Film Buff Musings

This is not a children’s film. It might be animated, but The Plague Dogs has more existential dread packed into its frames than most prestige dramas dare touch. Any child who stumbles across it will likely be scarred. Any adult who finishes it will likely be stunned… and probably also scarred. The story follows two dogs—Rowf and Snitter—who escape from a British research facility after enduring unspeakable experiments. One has survived endless drowning simulations; the other has had brain surgery for reasons left disturbingly vague. They flee into the countryside, maimed, shell-shocked, and completely unequipped for freedom. A clever, opportunistic fox guides them through the wild, though his help veers into exploitation. The dogs keep running, and the humans keep coming. The landscape is wide open and somehow still claustrophobic. There’s barely a plot in the traditional sense—just survival, inch by inch. The dogs’ view of humanity, shaped entirely by pain and containment, grows bleaker as they go. In one scene, Snitter speaks of a rumor he once heard: that humans can be kind to dogs. He says it like a fairy tale. Neither he nor Rowf has seen a shred of evidence to support it. The film is devastating precisely because it avoids sentimentality—it doesn’t reach for your tears; it grabs them through silence and truth. This film is quiet, methodical, and deeply, deeply sad. And the animation—dark, watercolor-drenched, and flecked with stark English realism—only heightens the emotional dissonance. The beauty never softens the blow. It sharpens it. The Plague Dogs is one of the rare films that leaves you a different person than when you began. It doesn’t moralize, it doesn’t resolve, and it certainly doesn’t comfort. It simply shows you what happens when creatures built for companionship are taught only to fear.

No rundown of “so-bad-it’s-good” cinema skips Plan 9 From Outer Space—Ed Wood’s earnest, slipshod crown jewel. It’s routinely called the worst film ever made, which almost flatters it, since that implies it ever stood a chance of being good. Originally titled Grave Robbers From Outer Space (a more honest preview of what you’re in for), the plot concerns aliens who, worried about humanity’s new doomsday toy, decide the best way to get our attention is to raise a few corpses and parade them through graveyards. Apparently flying saucers buzzing the neighborhood weren’t enough. Everything’s done on pocket change: cardboard tombstones buckle if someone exhales too hard, toy UFOs dangle on strings, and Bela Lugosi appears only in stray home footage shot before he died. Needing more, Wood plugged the gap with a taller double who spends every scene awkwardly hiding his face behind a cape. Yet for all its bargain-bin ambition, Plan 9 drifts along on sheer good-natured nerve. Its hamfisted anti-nuke message clangs like a dropped wrench, but under the plywood sets and stilted line readings, there’s an odd sincerity that almost charms. Tor Johnson and Vampira stalking through the fog even manage a flicker of real atmosphere—until someone crashes into a fake gravestone and ruins the spell. As a movie, it’s a slog. As a testament to one man’s conviction that cardboard and borrowed actors could conquer the stars, it’s kind of priceless. You don’t watch Plan 9 for story or suspense; you watch it to see what happens when blind enthusiasm outruns common sense—and keeps going anyway.

There’s nothing tidy about Planet of the Apes, which is exactly why it works. A studio-backed sci-fi spectacle that opens with misanthropic astronauts, pivots into primate theology, and ends with Charlton Heston howling on a beach—it holds together with total confidence. The premise kicks in fast: a spaceship crash-lands on a barren planet. The surviving crew wanders through cracked terrain until they’re rounded up by apes—on horseback, in uniforms, speaking fluent English, with a working knowledge of firearms. Taylor (Heston), all biceps and contempt, is shot in the throat, caged, and poked by scientists who don’t believe in speech. Kim Hunter, as Zira, is the lone researcher who thinks he might be more than a curiosity. Her colleagues would rather skip the paperwork and call it divine punishment. The world is built from contradictions. Ape law is half scripture, half bureaucracy. Museums display stuffed humans posed for educational value. Scientific debate takes place in front of religious panels dressed like papal judges. It’s all delivered with the straightest possible face, which somehow makes the satire bite harder. Goldsmith’s score doesn’t try to smooth anything over. It rattles and jolts, full of clanging percussion and woodwinds that sound like they’re playing through clenched teeth. It isn’t background—it’s friction. A soundtrack for a civilization barely holding itself together, and for a protagonist who wants no part of it. The atmosphere never settles. Even the quiet moments feel rigged to detonate. The film keeps your pulse just slightly too high, like it’s testing for cracks. Then comes the finale—bleached skies, broken stone, and Heston face down in the sand, delivering a monologue at once furious and defeated. It doesn’t play like a twist. It plays like confirmation—one final, decisive piece of evidence in a film that’s been gathering it the entire time. Taylor’s worst assumptions are validated, loudly. History doesn’t just repeat; it survives long enough to mock you. Planet of the Apes doesn’t hedge. It builds its world, lays out its philosophy, and pushes both to their logical conclusion. Strange, blunt, and absolutely sure of itself.

Tim Burton’s *Planet of the Apes* remake isn’t a catastrophe—it’s just miscalculated. It clings to the 1968 original’s bones but swaps its eeriness and impact for pageantry and noise. Reverent in structure, reckless in tone, it’s a glossy head-scratcher: too faithful where it should diverge, and off-course where it shouldn’t. Mark Wahlberg plays Leo Davidson, a space pilot who trains monkeys for interstellar missions. When one disappears into a magnetic storm, he follows—only to crash onto a world called Ashlar, where apes run the show and humans wear loincloths and flinch. But the dynamic has no bite. The humans aren’t mute, just scruffy and downgraded, which dulls the premise from the start. Leo doesn’t provoke shock so much as mild irritation, and the apes’ response feels more bureaucratic than primal. Visually, Burton goes full cathedral—stone arches, tribal insignias, militarized processions. The production design is overloaded but impressive, with sculpted fur, armor, and ape prosthetics that allow for snarls, smirks, and side-eyes without cracking the illusion. It’s a film you could screenshot endlessly, but the imagery does most of the talking. The lighting leans theatrical, the colors feel baked in dirt, and the camera often seems hemmed in by its own set dressing. Every now and then it flirts with something interesting, then slips back into rote action and breathless exposition. There’s no suspense, just forward motion. For all its polish, the movie feels hollow—less like sci-fi, more like a stunt show with lore attached.

Most Vietnam films keep their distance—philosophizing from the margins, tidying the chaos into commentary. Platoon doesn’t. It crawls inside the experience and stays there, sweating. Oliver Stone, who actually served in the war, directs not like someone trying to make a statement, but like someone trying to remember exactly how it felt to be nineteen, terrified, and in the jungle with no clear sense of what counted as victory. We follow Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen), a college dropout who volunteers for service and quickly realizes he’s made a mistake no one is interested in helping him fix. Dropped into the middle of a hardened squad, he learns that the real battle isn’t just with the North Vietnamese—it’s with the heat, the insects, the exhaustion, and the men around him. Especially the ones in charge. The squad fractures under the weight of its own contradictions: one half is led by Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe), who seems to believe the war hasn’t completely eaten his soul; the other, by Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger), whose face is carved into a permanent snarl and whose sense of morality has been replaced by expedience and threat. A cache of weapons is found in a village. A woman is killed. What matters isn’t just what happens, but how everyone behaves afterward—who justifies it, who cracks, who watches in silence. Stone doesn’t underline the moral fallout; he lets it seep in like rot. The violence is graphic but never gratuitous. The shock doesn’t come from the gore, but from how quickly horror becomes routine. Stone had already proven himself a visceral filmmaker with Salvador, but this is something else—less about outrage, more about immersion. Platoon doesn’t just indict the war; it drops you in, no exit, no clean way out. The toll on American soldiers is front and center, but the grief isn’t exclusive. The damage cuts both ways. The scars didn’t care which side of the barrel you stood on.

Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut is a lean, nerve-prickling thriller that gets under your skin early and keeps pressing. He plays Dave Garver, a smooth-voiced radio DJ in coastal California who spends his nights spinning jazz and casually seducing fans. One of them calls in night after night with the same request: “Play ‘Misty’ for me.” Then she shows up in person. Her name is Evelyn (Jessica Walter), and what begins as a one-night stand quickly curdles into something else. She starts popping up in his bar, his doorstep, his bed—with the entitled confidence of someone already moved in. Dave, predictably, is ready to move on. Evelyn, just as predictably, is not. When he tries to establish distance, she answers with escalation—first hurt, then hysterics, then something sharper. She crashes a business lunch, convinced it’s a date. She slashes his tires. And that’s just the start. Walter gives a terrifyingly precise performance: needy one minute, monstrous the next. She doesn’t play Evelyn as unhinged from the beginning—she lets the screws loosen gradually, until you’re not sure what’s scarier: her presence or her persistence. The film borrows liberally from Psycho, and while it doesn’t have Hitchcock’s command of structure, it knows how to stage a jolt. There are scenes here that don’t just echo the genre—they twist the knife a little. Eastwood, for his part, underplays Dave with typical restraint. He’s less a Hitchcock protagonist than a man who just wanted a drink and got saddled with a stalker. His detachment works, though it means Walter ends up doing the heavy lifting—emotionally, dramatically, and at times physically. It’s a tidy thriller with jagged edges. The pacing wobbles in places, and the romantic subplot feels more like filler than tension. But when it wants to scare you, it knows how. And when Jessica Walter locks into Evelyn’s manic focus, the film catches fire.

This movie’s entertainment value lies in the quirks of its characters, not the jokes. Come to think of it, I’m not sure anything here qualifies as a gag in the classic sense. When Carey Mahoney (Steve Guttenberg), a burnout parking lot attendant, loses an argument with a customer about whether the lot is full, he responds by driving the customer’s car on two side wheels and wedging it neatly between two parked cars. It’s absurd, but it’s not exactly a gag. Gags are what you’d expect in a spoof, and Police Academy doesn’t spoof anything. It just exists in a world where weird people are funny because they’re weird. The setup is that the city’s police academy has been forced, by liberal bureaucratic decree, to admit anyone—regardless of size, gender, temperament, or social standing. Certain higher-ups, including a perpetually fuming drill instructor (G.W. Bailey), pine for the days when recruits all looked alike and didn’t talk back. He takes it upon himself to weed out the “undesirables” through humiliation and aggression. Naturally, his tactics backfire, and he becomes the object of repeated embarrassment—usually through the quiet, cooperative chaos of his misfit recruits. There’s the prissy debutante (Kim Cattrall) joining the force to spite her family; the soft-spoken woman (Marion Ramsey) whose voice barely registers above a whisper; the towering well-mannered giant who can smash his way through anything (Bubba Smith); the unhinged gun enthusiast (David Graf); the human sound-effects machine (Michael Winslow); and the rotund, anxious recruit whose chief talent is simply being rotund and anxious (Donovan Scott). There are others, and none are especially developed, but each one adds a piece to the ensemble. This is the antithesis of refined comedy. The plotting is barely functional. The jokes are more like character beats. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy watching these strange, unpolished people bounce off one another. It’s not clever, but it is oddly satisfying—especially in how it embraces the idea that misfits, when given a shot, might turn out to be good at something after all.

The misfit recruits from the first film are back, this time tasked with saving the most crime-ridden precinct in the city—though you’d be forgiven for thinking they were sent there to wander aimlessly between punchlines. The setup is nominal. The result feels like everyone showed up, put their quirks in a pile, and hoped something resembling comedy would walk out. Where the first film coasted on personality—barely a plot, but at least some unruly momentum—this one wheezes. The characters return, technically, but whatever shreds of likability they had have been traded in for exaggerated twitches and autopilot grins. Guttenberg still grins like a man who knows he’s gotten away with something, but now it’s starting to feel like we’re the ones paying for it. The others shout, react, repeat. Bobcat Goldthwait enters like a wrong note in a broken symphony and somehow becomes the only part worth hearing. Playing a shrieking gang leader with the composure of a lawn chair in a hurricane, he twitches and sputters his way through scenes with a kind of delirious purpose. When he awkwardly finds himself beside the mayor during a public event, he mutters, “I voted for you,” with the dazed sincerity of a child who just recognized someone from TV. It’s the biggest laugh—maybe the only one—and it arrives completely sideways. The rest? A sluggish parade of callbacks, slapstick without rhythm, and plot points that dissolve before they’ve finished arriving. It’s a sequel that confuses repetition for structure and noise for spirit. Whatever strange little energy the first Police Academy stumbled into, this one manages to misplace before the opening credits are even done fading.

As the title promises, the misfit crew is back at the Academy—but this time, they’re the instructors. The blind leading the barely house-trained. Their mission: whip a new class into shape and save the Academy from being shut down by the State. Bureaucratic threats aside, it’s mostly an excuse to return to the original formula—underdogs driving authority figures crazy. In an especially bold act of narrative amnesia, they even let Zed (Bobcat Goldthwait) teach. Yes, the same screechy anarchist who spent the last film terrorizing the city is now somehow in uniform and barking instructions. Imagine that voice trying to walk you through firearm safety. I didn’t think much of Police Academy 2, but this third round feels lighter on its feet. The jokes don’t aim high, and they rarely hit hard, but the rhythm is breezy, and the tone lands comfortably back in the key of dumb-but-watchable. Nothing here reinvents anything. But I smiled more often than I expected to. If you didn’t like the first one, this won’t convert you. But if you did, this is the closest the sequels come to recapturing what made it work in the first place—antics, idiots, and authority figures on the verge of breakdown.

Jackie Chan doesn’t make action movies so much as try to murder himself in front of a camera. Police Story might be the purest distillation of that impulse—a vehicle for physical risk-taking disguised, barely, as a cop drama. The plot is there, technically: Chan plays a well-meaning wrecking ball in uniform, assigned to protect the secretary of a crime boss whose courtroom testimony might bring down an empire. There’s a romantic subplot, a few comedy beats, some gentle workplace humiliation—but it’s all there to support what Chan does best: launch himself through glass, concrete, and physics. The two sequences people remember aren’t just good; they’re permanently seared into the genre. It opens with a full-speed pursuit down a hillside shantytown, as Chan drives through—not around—every makeshift dwelling in sight. By the end, roofs have become ramps, entire homes are kindling, and the movie has declared war on structural integrity. Then comes the finale: a mall fight that concludes with Chan sliding down a thirty-foot pole wrapped in electric light bulbs, which shatter and flare on impact like he’s short-circuiting the building on the way down. He’s not just risking bones here—he’s tempting fate, volts first. The middle holds, more or less. There’s charm in the slapstick, and the tonal detours don’t derail anything because, really, no one’s here for the courtroom procedural. They’re here to see a man fall off increasingly tall objects and somehow keep the plot moving while concussed. This is a movie that turns bodily harm into choreography and turns choreography into legacy. You don’t walk away remembering the dialogue. You walk away wondering how Chan walked away at all.

Another dependable Jackie Chan showcase, and proof that a story doesn’t need much depth when the action is this reckless and done for real. Chan returns as Chan Ka-Kui—still “Kevin” for the sake of us English speakers—sent undercover to help take down a drug kingpin named Chaibat. The assignment is mostly an excuse to fling him from one dangerous scenario to the next and see what holds. This time he’s paired with Jessica Yang (Michelle Yeoh, calm, quick, and perfectly willing to risk her neck alongside him). Their teamwork is more about mutual respect than warmth—two competent people keeping each other alive while jumping on cars and dodging bullets. The plot does its job: betrayals, near misses, a double-cross or two, and then back to more leaping from tall places. The real reason to watch is what Chan and Yeoh actually put themselves through. He hangs onto moving cars, trades blows on a train roof, and famously swings from a helicopter ladder like it’s nothing. Yeoh keeps up without blinking—her motorcycle landing on that same moving train is still enough to make modern CGI look embarrassed. Nobody watches Supercop for the storyline. You watch it to see Chan and Yeoh push physics to its breaking point and grin while doing it. By the time that helicopter dips into frame for the last stunt, the film has already done what you paid for: pure, practical mayhem, with no apologies for it. The plot is fine. The stunts are the entire point.

For a while, it’s a riot. Riya (Priya Kansara), a teenage Anglo-Pakistani girl with a high-flying stunt-double fantasy, launches herself—sometimes literally—into a world of schoolyard scrapes, YouTube training videos, and hijinks with her two ride-or-die best friends. Her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya), a onetime art student turned dropout-in-a-slump, is her anchor and idol. Their relationship is the heartbeat of the first act: messy, protective, half-spoken in side-eyes and deep-cut references. And then Lena meets a rich, eerily polite geneticist, accepts his proposal with baffling speed, and starts pulling away—quieter, polished, and oddly blank. Riya’s mission is clear. She’s going to stop the wedding—by any means necessary. The setup is electric. School becomes a staging ground for spycraft. Parents hover. Schemes escalate. Riya, convinced something sinister is at work, enlists her friends in covert surveillance operations that play like a cross between Nancy Drew and Ocean’s Eleven—if both were choreographed by someone with a black belt and a very short fuse. Kansara gives it everything: kicks, timing, deranged optimism. She’s a live wire with good form. But then the film swerves. What starts as a culture-clash teen comedy slips into stylized martial arts set pieces, full-on Kill Bill brawls in bridal salons, and—eventually—a science fiction twist involving cloning, maternal obsession, and designer bloodlines. It’s not that the turn isn’t bold. It is. But the tonal whiplash is real. The genre shift comes hard and fast, and instead of deepening the satire, it splits the movie in two—half grounded coming-of-age, half comic-book delirium. Still, there’s momentum. The choreography’s inventive, the jokes come fast, and the direction pushes forward like it’s too busy to notice what’s not working. Even when it overreaches—and it does—you’re watching a filmmaker swing for something bigger than just another quirky debut. Polite Society may not fully earn its final act, but the first hour is pure adrenaline, and Kansara turns it into a star entrance.

They’re back—but the fear’s been downgraded. Poltergeist II relocates the Freeling family, swaps out their haunted house for a haunted zip code, and fires up the ghost machine once again. What it can’t recreate is the elegant dread of the original. This one’s messier, louder, and structured like a greatest-hits medley—less a continuation than a well-funded déjà vu. Still, if the scares feel recycled, the special effects don’t. The film lays on its practical wizardry with real commitment. Robbie’s dental braces erupt from his mouth in a snarl of wire and snake him across the bathroom like a possessed marionette. It’s not quite the haunted tree that snatched him from his bed the first time around, but it plays in the same sandbox—with a new set of twisted toys. And yet the most disturbing presence in the film doesn’t require rubber or rigging: it’s the preacher. Played by Julian Beck, he arrives looking like death on furlough—sunken eyes, skeletal frame, and a voice pitched somewhere between hymn and hiss. He doesn’t need effects. He is one. He shows up, and you want him gone immediately. The first film built tension like a Beethoven symphony—measured, escalating, impossible to outrun. This one scatters it—sharp bursts tossed like lit matches. But the cast holds steady. Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams return with the same bruised steadiness, panic threaded through parental instinct. And Heather O’Rourke—older now, still with that porcelain stillness—anchors the film without having to do much. The camera watches her closely, as if convinced she already knows where this is going. As flawed as this film is, you watch this and keep wishing these spirits would find a less wholesome family to pick on. It’s clunkier, weirder, and far less controlled than the first film—but there’s enough invention, affection, and full-throttle strangeness to justify its return. Not exactly scary, but hard to forget. Horror completists from this era shouldn’t miss it.

Not exactly good, but stranger and more ambitious than you’d expect from a third lap around the spectral block. What keeps Poltergeist III from dissolving entirely is its tactile weirdness—flesh bubbles, ice-crusted portals, bodies dragged kicking into glass. It’s not terrifying, but it looks haunted. Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke, in her final performance) has been relocated to a Chicago high-rise, living with her aunt and uncle (Nancy Allen and Tom Skerritt) while attending a school for gifted children—though here, “gifted” mostly means being closely monitored by smug adults. Chief among them is a resident psychiatrist (Richard Fire), who insists the strange phenomena are just parlor tricks and peer pressure. He’s convinced Carol Anne is orchestrating the whole thing for attention. That theory doesn’t last long—once a coffee mug flings itself through a mirror and the walls start pulsing like lungs, denial becomes a harder sell. The ghosts haven’t left. They’ve just upgraded. Reflections ripple. Doubles appear. Doors open onto nowhere. People vanish mid-sentence and return altered—expression off, voice wrong, something missing behind the eyes. Whatever realm used to lurk in the closet has now moved into the mirrors. Mirrors are the film’s main conduit: they trap, flip, and fracture. The practical effects team goes wild—reverse-motion tricks, actors mirrored in ways that defy physics, bodies melting through glass like wax figures under heat lamps. The laws of space and logic fray. The film doesn’t build tension so much as stack spectacle on spectacle. The plot is barely there and the mood keeps slipping. But for fans of practical horror, it holds a certain fascination, playing like a haunted house attraction built with studio money—stylized, muddled, and intermittently mesmerizing.

There’s not much new in The Pope’s Exorcist, but there is Russell Crowe—riding a Vespa through Rome, muttering Latin between dry quips, and treating demonic warfare like someone else’s clerical error. He plays Father Gabriele Amorth, chief exorcist to the Vatican and semi-willing participant in the Church’s less photogenic operations. He’s unbothered, sarcastic, and possibly more skeptical of his superiors than of the demons themselves. The film kicks off with a tidy little confrontation: a possibly-possessed man, a shotgun, and a pig who doesn’t make it out alive. Amorth declares the case psychosomatic and shrugs it off, but his next assignment in Spain proves less containable. A young boy named Henry has gone full Linda Blair, and something about this one makes Amorth uneasy. The backstory is ancient. The stakes are theological. The demon snarls in multiple languages and wants to make it personal. But the script doesn’t. The plot goes through the genre’s standard rotations—cryptic artifacts, buried secrets, levitation, snarling, more snarling—and none of it is especially frightening unless you’ve never seen an exorcism on film before. The jump scares are airless. The twists announce themselves like guests who text from the driveway. Crowe, at least, stays watchable. He gives Amorth a weary confidence, like a man who’s been over this drill for decades and would rather not raise his voice about it. The film is also glossy to the point of parody—every scene lit like it’s auditioning for a metal album cover, complete with robed figures backlit by fire. There’s the occasional chilling image, and Crowe plays it like he’s read the script and decided to make himself comfortable anyway. But for all the fuss about darkness and damnation, The Pope’s Exorcist doesn’t have much to show beyond the usual cross-waving and Latin shouting. Crowe’s presence gives it shape. The rest just goes through the motions.

Robert Altman’s Popeye is a misfire—though such an odd, lumbering misfire that I find myself half-admiring the sheer nerve of it. Nobody could accuse him of slapping a cartoon on screen and calling it a day; if anything, he smothered it in style until coherence tapped out. Robin Williams, in his first big-screen leading role, is weirdly perfect as the spinach-slurping sailor: all mumbled half-sentences and twitchy physical comedy, so spot-on you sometimes wish you could understand half of it. Shelley Duvall, meanwhile, was simply born to play Olive Oyl—no other human has ever looked so much like a walking doodle without needing prosthetics. The real marvel is the set: a weather-beaten tangle of docks and staircases clinging to a cliffside in Malta, looking like a place Popeye might squat in out of pure contrariness. Every corner seems propped up by crooked boards and sea air—one of the great accidental theme parks built for a film. Once the novelty wears off, the film starts tripping over its own feet. Scenes snip off mid-lunge and are cluttered with stray bits of slapstick—windows break, heads poke through doors, pratfalls trail off halfway—until your eyes can’t quite catch up before the next oddity shoves itself in. There’s a musical score too, technically: Harry Nilsson’s songs drift through in a half-sung, half-muttered haze, as if the cast were shy about raising their voices over the ever-grumbling tuba line. It’s one of those movies that people either defend with cultish devotion or declare unwatchable. I sit somewhere in between: there’s real artistry and mischief buried in the racket, but every time I try to love it, my brain surrenders halfway through the next muttered number.

A low-budget thriller with a premise so strong it’s almost a shame to watch it fall apart. Jeremy Sisto plays a U.S. Census worker dispatched to a remote North Dakota town, where something’s off—not with the people, at first, but with the math. For over a century, the population has stayed frozen at 436. Not 435. Not 437. Just 436. It’s the kind of setup that makes your ears perk up. And then the movie begins to explain itself. Too early, too easily. Anyone who’s seen a mid-tier Twilight Zone episode can spot where it’s going, and the film doesn’t fight the guesswork—it walks you to the answer like it’s proud of the reveal. What might’ve worked as a tight, unsettling short gets stretched out to feature length, with few new ideas and even fewer surprises. Visually, it doesn’t help that the town looks like any rural outpost off a highway exit. This should feel uncanny—picture-perfect in a way that raises suspicion—but the sets are flat, the cinematography uninspired, and the tone, while technically eerie, feels like it’s just checking boxes. Fred Durst—indeed, of Limp Bizkit fame—plays the town’s deputy. He’s perfectly serviceable, which is probably more than you’d expect, but not enough to be a draw. This is a movie that should have spiraled into something eerie, unhinged, maybe even grandiose. Instead, it walks in a straight line—neat, cautious, and too polite for its own concept. You don’t regret watching it. You just wish it had the nerve to get weird.

Only Hayao Miyazaki would look at a sky full of post-WWI dogfighters and see room for something wistful, funny, and gently surreal. Porco Rosso isn’t quite a fantasy and not quite a war story—it’s a lyrical detour through nostalgia, with propellers. Michael Keaton voices Porco, a mercenary pilot who used to be a man and now resembles a trench-coated pig with a pilot’s license and a moral code shaped by cigarette ash. He patrols the Adriatic Sea picking off air pirates, cashing modest bounties, and dodging questions. His condition—cursed, allegedly—is never explained and barely acknowledged, like everything else he doesn’t care to revisit. When his plane takes a hit, he hires Fio, a teenage engineer (voiced by Kimberly Williams-Paisley), to rebuild it. She’s bold, ingenious, and unbothered by his grumbling—a foil with the energy of someone who hasn’t yet learned to second-guess herself. The film’s plot is featherlight—mostly excuses for dogfights, repairs, and the occasional duel—but the flying is where it lifts off. Miyazaki draws planes like other directors draw faces: each with its own personality, stitched together from dream logic and riveted steel. The aerial sequences don’t just move—they glide, stall, dip, recover. Even when bullets fly, it’s not violence that registers, but choreography. The film moves at its own pace, but there’s purpose in the stillness. Beneath the jokes and the hum of propellers, there’s a sense that Porco isn’t just dodging the law—he’s keeping his distance from the man he used to be. Whether the pig curse is magic or metaphor barely matters. Miyazaki lets it hang in the air like smoke—felt, but never spelled out. It doesn’t hit like Spirited Away or Totoro, but Porco Rosso moves differently. Slower, more reflective. It’s a story about flight, but also about drifting, dodging, stalling out. The plot wanders, but not aimlessly. It feels like it’s following a current—one that knows detours can be beautiful, too.

Horny boys and hijinks—Porky’s is no-holds-barred, hormone-fueled nonsense, and it’s not shy about what it is. Offensive at the time of release, it has only grown worse with age. Watching it now feels less like a teen sex comedy and more like a case study in how easily sexual harassment was rebranded as light entertainment. The poster doesn’t lie. There’s a hole in the girls’ locker room wall, and a lineup of teenage boys takes turns peeking through it to watch them shower. The girls catch them—naturally—but instead of reacting with outrage, they giggle. One boy takes it a step further by pushing the prank into even more inappropriate territory, pushing a certain appendage through the peephole, which somehow gets even more laughs. Then Coach Balbricker (Nancy Parsons), the no-nonsense disciplinarian, walks in, catches him mid-act, and refuses to let go until someone confesses. It’s crass and uncomfortable—but at least the scene commits to its payoff, however ridiculous. Other scenes don’t even offer that much. There’s a subplot involving an assistant coach nicknamed “Lassie” (Kim Cattrall) and the reason her colleagues howl every time her name is mentioned. The joke gets dragged out past its expiration date—if it ever had one. Then there’s Porky himself: a gravel-voiced, cigar-chomping strip club owner who cons the boys out of their money by promising them a good time, only to drop them through a trap door into a swamp. It kicks off a feud between Porky and the boys, but even the slapstick feels more mean-spirited than mischievous. And yet, Porky’s remains oddly watchable—a collision of adolescent energy and crude spectacle that occasionally stumbles into something genuinely funny. Part of that might come from its former status as forbidden fruit. I still remember seeing the VHS cover at Hollywood Video as a teenager, long before I could rent R-rated movies, and wondering what kind of scandal was hiding inside that tape. I sort of enjoyed it, but I’m conflicted. This is the kind of movie that helped solidify the myth of “locker room talk”—the idea that boys naturally talk and act this way, and always have. It’s loud, lewd, and completely sold on the belief that boys will be boys—just as long as no one bothers to ask what the girls think.

This sequel lacks the gleeful sleaze of its predecessor, but I’ll give it this much: it ends with members of the Ku Klux Klan getting thoroughly humiliated. That’s not a spoiler—it’s obvious from the moment they show up that their comeuppance is baked in. The pleasure, such as it is, comes from seeing how it unfolds. Unfortunately, there’s little else worth savoring. The film opens with Pee Wee (Dan Monahan) basking in the glow of finally having lost his virginity to Wendy (Kaki Hunter), and strutting around school like he’s invincible. He isn’t. He’s still a walking target for lewd pranks and juvenile taunts. The rest of the film revolves around a planned Shakespeare festival that comes under fire from a fire-and-brimstone preacher named Bubba Flavel (Bill Wiley), who marches on rehearsals with his followers—one of whom is the returning Ms. Balbricker (Nancy Parsons)—demanding the event be canceled. Shakespeare, apparently, is a moral threat. But what really seems to be at stake is that the play features a Seminole student cast as Romeo opposite a white Juliet. That racial tension could’ve added substance, but the film barely scratches the surface in that regard. Instead, what we get are endless scenes of characters razzing another boy for playing “Yarn, the king of the fairies,” which has zero comedic effect. But the low point of the movie is an elaborate prank in a crowded restaurant, where Wendy accuses a local politician of statutory rape. It ends with her and a vat of fake vomit she’s stored inside her dress and pretends to hurl into a decorative fountain. It’s supposed to be outrageous, but it’s just off-putting—unconvincing, overwrought, and relentlessly cruel to a character who didn’t deserve it. Cringe comedy is one thing, but this sequel is just cringe.

Porky (Chuck Mitchell) returns after sitting out the last film, and this time he’s gone full spectacle: his rebuilt strip club now floats on a riverboat and doubles as a casino. One of its regulars, unfortunately, is the school’s beloved basketball coach, Mr. Goodenough (Bill Hindman), who’s drowning in gambling debt. That doesn’t sit well with the Boys, who devise a scheme to get even. They convince Porky to place a heavy bet against their team—promising to lose the big game on purpose—but then go all in to win it instead. If you’re watching these movies for the pranks, this third outing comes up embarrassingly short. Even the minor hijinks fall flat. A scene where the cheerleading squad tricks the Boys into thinking they’re getting an orgy isn’t just unfunny—it’s gross. Worse is the moment they leer at a woman bent over the hood of a car, admiring her legs, only to recoil when she lifts her head and reveals her face. She turns out to be Porky’s daughter and, eventually, unhinged—but the joke rests entirely on the idea that her appearance alone is a punchline. It’s not just mean—it’s lazy. But the lowest point belongs to a cruel trick played on Ms. Balbricker (Nancy Parsons), where the Boys lead her to believe an old flame is meeting her at a motel. Instead, she ends up in bed—naked—with one of her most hated students. It’s played for farce, but it feels more like punishment on the audience. While the first Porky’s was crude but guiltily watchable, this one doesn’t stir any such moral confusion. There’s no push-pull between laughter and discomfort—just the flat thud of a franchise scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The Portable Door plays like a Harry Potter spinoff that got lost in middle management. It has the outline of a magical adventure but never quite decides what story it wants to tell. Paul (Patrick Gibson) and Sophie (Sophie Wilde) are two interns at a vaguely sinister firm that claims to manage the invisible forces of fate, luck, and human behavior. Their first assignment: track down a missing door. Not metaphorical—a literal door, misplaced somewhere in the building, that leads to a forgotten magical realm. The premise suggests something madcap or mysterious, but the tone keeps defaulting to light whimsy. Is this a satirical take on corporate culture? A reluctant-hero journey with bureaucratic flair? A storybook adventure that accidentally grew a middle manager? The film gestures at all three and commits to none. Gibson plays Paul as a familiar sketch—awkward, well-meaning, slow to catch on—but he’s at least agreeable, and gets a few laughs. Wilde brings more spark, though the script rarely gives her control of the scene. The film gets a jolt every time Christoph Waltz enters the frame. He plays the company’s slippery CEO as someone who enjoys speaking in italics—drawling through exposition like it’s beneath him. Sam Neill, looking like he wandered in from a much duller meeting, plays it drier and darker, which helps. Their scenes don’t deepen the plot, but they do break the monotony. It’s a strange film—built around a fun idea, but too polite to push it anywhere surprising. The worldbuilding is thin, the magic mostly decorative, and the stakes never rise above a staff meeting. For a movie about losing a door, it keeps most of them closed. Slight, scattered, and not quite curious enough to be worth unlocking.

This is one of those films I feel like I should have forced myself to like—if only to avoid the scornful glares I am imagining receiving from the literary-minded kids back in middle school. But I’ll be honest: sitting through this costume drama bored me to tears. I can’t help but wonder if Jane Campion, a director I genuinely admire, felt the same way. The film opens with a strange, modern montage of contemporary women dancing in soft light, as if trying to suggest timeless feminism. But ultimately, it just feels out of place. Later, there’s another out-of-place moment—a surreal dream sequence that arrives without warning and dissolves just as quickly. It’s as though the film keeps trying to wake itself up. Based on the Henry James novel, the plot follows Isabel Archer (Nicole Kidman), a fiercely independent American who inherits a fortune and travels through Europe determined not to let anyone—especially men—shape her fate. But she falls under the influence of Madame Merle (Barbara Hershey), a manipulative woman who orchestrates Isabel’s disastrous marriage to the cold, controlling Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich). What unfolds is a slow-motion slide into regret, obligation, and emotional confinement. On the plus side, the film is gorgeous to look at. Every frame is a painting, and the performances are technically flawless. But in the end, I just couldn’t bring myself to care. This is a film where everyone speaks in prose and no one seems entirely alive. I admired the craft, but I sat through this wishing someone would open a window and let the air in.

What makes The Poseidon Adventure a top-shelf disaster movie isn’t just the scale or the stakes—it’s the conviction. The film traps a cast of seasoned pros inside an overturned cruise liner and dares them to crawl their way out, one flooding corridor at a time. The ship flips on New Year’s Eve, courtesy of a rogue wave and a penny-pinching executive decision to ignore safety valves. One minute there’s dancing and champagne, the next—ceiling is floor, floor is ceiling, and survival’s a vertical problem. Gene Hackman, giving the kind of performance that could shame most dramas, plays Reverend Scott, a renegade preacher who takes it upon himself to lead a shrinking group of survivors to the surface. He’s not pious, he’s pissed—at God, at the ship’s owners, at every death that might’ve been prevented. It’s one of Hackman’s most physically intense roles, and he turns every crawlspace into a pulpit. The ensemble—Shelley Winters, Red Buttons, Ernest Borgnine, Stella Stevens—doesn’t waste a second. They wear dread like it’s been stitched into their suits. No one’s mugging. No one’s safe. The suspense doesn’t come from if someone will die, but how soon—and whether it’ll be in vain. Visually, it’s a masterclass in contained spectacle. The upside-down set feels eerily plausible: grand staircases now lead to nowhere, dining rooms hang overhead, and every exit is either flooded or on fire. You can almost feel the tilt. It’s not art. It’s survival cinema that trades spectacle for pressure. Not just bodies scrambling through wreckage, but actors sweating through each decision—no guarantees, no dramatic swells, just one bad option after another. The structure groans, the light vanishes, and escape routes start looking more like traps. You don’t grip the seat because of what might happen—you grip it because of how narrowly everything already has.

Suzanne Vale (Meryl Streep) has one of those Hollywood careers held together by studio optimism and a steady drip of pharmaceuticals. She’s a recovering addict fresh out of rehab, trying to convince producers she’s stable enough to show up and stay vertical. Her latest gig comes with a clause: to get the part, she has to live with a responsible adult. That ends up being her mother. Doris Mann (Shirley MacLaine) doesn’t believe in quiet rooms or second billing. She’s a silver-screen holdover with a glitter-caked sense of composure and the instincts of someone who’s spent decades in front of mirrors and very little time in the present. Her brand of parenting flips between backhanded pep talks and cocktail-hour nostalgia. Suzanne, for her part, has mastered the sidestep—deploying dry barbs and long-honed eye-rolls like someone used to being cast as supporting in her own life. Carrie Fisher’s script drifts through rehab centers, tepid set visits, wrecked romances, and lunches that start civil and end with something airborne—emotional or otherwise. Suzanne tries to patch together a career while juggling the lifelong job of being someone’s daughter. It’s not a breakdown movie, not quite a showbiz satire, and definitely not a redemption arc. More like a scatterplot of emotional hazards—some funny, some sharp, none cushioned. What makes it work is the rhythm between them. Streep gives Suzanne a brittle poise—alert, depleted, always aware when she’s being handled and just lucid enough to play along until she isn’t. MacLaine brings Doris a cabaret glow and a conversational style that doubles as armor. Their scenes move like an argument that’s been paused and resumed too many times to still be about the original point.

A drifter walks into a diner, and the temperature spikes immediately. Frank (John Garfield), footloose and vaguely dangerous, picks up a job at a dusty roadside joint on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The place belongs to Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway), a cheerfully oblivious man with a fondness for drink and a younger wife he doesn’t quite know how to hold onto. That wife is Cora (Lana Turner), all platinum gloss and locked-in frustration, and the moment she steps onscreen in that iconic white outfit, the plot starts sweating. The affair between Frank and Cora ignites almost before they’ve exchanged pleasantries. Theirs isn’t a romance—it’s desperation with a physical outlet. Nick’s decision to sell the diner and drag Cora off to care for his ailing sister in northern Canada pushes the couple’s vague fantasies into something more tangible. Murder becomes not just an option but a way out. What follows is a slow slide into paranoia, betrayal, and everything that noir does best. Turner and Garfield are electric—two beautiful animals circling each other, half in lust and half in doom. Their chemistry is physical, but what makes it so unnerving is how hollow it is beneath the surface. These aren’t masterminds. They’re flawed, impulsive, and entirely out of their depth. When things start to spiral—plans backfiring, tensions flaring—the damage is psychological, emotional, and occasionally brutal. The violence, when it comes, isn’t flashy—it feels like consequence catching up to recklessness. This is quintessential film noir: sweaty, sordid, morally murky, and impossible to look away from.