Film Buff Musings

A high-gloss cautionary tale dressed up as a killer-doll movie, M3GAN walks a path so well-tread it could’ve been paved in 1988, but still manages to feel new enough to jolt. The premise—grief, technology, and a toy you wouldn’t wish on your worst preschooler—is familiar. The pleasure is in the execution. M3GAN (pronounced, with full corporate confidence, as “Megan”) is a prototype doll cooked up in a tech lab where deadlines matter more than ethics. She looks like a child, sings lullabies like a TikTok influencer, and learns at a rate her own creator didn’t bother to cap. That creator, Gemma (Allison Williams), is a toy company engineer with zero maternal instincts, suddenly tasked with raising her recently orphaned niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). She doesn’t know how to comfort a child—but she knows how to offload the job onto something with Wi-Fi. Cady bonds with M3GAN like she’s just found her emotional support algorithm. M3GAN bonds back—with just a little too much initiative. The doll begins “learning” what love looks like. Then she starts enforcing it. Violently. The film doesn’t ask you to believe M3GAN’s rise is possible—it just asks you to believe she’d ever get past the prototype stage looking that uncanny without a single parent raising their eyebrows. She’s eerie before she’s dangerous. And that’s part of the joke. The satire isn’t subtle: tech bros chasing patents, market testers ignoring red flags, trauma being monetized for emotional growth metrics. It sags a little in the middle, trying to juggle grief and camp, but finds its footing once the violence kicks in. The kills are sharp, the laughs are mean, and the script knows better than to get too preachy. It’s Child’s Play for the iPad generation—slick, pointed, and self-aware enough to bite the hand that scanned it.

Leonard Shelby can’t form new memories. Every few minutes, the world resets—names vanish, locations go soft, intentions evaporate—and he’s left clutching fragments of the present like they might explain the past. Guy Pearce plays him with the composure of a man who knows how to tie a tie but not why he’s wearing it. He’s dressed for a purpose he can’t remember, carrying out a mission he has to rediscover anew, over and over, like a detective trapped in a snow globe. His condition—locked in since the night his wife was murdered—has turned revenge into a logistical undertaking. Polaroids double as acquaintances, facts are scribbled onto motel stationery, and anything vital enough to survive his mental sieve gets inked across his body. He is his own case file. Nolan builds the film to reflect this disorientation—not in style, but in structure. Scenes unfold in reverse order, each one snapping into the previous like a jigsaw puzzle being assembled upside down. The film starts with a killing and then backs into explanation, demanding the audience stumble alongside Leonard without the courtesy of memory or roadmap. It’s a narrative experiment, sure, but one that’s curiously absorbing. Action scenes don’t accelerate so much as confuse themselves into existence: Leonard finds himself mid-chase, unsure if he’s predator or prey, and adjusts accordingly. The tension isn’t in what happens next—it’s in figuring out what just did. Pearce, whose handsomeness always seems a few degrees removed from warmth, is perfectly cast as a man built from restraint. His Leonard isn’t emotional—he’s procedural. A man performing grief with the precision of a checklist. Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano drift through the fog of his reality, playing multiple versions of themselves depending on which direction the plot is moving. They are either helpful or harmful—or, more likely, both—and the film lets that ambiguity rot deliciously in place. The so-called twist doesn’t explode so much as slide in sideways, dragging the narrative into a deeper loop. It’s clever, maybe a little smug, but fitting. Dialogue sometimes stiffens, and a few moments clunk around like exposition in a trench coat, but it hardly matters. The construction is the point. Memento is a mystery with amnesia in place of a detective. It doesn’t unwind—it recoils. Watching it is like solving a puzzle after someone’s tossed the box and filed the edges down. You might find the answer, but by then, you’ve forgotten the question.

A three-part sci-fi anthology from Studio Madhouse and a trio of directors, Memories opens with a bang, stumbles a little, then trails off in a puff of abstraction. But even when the stories dip, the images keep coming. The first short, Magnetic Rose, is easily the best: two space salvagers respond to a distress signal and wind up inside a floating opera house, where a long-dead soprano (Eva Friedel) haunts the place via hologram. What looks elegant from a distance starts to corrode the closer they get—lavish decor collapses into dust, childhood memories creep in uninvited, and trauma starts dressing up like décor. It’s eerie and hypnotic and weirdly moving, like someone adapted 2001 after watching too many Bergman films. Stink Bomb veers hard in the other direction—loud, frantic, and built like a chemical farce. A well-meaning lab tech accidentally swallows an experimental cold capsule and turns into a walking weapon, unleashing a toxic trail of mass death as he makes his way to Tokyo, still thinking he’s doing his job. The government throws tanks at him, fighter jets, entire platoons—it doesn’t help. It’s broad, manic, and plays like a pandemic satire that forgot to breathe. Cannon Fodder wraps things up in a haze of smoke and soot. The story takes place in a city devoted entirely to lobbing artillery at some vague enemy over the horizon. A little boy idolizes his cannon-loader father, who trudges off to war each day—except there is no war, not exactly. Just industrial noise, propaganda posters, and a lot of yelling through megaphones. It’s striking to look at, but more concept than story, and it runs out of momentum even before the final shot. The quality dips with each chapter, but there’s always something to look at—a haunted theater, a mushroom cloud, a kid in a gas mask gripping his lunch pail. The themes—memory, delusion, military routine dressed up as heroism—float around, sometimes cohering, sometimes not. But Memories isn’t trying to explain itself. It just wants to leave an imprint. And in fits and pieces, it does.

Abbie Polin’s body gives out before his patience does—which is how he ends up flying across the country to confront the man who taught him both stubbornness and stage presence. A successful heart surgeon with tightly packed feelings and a clipped delivery, Abbie (Billy Crystal) suffers a heart attack (because irony?) and decides to reconnect with his estranged father, Abe (Alan King), a lifelong Hollywood extra who treats the background like it’s where the real actors get to breathe. The plot is slight, but Crystal and King carry the film—bickering like it’s sport, volleying complaints and half-sincere compliments with the rhythm of people who’ve been having the same argument for twenty years. The script, co-written by Crystal and Eric Roth, isn’t afraid of a little well-placed cringe: Abe recounts more humiliating childhood moments than proud ones, and Abbie absorbs them like a man trying to locate the emotional exit. The laughs aren’t constant, but the reconciliation feels like a genuine attempt. Director Henry Winkler—best known for his sitcom work, and it shows—doesn’t always shape the sentiment with confidence. The tone can tip maudlin, and the visual style has the sheen of a TV special. But underneath the flatness is real warmth, and a few quiet moments that slip in like a sigh and stay like a bruise. The ending wraps a lifetime of friction a little too cleanly, but the feeling it leaves behind is earned the hard way.

Emilio Estevez writes, directs, and stars in this limp caper about two garbage men who discover a dead body on their route and proceed to handle the situation with the decision-making skills of men who’ve seen Weekend at Bernie’s one too many times. Charlie Sheen plays his roommate and co-worker, and between the two of them, there’s a shared brain cell and a pellet gun. Before the corpse shows up, the plot spends time trying to pass off their hobby of spying on the woman across the street as harmless curiosity. They think they’re witnessing domestic abuse. Sheen, playing to his strengths, responds by shooting the man in question in the backside. The next morning, the man is dead in a trash can. This doesn’t trigger a call to the police—it triggers a plan involving sunglasses, a dolly, and several scenes of vehicular mismanagement. There’s a villain, vaguely defined: a corporate operation dumping toxic waste into the ocean. There’s an environmental message in there somewhere, possibly scribbled in the margins of a different draft. The pacing limps from bit to bit, and any stabs at black comedy misfire into mild confusion. Keith David gives the only performance with real force, charging into scenes like he’s in a better movie—or at least determined to wake this one up. It’s an odd mix: part buddy movie, part slapstick murder cover-up, part ecological fable. None of it fits together, but it doesn’t entirely fall apart either. It just keeps going, like a trash truck with no brakes and nothing particularly valuable in the back.

The world is full of aliens—posing as cab drivers, magazine stand owners, and that weird guy at the DMV who never blinks. A secret government agency, dressed in black and equipped with memory-wiping pens, handles the daily grind of keeping Earth’s extraterrestrial population from causing trouble. It’s not glamorous. It’s paperwork, protocol, and the occasional world-ending threat. Will Smith is J, a street-smart cop thrown into this universe and paired with K, a veteran agent played by Tommy Lee Jones like he’s been doing this since Roswell and lost interest somewhere around 1974. J is fast-talking and wide-eyed; K doesn’t raise his voice or his eyebrows. Together, they’re assigned to stop an alien bug walking around in a badly stolen human body—Vincent D’Onofrio, doing something halfway between a twitch and a slow collapse—as it searches New York for a tiny galaxy that could trigger a war. The plot moves quickly but never in a rush. Threats pile up, aliens burst out of disguises, and the fate of the planet sits in the back of a jewelry store. Through it all, the Men in Black treat global destruction like a routine fire drill. It’s this calm, matter-of-fact attitude that gives the film its best laughs. Nothing gets overstated. The strange is treated as normal. The normal starts to feel strange. Sonnenfeld’s direction keeps things tidy. The visual effects are fun without showing off. The aliens are weird without being overwhelming. Everything is just exaggerated enough. You get the sense this agency has systems in place, even for tentacle births in the backseat of a sedan. The real engine here is the chemistry between Smith and Jones. Smith moves like he’s testing gravity. Jones barely moves at all. The dynamic works because the movie doesn’t push it—it lets their differences fill the space naturally. Men in Black works because it never tries too hard. The jokes land without fuss, the pacing never drags, and the sci-fi premise stays light on its feet. It’s confident, quick, and never lets the weirdness outweigh the fun.

Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith return, though the spark does not. The chemistry that once felt quick, intuitive, and oddly elegant now plays out with the air of obligation—two performers exchanging lines, eyes elsewhere. The premise flips the original: K (Jones), now enjoying a low-profile retirement as a postal worker, is pulled back into service when an alien threat disguised as a lingerie model arrives on Earth looking for an object called the Light of Zartha. Lara Flynn Boyle, playing the villain, looks convincingly extraterrestrial, but the film gives her little more than costume changes and the occasional glare. The setup—in which J (Smith) becomes the seasoned agent, guiding his now-forgetful former mentor—could have offered a clever reversal. Instead, it stumbles. The rhythm is off, the humor strained, and the sense of discovery from the first film is replaced with mechanical repetition. Smith seems restless, trapped in a role that once felt alive. Jones barely musters enough energy to finish his sentences. Scenes unfold with a glazed efficiency, as if checking boxes on a list no one believes in anymore. The film moves, but without direction—just enough momentum to suggest progress, but none of the invention that made the first outing feel so nimble. Watching it immediately after the original is like jumping from a trampoline onto a mattress. Even the target audience seems unclear. The jokes are broad, the plot undercooked, and the tone seems torn between entertaining children and pretending it’s smarter than it is. The talking pug reappears in a black suit and tie, and somehow that ends up being the highlight—more memorable than anything involving space politics, memory-erasing gadgets, or sussing out which normal people amongst us are extraterrestrial. Boyle could have brought real bite to the film had the script offered more than posturing. She enters, stalks the set, and vanishes again, as though waiting for a better rewrite that never came. Men in Black II isn’t an outright failure—it’s something quieter, more dispiriting. A sequel going through the motions, made by people who once knew how this worked and now seem faintly annoyed to be asked again. You don’t leave angry. You just leave puzzled that it’s the same director, the same cast, and yet almost nothing connects.

Now this is the sequel the original deserved—funnier, warmer, sharper than anyone had the right to expect after the detour that was the second installment. Men in Black 3 manages not just to recapture the original’s offbeat rhythm and visual invention, but to tuck a surprisingly heartfelt coda beneath the prosthetics, gadgets, and goo. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones return as Agents J and K, though Jones doesn’t stick around for long. Boris the Animal (Jermaine Clement), a sneering cycloptic brute with pincers and a vocabulary problem, breaks out of lunar lockup and slips through time to 1969 to eliminate the younger Agent K before he can imprison him. As time bends, K vanishes from the present entirely, remembered only by the agency’s older brass—except for J, who somehow holds on to the original timeline like a splinter in his memory. So off he goes, back to the late ’60s with a borrowed time-jump gadget and just enough exposition to get the plot rolling. In the past, J meets a 29-year-old K (Josh Brolin), and from there the film finds its groove—snappy, eccentric, and just this side of sentimental. The chemistry between Smith and Brolin has an unexpected ease, and Brolin’s uncanny imitation of Jones is more than a party trick—it’s a performance, dry and precise but with enough room for subtle shifts that hint at the person K will become. Sonnenfeld’s direction returns to the bright, candy-colored weirdness of the first film, all retro-futuristic control panels, rubbery alien designs, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sight gags tucked in every corner. The jokes hit with enough consistency to keep the tone nimble, and the production design walks the line between nostalgia and invention without tipping into parody. There’s even time for a touch of melancholy, delivered through a third-act revelation that sneaks up gently and lands with real feeling. Clement makes a properly grotesque villain—funny, loud, gross, and just threatening enough. He doesn’t chew the scenery so much as secrete over it, and it works. And while Jones appears only briefly, his presence lingers through Brolin, who turns what could’ve been stunt casting into something weirdly elegant. Somehow, this unlikely third entry finds the sweet spot: big sci-fi action without bloat, time-travel shenanigans without incoherence, and just enough human emotion to keep it from floating off into novelty. The pug doesn’t even need to show up. That’s how good it is.

A soft reboot with soft edges, Men in Black: International tries to keep the brand alive by changing the faces but leaving the chassis untouched. Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth take over as Agents M and H, dressed appropriately, framed cleanly, and surrounded by the expected creatures and gadgets. The production design mimics the earlier films with confidence—chrome surfaces, shadowy hallways, aliens with varying degrees of moistness—but there’s nothing underneath the gloss. The soul’s gone missing. The original film worked not because of the visual oddities but because of the friction between its leads. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones had that crucial spark: hot and cold, awe and apathy, chaos and protocol. The contrast animated everything. Here, Thompson and Hemsworth seem to be operating at the same frequency, and that frequency is low. It’s not that they’re unlikable—they’re affable enough—but put together, they vanish into each other. Styrofoam and styrofoam: light, inoffensive, no structural resistance. The story, which involves mole hunts and alien royalty and secret planets and portals, is less a plot than a string of action figures being moved across a table. It has none of the brisk weirdness or narrative snap of the original, and even Men in Black II—uninspired as it was—had a better handle on setup and payoff. This one idles, then wanders, then sort of forgets it’s supposed to end. Most of the jokes evaporate on contact. The one-liners don’t register, the set pieces have no rhythm, and the sight gags that used to pop out of nowhere now feel like background noise. The aliens, though still inventive in design, are treated like props rather than surprises. Even Kumail Nanjiani, voicing a tiny alien sidekick with royal duties, gets reduced to punchline filler with no bounce. And yet, it’s not quite a disaster. The film isn’t unpleasant. It’s just forgettable—franchise maintenance disguised as a feature. Thompson and Hemsworth remain watchable, even as the movie gives them little to play. Compared to the stilted chemistry of Jones and Smith in MIB II, their dynamic is an improvement, if only by being less uncomfortable. For those who take pleasure in creature effects and shimmering sci-fi décor, there’s still something to gaze at. Background aliens still shuffle, blink, burp, and glow, even if no one’s bothering to build a real story around them. But for a series once defined by its blend of cosmic oddity and bureaucratic comedy, this entry feels like a memo filed too late.

A coming-of-age story with cherry Kool-Aid in one hand and emotional wreckage in the other, Mermaids is a funny, occasionally bracing comedy-drama that swims through the unpredictable tides of mother-daughter dynamics with a sideways stroke. Cher plays Rachel Flax, a single mother who changes homes and men with the same frequency and logic as seasonal shoes. Her maternal approach is a mix of flair, instinct, and mild panic—equal parts glamour and improvisation. When things get complicated (which they usually do), she bolts for the next small town like someone who’s made a lifestyle out of not unpacking. Her daughters adjust with equal parts creativity and dysfunction. Charlotte (Winona Ryder) throws herself into Catholicism with the fervor of someone auditioning for sainthood—fasts, prayers, and internalized guilt stacked like altar candles, all in protest of her mother’s unapologetic sensuality. Kate (Christina Ricci), younger and more aquatic in temperament, prepares for a future as a mermaid, swimming in circles and dreaming of a world less prone to upheaval. Then comes Lou (Bob Hoskins), a shoe salesman with the calm of someone who has outlasted worse weather. He’s not glamorous—he looks like someone’s warm-hearted uncle who knows exactly how to refinish a linoleum floor—but his kindness hits like a shock to the system. Rachel doesn’t know what to do with him, which is exactly why he might work. He doesn’t fix the family. He just doesn’t damage it, which in this house, counts as radical progress. Mermaids doesn’t go hunting for catharsis. It prefers drift to declaration. But its world is textured, affectionate, and unexpectedly precise. Cher mixes flash with restraint, Ryder burns quietly from within, and Ricci—barely out of the gate—is already on beat four while everyone else is counting to two. The film flails toward sincerity and brushes up against something real. These women fumble through rituals of closeness and, improbably, find something like understanding.

Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is a war film that seems to regard violence as a failure of imagination. Set in a Japanese POW camp in Java during World War II, the movie trades battlefields for gazes that go on too long and orders delivered like personal riddles. Its quietude isn’t peaceful—it’s combustible. Into this humid micro-state arrives David Bowie’s Lt. Col. Jack Celliers, a new prisoner with a face that floats somewhere between guilt and disdain, and the faint smirk of someone whose trauma has already set up shop behind the eyes. The film’s real combustion occurs not in its command structures or survival protocols, but in the subdued and heavily coded connection between Celliers and his captor, Capt. Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto), whose fascination with this oddly poised Brit amounts to a slow-motion internal collapse. Their relationship—never romantic in act, though practically operatic in implication—draws itself out in glances and ritual, a courtship disguised as military protocol. Sakamoto, best known at the time for his work with Yellow Magic Orchestra, gives a performance of rigid composure threaded with quiet longing. Bowie—ghostlike, angular, unreadable—responds with a slow drip of provocation and melancholy. They never touch. They don’t need to. Tom Conti plays the nominal protagonist, Col. Lawrence, a British officer fluent in Japanese and deployed here as a kind of narrative glue. Conti is excellent—wry, observant—but his character often feels like a diplomatic concession, designed to keep the film within arm’s reach of the conventional. Remove him, and the center might not hold, but what’s left would be something far stranger, and possibly more profound. The film falters at times. Its theatrical rigidity can harden into stasis, and certain passages beg for a scalpel. But Ōshima’s control is deliberate, and the stillness becomes its own kind of pressure. When violence does erupt, it feels less like an escalation than a breach of etiquette. Sakamoto’s electronic score is reason enough to watch it—cool, melancholic, and unmistakably human, it softens the film’s austerity without loosening its grip. The music seems to carry the emotion the characters can’t admit, echoing through the frame like memory half-remembered. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence doesn’t court resolution. It occupies the space between silence and confession—an elliptical, cerebral chamber piece that observes longing, power, and shame without resolving any of them. What it offers instead is something quieter, and perhaps rarer: a study of human contradiction, precisely arranged and exquisitely withheld.

Michael Mann’s Miami Vice opens with all the mood and texture of a crime thriller bent on disappearing into itself. The digital grain twitches in the darkness. Thunderclouds wait behind mirrored sunglasses. And somewhere beneath it all, two detectives—Crockett and Tubbs—exchange words like currency under audit. Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell play the pair with the muted professionalism of men who’ve stopped explaining themselves. There’s history between them, but it’s buried deep under the hush. The plot—at least what registers as plot—involves an international drug syndicate, multiple identities, encrypted drop points, and boats that go very fast. A white supremacist gang kicks off the operation, then vanishes without follow-up. Most of the action is absorbed into a larger, murkier sting involving a cartel liaison (Gong Li) and a briefcase full of terminal arrangements. Characters appear, do business, disappear. The structure resembles a memory—fragmented, circular, not always concerned with order. Farrell and Gong Li share a romance, or at least scenes where attraction is suggested via lighting and tide patterns. The intention is clear: a doomed, temporary escape carved out of duty. But the camera does more yearning than the actors. Their relationship feels less like a complication than a pause in narrative velocity. What Mann’s chasing here isn’t plot, or even character—it’s atmosphere. The series’ neon kitsch is gone, replaced by procedural malaise and a color palette that rarely allows daylight. It’s an experiment in genre removal, stripping away friction, banter, rhythm, anything that might create momentum. What remains are men in motion, filmed like weather. The idea of elevating a disposable ’80s property into something brutal, internal, and textural has its own strange logic. But somewhere in the translation, the thrill went quiet. The movie doesn’t collapse; it recedes.

As a follow-up to Parasite—a film that hit every note like it was born knowing the melody—Mickey 17 is more curious than essential. Bong Joon-ho swaps sub-basements for deep space and trades class warfare for cloning logistics, but this time the ideas feel neater, more contained. The setup: in a frozen outpost on a distant planet, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) has been hired to die. Repeatedly. He’s what they call an Expendable—a disposable worker printed fresh every time the last version meets an inconvenient end. Number 16 freezes to death on a mission? No problem. Just reprint 17 and hand him a coat. The wrinkle comes when Mickey 17 survives—only to find that Mickey 18 has already been printed in his place. Now there are two of them, both insisting they’re the real one, both diverging in small but troubling ways. Are they copies, or are they driftwood versions of someone who stopped existing fifteen iterations ago? The film touches the existential question, then backs away before things get too messy. This isn’t a thought experiment—it’s a sci-fi thriller dressed up like one, full of split identities but not all that interested in pulling them apart. Pattinson gives both versions a twitchy, half-smirking edge—one deadpan, one barely holding it together. They’re mirror images with just enough distortion to make things uneasy. Around them, the colony’s authority figures operate with the polished cruelty of an HR memo: Mark Ruffalo as the autocratic governor, Toni Collette as the colony’s operations director—both fluent in ends-justify-means logic, ethics optional. The planet, Niflheim, is cold and hostile, swarming with giant roly-polies known as “Creepers”—at first treated like pests, then possibly something more sentient. The film flirts with ecological allegory and brushes past it. There’s satire here, and action, and just enough intelligence to suggest deeper ambitions—but it never quite lets them take root. Mickey 17 is clever, slick, intermittently fascinating. It raises a lot of questions and answers only the ones that won’t disrupt the mission. Good enough to entertain, not quite enough to haunt.

Dudley Moore plays a man with one wife, one mistress, and eventually two children—born on the same day in the same hospital to two women who don’t know the other exists. And somehow, he’s the sympathetic one. In Micki & Maude, Moore stars as Rob Salinger, a TV reporter with baby fever and a growing sense that his burgeoning politician wife Micki (Ann Reinking) is more focused on campaign strategy and public appearances than starting a family. Enter Maude (Amy Irving), a cellist with a maternal streak and better timing. One thing leads to another, Maude gets pregnant, and Rob—figuring Micki’s halfway out the door anyway—quietly marries her too. Then comes the dinner. Rob sits down to tell Micki it’s over, and before he can get a syllable out, she confesses she’s never loved him more—and she’s pregnant. Now he’s married to two women, expecting two babies, and too emotionally scrambled to choose between them. So he doesn’t. He just juggles. The farce builds, of course, to a labor-day climax: both women in the same hospital, giving birth at the same time, with Rob pinballing between maternity wings like a man running a three-act play with no intermission. The nurses are baffled, the lies unravel, and the movie somehow keeps a light touch without dissolving into bedlam. It helps that Blake Edwards directs with clockwork timing and Moore plays Rob not as a schemer, but as a man whose panic keeps digging its own tunnels. The premise is undeniably tricky—you don’t get many likable bigamists—but the film pulls it off with enough sincerity and momentum to stay upright. It’s ridiculous, but never smug, and it earns its laughs the hard way: through precision.

A film that walks with a limp and still finds its way to something shattering, Midnight Cowboy remains one of the more quietly devastating entries in American cinema—a character drama about disillusionment that manages to feel both harsh and tender, broken and strangely intact. Jon Voight, all toothy optimism and clueless swagger, plays Joe Buck, a Texas dishwasher with more confidence than direction. He arrives in New York City in a cowboy outfit that borders on costume and announces himself as a hustler for hire, despite the fact that nobody seems to be hiring. He meets Rico “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a scruffy, limping street hustler with a wheeze in his lungs and a grift in every pocket. Ratso cons Joe out of twenty bucks in their first encounter, and Joe barely has enough self-awareness to be insulted. But in a city where kindness costs more than rent, their bond forms anyway—part mutual dependence, part something less nameable. The performances are phenomenal, maybe untouchable. Voight leans into Joe’s naiveté without mocking him, while Hoffman folds himself into the part of Ratso like he’s been living in that trench coat for years. They orbit each other awkwardly at first, then fall into rhythm—an off-key duet, full of missteps and grace notes. The film’s ending has long since earned its reputation: not manipulative, not designed for tears, but simply devastating in its quiet. It arrives without punctuation. If there’s anything pulling at the seams, it’s Schlesinger’s occasional forays into surrealism—flashbacks, hallucinations, and stray bursts of psychedelia that interrupt more than they illuminate. They’re executed with confidence, and possibly even taste, but they sit at odds with the emotional core. Still, the messiness doesn’t erase the power. Midnight Cowboy isn’t flawless, but it’s felt—deeply, and for a long time after.

A pale-blue thriller with its nerves shot and its fog machine running overtime, Midnight Lace borrows from Hitchcock’s toolbox without quite knowing how to wield it. What it does have—firmly and convincingly—is Doris Day, delivering a performance of unraveling panic so committed it nearly carries the whole production on its white-gloved hands. She plays Kit Preston, a recently married American heiress adrift in the London mist, who hears a voice—disembodied, cruel—promising to kill her. She flees, rattled, to her husband Anthony (Rex Harrison), who listens with a slightly furrowed brow and dutiful concern. The police, summoned out of obligation, chalk it up to pranksters. And then the calls keep coming. And then they stop dismissing her—and start wondering if she’s gone completely mad. It’s a set-up designed to spiral, and it does, but perhaps a bit too linearly. The threats escalate, the camera angles tilt, and Kit’s hysteria becomes her calling card. There’s no shading to her fear—no flicker of defiance or interior steel—just a steady, elegant disintegration. Day plays it with absolute conviction, but the character is more syndrome than person. You want her to fight, to crack wise, to outmaneuver the fog; instead, she cries exquisitely. The script keeps its secrets, but not many of them are interesting. There are suspects, a few red herrings, and an eventual twist that works well enough, though it feels more functional than inspired. The supporting cast—Myrna Loy, John Gavin, Roddy McDowall—adds gloss and distraction in equal measure. Still, this is a perfectly serviceable thriller, draped in silk and menace. It might not burrow under your skin the way it wants to, but it dresses the part convincingly. Once you’ve run out of Hitchcock and want something that walks like suspense but thinks like melodrama, Midnight Lace is a worthy curio.

Jonah Hill’s directorial debut is a compact, rough-edged coming-of-age film about the people you meet when you’re thirteen and impressionable and trying very hard not to seem either. Set in sunbaked Los Angeles during the Clinton-era adolescence of baggy shirts, bootleg skate videos, and performative cool, Mid90s isn’t just a tribute to a subculture—it’s a snapshot of how kids shape themselves by the company they keep. Stevie (Sunny Suljic) is the youngest in a tense two-person sibling rivalry. He lives with his single mother (Katharine Waterston), who tries hard but doesn’t have much bandwidth, and his older brother Ian (Lucas Hedges), who splits his time between working out and throwing Stevie into walls. When Stevie spots a crew of skaters hanging outside a shop, he’s immediately drawn in—not just by the tricks, but by the posture. Their looseness. Their detachment. Their deliberate refusal to care. He trades in his Nintendo and a childhood of dodging fists for a skateboard and a shot at belonging. The group dubs him “Sunburn,” initiates him through mild hazing, and folds him into their world—grime, smoke, bruises, and all. His gateway is Ruben, a kid barely older than he is, who passes along advice that lands somewhere between locker-room bravado and outright nonsense (including a warning that saying “thank you” is somehow unmasculine). But Stevie, inexperienced and eager, takes it all in. He falls off rooftops. He picks up smoking, drinking, harder stuff. His mother confronts it, predictably. He shrugs it off, just as predictably. What makes Mid90s interesting isn’t that it endorses or condemns the behavior—it just watches it. Hill, who also wrote the script, seems more interested in the texture of adolescence than its lessons. There’s no formal arc, no major life event that turns Stevie into a different person. He doesn’t crash, learn, and grow. He crashes, and keeps skating. The consequences are real, but not life-defining. There’s something refreshingly honest about that. The film is well-observed, even if its nostalgia isn’t as overpowering as advertised. The 4:3 aspect ratio feels like a nod to VHS-era framing, but the tone is more lo-fi realism than mixtape memory. These aren’t rose-colored memories—they’re scuffed-up, semi-fictionalized recollections of how strange and sudden teenage freedom can feel when no one’s really watching. Mid90s doesn’t aim for profundity. It hangs out, and in the process captures something genuine—about boys, about growing up, and about how every group of kids has a Sunburn, even if they never called him that.

There are dozens of doors through which one might enter A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but few are quite as strange or sparkling as this one—an ornate, black-and-white fantasia from Warner Bros., built on Shakespeare, Mendelssohn, and a cast pulled straight from the Golden Age studio lot. It’s the kind of oddball prestige experiment that only makes more sense the longer you sit with it. Or perhaps the more you surrender to its weirdness. What this version offers isn’t textual rigor or conceptual daring—it’s pageantry, precision lighting, and James Cagney with a donkey’s head. Cagney plays Bottom with more gusto than grace, but his clowning is calibrated for the camera, and it works. You’re not watching Shakespeare interpreted—you’re watching it mugged at lovingly from the footlights. Joe E. Brown, in a smaller role as Flute, wears perpetual bafflement like a costume piece he was born with. He barely has to say anything—his face does the scene work for him. And then there’s Mickey Rooney, Puck as percussive outburst. He spins, leaps, shrieks, mugs, and then does it all again louder. Whether this is delightful or deeply grating might depend on your stamina for boyish mischief pitched to the rafters. But to be fair, Puck is a deeply grating character, even on the page. Rooney simply commits to the job with terrifying enthusiasm. Elsewhere, there’s beauty: Mendelssohn’s music, woven through extended sequences of fairy frolics and fog-bound forests, creates a hypnotic lull. The cinematography—soft, silvery, slightly haunted—belongs to another realm entirely. You don’t watch these scenes for narrative progress; you watch them because they’ve been carved out of dream logic. The result isn’t polished, but it mesmerizes. Where the 1999 version might wrap itself in tasteful whimsy, this one feels like it was embalmed in nitrate and woke up mid-dream. It’s a pageant, a relic, a loony spectacle—and, yes, it casts a spell.

From the same minds that gave us King Kong, Mighty Joe Young manages the improbable: it imbues a stop-motion gorilla with more pathos than most human leads. But then again, maybe it’s not so improbable. Clay, like flesh, is only shadow once projected—and what we believe, we feel. It begins in colonial Africa, where a young girl named Jill Young (Terry Moore), full of impulse and without parental clearance, buys a baby gorilla from a pair of passing traders. She names him Joe. Fifteen years later, Joe has grown into a 2,000-pound guardian with the build of a prizefighter and the temperament of a Labrador. He helps with farm work. He listens to Jill. He understands. Enter Hollywood, in the form of a promoter played by Robert Armstrong—basically reprising his Kong role with fewer scruples and more neon signage. He lures Jill and Joe to Los Angeles, where they become headliners in a swanky nightclub revue. The act is spectacular—Joe juggles strongmen, lifts pianos, and responds to applause like a seasoned performer. There’s genuine wonder in these scenes: the special effects (courtesy of the great Willis O’Brien, assisted by Ray Harryhausen) are precise and often dazzling, but it’s the creature’s face—tilted, furrowed, expressive—that sells the illusion. And then come the bottles. Drunk patrons, poorly managed crowds, and a gorilla pushed beyond what he signed up for. Joe’s homesickness curdles into rage, and eventually the expected “rampage” arrives—but it’s not mayhem for the sake of spectacle. It’s frustration, betrayal, and grief, executed with surprising empathy. When Joe fights back, he doesn’t feel monstrous—he feels wronged. It’s a fantasy, but a thoughtful one. You come for the creature, but stay for his soul.

Mikey exists in a strange cinematic purgatory—too silly to take seriously, too grim to laugh off, and just confident enough to keep you watching. On paper, it’s junk: bush-league acting, clunky dialogue, and a mood that swings between TV melodrama and straight-faced horror. The plot has nowhere to go but the inevitable. It opens strong. Mikey (Brian Bonsall), a seemingly sweet, newly adopted child, is caught lighting newspapers on fire in the basement. By the time his adoptive parents intervene, it’s already too late. His little sister drowns in the backyard pool, his mother is electrocuted in the tub, and his father is beaten to death with a baseball bat. Mikey hides in the closet and tells the cops it was intruders. They believe him. What follows is a second adoption into a new suburban home, where Mikey resumes the role of model child with unnerving ease. He smiles, listens, pretends. Eventually, the violence returns, but the pacing drags, and the whole thing is lit and scored like an after-school special that wandered into a slasher script. And yet, it’s watchable. Bonsall is disturbingly effective, and the core idea—an angel-faced sociopath hiding in plain sight—still hits a primal nerve. It’s not great horror, but it’s hard to shake. If you’ve got a taste for off-brand evil wrapped in made-for-TV packaging, Mikey might hit that uncomfortable sweet spot.

Before Trading Places put a Reagan-era spin on class and con artistry, The Million Pound Note quietly got there first—an amiable 1954 comedy adapted from a short story by Mark Twain. The premise is pure social satire: drop an outsider into high society, give him the appearance of immense wealth, and watch the world throw open its doors. Gregory Peck, charming and square-jawed as ever, plays Henry Adams, a penniless American adrift in Edwardian London. Two well-fed brothers with too much time on their hands hatch a bet. They hand Henry a £1,000,000 bank note—not to spend, but to carry. The terms: if he can survive a month without cashing it, they’ll give him a job. If he fails, no harm done. Either way, they get their little experiment. Twain’s original conceit survives intact: money—or at least the illusion of it—buys everything. Henry can’t actually spend the note—no one has the change—but the prestige of possessing it grants him credit, deference, and increasingly absurd opportunities. Tailors dress him for free. Bankers fall over themselves to do business. The satire is less biting than it could be, but the absurdity registers. Even in powdered wigs and waistcoats, status is status. The film itself is more frothy than ferocious. It plays up the comedy, adds a romance, and rarely breaks a sweat. Ronald Neame directs with a light touch, and Peck carries the thing with steady charm. The satire might be a little declawed, but the bones are still there. It’s not essential cinema, and Trading Places arguably wrung more juice from the setup, but The Million Pound Note remains a pleasant curiosity—a genteel farce with a clever hook and just enough edge to keep it from going slack.

The title tells you everything: rich men, jail cells, and the faint promise of watching them squirm. For a few minutes, it delivers. A white-collar crook tries to order room service from his cell. Another assumes his arrest must be a clerical error. Their confusion is the comedy. And then—without much warning—it stops being that kind of movie. Instead of letting these men flounder, the script gives them purpose. They organize financial schemes behind bars, buddy up with the guards, and settle into prison life like it’s a gentleman’s club with fewer windows. Whatever bite the premise had disappears under layers of cooperation and group morale. A new thread takes over: a fellow inmate, a wealthy physician, begins working with the prison doctor to cure a deadly Malta virus outbreak. It’s an odd turn—not wrong exactly, just oddly self-serious for a movie that started with punchlines about caviar. It also tries to do too much. There are subplots—plenty of them—but few stick around long enough to mean anything. The characters blur, the pacing skips, and the film quietly trades its satire for something close to civic duty. There are bright spots: a few sly moments, a nice supporting turn or two. But the setup—millionaires fumbling through prison rules—barely gets explored before everyone’s too well-adjusted to be interesting.

Millions is a moral fable dressed up like a kids’ caper, but what makes it work is how little it tries to act important. It’s brisk, weird, and totally sincere—even when it’s halfway to bonkers. Alex Etel plays Damian, a wide-eyed nine-year-old with an obsessive knowledge of Catholic saints and a tendency to hold long conversations with them. They drift in and out like imaginary friends or visiting professors—St. Francis, St. Peter, a few lesser-knowns—offering vague spiritual advice and hanging around like they’re waiting on tea. Damian’s life gets knocked sideways when a suitcase full of cash comes hurtling through the roof of his cardboard fort. He takes it as a gift from God. His older brother Anthony—age twelve, already reading stock tickers—sees a portfolio. Damian wants to donate it, anonymously and extravagantly. He buys a bunch of homeless men Pizza Hut and hovers nearby like a small, solemn maître d’. Of course, the money’s not heaven-sent. It’s dirty. And someone out there wants it back. That knowledge creeps in slowly, almost like a different movie has started up inside the original one—but Boyle keeps it nimble. The film stays bright, even when things start to darken. There are visual tricks, daydream tangents, whip-fast edits—Boyle shoots the whole thing like it’s running late for something, which fits. It’s not trying to be “magical realism”; it just happens to believe in magic. The religious bent is definitely there, but it’s folded into the fabric—never sanctimonious, never coy. Just a kid, trying to do good, armed with too much money and the vaguest understanding of sainthood. It’s a little uneven, a little wild around the edges, and better for it.

There’s no real way to summarize Mind Game without flattening it. It’s not a story so much as an experience—animated, fractured, hysterical, and occasionally transcendent. The animation style changes from one frame to the next. Sometimes it’s traditional anime, but more jagged, more chaotic. Sometimes it’s rotoscope. Sometimes it looks like a doodle dragged through a scanner. At one point, it becomes photographic. Other times, it resembles CGI running on a fever. Characters appear, disappear, reappear. Settings collapse into other settings. A wooden raft drifts through what might be an ocean, or maybe a digestive tract. A woman gives birth to a van-sized water sac full of plastic dolls, then shoots it open with an archery kit. Her breasts swell to skyscraper proportions, rupture like balloons, and release confetti. These are not metaphors, or at least I don’t think they are. They’re just things that happen. The movie has a plot—technically. A man is shot, dies, meets God (or gods, plural—he, she, it changes form randomly within seconds), and is told to walk toward the light. He runs the other way. That’s the framework, loosely. Everything else is a blur of memory, fantasy, regret, reinvention, and physical sensation rendered with religious commitment to visual chaos. One minute, the characters are floating through a candy-colored future city like fish in an electric stream. The next, they’re on the verge of drowning, or philosophizing mid-sprint. The film has moods, but no order. To ask Mind Game to make sense is to misunderstand it. This isn’t a puzzle to be solved. It’s an electrical storm—dizzying, aggressive, and sometimes beautiful in spite of itself. You don’t follow it. You just let it happen. Avant-garde? Maybe. Dadaist? Almost. Whatever it is, it’s hypnotic, frequently stunning, and never boring.