Film Buff Musings

A baby talks. That’s the hook. But the miracle is that the film doesn’t choke on its own gimmick—it stretches it like taffy, folds it into the fabric, and somehow comes out the other side with something resembling a movie. A real one. Not profound, not profound-adjacent, but breezy and buoyant and smugly aware that it has no business working as well as it does. Mikey, the baby, narrates his own infancy with the gravel and timing of Bruce Willis, back when his voice still had caffeine in it. He’s the son of Mollie (Kirstie Alley), a whip-smart accountant with a newly rearranged life after her married lover (George Segal) leaves her for someone thinner, blonder, and more morally streamlined. Mollie doesn’t spiral—she spreadsheets. Dates eligible bachelors like she’s checking references, eyes peeled for financial stability and a chin that doesn’t disappear when they smile. But the man who keeps showing up isn’t one of the applicants. He’s James (John Travolta), a cab driver with a pilot’s license and no sense of timing. He’s loose-limbed, fast-talking, and grinning like a man who’s seen a few romantic comedies and figured out where he fits in. He watches the baby. He tells jokes. He makes formula. His resume is blank, but he aces the road test. The romantic formula is preserved like a specimen: meet-cute, flare-up, pull-back, swell. Heckerling shoots it clean and writes it funnier, avoiding goo while still dipping a toe in the syrup jar. Alley keeps it grounded with enough panic and pride to give the slapstick some spine. Travolta, at his most weightless, turns on the wattage like a man finally forgiven for Perfect. What sells the whole thing isn’t just the baby voiceover, though it helps. It’s the film’s refusal to press. It skips along—buoyant, not smug—and finds its rhythm in the quiet absurdities of dating while sleep-deprived.

The baby talks again. And now there’s a second baby, louder, shriller, armed with the vocal stylings of Roseanne Barr. A sequel made not so much to build on anything but to echo a previous success back at the audience until someone laughs out of obligation. Mikey, still voiced by Bruce Willis and now wobbling around on toddler legs, has been upgraded with jealousy issues and vengeance fantasies. His sister Julie arrives wrapped in pink and attitude, and before long he’s dismantling her stuffed penguin like a pint-sized enforcer with a personal vendetta against plush. The toy’s name is Herbie, and its murder scene is somehow the emotional high point. This time around, the domestic unit is fraying. James (John Travolta) and Mollie (Kirstie Alley) have misplaced their movie-romance glow and now argue in sitcom rhythms about money, diapers, and exhaustion—mostly exhaustion. James temporarily moves out. Mikey blames Julie. Barr’s voice performance, pitched somewhere between Catskills stand-up and chain-smoking daycare dropout, ensures the tension never quite dissolves. Where the first film slipped the gimmick into place with a wink and some restraint, this one stacks the deck with references, punchlines, and commentary that no child under four could feasibly dream of. The illusion shatters. There’s no internal logic left—just zingers in search of timing. It still gets a few things right. The comedic rhythm flickers back to life now and then, and Willis manages to slide in a couple of half-decent lines. But the emotional thread has thinned. The first film sold you on a man discovering he might be a father worth having. This one proposes he’s not so sure it was worth the paperwork. What’s left is mostly noise and sentiment doled out in handfuls—like snacks tossed to a fussy audience from behind the camera.

In 2044, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) works as a contract killer known as a Looper. His targets arrive gagged and bound, dropped from thirty years in the future with silver strapped to their backs—payment delivered with the body. It’s clean, silent, and surgically detached. Time travel hasn’t been invented yet, but in 2074, it will be—and the only people using it are criminals who find it easier to erase someone from history than hide a body in the present. Eventually, every Looper gets a retirement gift in reverse: kill your older self, collect a final payout in gold, and vanish into early luxury. Joe’s ready—until his target shows up unbound, makes eye contact, and bolts. The man is him. Thirty years older. Played by Bruce Willis and not interested in cooperation. Old Joe isn’t trying to live forever—he’s trying to rewrite a death. His wife was killed in a raid ordered by a rising underworld figure called the Rainmaker. Joe doesn’t want to break the cycle; he wants to shoot the future in the crib. All he has is a name, a number, and three addresses—one of which belongs to Cid (Pierce Gagnon), a child living on a farm with his mother Sara (Emily Blunt). The boy floats quarters like party tricks, but that’s the prelude. His real powers arrive in bursts—terrifying, uncontrolled, and clearly capable of shaping history. Once the story hits the farmhouse, it tightens. The action slows just enough to become something heavier: a battle of wills between a woman protecting her son, a man protecting his past, and a younger version of that man trying to find a better outcome than either of them has planned. Director Rian Johnson avoids timelines and diagrams. Instead, he focuses on stakes: what happens if the wrong person is killed—or spared. The logic holds well enough for the tension to stay sharp. And when the film makes its final turn, it does so with a clarity that clicks everything into place. The last few minutes don’t feel like a twist so much as the completion of a pattern. Looper pulls together noir grit, speculative fiction, and the light outline of a superpower origin story. It’s one of the most inventive science fiction thrillers of the past two decades—and smart without getting lost in its own cleverness.

At 154 minutes, Lord Jim isn’t so much a film as a prolonged attempt to dramatize guilt under jungle heat. Peter O’Toole, cool-eyed and sunburnt, plays a disgraced British officer drifting through Southeast Asia with little more than his conscience and bone structure to guide him. Years earlier, he abandoned a ship he believed was sinking—leaving hundreds of passengers to die. They survived. He didn’t. The shame lingers like smoke. He winds up in the fictional region of Patusan, sent as a company emissary—meant to keep things diplomatic. But the situation hardens, and soon the moral equations start involving firearms. Jim, once court-martialed and publicly disgraced, drags his conscience like luggage and stumbles into a second chance—or at least a setting that’s willing to stage one. The villagers, worn down by the usual predators—bribery, threats, and the kind of white man who shows up quoting Rousseau—look at this pale, poetic drifter and decide he might pass for a savior. They need a defender. Jim steps in. Maybe out of guilt. Maybe because he wants to become the man he once claimed to be. Or maybe just because the story expects it. He helps them push back—fights off the local tyrants, brokers a fragile peace. For a while, he becomes something close to heroic. Eli Wallach arrives midway through, a smirk and a sidearm, playing a mercenary commander sent to finish the job. He’s meant to be fearsome but never quite makes the leap from costume to threat. His villainy feels negotiated—present, but only as much as the runtime allows. The film wants to be stately, and in fits, it is. The battle scenes—rife with stabbings, gunfire, and morally weighted squibs—are professionally cut, but the pacing is waterlogged. Each action beat feels penciled in during a long meeting and shot like a contractual obligation. O’Toole is magnetic in his usual cerebral way, though his Jim floats too lightly through the politics and peril. His motivations—guilt, rebirth, an abstract sense of decency—never quite congeal, which gives the film its opacity but not its depth. Daliah Lavi, as the local love interest, is slotted in with the delicacy of a placeholder. She glows, yes, but the script gives her little to do beyond following Jim’s moral wading with devotional squints. What remains is a film that wants to feel weighty but handles its gravitas like it’s made of porcelain. It gestures at spiritual transformation but keeps mistaking narrative stasis for contemplation. The source material still waits for its definitive adaptation. This one is handsomely staged, faintly haunted, and stretched far beyond its narrative stamina.

It begins in whispers—old legends, long shadows—and builds into the loudest, most sweeping fantasy epic ever put to film. The Fellowship of the Ring isn’t just the beginning of a trilogy; it’s the start of a world so thoroughly imagined it stops feeling made up. The Shire is green, round, safe. Then Gandalf (Ian McKellen) arrives—urgent, watchful—with news of a ring that shouldn’t exist. And just like that, safety peels away. The ring is power. Power corrupts. It must be destroyed. One location. One fire. Mount Doom. Mordor. That’s the plan. Frodo (Elijah Wood) takes the job—wide-eyed, soft-spoken, hopelessly decent. He isn’t built for quests. He’s built for second breakfasts and quiet corners. But he accepts, and that’s what matters. The rest fall in around him like pieces clicking into place. Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), the ranger with royal blood and no appetite for crowns—his voice low, his stride like he’s already walked through three wars and didn’t bother changing boots. Legolas (Orlando Bloom), so graceful it’s like gravity never signed a contract with him. Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), bark and steel, talking in axe swipes and chest puffs. Gandalf leads. Sauron watches. They walk. Forests. Mountains. Mines. Things attack. Orcs, wraiths, creatures from somewhere beneath the map. Magic. Betrayal. Death. Jackson keeps the pace taut—never too long in one place, never too safe. The effects—practical where it counts, digital where it matters—still look right. Still hold. And the extended editions, longer yes, but never bloated—just deeper. Side paths, extra breaths, margins. Jackson shows us what’s around the edges. Lets it exhale. Middle-earth feels etched. The elvish scrollwork on a doorway. A hobbit’s callused feet. It’s vast, but the intimacy sticks. The friendships. The glances. The way Frodo tenses when the ring calls to him. It’s a MacGuffin, technically. But it weighs something here. And when the group breaks—splinters—it doesn’t cue a sequel. It aches. The trilogy darkens from here. But Fellowship is the light still burning. The road is long. The dangers multiply. But the map is clear. And the company—still good.

The magic trick of this trilogy is that it doesn’t just get bigger—it gets better. The Two Towers could have dragged. It’s the middle chapter. The bridge. The logistical nightmare. The part where stories usually stall. Instead, it gains momentum, deepens everything, and turns transition into spectacle. Frodo (Elijah Wood) keeps walking, but he’s starting to fade—like a figure pulled from a dream that no longer recognizes him. The ring isn’t just pulling him. It’s replacing him. Sam (Sean Astin) sees it happening. He keeps them moving. He rations food. He worries out loud. He’s the backup Frodo never asked for but always needed—loyal, plainspoken, bracing against whatever Frodo won’t admit. Enter Gollum. Skittish, twitchy, and fully formed—half-creature, half-confession. Andy Serkis makes him a presence even in silence, whispering to himself or flipping between personas mid-sentence. He’s comic relief until he isn’t. The animation still holds, but what makes Gollum work is his instability. He wants the ring. He hates the ring. He hates himself. Frodo calls him “Smeagol.” Sam calls him what he is. Elsewhere, the world widens. Merry and Pippin, once comic relief, find themselves in Fangorn Forest, talking trees into going to war. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli cut across the plains—fighting, tracking, trading insults like soldiers who’ve learned how to rest between kills. Rohan is introduced—windswept, besieged, proud. Bernard Hill plays Théoden like a man climbing out of a fog, trying to remember how to lead. There’s a quiet ache in how he listens before he speaks. And then Helm’s Deep—a fortress carved into the mountains, meant to shelter the people of Rohan, now cornered by an approaching army. What starts as a retreat becomes a last stand. The rain falls. The wall buckles. The bodies pile up. It’s extended, yes—but never inflated. The pacing stretches, contracts, holds its breath. Every cut feels like a heartbeat. Jackson stages it like war half-remembered—chaotic, heroic, close to collapse, then saved at the last second by forces that weren’t planning to come. The tone darkens, but not completely. The fellowship may be scattered, but the bonds still hold. Gollum inches toward betrayal. Frodo inches toward collapse. But Sam is still beside him. And Merry and Pippin aren’t tagging along anymore—they’re changing outcomes. The thread hasn’t snapped. It’s just pulling tighter. The film leaves you hanging—it’s the middle, after all—but it doesn’t leave you drifting. It’s locked in place. Just before the storm. The danger is near. The map is splitting. The world is preparing for siege. And the story, somehow, keeps getting better.

The road ends here—fractured, burning, staggering forward. The Return of the King is the final chapter, but it doesn’t slow down to say goodbye. It charges. It’s harder, darker, and even grander. Everything that’s been simmering—frayed threads, delayed reckonings—finally locks into place. Frodo (Elijah Wood) is barely himself. The ring has eaten away at him, piece by piece, until what’s left is a hollow frame with just enough will to keep moving. Sam (Sean Astin) watches it happen—helpless, but unshaken. Their friendship stretches thin. It’s not quite betrayal, but it bruises like one. What follows is sharp, stripped-down, almost Shakespearean: two men bound by purpose, divided by the thing they’re trying to destroy. And still, Sam stays. He carries Frodo when Frodo can’t carry himself. Meanwhile, Middle-earth braces for collapse. Gondor falters. Denethor (John Noble), mad with grief and firelight, treats death like it’s already written. Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) finally steps into the role he’s spent three films avoiding—not just a swordsman, but a king, with a crown to wear and a death march to lead. The battle for Minas Tirith doesn’t unfold—it detonates. Horses tear through city streets. Winged beasts descend. Oliphaunts, massive and mythic, flatten everything in their path. It’s spectacle at full gallop, but Jackson never lets it blur. Every cut lands. Every moment counts. The war is brutal—but it’s also a reckoning. And still, the true climax isn’t on a battlefield. It’s a mountain. A fire. A final, impossible decision. The burden is more than physical—it corrodes. And when release finally comes, it doesn’t feel like triumph. It feels like surrender. Like the only way out is to let go of the thing that kept you alive. The conclusion is long—famously, almost defiantly so—but it earns every breath. Jackson doesn’t just close the story; he lets it exhale. Endings like this don’t snap shut. They stretch. They ache. They ask you to sit with what’s been lost and what won’t come back. The battles have ended, but nothing sits easy. There are goodbyes to speak, scars to keep, and a world waiting that doesn’t quite fit anymore. I found myself holding my breath—not from suspense, but from reverence. It’s the kind of goodbye most films are too impatient to allow. The trilogy doesn’t just stick the landing—it deepens it. The Return of the King brings everything home: bloodied, spent, and somehow still intact. The scale is epic, but the power is personal. There’s victory, yes—but it comes wrapped in sorrow. Frodo wins, and loses. Aragorn ascends, but inherits a burden. Peace arrives, but the cost is never hidden. Jackson honors the journey by acknowledging the toll.

A jungle adventure with studio sheen and a soft romantic underbelly—though the real quest is figuring out why none of it ever moves beyond corporate cosplay. Sandra Bullock is miscast, but not in the usual way. She plays an antisocial, grief-stricken novelist—reclusive, neurotic, someone who probably eats dinner standing over the sink—but there’s not a frame where she doesn’t look ready for a fragrance ad. The script tells us she’s a shut-in; the lighting suggests she’s just between magazine covers. She’s paired with Channing Tatum, playing her bodice-ripping book covers come to life, complete with a Fabio wig and the emotional range of a golden retriever. The film insists they’re an odd couple, a friction so potent it could start fires. What you get is two well-moisturized actors pretending they’ve never met people who look like them. Daniel Radcliffe kidnaps Bullock in a storyline that spirals from novel research into full-blown treasure hunt, and suddenly we’re watching Indiana Jones for the influencer era. And then there’s Brad Pitt, who wanders in for what amounts to a studio-funded prank: a brief, smirking cameo as a rugged ex–Navy SEAL who arrives just long enough to remind everyone what effortless charisma looks like. The script never trusts its own genre. It wants to be parody, but it also wants the kissing to count. The action plays like someone describing a better movie they once watched on a plane. Jokes come doubled, then explained, then repeated just to be sure. Bullock, ever watchable, is never allowed to be undignified enough for the role. What this needed was a messier actress in messier lighting—someone who could wear failure without bronzer.

The snowstorm’s the best part. A plane crashes in the Himalayas, faces bitten raw, coats frozen stiff, the wind loud enough to strip the dialogue from the script. For ten minutes, Lost Horizon flirts with being a survival thriller. Capra shoots it like he means it—the whiteout vast and unforgiving, the actors slogging forward as if they might vanish into the frame. You feel the altitude. Then they reach the top, and the movie exhales into silk robes and philosophical small talk, and never quite breathes again. The prize is Shangri-La: a hidden enclave of peace and perpetual health, where no one rushes, ages, or seems to perspire. The setting should feel sacred. Instead, it looks like a museum annex with curtains. Marble staircases, gliding attendants, robes perfectly pressed. No grit. No soul. Longevity is the deal, but it comes at the cost of expression—like the price of serenity was an emotional freeze-dry. Ronald Colman leads with that soft-spoken gravitas he could summon in his sleep. Jane Wyatt hovers close by, luminous but underused. The rest blur into the upholstery—drawn with purpose, then set aside. They speak in polished platitudes, disagree politely, and behave as if philosophical tension were a matter of volume control. Even the dissenters look like they’d apologize for raising their voices. Still, there’s something in it. Capra may not convince you of Shangri-La’s brilliance, but he makes a case for the desire behind it. You see the pull. Not toward paradise, necessarily—but toward stillness. Toward a world where the clocks slow, the stakes relax, and every decision takes a seat. It’s less a fantasy than a symptom: peace as a prescription for modern nausea. You don’t believe in Shangri-La. Not really. But for a moment, you understand the temptation. And that, flickering faintly beneath the artifice, is what sticks.

It’s 2 a.m. in Tokyo. You’re rich, restless, vaguely famous, and the vending machine just became your best English-speaking friend. The hotel bar glows like an aquarium—blue light, soft jazz, and silence expensive enough to charge by the hour. Across the room: a girl with a faraway stare and a wedding ring she keeps forgetting to feel. That’s Lost in Translation. A whisper of a movie about two people stuck in the same emotional dead zone, killing time before the next version of themselves shows up. Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, a movie star flown in to sell whiskey and quietly rot. He poses, he mumbles, he takes his check. Scarlett Johansson is Charlotte, newly married and already halfway ghosted, tagging along while her husband photographs bands and leaves her to figure out whether she married a person or just a lifestyle. She drifts. He decays. They meet. And they don’t fall in love. Instead, they orbit. They murmur. They eat lunch in bathrobes and stare out hotel windows like they’re waiting for a better version of Tokyo to load. The movie doesn’t push it. They barely touch. They barely need to. The connection’s there, flickering like bad neon—glances held too long, silences that start to mean things, jokes tossed like life preservers. Murray moves through the film like someone who’s started seeing through walls. He’s funny without effort, sad without asking. Johansson gives a performance that doesn’t try to prove anything—it just exists, raw and slightly bruised. She listens like she’s writing it down. They share a bed, not a night. It’s romantic the way an open tab can be. Sofia Coppola directs like she’s holding her breath. Scenes trail off. Light spills the wrong way. Whole conversations hang in the air unfinished, like someone lost the last page of the script. It’s beautiful and off-kilter and slightly numb—like jet lag turned into a language. Lost in Translation doesn’t tell you what to feel. It barely tells you anything. But it gets you. The ache of being noticed exactly once, perfectly. The strangeness of clicking with someone you’ll never see again. The way loneliness looks different at 30 stories high. No third act fireworks. No payoff. Just a whisper in a crowd. A touch on the shoulder. A half-heard goodbye that guts you anyway. It’s not a love story. It’s the pause between two lives.

Lost River doesn’t unfold so much as drift—half story, half spell. Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut trades exposition for symbolism, sinking into a dreamlike fugue of rot, survival, and stage blood. The meaning isn’t hidden—it’s just murmured through images, textures, and atmosphere. Christina Hendricks plays Billy, a single mother clinging to what’s left of her home in a crumbling corner of Detroit. Her teenage son Bones (Iain De Caestecker) scavenges copper from abandoned houses, while her younger child Franky stays close, quiet and watchful. When the foreclosure threats escalate, a city official named Dave (Ben Mendelsohn, oozing threat in half-speed) offers Billy a grotesque way out: work behind the scenes at his private cabaret, where the acts revolve around staged mutilation and voyeuristic violence. Eventually, he wants her onstage. Bones spends his downtime shadowing Rat (Saoirse Ronan), the girl next door in a crumbling fairytale. She lives with her mute grandmother and an air of mild defiance, and their rapport feels just grounded enough to matter. There’s no love story here, just a flicker of connection in a place that forgot how to hold one. Matt Smith appears as Bully, a chrome-domed local tyrant with a lawn chair welded to the roof of his car and a taste for theatrics. He slices up rivals, claims turf with a switchblade grin, and speaks like he’s ruling from the ruins. Eva Mendes glides through the cabaret as Cat, another performer in Dave’s gore-drenched illusion show. Narratively, it’s thin—fragments of fable grafted onto urban collapse. But visually, it’s arresting. Benoît Debie lights the ruins like stained glass—bathed in radioactive reds, swampy greens, and shadows that seem to inhale. The film moves less on story than sensation, carried by symbols, gestures, and tone. The themes—debt, decay, exploitation—don’t develop so much as echo, but Gosling commits. It’s indulgent, a little hollow, and too enamored with its own symbolism. But it’s also serious, strange, and unmistakably its own thing. You don’t come away enlightened, but you remember the glow. A flawed but distinctive debut—style-first, half-submerged, and beautiful in its ruin.

Messy and overstuffed but disarmingly sweet, Love Actually is a sprawling ensemble valentine to that slippery, much-abused concept called love—romantic, familial, platonic, misguided, occasionally questionable. It weaves together eight storylines, each loosely connected by geography (London) and season (Christmas), and held together by Richard Curtis’s unshakable belief that love is what makes us human, or at least entertaining. The most memorable thread follows Hugh Grant as a single Prime Minister who falls for a tea cart attendant (Martine McCutcheon) with a south London accent and a knack for being adorably improper. Their flirtation is implausible, but Grant sells it with a twitch and a stammer, culminating in a door-to-door search for her home address that straddles the line between stalker and sweetheart with all the finesse of a rom-com trained in plausible deniability. Elsewhere, Emma Thompson, as the Prime Minister’s sister, is devastating in a storyline that contains the film’s one genuinely mature heartbreak. Her husband (Alan Rickman) is caught mid-affair, or at least mid-purchase of jewelry for a woman who is not his wife. Thompson’s quiet devastation—opening a Joni Mitchell CD where she expected diamonds—lingers more effectively than any of the film’s showier set pieces. Had the film stayed with these two stories, it might have been something leaner, sadder, and possibly better. But restraint is not in its DNA. So we also get: a washed-up rock star (Bill Nighy) trying to win a novelty hit and our affection; a meet-cute between two adult film stand-ins (Martin Freeman and Joanna Page) staged with endearing awkwardness; a deeply miscalculated subplot involving a British hornball (Kris Marshall) who travels to America to score with beer commercial extras; and Laura Linney, stuck in a love story so lopsided it barely qualifies as a triangle. There’s also Liam Neeson coaching his precocious stepson (Thomas Sangster) through the mechanics of romantic obsession, and a now-infamous scene in which a man professes love to his best friend’s wife (Keira Knightley) via cue cards in the driveway, which plays better if you don’t think about it for more than three seconds. A more honest title might’ve been Sexual Harassment, But Make It Adorable. But the film’s saving grace is how sincerely it believes in its mosaic. For all its narrative tangents and questionable moral coordinates, it has the odd ability to sneak up on you. It builds toward a climax of airport reunions and warm glances and delayed embraces that, against all logic, kind of works. Even when your brain checks out, your tear ducts might tap in.

A rare biopic that listens as much as it explains, Love & Mercy traces the life of Brian Wilson not through the greatest hits, but through the uneasy space between creation and collapse. It toggles between two timelines: the sun-drenched ‘60s, when Wilson is at his most visionary and fragile, and the dulled-out ‘80s, when the music is gone and control has been outsourced to his live-in tormentor, Dr. Eugene Landy. Paul Dano plays the younger Wilson, all open nerves and manic inspiration—his face a tuning fork for frequencies only he seems to hear. The studio sessions are shot like religious rituals: Wilson isolated in a soundproof sanctuary, orchestrating chaos into harmony. John Cusack, older, wearier, quieter, takes the baton in the later timeline, playing Wilson with a sort of dazed gentleness that seems to flinch in the presence of sunlight. The film isn’t flashy, but it’s carefully tuned. There’s no broad showboating or Oscar-friendly posturing, just a meticulous, emotionally specific portrait of someone being slowly dismantled and then pieced back together. Elizabeth Banks, as the woman who falls for Wilson and begins helping him break free of Landy’s grip, is warm without being sainted. And Paul Giamatti, as Landy, gives cruelty a syrupy sheen that’s far more disturbing than any yelling could have been. Of course, the music helps—it always does. God Only Knows, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Good Vibrations—they pour out like postcards from a better world Wilson only visited briefly. Love & Mercy doesn’t try to solve him. It just tries to hear what he heard.

End-of-the-world stories tend to favor the brooding loner with tragic backstory and military-grade abs. Love and Monsters wisely gives us Joel (Dylan O’Brien), a mild-mannered bunker boy with abandonment issues and poor aim. He narrates our entry into this post-apocalyptic ecosystem—a world where an asteroid strike didn’t kill humanity but instead rained down chemicals that ballooned insects, amphibians, and shellfish into oversized, meat-hungry nightmares. Earth has gone full sci-fi seafood platter, and what’s left of humanity now hides underground, licking canned peaches and old memories. Joel’s colony is a safe but stifling place, and while many of his fellow survivors have paired off for the long haul, he remains romantically marooned—more mascot than man of action. But love, or at least the hazy memory of it, gets him moving. He decides to trek across the monster-infested surface to reunite with Aimee (Jessica Henwick), his pre-Monsterpocalypse crush, whom he hasn’t seen or spoken to in seven years and now leads a coastal colony 85 miles away. That setup should feel recycled—and maybe it is—but the film’s secret weapon is its tone: plucky, inventive, and charmingly unheroic. Joel’s journey plays out like a B-movie fairy tale filtered through a YA lens, complete with a toughened survivalist (Michael Rooker, chewing scenery and dispensing wisdom), a razor-sharp kid sidekick (Ariana Greenblatt), and a very good dog named Boy. The monsters, when they arrive, are imaginative and impressively rendered—grotesque without being grotesquely overdone. O’Brien carries the film on gangly charm and comic timing, narrating with the breeziness of someone who’s learned to cope with trauma by giving it a voiceover. The result is a nimble surprise in a genre bloated with either too much grit or not enough personality. Here, the balance holds.

Love Crazy may not be peak screwball, but it has rhythm, gloss, and the good sense to stay out of its stars’ way. Powell and Loy—on their eleventh cinematic pas de deux—still click like clockwork, their chemistry dancing between irritation and flirtation without ever losing time. He’s Steve, a husband gleefully preparing to celebrate his fourth wedding anniversary with Susan (Loy), until fate—and an elevator—intervenes. A chance encounter with old flame Isobel (Gail Patrick) leads to a stuck lift, a pair of high heels in his pocket, and a perfectly timed sighting by Susan’s meddling mother. Before Steve can explain, the whole situation is barreling toward divorce by dinner. What follows is a cheerful pile-up of mistaken identities, legal dodges, and theatrical breakdowns—highlighted by Powell’s increasingly desperate ploys to stall the proceedings, including a stint faking insanity that lands him in a straitjacket and, eventually, drag. There’s a trace of The Awful Truth in the bones, but this version ditches the finesse for bigger swings and broader gags. The dialogue still hits where it needs to, and Powell, no stranger to elegant nonsense, gets the tone just right. Loy gives deadpan elegance a workout, while Patrick slinks through her scenes like she’s been training for mischief. It’s fizzy, featherlight, and committed to the bit. Not the sharpest of the genre, but a polished, ridiculous, and thoroughly enjoyable entry in the screwball rotation.

It opens with premise and punchline bundled together: Nick (Damon Wayans Jr.), a serial dater with nearly a thousand first dates and zero lasting love, wants to sue the dating site responsible—Love, Guaranteed. Enter Susan (Rachael Leigh Cook), a principled but cash-strapped attorney whose usual cases involve crooked sidewalks and kindly grandmothers, not algorithmic heartbreak. She’s skeptical. He’s charming in the way only the hopelessly overexposed can be. And yes, a third-act kiss is basically court-ordered. The setup is pure rom-com concentrate—opposites, a lawsuit, flirtation masquerading as legal prep—but the film wears its formula with a wink and a cardigan. It’s not reinventing anything, but it doesn’t try to. What it offers instead is modest charm, a few legitimately funny exchanges, and a supporting cast that flutters at the edges with just enough quirk to keep things breathing. Jed Rees, in particular, pops as a corporate executive with the soul of a sitcom villain and the wardrobe of a minor Bond character. Wayans Jr. plays Nick with a smirk that hides some bruises, complicating the charisma just enough to avoid Hallmark glaze. Cook, ever grounded, radiates competence and likability—a rom-com lead who actually seems like she reads contracts for fun. Their chemistry isn’t fireworks, but it sparks gently in the margins. The second half wobbles a bit, unsure whether to lean into legal satire or hand over the roses, but it never falls flat. The jokes stay light, the stakes low, and the vibe comforting. Love, Guaranteed doesn’t aim high—but it lands where it means to: a rainy-day watch, pleasant and disposable, with just enough personality to be worth the click.

Ke Huy Quan is the reason this almost works. He plays Marvin Gable, a retired assassin turned Wisconsin real estate agent, whose idea of danger now involves staging a fixer-upper with too much natural light. That is, until his past rings the doorbell. Rose (Ariana DeBose), a former flame and the woman he once chose not to kill, shows up needing help taking down Marvin’s estranged brother—an elusive, theatrically violent figure known as Knuckles (Daniel Wu). What follows is a string of glossy, overcaffeinated set pieces held together by a plot that gets foggier the longer you look at it. The film gestures at character—Marvin reckoning with his past, his failures—but most of that is buried beneath costumed assassins and pop-art gunfights. He’s not so much pursuing something as surviving whatever kicks down the next door. To its credit, the action is sprightly and well-staged. Director Jonathan Eusebio, a veteran of fight choreography, knows how to shoot mayhem with zip and flair. Mustafa Shakir, as a poetry-quoting killer, and Lio Tipton, as Marvin’s deadpan assistant, inject welcome eccentricity—though they seem to belong in a better, stranger movie. Quan holds the center with charm and gravity, but the character never quite connects the dots. There’s a character arc in theory—regret, confrontation, redemption—but it never quite materializes on screen. He’s watchable, but the film around him feels like a flipbook—fast, colorful, oddly empty. Love Hurts isn’t a disaster, but it is a missed opportunity: a slick, blood-spattered genre romp that mistakes momentum for meaning, and confusion for complexity.

A whimsical conceit, listlessly handled. The Love Letter imagines a seaside town overtaken by an unsigned love note—flowery, anonymous, and passed hand-to-hand like a romantic biohazard. Whoever reads it assumes it’s meant for them. Emotions flare. Glances are stolen. Mild confusion ensues. It feels like A Midsummer Night’s Dream by way of a Yankee Candle catalog. Kate Capshaw plays Helen, a vaguely discontented bookstore owner who discovers the letter first—or at least holds it while looking faintly inconvenienced. She half-hopes it came from the town fireman (Tom Selleck, clean-shaven and aging like a well-kept porch swing) but begins to suspect it was written by her much younger employee (Tom Everett Scott), who stares at her like he’s already rehearsed their first anniversary. She wavers. The film does too. The supporting cast circulates with mild enthusiasm. Ellen DeGeneres, as Helen’s coworker, gets the only lines that sound like they were meant to be said out loud. Most others wander in, mistake each other for soulmates, then drift back out. The town itself—overdecorated, suspiciously quiet, and full of deliberate charm—looks less like a place where people live than one where they pause attractively between errands. The film toys with farce but never commits. It hints at a May–December romance, then backs away like it forgot why it brought it up. No one gets jealous. No one gets embarrassed. The letter stirs things up just long enough for everyone to gently return to baseline. The Love Letter coasts on ambiance. It’s easy to watch, easier to forget. For a story about misplaced desire, it’s allergic to discomfort. Everyone’s too polite to make a move, and the movie rewards them for it.

Written by I.A.L. Diamond before his name was etched into Hollywood marble alongside Billy Wilder’s, Love Nest is more of a soft landing than a revelation—but it’s a pleasant glide nonetheless. It’s the kind of postwar domestic comedy-drama that plays like a long-lost pilot episode, buoyed by affable leads and one now-iconic face peeking in from the corner. Jim (William Lundigan) returns from the war to find his wife Connie (June Haver) has made a surprise investment with their savings: a fixer-upper in New York City with built-in tenants and the promise of passive income. Naturally, the promise is misleading. The house has more issues than the paperwork suggested—some structural, some human. One of their boarders, an affable older man with suspicious charm, turns out to be a reformed con artist with a history worth Googling, if Google had existed in 1951. Complications multiply when Bobbie—an old war buddy of Jim’s—shows up. Connie wasn’t expecting Bobbie to be short for Roberta, and certainly not for Bobbie to arrive in the form of a glowing, early-career Marilyn Monroe. Monroe only has a few scenes, but current DVD covers have no qualms about plastering her front and center, as if this were a Monroe vehicle and not a brief, breezy ensemble piece. She’s fourth-billed, but first in hindsight. The story never builds to much and the stakes are wafer-thin, but it doesn’t overpromise. It’s less a film than a pleasant ninety-minute diversion—full of small comic miscommunications, marital squabbles that never fully ignite, and characters who are easy to spend time with. Love Nest won’t make anyone’s list of essential classics, but like the apartment itself, it’s got just enough character to justify the rent.

Some teen movies chase cool; Lucas can barely remember to tie its shoes. Corey Haim plays the title role—a meek, hyper-intelligent kid who’s already skipped a few grades, which leaves him surrounded by older, taller classmates who treat him as a novelty on good days and a target on bad ones. He’s armed with facts instead of comebacks, and his bug-collecting hobby works like a suit of armor—transparent, but at least it’s something. The jocks don’t understand him. They don’t bother trying. His one unlikely ally is Cappie (Charlie Sheen), the school’s golden-boy quarterback, who offers something rare in Lucas’s world: unforced friendship. Late in the summer, Lucas spots Maggie (Kerri Green) on a tennis court. She doesn’t brush him off or pat him on the head—she talks, listens, laughs like his sentences have weight. They spend the last warm days swapping curiosities: Beethoven for her, cicadas and grasshoppers for him. Somewhere in there, without ceremony, he decides he’s in love. Then school starts. Gravity works fast. Maggie gets pulled into the cheer squad. Cappie—Lucas’s safe harbor—drifts toward her, too. He’s stuck in the narrowing gap between loyalty and jealousy, reaching for something he was never going to get. The film works because it never files itself down to fit the teen-movie mold. It’s funny in the accidental way people are funny when they’re just talking. It’s tender without going soft. Even the smaller roles—Courtney Thorne-Smith as Cappie’s on-again girlfriend, a young Winona Ryder as the shy kid who notices everything—are sketched with the kind of throwaway accuracy that makes you think they could carry their own picture if anyone bothered to follow them home. Only the ending trips. The big feel-good finish is tacked on with enough syrup to drown what came before. But until that point, Lucas might be the most genuine ‘80s teen film about wanting something you can’t have—and finding out it can still make you braver, even if it never makes you taller.

Some stories are too strange to embellish. In 1984, Michael Larson—an awkward, broke ice cream truck driver with a head full of patterns—walked onto the set of Press Your Luck in a tie, a sports coat, and khaki shorts the TV cameras never caught. The game was simple: hit a button, win some cash, dodge the Whammy—a cartoon goblin who dances off with your money. Larson didn’t just beat the game. He cracked it. Paul Walter Hauser plays him with the right kind of discomfort—jittery, withdrawn, half-prepared for greatness, wholly unequipped to enjoy it. At first, Larson just seems lucky. Then uncannily precise. Then weirdly confident. He starts celebrating before the board stops spinning. In the control room, the producers twitch. One of them, Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn, all network composure), figures it out: Larson has memorized the board. He’s not guessing. He’s timing it. Predicting it. Owning it. They want to stop the taping. But the show’s legal consultant (Shaunette Renée Wilson, quietly terrific) reminds them—this isn’t cheating. No tricks, no tampering. Just observation. And nobody wants another quiz show scandal. There’s a great story here. The film knows that. It catches the sweat, the weird tension, the slow shift from luck to something stranger. But it never quite knows what to make of Larson. He’s not a hero. Not a con artist. Just a man who noticed something no one else did, held on like it might fix everything, and watched it come apart anyway. The movie gestures toward meaning—redemption, irony, some quiet bit of cosmic poetry—but it never lands. He starts out a sad man and ends the same way. Just with a better jacket. The tone’s a little unsure, too. It wants that low-burn Coen brothers thing—quietly funny, a little off, kind of sad without pressing too hard—but it doesn’t fully commit. It hesitates. You can feel it pulling back. The humor is mild. The character study, more of a character sketch. This is disappointing to me considering the director, Michael Showalter, very much made this happen with his earlier Sally Field vehicle, Hello, My Name is Doris. Maybe being limited to what he felt he could embellish about a real person got to him. The Luckiest Man in America captures the oddness of Larson’s moment, but not the spark. It watches him win, then doesn’t quite know what to do with him after.

Slevin Kelevra (Josh Hartnett) is the kind of guy who shows up in New York wearing someone else’s clothes, staying in someone else’s apartment, and gets mistaken for someone else entirely. He’s visiting from out of town—mugged on arrival, no ID, no wallet—when a couple of henchmen come knocking and decide he must be the man they’re looking for. That man, unfortunately, owes money to two rival crime bosses. One wants him to commit a murder. The other assumes he already has. Slevin handles it all with a deadpan calm. He explains he has a neurological condition that prevents anxiety, though it plays more like he’s just not particularly invested in the outcome. Lucy Liu plays a neighbor who gets involved for reasons the script doesn’t examine too closely. Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley appear as mob bosses with names that sound like stage credits: The Boss and The Rabbi. Bruce Willis, pale and severe, is somewhere in the background, usually holding a silenced pistol and staring at people until they fall over. The plot folds in on itself like a napkin trick—some of the twists land, some hinge on the movie hiding information it doesn’t trust you to handle early. You get the feeling there’s a whiteboard somewhere with a lot of arrows. Still, the story resolves with a certain grim flair, even if it doesn’t quite earn all of it. Visually, it’s the kind of slick noir that likes to underline its framing. The tone hovers between comic book and cocktail lounge, full of suits, shadows, and dialogue that seems more concerned with rhythm than meaning. It’s derivative in a dozen ways but gets by on confidence and pace. Lucky Number Slevin doesn’t have anything new to say, but it says the old stuff in a voice that’s hard not to enjoy. The cast is overqualified, the structure is tight enough, and the mood—when it clicks—is stylish in that way that used to count for a lot.

You’d think by 2014 we’d have retired the “we only use 10% of our brains” myth. But Lucy grabs it like it’s gospel—and builds an entire evolution-to-godhood action movie on top. If that sounds dumb, it is. But it’s also sleek, fast, and surprisingly committed to its own techno-babble. Scarlett Johansson plays Lucy, a student in Taiwan tricked into delivering a briefcase to a gangster in a white suit. She wakes up with a pouch of synthetic drugs stitched into her gut like a carry-on organ. When the bag ruptures, the drug doesn’t kill her—it supercharges her. Rapidly. By the time Morgan Freeman shows up as a neurologist giving TED Talks on untapped cerebral potential, Lucy’s already bending time, rewriting physics, and downloading the universe. The plot’s nonsense, but it races forward, never pausing for long. Luc Besson helms it like he’s sprinting toward a deadline—sewing together shootouts, car chases, and glossy CG metaphysics with zero patience for coherence. And yet it clicks. The animal cutaways—National Geographic smash-cut with sci-fi escalation—should feel ridiculous. But somehow, they don’t. Johansson plays the transformation like a human modem quietly phasing out of reality. It’s all chilly detachment and eerie calm, a performance that keeps the story just barely grounded. Freeman does what he’s there to do: lend gravitas to the gobbledygook. By the end, the movie trades logic for velocity and turns Lucy into a USB drive with metaphysical side effects. It’s not exactly satisfying, but it strikes a pose and holds it. Lucy isn’t as smart as it looks, but it keeps a straight face—shiny, stern, and just structured enough to pass for something sharper. It’s brain candy in a metallic wrapper: looks expensive, melts instantly.

A trifle in tap shoes, whipped up with Technicolor frosting and served with the bounce of a studio-engineered grin. Doris Day, buoyant and barely terrestrial, stars as Melinda Howard, a singer returning from London with stars in her eyes and Broadway dreams under her hat—only to discover that her once-glamorous mother (Gladys George) is now a washed-up lush, clutching a liquor bottle instead of a curtain call. Not one to dwell, Melinda aims to make her own mark in American showbiz, and along the way, collides with Gene Nelson’s Tom Farnham—first bristling, then swooning, as these things tend to go. The plot—thin as tulle and just as see-through—mostly exists to string together numbers, many of them pulled from the back catalogs of Harry Warren and Al Dubin. “Lullaby of Broadway” itself gets a workout, though not a reinvention, and there’s the added pleasure of watching Nelson’s high-kicking precision—he moves like a man trying to outpace gravity with style. Day, naturally, sparkles. There’s never any question that she’s better than the material, but she never condescends to it. She sells fluff with feeling. As a film, it’s neither transporting nor grating. The stakes are featherweight and evaporate on contact, but if you’re craving tap numbers and Technicolor gloss with a dash of pre-packaged sentiment, there are worse diversions. It’s a puff pastry of a musical—light, colorful, and easily forgotten. But during its runtime, it plays like a carousel that refuses to admit it’s spinning in circles.