in particular—but he also taps into something quieter. He makes Stanley tired without making him pathetic. Queen Latifah, as his wife, brings stability and tenderness to a role that doesn’t get much screen time, but gives the film an emotional ballast. The story hits the familiar beats—training montages, big setbacks, a climactic tryout—but it tweaks the formula just enough to keep from running stale. The NBA cameos are plentiful and visible (Dr. J, Trae Young, Kenny Smith, even Doc Rivers playing himself), but Zagar smartly folds them into the texture rather than pausing for applause. And Hernangómez, playing the unlikely star, has a quiet presence that reads well onscreen—he may not be a natural actor, but he’s convincing in a way that most “sports movie athletes” never are. Hustle doesn’t reinvent the playbook, but it runs it clean. It respects the game, respects the audience, and gives Sandler a role that doesn’t require shouting or slapstick. That alone feels like progress.

DJay (Terrence Howard) is a small-time hustler peddling weed and women in the muggy backstreets of Memphis—middle-aged, out of angles, and scraping at the ceiling of his own dead-end hustle. Somewhere under the grime and the daily half-lies, he’s got a head full of beats and rhymes—fragments stitched together from everything he’s seen and done that still keep him awake at night. One of them goes by the working title It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp. He’s not wrong. Sick of drifting, he ropes in Key (Anthony Anderson), an old friend with a cautious streak and a half-functioning home studio. They drag in Shelby (DJ Qualls), a twitchy local sound guy with more equipment than social skills, and park themselves in DJay’s grimy back room to hammer out tracks. The second they start, they know it’s half-mad and half-magic—and they cling to that spark like men who know the window is closing fast. Craig Brewer’s film is honest in a way that’s rarely comfortable. Life on the margins stays ugly here—DJay hustles his crew as hard as he hustles everyone else, and the small triumph of making music never really wipes the dirt off his hands. But the recording scenes crackle with a joy so unpolished and genuine it blindsides you; for a few glorious minutes, you forget what the rent costs and who has to be lied to next. Howard threads the whole thing together with a performance that never feels forced. His DJay is raw and cracked open—tough enough to shove people around, soft enough to let this weird spark of artistry crawl out before life stomps it back down. He sells the dream without pretending the dream forgives everything that came before. It isn’t pretty and never tries to be. The next hit of reality is always waiting in the wings, but for a few rough hours, DJay and his mismatched crew make something that can’t be pawned or pimped—just played loud enough to drown out the silence they’ve been living in.

Paul Newman plays Fast Eddie Felson like a man who already knows the punchline to his own downfall. He’s young, gifted, and hungry—too hungry. His game is pool, but really it’s pride, and he’s been scraping by on small-time grifts until he sets his sights on the legend: Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), all poise and polish, with a stomach for twelve-hour marathons and a face that never changes. Their match isn’t just the film’s centerpiece—it’s a character study disguised as sport, and it stretches with the tension of men playing for something bigger than money. Eddie loses more than the game. He loses what little ego he had left. But that’s when the story really begins—when the talent curdles into something darker. George C. Scott appears like smoke in the wreckage, playing a cold-blooded financier who sees potential in Eddie and knows exactly how to bleed it. He takes him in, not to mentor, but to manage. Off the table, Eddie falls in with Sarah (Piper Laurie), a drifting, damaged woman who drinks to stay out of focus. Their relationship isn’t quite love—more like a fragile alignment between two people who’ve been worn down in different ways. It’s not a romance so much as a slow collision, tender in places but too unstable to last. The pool scenes are hypnotic: long, deliberate, and shot with the reverence of a prizefight. Every shot tells you something about the man behind the cue. Newman is electric, not just for his charisma but for how raw he lets the role become. Fast Eddie is a man who can’t stop getting in his own way. He knows how to win—but not how to lose, and certainly not how to walk away. The Hustler isn’t just about pool. It’s about obsession, ego, and what happens when talent outruns character. The fallout is personal, and the wounds don’t fade. That’s what makes it great.