Film Buff Musings

Albert Brooks plays a man unraveling in real time—not in dramatic bursts, but in slow, incremental misjudgments that pile up like unpaid bills. His character, Robert Cole, is a film editor stuck in the undertow of his own neuroses, and part of what makes him so watchable—so funny, so infuriating—is how familiar he feels. You recognize the impulse. You might even share it. The difference is, most of us have filters. Robert doesn’t. He breaks up with his girlfriend in the first scene, then spends the rest of the film trying to make that decision feel justified—spiraling through jealousy, regret, projection, and increasingly unhinged behavior. He talks himself into problems and then keeps talking, as if words alone could bail him out. The more he explains himself, the worse it gets. He can’t help it. He’s addicted to second-guessing. There’s a brilliant stretch where Robert impulsively drops a small fortune on exercise equipment—determined to reinvent himself—and then proceeds to use it for all of thirty seconds. Not because he’s lazy, necessarily, but because the fantasy of improvement is always more appealing than the effort. Some of the film’s best scenes take place in the editing room, where Robert is supposed to be working on a schlocky sci-fi movie. He offers smug notes to the director, tweaks sound effects, and fiddles with reels—performing competence while barely holding it together. For anyone obsessed with movies, it’s a rare glimpse into the mechanics of post-production, but it’s also just flat-out hilarious. Brooks turns even mundane studio errands into existential dead ends. Modern Romance isn’t just a character study—it’s a self-inflicted trap. Every decision Robert makes is understandable. It’s the accumulation that becomes unbearable. The film is perceptive, painful, and relentlessly funny. And Brooks, with his deadpan delivery and bottomless capacity for discomfort, makes self-sabotage feel almost cinematic.

The Money Pit wants to be a slapstick comedy about domestic ruin, but Richard Benjamin directs it like someone trying to remember where the punchline goes. The setup is classic: a financially overextended couple—Walter (Tom Hanks) and Anna (Shelley Long)—buy a suspiciously affordable mansion from a batty old woman (Maureen Stapleton), whose husband is facing jail time and whose urgency to sell ought to set off alarms louder than the collapsing roof. They sign the papers, the ink dries, and the house begins falling apart as if it’s been holding its breath. Staircases vanish. Bathtubs plummet. Doors detach. Plumbing screams. The film stages these catastrophes with mounting chaos, but little comic lift. There’s a fine line between funny and cruel, and this one can’t find it. Hanks and Long suffer impressively, but the timing is slack, the rhythm is off, and instead of laughing, you mostly wince. It’s less “zany hijinks” than a slow-motion renovation horror show with punchlines that miss their cues. In the final act, the film remembers it needs emotional stakes and wedges in a romantic implosion. It’s standard-issue stuff—jealousy, miscommunication, a dramatic parting—but Hanks and Long sell it with the kind of sitcom-seasoned ease that makes you wonder why they weren’t given more to do from the start. They’re the one part of the film that actually works, even when the floorboards don’t. There’s a sharper, meaner movie buried somewhere in this premise—a screwball descent into madness where love is tested by shoddy wiring and structural decay. Instead, The Money Pit settles for mild wreckage. It wants to be a comedy of errors but never commits to the errors or the comedy. By the time the credits roll, you’re left with a film built like the house: promising, overextended, and creaking at every joint.

The premise is nonsense, but Monkey Business commits to it. Cary Grant plays Barnaby Fulton, a mild-mannered chemist working on a youth formula for a pharmaceutical company. Progress is slow until a lab monkey—unsupervised and surprisingly capable—mixes a batch, dumps it in the water cooler, and walks away. Barnaby drinks it, unknowingly. Within minutes, he’s acting like a hormone-addled college sophomore: driving too fast, leaping over desks, and flirting with his boss’s secretary (Marilyn Monroe, still in her breathy ingenue phase). His wife Edwina (Ginger Rogers) is baffled, then irritated, then intrigued enough to try it herself. The film’s central gag is simple: each dose knocks a few more years off your behavior. First it’s adolescence. Then childhood. Eventually the Fultons are playing Cowboys and Indians in the woods, with Grant in brownface—an extended bit that may once have read as zany and now mostly lands with a wince. This is Hawks coasting, but his idea of coasting still has polish. Unlike Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday, which run on speed and combustion, Monkey Business never quite accelerates. It stretches a single joke until the elastic shows. Funny enough, but rarely sharper than its premise. Still, the leads are in fine form. Grant glides through the physicality like he’s been rewound and set slightly off-center. Rogers keeps pace with a kind of bemused precision. Monroe isn’t given much to do, but manages to steal her scenes by simply existing in them—an early preview of how the rest of her career would operate. It’s minor Hawks, but not negligible. The setup thins fast, and the repetition starts to show, but there’s enough daffy invention to keep it afloat. Not essential, but far from forgettable.

Jacques Tati’s first appearance as Monsieur Hulot—a lanky man in high-waisted pants and squints as though he’s trying to read the train schedule from across the station. He’s part tourist, part coat rack, perhaps a ghost. Always with a pipe. He moves through the world like it’s misaligned by half an inch but decides not to make a scene. When he talks—and it’s not often—it’s more of a mutter, easily mistaken for wind. He shows up at a coastal resort with the vague purpose of having a good time, though you get a sense that he doesn’t really know what that’s supposed to look like. He stumbles through doors. Fusses with beach chairs. Accidentally causes a few mild inconveniences—umbrellas misfire, tennis balls go rogue—but nothing that ruins anyone’s afternoon. He’s the kind of man who disrupts a room by existing slightly out of rhythm with it. Then he quietly moves on. A few tennis balls go rogue. A horse gets spooked. Chairs collapse. Doors act up. But nobody’s vacation is ruined. Not really. Hulot doesn’t upend the world—he disorganizes it slightly, like wind rearranging a picnic napkin. The comedy is almost entirely visual, but it’s not built on punchlines so much as patterns. Tati finds humor in rhythm, in repetition, in things that escalate just enough to feel like they might be going somewhere. The image I remember most clearly—more than any of Hulot’s own antics—is a man in a seaside diner, expression fixed, while a strong wind slaps his comically loose mustache against his face like it’s trying to escape. That kind of moment is the film’s real pulse. Musically, Alain Romans’ buoyant, meandering jazz feels like it’s been poured directly into the soles of the characters’ shoes. It turns the whole movie into a kind of gentle dance—everyone moving at slightly the wrong tempo, but with undeniable grace. This is a film that floats. It’s a tone, a temperature, a sustained exhale. A rare movie that doesn’t chase joy, but slips into it unannounced—and invites you to do the same.

A horror film boiled down to its barest elements: two people, one road, and something in the dark that won’t stay there. Kathy (Zoe Kazan) grips the wheel harder than necessary. Her ten-year-old daughter, Lizzie (Ella Ballentine), stares out the rain-specked window beside her. They’re driving a long stretch of wooded road, headed toward Lizzie’s father—this time for good. Kathy, worn thin by alcoholism and regret, has finally agreed that Lizzie deserves better. There’s no argument, only a mutual resignation. The silence between them is its own kind of peace. Then the car hits a wolf. The impact is sudden, jarring, and total. The engine gives out. The road becomes a trap. Kathy steps out to check the damage and finds the animal—not roadkill, but something already mauled. Its body has been torn open by claws longer than a human hand. And whatever did it is still out there. A tow truck eventually arrives. Then it disappears. The driver is dragged into the woods. The car remains broken, the road soaked, the mother and daughter completely exposed. Something watches from the treeline. The forest presses in. The headlights start to feel like the last glow of a dying campfire. Lizzie may have been headed for a new home, but now survival is the only destination in sight. What follows is a lean, sharply focused monster movie, stripped of gloss but rich in tension. The creature, rendered with practical effects, doesn’t always look convincing—but it’s present, sharing the frame with the actors, and that counts for more than polish. Kazan plays Kathy as a woman whose life has collapsed into damage control; Ballentine’s Lizzie has the rawness of a child forced to grow up too quickly. The threat isn’t just outside the car, but in everything that brought them there to begin with. It’s not easy, but it’s gripping—a film about a monster in the woods, and the one you bring with you.

Even Jane Fonda, staging a return from a 15-year sabbatical, can’t rescue Monster-in-Law from the dead zone it wanders into almost immediately. She tries, though. In the role of Viola, a steely talk-show host recently yanked from her pedestal, Fonda delivers with sharpened claws and impressive comedic instincts. But she’s trapped in a screenplay that’s all premise and no propulsion. Viola’s son Kevin (Michael Vartan) has proposed to Charlie (Jennifer Lopez), a plucky temp-slash-dog walker who might as well be a resume in a skirt, and Viola’s response is to self-destruct—and take the engagement down with her. Why does she hate Charlie? That’s never clarified. Boredom, possibly. Career displacement, maybe. The film gestures toward maternal possessiveness but doesn’t bother to color it in. One minute Viola’s imploding on national television during an interview with a Spears-adjacent starlet; the next, she’s faking a panic attack to move into her son’s house and play psychological tetherball with his fiancée. Her strategy? Petty sabotage. Charlie’s retaliation? Slightly pettier sabotage. The escalation feels less like warfare and more like two people fighting over a scented candle. This might have worked with stakes—or with stakes dressed as gags—but neither materializes. Meet the Parents had elaborate humiliations, misunderstandings, a milked cat. Monster-in-Law has brusque remarks about dinner parties and passive-aggressive floral arrangements. Even the old standby of accusing the fiancée of gold-digging is left on the shelf. No motive, no hijinks—just a long, arid middle act where nothing’s particularly funny or even all that mean. The one bright spot: Wanda Sykes as Viola’s dry-as-gin assistant, Ruby, who delivers every line like she’s daring the movie to get better. It doesn’t. But at least she seems to know it.

A proudly idiotic lark from Troma Entertainment, Monster in the Closet is cheap, cheeky, and stitched together from secondhand genre parts. The title promises a childhood nightmare; the movie delivers something much weirder. This monster doesn’t lurk to spook toddlers—it devours fully grown adults, then exhales their clothing in a neat puff of air, like a supernatural dry cleaner with a taste for human flesh. When the beast finally shuffles into full view, it looks like the unfortunate result of a one-night stand between the monster from Alien and a sandworm from Dune—rubbery in menace, even rubberier in articulation. There’s no tension, no real payoff, but the film wobbles forward with something like integrity. That’s the delirious miracle of Troma: once it finds a tone, it never questions it. For better or (usually) worse, the commitment is absolute. There are pleasures in the cast, who mostly play it with wide-eyed sincerity. Henry Gibson appears in a lab coat and bow tie as a comic academic, delivering long-winded theories with the gravitas of someone explaining particle physics to a sock puppet. Paul Dooley, cast as a generic husband, gets eaten early. Frank Ashmore wanders through as a reporter named Scoop Johnson (subtlety is not on the call sheet). A very pre–Fast & Furious Paul Walker plays a precocious 12-year-old known as “Professor”—barred from eating chocolate but cleared for cucumber pudding. (For reasons I can’t explain, this character’s dietary quirks stick with me more than any of the monster attacks.) The film’s use of timestamps is another strange delight—sometimes hilariously precise, other times so vague they feel like guesses. One critical scene occurs on a “Tuesday or Wednesday,” as if the movie forgot to take notes. The final punchline is a misapplied quote from King Kong, which lands with such a comic thud it somehow feels like the only way this thing could have ended: clumsy, but weirdly satisfying—and completely in character. This is a film that won’t scare you. You might not even laugh much. But if you’ve got a soft spot for scrappy, gloriously dumb horror movies, this one might just scratch the itch.

Basically The Goonies by way of the Universal Monsters—swapping buried treasure for a magic amulet, and pirate ships for Dracula and his crew. There’s even a fat kid in a Hawaiian shirt, and enough jokes—corny but committed—to keep it upright. You end up going along with it. The titular squad is a group of preteens who love old-school creature features and have formed an exclusive, boys-only club to talk about them. One member’s little sister keeps barging in, occasionally yelling “You guys!” like someone too young to doubt her own authority. They trade trivia, draw up monster-fighting rules, and treat Lon Chaney like scripture. Then Dracula shows up. Turns out ol’ fang-face has been kicking around since Van Helsing’s failed attempt to banish him into a wormhole—a portal that only opens once every hundred years. Dracula’s after a powerful amulet that, if claimed, will unleash evil across the globe. Our pint-sized protagonists get wind of the plot thanks to Van Helsing’s diary, written inconveniently in German. Enter “Scary German Guy,” the local Boo Radley figure who turns out to be a sweet old man with a tragic backstory and a knack for translation. From there, it’s off to the races: wolfmen, gill-men, mummy attacks, and a Frankenstein’s monster who ends up being more endearing than menacing. It’s all played with just enough sincerity to keep it from collapsing under the camp. The tone straddles earnest kid fantasy and surprisingly dark stakes—people die, and not always offscreen. The ending’s a bit pat, and there’s a distinct sense that budgetary limits clipped the film’s wings. But that’s part of the charm. It feels handmade and half-feral, like something pieced together by kids raised on Famous Monsters of Filmland and let loose with a camera and a box of rubber masks. Not everything clicks, but enough does—especially if you saw it young and still have “Wolfman’s got nards” rattling around in your brain.

Monster’s Ball is cloaked in unrelenting bleakness—so much so that without its exceptional cast, it might be unwatchable. But the performances, especially Halle Berry’s Oscar-winning turn, ground the film in something raw and affecting. Berry plays Letitia Musgrove, a woman scraped thin by grief. Her husband (Sean Combs) has just been executed, her son (Coronji Calhoun) struggles to navigate life’s daily cruelties, and Letitia herself is hanging on by threadbare resolve. Her unexpected solace comes in the form of Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton), a former prison guard who, in a twist neither of them initially realizes, helped carry out her husband’s execution. Their relationship begins not as a romance but as an emotional collision—two people moving through pain on parallel tracks until they converge. The irony of their union is devastating, yet the film doesn’t overplay it. It lets the discomfort simmer, knowing that discovery is more powerful than confrontation. Peter Boyle, as Hank’s father, offers a noxious portrait of generational bigotry, a bitter man rooted to his armchair and unwilling to rot quietly. Heath Ledger, in a brief, anguished turn as Hank’s son, delivers something so deeply felt it lingers long after his scenes are over. Director Marc Forster leans into silence and atmosphere, letting bleak interiors and empty roads speak for characters too exhausted to. The story refuses catharsis; nothing is made clean, and no one is redeemed. But in the exhausted faces of its leads, there’s something close to grace—not a healing, but the beginning of one.

In Monstropolis, power comes from panic. The city runs on children’s screams—collected one door at a time by professional scarers who treat closet raids like overtime shifts at a nuclear plant. The monsters are cute, the job is terrifying, and the logic, somehow, checks out. Sully (John Goodman), a towering fuzzball with the temperament of a golden retriever, is the agency’s top performer. His best friend Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal), a green eyeball with legs and opinions, handles the logistics. Together they’re a dream team—until a little girl slips through the system and into their world, grinning like it’s the best field trip of her life. Her name is Boo. She’s loud, fearless, and radioactive (or so everyone believes). One sock clinging to a monster’s back sets off a full hazmat response. Imagine what an actual toddler does. The film’s setup is ridiculous in the best way—and the comic timing is sharp across the board. Jokes pile up, smart ones and dumb ones, big gags and blink-and-miss-’em throwaways. Crystal and Goodman make a perfect pair: loose, fast, and never coasting. Steve Buscemi slithers in as Randall, a rival scarer with a disappearing act and a nasty streak. He’s plotting something shady. Of course he is. While this might be considered early Pixar, the animation still clicks, the monsters still pop, and the premise still runs like a wind-up toy with just enough menace. It’s a world that makes sense the way a kid’s drawing does—colorful, off-kilter, and truer than it ought to be. Fear turns out to be a lousy fuel source. Laughter is cleaner, louder, and a lot more fun to chase. The moral’s there, but it doesn’t thud—it sneaks in between pratfalls and punchlines. Empathy wins, not with a speech, but with a giggle.

This anarchic masterpiece from the Monty Python crew is an irreverent dismantling of everything you thought you knew about heroism, the Middle Ages, and even hand grenades. On paper, it’s a film about King Arthur (played with just the right mix of cluelessness and conviction by Graham Chapman) receiving a divine notification from God himself to seek the Holy Grail. What follows is a wildly unspooling series of barely connected sketches that gleefully abandon coherence in favor of pure, unfiltered silliness. Arthur’s quest has all the hallmarks of a classic adventure—except instead of dragons or damsels, he’s up against passive-aggressive French castle guards (“Your mother was a hamster!”), a knight reduced to a torso still bleeding out mid-taunt, muck-covered peasants screaming at him about oppression, and a homicidal rabbit with the ferocity of ten Rottweilers. This film isn’t just quotable—it’s an endless fountain of one-liners that, if you’re like me and first encountered it in middle school (when it hit my brain like a sugar rush mixed with fireworks), will infest your vocabulary like a brain worm. (“What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?” is essentially Shakespeare for nerds.) The film itself is as scrappy and rebellious as its creators, who clearly had more ideas than budget. Every sketch has the chaotic energy of a writer’s room that stayed up too late, drank too much, and then said, “What if we just mass arrest everyone at the end?” And while the humor feels silly on the surface, it’s dripping with sly commentary, skewering everything from organized religion to the concept of medieval chivalry, while throwing in digs at bureaucracy, groupthink, and (somehow) the weight conversion of witches to ducks. I’ve seen this movie more times than I can count, and I still laugh just as hard as the first time I saw it—probably harder, since I now catch jokes that I didn’t understand back then.

Brian is born in Bethlehem the same night as Jesus—just a few doors down, wrong stable. From the start, he’s confused for someone holier, and the mistake only grows. He comes of age in Roman-occupied Judea, aimless, irritated, and gradually pursued by crowds who want a Messiah and decide he’ll do. The misunderstanding doesn’t strike—it accumulates. One bad vantage point, a few scrambled messages, and suddenly Brian is being worshipped for saying nothing at all. Monty Python doesn’t go after belief—it goes after the scramble to interpret it. Life of Brian isn’t a parody of Jesus. It’s a diagnosis of how quickly meaning rots once it’s passed through enough mouths. Zealots, sects, martyrs, prophets-for-hire—the story collects them all. By the time Brian protests, it’s too late. The crowd has already drafted their doctrine. His silence is sacred. His mistakes are scripture. Even his gourd becomes a relic. Graham Chapman plays him like a man stuck half a step behind his own myth. Around him, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Terry Gilliam cycle through priests, revolutionaries, bureaucrats, and fanatics—each louder than the last, each convinced they’re the only one who’s right. That’s the joke: everyone’s sure, and everyone’s wrong. The film looks sun-dried and brittle—stone courtyards, cracked sandals, dust where the budget should be. It works. The more convincing the setting, the sharper the farce. The satire doesn’t escalate—it loops. Slogans, declarations, parables misquoted before they’re finished. Jesus shows up once, gives the Sermon on the Mount, and walks off without a scratch. The film leaves him alone. The problem starts down the hill, where the crowd mishears “Blessed are the peacemakers” and starts arguing about what it meant—and who gets credit. The film ends with Brian on a cross—mistaken, forgotten, swallowed by the scene. No rescue. Just a song: chipper, glib, and wildly beside the point. The joke isn’t the tune—it’s how fast the meaning disappears. Faith turns into performance. Death becomes background. And the message, whatever it was, gets whistled away.

Probably the least of the Monty Python films—at least if you’re judging by sheer volume of laughs. But that doesn’t make it a lesser effort. Unlike Holy Grail or Life of Brian, which aimed for something resembling narrative, The Meaning of Life leans proudly into its sketch format. It’s an episodic, sometimes grotesque exploration of the stages of human existence, loosely tethered to the question of what it’s all supposed to mean—and not especially interested in answering it. The R rating gets a workout early and often, with the film escalating in offense and bodily fluids as it goes along. The most notorious sequence takes place in a restaurant, where an impossibly obese man is wheeled to his seat and proceeds to eat until he explodes—literally—coating everything and everyone around him. It’s disgusting, elaborate, and difficult to forget. The film opens with The Crimson Permanent Assurance, a short directed by Terry Gilliam in which a group of elderly accountants, facing corporate takeover, stage a mutiny that transforms their office into a sea-faring battleship. Filing cabinets become artillery, skyscrapers double as ships, and the mundane quickly escalates into something gloriously unhinged. Other segments include a sex-ed class where visibly disinterested schoolboys watch their teacher conduct a live demonstration, a gory bit involving door-to-door liver donation (requested and extracted on the spot), and a dinner party that ends with Death arriving to inform the guests they’ve all died—at which point they’re politely escorted to a celestial Vegas where it’s Christmas every day. There’s no through-line, and little in the way of consistent tone. But the absurdity is purposeful, and the structure gives the Pythons room to push the limits of taste, logic, and narrative with more freedom than ever before. It’s not especially gut-busting, nor is the satire particularly ripe, but I enjoyed the surreal structure of the film, and it’s weird and bold enough to be so nuts that you almost can’t believe it. It’s uneven, frequently juvenile, occasionally brilliant, and still greater than the sum of its entrails.

A serviceable comedy with a premise that should fly but mostly idles on the runway. Richard Dreyfuss plays Jack Noah, a hammy actor shooting a film in the fictional banana republic of Parador, where the extras carry guns and the catering staff might double as secret police. As luck—or screenwriting—would have it, he’s a dead ringer for the country’s recently deceased dictator, Alfonse Simms (also Dreyfuss), who keels over from a heart attack before the opening credits have cooled. Raul Julia, playing the regime’s silver-tongued fixer, ropes Jack into assuming Simms’s identity to preserve the illusion of order. Jack agrees, initially out of survival instinct, but soon starts redistributing wealth and soft-pedaling tyranny after catching feelings for the late despot’s mistress (Sônia Braga, giving the film its only real pulse). What follows is a mildly charming, mildly flat satire that gestures at political farce without ever landing a blow. The idea of a puppet dictator with a conscience has mileage, but Moon Over Parador never picks a gear—it drifts from gag to gag, polite and forgettable. A remake of The Magnificent Fraud (1939), the premise would get a far more satisfying rewrite in Ivan Reitman’s Dave (1993), which moved the action to Washington and actually figured out how to make the whole thing feel sharp and crowd-pleasing. Moon Over Parador, by contrast, keeps grinning from behind the curtain but never quite knows what it’s trying to be.

Moonage Daydream isn’t so much a documentary as it is a full-body immersion—a kaleidoscopic plunge into the orbit of David Bowie that trades biographical bullet points for sensation and sound. Directed by Brett Morgen, it sidesteps the usual parade of talking heads and archival B-roll, opting instead for a montage of live performances, interviews, experimental visuals, and refracted fragments of Bowie’s public self. There’s no narrator. No chronological spine. It plays like the inner monologue of an artist in flux—dazzling, nonlinear, impossible to pin down. This is a film that isn’t interested in telling you who David Bowie was. It wants you to feel him. Not just Ziggy Stardust, or the Thin White Duke, or the Berlin years, but the strange totality of a man who treated his identity like clay, reshaping it album to album, era to era. Morgen leans hard into this, blending Bowie’s voice—whether in interview clips or lyrics—into a kind of cosmic fugue state. The result is less a history lesson than a sensory séance. Still, viewers hoping to bop along to the familiar hits might find themselves a little adrift. This is not the jukebox Bowie. The film draws from deeper cuts, emphasizing atmosphere over melody, abstraction over catchiness. There are stretches where the music folds in on itself, pulsing with hypnotic rhythms and strobing visuals, more psychedelic than pop. One could forget that this was the same artist who once topped the charts with “Let’s Dance.” But that’s the point. Moonage Daydream isn’t built for newcomers; it’s a gift to those already in orbit. And for fans who’ve already fallen down the Bowie rabbit hole more than once, it’s a trip worth taking again—louder, stranger, and more celestial this time.

A well-crafted film, tonally precise and emotionally competent, but content to remain suspended in one key: muted sorrow. It opens in the aftermath of a senseless act of violence—Diane, a young woman, is killed in a random diner shooting, and those left behind try to make sense of what’s left. Her fiancé, Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal), stays close with her parents, Ben and Jojo (Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon), despite the unspoken truth that he had quietly ended the engagement days before her death. No one else knows. So he grieves in costume, mourning a version of his life he had already begun to step away from, and trying to hold together a family that was never quite his. The setup is beautifully somber, and the actors inhabit their characters with a raw attentiveness that feels lived-in. But there’s not much tonal variation. The film moves in glacial half-steps through grief and guilt, and while its restraint is admirable, the emotional register rarely changes. Gyllenhaal does good, inward-facing work here—his quiet paralysis reads true—but the character never really evolves. The same goes for Sarandon, who’s given a handful of punchy lines but remains largely an emblem of unfocused grief. Hoffman, playing the eager-to-distract father, circles around pathos with warmth and fussiness. There is a romantic subplot involving Joe and a local woman, Bertie (Ellen Pompeo), that the film treats as a path toward healing, but it plays more like an emotional placeholder. When Joe finally confesses the truth to Diane’s parents, the moment is meant to hit like catharsis, but it feels more obligatory than earned. Still, this is a respectable film. Its missteps come not from insincerity but from an unwillingness to let light in.

An eccentric, big-hearted romantic comedy that manages to be both grounded in its Italian-American Brooklyn setting and elevated into something nearly operatic. Cher stars as Loretta Castorini, a 37-year-old widowed accountant who agrees to marry her stammering, unromantic boyfriend Johnny (Danny Aiello)—not out of passion, but out of pragmatism. Johnny proposes over dinner like he’s placing an order, and Loretta, convinced her first City Hall marriage was cursed, insists this one be done properly: church, dress, the works. He obliges—sort of. The next day, he’s on a plane to Sicily to visit his dying mother, leaving Loretta in charge of the arrangements. It’s during his absence that Loretta visits Johnny’s estranged brother, Ronny (Nicolas Cage), a one-handed baker with a volcanic temper and a flair for dramatic brooding. He lost his hand in an accident he blames, quite bitterly, on Johnny. Loretta, expecting a civil conversation, instead finds herself drawn into something raw and impulsive. Ronny is, as she says, a wolf. She knows this is a mistake. She also knows it’s happening anyway. The film is wildly funny in that very specific way where comedy rises from the accumulation of quirks rather than the pursuit of punchlines. John Patrick Shanley’s script is bursting with flavor, and the entire cast leans in with full conviction. Cher earned her Oscar not just by commanding the screen but by grounding her performance with exhaustion, wisdom, and a quiet ache. Nicolas Cage, at his most unfiltered, turns what could have been cartoonish into something weirdly magnetic. Olympia Dukakis, as Loretta’s mother, steals every scene with deadpan serenity and razor insight. What makes Moonstruck work isn’t just the oddball romance—it’s the sense that everyone in it is circling around some essential truth they’re too stubborn, or too proud, to say aloud. It’s a film that knows people are messy, and that love, if it’s worth anything, probably is too.

A serviceable title for a western that gets the look right—glinting rifles, broken fences, scowls in silhouette—but the tension never snaps, and neither does the spell. Clint Walker plays Cain, a reformed outlaw with a dozen murders behind him and eighteen years in prison to show for it. Now he wants peace: maybe a job on a ranch, maybe a quiet life. But no one hires a man whose name still echoes in wanted posters—except Dan Ruffalo, the slick-tongued showman behind a traveling gun act. Vincent Price plays him with the sly menace of a man who could drop you through a trapdoor at any moment. Cain signs on, reluctantly. The money’s decent, the crowds cheer, but living off the fumes of your notorious past is a poor substitute for redemption. Meanwhile, half the supporting cast crawls out of the woodwork to settle old scores. Eighteen years, in their eyes, wasn’t enough for his crimes, and they mean to see he pays the rest directly. There’s a romance, too—sort of—with Monica (Anne Francis), a small-town painter who sees something decent under Cain’s thousand-yard stare. Like the revenge plots, it develops, but never enough to matter. The result is a movie with good ideas, but they never quite cohere. Paul Hampton plays Billy, Cain’s hot-blooded rival and would-be headliner if people weren’t paying to see the notorious outlaw. He’s got a quick draw, a loud mouth, and the temperament of a live grenade. His climactic breakdown is so overwrought it flirts with farce—bellowing pathetically as he writhes on the ground after a shoulder wound, then somehow belly-crawling with both arms in perfect working order while presumably still bleeding out. That’s either commitment or unintentional comedy; take your pick. Price, as always, is a welcome disruption. He gets one scene as a carnival barker—slippery, smug, and just theatrical enough to wake the movie up. Briefly. Overall, More Dead Than Alive can’t decide if it’s gunning for redemption, revenge, or romance—and ends up missing them all. There are worse westerns, but few this well-dressed with so little in the holster.

Mortal Kombat wants to be an origin story, a franchise launcher, and a blood-soaked fan-service parade—but forgets to be fun somewhere around the second “ancient prophecy.” Instead of embracing its arcade roots—neon violence, bad puns, flying guts—it solemnly delivers lore like it’s reading from a stone tablet. We’re introduced to Cole Young (Lewis Tan), a charisma void with fists, who learns he’s “chosen” to defend Earthrealm against invading supervillains with names like Sub-Zero, Reptile, and Plot Device. He has a dragon-shaped birthmark, which means he’s special, or at least necessary for exposition. The film trots out franchise favorites—Sonya, Jax, Kano, Liu Kang—but mostly to announce their names and make dramatic exits after brief action scenes. The fights? Fine. The gore? Present. But everything between them feels like homework. Dialogue is less written than assembled from clichés: “This is only the beginning,” “You must unlock your true power,” etc. Even the music seems afraid to drop the beat too hard, lest someone mistake this for entertainment. Worst of all, it’s afraid of its own absurdity. The 1995 version knew it was nonsense and ran with it, grinning like a man about to yell “Fatality.” This one pauses to explain the mechanics of magical uppercuts. It’s a movie where people yell “Finish him!” like it’s a courtroom objection—and it lands with about as much energy.

Somewhere between sci-fi spoof and bug-splatter throwback, Mosquito lumbers in with a spaceship, oversized insects, and a tone that’s more confused than campy. The bugs drink people dry like Capri Suns and leave behind what look like overcooked CPR dummies. After a spaceship crashes in a national park, the local mosquito population gets an alien makeover—swelling to the size of Buicks and developing a taste for human blood. They don’t just bite; they drain. One sting and you’re a husk. The plot barely qualifies as one—just a loose excuse to assemble a misfit squad: a park ranger, a few stranded campers, a nerdy scientist, and a survivalist ex-con named Earl (played by Gunnar Hansen, chainsaw veteran). Their job: kill the bugs before the bugs kill them. The effects are aggressively low-budget—limp mannequins, chintzy corpses—but the mosquitoes themselves are impressively grotesque: rubbery, oversized, and twitching just enough to sell the threat. The acting is rough, the humor forced, and the tone never quite sticks. There’s a long middle stretch where the movie just stalls. It’s often hard to tell the difference between a creature feature that’s bad on purpose and one that just turns out that way. The former can feel like a party. The latter can feel like a chore. Mosquito winks so hard its eyelids make a crashing sound—and that self-awareness alone doesn’t make it any funnier. There’s a solid burst of action near the end, but most of the film plays like a campfire story told by someone who keeps losing the thread.

The story doesn’t sound like much—because, frankly, it isn’t. A recently divorced, mildly neurotic science fiction writer (Albert Brooks) moves back in with his mother (Debbie Reynolds) to reclaim some vague, ineffable part of himself that went missing somewhere between puberty and publication. That’s the setup. But the film isn’t really about setup. It’s about tone. Rhythm. Cadence. It’s about watching two people who know exactly how to irritate each other do so with precision and affection for ninety minutes straight. And on that level, Mother is pure pleasure. Brooks and Reynolds are electric together—acerbic, petulant, relentlessly petty. They bicker over everything: grocery store etiquette, thawing lettuce, the philosophical limits of frozen food. Nothing is too small to become a point of principle. The dialogue snaps, but it also meanders like real conversation—circular, trivial, and occasionally brutal in the way only a mother and adult son can manage without thinking twice. There’s technically a plot, but the film seems faintly embarrassed by it. As it should. Nothing as formal as story should be allowed to interfere with this much enjoyable dysfunction. Brooks knows this. He keeps the structure minimal and the emotional beats low-stakes, letting the comedy drift in sideways. John, the younger brother (Rob Morrow), shows up too—offering brotherly concern that’s mostly just territorial anxiety in disguise. He’s less worried about his brother’s collapse than he is about losing his place in their mother’s internal ranking system. He’s funny, too, but the show belongs to Brooks and Reynolds. She’s warm and cutting in equal measure, and he’s perfected the art of looking personally affronted by his own upbringing. There is, eventually, a small revelation. A moment of clarity about why this mother-son pairing has never quite clicked. It works. Neatly, maybe too neatly, but it gives the film its final note without overstating anything. It’s not a movie about healing, exactly. Just about noticing what’s been broken. Mother isn’t sweeping, transformative, or built for epiphanies. It doesn’t chase resolution. It stays in the mess—long enough to amuse, sharp enough to leave a mark. Two people locked in a rhythm they never agreed to, volleying grievances and deflections, and arriving—not at closure—but at something like clarity.

Just let this be a lesson: if you stumble upon a remote island with twin twelve-inch fairy priestesses guarding a sacred egg, maybe don’t kidnap them for your nightclub act. It’s not just bad manners—those fairies don’t just sing, they invoke. And what they’re invoking is a giant celestial insect with a bad temper. And the beast comes. It always comes. First crawling, then cocooning, then emerging in a slow-motion glitter of wings and vengeance. That’s Mothra—less a monster than a divine consequence with antennae. The plot—loose, but deliberate—follows the aftermath of a reckless expedition led by a sleazy showman who spirits the fairies away to Tokyo for profit. The island’s natives warn him, of course. Everyone does. But he sees a stage act, not a covenant. While politicians fumble and scientists issue cautious memos, Mothra barrels forward—unstoppable, unhurried, answering not to weaponry but to song. It’s not about conquest. She’s coming to retrieve what was taken. Of the early Toho kaiju lineup, this one feels the most peculiar. Less urban rage, more spiritual rescue mission. The usual toy tanks and painted backdrops are here, sure, but Mothra leans dreamlike, even delicate. The destruction is still there—buildings collapse, runways shred under gale-force wings—but it’s devastation by way of opera. A kind of sacred mayhem. The humans, as always, talk a lot and wave maps. You tune them out. What matters is the island, the song, the slow unraveling of civilization beneath something beautiful and ancient that doesn’t care how many scientists you brought along. The fairies—played with eerie grace by the Peanuts, a real-life singing duo—don’t plead or warn. They just smile, serene and motionless, like sentries who know the sky is about to split open. You can’t steal the sacred without the sacred showing up to collect. The chrysalis looks slapped together from craft foam and good intentions. The cityscapes could pass for school projects if the lighting weren’t so dramatic. You can almost spot the tape, the seams, the shaky edges—but the film never blinks. It’s myth dressed in cardboard and moves like a judgment wrapped in silk—slow, shining. Among Toho’s monsters, Mothra isn’t the brute force of Godzilla. She’s the reckoning.

Some road movies chase the American dream. Motorama steals the keys, straps a ten-year-old into a Mustang, and sends him drifting through a make-believe America with no brakes and no map. Gus (Jordan Christopher Michael) is a pint-sized oddball with the vocabulary of a jaded philosophy major. He slips away from home and hits the road, chasing a gas station sweepstakes that may or may not be real. The rules are simple: collect enough scratch-off cards to spell M-O-T-O-R-A-M-A and win a $500 million prize. But nothing else in this world plays fair. Clerks hand out cards like they’re unloading junk mail. The towns blur together. Logic melts. Cameos show up like hallucinations—Michael J. Pollard, Flea, Garrett Morris, Meat Loaf (who forces Gus into an arm-wrestling match that’s more unsettling than funny). Drew Barrymore materializes in a sugar-glazed fantasy that feels plucked from a soft drink ad pitched by someone on hour six of a road trip. Joseph Minion’s script (After Hours) gestures toward satire—maybe a statement about consumerism or dead-end dreaming—but it’s too scattered to land much of anything. The tone lurches from whimsical to nasty without warning. Director Barry Shils seems content to let it all drift, but without a stronger point of view, the film just feels stranded. There are flashes of weirdness that stick. But mostly, Motorama spins its wheels in a strange, empty world that isn’t as clever—or as meaningful—as it thinks it is.

Overstimulation doesn’t quite cover it. Moulin Rouge! is a two-hour sensory stampede powered by camera whiplash, pop song medleys, and production design that looks like it was bedazzled by a Victorian, absinthe-inspired hallucination. Somehow, the movie is not only bearable—it’s glorious. The soundtrack is a stitched-together pastiche of Top 40 ballads, mostly from the ’70s and ’80s, reimagined with straight-faced operatic intensity. Elton John, The Police, Madonna—all recruited to push this thing past the breaking point. Ewan McGregor plays Christian, a moon-eyed writer who falls in with a Bohemian troupe and tries to sell a musical—Spectacular Spectacular—to the star of the Moulin Rouge. That would be Satine, played by Nicole Kidman, all breathy allure and carefully arranged fragility. Their relationship is the definition of style over substance, but with style this elaborate, substance wouldn’t stand a chance anyway. The setting is a romanticized Paris that never existed and couldn’t possibly function if it had—where night glows like a jewel box and everything moves with the energy of a theater production trying to outrun its own third act. Luhrmann directs like he’s afraid the film will stop if he lets up for even a second, and for better or worse, he never does. That the film remains comprehensible is nothing short of a miracle. The story—beneath the rhinestones, the acrobatics, the yelped declarations of love—is engaging enough to carry through. And while the romance between Christian and Satine doesn’t exactly deepen over time, it hits the emotional notes hard enough to feel convincing in the moment, which is really all the film asks for. Whether it’s a masterpiece or just a triumph of production design is up for debate. But there’s nothing else like it. And any attempt to replicate it probably would’ve burned out before the curtain rose.

A live-action cartoon by design and in spirit, Mouse Hunt stars Nathan Lane and Lee Evans as a pair of mismatched brothers who inherit a crumbling mansion from their eccentric father (William Hickey). The plan is simple: renovate, flip, and cash in. But there’s a snag—specifically, a mouse. Not just any mouse, but a small, silent saboteur with a level of intelligence better suited to a Bond villain. The brothers’ attempts to evict the whiskered tenant spiral quickly into full-blown mania, and the film becomes a Rube Goldberg parade of pratfalls, collapsing floorboards, and elaborate traps that never quite catch their target. The slapstick is relentless and frequently crude, but it’s hard not to admire the commitment. Lane and Evans, both physical comedians with faces made for rubbery overreaction, throw themselves into the chaos with gusto. It might be a little too lowbrow for adults and a little too manic for very young kids, but somewhere in the middle is the perfect audience—those who enjoy watching destruction mount in increasingly elaborate and nonsensical ways. And just when the premise threatens to wear out its welcome, the film tosses in an ending that’s surprisingly sweet. This is a film that is anything but profound, but it hits the right note: a truce, a shift, a moment of unlikely harmony. Ninety minutes trying to kill one mouse and a wrap-up that's about as graceful as you could hope.

This made-for-TV thriller stars a teenage Jason Bateman as Toby Kellogg, a kid who skips out early on summer camp and returns home only to discover his house is deserted—his parents gone, his life dismantled. And not in the metaphorical, coming-of-age sense. Furniture’s missing. No note. No trace. Just the slow-dawning realization that his family may not have been who he thought they were. Soon enough, Toby finds himself pursued by mysterious figures with guns and vague motives, and the film shifts into chase mode. The hook is decent: suburban teen accidentally stumbles into a spy plot. But it’s the execution that underwhelms. What begins with some intrigue fizzles into routine car chases, shadowy government types, and the sort of “thrilling” music cues that sound like they came with the editing software. Still, for an NBC original movie in 1988, this isn’t without its modest pleasures. Bateman, already known for his sitcom work, has a certain appeal—even if he’s asked to do little more than furrow his brow and jog cautiously. And there’s something comforting about the film’s old-school, VHS-era texture: payphones, trench coats, the idea that being off the grid means anything at all. It’s the kind of movie that filled a time slot and maybe entertained a few households before disappearing into the recesses of late-night reruns. Not bad, but not quite worth unearthing unless you’re chasing nostalgia.

There’s a lot to admire—and even root for—in Moxie, a high school rebellion comedy filtered through Xeroxed paper, riot grrrl playlists, and the ever-lingering scent of cafeteria injustice. Hadley Robinson plays Vivian, a quiet teenager who stumbles upon her mom’s (Amy Poehler) old punk-era mementos and, inspired, launches an anonymous girlzine calling out the sexist double standards baked into her school’s culture. The zine, titled Moxie, hits like a firecracker in a silent room. Cliques splinter. Friendships form. The administration stammers. A movement begins. Poehler, directing with a light touch and a clear affection for her characters, gives the film a sense of momentum—equal parts pep rally and protest. There are big laughs, endearing performances, and a message that hits squarely in the Me Too era sweet spot. Robinson gives Vivian a believable arc, growing from a sideline observer to a reluctant firebrand, and the ensemble cast is refreshingly diverse and likable. That said, the tone often veers into sitcom territory—overlit, over-scripted, and a little too eager to resolve every conflict with a montage. You can feel the edges being sanded down for broader appeal, which blunts some of the impact. This story wants to roar but settles for cheering. Still, Moxie has its heart in the right place and its fists halfway in the air. It might not be punk rock, exactly, but it knows how to strike a chord.