Film Buff Musings

By the sixth outing in their freewheeling franchise, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby weren’t so much reinventing the formula as test-driving it through increasingly exotic backlots. Road to Bali has all the expected features: topical zingers, fourth-wall winks, romantic rivalry, and Dorothy Lamour—glamorous, poised, and once again caught in a love triangle with two wisecracking man-children. The scenery changes (Australia to Indonesia, with Hollywood’s idea of “Bali” rendered in palm fronds and papier-mâché volcanoes), but the rhythm is familiar: flee commitment, flirt with danger, fall into treasure. Hope and Crosby, to their credit, still have the banter down to a science. Even when the jokes themselves fizzle, their timing keeps things buoyant. But the film leans hard on gags that were probably creaky on arrival—references to 1950s pop culture, celebrity cameos, and the kind of smirking self-awareness that thinks acknowledging the artifice is just as good as fixing it. The result is more diverting than funny, a comedy of detours rather than punchlines. Still, there’s a strange charm in its showbiz insularity: an artifact less interested in storytelling than in watching two stars coast on chemistry. For casual viewers, the novelty wears thin fast. But for film historians—or anyone interested in the shape of mid-century comedy—it’s a mild curiosity, preserved in technicolor and sealed in celluloid like a vaudeville act stubbornly refusing to bow.

Few big-budget Hollywood films operate with this much stillness. Road to Perdition is a gangster story stripped of bluster, a Prohibition-era fable told in hushed tones and shrouded grays, where the bursts of violence feel less like spectacle than consequence. Tom Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, a hitman so composed and reticent he barely seems to belong to the same species as the men he kills. But he’s also a father—fiercely protective, quietly affectionate—and it’s this contradiction that gives the film its gravitational pull. When Sullivan is betrayed by the very Chicago crime family that once treated him like blood, he grabs his son and hits the road—not to escape so much as to reckon. The boy, suddenly confronted with his father’s double life, watches from the passenger seat as the myth of heroism shrivels into something colder, sadder, more human. Their bond doesn’t deepen so much as it clarifies—shaped in silence, tempered by grief. Paul Newman, in one of his last great roles, plays crime boss John Rooney with elegiac weight. There’s a sadness in his performance, a resignation that seems to seep through his famously blue eyes like smoke through floorboards. And then there’s Daniel Craig, as Rooney’s volatile son—petulant, cowardly, and psychotically jealous. One grin from him is enough to send a chill through the reel. Jude Law, meanwhile, slinks through the picture like a carrion bird, a crime-scene photographer with a side hustle in murder, his presence grimy and clinical in a way the others are not. The execution is as serious as the story demands. Mendes doesn’t rush, doesn’t lean on cheap theatrics, and never lets the film slip into action-for-action’s-sake. Conrad Hall’s cinematography is remarkable in how understated it is—light and shadow are used to build character, not decorate it. The color palette stays drained, the pacing steady, the violence quiet but final. This isn’t really a revenge story. It’s about what’s left standing after the blood dries.

An effective, offbeat thriller that drives its suspense more on personality than spectacle. Stacy Keach stars as Pat Quid, an American trucker hauling meat across the vast Australian outback, with only his loyal dingo Boswell for company. When a series of women go missing along his route, Quid starts suspecting the driver of a shadowy green van. His musings might be pure road paranoia—until reality starts catching up. Jamie Lee Curtis brings her usual cool-headed presence to the role of a sharp-witted hitchhiker who joins the ride just as things begin to spiral. The two make a strong pair, riffing like a screwball duo while slowly closing in on the mystery—or perhaps stumbling deeper into it. What gives the film its unique spark isn’t just the tension (though it’s got plenty), but the fact that it never rushes to reveal its cards. It lets its characters breathe, doubt, and second-guess—especially as the authorities begin to suspect Quid himself. The production’s scrappy texture betrays its B-movie bones, but the filmmaking is resourceful, and the wide, empty roads of the outback become a canvas for paranoia. Keach gives a compelling performance: twitchy, talkative, and just barely holding it together. It doesn’t quite have the polish of a Hitchcock homage, but it runs on similar fuel—dread, wit, and a little existential vertigo. A smart, slightly strange ride that deserves a wider following.

The first Disney animated feature completed entirely without Walt Disney’s oversight—he’d approved The Aristocats before his passing—Robin Hood feels like a studio testing whether its signature magic could run on autopilot. It mostly can, though the seams show more than usual. The animation is fluid and confidently staged, but the thick ink outlines and recycled character designs give it a faintly rough-hewn look compared to Disney’s more polished classics. Some sequences re-use entire bits of animation from The Jungle Book and Snow White, which doesn’t ruin the fun but does cheapen it if you notice. The story sticks faithfully to the folklore: the charming outlaw who robs the rich to feed the poor, outwits the greedy prince, and wins the maiden’s heart. Here, the twist is everyone’s an animal—Robin is a fox with a bow and a grin (voiced with sly warmth by Brian Bedford), Little John is a big, affable bear voiced by Phil Harris, who more or less repeats his Baloo routine from The Jungle Book, both in voice and design. It’s framed by a banjo-plucking rooster troubadour (Roger Miller) who insists this is the animal kingdom’s version of the tale, though the plot unfolds exactly as it does in the human version, so the conceit feels mostly cosmetic. It’s not as consistently funny or richly drawn as Disney’s finest work—too much of it coasts on easy slapstick and recycled charm—but it has an earnest sweetness that’s hard to resist. The music is folksy and catchy enough to hum later, the villains are enjoyably hissable, and the whole thing moves with the gentle momentum of a bedtime story. Watching the movie as a kid, it felt like a storybook come to life, and in a way, it still does. It never reaches the grandeur or wit of Disney’s peak, but it gets by on pure good nature—and that’s enough to make it one of the studio’s more enduring comfort watches.

This lesser-seen Robin Hood arrived just in time to be completely steamrolled by Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and was quietly redirected to American television—where, frankly, it probably always belonged. It’s not a disaster, but it plays more like a lavish pilot than a feature film, complete with bright, plasticine sets, stilted swordplay, and a tone that lands somewhere between Ren Faire sincerity and Saturday afternoon camp. Patrick Bergin—looking like a vaguely more British Tom Selleck in forest drag—takes up the mantle of Robin with all the charm he can muster, which isn’t much, but it’s enough to coast through. Uma Thurman, improbably, is cast as Maid Marian, and while her presence gives the film a certain gravity, the dialogue does her no favors. In fact, dialogue is where this version most obviously stalls: long, talky stretches that sound less like medieval England and more like community theater Shakespeare warmed over. But there’s a kind of weird appeal here, especially if you’re the type who finds comfort in mid-budget historical pulp. The tone is light, the violence is tame, and the whole production has the makeshift feel of a syndicated fantasy series a few years ahead of its time—Xena: Warrior Princess is the nearest spiritual cousin, right down to the overpronounced costumes and awkwardly staged action. It’s not the Robin Hood you show to someone new to the legend. But if you’ve seen all the big ones and want something offbeat and mildly ridiculous, this one fits the bill. Lower your expectations, embrace the camp, and it goes down easier than expected.

My yearning to break into helpless laughter during a post-Silent Movie Mel Brooks send-up usually overshoots the actual number of laughs that make it out alive. Men in Tights is a prime example: a cheerfully sloppy swipe at Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves that fires off gags in every direction, hitting just enough to stay watchable but never quite piling up the laughs you hope for. Cary Elwes, fully aware of the swashbuckler clichés he’s sending up, plays Robin of Locksley—back from the Crusades and horrified to find his estate ransacked and Prince John (Richard Lewis, appropriately weaselly) squeezing the peasants dry. The plot mostly serves as a clothesline for Brooks’s usual bag of tricks: anachronisms, bawdy puns, direct nods to the audience, and a few musical breaks to remind you he never met a genre he wouldn’t lace with a show tune. A handful of bits still work well enough: Amy Yasbeck’s Maid Marian and her iron chastity belt earn a few smiles, and Mark Blankfield’s Blinkin—Robin’s blind lookout—gets in a few dumb but well-timed lines, especially when someone shouts “Hey, Blinkin!” which of course comes out sounding like “Abe Lincoln.” Brooks himself pops in as Rabbi Tuckman, who quickly realizes his circumcision side hustle has limited appeal once grown men are involved. Not every joke holds its shape. Tracey Ullman, wasted as a witch with a crush on Prince John, spends most of her time flailing for punchlines. Dom DeLuise pops up late in a limp Brando parody that doesn’t add much beyond reminding you Brando exists. Still, it’s hard to resent a film this goofy and overeager to amuse. It flings everything at the audience, snickers at its own nonsense, and keeps the mood light. As Robin points out, “Unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent.” The movie can’t always match his bravado, but you can’t say it doesn’t aim for it.

With a title like Robo Vampire, you expect some kind of cybernetic Dracula—maybe a bulletproof ghoul stalking the night while a frazzled Van Helsing tries to jam a stake through reinforced alloy. What you get instead is a guy in a silver, off-brand RoboCop costume, staggering through fights against white-faced “vampires” who bounce up and down with their arms stiff like malfunctioning animatronics. The film is a jumbled mash-up of horror, sci-fi, and kung fu—assembled from what looks like multiple unfinished projects and barely glued together. The picture quality hovers somewhere between bootleg and cable rerun, and the special effects seem to peak with a fireworks budget that might’ve cracked a hundred bucks. Scenes lurch into one another with no buildup, and the dialogue, dubbed into near-nonsense, doesn’t even try to match the actors’ mouths—or moods. And yet, for a while, it’s perversely entertaining. Zombies spring back to life with globs of mystery gel on their faces. A white witch—wearing a transparent gown and wielding no discernible acting ability—somehow manages a few competent fight scenes. At one point, a woman slices open a dead cow to stash bags of narcotics inside its ribcage—and unless this was the most elaborate practical effect ever pulled off on a $12 budget, that cow was real. But the film wears out its welcome in the final third, where the nonsense loses its novelty and becomes just noise. There’s no rhythm, no stakes, and no real climax—just a slow crawl through mismatched scenes and whiplash edits until the whole thing just gives up. This is a bad movie by any standard, but there’s a certain low-rent appeal early on—especially if you watch it the way it seems to have been made: with no clear plan and plenty of improv.

RoboCop is a film that seems like it should be ridiculous but somehow isn’t. It blends over-the-top violence, sci-fi dystopia, and deadpan corporate satire into something that works on almost every level. The practical effects are loud, vivid, and frequently grotesque, and the action scenes—especially early on—have a grim, almost clinical punctuation to them. It’s a movie that knows how to go big, but never forgets it has a point. Peter Weller plays Alex Murphy, a straight-arrow cop assigned to a precinct that might as well be war-torn. He’s barely on the job before he’s cornered and executed in a scene so brutal it borders on cartoonish. The final shot—right between the eyes—comes courtesy of Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith), a cackling gang leader who delivers violence like he’s tossing off punchlines. Murphy should be dead and buried, but instead becomes the property of Omni Consumer Products, thanks to an executive fast-tracking a project that turns dead cops into corporate-owned cyborgs. The man behind it, played by Miguel Ferrer, sees RoboCop as a product launch, not a resurrection. Murphy’s memories were supposed to be wiped, but fragments remain—his family, his house, the moment of death. And that crack in the programming becomes the film’s emotional throughline. RoboCop starts to remember. He starts asking questions. And eventually, he sets out to find the men who made him what he is. There’s a strong sci-fi backbone here—bits of I, Robot and Frankenstein, all filtered through Verhoeven’s warped sense of humor. The ED-209 demonstration is the clearest example: a towering, stop-motion robot guns down a board member for not dropping his weapon fast enough. It’s sudden, gruesome, and hilarious. Weller’s performance is restrained in all the right ways—stiff, unreadable, but tinged with something faintly human. Nancy Allen is solid as his partner, and both Ferrer and Smith bring the kind of presence that makes scenes sharper just by being in them. It shouldn’t work. But it does—brilliantly. Grim, absurd, and—amazingly—moving.

It gets the look right. The grime, the steel-blue palette, the soulless corporate boardrooms—it all mimics the first RoboCop well enough to feel like a continuation. But it doesn’t capture the essence. The bite’s been dulled, the emotion pared down, and what’s left is something more mechanical than thematic—which is saying something, given the lead character. Peter Weller returns, still magnetic under all that armor. He clunks, pivots, and blasts his way through crime like a walking tank, and still manages to give RoboCop a presence that never feels boring. But the filmmakers do his character no favors by draining away most of his internal struggle. In RoboCop, he was a man imprisoned inside a machine. Here, he’s a machine who vaguely remembers being a man—and apparently prefers not to dwell on it. In one scene, he tells his former wife that the human inside him is dead. It should sting. But the scene plays flat, because it feels like he’s right. The special effects are still solid—gruesome when needed, flashy in spots—but they mostly echo what the first film already did better. The villain this time around, a drug kingpin named Cain (Tom Noonan), never comes off as particularly dangerous or deranged—just underwritten. For a movie about escalating threats, it’s stuck with a pretty tepid one. Still, the film isn’t without charm. The script doesn’t forget to be funny. One standout sequence involves a committee of city bureaucrats trying to make RoboCop more “community friendly.” The result? He intervenes in a store robbery by gently scolding the children for poor manners while they loot the place in real time. That moment works. There should have been more like it. RoboCop 2 isn’t as smart, sharp, or emotionally grounded as its predecessor. But as a piece of chaotic, effects-driven sci-fi, it clears the bar—and then some—compared to the usual early-’90s action leftovers.

Disappointing, but not enough to ruin the afternoon. The third RoboCop opens with a scene that briefly suggests the filmmakers haven’t entirely forgotten the franchise’s bite: a little girl, Nikko (Remy Ryan), watches as a wrecking ball takes out her family’s living room mid-conversation. Apparently notice was served, just not taken seriously. Her parents vanish from the plot shortly after, but she sticks around—turns out she can reprogram military-grade androids to obey like lapdogs. RoboCop himself (now played by Robert Burke) decides his employer’s moral compass is spinning in the wrong direction and defects. He throws in with a band of armed civilians trying to hold on to what’s left of their homes, while OCP—still pushing its redevelopment agenda—sends in private security to clear the streets. After the first ten minutes—decent enough, if a little borrowed—the movie settles into something softer, safer, and a little too pleased with itself. Nikko is repositioned as a pint-sized tech prodigy. A ninja cyborg shows up, because of course one does. The PG-13 rating clings to everything like shrink-wrap. Whatever tone remains is scattershot, shuffled between scenes like it’s waiting to be picked. The cast is fine—Rip Torn, John Castle, Mako—but the script hands them cartoon motivations and sends them out to pose. The visuals are still impressive, and the basic outline of the story might’ve worked, but the execution feels padded with miscalculations. This film might not be the worst kind of failure—just the kind that confuses good intentions with good results, and forgets that this franchise wasn’t built for the toy aisle.

The Rock is a gleaming slab of ’90s action maximalism: high concept, high budget, and proudly improbable. It assumes you’re already elbows-deep in popcorn and proceeds accordingly. Ed Harris plays Brigadier General Frank Hummel, a decorated Marine turned rogue, who commandeers Alcatraz with a loyal unit and aims a cache of VX rockets—each loaded with delicate green globes of death—at San Francisco. His demand: restitution for families of soldiers killed on black ops missions. He’s not entirely wrong, but threatening mass chemical warfare tends to muddle the moral high ground. Enter Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), a twitchy FBI biochemist with no field training and an encyclopedic grasp of neurotoxins. He’s paired with John Mason (Sean Connery), a long-imprisoned ex-SAS operative and the only man to escape Alcatraz alive. Officially, Mason’s been kept off the books—not for what he did, but for what he knows. Now he’s out, reluctantly, with some hair product and the promise of daylight. The film’s opening third is overstocked with motives and backstories the script only half-sorts. Hummel’s men seem honor-bound—until they aren’t. Mason spends his early scenes needling authority figures before deciding, somewhat vaguely, to play along. But once the infiltration begins, the film locks into gear: narrow tunnels, stylized gunfights, and countdowns that rarely dip below five minutes. Cage and Connery settle into an odd-couple rhythm that mostly clicks—Cage twitching through every line while Connery projects calm exasperation. The action, in true Bay fashion, is choreographed with hyperactive precision: slow-motion hero shots, whiplash cuts, and camera angles that seem to flex. It’s all a bit much, but it works. The film might be nonsense, but it moves like it means it. At over two hours, it should wear out its welcome. It doesn’t. There’s always another corridor to clear, another compromise to blow past, another explosion staged like opera. Still probably the best thing Michael Bay ever directed—which says more about the rest of his résumé than it does about The Rock. But even on its own, it hits the target.

Roger & Me wastes no time laying down the blueprint for what would become Michael Moore’s signature approach: put himself in the middle of the story, aim high, ask the obvious questions no one else will, and watch the system squirm. The premise is simple, and brilliant: Moore wants to talk to the man at the top—General Motors chairman Roger B. Smith—about why the company decided to shutter a massive number of plants in Flint, Michigan, and ship the jobs to Mexico. Flint is Moore’s hometown. His dad worked at GM. He grew up with the promise of middle-class security, and now he’s watching his community fall apart in slow motion. The documentary becomes a kind of tragicomic odyssey as Moore, armed with nothing but a mic and some Midwestern resolve, tries to corner Smith for a conversation. Naturally, he’s stonewalled at every turn—chased off corporate property, brushed off by spokespeople, and treated like a trespasser for daring to ask a straightforward question: why? The genius of Roger & Me isn’t just in its thesis—it’s in how it plays. The tone oscillates between deadpan and devastating. Moore doesn’t rely on narration alone; he lets the absurdity speak for itself. One moment we’re watching a PR rep explain the company’s commitment to community while workers are being escorted out the back gate. The next, we’re meeting a woman selling rabbits for “pets or meat,” skinning one on camera without flinching. It’s not presented as freakshow material—it’s survival. By inserting himself into the story, Moore personalizes the narrative without hijacking it. He’s not trying to be neutral—he’s trying to be honest. And it works. What could have been a dry economic study becomes something alive and pointed. You laugh, and then you feel sick about why you’re laughing. The questions Moore asks in Roger & Me haven’t gone away. If anything, they’ve only gotten bigger.

It’s not every day a film invents its own sport—and even rarer when that sport looks like something a dystopian culture might genuinely embrace. Rollerball does both. Equal parts roller derby, hockey, and full-contact motocross, it features players circling a steel track on skates, slingshotted by motorcycles and periodically removed from competition by blunt force trauma. Helmets help. Briefly. Most careers end before year three. So when one man survives a decade, the system starts to malfunction. Jonathan (James Caan) is that man—a ten-year veteran, crowd favorite, and accidental symbol of human endurance in a society where individuality has been flagged as a threat. His popularity rattles the global megacorporation that controls the sport—and everything else, since boardrooms have replaced governments. They offer him a soft landing. He declines. So they change the rules—first no penalties, then no substitutions, finally no guardrails at all. The game sequences are brutal, kinetic, and edited with confidence. Jewison lets the sport explain itself—no rulebook monologues, no announcers mapping it out. It works by momentum alone. The broader dystopia, though, never hits quite as hard. The satire is blunt. The supposed overlords feel more procedural than tyrannical. For an entity that brought down nation-states, they seem oddly flustered by one skater who won’t take a hint. Late in the film, Jonathan visits a corporate supercomputer and learns that all the world’s books were digitized, then destroyed. The machine can’t explain why. It’s a weighty metaphor—one that might carry more force if it weren’t handed to a man best known for crashing into walls. The film treats the moment like a revelation, but it plays more like misdirection. It’s Space Jam pausing so Michael Jordan can mourn the death of the Dewey Decimal System. Rollerball keeps gesturing at big ideas—power, control, the erasure of history—but it never quite knows what to do with them. The social critique feels patched in, the revelations misassigned, and the future imagined just enough to frame the action. It doesn’t really hold together, but at least it knows how to stage a corporate beating.

Romance with a Double Bass is a 40-minute curiosity starring John Cleese as Smychov, a socially anxious double bass player in 19th-century Imperial Russia who finds himself embroiled in what can only be described as a genteel streaking incident. With time to kill before a performance, Smychov strips down for a swim in a secluded pond—blissfully unaware that Princess Constanza (Connie Booth) is doing the same thing just around the bend. Enter a thief, who relieves them both of their clothes, leaving one royal and one bassist stranded, nude, and scrambling for cover. The setup is simple, but the execution is everything. The film plays like a silent comedy with dialogue—built on long, awkward takes, muffled shrieks, and the increasingly desperate gymnastics required to keep the princess hidden (and Smychov chaste). It’s a high-wire act of comic restraint, made even funnier by the fact that the stakes are almost entirely social. The scandal isn’t sex—it’s etiquette. Cleese is at his gawky, panicked best, all limbs and self-repression, and Booth, dry and dignified, plays the straight woman with a sly glint that suggests she might be enjoying this more than she lets on. The chemistry between them is undeniable, and fans of Fawlty Towers will recognize the dynamic immediately—this is the warm-up act for the greatest sitcom of all time. Romance with a Double Bass is the kind of hidden gem that feels like it shouldn’t exist: part drawing-room farce, part slapstick burlesque, and entirely too classy for its own premise. But it works, effortlessly.

Romancing the Stone is a pulpy jungle adventure with actual charm and characters you want to follow—it may live in the long shadow of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it stands confidently on its own two muddy feet. It’s an energetic mix of action, romance, and slapstick, and while it may not be as polished or mythic as Spielberg’s landmark, it’s clever enough—and distinct enough—to feel like more than just a second helping. Kathleen Turner plays Joan Wilder, a romance novelist who lives vicariously through the exploits of her fictional heroines—until she finds herself living out one of her own plots, complete with lost treasure, gun-toting criminals, and one very reluctant hero. That would be Jack T. Colton (Michael Douglas), an exotic bird smuggler with a flair for surviving things he really shouldn’t. He’s not exactly noble, and she’s not exactly helpless, which is what makes them work. The characters have texture—she’s not just the uptight city girl, and he’s not just the grinning rogue. There’s some grit under the banter. Turner and Douglas have real chemistry, which is good, because the film depends on it. Their romance is slow-burning, prickly, and actually believable, helped along by some genuinely funny dialogue and a few moments that land harder than they have to. And then there’s Danny DeVito, slinking around the edges as a slimy little treasure-hunter who clearly thinks he’s in charge. He isn’t, but he’s very entertaining while trying. The jungle backdrop, the shifting loyalties, the race for the jewel—it’s all familiar material, but the tone is what elevates it. Zemeckis keeps the pace snappy, the set pieces playful, and the characters just shy of cartoonish. It’s the kind of movie that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to oversell it.

Not even Alex Cox would’ve titled one of his films Art House for Geeks, but here we are with Romantic Comedy, named like someone forgot they were supposed to come up with a real title. Dudley Moore stars as Jason Kramer, a New York playwright who loses his longtime writing partner and gains a new wife—on the same day. The wife is a rich socialite (Janet Eilber). The new partner is Phoebe (Mary Steenburgen), a schoolteacher and fan who strolls into his life and essentially hires herself. It’s kismet. Or contrivance. Take your pick. The film follows their friendship-slash-collaboration over the next several years as their personal lives drift out of sync with their professional one. When Phoebe falls for Jason, he’s married. When he finally gets divorced, she’s already off with a reporter. In between, they drink, talk about the plays they’re writing, and tiptoe around the obvious emotional subtext like it’s the third rail of the F train. To its credit, Moore and Steenburgen are a pleasant pair. She brings some sparkle to dialogue that often feels like it was punched up by someone who once saw a Neil Simon play from the back row. Moore leans into his usual rumpled charm, and together they do their best to keep the material afloat. But the script gets bogged down in so much wine-sipping writer talk that it starts to feel like an off-brand My Dinner with Andre, if Andre had also been an awkward workplace romance. Not terrible, just aimless. It’s the sort of film that gets left running on a hotel TV while you dig through the mini-bar. With this cast and this setup, it should’ve at least had a pulse. Instead, it drifts politely toward the end credits, shrugging as it goes.

Hollywood’s first true stab at Shakespeare with all the bells and whistles—lush costumes, towering sets, and a cast that drips old-school stage pedigree. George Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet feels less like a teenage tragedy and more like a stately pageant, elegantly spoken by actors who look like they should be worrying about mortgages, not mooning over stolen kisses. Leslie Howard, pushing forty, recites his poetry with the practiced sorrow of a man who’s seen too many winters to plausibly loiter beneath balconies. Norma Shearer, luminous but unmistakably adult, does her best to conjure a giddy girl’s first flutterings of love—and mostly succeeds, though you half expect Juliet to slip into a lecture on sensible marriage contracts when Romeo isn’t looking. If you want youthful ardor, wait for Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version, which crackles with sweaty teenage mischief. This Romeo and Juliet is something else entirely: more akin to what you might have caught at the Globe in the early twentieth century—precise, declamatory, and deeply respectful of every syllable. Cukor lays it out like a master’s painting: balconies swaddled in velvet shadows, ballrooms spilling over with jewel-toned finery, duels that unfold with a dancer’s grace rather than a street brawler’s snarl. It might not burst with hormonal heat, but it’s never less than beautiful to look at, and the cast’s Shakespearean chops turn the language into an orchestral hum. You don’t always buy the passion, but you can’t miss the craftsmanship. For anyone curious about how MGM in its prime handled the Bard, this is a lavish curiosity worth seeing—an elegant, adult take on the world’s most over-analyzed doomed couple.

If Dumb and Dumber had been filtered through pastel fabrics and sparkly glue sticks, it might’ve looked something like this. Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion plays like the female answer to that brand of cheerful idiocy—and it’s just about as funny. The secret isn’t in the premise, which is serviceable, but in the blankly committed performances of Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow, who play 28-year-olds with average intelligence, minimal ambition, and a flair for the deeply impractical. The plot is barely more than a pretext: a ten-year high school reunion is coming up, and the girls want to impress the same cliques who once rolled their eyes at them in algebra. What follows is a mostly low-stakes road to reinvention, powered by impromptu brainstorms, fake résumés, and one of the more inspired business suit montages in recent memory. The comedy isn’t relentless, but it’s consistent—offhand lines, oddball reactions, and misapplied confidence that sneak up and pay off. Sorvino and Kudrow commit to the bit with a kind of hypnotic sincerity. Their friendship feels both completely ridiculous and unexpectedly touching, built not on depth but on the mutual agreement to just keep being weird in the same direction. The film doesn’t satirize them so much as indulge them. A long fantasy sequence in the final stretch—meant to chart Romy’s spiraling insecurity—throws the momentum a bit. The film had been floating along on charm and small stakes; suddenly it’s trying to deliver an emotional crescendo it doesn’t really need. The recovery is quick, but the detour shows. What sticks isn’t the structure or the gags—it’s the lopsided optimism of two women who treat delusion like a lifestyle choice. They’re not cool, not clever, not even particularly good at pretending. But somehow, that’s exactly what makes them great.

A rare dud for the Marx Brothers—though to be fair, the warning signs were right there on the marquee. Room Service began as a neat Broadway farce that never needed a Marx, and it mostly pretends not to have them now. They didn’t bother rewriting much, so Groucho, Chico, and Harpo spend eighty minutes wedged into someone else’s blueprint, trying to smuggle their usual mischief into corners that don’t want it. The plot is standard dinner-theater hustle: Groucho is a threadbare producer trying to mount a play with no money, so he hides his cast and crew in a Manhattan hotel suite and stalls the staff by talking fast and paying nothing. Doors slam, managers bark, the bills stay unpaid—farce architecture without the loose screws that normally make a Marx Brothers picture gleeful instead of merely frantic. You get flickers: Groucho squeezing out a half-decent insult, Chico gamely pushing through a routine that nonetheless lands with a dull thud, Harpo rifling through other people’s luggage because at least that stays on brand. But mostly, they hover, shackled by lines that don’t know what to do with them. The laughs knock politely, then wander back down the hallway. It’s still mildly pleasant to watch—like bumping into an old friend on an off day—but it’s a thoroughly skippable entry in their filmography. Check in if you must, but don’t bother to unpack.

Few films make restraint look this seductive. A Room with a View, Merchant Ivory’s luminous adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel, moves between continents and class structures with the elegance of something too confident to show off. It proceeds with grace, precision, and just enough irreverence to keep its formality from becoming a museum piece. The story centers on Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter, still in her wide-eyed, porcelain-doll phase), a young Englishwoman whose tightly corseted worldview begins to loosen during a trip to Florence. The city is a sensory jolt—warm, expressive, impulsive—and it nudges Lucy toward something she didn’t know she was missing. That nudge arrives in the form of George Emerson (Julian Sands), a gentle radical with untamed hair and a habit of saying exactly what he feels. Waiting back in England is Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day-Lewis), a man so self-serious he seems allergic to daylight. The choice isn’t complex, but the film is interested in the internal architecture it takes to admit what you really want. Lucy’s chaperone Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith) does her best to keep things respectable, though she’s also the reason Lucy ends up next to the Emersons in the first place. Her flustered propriety provides its own quiet tug on the plot, and Smith plays every hesitation like a precision instrument. The performances are uniformly strong, but Denholm Elliott quietly walks away with every scene he’s in. As Mr. Emerson, George’s father, he plays the blunt, unfiltered observer with a philosopher’s heart—garrulous, intrusive, and somehow always right. Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, and Simon Callow fill in the rest of the ensemble with well-calibrated flourishes, each of them working in that specific British register that turns social awkwardness into a form of warfare. The production is a marvel: Florence looks like it’s been painted in sunlight, while the English countryside simmers with a different kind of tension—cooler, quieter, but no less persuasive. Every shot feels framed with intention, but never fussed over. The humor lives in the friction—politeness weaponized, compliments that double as insults, moments stretched just long enough to catch in the throat. It’s not trying to be funny, which is exactly why it is. Beneath the fine china and clipped speech is a film about emotional clarity—about naming your desires and deciding they matter. A Room with a View doesn’t lecture, or swoon, or overreach. It simply makes space. And then waits for you to fill it.

Two men, forever footnotes in someone else’s tragedy, drift through this clever, exasperating spin on Hamlet with just enough wit to make their existential crisis worth watching. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead lifts Shakespeare’s anonymous couriers out of their single line of stage direction and lets them fret, babble, and ping-pong logic puzzles back and forth until destiny finally remembers to swallow them whole. Gary Oldman and Tim Roth—both so young you want to ruffle their hair and tell them it’ll all work out—play these doomed tagalongs like a vaudeville act marooned on the fringes of a classic. They flip coins that never land wrong, wonder aloud whether choice is real or a cruel rumor, and occasionally bump into Hamlet proper when the plot needs reminding that they exist. Behind them, the bigger tragedy marches on: a king murdered, a prince unraveling, courtiers whispering behind arras curtains. Our heroes mostly miss the bigger mess unfolding—too busy wondering if they even exist in the first place. Stoppard’s dialogue doesn’t bother trying to untangle life’s mysteries; it just pokes enough holes in them to let the air hiss out in little philosophical chuckles. The wordplay spins into riddles, the riddles tip over into nonsense, and the nonsense circles back to something that almost makes sense—if you squint hard enough. It’s all very self-amused, but with performers this sharp, you can’t mind much. If you worship Shakespeare, you’ll appreciate the echoes. If you hate Shakespeare, you might find the whole thing a daisy chain of talking in circles. But if you enjoy watching two nobodies poke the cosmos with a stick, you’ll find plenty to chuckle at before the inevitable end arrives—unremarked, unfair, and exactly what the Bard promised all along.

Rosemary’s Baby is a horror film that doesn’t scream. The horror hides in the niceties—in prescription pads, pink wallpaper, casseroles you didn’t ask for, and neighbors who hover like they’re casing the joint. In 1968, that wasn’t just a bold way to make a horror film—it was practically subversive. No blood, no ghosts, no monster behind the curtain. Just a mounting sense that something’s wrong, and everyone’s pretending it isn’t. Mia Farrow plays Rosemary like she’s been trained to apologize for existing. Newly married, newly pregnant, newly settled into a Manhattan apartment that feels leased with conditions. Her husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), is an actor with the exact amount of ambition needed to overlook the creeping unease—or maybe not overlook it at all. And then there are the Castevets: Minnie and Roman, elderly neighbors with strong opinions and weak boundaries, who arrive with wine, advice, and a tone that suggests you’re not so much being welcomed as acquired. Polanski directs the whole thing like he’s tightening a lid. Nothing rushes. The camera keeps still, as if it doesn’t want to interfere. The dread creeps in sideways—through long silences, too much smiling, and an atmosphere that keeps smoothing itself over just when it starts to curdle. Farrow barely raises her voice, and it’s one of the great horror performances because of it. She listens, wilts, complies. And then slowly starts to resist, though never loudly enough for the people around her to notice—or care. Every time she questions what’s happening, she’s talked over, put down, gently redirected. She’s told to rest. To trust. To let the experts handle it. Meanwhile, the walls seem to listen, and the neighbors always seem one step ahead. That’s where Ruth Gordon comes in, playing Minnie Castevet like a nosy sitcom side character who wandered into a psychological thriller and decided to stay. She meddles with a smile, barters vitamins like party favors, and never misses a beat. You’d laugh—if you didn’t want to run. And then there’s Komeda’s score—a lullaby that sours as it goes, like it knows what’s waiting at the end. It trails through the film, light and lilting and just wrong enough to catch. Rosemary’s Baby is pregnancy as paranoia, marriage as performance, and Manhattan as a carpeted maze with no exits. There’s no jump scare. No reveal you didn’t suspect. Just the slow realization that the trap was disguised as hospitality—and it snapped shut ten scenes ago.

Shot with a restless handheld camera and no soundtrack, Rosetta pushes realism until it scrapes. It’s bleak, tight, and staring straight at you. Cannes gave it the Palme d’Or. Émilie Dequenne won Best Actress for a performance that doesn’t ask for sympathy and wouldn’t know what to do with it if it came. Rosetta is seventeen, stuck in a trailer with her alcoholic mother, dragging her home from benders like it’s just another chore. She fishes for trout in a nearby stream, sets traps, scours for any job that might pay under the table. The film opens as her trial employment at a factory ends. She’s let go—news she receives and reacts to with startling violence. Later, she pushes her way into a waffle stand, where she talks her way into an off-the-books gig and strikes up a hesitant friendship with Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione). But when her position is threatened, she reports him behind his back and takes his place. Her mother (Anne Yernaux) refuses to admit she’s an addict. Their arguments escalate—once ending with Rosetta plunging into a river and nearly drowning. The camera doesn’t pull back for drama. It stays close, impassive. Life doesn’t stop, and neither does the film. Rosetta refuses welfare. She refuses charity. She wants work, not help. It’s the bootstraps myth taken to its breaking point—only no one’s handing out straps. It doesn’t play like a political film, but the subtext isn’t subtle. Rosetta follows the rules she’s been taught—work hard, take nothing—and pays for it at every turn. It’s absorbing and unsparing, though probably too bleak to recommend without warning. But it’s the rare drama that honors its subject without pity. Rosetta doesn’t ask for sympathy. She asks for a job. The tragedy is, that’s never quite enough.

For Mike McDermott (Matt Damon), poker is less a game of chance than a test of skill, psychology, and pattern recognition. You have to know when someone’s bluffing, when they’re holding, and when they’re barely hanging on. That belief carries him straight into disaster: in the film’s opening, he loses his entire bankroll to Teddy KGB (John Malkovich), a sneering Russian mobster who doesn’t just play to win—he plays to watch you lose. Mike steps away from the game, returns to law school, and assures his girlfriend (Gretchen Mol) that he’s done. Then his friend Worm (Edward Norton) gets out of prison, already in debt and already back to the same old habits. Mike agrees to help him out, and the promise to stay away from the cards expires almost immediately. The structure is familiar—man returns to the thing that broke him, tries to master it on the second pass—but the film is efficient in the telling. Damon’s voiceover gives it rhythm, walking us through rules, reads, and strategy without overplaying the tension. It adds a noir-tinged clarity, as if every loss has already been priced in. Damon is steady and convincing in the role, but emotionally, the character keeps his distance. His downfall doesn’t feel like a collapse—just a quiet reversion. Norton brings spark to Worm, but the character disappears midway through, and the film seems unsure what to do with him after that. Still, Rounders works. It captures the rhythm of high-stakes poker without turning it into melodrama, and the final showdown—a rematch with KGB—is well-executed and quietly satisfying. As a sports film disguised as a character study, it plays fair, deals clean, and doesn’t overreach.

Steve Martin trades ruffled sleeves for a fire chief’s uniform in this smart, surprisingly tender update of Cyrano de Bergerac—a story that’s lasted centuries because the premise still stings: the man with the words doesn’t always have the face. Martin’s Charlie is sharp, charismatic, and visibly cursed with a comically long nose—one that enters the room a beat before he does. He runs the firehouse in a sleepy Colorado town, trades quips like oxygen, and keeps his romantic hopes on a low simmer. Then Roxanne (Daryl Hannah), a visiting astronomer, moves in, and everything flickers to life. Charlie, too sharp to kid himself, slips into Cyrano mode—whispering poetry through walkie-talkies to Chris (Rick Rossovich), a slab of handsomeness with the conversational range of a windchime. From rooftops and alleyways, Charlie feeds him the lines that make her swoon, hiding his own bruises behind banter and verbal footwork so slick it barely reads as heartbreak. Martin’s script is clever without being smug, folding in slapstick, wordplay, and a deep fondness for everyone on screen. A scene where Charlie rattles off 20 better insults than “big nose” is a comedy masterclass. Another, where he convinces a group of town busybodies he was dropped off by aliens, feels like Martin slipping in an old stand-up bit and making it sing. The tone stays light but never flimsy. Roxanne plays like a romantic comedy but hums like a character study—of a man who hides behind wit not out of vanity, but because he knows what he’s shielding. It’s Steve Martin in top form: funny, aching, and finally given room to stretch.

A pastel-colored, slow-motion collapse in corduroy and eyeliner—The Royal Tenenbaums is a comedy of brilliance gone brittle, and the grudging, side-eyed attempt to tape it back together. Wes Anderson directs like he’s dusting a dollhouse crime scene: symmetrical, precious, and quietly devastating. His world is all monogrammed luggage, framed grievances, and family portraits that look more like exhibits than memories—fussy on the surface, frayed underneath. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), estranged patriarch and lifelong liability, crashes back into his family’s life armed with a cheap suit, a fake cancer diagnosis, and the same salesman grin he’s been weaponizing since the Nixon years. His wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston), serene and steel-spined, is considering a proposal from a soft-spoken accountant (Danny Glover), a development that seems to irritate Royal mostly because it wasn’t cleared with him. He’s not ready to be replaced—even if he effectively replaced himself years ago. Their children—once celebrated prodigies, now emotionally adrift—have all returned home, carrying with them varying degrees of failure, grief, and suspended adolescence. Chas (Ben Stiller), widowed and high-strung, arrives with his two identical sons outfitted in matching red tracksuits like grief-sized bodyguards. Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), chain-smoking and laminated in affectation, moves back into the house and immediately locks herself in the bathroom. Richie (Luke Wilson), a former tennis star whose career dissolved in slow motion, sails in on a wave of romantic confusion and unreleased heartbreak. Even Eli Cash (Owen Wilson), the cowboy-dressed family friend turned third-rate novelist, wants in—though it’s never clear if he’s chasing nostalgia or simply the illusion of belonging. The setup flirts with the biblical—three prodigal children, one returning father, a house dense with unresolved history—but it’s all played in Anderson’s signature deadpan key, where the punchlines are spoken without emphasis and the pathos sneaks in through the back door. The humor is so dry it flakes, the emotion so understated it nearly vanishes—until it doesn’t. There’s a moment when Royal, in an effort to bond with his grandsons, leads them on a spree that includes jaywalking across highways, breaking into demolition sites, and stealing chocolate milk from a corner store. One cut later, one of the boys leans against the storefront, sipping it straight from the carton like it’s bourbon in a paper bag. The image is absurd, precise, and—somehow—strangely affecting. The performances never tilt into caricature, which is half the trick. Hackman is electric as Royal, refusing to sand down the character’s selfishness and letting the cracks show instead. Paltrow plays Margot as a human ellipsis, unreadable but never blank. Stiller, Huston, both Wilsons—all inhabit their corners of this melancholic dollhouse without ever breaking the spell. Nobody oversells, and that’s what makes it work. The production design looks like someone tried to preserve a childhood instead of living past it. Faded wallpaper, glassy-eyed taxidermy, board games nobody plays but nobody moves either. Everything’s been kept, maybe too carefully. The soundtrack—Elliott Smith, Nico, The Rolling Stones—doesn’t ask for emotion. It drifts in, and something unspoken answers back. The Royal Tenenbaums wears the shape of a comedy, but its heart beats somewhere lower. It sketches emotional drift in primary colors, wraps old wounds in corduroy, and lets its characters circle the past like they’re hoping it might blink first. That ache—quiet, unresolved—is what stays with you. A treat. And maybe something better.

Another notch on Stanley Donen’s belt—and a shiny one at that. Royal Wedding is among the most buoyant musical comedies MGM turned out during its golden age, even if plot and character are largely decorative. The story follows a brother-sister dance duo (Fred Astaire and Jane Powell) sent to London to perform in honor of the royal nuptials of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. That setup matters only in the loosest sense. It gets us to England, cues up a few romantic subplots, and graciously steps aside for what actually counts: the dancing. And there’s plenty. The film has not one but two musical numbers so iconic they’ve entered the bloodstream of classic movie history. First, there’s Astaire’s coat rack routine—understated, clever, and so casually graceful it’s easy to miss how hard it must be. He dances with it like it’s just another partner, which, in his case, is probably a compliment. But the real showstopper—and one of cinema’s most enduring magic tricks—is the sequence where Astaire dances on the walls and ceiling of a room. It’s not just impressive. It’s beguiling. The camera turns, the furniture stays glued, and Astaire glides up and over like he’s made of vapor. It appears to unfold in a single take, and unless you’re determined to rob yourself of wonder, don’t look up how it was done. Jane Powell, warm and quick on her feet, plays the sister half of the act, though her romantic storyline (and Astaire’s, for that matter) functions more as a structural requirement than a narrative draw. But it hardly matters. The sheer volume and variety of musical numbers keeps things snapping forward—elegant ballroom interludes, intimate solos, and a splashy, Latin-tinged number called “I Left My Hat in Haiti.” The plot knows when to get out of the way. This isn’t a story so much as a showcase. And on that front, Royal Wedding holds its own—charming, precise, and buoyed by moments of real cinematic alchemy.

Sean Astin plays Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger, a kid with no money, no grades, no size, and no real athletic ability—just the misguided conviction that he belongs on the Notre Dame football team. Any one of those things would be enough to stop a reasonable person. Rudy isn’t reasonable. He’s relentless. And Astin makes that relentlessness feel like something noble instead of grating—a quiet refusal to take the hint. The film follows the usual underdog blueprint, but skips the sugar. Rudy gets knocked down, brushed off, overlooked—and still keeps showing up. Not so much a hero as an inconvenience no one’s figured out how to get rid of. Even the training montage doesn’t build to anything. It just loops, like effort for its own sake. The stakes are barely cinematic—he’s not chasing records or rewriting history. He just wants to dress for a single game. A dream so modest it almost seems reasonable, until you realize how little the system was ever going to give him. Astin keeps the character from curdling into self-parody. He doesn’t beam through every setback or turn into a motivational poster. He sulks. He flails. He throws himself at locked doors because no one else will open them. What could’ve been mawkish turns out strangely practical—a film about effort as a kind of identity. He’s not the best. He’s not even good. But he’s there. And sometimes, being there is the whole point. It’s the kind of story that could’ve coasted on sentiment, but the filmmaking has more discipline than that. In a market crowded with films that chase inspiration by telling you how to feel, Rudy is one of the rare ones that earns it by simply showing you why it matters.

Decades before Disney’s remake machine revved up in earnest—before photorealistic lions started quoting Elton John and The Jungle Book was run back with a bigger roar—there was this 1994 oddity. Technically Disney-backed, loosely based on The Second Jungle Book, and only tangentially related to the 1967 animated musical, it’s less a redo than a side project: familiar animals, unfamiliar format, and a grown-up Mowgli who doesn’t sing, doesn’t talk to his animal friends, and often looks like he wandered in from Tarzan. Jason Scott Lee plays Mowgli, now in his twenties, with a patchy memory of his early days among humans. He’s reintroduced to British society through Kitty (Lena Headey), a childhood friend turned upper-crust ingénue, and her father, a kindly colonel (Sam Neill) who treats Mowgli like a social experiment. The love story is perfunctory—present, but unconvincing—and derailed entirely by Kitty’s pompous fiancé, played with aristocratic smarm by Cary Elwes, who mistakes cruelty for British decorum. John Cleese turns up as a mild-mannered academic, fumbling toward cross-species diplomacy. Baloo shows up. So does Bagheera, and King Louie, and Shere Khan—though none of them speak. The animals behave like animals, which is refreshing at first but eventually limits the film’s imagination. The final act brings a clash of worlds, with Mowgli calling in the jungle cavalry like he’s assembling a mammalian Avengers. This Jungle Book doesn’t traffic in musical numbers or comic relief. It wants to be grander. More Kipling than Disney. It doesn’t quite get there, but you can feel the effort—and that gives it a certain pull. Visually, it’s polished: lush greens, clear framing, action that moves without slipping into noise. Less an update than a companion piece, it exists somewhere between nostalgia and detour—a scenic route through familiar jungle.

A satire of British aristocracy and organized religion—two institutions already so far gone they hardly need skewering. The Ruling Class doesn’t dissect them so much as throw a carnival around their collapse. It’s ambitious, unruly, and at least an hour too long. What starts as an irreverent farce mutates into a surreal nightmare, and by the end, you’re not sure if it’s brilliant or just yelling at itself. It opens with a peer of the realm accidentally hanging himself during a bizarre private ritual—clearing the path for his heir, Jack Gurney (Peter O’Toole), to inherit the title. Jack is polite, poetic, and completely insane. Grace in a silk dressing gown—whispering scripture, gliding through the manor with beatific calm. He’s convinced he’s God. Offers blessings instead of small talk. Sleeps upright in a cruciform bed—arms outstretched, face tilted heavenward like a devotional statue. His horrified family hatches a plan: find him a bride, secure an heir, and ship him off to an asylum. Naturally, it backfires. Jack undergoes treatment—electroshock, degradation, the full toolkit—and emerges “cured.” He no longer thinks he’s Jesus. Now he thinks he’s Jack the Ripper. It’s a hysterical twist, but the tonal shift is whiplash. What began as a fizzy send-up of class and delusion turns sour—grotesque, theatrical, loud. The satire dissolves into full-blown mania: courtroom scenes, musical numbers, sermons, screeds. Some of it stings. Much of it confuses. Whatever the message was gets swallowed in the noise. And yet O’Toole keeps the film from sinking. He plays Jack like three men stitched into one—saint, maniac, butcher. It’s a performance of fevered precision: wild, glorious, and impossible to look away from. Which is good, because at 154 minutes, you’ll be staring at it for a while.

The premise is clever, or at least promising: what if The Graduate had been based on real people—and what if one of their descendants started putting the pieces together? But Rumor Has It squanders that setup so thoroughly it almost feels deliberate, as if the filmmakers lost interest somewhere around the second act and never got it back. Aniston plays Sarah, a woman on the verge of getting engaged to her boyfriend Jeff (Mark Ruffalo). While attending her sister’s (Mena Suvari) wedding, she uncovers a family rumor: her late mother, and before her, her grandmother, both had affairs with the same man—Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner), who may have served as the real-life template for The Graduate’s enigmatic seducer. Sarah suspects Beau might also be her biological father. So she seeks him out. And then, supposedly after she rules that out as a possibility, sleeps with him. This might have worked as a black comedy or sharp-edged farce. Instead, it’s a sunny romantic comedy in which the main character briefly suspects a man might be her father, concludes—somehow—that he isn’t, and then sleeps with him anyway. Her fiancé spends most of the film in the background, then turns up again just in time to hear about the affair and look mildly betrayed. The tone isn’t uneven—it’s absent. Rob Reiner’s direction offers no help. Scenes drag until they just stop. Jokes fizzle without ever quite forming. And the dramatic moments have no discernible conviction. Aniston, meanwhile, is left stranded—reduced to nervous gestures and aborted sentences that never quite become comic delivery. The one bright spot is the soundtrack, which features several excellent songs by Nellie McKay—each one sharper and more alive than anything on screen. The rest is exactly what it sounds like: a romantic comedy about potential accidental incest, played for charm. Good luck with that.

Set in a “near future” where people still dress like it’s the Reagan era but their kitchen appliances might strangle them, Runaway imagines a society overrun by disobedient robots and the underpaid cops who chase them down. Tom Selleck, calm to the point of inertia, plays one of those cops—a specialist in “runaways,” or machines gone rogue. He’s just finished telling his new partner (Cynthia Rhodes) how routine the job is when a homicidal Roomba starts bodying civilians. The movie’s real antagonist is a sneering tech-saboteur played by Gene Simmons, who projects menace mostly by standing still and glaring like someone just unplugged his amp mid-riff. His weapon of choice is a heat-seeking bullet that swerves midair, which somehow makes him less threatening than the robot spiders that inject acid through syringes in their jaws. The human characters are fine, if slightly upstaged by the gadgets—zipping, skittering, launching, combusting. Crichton directs with a firm grip on momentum but not much interest in coherence. This is part noir, part sci-fi procedural, with some memorable tech and a lot of blinking lights. Not a failure, just a genre exercise with more concept than combustion.

Freedom’s five minutes old when the brakes give out. A freight train rockets through the Alaskan wild—dead engineer in the cab, two fugitives onboard, and nothing between them and a frozen oblivion but steel rails and bad luck. Runaway Train doesn’t fuss with buildup. Two convicts escape a maximum-security prison and hop a locomotive that promptly turns into a death trap. The engineer drops dead of a heart attack. The throttle jams. The train barrels forward—sightless, unstoppable. Jon Voight is Manny, a hardened inmate with scars to match—some earned, some inherited. After years of failed attempts, he finally breaks out, dragging along Buck (Eric Roberts), a younger, louder tag-along who never stops talking and rarely says anything useful. They climb aboard in the middle of frozen nowhere, chasing freedom. What they get is a metal coffin on rails. The story began as a Kurosawa project, and you can still feel his touch—ice, grit, stripped-down morality, and the sense that fate was sealed before the first frame. The landscape is merciless, the action pared to muscle and motion. The tension arrives like a steel trap—snaps shut, doesn’t flinch. Sara (Rebecca De Mornay), curled up in the cab, opens her eyes into the middle of disaster. She’s not rescued, not rescuing—just awake, alert, and exactly where no one wants to be. Roberts, somehow Oscar-nominated, plays Buck like a cartoon sidekick dropped into a tragedy—occasionally moving, mostly just loud. Voight carries the force: flinty, unyielding, already drifting toward myth. Their pursuer, Warden Ranken (John P. Ryan), follows by chopper—snarling, obsessed, and so wired for control he can’t stand the sight of two men slipping the leash. The metaphor’s clear: forward motion as doom—steel on snow, no brakes. It doesn’t quite jolt you, and it stops short of greatness. But its trajectory is fierce, stark, and strange enough to hold your gaze. You ride it out.

An enjoyable cartoonish dystopia—the missing link between The Hunger Games and a mountain of discarded ‘80s pulp, but dressed up in yellow spandex with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biceps doing most of the talking. The concept is slick enough: a police state in what was then the far-off future of 2017, where the masses calm their existential boredom by watching criminals get hunted on live television like defective game show prizes. The satire is about as subtle as a steel chair to the head—poking at propaganda, media bloodlust, and the average viewer’s knack for rooting for slaughter when the commercials say it’s fine. Schwarzenegger, in peak brick-wall mode, plays Ben Richards—a former police captain scapegoated for a civilian massacre he didn’t commit. When he tries to vanish off-grid, he’s caught, shaved, and fed to the ratings machine run by Richard Dawson, who plays the sadistic host with the smug calm of a man who could make a puppy-kicking contest sound marketable. Richards is thrown into The Running Man, a televised meat grinder pitting convicts against a stable of cartoonish gladiators with names like Subzero (he’s got a hockey stick and zero chill, naturally) and Buzzsaw (guess what he uses). Plot depth is beside the point. This is a playground for Arnold one-liners, over-the-top brawls, and Reagan-era cynicism about what entertainment might look like once people stopped pretending to care about taste. It’s slick enough to pass a Saturday night, with occasional moments that remember it could have been RoboCop’s trashier cousin if it tried harder. An above-average Schwarzenegger vehicle with enough goofy bravado to stick the landing, but not sharp enough to stand with Total Recall or The Terminator. File under: worth a rewatch, but only when you’re in the mood for dystopia with exploding neck collars and a grab-bag of Schwarzenegger-style one-liners.

The plot’s nothing special, but that’s not why you show up for a buddy-cop movie. You come for the banter, and *Running Scared* has Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal working it like they’ve been trading wisecracks since birth. Even the clunkier one-liners—of which there are plenty—come off better than expected, carried by the easy, slightly exasperated rapport between the two. Hines is Ray Hughes, Crystal is Danny Costanzo—Chicago cops with no patience for procedure and even less for subtlety. Their current headache is Julio Gonzales (Jimmy Smits), a smooth-talking gangster trying to muscle his way into bigger territory. On paper, it’s a standard issue cop-vs-crime-boss setup: stakeouts, chases, the occasional internal scuffle with colleagues who think Ray and Danny’s methods are half-baked. The villains are strictly by-the-numbers, the storyline plain as a file folder. What keeps it alive is the rhythm between Hines and Crystal—half competitive patter, half affectionate ribbing. They can walk into a scene, toss three lines back and forth, and make you forget the case they’re supposed to be solving. Hyams shoots Chicago like a brick-and-steel playground, giving the car chases and foot pursuits some texture, but it’s the leads who make the thing breathe. Not a classic, not even a standout in the genre, but if you’ve got a taste for mid-’80s buddy-cop comfort food, it’s an easy one to add to the list.

Jackie Chan’s big Hollywood breakthrough arrived with Rush Hour—a buddy cop comedy that made a fortune, launched a franchise, and introduced a lot of American audiences to Chan’s brand of slapstick martial arts. It’s fun, fast, and mostly well-paced. But if you’ve seen his Hong Kong films, you already know this is a diluted version of what he can really do. Part of the issue is structural. In his earlier films, Chan doesn’t have to split screen time with a loudmouthed sidekick trying to punch up the runtime. Here, that role goes to Chris Tucker—an LAPD officer whose main function is to complain, monologue, and occasionally play the clown. And while he’s undeniably funny in spots, he’s also on constant volume. The result is a movie that knows how to entertain but doesn’t always know when to let its biggest asset breathe. Chan plays Inspector Lee, a Hong Kong detective sent to Los Angeles to help find the kidnapped daughter of a Chinese consul. The FBI doesn’t want the help, so they stick him with Tucker’s character, James Carter, hoping Carter will keep Lee out of the way. Lee, of course, has other plans. He slips free, feigns not knowing English, and spends most of the movie quietly outsmarting everyone around him. The plot is textbook buddy cop stuff—odd-couple bickering, a reluctant partnership, a growing mutual respect—but the highs outweigh the lows. And most of those highs come from Chan, whose physical comedy and stunt work remain the real draw. There’s a set piece near the end that’s pure adrenaline: Chan dashing across rafters high above a cavernous lobby, falling stories through the air, and grabbing hold of a massive red banner to break his fall. No wires, no digital tricks, no stunt double. Just him. Watching it feels less like action cinema and more like controlled chaos—something barely survived, let alone choreographed. Tucker might hog more of the spotlight than needed, but he’s not without charm—especially when he’s getting knocked around. And even if Rush Hour doesn’t match Chan’s best work, it’s still a slick, crowd-pleasing vehicle that gave him the visibility he deserved.

Like most sequels that exist because the first film made money, Rush Hour 2 doesn’t aim high. It gives you what the studio thinks you came for—more stunts, more banter, more Chris Tucker—only now the novelty’s worn off and the imbalance is harder to ignore. The biggest problem here is Tucker. In the original film, he was at least tolerable, mostly riffing with friends, family, and the occasional suspect while Jackie Chan handled the actual action. Here, he’s given more space, more lines, and unfortunately, more time to make a case for why he shouldn’t be headlining anything. He spends most of the movie ogling women, shouting over everyone else, and tanking a painfully unfunny scene at a Las Vegas craps table where he accuses a dealer of racism for handing him lower-denomination chips. The joke lands with a thud and just stays there. Meanwhile, Jackie Chan continues to be the only reason this franchise has any real value. The film opens with him scaling bamboo scaffolding, leaping through narrow openings, and dangling off a precariously loose chute like it’s a casual Wednesday. There’s also a standout bathhouse fight—easily the film’s high point—where Chan dispatches a swarm of attackers using towels, benches, and whatever else isn’t bolted down. Tucker, for his part, stands off to the side and narrates the action like an unwanted director’s commentary. He’s meant to be comic relief, but Chan’s own physical comedy makes him redundant. There’s a plot in here somewhere—something about counterfeit money and revenge and Zhang Ziyi kicking people—but it barely registers. You don’t watch this for the mystery. You watch it to see Jackie Chan turn furniture into weapons and escape certain death with a grin. The movie is just smart enough to give him a few showcase scenes, but it keeps cutting away to give Tucker more one-liners that don’t land. It’s not unwatchable. But it is forgettable, apart from the moments when Chan takes over and reminds you what real screen presence looks like.

By the time Rush Hour 3 rolls around, the franchise isn’t so much running on fumes as stalling in the middle of traffic. This is by far the least inspired entry—a stitched-together sequel where everyone seems vaguely embarrassed to be there, and with good reason. Chris Tucker, somehow louder and more insufferable than ever, continues his character’s one-note trajectory of yelling, flirting, and mistaking volume for charm. At one point, he walks uninvited into a women’s changing room with the kind of entitled smirk that plays less like comedy and more like a creepy improv exercise gone wrong—unfunny and weirdly tone-deaf. Meanwhile, Jackie Chan, always the MVP, is given far less to do. The stunts—what few there are—feel dulled, more cartoonish than kinetic. There’s a reason for that: Chan, at this point, was aging out of the death-defying acrobatics that defined his earlier work. But instead of compensating with smarter choreography or better writing, the film mostly shrugs. The plot is thinner than ever—a vague conspiracy involving the Chinese Triads, set mostly in Paris, because at this point exotic location is standing in for actual story. But the real low points are the supposed comic set pieces, which feel like outtakes from a sitcom nobody watched. There’s a woeful take on Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” routine that plays like it was assembled out of half-remembered banter and forced enthusiasm. There’s a botched musical theater number that leans heavily on secondhand embarrassment. And in what may be the nadir of the entire series, Tucker strong-arms a French taxi driver into singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” for no reason other than to kill time. The only thing that keeps this from total collapse is Chan himself. Even when the material gives him nothing, he finds small moments of charm—little gestures, glances, or physical bits that remind you how good he can be. But it’s not enough. Not nearly.

A harmless family comedy by design—and mostly by default—RV is a soft-edged retread of National Lampoon’s Vacation, only with less bite and a faint whiff of boardroom compromise. The premise adds a twist: what if, in the middle of his disastrous family road trip, Clark Griswold was also sneaking off to attend a critical work meeting? Robin Williams stars as Bob Munro, a well-meaning dad trying to reconnect with his increasingly aloof wife (Cheryl Hines) and teenage children. Their original plan? A luxury vacation in Hawaii. The reality? A last-minute swap for an RV trip through Colorado, which just so happens to place Bob in convenient proximity to the aforementioned business obligation. He tells himself he can slip away unnoticed. Spoiler: he cannot. Bob, naturally, is a first-timer in the world of motorhomes and makes every rookie mistake. He crashes into mailboxes, triggers a geyser from the blackwater tank, and endures the overly chummy advances of veteran RVers who act like lifestyle gurus but are just as clueless. None of it is painful to watch, but none of it feels fresh, either. It’s the sort of mid-2000s family film that coasts on well-worn sitcom logic: mild humiliation, life lessons, and a syrupy conclusion that suggests everyone has grown, but not too much. Robin Williams brings energy, but the material barely lets him off the leash. The slapstick set pieces—falling down hills, dirt bike wipeouts, an RV headed for a body of water—are mostly performed by stunt doubles from a safe distance. You can feel the missed opportunity in every wide shot. Williams’ genius was his spontaneity, but the film leaves almost no room for it. You get the feeling he could’ve improvised something funny—if only the script hadn’t already filled in all the blanks with mediocrity. Still, there are some glimmers. Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth clearly enjoy themselves as a perky, ever-present couple who keep popping up at campsites, cookouts, and anywhere else the Munros stop. They’re cartoonish, but at least they’re in on the joke. RV isn’t offensive. It’s just unnecessary—a film that hits all its marks without ever making a real impression.