Film Buff Musings

A 2D animated feature from Disney’s main division, Lilo & Stitch marked a brief departure from the studio’s usual polish. It’s rougher, stranger, and more willing to follow impulses that feel closer in spirit to early-2000s Nickelodeon than to Disney’s own urbane legacy. For once, that wasn’t a bad instinct. Stitch isn’t from a planet of misfits—he’s the misfit. A genetic experiment gone rogue, designed for destruction and engineered in a lab by a mad scientist named Jumbaa. He looks something like a blue koala with six limbs (two of which he folds away when he needs to pass as Earth-appropriate), oversized ears with pieces missing, and the temperament of a toddler crossed with a demolition crew. Whatever took that bite out of his ear, the film wisely doesn’t say. After escaping custody and crash-landing in Hawaii, he’s brought to an animal shelter and quickly adopted—intentionally, and without much hesitation—by Lilo, a sharp, socially misaligned girl with a fixation on Elvis and a tendency to act out in ways that unsettle everyone around her. Their bond isn’t immediate, but it settles into something functional. Both of them are, in different ways, problems no one wants to solve. The animation is looser than the studio standard: watercolor backgrounds, soft character designs, and none of the forced gloss that had become typical of the era. Stitch feels like he wandered in from Gremlins—volatile by design, but prone to hesitation just long enough to wonder why he wrecks things. The film moves quickly and unpredictably, but beneath the surface, the structure is tight. And like most Disney stories, it eventually circles back to family—what it means to be claimed, to be forgiven, to be kept. Lilo & Stitch is uneven in places, but surprisingly affecting. It doesn’t try to be timeless. It just tries to be itself, and that’s part of the appeal.

Arguably the last undisputed triumph of Disney’s so-called Renaissance—the studio’s second golden age that kicked off in 1989 with The Little Mermaid—The Lion King is Shakespeare in fur, Africa without a single human footprint, and a drama so archetypal it could be painted on a cave wall. Here, lions rule the savanna like monarchs ordained by the sun, and every other creature—even the grass they walk on—bows to the hierarchy. Yes, the lions eat their subjects, but it’s okay because it’s in a song. “Circle of Life,” they call it. The reigning king is Mufasa (voiced by James Earl Jones with that godlike, subterranean authority that could part clouds), who proudly welcomes the birth of his cub, Simba (voiced as a child by Jonathan Taylor Thomas). Everything, naturally, is perfect—sunrises blaze, giraffes kneel, music swells—until Mufasa’s brother Scar (Jeremy Irons, practically purring with theatrical disdain) decides the throne would suit him better. The plot, lifted from Hamlet, comes with its own thunderous set piece: a gorge, a wildebeest stampede, a betrayal that still echoes decades later. It’s among the most operatic scenes Disney ever dared animate. Simba escapes and is presumed dead, but instead of vengeance or madness, he grows up in a hammock of forgetfulness with a wisecracking meerkat and a flatulent warthog. Timon and Pumbaa—voiced by Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella—might be Disney’s most effective comic duo: all riff, no rules, singing “Hakuna Matata” like it’s gospel. But the past refuses to stay buried. It begins to surface—through memory, through music, through the eyes of those who still remember him—and Simba is forced to decide whether he’s going to keep drifting or return to the life he left behind. The animation is impeccable, the landscapes wide and painterly, the animal movement fluid without ever tipping into cartoonishness. And then there’s the music. Elton John and Tim Rice supply anthems and earworms that burrow into the brain—“Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King”—songs that probably soundtracked your entire sixth grade whether you asked for it or not. Exhilarating, emotionally precise, and mounted with mythic sweep, The Lion King may have been engineered for greatness—but the real surprise is how much heart beats beneath the engineering.

Another twist on the “grown-up forced to grow up—again” gimmick: this time, Jordan (Regina Hall), a tyrannical tech mogul, wakes up trapped in her 13-year-old body after insulting the wrong tween with a magic wand and bad timing. Cruel to her staff, brittle in conversation, she rules by fear and has the emotional availability of a smoke alarm. Now fun-sized and barred from her own office tower, her kingdom falls into the trembling hands of April (Issa Rae), her long-suffering assistant, whose sudden bump in status doesn’t erase years of verbal paper cuts. Meanwhile, young Jordan must attend middle school—a place she once fled—and survive awkward flirtations, cafeteria torments, and the creeping realization that maybe her inner child wasn’t neglected, just prematurely weaponized. For a while, the premise holds—Marsai Martin, as the pint-sized Jordan, sells the performance with alarming precision, all boardroom bark in a kid-sized frame. Rae works overtime to add dimension to April, who shoulders most of the emotional weight the script forgot to distribute. Together, they find a workable rhythm—until the film nosedives into a slapstick fugue, capped by a restaurant floor show that halts the plot like a traffic cone. What’s meant to be a fable of self-discovery plays more like corporate rebranding. Jordan doesn’t evolve so much as overhear something inconvenient and adjust accordingly. There’s no unraveling, no shift in philosophy—just a switch flipped from tyrant to vaguely tolerable. The cast is game, the premise reliable, and still, the result feels faint—too much scaffolding, not enough structure. It wants to teach us something about growing down but forgets the part where anyone grows at all.

A quasi-absurdist retelling of American frontier history, told by a man who may have outlived the truth—or at least reshaped it to his liking. Little Big Man is part fable, part confession, and part cultural indictment, delivered by way of a 121-year-old survivor with a selective memory and a flair for performance. Dustin Hoffman plays Jack Crabb, a man who claims to have done it all: raised by the Cheyenne, fought alongside Wild Bill Hickok, and walked away from the Battle of Little Bighorn as its lone white survivor. Whether any of it happened is beside the point. The film unfolds as an extended flashback, framed by an interview with a deferential historian who records Jack’s every word like gospel. What follows is a kind of Westward Forrest Gump, except sharper and stranger. Jack moves through identities like he’s rifling a costume trunk. One minute he’s a frontier orphan, the next a dime-store prophet, then a drunk, a dud, a scout with no business scouting. Tragedy slides into farce, then loops back into something meaner. The stories contradict each other, but maybe that’s the point. He’s not offering facts—he’s offering a version, and relishing the delivery. Some memories come out smooth from overuse; others feel arranged, like props set just so. But behind the performance, there’s a current that runs colder, and more honest. The humor is real—strange, sometimes accidental. A preacher’s wife with creative ideas about sin. A heroic horse that refuses to gallop on cue. But the film’s emotional weight comes from what it refuses to dress up: the systemic destruction of Native American life by white settlers. Jack doesn’t editorialize—he just reports. The embellishments serve his ego; the brutality needs no help. Hoffman is quietly extraordinary, shifting between innocence and fatalism with barely a change in volume. And Richard Mulligan, as General George Armstrong Custer, gives a performance so deranged and precise it borders on surrealism—playing the general as a deluded egomaniac with the messianic flair of a cult leader in cavalry boots. The facts are crooked. The tone wanders. But the film holds together with something stronger than accuracy. Call it witness. Call it invention. It feels like history told by the last man alive who still remembers how to lie well.

Some films exist more as curiosities than anything else. Little Cigars is one such oddity—a peculiar hybrid of heist flick, carnival sideshow, and discount fairy tale. It stars a traveling troupe of little people who put on a show not to entertain, exactly, but to distract. While they spin plates and flash routines for unsuspecting crowds, a few nimble fingers work the audience for wallets and watches. It’s larceny wrapped in novelty, and that’s before the tall blonde walks in. Cleo (Angel Tompkins), all legs and layered eye makeup, sees through the scam but doesn’t mind the company. She’s on the run from a controlling boyfriend and decides this merry band of pickpockets is due for a promotion. Her pitch: why stop at personal property when there are banks to knock over? It’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs reimagined by a parole board. The premise alone guarantees its place in the cinematic curiosity cabinet—probably the only movie where a team of little people knocks over a vault. But while the concept has teeth, the story barely nibbles. The robbery itself is paint-by-numbers, the teleplay reads like it came pre-folded inside a TV Guide, and the pacing is so flat you could press flowers between scenes. And then there’s the romance—Cleo and Slick (Billy Curtis), troupe leader and pint-sized strategist, share a chemistry best described as contractual. The film plays it straight, but the sincerity is so over-rehearsed it evaporates. What could’ve registered as daring, absurd, or even perversely sweet ends up simply inert. There’s novelty here, but novelty only carries so far when the writing’s this lifeless and the tone this uneven. Still, there’s something faintly admirable about how committed it is to its own weird little corner.

Laughter, technically, occurred. Twice. But it came with the same sensation as stepping on a rake handle and pretending you meant to. Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro), ex-CIA and still scrutinizing his family like he’s hunting for espionage in their brunch orders, suffers a minor heart attack and decides it’s time to name a successor. His son-in-law Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) gets the dubious promotion. The title? The God-Focker. Yes, that’s what this movie thinks is worth repeating. The Meet the Parents series was never subtle, but this installment drops rhythm and replaces it with noise. The screenplay plays like a writer’s room dare: each gag a first draft, each plot point seemingly pulled from a hat labeled barely amusing ideas rejected by earlier sequels. Dustin Hoffman, returning as the patriarch Focker, is now inexplicably in Spain taking flamenco lessons. Barbra Streisand becomes a television sex guru—loud, grating, and with the tact of someone yelling “I’m liberated!” through a megaphone. Owen Wilson reappears, sun-kissed and smirking, now recast as a roving libertine inexplicably adored by Jack. In a previous chapter, he was married to Jack’s other daughter. She has since vanished—no eulogy, no offhand remark—just erased. And not in a way that suggests mystery, but more as if someone forgot she ever existed. Pacing stumbles from gag to gag like a drunk searching for a doorway. The jokes repeat themselves before they’ve made a point, and the physical comedy seems cobbled together from discarded rehearsal takes. Jessica Alba arrives to inject energy and winds up trapped in a subplot that plays like promotional filler for a movie-within-the-movie no one asked for. Whatever chemistry existed in the earlier films has curdled into discomfort—like watching a family reunion held out of obligation: staged smiles, awkward silences, no one remembering why they came.

Jodie Foster, age 13 but already carrying the cool defiance of someone who’s figured out adults are mostly trouble, stars as Rynn Jacobs—a child who lives alone, convincingly, unnervingly, and with a poet father she insists mustn’t be disturbed upstairs. The door to his study is always closed. So is Rynn’s disposition. She lives on the outskirts of a small New England town in a borrowed house, trying to vanish into routine, but strangers have a way of peering in. Chief among them is Frank Hallet (Martin Sheen), a leering local whose eyes flick over Rynn like inventory. His mother (Alexis Smith), the landlord, is no gentler—more prim than predatory, but with the same unwelcome persistence. Rynn fends them off with poise and prepared answers. But fictions—especially ones involving absent parents—don’t stay airtight for long. Billed as a thriller, the film moves more like a long-held breath than a rush of adrenaline. There’s no sharp build, no clean release. Tension simmers but never hisses. Even the supposed reveals feel less like narrative twists than slow dissolves. And yet, something about its restraint holds attention. There’s a moral provocation under the quiet: a child staking her claim to privacy, autonomy, and survival on her own terms. Foster is immaculate—controlled, alert, and oddly self-possessed without falling into precocity. Martin Sheen does menace with practiced ease, though there’s a performative quality to his predation that borders on over-mannered. He’s creepy, yes, but the chill doesn’t always register. It’s not a film that satisfies in the way thrillers typically do, but it leaves a mark. Not from shocks or scares, but from the idea that a 13-year-old girl might be the only one in the film who understands the stakes.

Fred Tate (Adam Hann-Byrd) is seven years old, plays piano like a miniature savant, sketches with unnerving precision, and spends most of his free time worrying about metaphysics. He’s a prodigy, but more importantly, he’s lonely—trapped between a mind that won’t slow down and a world that keeps mistaking him for adorable. His mother Dede (Jodie Foster), blunt, broke, and visibly allergic to pretension, loves him more fiercely than she knows how to help him. The story gets going once Fred is spotted by Jane Grierson (Dianne Wiest), a sort of velvet-gloved academic talent scout who runs a gifted program that looks like Montessori by way of the Jet Propulsion Lab. Fred is enrolled, tested, examined, and finally surrounded by fellow wunderkinder—who, in one of the film’s smarter observations, are often just as alienated as he is. For all their brainpower, none of them know what to say at lunch. This was Foster’s first time directing, and it plays like a film made by someone who’s done her time in the spotlight—quiet, precise, and uninterested in applause. She keeps the emotions close to the skin but never sentimentalizes them. What could’ve been an educational after-school fable turns out to have its own pulse: awkward, humane, and full of small detours that matter more than the plot thinks they do. It stalls a little near the end, as though trying to solve Fred’s future with a tidy bow it doesn’t believe in. But even when the story falters, the tone stays sharp. Foster doesn’t try to explain giftedness like a condition or a burden—she just watches it, smartly, and lets it bruise the people around it.

A farewell to Disney’s hand-drawn golden age and the bright dawn of the so-called Renaissance that shook the studio awake after its mid-century nap. The Little Mermaid didn’t just flip the lights back on—it reminded everyone a fully cartoon feature could charm kids, parents, and the occasional cynic without drowning in its own nostalgia. The first unambiguously great fully animated Disney film since The Jungle Book—maybe even Sleeping Beauty if you’re feeling picky. The plot’s fairy-tale thin but watertight: Ariel—red hair like a neon flag and the singing voice of an angel—wants legs, freedom, and the aristocratic dreamboat Eric, whom she rescues from a shipwreck. To get him, she trades her voice to Ursula—half cabaret diva, half tentacled loan shark—who delivers exactly what she promises, then rigs the game so shamelessly you almost admire her hustle. What keeps it fresh decades on is how breezy and self-assured it all feels. No padding, no frantic toddler-bait gags. The stakes are clean: three days, no voice, one kiss or back to fins forever. And if that’s not tense enough, there’s Ursula ballooning into a kaiju sea witch just because she can. The comedy slides in neat: Sebastian, the neurotic court composer turned reluctant babysitter, micromanages a lovestruck teenager while delivering the two songs that basically carry the box office—Under the Sea and Kiss the Girl. Flounder does what sidekicks do: flutters, frets, and makes the heroine braver by contrast. Scuttle the seagull mangles human trivia to delightful effect. And that deranged French chef hacking crabs to pieces while Sebastian scuttles around and hides is among Disney’s darkest joke. Alan Menken’s music practically lifts the film off the ground. You don’t just hum these songs, they burrow in like nursery rhymes you’re sure you knew before you were born. When people sigh about “classic Disney magic,” this is what they mean: a simple plot, songs you hum in your sleep, a deeply relatable heroine who charges headfirst into trouble, and a villain who enjoys herself far too much to hate. Sweet but sharp, timeless but never cloying. No wasted scenes, no wink-wink irony. Just a clean fairytale that still floats like it did back in ’89.

An entertaining-enough prequel to The Little Mermaid that should satisfy younger fans of the original, though adults may notice the storytelling has been—well—lightly brined. Familiar characters return, the humor leans dopey, and the callbacks arrive on cue. Still, some care went in. The backgrounds look a bit flat, but the animation is fluid and surprisingly polished—more streamlined than lavish, but far from bargain-bin. The storyline’s thin, and that’s the film’s undoing. After Ariel’s mother dies in a prologue of no great consequence, King Triton bans music from the kingdom. Of course, that won’t hold—Ariel still has the voice of a siren, and Sebastian’s crustacean band keeps the rhythm pulsing in secret. Ariel and her sisters sneak off to hear them and, predictably, find it all wonderful. At one point, Flounder performs an electric guitar air solo, which raises the question: is he a time traveler? Then again, these 19th-century sea creatures already know calypso, so historical consistency may not be the point. Sebastian and his band deliver a fun (if too brief) rendition of “Jump in the Line,” and just like in the original, the band is the highlight. The villain this time is Marina Del Rey—voiced by Sally Field—a sort of Ursula halfway through a sea-witch drag transformation. I thought she was a prequel Ursula, but no: she’s just a crabby careerist with a flair for petty sabotage. She’s cartoonish, insistent, and never especially threatening. She merely flails around the margins while the plot treads water. Still, it’s more entertaining than expected. And in the sequel graveyard, that qualifies as a modest triumph.

Disney’s self-cannibalization project barrels on, and this one’s a particularly joyless chew. The 1989 original was candy-colored and effervescent from start to finish. Here, despite access to the full toolbox of modern effects, the underwater scenes look bleached and sullen—like a crime scene drained of all suspects except the ocean floor. When Sebastian the crab (voiced by Daveed Diggs) launches into “Under the Sea,” a song about how lively things are beneath the waves, the visuals stage a quiet rebuttal. He might as well be pitching timeshares in an aquarium filtration system. Halle Bailey, at least, is well-cast as Ariel. She’s luminous, with a voice that does the songs justice and a presence that nearly rescues the thing from total inertia. But Melissa McCarthy, as Ursula, feels stranded. The original villain had menace, allure, and a streak of showbiz sleaze; McCarthy gives the impression of someone who’s just had a bad experience with a flat iron and is ready to speak to a manager. What’s most baffling is how risk-averse this remake is. It doesn’t so much reinterpret the original as trace over it in fainter pencil. The songs are mostly preserved, which counts as mercy considering what Aladdin went through, but the energy that made the cartoon sing—visually and otherwise—has been drained into a kind of corporate murk. The result isn’t a disaster, just a listless imitation with nice vocals and dead eyes. It’s The Little Mermaid, yes, but only in the sense that an oil painting of a goldfish is still technically a fish.

Little Miss Sunshine sells itself as heartwarming, but the real pleasure is how little warmth there is under the sweat and bickering. It’s a squabbling-family road trip that insists on collapsing in public, and it’s funnier the more miserable everyone looks. The Hoovers are not a family you’d trust to get through a potluck, let alone a thousand-mile road trip. Greg Kinnear is Richard, a motivational speaker nobody’s motivated to hire—least of all his own wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette), who’s too busy plugging holes in the household budget to care about his nine-step plan for success. Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin) is the family’s secret weapon: a foul-mouthed retiree with a taste for heroin and no indoor voice. Sheryl’s brother Frank (Steve Carell), a Proust scholar newly scraped off the bathroom floor after a failed suicide attempt, rounds out the back seat, next to Dwayne (Paul Dano), the teenager so disgusted by his DNA he’s vowed silence until the Air Force makes him someone else’s problem. At the center is Olive (Abigail Breslin), round-cheeked, earnest to a fault, and fully convinced she’s destined for a crown and a sparkly sash. When another contestant bails on the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, Olive slots right in—ecstatic, oblivious, and dragging her entire train wreck of a family along for the ride. The family piles into a dying VW bus and rattles toward California, trailing dysfunction, mechanical failures, and the occasional corpse—one scene finds them sneaking Grandpa’s body out a hospital window like it’s just another suitcase. It’s broad, it’s silly, and when it tries for sentiment, it’s not nearly as profound as it wants to be. But who cares? The film knows exactly how small, selfish, and weird this clan is and doesn’t force you to love them—just to watch them sweat under the desert sun until they earn your laugh, and maybe a little pity.

A Faust story with backup singers, bloodthirst, and a puppet that could out-act most people. Rick Moranis plays Seymour Krelborn, a shy, slouched nobody who bags plants in a failing flower shop and dreams of escaping skid row with Audrey (Ellen Greene), the squeaky-voiced blonde in the back room whose taste in men has already left her bruised and dating a dentist who treats cavities like target practice. Then, during a solar eclipse, Seymour finds something strange—a plant. It looks like a Venus flytrap but with lips. He names it Audrey II, sets it in the shop window, and almost overnight, business starts buzzing. But what feeds the plant? Human blood. Things escalate. Adapted from the Off-Broadway musical (itself a reworking of Roger Corman’s 1960 cult curio), the film sharpens its B-movie roots into something sleeker, funnier, and far more precise in its madness. The songs, by Ashman and Menken, are giddy and immaculate. Greene’s “Somewhere That’s Green” is the standout—a parody of 1950s domestic fantasy, but sung with the breathy conviction of someone who’s never had anything better to believe in. She doesn’t want riches, she wants an I Love Lucy-sized TV, a chain-link fence, a tidy yard where nothing hurts. It’s hilarious and gutting. The joke isn’t on her—it’s on a world that convinced her to dream that small in the first place. Steve Martin crashes through the movie like a greaser weaponizing every grin. As the sadistic dentist with Elvis hair and a gas addiction, he doesn’t chew the scenery—he drills into it. His big number, a howl of childhood trauma and dental glee, plays like Little Richard doing malpractice. Moranis, all hunched sincerity and nervous twitches, stays firmly in orbit—sweet, sweat-soaked, and visibly wilting under the moral rot blooming around him. He’s the still point in the swirl, just trying to keep the blood off his hands and the girl within reach. And then there’s the plant. Audrey II doesn’t walk—it prowls. Its vines don’t just twitch—they scheme. Voiced by Levi Stubbs, it growls, sings, and sweet-talks like a soul singer working overtime. By the time it starts dreaming out loud about global conquest, you believe it could get there. Frank Oz directs like he’s stage-managing anarchy in four-part harmony. Every detail’s tuned to a kind of warped perfection: cheap sets made lush, slapstick made operatic, puppetry made majestic. Little Shop of Horrors isn’t some cult curio begging for approval—it’s a full-throated genre mutation, stitched with style and pumped full of hemoglobin. The blood might be fake, but the pleasure’s real.

Roger Moore’s first outing as 007 announces itself right away: lighter, glossier, and just a touch too pleased with its own cleverness—which, to be fair, suits Moore down to the cufflinks. Where Connery’s Bond could growl or swagger depending on the climate, Moore’s version floats through danger like a man who’s never once been scuffed by reality. He doesn’t so much survive scrapes as politely decline to acknowledge them. This is also one of the more gleefully gimmicky Bond films—and that’s not a complaint. The plot, loosely draped around heroin smuggling and Caribbean voodoo, borrows liberally from the blaxploitation craze of the era. Watching the polished English spy flounder through Harlem back rooms and crocodile farms is half the fun; Moore is so at odds with the grit around him that every gunfight feels like a polite misunderstanding. Connery might have looked too comfortable here, a tourist who’d done this a dozen times before. Moore, by contrast, looks amused to find himself involved at all. And then there’s the villain: Geoffrey Holder’s Baron Samedi, a grinning, cackling voodoo spirit who dances on coffins and might—might—actually be supernatural. In a franchise that has never been shy about improbable death traps, it’s oddly satisfying to have a big bad whose magic is left just ambiguous enough to feel genuinely uncanny. Jane Seymour, impossibly young and impossible to look away from, is tarot-reading psychic Solitaire—arguably one of the franchise’s great Bond girls, though perhaps not for reasons the script intends. Her storyline, involving virginity and a rather questionable loss-of-superpowers clause, has aged about as well as milk—but Seymour herself floats above the nonsense, radiant and nearly believable as the one person Bond might regret ruining. It’s not the grittiest Bond. It’s certainly not the smartest. But Live and Let Die drips with a goofy, exotic energy that makes it tough to resist—a glossy postcard from a time when 007 was more trick deck than blunt instrument, and Roger Moore was more than happy to grin through the mayhem without a hair out of place.

A movie about making a movie—until it resets, and turns out to be a dream about making a movie. And then resets again. Living in Oblivion opens on a calamitous shoot: Nick Reve (Steve Buscemi), an indie director on the edge, is just trying to capture a simple scene, but the equipment misfires, the boom drops into frame, and the actors seem allergic to direction. Then Nick wakes up. None of it happened. Or didn’t yet. The next section replays the day from the perspective of Nicole (Catherine Keener), the lead actress, whose own dream version peels back a different set of nerves. And then comes a third version—the “real” one—though by this point, the movie has folded in on itself so many times you start to wonder whether the whole shoot exists somewhere inside someone’s anxious REM cycle. It sounds like it should be exhausting. It’s not. DiCillo keeps the rhythm tight and the dialogue crackling, letting each setback spiral just long enough to sting. James LeGros nails the part of a pompous actor who treats every line like a personal insult. Peter Dinklage, in his first film role, delivers a miniature masterclass in comedic outrage, storming off the set after learning his only scene is in a dream sequence: “Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it? Do you know anyone who’s had a dream with a dwarf in it? No! I don’t even have dreams with dwarves in them. The only place I’ve seen dwarves in dreams is in stupid movies like this!” Living in Oblivion isn’t just clever—it’s pointed. It takes the machinery of low-budget filmmaking and reassembles it into a looping farce, where no one’s entirely sure what they’re making or why, but they can’t stop trying. It captures the grind, the delusion, the oddly devotional energy of people chasing a vision with borrowed gear and nothing to fall back on. It’s a film about filmmaking that manages to be both an inside joke and a universal one.

The democratization of filmmaking is, in theory, a beautiful thing. Anyone with a camera, a script, and a few willing accomplices can make a movie. But Llamageddon isn’t just backyard filmmaking—it’s filmmaking with the backyard still under construction. The premise—a killer alien llama crash-landing on Earth to terrorize suburban partygoers—has cult aspirations written in glitter marker. The spaceship is a livestock trailer with an aluminum plank jammed through the vents. The alien llama differs from its Earthbound cousins only in that its eyes glow red and shoot lasers. It kills. Sometimes by incineration. Sometimes by electrocution. Sometimes for reasons even the film doesn’t bother to invent. In one scene, it zaps a group of teens in a hot tub. Moments later, a friend walks in with a six-pack and drops it in horror—except the cans are clearly empty. So he brought props, not beverages. That’s the level of attention we’re working with. Did the cast and crew forget they weren’t supposed to drink the set dressing? Possibly. The plot, such as it is, involves the llama picking off the cast one by one while they flirt, party, and wander haplessly into kill setups. The script aims for late-night, stoner-friendly absurdity, but the delivery is too indifferent to even register as fun. The timing’s off. The jokes barely land. It commits to badness with such nonchalance it forgets to be entertaining. Even at a blessed 69 minutes, it drags.

The first time I saw The Lobster, in a theater, I left feeling like I’d been introduced to another planet—a quiet one, gray and overcast, where the air smells like chlorine and rules are recited instead of explained. It looks like our world, until someone opens their mouth. Then it becomes something else entirely. This is dystopia played with the straightest possible face. In Lanthimos’s universe, newly single people are relocated to a countryside hotel where they have 45 days to find a new partner. Should they fail, they will be transformed into an animal of their choosing. Our protagonist David (Colin Farrell, doughy and drained, with a mustache and the body language of a man waiting for a fax that never arrives) has just been dumped after twelve years. He chooses to become a lobster—because they live over a hundred years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and, well, he rather likes the sea. The premise sounds ludicrous, and it is, but what makes it sing is the film’s ruthless consistency. The world is fully realized, airtight in its twisted logic. Romance is reduced to matching surface traits—shared physical flaws, minor tics, socially sanctioned neuroses. One man bloodies his nose nightly to match a woman prone to spontaneous bleeds. A woman who feels nothing becomes a model citizen. Small talk has never felt more like survival. The comic timing is surgical—scenes unfold with a measured, mechanical rhythm that somehow creates the loudest laughs. It’s not that the film tells jokes; it simply presents a reality so skewed, so matter-of-fact in its cruelty, that laughter becomes inevitable. Farrell is quietly magnificent—emotive even in inertia—and the supporting cast reads like a who’s-who of deadpan despair: Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw, Olivia Colman, John C. Reilly, each playing their lines as if under sedation, as though feeling too much might break the rules. This is a film built for discussion—dry, bizarre, fully committed, and strange enough to haunt. You don’t watch The Lobster so much as absorb it, turn it over, let it grow peculiar corners in your brain. And like all the best sci-fi fables, it reflects us perfectly, just a few steps removed.

Some horror films burrow under your skin with blood, others with fog. The Lodge chooses the latter—and lets it linger. It’s a movie that moves like a prayer whispered under frostbite: hushed, grim, and unknowable until it’s too late. For much of the runtime, I wasn’t sure what I was watching—a slow-burn psychodrama, a dream logic survival story, maybe something worse. The premise is deceptively simple: a man leaves his two children alone at a remote winter lodge with his new fiancée, a woman still clawing her way out of a traumatic past. But what follows isn’t neat. It’s a collapsing spiral of grief, suspicion, isolation—and something colder still. The opening sequence is devastating enough to rattle your stomach. Alicia Silverstone, in a performance that barely spans ten minutes, delivers one of the most jarring exits I’ve seen onscreen in years. It sets the tone. The children (Jaeden Martell and Lia McHugh), raw with grief, turn their resentment toward Grace (Riley Keough), the unwelcome future stepmother. Then the snow traps them. Then the power goes out. Then things begin to vanish. Faith, memory, meaning—each one flickering and receding like light under a door. Keough gives a haunted, brittle performance—poised on the edge of fracture, never quite offering the audience the reassurance it craves. Martell and McHugh, too, operate in a register of eerie restraint. You can never quite pin down what anyone’s thinking, which is part of the film’s slow, brutal tension. It’s not a perfect film. The pacing drags in its middle third, and the twists arrive wrapped in a few too many red herrings—mechanical, not elegant. But when it lands, it cuts like ice. What frightened me most weren’t the visuals, but the ideas: what grief can do, what guilt can mutate into, how belief—when stretched—can quietly snap.

A sharp idea, and by superhero standards, almost reckless in its refusal to sugarcoat anything. Logan imagines what’s left when the capes and heroics dry up—and what’s left is mostly pain, guilt, and blood in the desert sand. It’s 2029. Mutants are nearly extinct. No new ones have been born in decades. Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), once the world’s greatest mind, is now a fragile, unstable old man whose psychic seizures paralyze or kill anyone within range—and one such attack has already wiped out most of his beloved X-Men. He lives hidden away on the Mexican border, looked after by Logan (Hugh Jackman), who’s aging too: his mutant healing factor is rotting from the inside, poisoned by the very metal fused to his bones. Stephen Merchant appears as Caliban, a pale, weary tracker who helps keep Xavier from accidentally destroying what’s left of the world. Logan drives a limo by day and drinks himself to sleep by night, trying to scrape together enough money to buy a boat where he and Xavier can die in peace. But that grim plan collapses when a young girl named Laura (Dafne Keen) crashes into his life—a lab-grown child with claws, healing powers, and a temper just like his. She’s an escaped test subject from a secret corporate program that’s been trying to breed mutants as weapons, since nature no longer cooperates. Before long, mercenaries led by the relentless Donald Pierce come hunting for her. Logan, unwilling at first but predictably unable to ignore his own reflection, becomes her protector. Together with Xavier, they flee across the Southwest toward a rumored safe haven for mutant children called Eden—though no one knows if it’s real or just a fairytale scribbled in a comic book. The violence is raw and vicious, making good on the R rating—limbs fly, blood sprays, and nobody bounces back with a quip. It’s a grim road movie dressed up like a western, with the pulse of a deathbed confession. The hook—a hero too battered to heal, a legend too senile to trust himself—feels daring. The actual story, though, is less so. It all boils down to genre basics: one more job, one more doomed shot at redemption, one more corpse in the desert, a passing of a torch to a new generation. Once the novelty of seeing an R-rated Wolverine fades, the actual journey is more conventional than it wants to let on. But it’s still one of the genre’s most honest farewells—a dying man, a dying dream, and a brief, bloody reminder that even myths don’t live forever.

The premise is about as silly as the wardrobe they strapped the cast into—youth cults, vaporized thirtysomethings, and Michael York as a sex cop—but at least no one’s pretending it’s Shakespeare. It’s 2274, and society now lives under a giant dome where everyone frolics in holographic orgy chambers until they turn thirty, at which point they’re sent to Carousel—a sparkly death ritual dressed up like spiritual renewal. York plays Logan 5, a Sandman whose job is to hunt down “Runners” trying to age in peace. When the central computer decides Logan should infiltrate the underground resistance, it forcibly flags him for termination—resetting his lifeclock so it reads like he’s aged out, even though he hasn’t. Suddenly a fugitive in his own system, Logan flees with Jessica 6 (Jenny Agutter), who looks permanently unimpressed. They escape the dome and wander into what’s left of the world—mostly dust, vines, and Peter Ustinov mumbling through stacks of old books and a pile of cats. There’s a rogue ice robot that talks like a malfunctioning butler, and a sequence with Styrofoam ruins so fragile they look like they might collapse if anyone blinks too hard. But for a pre-Star Wars sci-fi flick, it holds together better than you’d expect. The sets are strange but memorable, the pacing brisk, and the effects—dated as they are—have a certain committed weirdness that keeps things interesting. York plays it like it’s serious drama, which somehow helps, and the movie never gives you that smirking nudge that it’s in on the joke. It doesn’t build to a revolution so much as a system short-circuiting under its own delusions. For all its kitsch and confusion, Logan’s Run taps into something real: the panic of aging out of your purpose, and the absurdity of a world that treats thirty like a terminal diagnosis. A mid-life crisis disguises as a dystopian uprising.

This is not a nice movie—let’s get that straight. It’s about men who leer at, manipulate, and do worse to a 14-year-old girl. But it’s also an artful film, made by a director who doesn’t glamorize these men so much as trap them in their own delusions, letting their ugliness bloom in slow, clinical rot. The smartest thing Kubrick does is leave Lolita (Sue Lyon) a child. She fidgets, pouts, smacks gum, talks in the babbling, self-important tone of a girl who’s learned how to flirt but hasn’t yet discovered what it means. There’s nothing enigmatic about her. She’s just young. The men—older, self-justifying, increasingly pathetic—do all the mythologizing. James Mason plays Humbert Humbert, a British professor newly arrived in small-town America. He takes a room with a lonely, cloying widow (Shelley Winters), then quickly redirects his attention to her daughter sunbathing in the yard. Humbert’s infatuation is grotesque and obsessive—kept under wraps, except in the pages of his diary—but soon becomes the only thing animating him. He marries the mother, waits for an opportunity, and then flees with Lolita across the country, posing as her father and treating her like something between a secret and a possession. Peter Sellers, unmoored and unnervingly intuitive, plays Clare Quilty—a shapeshifting stranger who sees through Humbert’s routine and uses it to stage his own. He floats in and out of the story, part comic relief, part moral rot made flesh. It’s all rather tame by today’s standards, a consequence of the censors snipping at the edges. But the restraint makes it stranger, more unnerving. You’re never invited to indulge. If anything, you’re asked to squirm—trapped behind Humbert’s eyes, forced to watch his rationalizations metastasize. Kubrick, as always, leaves space for interpretation. Which means Lolita remains deeply uncomfortable. But it’s discomfort with a purpose.

Lone Star is the kind of western that dresses a civics lesson in pistols and posturing. Set in 1845, just before Texas joined the Union, it loosely imagines the political brawl over annexation—not so much a history lesson as a backdrop for frontier theatrics. Clark Gable plays Devereaux Burke, sent by a weary Andrew Jackson (Lionel Barrymore, in his final screen role) to shepherd Texas into statehood. Standing in his way is Thomas Craden (Broderick Crawford), a hard-edged opportunist who prefers force to argument. When senators refuse to back his position, he invites them to dinner and doesn’t let them leave. Sam Houston (Moroni Olsen) is thought to oppose annexation—a rumor Craden exploits—until Houston clears things up himself. Ava Gardner appears as a newspaper editor, trading sharp glances and pointed lines with Gable. The romantic tension is mostly implied, but she brings a cool defiance to a film otherwise thick with speechmaking. It’s a dry film, both in setting and occasionally in delivery. The plot moves with a sort of procedural stiffness, more interested in keeping the story moving than digging into what any of it means. The historical framing is interesting but undercooked—Texas statehood reduced to a convenient backdrop rather than a source of real dramatic tension. That said, the final act delivers: a full-blown shootout between rival factions plays out while Congress nervously votes on annexation, and it’s staged with enough energy to make you wish the rest of the film had borrowed some of that urgency. The melodrama works well enough, the cast is stronger than the material, and the ending sticks. It’s not essential viewing, but western fans will likely find it a solid entry with a few standout ingredients.

Chuck Norris, in full monosyllabic glory, plays McQuade—a Texas Ranger so allergic to civilization he lives in a trailer parked in its own dust cloud. His idea of self-care involves drinking warm beer straight from the can and refusing to make eye contact unless violence is imminent. He’s not so much a character as a well-armed mood. This is action cinema with spurs on: dirt-kicking machismo set against the hollowed-out grandeur of spaghetti western staging. There’s a villain, of course—David Carradine, preening in designer karatewear, equal parts elegance and grease, who looks like he wouldn’t hesitate to kill you but would probably try seducing your aunt first. Their climactic martial arts showdown—slow-motion, shirtless, and punctuated by the music of testosterone—is the reason movies like this get remembered. Plot is mostly structural support. There’s an illegal arms ring, a tangle of jurisdictional politics, some light double-crossing, and eventually, a kidnapped daughter to pull things into emotional focus for the third act. The love interest (Barbara Carrera) appears intermittently, less as a romantic pivot than as visual relief from the dust and testosterone. Dialogue happens, though not often, and the supporting cast—Leon Isaac Kennedy, L.Q. Jones, Robert Beltran—shows up mostly to react to McQuade like he’s a weather system that wears jeans. And then there’s the score. Francesco De Masi’s Ennio-by-way-of-El-Paso compositions ride over it all like they’re trying to rescue the film from its own brute instincts. They nearly succeed. The soundtrack is operatic, thunderous, far too good for the material—like discovering a Morricone riff inside a pawn shop jukebox. Lone Wolf McQuade doesn’t rise to poetry, but it squints at it from across the saloon. A film made of roundhouse kicks, sweat, dirt, and prolonged stares, with the occasional explosion just to make sure you’re awake. I loved it, of course.

A hardboiled, blood-slicked crime film about a man who thinks he’s outgrown crime. Bob Hoskins, never more compact or combustible, plays Harold Shand—a London gangster with a vision. He’s done with petty rackets and protection fees. Now he’s talking infrastructure. Redevelopment. International capital. He wants to turn the Docklands into a glossy commercial hub, backed by American investors and polished just enough to pass for legitimate. But just as Harold starts pitching himself as legitimate, the violence begins. Associates disappear, cars detonate, and bodies show up in place of handshakes. This isn’t a turf war—it’s something quieter and more precise, with no interest in being seen until it’s too late. He paces through bloodied pubs, barks orders that sound more desperate by the hour, and clenches his jaw so tightly it feels like half the performance is in his molars. The threat turns out to be political, not personal—though Harold doesn’t recognize the difference until it’s too late. Helen Mirren plays Victoria, his partner in everything but name. Cool, precise, and fluent in the rooms Harold can’t quite manage, she smooths over meetings, calibrates reactions, and navigates crisis with the composure of someone used to being underestimated. The plot tangles in places, but Hoskins keeps the film locked in a forward lean. He doesn’t play Harold as a man losing control—he plays him as someone refusing to admit he never really had it. Every conversation is a transaction, every room a test, and the tension builds not from what’s said but from what’s being calculated behind the eyes. The Long Good Friday strips the gangster myth of its glamour and leaves the wiring exposed. It’s not about legacy, or loyalty, or even money—not really. It’s about a man mistaking control for invincibility, and learning far too late that power doesn’t care how long it took you to earn it. It just waits for the opening. Bond fans can catch a glimpse of future 007 Pierce Brosnan in an early role as a silent hitman lurking in a health club.

Robert Altman called it a “satire of melancholy,” which sounds like a contradiction until you see what he’s doing. The Long Goodbye borrows the skeleton of 1940s noir but drapes it in something looser, stranger, more sun-faded. It still opens with a missing friend and a dead wife, but the lighting’s harsh, the pacing is aimless, and the trench coat’s been replaced by a crumpled brown suit worn seven days straight. Elliott Gould plays Marlowe like he’s been sealed in a haze of cigarette smoke since 1950, moving through a city that flipped channels and left him on the wrong one. He mutters through errands, talks to strangers who barely look up, and feeds his cat like it’s the only part of his life with a schedule. He doesn’t talk to impress anyone. He talks because it’s what Marlowe does, even if nobody’s listening. Especially when nobody’s listening. It starts with a favor. His friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) needs a ride to Mexico. Marlowe gives it, no questions asked. By morning, Terry’s wife is dead and Marlowe’s in lockup—refusing to cooperate, refusing to explain. Not because he has anything to hide, but because principle is the only thing he has left. Three days later, Terry turns up dead. Suicide. Case closed. Or so it looks. Marlowe takes a job—missing person, alcoholic writer, beach house with a nervous wife and a lot of empty bottles. On paper, unrelated. In practice, less so. The connections creep in slowly, almost lazily, like smoke under a door. Everyone smiles too much or not at all. Names repeat. Faces reappear. Nothing adds up, until suddenly everything does. It’s a mystery, technically. But the mystery isn’t what keeps you watching. It’s the mood—half disoriented, half sedated—and Marlowe himself, wandering through it like a man still clinging to rules the city quietly canceled years ago. The ending doesn’t explain. It doesn’t build. It snaps. The fog doesn’t vanish—it thins. Long enough to glimpse the truth sitting exactly where it’s always been.

Maybe not the loneliest boy—just the weirdest. And not in a compelling way. Oliver is a glassy-eyed recluse whose mother dies in a freak garden gnome accident. After a stint in a mental institution, he’s released into the care of a pastel-colored suburb where two chipper social workers inform him he must prove he’s capable of living independently. Lacking friends or family, he takes this literally—by digging up corpses to form one. The dead come back, of course. No real explanation—just one morning, they’re up and dressed like a ‘90s sitcom intro. There’s a picture-perfect nuclear family, a loyal zombie dog, a shy goth love interest, and a cast of side characters who all seem tuned to different channels. The problem is, Oliver himself never feels like a character. He’s a bundle of tics and blank stares, somewhere between childlike and deranged, without enough substance to make either side relatable. Visually, the film has a style—bubblegum graveyards, synthetic lawns, color-coded everything—but it’s a style that starts to feel like hiding. The tone flirts with deadpan horror-comedy but rarely clicks. There are a few inspired moments—a breakfast montage, some clever physical gags—but they don’t build toward anything. Mostly, it feels like the movie’s decorating an empty room. It’s watchable in a “what am I even looking at” way, and strange enough to hold your attention. But satire needs teeth, and this one just sort of nibbles around the edges.