Film Buff Musings

Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing treats Shakespeare with more affection than reverence—sunny, fast-talking, and happy to trade gravitas for good company. It’s light on its feet, occasionally tipsy, and just self-aware enough to get away with it. Branagh, directing and starring, throws himself at the material with the eagerness of a drama student who finally got the lead, which isn’t a bad fit for Benedick—a smug, over-articulated bachelor whose allergy to love gets louder the closer it creeps. Emma Thompson’s Beatrice slices through him with that bone-dry precision she does better than anyone—her lines flung like darts tipped in irony. Together, they make bickering look aerobic. Hovering in the background are Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard) and Hero (Kate Beckinsale), the decorative couple, less a romance than a plot device waiting to be sabotaged—which Keanu Reeves obliges, glowering his way through Don John like a goth left alone at prom. It’s Don who kicks off the smear campaign, accusing Hero of sleeping around for no reason more compelling than spite with nowhere to go. Denzel Washington lends his usual quiet command as Don Pedro, Don John’s nobler brother, and Michael Keaton shows up as a bug-eyed constable with all the grace of a man locked in a broom closet too long. Nobody’s on quite the same page, but the tones converge into something that holds together—sunny, sincere, and frequently ridiculous. This isn’t Shakespeare’s deepest work, but it’s fleet and flirty and perfectly content to let the plot wobble so long as the wine stays poured. Branagh doesn’t treat it like scripture—he treats it like a party that’s been going on a little too long, and that turned out to be the right instinct.

Unlike most of Disney’s live-action remakes, Mulan didn’t start from a masterpiece. The 1998 animated film had its charms, but it wasn’t sacred ground—meaning Disney had a rare opportunity here: improve on the original. And for a moment, it looks like they might. The comic relief is gone. No songs, no wisecracking dragon, no glib sidekicks. What replaces them, though, isn’t substance but solemnity. It’s all weighty stares and sweeping vistas, suggesting epic depth, but all it does is skim the surface. The story gestures at mythic resonance, retooling Mulan (Yifei Liu) as a warrior with “chi”—an inner power that, when properly harnessed, makes her a kind of wire-fu superhero. She hides this strength under the guise of a male soldier, fighting for her family’s honor while the empire braces against an invading Rouran army. There’s a shape-shifting witch (Gong Li), who might’ve added a layer of moral complexity, but she’s given just enough screen time to hint at metaphor before being swept aside. The Emperor (Jet Li) has lines like a motivational poster. The villain wants revenge. That’s about it. Liu plays Mulan as reserved to the point of unreadable. The father-daughter scenes try for poignancy, and while the scaffolding is there, the emotions don’t quite settle in. It’s not a total loss—there’s a sincerity beneath the spectacle, and the film looks like $200 million—but dazzling backdrops can’t do the storytelling for you. For all the effort to make Mulan feel important, it ends up oddly hollow: a war epic that tries to say something about honor and identity, but mostly just says “look how serious I am.”

Solid action-adventure fare with Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell, a rakish explorer with a pistol in one hand and a wisecrack in the other. He’s roped into an expedition to the fabled Egyptian city of Hamunaptra—City of the Dead—by treasure hunter Jonathan (John Hannah) and his sister Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), a bookish librarian with an appetite for danger. Naturally, their archaeological meddling stirs up more than just dust. They awaken Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), a cursed priest with supernatural powers and a talent for summoning sandstorms that behave like sentient beasts. The plot moves like a theme park ride, which is part of the appeal. Secret tombs, flesh-eating scarabs, ancient plagues—it’s all tossed into the blender with a wink and a whipcrack. The trio at the center makes for a thoroughly entertaining team: Fraser leans hard into the dashing-doofus archetype with likable ease, and Weisz is a delight as the sharp-tongued scholar who’s far braver than she lets on. Their chemistry gives the film its center of gravity. Vosloo’s Imhotep is a worthy villain, slinking through the movie with a regal menace, always one ancient chant away from mass destruction. Sure, the jokes can be broad and the CGI a touch dated, but there’s an infectious energy to it all. If it’s not quite in the same league as Indiana Jones, it at least makes a strong case for a junior varsity spot—pulp spectacle with just enough intelligence to keep it from collapsing under its own silliness. For those in search of booby-trapped catacombs, flirty banter, and a villain with the power to turn into a sand hurricane, this one more than delivers.

Time has passed since the events of the first film, but Rick and Evelyn (Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz) haven’t let go of their taste for ancient ruins—or each other. They now have a precocious son, Alex (Freddie Boath), who, naturally, gets swept up in their latest adventure when Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) is resurrected once more—this time by a secretive cult led by a museum curator with ulterior motives. Said curator, Baltus Hafez, is secretly the reincarnation of Anck-su-namun, Imhotep’s forbidden love, now looking to reunite with her ancient flame and raise an even greater threat: the Scorpion King (a digitally distorted Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), whose mythical army could tip the balance of power in their favor. There’s still some fun to be had here, but it’s diluted. The simple thrills of the first film give way to a cluttered mythology that bogs down the pacing. Characters dash around trying to decode ancient prophecies while the audience tries to keep up. Still, Fraser and Weisz remain likable leads, and their banter hasn’t lost its spark. The visual effects—while occasionally rubbery—deliver the expected spectacle, and the sun-drenched desert vistas are enough to keep the eye engaged. The real scene-stealer might just be the gloriously gratuitous, slow-motion-heavy swordfight between Weisz and Patricia Velasquez—stylized, kinetic, and far more memorable than much of the plot. A bit too bloated to be fully satisfying, but still a serviceable sequel for those seeking more ancient thrills and supernatural spectacle.

Whatever gave the 1999 film its zip—the balance of quippy banter, booby-trapped temples, and breezy adventure—is largely absent here. This third installment trades wonder for spectacle, piling on noise and motion without knowing when to take a breath. At least the setting is new: the action moves to China, where ancient tombs hide reanimated terra cotta soldiers, and, inexplicably, Yeti are real. Brendan Fraser remains the franchise’s best asset, slicing through the mayhem with his usual mix of charm and agility. But the recasting of Evelyn doesn’t help. Maria Bello, stepping in for Rachel Weisz, offers a more restrained, cooler take that never quite finds its footing. Their now-grown son Alex (Luke Ford) is positioned as a junior adventurer, though the script mostly tasks him with exposition and shouting. Jet Li appears as the Dragon Emperor, though he’s largely sidelined—spending much of the film as a stone statue or morphing into a series of elaborate, unconvincing CGI forms. The plot, which involves resurrection, an undead army, and a bid for world domination, unfolds in fits and starts. The film races from one chaotic set-piece to another, with little buildup or payoff. Flying debris, roaring monsters, and digital swarms dominate, but the thrill of discovery—the joy of creeping through ancient ruins or outwitting clever traps—is nowhere to be found. There are flashes of the old swashbuckling fun, but they’re fleeting. Mostly, this feels like a sequel running on fumes, trying to finish a journey that lost its map.

A tense, morally slippery thriller that resists the tidy moral lines usually baked into a Steven Spielberg production. Munich picks up in the smoking aftermath of the 1972 Olympics massacre, when eleven Israeli athletes were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists—a crime that left the world rattled and Israel resolved to answer in kind. To carry out that answer, the Mossad assembles a team of expendable shadows led by Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), a soft-spoken family man drafted into a kill squad for reasons that sound patriotic on paper and corrode him in practice. Their mission: locate and assassinate each conspirator behind the attack, country by country, hotel by hotel—each hit leaving more chaos in its wake than closure. Spielberg, reportedly rewatching The French Connection for grit calibration, strips away his usual polish and sentimentality. What’s left is a procedural made for clenched jaws and moral vertigo—a long drift through safehouses, back alleys, and whispered exchanges where every clean shot costs more than the last. It’s gripping moment to moment, but the real hook is how steadily it questions whether the retribution even works. As Avner drifts further into this quiet war, he loses sight of what side he’s serving—if there’s even a side left worth naming. Spielberg rarely looks this squarely at the price of sanctioned revenge—bodies drop, new names surface, and the cycle spins without a finish line. A tough, clear-eyed thriller about payback dressed up as justice—gripping in the moment, but never pretending there’s a victor waiting at the end.

It opens in a swamp: Kermit, alone with a banjo, strumming “Rainbow Connection” under a gleam of sunlight. The song’s been recycled enough over the years to qualify as parody, but here it plays straight—gentle, melancholy, and oddly persuasive. From there, the film meanders forward—or sideways. Kermit heads to Hollywood, collecting a van full of loosely defined companions, all vaguely aspiring to showbiz. There’s technically a plot, but it’s held together by a kind of cheerful nonsense logic. At one point, the characters consult their own screenplay to find out what happens next. At another, they search for a fork in the road—and find one: massive, metallic, and planted like a highway sign. That’s about the level of realism in play. The film isn’t interested in narrative tension. It’s interested in being funny, musical, and weird—not necessarily in that order. The cameos are well-timed and often perfect. Steve Martin shows up as a waiter on the verge of a breakdown. Richard Pryor sells balloons. Mel Brooks operates a mad-scientist lab with just enough menace to unsettle small children. And Orson Welles turns up in the final minutes to deliver a “Standard Rich and Famous Contract”—what success looks like when typed on studio letterhead and handed over by Charles Foster Kane. What holds the film together isn’t structure but tone. The songs are breezy without vanishing. The jokes are scattershot, but the hit rate is high. And beneath the gags and shaggy pacing, there’s real affection for these felt-covered misfits. For a film that openly mocks the mechanics of storytelling, it sneaks in a surprising amount of sincerity. The Muppets want to make it in Hollywood, and after ninety-five minutes of musical detours and conversational nonsense, you sort of want them to.

A gleefully silly and wonderfully breezy entry in Jim Henson’s original run of Muppet films. Kermit the Frog, the troupe’s ever-hopeful ringleader, brings the whole gang to New York City with stars in their eyes and a musical—Manhattan Melodies—they’re convinced will be their big break. But the city proves indifferent. After one rejection too many, their savings vanish, and the group reluctantly splinters. Some head home. Others scatter to who-knows-where. Get your hankies ready—you’ll never cry harder over felt and polyester. Miss Piggy stays behind, of course, shadowing her beloved frog with the persistence of a noir detective and the flair of a diva in exile. The film floats through a string of comic episodes: the gang shacks up in airport lockers, Gonzo attempts poultry CPR, and Kermit—thanks to a blow to the head—briefly forgets who he is and lands a job writing jingles for soap commercials. A flashback sequence of the Muppets as toddlers makes a brief, charming detour, sweet enough to inspire a whole animated series years later. The musical numbers bounce with energy; I’ve been whistling them since grade school. The guest stars are perfectly deployed: Gregory Hines lends Piggy his roller skates in Central Park, Dabney Coleman slinks in as a greasy producer, and Joan Rivers unravels in a cloud of lipstick and perfume. But the ending is the true showstopper. Kermit and Piggy’s wedding—staged as both finale and full-circle emotional payoff—unfolds in a cathedral flooded with Muppets. Familiar faces everywhere. Not just for laughs, but as a kind of homecoming. The scene tips into fantasy without ever breaking the spell: joyful, unembarrassed, and unexpectedly moving. I remember watching it as a kid, wide-eyed and completely gone. I still watch it that way.

For devotees of the classic whodunit, this is a giddy little send-up dressed in formalwear and armed with a dagger in the hors d’oeuvres. Neil Simon’s script assembles a rogue’s gallery of barely disguised literary sleuths: Peter Falk rasps and squints as Sam Diamond (Sam Spade with trench coat mildew), David Niven and Maggie Smith sip martinis as Dick and Dora Charleston (Nick and Nora Charles gone slightly stale), James Coco flutters as the high-strung Milo Perrier (Poirot, but petulant), Elsa Lanchester twitches her teacup as Jessica Marbles (a no-nonsense Miss Marple), and Peter Sellers—uncomfortably cast—plays Sidney Wang, a broad parody of Charlie Chan that clangs in ways it wouldn’t get away with now. The premise is pure locked-room lunacy: these famous detectives are lured to a gothic mansion for “dinner and a murder,” orchestrated by Truman Capote, of all people, doing a nasal riff on madcap villainy as Lionel Twain. Alec Guinness is bone-dry as the blind butler, Nancy Walker goes gleefully mute as the maid, and Eileen Brennan slides around the periphery with a knowing glare. The fun is in the precision. Simon’s script drops punchlines like deadpan grenades—half the jokes are so casually tossed off, they barely make a sound before detonating a few seconds later. The plot, if you care, builds to a deliberately nonsensical conclusion. Traditionalists may wince, but the final twist has its own sideways genius—one last jab at a genre that too often pretends to make sense. A lark with knives out, it’s more spoof than mystery, but when it clicks, it’s wickedly delightful.

Jack Murphy: a cop so unlucky they named a law after him. He drinks too much, talks too little, and scowls like it’s muscle memory. His wife left him for a job as a stripper, and his car gets stolen by a foul-mouthed petty thief who winds up handcuffed to him for most of the runtime. This is the sixth Charles Bronson vehicle directed by J. Lee Thompson, and by now they’ve stopped pretending it might be something else. The movie is junk—grimy, pulpy, exactly the kind of late-night trash you root for when flipping through cable with your brain half-switched off. Bronson plays Murphy like he’s got sand in his shoes and a vendetta against everyone. Kathleen Wilhoite, as Arabella, is the car thief who crashes into his life and refuses to leave. Her insults aren’t just vulgar—they’re encyclopedic. (“Suck a doorknob, you homo!” “Kiss my pantyhose, sperm bank!” “You’re welcome, dildo nose!”) They’re so grating they start to become their own sort of music. Eventually, a killer from Murphy’s past shows up—Carrie Snodgress, grim and glaring—and frames him for murder. From there, it’s a chase. Murphy and Arabella run, bicker, shoot their way through half the city. The plot’s a wreck, and the dialogue’s unspeakable—but eventually, the rhythm clicks in. The insults stop reading as pure hatred and start playing like the only language they’ve got. They’re not friends. They’re not quite partners. They’re just stuck with each other—and by then, stuck is enough. The story’s ridiculous, and the movie barrels through it like it’s on a schedule. Blood, car chases, sleaze, repeat. Trash? Sure. But for anyone with a taste for it, it’s the kind that makes you want to keep digging.

There’s something gently off-pattern about Murphy’s Romance—enough that it sidesteps the usual studio polish and settles into something quieter, more lived-in. It’s a romance, sure, but not one built on grand gestures or orchestral swells. It moves like a story that could’ve happened down the street—if you happened to live in a sun-bleached Arizona town where people still trade favors and gossip from the porch. Sally Field plays Emma, a 33-year-old single mother starting over with a trailer, a teenage son, and an unsteady plan to make a living training and boarding horses. She’s worn thin but not worn down. Her fresh start lands her in a sleepy desert town where she meets Murphy Jones (James Garner), a local fixture who owns a drugstore, a small patch of land, and the confidence of a man who’s long since stopped trying to impress anyone. Murphy doesn’t give her charity—he gives her a horse to train, cash in hand, and enough quiet encouragement to let her stand on her own. Their connection isn’t instant, and it isn’t simple. Emma’s ex-husband (Brian Kerwin) drifts into town and into her spare bedroom, muddying the water with just enough charm to keep things messy. The love story, when it finally surfaces, feels like something that was earned rather than orchestrated. The script is smart, the dialogue measured, and the characters drawn with just enough grain to resist cliché. Garner, in particular, does a lot with small gestures and sideways glances, never pushing harder than he needs to. It’s not a masterpiece. But it’s easy to like, easier to believe, and just right for when you want a film that doesn’t chase emotion but lets it settle in slowly, like dusk on a front porch.

No one goes into a Beach Party movie expecting Terrence Malick. What they’re after are shimmying dance numbers, slapstick gags, and the sunny magnetism of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. And on that front, Muscle Beach Party mostly delivers. Avalon gets swept away—literally and figuratively—by a glamorous young Italian countess (Luciana Paluzzi) who offers him fame, fortune, and a sleek convertible, much to the chagrin of Funicello, whose character spends most of the movie scowling with wounded jealousy. It’s not her best showcase, but she’s still effortlessly watchable. Meanwhile, the actual conflict (such as it is) involves a team of hyper-disciplined bodybuilders led by a pre-roast Don Rickles, who’s so tightly wound you’d think someone swapped his protein shake for espresso. They’re threatening to take over the beach, but the surfers—blissfully laid-back—aren’t having it. The jokes are corny, the stakes nonexistent, but that’s part of the beach-movie code: everyone gets a tan, a tune, and a tidy resolution. As a ‘60s rock completist, I got a particular kick out of the cameos—Dick Dale shreds in one corner, and a baby-faced Little Stevie Wonder appears in another, adding a splash of genuine cool to the sand and silliness. Not essential, even by beach party standards, but breezy and harmless in that way only a movie with musclemen, mopeds, and musical interludes can be.

It opens with a birth and ends with a coin toss. Somewhere in between, Music from Another Room decides it’s a love story—and never once checks to see if that makes sense. Jude Law plays Danny, a pleasant-enough man saddled with the conviction that fate excuses everything. As a child, he’s pulled into a medical emergency and helps deliver a family friend’s baby. It’s dramatic. Emotional. And then, without warning, he tells the room: “I’m going to marry her.” No one questions it. They just nod. The film treats it as charming—like he’s naming a star, not making a lifelong claim on a newborn. Flash forward 25 years. Anna (Gretchen Mol), the baby, is now grown. He sees her across the room and decides, without hesitation or context, that she’s it. No build-up, no spark—just recognition, like he’s spotting a claim he left in escrow. The film doesn’t stage a connection; it declares one and moves on. He’s in love. Because he said he would be. Anna gets engaged that night. At dinner. To someone else. The timing is less a twist than a scheduling device. But it’s fine—he waits. The movie already told us how this ends. At some point, fate becomes the organizing principle. Coins are flipped. Signs are read. Decisions get outsourced to the universe like it’s covering script rewrites. There’s no real justification for it—it just happens, like the film got tired of building scenes and defaulted to mysticism. The supporting characters feel imported from other films. One sister (Jennifer Tilly) is blind, which might mean something, though the script doesn’t pursue it. Another (Jane Adams) is emotionally volatile and armed, waving a handgun through scenes that seem to think this is darkly funny. It isn’t. The tone keeps swerving—romance, farce, breakdown—like no one remembered which version they were shooting. And still, it moves. Not gracefully, not coherently—but forward. The actors try. The film believes in what it’s selling. It just doesn’t know how to sell it. Everyone talks like they’re following a different rulebook on how people fall in love. The plot fumbles between sincerity and contrivance, hoping the next big gesture will stick. It’s not good. But it is sincere. And that sincerity is the one thing holding the whole mess together—just barely.

A flabby direct-to-video action flick with a title far more evocative than anything that actually plays out onscreen. Musketeers Forever follows a trio of retired secret service agents—though “retired” may just mean they’d rather not stand up too often—who find themselves squaring off against a wispy-looking mob boss over a plan to open a casino on tribal land. That’s the gist, padded out with bar fights, flat punchlines, and clunky stabs at old-guy banter. Michael Dudikoff, once a staple of Reagan-era action, looks vaguely inconvenienced throughout. Lee Majors shows up, adds a few shades of veteran presence, but the film doesn’t seem to know what to do with him beyond having him glower. The mobsters are barely threats; they’re the kind of guys who look like they got lost on their way to a dinner theater production of Guys and Dolls. The tone wobbles between nostalgia and forced swagger, but there’s no pulse. It’s all dutifully staged and endlessly bland—competent enough to run on cable, forgettable enough to never ask about again.

Not especially funny, but consistently cute. Must Love Dogs is easy to sit through and just as easy to forget—like a dinner made of marshmallows and chocolate milk. Pleasant enough, no lasting nutritional value. Diane Lane plays a recently divorced preschool teacher being gently shoved into online dating—still considered a punchline in 2005. John Cusack plays the romantic lead, a boat builder who watches Doctor Zhivago and talks like he’s been practicing for this conversation since breakfast. They have an awkward first meeting. Of course they do. The characters sound smart without saying anything especially clever. It’s all just relatable enough to pass. The dialogue has a decent rhythm, and the cast sells it well. Lane gives a solid lead performance, while Cusack does his usual offbeat romantic routine. Christopher Plummer wanders in as her father and quietly brings some class into his scenes. Stockard Channing and Elizabeth Perkins round things out and seem game. The movie is standard-issue rom-com—competent, harmless, vaguely overlit. I kept expecting to roll my eyes more than I did. There’s nothing original about it, but it moves well, and the tone stays breezy enough to keep things from collapsing. No major complaints. You just won’t remember it happened.

So syrupy I kept wanting to rinse my teeth. My All American mistakes tears for texture and earnestness for insight. It tells the true story of Freddie Steinmark (Finn Wittrock), a Texas Longhorns safety who turned grit and good manners into a starting spot—and then, after a cancer diagnosis, into a legacy. The film seems determined to honor him, but mostly just embalms him in inspiration. The story alone could break your heart. This movie brings a crowbar and smashes it. It opens with Darrell Royal in old-man prosthetics, murmuring to a reporter that he doesn’t even remember playing football. It’s supposed to be touching, I think. Instead, I laughed out loud. The line is so awkwardly delivered and tonally off it plays like a parody of gravitas. Then I found out the real Darrell Royal later had Alzheimer’s, which means this movie—somehow—made me laugh at a guy with Alzheimer’s. Not exactly a triumph of tone. From there, we rewind to the 1960s—cue convertibles, jukeboxes, and a steady stream of needle drops pulled from a “Remember When” playlist. Freddie, scrappy and undersized, claws his way from Colorado dreamer to Texas starter. His girlfriend Linda (Sarah Bolger) trails behind, mostly to beam from the bleachers and offer G-rated encouragement. Eckhart tries to bring some grit to Coach Royal, but he’s stuck delivering factory-issued clichés that sound less written than cleared by the Dean of Student Affairs. Wittrock, for his part, throws himself into the role—physically, at least. He looks convincing in pads and cleats. But the script gives Freddie no dimension beyond Saintly Fighter. To the film’s credit, the football scenes are functional—well-lit, coherent, occasionally exciting. And if all you want is a rousing tribute to perseverance with a lump-in-the-throat payoff, this probably delivers. But it’s so emotionally choreographed, so lopsided in its worship, that by the time the credits roll, you feel more wrung out than moved. By the end, I wasn’t teary—I was relieved. Freddie’s death feels less like a tragedy than a mercy: it frees him from pain and the audience from two hours of orchestral uplift. It’s a eulogy wrapped in string music, sealed with a football helmet, and mailed straight to your tear ducts—whether you asked for it or not.

If someone at a rehearsal dinner suddenly burst into “I Say a Little Prayer,” and the entire table joined in, harmony and all, would you wince—or harmonize? My Best Friend’s Wedding doesn’t ask so much as whisk you straight into the chorus. Julia Roberts plays Julianne, a food critic who once made a pact with her best friend Michael (Dermot Mulroney): if neither was married by 28, they’d marry each other. Now 28 has arrived, and Michael’s found someone else—Kimmy (Cameron Diaz), a wide-eyed college student with a millionaire father and an unshakable belief in true love. Julianne, newly aware of feelings she’s long buried or ignored, sets out to wreck the wedding. It’s a sour little plan wrapped in tulle and champagne flutes, and the film has the good sense not to pretend otherwise. Roberts plays Julianne with an edge—funny, self-possessed, but always just a breath away from unraveling. Diaz, charming in a role that easily could’ve been played as a punchline, walks the line between innocence and guilelessness with real poise. And Rupert Everett glides in as Julianne’s confidant, equal parts Greek chorus and bemused conscience. It’s not just a cute romance—it’s a comedy of desperation, misfired timing, and unspoken regrets.

A small-scale love story wrapped inside a cultural blitz, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is less about falling in love than surviving the fallout. It’s a movie where every quiet moment is a setup for noise, and every family gathering feels like a contact sport performed in business casual. Nia Vardalos writes herself as Toula, a dutiful Greek-American daughter who drifts politely through life until she falls for a vegetarian schoolteacher—a minor scandal in a family that treats eating meat as sacred and marriage as a group project with yelling. Michael Constantine plays her father, the kind of man who sees no ailment—physical, emotional, or possibly geopolitical—that a few blasts of Windex can’t fix. Lainie Kazan is the mother—warm, watchful, and quietly tactical. She can dismantle resistance with a compliment and make surrender feel like your idea. The aunts are a Greek chorus of overshare. One delivers a hilariously grotesque story about a lump in her neck with the enthusiasm of someone describing a party trick. Every relative operates at full blast—no whispers, no tact, no chance of getting a word in. And yet the romance, which could’ve been flattened by the noise around it, sneaks in with its dignity intact. John Corbett, playing the world’s most agreeable man, nods, listens, and learns to pronounce things ending in -opoulos. Together, they work. She wants air. He doesn’t mind the crowd. The plot follows a straight line but dresses it in tulle and baklava, and the punchlines—while not new—are fired off with conviction. It moves quickly, never apologizes for going broad, and understands the real love story is between a woman and the 37 people who think they raised her.

Twenty years ago, the mining town of Valentine Bluffs held a Valentine’s Day dance. It ended poorly. A methane explosion trapped five miners underground after their supervisors slipped away early to join the festivities. Only one man, Harry Warden, made it out—alive, unhinged, and holding a pickaxe. Before disappearing, he left a warning: if the town ever held the dance again, he’d come back. Now it’s 1981, and caution has been replaced by party planning. The town decides to revive the dance. Decorations go up, kegs are tapped, and the sheriff opens a heart-shaped box to find an actual human heart inside. Then someone goes missing. Then someone else. The music softens. The town gets quiet. There’s a figure in mining gear moving through the shadows, and he’s not here to dance. The setup is standard-issue slasher—small town, old curse, young people with short memories—but what gives My Bloody Valentine its edge is how convincingly it sells the world around the story. Valentine Bluffs doesn’t feel like a stage—it feels like it’s been breathing coal dust for decades. You believe this town had a mine disaster. You believe people still lower their voices when they talk about it. And when a group of twenty-somethings decides to party in the tunnels, it doesn’t feel like horror-movie logic—it feels like a dumb local tradition that never quite got canceled. There’s a love triangle, a few bait-and-switch suspects, and a body count that escalates with precision. The kills are quick and specific, the gore practical and focused. The film doesn’t gawk at its violence, but it doesn’t pull away either. There’s nothing polished about the production. The mine sets are damp, narrow, and lit like the power’s about to fail. George Mihalka doesn’t try to elevate the material, but he knows how to work with what he’s got: hold the shot, stretch the silence, and let the scream take over. My Bloody Valentine doesn’t rewrite the playbook. It just plays the game better than you’d think: tighter pace, stronger atmosphere, and a killer who doesn’t bother with theatrics—he just shows up and gets to work.

Vinnie Antonelli, a slick-talking ex-mobster with a wardrobe that clashes with daylight, gets scooped out of New York and deposited in the flat, beige comfort of suburban San Diego. His crimes are many, but the FBI has other plans—they stash him in Witness Protection and hope he’ll behave. He doesn’t. Steve Martin plays Vinnie like he’s onstage at a nightclub that only exists in his head—flamboyant, ridiculous, and utterly convinced of his own importance. Assigned to babysit him is Barney Coopersmith (Rick Moranis), an FBI agent so by-the-book he probably underlines the margins. Vinnie talks fast, lives loud, and starts bending the rules before the boxes are unpacked. Meanwhile, several of Vinnie’s former criminal associates have also been tucked into the same suburban cul-de-sac, a relocation plan with the foresight of a pie fight. They reconnect. Trouble resumes. The film isn’t a procedural—it’s a light-footed farce with a mobster center and a soft, romantic underbelly. Nora Ephron’s script keeps the narrative clipping along, tossing in a subplot where Barney awkwardly courts Joan Cusack’s uptight DEA attorney. Martin steals it all anyway. He’s not playing a person—he’s playing the idea of mischief in a double-breasted suit. The story doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. But the laughs do, and that’s the point.

A boy comes back from the dead to take a girl to prom. People have done worse things for love. Johnny Dingle, played with oblivious charm by Andrew Lowery, thinks courtship should involve flair. His idea: fake a stickup, rescue the girl, ride off with her into senior-year bliss. Missy (Traci Lind) is the target of this misfire. A friend plays the gunman. Only a real one shows up instead. Johnny gets shot, collapses, asks her out with his last breath. She says yes, possibly out of shock, possibly out of mercy. He comes back the next day. Not in a blaze of horror or mystery—just climbs out of the dirt and heads home like he forgot his lunch. His parents panic briefly, then set a place for dinner. The neighbors mutter, but it’s not the weirdest thing they’ve seen. The gravekeeper doesn’t even flinch. Johnny, now undead, finds himself developing a taste for human flesh, which he treats less like a curse and more like an embarrassing dietary restriction. He resists it, mostly. There’s no real carnage, no body count. Just a boy with peeling skin and a prom date to keep. It cycles through genres like someone trying on coats—zombie horror, high school comedy, light satire—but never bothers to fasten any of them. Nothing holds. The jokes deflate midair. The horror is harmless. And the tone shifts like a table with a short leg. The central conceit might’ve worked with more bite—or less. Here it just flattens into novelty. One character brings a gun to school and no one blinks. Johnny nibbles on a classmate and barely gets detention. Missy’s feelings shift depending on the needs of the scene. Physics, logic, and tone are treated like guest stars: welcome, but not required. Matthew McConaughey and Philip Seymour Hoffman appear in thankless early roles—proof that talent can survive anything, including this. It’s a misfire, but its heart was in the right place. Too silly to take seriously, too limp to hate-watch. A zombie movie with no appetite, wandering through scenes like it’s late for a dentist appointment. You forget most of it as it’s happening—but what sticks is how weirdly harmless it all feels.

Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis), a tangle of red hair and refusal, lives on a parched patch of 1890s Australia—a place where ambition dries out quicker than the creek bed. Her family’s homestead is little more than a skeletal ranch house: creaky, sun-faded, and nowhere near the stage she envisions for herself. She announces early that she plans to be an artist. What kind, she can’t say. She hasn’t written her masterpiece or painted anything in particular, but the urge—to do, to be, to matter—is insatiable. Her parents, practical to the point of cruelty, respond the way parents often do in stories like this: by packing her off to work as domestic help. But her grandmother, a wealthy and regal matron with a cane in one hand and a well-preserved sense of superiority in the other, intervenes. Sybylla is given a shot at society. She responds with a firework display of stubbornness. Men appear, as they always must. One is dull and dismissible. The other—Harry Beecham (Sam Neill), a sincere and affable landowner—seems to genuinely enjoy her company. But Sybylla’s resolve isn’t easily softened. She sees the trap, even when it arrives with a kind smile and a ring box. No matter how appealing Harry is, she suspects marriage would shrink her into a polite ghost of herself. Judy Davis is electric—never striving for likability, and all the better for it. Her Sybylla is unruly, self-important, funny, and smart. It’s a performance of perpetual resistance, and it gives the film its spiny backbone. Gillian Armstrong directs with a quiet sensitivity that allows the landscape to breathe and Sybylla’s contradictions to coexist. The result is a feminist period piece that rejects tidy conclusions. It isn’t about the triumph of a dream so much as the will to keep having one.

A feel-good documentary about a guy with no money, no connections, and one wildly impractical dream: go on a date with Drew Barrymore. Brian Herzlinger, a 27-year-old aspiring filmmaker, takes the $1,100 he wins on a game show and pours it into a plan he’s been nursing since childhood. He buys the camera like a man borrowing a tux—intending to use it, not keep it. Circuit City’s 30-day return policy becomes his executive producer. That’s the whole movie. A man with a borrowed camera and a borrowed timeline, trying to get a meeting with an A-lister. And it’s remarkably watchable. Not just as a narrative, but as a piece of filmmaking—charming, shaggy, and improbably engaging. Herzlinger’s friends rally around him. He cold-calls publicists, stalks red carpets, and documents each small win like it’s a moon landing. There’s a scene with his parents—equal parts adorable and deadpan—where his father gently suggests he broaden his scope and maybe also try Gwyneth Paltrow. The film doesn’t stretch the concept so much as spin it with heart and hustle. It begins like a stunt and ends like a diary. Herzlinger moves like a man on borrowed time—half-embarrassed, half-committed—and the film meets him there. It’s not about celebrity so much as the power of deciding to try—about seeing the long shot and taking it anyway. That he carved out a career from this feels right. If you can turn a consumer loophole and a celebrity daydream into a full-length movie people actually want to watch, you’re probably not cut out for a normal job anyway.

An unapologetically spare film, My Dinner with Andre makes a table for two the entire stage. On one side: Wallace Shawn, a playwright with a low-key sense of despair. On the other: Andre Gregory, a former theater director turned wandering philosopher with a taste for spiritual epiphanies and global detours. They meet at a Manhattan café, order dinner, and talk. That’s it. The conversation is expansive, erratic, and often impossible to pin down. Gregory recounts his excursions through Poland, Tibet, the woods of Scotland—tales delivered with a kind of mystic fervor, equal parts compelling and insufferable. Shawn listens politely, occasionally interjecting with doses of realism that ground the more airborne parts of the exchange. He’s the stand-in for anyone who’s ever nodded through a monologue and quietly thought, “Are we still talking?” And yet, the film has a pull. It moves in strange rhythms—philosophy, anecdotes, digressions that drift into each other until the whole thing starts to feel like a dream you’re having in real time. At moments, it’s magnetic. At others, you might feel the urge to grab the check and walk out. There’s no arc, no payoff, no narrative resolution. It’s a film that acts as a kind of Rorschach test for the viewer. It can feel profound or pretentious, lucid or maddening, depending entirely on what you bring to it. That ambiguity is the point. My Dinner with Andre doesn’t unlock any big truths. But it’s watchable, memorable, and brave. A film that risks being boring in order to be something else—and, for stretches, actually is.

The score is so syrupy it practically sweats. Strings swell like the composer left the faucet running, and you wonder how the characters manage to breathe under it. And yet, under the musical gauze and gloppy narration, My Dog Skip finds a pulse—faint at times, but unmistakably there. Set in a sleepy Mississippi town during World War II, the film centers on Willie (Frankie Muniz), a bashful nine-year-old with few friends and even less confidence. His mother (Diane Lane, luminous in the soft-focus way mothers always are in these stories) gifts him a Jack Russell Terrier named Skip, despite protestations from his war-wounded, emotionally frostbitten father (Kevin Bacon). During this scene, I find myself talking to the screen. Every boy needs a dog. Bacon plays it as if disagreeing is a character trait. Skip is less a dog than a local phenomenon. He befriends butchers, wins over bullies, chases baseballs, and practically runs the town like a pint-sized mayor with a wagging tail. Muniz sells every emotion with wide-eyed precision: the first sight of Skip is pure oxygen; the later hospital scene, crushing. His face does the work the screenplay doesn’t quite earn. Harry Connick Jr.’s narration, however, nearly pulls the whole thing under. It’s a molasses pour of dime-store sentiment, delivered with the earnestness of a man reading a Hallmark card to a grave. Some lines are so laced with treacle I laughed out loud. But by the end of the film, I wasn’t laughing anymore, because the damn thing works. It has an emotional payoff that sneaks up like a well-trained dog—it sits, stays, and breaks your heart.

My Fair Lady turns George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion into a musical showcase of elocution, class anxiety, and extravagantly feathered hats. What begins as a bet between two high-society linguists quickly unfurls into a full-scale pageant of social satire in formalwear. Audrey Hepburn, all raw edges and wide eyes, plays Eliza Doolittle with a spark that’s equal parts defiance and metamorphosis. She starts as a grubby flower girl with a foghorn Cockney bark and, under protest, is sculpted into something polished and brittle. Rex Harrison’s Higgins pegs her early on as a “draggle-tailed guttersnipe” and never quite manages to see past it, even once she’s learned to glide through embassy halls with a posture that suggests she was poured into a tiara. Though her singing voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon, the performance—witty, wounded, and full of friction—is unmistakably Hepburn’s. Harrison speak-sings his way through Higgins’ litany of social grievances with the precision of a man who corrects grammar out of reflex. Their dynamic is thorny, not romantic—closer to mutual disbelief than affection—until the last act nudges them into a pairing that feels like it was pre-approved by studio mandate. The sets float somewhere between daydream and diorama, the costumes arrive in battalions, and Lerner and Loewe’s songs actually carry weight. “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and “I Could Have Danced All Night” are more than hummable; they hold character and conflict inside them. It’s long, lush, and not as refined in sentiment as it is in tailoring—but when it works, it works like gangbusters.

Two ex-presidents go on the run. That’s the pitch. Not bad, in theory. Jack Lemmon and James Garner—pinch-hitting for Matthau like it’s a buddy-comedy understudy system—play ex-presidents and political rivals forced into a cross-country escape after getting tangled in a vaguely explained government scandal involving bribes, helicopters, and the usual folderol. They hitchhike, evade hitmen, yell at each other, and wander through middle America like pensioners cosplaying The Fugitive. It’s a high-concept comedy that thinks the concept is the joke. The setup—two cranky old men, once leaders of the free world, now bickering over motel beds and diner food—could’ve worked if the script had any edge, rhythm, or even basic wit. But the barbs stop somewhere around “screw you” and “blow me”—less ping-pong, more flat tire. Though to be fair, given the state of political discourse now, that might read as courtly. The appeal, obviously, is watching Lemmon and Garner lob insults with the kind of timing you can’t teach. But the film gives them nothing to lob. Instead of acidic repartee, we get reheated sitcom gripes. Instead of political satire, we get chase scenes and dad jokes. Even the gags involving stunned civilians—blue-collar Americans who keep recognizing them from TV—fizzle after the third or fourth variation. There’s an idea in here. Two former presidents, stripped of power, forced to rely on strangers and each other, realizing too late that their policies had consequences. But the film isn’t interested in irony or reflection. It’s not interested in much beyond moving the plot from Point A to Point C with a lot of yelling in between. It ends, as these things do, with a speech and a handshake. Reconciliation, redemption, roll credits. It wants to be Planes, Trains and Oval Offices—what it ends up as is a two-man roast with no writers.

Roddy McDowall plays Ken, a 14-year-old ranch kid with big feelings, something to prove, and—for reasons never explained—a distinctly British accent. His family runs a Wyoming horse ranch, the kind where money’s tight and expectations are tighter. Ken is dreamy, distracted, always one mistake away from losing his parents’ patience. Especially his father (Preston Foster), who believes in hard work, not daydreams. But when Ken begs for a horse of his own, the father relents—on one condition: he can pick any filly on the ranch, but he has to break her himself. Ken picks the wrong horse. Or maybe the right one. She’s wild, skittish, barely halter-broke. He names her Flicka. She runs at the first chance and nearly ruins herself trying to escape. His father says she’s no good—too much spirit, too little sense. Ken insists she’s the one. And when she goes down, badly hurt, he stays beside her like it’s a vow. The setup is familiar, but the telling isn’t. McDowall gives a performance that works because it doesn’t try too hard—he’s all wounded pride and soft defiance, a boy too sensitive for the world he’s trying to belong to. Foster plays the father as a man quietly terrified of what gentleness might cost his son. The tension isn’t about whether the horse can be tamed—it’s whether love can be strong without being hard. The style is modest, even by 1943 standards. The camera mostly stays put. The music swells on cue. But the emotional rhythm is sharp. The third act doesn’t hedge. There’s pain. Real pain. And the film doesn’t back away from it. It trusts the audience to handle the consequences. No, it’s not great cinema. But it’s something rarer: a children’s film with bones. It believes in work, and loyalty, and in the strange, private bond between a boy and the thing he’s staked his heart on. That’s enough.

The glue holding My Girl together—when it threatens to dissolve into syrup—is Anna Chlumsky as Vada Sultenfuss, a death-obsessed hypochondriac with a mouthful of prematurely adult observations. She’s 11, lives in a funeral home, and toggles between romantic daydreams and existential dread like it’s recess. Her best friend is Thomas J. (Macaulay Culkin, still blinking from Home Alone fame), an allergy-prone ghost-in-waiting who trails after her like a backup conscience. She’s often mean; he rarely notices. The first half of the film works like gangbusters. Vada’s zingers land with the kind of accuracy that only comes from kids who’ve spent too much time listening in on adult conversations, and her interactions with the grown-ups are where the film finds its pulse. Dan Aykroyd, as her emotionally paralyzed father, runs his funeral parlor with the blankness of someone who’s stopped pretending to understand the living. Jamie Lee Curtis, as the breezy new makeup artist, cuts through his inertia like fresh air through formaldehyde. Their awkward flirtation plays low and believable. Then comes the pivot. Sentimentality creeps in like a second coat of wallpaper—too thick, too neat, and not fully dry. What starts as an offbeat coming-of-age story gradually swerves toward tearjerker territory, complete with the traumatic moment that seared itself into every Xennial memory. It still works, but it feels far too engineered. The film pushes too hard. But still, Chlumsky keeps pulling it back. There’s something magnetic in her performance: smart, raw, and unnervingly precise. My Girl flirts with collapse, but it never slips. It sticks.

The upside: Macaulay Culkin doesn’t get murdered by bees again. The downside: everything else. My Girl 2 picks up with Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky) a few years older, a little taller, and suddenly compelled to excavate the life of her long-dead mother. The method: flying solo to Los Angeles with the vague blessing of her father and stepmother, as if cross-country soul-searching were a reasonable middle-school activity. She’s chaperoned, loosely, by her uncle (Richard Masur) and trailed by Nick (Austin O’Brien), a local kid conscripted into tour guide duty and positioned—awkwardly—as the heir to Culkin’s ghost. The story, such as it is, moves from one lightly maudlin clue to the next: photo studios, poetry readings, old friends with faint memories. Nothing is uncovered that couldn’t be pieced together from a box of keepsakes and an Enya CD. The dialogue clunks from scene to scene like it was written by someone half-remembering lines from a self-help seminar. Where the first film had mischief in its margins—funeral parlor weirdness, a bee sting of mortality—this one behaves like it’s been sedated. The emotional tone is slathered on like moisturizer: soft, floral, and determinedly comforting. Even Vada’s “growth” feels less like character development and more like a book report on what self-discovery might look like. Nick, for his part, spends the movie toggling between irritation and sudden devotion, though neither mode convinces. He’s less a character than a sanitized placeholder for a first crush—more market-tested than human. There are flickers of intention—a few decent ideas about grief and adolescence poking through—but they’re drowned in a pink fog of good intentions. My Girl 2 plays like someone tried to bottle the original’s success, diluted it with chamomile tea, and forgot to stir.

Christy Brown (Daniel Day‑Lewis) was born into a cramped Dublin household as just another mouth to feed—except his mouth barely worked, his limbs barely obeyed him, and for the better part of his childhood he was assumed, even by his own mother and father, to be little more than furniture that cried. Cerebral palsy locked up nearly every muscle he had, save one: his left foot. Ignored, pitied, humored—Christy learned early that if he wanted to be noticed, he’d have to force it. And he did, scraping chalk across floors, picking fights with his siblings, and eventually wrestling a brush into that single obedient foot until the world had no choice but to admit he was more than the neighborhood charity case. His rise—invalid to published poet, celebrated painter, and minor Irish folk hero—is the sort of real‑life arc tailor‑made for an “inspirational” biopic, and My Left Foot doesn’t push far beyond that basic pitch. But it does find one sharp edge: Christy’s aching, often humiliating search for romantic love. He doesn’t let anyone forget—loudly if he has to—that he wants what any man wants: to be wanted back. Desire, jealousy, a stubborn hunger for attention that his body can’t deliver on, which bruises worse than any physical setback. What stays with you, though, is Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance: the twisted posture, the half-choked speech, the quick flashes of wit that cut through the pity. He makes Christy impossible to patronize—hard to endure one minute, impossible to dismiss the next. Stubborn in failure, almost animal in victory. The arc is familiar enough, but the jagged honesty keeps it from floating off as just another life-lesson package. A straightforward biography on paper, lifted scene by scene by a lead who refuses to let the “inspiration” get too comfortable.

A marvelously peculiar coming-of-age film from Sweden, My Life as a Dog floats along the edges of grief without ever declaring itself sad. Ingemar, a wide-eyed, unnervingly perceptive twelve-year-old (Anton Glanzelius), is sent off to live with relatives while his mother deteriorates offscreen. He’s been separated from his beloved dog—an absence the movie treats not as a plot point but as something closer to spiritual damage. You feel it more than you hear about it. Ingemar narrates the world like it’s a trivia column, cataloging cosmonauts, crushed circus performers, and strange news clippings in an effort to keep his own life at a safe observational distance. He doesn’t analyze. He recites. It’s how he stays upright. His emotions are rerouted through incident, and Hallström knows better than to pry them loose. The house he’s dropped into feels pieced together from mismatched furniture and half-distracted people. The father figure boxes in the basement. A woman upstairs poses nude. Someone is always yelling, but rarely at Ingemar. They seem to like him in theory, though it’s unclear what he’s meant to do or where he’s supposed to sit. He befriends Saga (Melinda Kinnaman), a wiry tomboy with a boxer’s stance and the face of someone who’s decided softness is a tactical disadvantage. She cuts her hair to see if he notices. He doesn’t—but not unkindly. He doesn’t know what she’s asking for—only that it’s directed at him. So he sticks close, the way a kid might hover near a locked door, waiting for it to open without being told how. Glanzelius plays Ingemar like a boy who doesn’t want to give himself away. His grin hangs back, crooked and brief, while his eyes scan the room like they’re bracing for something—never blank, just holding more than he’s ready to say. Hallström directs the film with quiet slyness. He doesn’t shape the scenes so much as let them unfold. The emotion slips in sideways, never forced. The camera stays put just long enough to make you wonder if you’re intruding. A beat too long. A breath no one fills. It’s like watching something private that wasn’t meant for you—but no one stops you either. Nothing’s spelled out. The film just keeps drifting forward—moments piling up, not loudly, just steadily. Then it ends. Not abruptly, but with the kind of finality that doesn’t explain itself. And only then do you realize how closely you’d been watching.

Pairing Mae West with W.C. Fields feels like a vaudeville stunt dreamed up in a whiskey haze—and for the most part, it works. Their union is less about chemistry than collision: two oversized personalities, each orbiting their own solar system of innuendo and insult. Together, they create a kind of comic turbulence—riotous in bursts, though occasionally exhausting in its one-note persistence. Set in a sepia-toned Wild West that owes more to soundstage dust than frontier grit, the story functions mainly as a delivery system for wisecracks. West plays Flower Belle Lee, a voluptuous scandal in a corset who’s run out of town for consorting with a masked bandit. She’s informed she can’t return unless married, so she grabs the nearest acceptable option—Fields’ Cuthbert J. Twillie, a train-bound charlatan in a constant state of comic inebriation. The plot moves like a buckboard with one good wheel, but you’re not here for the structure. You’re here to hear West purr innuendo like it’s a second language and watch Fields navigate the English language like it’s a third. It’s a stitched-together showcase that leans hard on its stars. But when the rhythm hits and the one-liners keep pace, there’s a wry, lopsided joy in watching these two hams try to outglaze each other.

A forgotten man with immaculate posture, a society girl with the attention span of a kitten, and a family that treats dysfunction like a birthright—My Man Godfrey doesn’t so much tell a story as lob one-liners at a moving target and watch what sticks. Carole Lombard plays Irene Bullock, a Park Avenue flake on the verge of hysteria, who plucks a hobo from a city dump as part of a scavenger hunt. It’s supposed to be funny. It is. But it’s also mortifying, and Godfrey (William Powell), the hobo in question, makes sure the room knows it. He agrees to come along just to deliver a speech—but ends up sticking around as the family’s butler. Why? Maybe it’s the job. Maybe it’s Irene, who vacillates between daffy and devoted so quickly it could cause whiplash. Or maybe Godfrey just enjoys the view from inside the madhouse. The Bullock clan is equal parts oblivious and overfunded, with Eugene Pallette grumbling magnificently as the exasperated patriarch and Alice Brady floating around in a mink-trimmed fog, doting on a freeloading “musician” named Carlo (Mischa Auer), whose genius no one can locate, least of all him. Godfrey, calm and unflappable, becomes the gravitational center of the household—quietly cleaning up messes, moral and otherwise, with a raised eyebrow and a well-placed towel. Jean Dixon, as the skeptical maid, clocks him immediately: smart, capable, and probably too good to be true. Irene, naturally, falls in love. Her sister, sour and strategic (Gail Patrick at her iciest), spots it and makes it her mission to derail the whole thing. This film is all staged with the velocity and precision of champagne corks ricocheting off crystal. The script sparkles, the performances sizzle, and somehow underneath the gags there’s a working moral engine—though by the time Godfrey gets around to his grand solution, the film’s politics lean suspiciously bootstrapped. Still, for a Depression-era comedy about class, it goes down smooth and sticks the landing. A little mad, a little magical, and funnier than most films twice as loud.

An interstellar misfire with a few decent laughs scattered like space debris, My Stepmother Is an Alien plays like Splash beamed through the static of late-’80s genre confusion. Dan Aykroyd stars as Steven Mills, a terminally awkward astrophysicist whose experimental radio wave—flung beyond the galaxy—accidentally interferes with the gravitational field of an alien civilization. This, understandably, causes some alarm. The aliens’ solution? Send a walking blonde bombshell to Earth to investigate. Kim Basinger arrives as Celeste, the alien emissary disguised as a fashion-model type with a suspicious fondness for cocktail dresses and giddy seduction. She has no real plan beyond smiling cryptically and batting her lashes. Fortunately, that’s all it takes to win over Steven, who’s too stunned to question why a woman like that would be interested in someone who’s been married to his lab equipment for twenty years. His teenage daughter (a pre-Buffy Alyson Hannigan) is skeptical but wouldn’t mind a maternal presence—if only this one didn’t consult her purse before answering every question. Said purse contains a mechanical eyeball that hovers, yaps, and dispenses exposition like a sentient VCR manual. It torpedoes the film’s rhythm every time it appears. The movie wobbles between romantic comedy and sci-fi farce without ever fully committing to either. Aykroyd—usually charming in a different register—is miscast as the wide-eyed romantic lead. Basinger, meanwhile, gamely tries to split the difference between naïveté and sultry mystery, but her alien-meets-Valley-girl delivery rarely clicks. Still, there’s enough here to keep it from floating off entirely—Jon Lovitz, as the wisecracking brother, gets some mileage—but for a film about the improbable, it settles too often for the forgettable.

A perfectly pleasant superhero lark that doesn’t embarrass itself yet never works up the nerve to be more than a half-good sketch idea stretched thin. The premise clicks at first glance: mild-mannered architect Matt (Luke Wilson, exuding that perpetual good sport vibe) strikes up conversation with a pretty stranger on the subway. She’s Jenny (Uma Thurman), who happens to be G-Girl—local flying savior, bane of bad guys, and soon enough, his new girlfriend. So far, so workable. The twist—and the entire movie leans on it—is that G-Girl is also catastrophically possessive. Not mild jealousy, but windows blasted with laser vision, cars pitched into orbit, and ex-boyfriends vaporized if they so much as smile the wrong way. On paper, that’s a sharp hook: what if your break-up triggered a one-woman supervillain origin story? But the film can’t quite sell the switch. Jenny goes from shy to unstable in the space of a single montage, and Thurman, game as she is, can’t bridge the tonal gap alone. Reitman directs with the same shrugging amiability that made Ghostbusters drift along nicely, but here it just softens what ought to have sharper teeth. The tone stays lodged in sitcom mode—broad, goofy, never mean enough to make the absurdity bite. It’s watchable, and a few gags work well, but the film never digs past the headline joke. A clever premise, a likable cast, and a finished product that coasts along at half throttle. Harmless, forgettable, and not quite worth a second date.

Mystery, Alaska is not a bad film by any stretch—just so mild you might wonder, halfway through, if anyone on screen actually cares what happens. Mystery, Alaska stitches a small-town comedy onto an underdog sports yarn and hopes you’ll mistake coziness for suspense. The setup is simple enough: a big-city columnist (Hank Azaria) files a fluffy piece about his frozen hometown—Mystery, Alaska—where half the population treats pond hockey like a civic duty. He claims, perhaps recklessly, that these local amateurs could skate circles around any NHL team. The New York Rangers, smelling an easy PR stunt, decide to test the theory. From there, it’s exactly what you’d expect: local nobodies facing down smug professionals, reporters flailing in real snow, and a town whose biggest scandal until now involved gossip and the odd personal feud. Russell Crowe plays the sheriff and aging star player—worn down but too proud to hang up his skates. Burt Reynolds, as the town’s judge and resident old lion, spends most of the runtime insisting they’re out of their depth and probably ought to forfeit before someone gets embarrassed. It’s not unpleasant. The performances hit their marks, the rink-and-flannel atmosphere feels right, and the snowy backdrop sells the illusion that these folks would rather freeze than back down. But any real sense of urgency drips away fast: the team didn’t start this fight, they don’t have much to prove, and the big game feels more like civic duty than a grudge match. If you have a soft spot for small-town oddballs giving big shots a token scare, this scratches the itch—just don’t expect to think about it once the ice melts.

If ever there were a medium begging to blur the line between object and soul, it’s wax—slick, pliable, unnervingly human in the wrong light. A wax figure doesn’t need to move to be disturbing; it just needs to hold still long enough to make you start seeing things. Mystery of the Wax Museum takes this premise and runs a hot iron straight through it, coating every inch of its lurid Technicolor palette in menace and theatrical swoon. The year is 1921. Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill), sculptor of dubious sanity and exceptional talent, presides over a London wax museum with the gaze of a man who’d marry one of his exhibits if they’d only say “I do.” He crafts Marie Antoinette and Joan of Arc with so much lifelike grace it’s almost indecent. But his financier (Edwin Maxwell) wants the place torched for insurance, and one insurance fraud later, Igor is presumed dead—his beloved creations puddled on the floor. Cut to New York, twelve years later. Bodies are disappearing, wax figures are appearing, and Igor, now cloaked in shadows and draped in silk scarves, is back at it with suspicious speed. Glenda Farrell is the real engine here as a wisecracking reporter in the old-fashioned mold: fast mouth, sharper brain. Fay Wray, caught in Igor’s deranged affections, supplies the film’s swooniest terror. The mystery holds together, but the film is more interested in atmosphere than logic. It wants to seduce you with gaslight and glossy eyes, and it does. The early Technicolor, with its gelatinous hues and half-melted edges, turns the figures into things you want to touch and absolutely shouldn’t. There’s nothing real about this world, which is exactly what makes it so gripping.