Film Buff Musings

Seabiscuit is a warm, earnest film about damaged men, a misfit horse, and the improbable victories that knit them together. It’s a story built on bruised spirits and second chances, and it wants very much to move you—which it often does, even while slipping into sentimentality like it’s easing into a hot bath. Tobey Maguire plays Red Pollard, a scrappy jockey with the body of a welterweight and the disposition of someone who’s taken one too many punches—too tall for the saddle, too angry for easy company, but possessed of a quiet intensity that finds its match in a horse as unruly as he is. Jeff Bridges is Charles Howard, a wealthy car magnate looking for meaning after personal tragedy, who buys a racehorse not because it makes sense but because it offers something irrationally hopeful. He hires Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), a trainer with more instinct than polish and a reputation for whispering to creatures other men would put down. The horse—Seabiscuit—is small, temperamental, overlooked. Together, they become a problem no one sees coming. The film positions them as underdogs in tandem: Red, Tom, Howard, and the horse nobody wanted. Their ascent is painted in broad, affectionate strokes—Americana in motion, full of sepia filters and slow-motion victories. It’s rousing, yes, but also unwieldy. The pacing could stand a leaner cut—several scenes circle the same emotional territory, and the hokey, newsreel-style narration doesn’t help. William H. Macy’s excitable radio announcer is meant to be comic relief, but often feels like a tonal detour on top of everything else. Still, Seabiscuit wears its heart proudly. It runs long and leans heavily on its inspirational spirit, but its sentiment never feels forced. For those who like their sports movies tender and a little dusted with myth, it holds up. Not a great film, but a gracious one.

The first film had a premise: pets with inner lives. The sequel has a schedule. It jumps between three storylines, none strong enough to hold their own. Max the terrier develops a nervous tic when his owner has a baby. He’s sent to the country, fitted with a cone, and lectured by a grizzled farm dog voiced by Harrison Ford, who sounds like he’d rather be elsewhere. Gidget, playing action hero again, loses Max’s squeaky toy and infiltrates a cat-filled apartment to retrieve it. Meanwhile, Snowball—a rabbit in superhero pajamas—teams up with a Shih Tzu to rescue a tiger cub from a circus run by a sadist. Three plots. No spine. The film jolts from one set piece to the next. A cow monologues about canine stupidity. A kitten gets blitzed on catnip and pinwheels off the furniture. A monkey tosses keys with the precision of a prop comic. The jokes aren’t staged—they’re dispensed. The animation is sleek, the momentum quick on its feet, but the characters don’t grow—they reset. Max’s anxiety is solved with a pep talk. Gidget’s heroics lead nowhere. Snowball, once a rebel leader, now just mugs in a cape. They’re trapped in a loop: overreact, rebound, repeat. Arcs collapse into skits. The tiger rescue ends with a handshake and a montage, as if no one knew what it was about to begin with. It’s a movie built like a playlist. Something new every few minutes, none of it connected. You get chases, pratfalls, a karaoke sequence, a half-hearted lesson about bravery, and a villain who disappears once the scene changes. The tone flattens everything into one long commercial break. Ultimately nothing more than a flurry of movement and the occasional punchline, flickering across the screen like it’s been programmed to hold your attention without ever earning it. There’s an audience for this, though. It’s probably in the back seat right now asking for snacks. But for anyone looking for story, rhythm, or even a single moment that holds, this is noise shaped like a movie.

The Secret of My Success plays like a Reagan-era fable about bootstraps, bluffs, and the magic of looking the part. It lifts its premise from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying but files down the satire in favor of something breezier, safer, and—depending on your tolerance for corporate wish fulfillment—more or less charming. Michael J. Fox stars as Brantley Foster, a bright-eyed Kansas grad who arrives in Manhattan with nothing but optimism and a freshly printed degree. Unfortunately, New York has no interest in either. Every job demands experience, and no one’s offering it—a bureaucratic ouroboros with a help-wanted sign taped to its own tail. Nepotism proves more reliable. Brantley’s uncle (Richard Jordan), a corporate CEO with little patience for family loyalty, begrudgingly installs him in the mailroom. From there, Brantley engineers a second identity—Carlton Whitfield, junior executive—slipping between cubicles, adopting abandoned offices, and making decisions under borrowed letterhead. It’s corporate improv, and for a while, it works. Meanwhile, he strikes up a romance with Christy (Helen Slater), an executive sharp enough to sense something’s off but apparently too underwritten to do much about it. Their chemistry is light but underfed, a subplot waiting for a second draft. More problematic is the tone-deaf detour in which Brantley’s Aunt Vera (Margaret Whitton) tries to seduce him—a scene that means to echo The Graduate but mostly lands with a dull thud. Fox, to his credit, never wavers. He’s all quick wit and open-face likability, keeping the film from collapsing under its own flimsiness. The comedy-of-errors framework fits him like a glove. But the script pulls its punches—it hints at ambition and ingenuity, then defaults to convenience. The best con jobs hinge on detail; this one skims. There’s fun to be had, but little to hang onto. For a movie about upward mobility, The Secret of My Success never climbs far past its own premise.

There is something strangely grave about The Secret of NIMH—a thick, unspoken sadness baked into the soil before the first frame was drawn. The animation is lush, but the tone is hushed, almost monastic. It feels like a children’s story told by someone who no longer believes in happy endings, but still hopes to be wrong. The film moves slowly and deliberately, never rushing toward sentiment. Emotion arrives sideways, without cue music or fanfare. Visually, it’s one of the most finely drawn animated films of its era. The lines are precise, the colors soft and moody, with shadows that seem to exhale across the frame. It looks like a storybook illustrated by someone who never fully outgrew fear. The adventure is often spellbinding, though occasionally slowed by its own sense of gravity—certain scenes linger longer than they need to, and a few transitions feel more poetic than purposeful. Still, the atmosphere holds. At the center is Mrs. Brisby (voiced by Elizabeth Hartman), a recently widowed field mouse trying to keep her children alive in a cinder block on the edge of a plow line. Her youngest son is too sick to move, and the tractors are coming. What begins as a desperate errand for medicine turns into something far stranger: a journey into the world of the rats of NIMH, former test subjects who escaped a laboratory with sharpened minds and an aversion to daylight. They live beneath a rose bush, speak in riddles, and wire their homes for electricity. Nicodemus, their aging mystic-in-residence, agrees to help—but not without revealing just how much Mrs. Brisby doesn’t know. Some of the exposition here grows murky—particularly when the backstory leans into mysticism and leans away from the science that supposedly shaped it—but the strangeness is part of the spell. What follows is a swirl of chases, relics, blades, and quiet acts of desperation that feel less like fantasy than folklore. Mrs. Brisby is not a standard-issue protagonist. She is nervous, outmatched, and visibly exhausted. But the film never condescends to her. She succeeds not because she’s brave, but because she keeps going. There are no talking animal duets. No slapstick distractions. Just a quiet, clear resolve—and a grief that never entirely lifts. The Secret of NIMH isn’t really a children’s movie. It’s a solemn little epic about intelligence, survival, and the price of persistence. And if a few moments feel more murky than mythic, that may be part of the risk when a film this earnest shoots just slightly beyond its range.

You can always tell a twist is coming when the movie starts reminding you how clever it is. Secret Window spends an hour building mood and mystery, then chucks it for an ending that feels like someone lost interest halfway through the script. Johnny Depp plays Mort Rainey, a once-famous author now living in bathrobe exile at a cabin in upstate New York, trying to outrun his writer’s block and a divorce he won’t shut up about. He naps, mutters, replays conversations in his head like they’re stuck on a scratched record. Then there’s a knock at the door: a stranger named John Shooter (John Turturro), hat low, accent thick, manuscript in hand. He claims Mort has stolen his story and wants some form of justice—or possibly revenge. Mort shrugs him off, but things escalate. A dead dog. Cryptic threats. A sense that this might not be just about a story after all. For a while, it holds. The pacing is deliberate, the atmosphere fogged with unease, and the premise has real potential. Depp’s performance is watchable in that detached, vaguely amused way he was coasting on at the time. Turturro, meanwhile, plays it like a Southern gothic specter who wandered into a studio thriller and decided to stay. But just when it should start to bear down, the film folds. The final twist doesn’t elevate—it undercuts. It takes the tension and promise the film’s been carefully nursing and swaps it for something thinner, less satisfying, and nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. You’re not surprised. You’re deflated. There’s craft here. And mood. And two leads doing real work. But mystery without payoff is just foreplay with no follow-through. Secret Window walks in like a thriller and stumbles out like a shrug.

The title promises melodrama, but the film doesn’t raise its voice. Secrets & Lies is about the quiet corrosion of family—how lives warp around what isn’t said, and what happens when someone finally speaks. Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), composed, exact, an optometrist with a quiet calm, begins searching for her birth mother after the death of her adoptive one. A change in British law opens the records. The name she finds: Cynthia Purley (Brenda Blethyn). White. Working class. Wound tight. Not expecting company. Cynthia lives with her daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), who works sanitation and seems to resent every minute of it—including the minutes spent at home. Her brother Maurice (Timothy Spall), a weary photographer, plays mediator from across town, bracing for the kind of reunion that rarely stays civil. When Hortense appears, the tension doesn’t explode—it leaks in. The air thickens. The talk turns clumsy. Everyone starts watching each other a little too closely, waiting for someone to say the thing no one’s prepared to hear. It feels like what might actually happen if ordinary people were thrown into this. Mike Leigh doesn’t impose drama. He sets the camera down and lets people fumble. Words come late. Apologies misfire. Conversations veer off-course and never quite land. Blethyn starts off fluttery and overeager, but by the end she’s howling—too raw, too cracked open to feel staged. Jean-Baptiste barely moves. She watches. She listens. And that stillness makes the others unravel faster. The film doesn’t end with healing. It ends with the volume turned down. A little less static. A few knots loosened. The lies are still there. But at least now they’re out in the open.

See How They Run is a crisp whodunit dressed in period wool and theater greasepaint, equal parts murder mystery, self-aware send-up, and breezy double-act comedy. Set in 1950s London during the 100th performance of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, the film opens with the murder of brash American director Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody), who was slated to adapt the play for the screen. His death—offstage, of course—brings in the authorities, and with them, the mismatched duo at the heart of the film’s comic pulse. Sam Rockwell plays Inspector Stoppard, a glum Metropolitan Police veteran with a perpetual cold and a liquor cabinet where his better instincts used to be. He’s reluctantly saddled with Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), a chipper rookie with boundless enthusiasm and a habit of jotting things in her notebook before she understands what they mean. When she prematurely announces she’s solved the case, Stoppard wearily hands her the pen and tells her to write “Don’t jump to conclusions.” She does. Repeatedly. The mystery itself—while functional—settles into a somewhat forgettable denouement, but the pleasure is in the detour. Ronan’s timing is immaculate, all earnestness and baffled logic, while Rockwell, fine as ever, still feels like a mildly off-kilter casting choice—his American drawl and sleepy rhythm slightly at odds with the snappy British setting. That said, his underplaying gives Ronan the runway to walk away with nearly every scene. The supporting ensemble—suspicious playwrights, flamboyant actors, exasperated producers—is crisply sketched, and the production design is a confection of vintage details, rich tweeds, and velvet curtains. If the mystery doesn’t exactly haunt your memory, the texture will. See How They Run is the kind of playful, well-tailored comedy that winks without mugging and amuses without overstaying. A neat little caper, with flair stitched into every corner.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil begins with a premise that could’ve held its own: a blind man and a deaf man, each pretending otherwise, forming a mismatched alliance built on misunderstanding and sheer nerve. That’s more than enough for a tight, character-driven comedy. But the film doesn’t trust its own simplicity. Instead, it stuffs Wilder and Pryor into a limp action-mystery involving stolen coins, a murder charge, and far too many scenes of people shouting and darting around in circles. Gene Wilder plays Dave, deaf but discreet about it; Richard Pryor is Wally, blind and doing his best to fake sight. Their dynamic has promise—the deaf leading the blind, and vice versa. Wilder’s anxious precision offsets Pryor’s exasperated smoothness. But the movie keeps dragging them through a plot that has no real interest in either character. The premise dissolves early, overwhelmed by formulaic chase scenes, flimsy set pieces, and villains who look like they were borrowed from a Saturday morning cartoon. The performances are pitched high—Wilder flails, Pryor explodes—each trying to will the material into being funny. Occasionally, there’s a flicker of what could’ve been: a dry line, a well-timed pause, the trace of real comic rhythm. But too often the film trades invention for noise, movement for clarity. It’s not unwatchable. It’s just numbing. A farce in shape only, assembled from mismatched parts and running on fumes. Two gifted performers, stranded in a movie that keeps tripping over its own setup.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World turns an apocalyptic setup into a quiet road movie with a streak of gallows humor and a preference for small, human exchanges over large-scale spectacle. It wants to be poignant and funny and romantic at once, and it occasionally gets there. Just not where it counts. Steve Carell plays Dodge, a numbed insurance man abandoned by his wife in the opening scene, left to face extinction with a sweater vest and no plan. His neighbor Penny (Keira Knightley) is flutter and impulse, obsessed with records and riddled with regrets. When she climbs through his window in search of company and closure, they embark on a trip across the crumbling American landscape—he to find an old flame, she to catch a final flight home. Their conversations have a rhythm: his defeated calm bumping up against her nervous urgency, and there’s a dry humor in how they try to pretend the world isn’t actively ending. There are funny moments, some tender ones too. But as the film pivots toward romance, something breaks. The chemistry never quite takes. Carell reads as too withdrawn, Knightley too effervescent, and the age gap doesn’t help. Their connection plays more like two people who’d enjoy a few quiet breakfasts together, not a cosmic love story in the final hours of humanity. There’s feeling here, and some lovely moments to go with it. But the emotional payoff depends too much on a connection that doesn’t feel earned. What remains isn’t bad—it’s a sweet, slightly off-center elegy for human connection.

Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn are so in sync comedically that Neil Simon’s already lively dialogue practically hums when they’re in the same room. It’s a slight shame the plot they’re stuck with is more sitcom scaffolding than airtight farce—but as an excuse for snappy banter and a flurry of screwball mishaps, it gets the job done. Chase is Nick, a writer whose talent for bad timing reaches its peak when he’s kidnapped at gunpoint and forced to rob a bank. Overnight, he’s public enemy number one—a premise so rickety it topples if you poke it too hard, but sturdy enough to keep the scenes moving. Hawn plays Glenda, Nick’s upbeat, stubbornly loyal ex-wife, who refuses to believe he’d willingly turn criminal. Her new husband, Ira (Charles Grodin, the human embodiment of barely contained annoyance), happens to be the District Attorney now charged with dragging Nick back in. What follows is a chain reaction of slammed doors, half-baked cover stories, and increasingly frantic close calls: Nick hiding in Glenda’s garage, Glenda torn between protecting him and placating Ira, and Ira trying—unsuccessfully—to keep his marriage, his career, and a wanted fugitive from colliding at high speed. The film’s biggest payoff arrives at a high-stakes dinner party attended by the governor and various power players—blissfully unaware that the man everyone’s hunting is in a tux, refilling wine glasses under their noses. It’s too fluffy to linger long in the mind, but between Simon’s crackling lines, Chase’s stumbling charm, and Hawn’s good-natured exasperation, Seems Like Old Times lives up to its name—a breezy throwback that stays just chaotic enough to keep you smiling.

Ang Lee directs with a light touch, maybe a little too light at times, but Sense and Sensibility still lands as one of the more emotionally coherent Austen adaptations. Emma Thompson, who also wrote the screenplay, plays Elinor Dashwood—the eldest and most tightly corseted of three sisters forced into reduced circumstances after the family fortune skips over them by way of inheritance law. She keeps her feelings sealed under glass, especially when it comes to Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant), a well-meaning stammerer who seems permanently one breath away from explaining himself. Her younger sister Marianne (Kate Winslet) has no such filter. She falls for John Willoughby (Greg Wise) in a matter of seconds, and unravels almost as fast when he turns out to be the kind of romantic hero who folds under financial pressure. Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), patient and older and wearing his devotion like a second coat, ends up being the more reliable option—not that anyone realizes it right away. The cast is just about perfect, though that can make things feel a little smooth around the edges. Thompson gives Elinor a weary kind of precision. Winslet leans hard into Marianne’s impulsiveness but never loses the thread. Rickman delivers most of his performance just above a whisper and still comes out the most grounded. Even Grant’s hesitation and half-smiles work in context, though there are scenes where you wish he’d finish a sentence before the carriage pulls away. It all looks right—lush countryside, tasteful interiors, people standing very still while thinking very hard. But the real strength is in Thompson’s adaptation, which pares down Austen’s prose without losing its shape. The dialogue has texture. The humor stays dry. The drama, when it comes, settles in quietly—less like a revelation than the confirmation of what everyone already knew.

Fate, in Serendipity, is less a force than a flirtation—an excuse for a meet-cute so sugary it could rot teeth at fifty paces. The film begins with John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale fighting over a pair of black cashmere gloves in Bloomingdale’s, as if the universe itself were playing matchmaker at the accessories counter. His name is Jonathan. Hers is Sara. They wander the New York night together like people who’ve just read The Little Prince and are high on metaphysical possibility. When the evening ends, he asks for her number. She refuses. Instead, they agree to let destiny decide: he writes his contact info on a five-dollar bill and spends it. She inscribes hers in a used book and donates it. If the universe wants them reunited, it’ll work overtime. Years pass. Jonathan is engaged. So is Sara. But both are quietly haunted by that night, that chance, that maybe. So begins a low-stakes, parallel search through bookstores and hotels, weddings and record stores, with New York City once again playing host to romantic improbability. The film runs on gossamer logic and wistful stalling. Its most promising jokes—particularly the fiancé-as-Kenny G parody—barely register beyond the concept stage. But there’s a buoyancy to the leads. Cusack, as usual, brings a neurotic charm that makes even the most unlikely behavior feel plausible. Beckinsale matches him with a kind of calm radiance. Serendipity is a confection. It dissolves as you watch it, offering the brief high of a well-played fantasy before vanishing into the air. But for a premise that hinges on absurd romantic faith, it commits just enough to earn a small smile.

A wicked little black comedy with a premise that feels like satire until you remember how close we already are. In this near-future—if you can call three camera angles and a corporate logo “the future”—six ordinary citizens are plucked at random, handed firearms, and told to kill each other. Last one alive wins. Everyone else is ratings fodder. Dawn (Brooke Smith) is the network’s gift: a reigning champion with ten confirmed kills, now in her eighth month of pregnancy and still game to run. The rest of the roster looks like it was assembled by a producer with a private grudge. There’s a nurse (Marylouise Burke) who swears she’s a healer, though rumors say she’s been “helping” patients into the grave for years; an 18-year-old honor student (Merritt Wever) whose helicopter parents practically hover in the background of her confessionals; and an artist (Glenn Fitzgerald), Dawn’s former goth boyfriend, whose biggest crime before this was starring with her in a hilariously over-serious high school music video set to Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” The show plays the clip, of course, because humiliation tests better than sympathy. Minahan nails the fake-TV dialect—the overproduced bumpers, the soap-operatic narration, every “candid” moment lit like it’s selling shampoo. The early laughs come easy, especially once the contestants slip into the game’s rhythm, meeting life-and-death showdowns with the patience of someone waiting for their deli number to be called. And then, gradually, the momentum dips. Once the joke’s landed—reality TV as literal blood sport—it coasts toward the finish when it could’ve gone for the jugular. Still, there’s a sting in it. A world where a pregnant woman with a gun is “America’s sweetheart” isn’t even a stretch; it’s just cable. A minor gem for anyone who likes their comedy black enough to stain.

The opening image is not of heroism but aftermath: Frank Serpico, bloodied and broken, being rushed to a hospital after a job gone very wrong. That he’s a cop doesn’t make the picture clearer—it muddies it. Serpico doesn’t work in straight lines. It tells its story through bruises, contradictions, and institutional rot. Al Pacino, in one of his most electrified performances, plays the title character like a man vibrating with internal static—idealistic to the point of pathology, stubborn beyond reason, and utterly alone. When we first meet him, he’s fresh from the academy, all bright ideas and community outreach programs. But the uniform brings with it more than a badge. It brings bribes, blind eyes, and the suffocating expectation to play along. Serpico won’t. And that’s the problem. As the timeline curls back through his early years on the force, what emerges is less a rise-and-fall narrative than a slow-motion rejection of every institutional mechanism designed to keep its parts greased. He tries to report the corruption—first politely, then persistently, then furiously. No one listens. His refusal to go along doesn’t just make him unpopular. It makes him dangerous. To the men around him, he isn’t just a rat. He’s a mirror. Directed with needle-sharp realism by Sidney Lumet, the film drips with texture: grimy precincts, cramped apartments, stakeouts where the cigarette smoke seems to do half the surveillance. It sidesteps sensationalism not out of restraint but because it’s unnecessary—every sideways glance, every door closed mid-sentence, carries the charge of a loaded gun. The threat isn’t in the shootouts. It’s in the silence. By the end, he’s unraveling—morally righteous but emotionally wrecked. He shouts, he threatens, and when necessary, he intimidates, raising the question the film quietly threads throughout: how much rot can a good man take before he starts to crack? Serpico doesn’t give easy answers. It just watches the system press down, one inch at a time.

A comedy without a pulse—flat from the first scene, riddled with enough holes to drain pasta and maybe the patience of anyone still watching. Matthew Perry plays Joe Tyler, a process server chasing Sara Moore (Elizabeth Hurley) with divorce papers. He’s almost got her when office rival Tony (Vincent Pastore) tips her off, sending her bolting like the plot depends on it—which, unfortunately, it does. When Joe finally catches up, she offers a trade: tear up her papers, serve her husband Gordon (Bruce Campbell) instead, and pocket a million. The legal twist is simple—Texas divorce, she gets nothing; New York divorce, she gets half—but the movie still manages to make it feel like homework. It’s the kind of setup that should sprint. Instead, it drags its feet, pausing only to trip over its own jokes. Perry recycles sitcom shrugs into feature-length filler. Hurley floats through in expensive clothes, exhaling mild irritation. Their chemistry is fine, but the film treats it like a prop—there to be moved around, not used. Campbell tries to jolt the thing awake with his usual swagger, but the script barely notices. Amy Adams, years before prestige roles, turns up as Gordon’s mistress: a cartoon blonde capped by a gag where her cleavage literally winks at Perry. That she walked away from this without career damage is proof of divine intervention. Serving Sara can’t even fail with style. Too dull for farce, too polite for trash, too timid to be weird—it just exists, waiting for the credits like the rest of us.

Seven isn’t remembered for plot. It’s remembered for the way it smells. Wet concrete, flickering fluorescents, sins spelled out in body parts—David Fincher’s idea of a city is one where daylight looks guilty and nothing dries. Into this, he drops two detectives: Morgan Freeman, who seems like he’s been solving murders since before the city had plumbing, and Brad Pitt, charging ahead with the twitchy confidence of someone who still thinks the good guys are supposed to win. They’re tracking a killer who sees himself as a theologian with props. Seven victims, seven sins, each killing arranged like a thesis defense soaked in bile. “Gluttony” gets the ball rolling—death by force-feeding, a crime scene that looks like a punishment drawn by someone with a grudge against food. The film doesn’t leer, it documents. And it keeps documenting, long past the point where most thrillers would cut to catharsis. What’s compelling isn’t the mystery, but the grind—the detectives in freefall, trying to follow rules in a story that doesn’t want them to matter. Once the killer’s logic kicks in, the movie locks into gear. There’s no surprise twist, just a mechanical arm pulling every string it’s been quietly setting up since frame one. If there’s a weak link, it’s the killer himself—a cipher with a philosophy and just enough screen time to explain it. Fincher would go stranger with Zodiac, but here he sticks to the rails. Seven starts in the gutter and heads downward. It’s not interested in escape—it’s too busy proving that hell is a place with gridlock and case files.

A raucous frontier musical with choreography that could fell a tree, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers follows rugged mountain man Adam Pontipee (Howard Keel), who comes down from the hills to find himself a wife. He spots Millie (Jane Powell) slinging hash in a frontier inn and proposes on the spot. She says yes, charmed—perhaps—by his confidence, voice, and lack of context. Only after arriving at the cabin does she realize she’s also married into six additional roommates: Adam’s equally enormous and entirely unrefined younger brothers. This being a musical, songs break out mid-labor and emotions are sorted through dance. Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer’s score delivers its share of high-spirited anthems, but the showstopper is Michael Kidd’s choreography—aggressive, acrobatic, and so masculinely overcompensating it loops back around to elegance. The barn-raising number alone is practically a contact sport. The plot, on the other hand, is best filed under “aged poorly.” Taking inspiration from the Roman myth of the Sabine women, the brothers decide the best path to romance is mass abduction—kidnapping their crushes and waiting out the winter while an avalanche blocks the townsfolk from storming the cabin. It’s meant to be roguish and sweet. It’s not. But the film, to its credit or peril, never pauses long enough for anyone to question it. Jane Powell brings some spark to Millie, even as the script asks her to vacillate between housekeeper, den mother, and romantic lead. Keel booms his way through every line like it’s a show tune, which it usually is. Everyone looks like they’ve been scrubbed clean for Cinemascope—except the brothers, who carry the dust of ten offscreen weeks without supervision. What saves it is the momentum. The plot may creak, but the dancing never does.

A postmodern genre puzzle with its edges sanded down by blood and punchlines, Seven Psychopaths feels like a latecomer to the Tarantino knockoff wave—only sharper, stranger, and more self-aware than most of the ’90s imitators it faintly resembles. Writer-director Martin McDonagh takes the blueprint—hitmen, meta-winks, wounded masculinity—and turns it into something messier, funnier, and more self-flagellating. Colin Farrell stars as Marty, a half-functioning alcoholic screenwriter trying to write a movie titled Seven Psychopaths—a promising title he can’t seem to fill with content. He’s stuck. He has a title, a vague sense of tone, and no actual characters. Enter Billy (Sam Rockwell), a part-time actor and full-time lunatic who steals dogs for ransom and may or may not be supplying Marty with “real-life” psychopaths to populate his screenplay. The boundary between fiction and reality is soon rendered irrelevant, and Marty’s sanity takes a backseat to a narrative that coils and recoils like a snake with a screenplay in its mouth. The film runs on gasoline and banter—smart, punchy dialogue that doesn’t choke on its own cleverness. McDonagh juggles his madmen with confidence: a vengeful Quaker who takes patience to murderous lengths, a Vietnamese priest nursing a mythic grudge, a rabbit-toting Christopher Walken who balances his biblical cadence with serene menace. And then there’s Rockwell, practically vibrating with glee, hijacking the movie in bursts of monologue and violence, playing a character who is both the comic relief and the explosive third act. This movie could’ve been a smug genre exercise, but it ends up being something far more spirited: a black comedy that’s not afraid to wear its blood-streaked heart on its sleeve. It’s violent, profane, intermittently profound—but perhaps most importantly, very funny. A film about writing a film that goes into a metaphorical hell as it tries to understand its own story.

Three and a half hours. Sixteenth-century Japan. A rural village under threat, a group of mercenaries for hire, and a job no one really wants. Seven Samurai is less about gallantry than grim obligation. Takashi Shimura plays Kambei, a weary ronin who agrees—more out of principle than enthusiasm—to help protect a farming community from the next wave of seasonal plundering. He then recruits six more, each with his own temperament and baggage. They’re not saints. They’re not even entirely sure the villagers deserve saving. But the bandits are coming, and someone has to draw a line. Kurosawa takes his time with all of it. The first hour is mostly setup—introductions, quiet posturing, and strategy sessions. But once it kicks in, the momentum stays. The action scenes are dirt-caked and chaotic, and there’s a strange energy to them that’s hard to describe. You feel the weight of each decision, even if you lose track of who exactly is still standing. Toshiro Mifune, in particular, doesn’t play a samurai at all—he’s more of a tagalong wild card, straddling the line between comic relief and something sadder. His performance wobbles at times, but it sticks with you. While not a Western, at least not technically, Seven Samurai clearly fed into the genre it was borrowing from. The Magnificent Seven lifted its structure wholesale and tried to cowboy it up, but this version cuts deeper. There’s no rousing finale, no victory speech. Just a handful of exhausted men standing in the mud, realizing the battle was never really theirs to win.

Roy Scheider plays Buddy Manucci, a trench-coated throwback with a badge, a temper, and a moral compass that’s seen better days. He runs a rogue police unit known as the Seven-Ups—a group of plainclothes cops who play fast, loose, and just this side of legal. The nickname comes from their track record: most of the guys they collar get sentenced to seven years or more. It’s not exactly policy, but it gets results. The story kicks off with a kidnapping scheme that’s just off-kilter enough to feel real: a pair of lowlifes (including Richard Lynch, looking like he came out of the womb with a switchblade) start abducting high-level criminals and ransoming them back to their associates. It’s a smart racket—until one of the victims winds up dead and the whole thing starts to reek of police involvement. Buddy catches the scent early, and when it starts drifting toward his own unit, he digs in like a man who’s been gut-punched by his own instincts more than once. There’s not much sentiment here—just grimy alleyways, gravel voices, and a city that seems to sweat guilt. The characters don’t get interior lives so much as they get habits, and even Buddy, compelling as Scheider makes him, is more attitude than arc. But that’s the point. These aren’t men you root for. They’re men you follow because no one else is crazy enough to chase what they’re chasing. Plot-wise, it’s not airtight. Some of the twists don’t quite click, and you can feel the seams between the shootouts. But when the engine revs—literally—it hums. The car chase down Manhattan’s West Side is a real piece of work: no score, no glamor, just raw noise and panic as cars bounce off curbs and ricochet down city blocks like pinballs on asphalt. It doesn’t top The French Connection, but it earns the comparison. It’s not a classic, but it’s cut from the same cloth—grimy, direct, and proudly unconcerned with polish. If you like your cop thrillers with a cracked moral code and the occasional windshield through a storefront, The Seven-Ups has enough gas in the tank to get you there.

An Italian-language whodunnit in bright colors and high volume, reaching for brittle comedy and locked-room intrigue but never gripping either for long. Seven women converge in a lavish mansion; upstairs, the family patriarch lies with a knife in his back. Every one of them has a motive, and every one is eager to explain—usually while pointing the finger elsewhere. Gossip swells, half-confessions surface, and slaps are exchanged, as if noise alone could pass for wit. It clearly wants the sly clockwork of Knives Out, just with a European accent and a little extra lipstick. What it offers is closer to a holiday skit that doesn’t know when to leave the stage—characters pacing, shouting, and pointing until the script decides who’s right. Every twist feels preloaded, and instead of the genre’s usual pleasure of being one step behind, you’re two steps ahead and waiting for the movie to catch up. The production design does most of the heavy lifting: gilt-edged rooms, jewel-toned dresses, lighting that seems borrowed from a son et lumière show. It’s gorgeous to look at, but beauty without real tension becomes background. The spunk is there in volume, but without genuine wit or bite, it turns decorative—like an argument staged for display.

Richard Sherman, a publishing executive of middling stature and restless imagination, is left behind for the summer while his wife and son flee to Maine. The apartment is quiet. His conscience is loud. And just as he starts negotiating with himself over dietary restrictions and fidelity, Marilyn Monroe moves in upstairs. Tom Ewell plays Richard like a man permanently stuck between a daydream and a nosebleed. He’s the kind of person who quits smoking and immediately wonders what else might be on the table. His imagination picks up speed the moment Monroe—barefoot, casually luminous, unbothered—drifts into his airspace. She doesn’t play a person so much as a possibility: not seductive, exactly, just present enough to reroute his internal monologue. He talks himself in and out of decisions with the anxious logic of someone who wants credit for resisting temptations he barely has access to. Reality doesn’t agree, but he keeps the debate going. The premise is dated, obviously, but Wilder keeps the dialogue quick and dry, which helps. The jokes don’t beg for approval, and Ewell’s performance, full of anxious tics and moral tap-dancing, lets the sleaze stay mostly in his head. Monroe does what she was hired to do: float through the movie with just enough presence to make the plot collapse inward. Her performance isn’t deep, but it’s calibrated. She knows the effect she has and doesn’t pretend otherwise. The subway grate scene—white dress, blown fabric, a thousand T-shirts to come—shows up mid-movie and gets no particular emphasis. It doesn’t need any. The film doesn’t change anyone’s mind, and it doesn’t try. It mostly stands around smirking while a man talks himself into a corner. That it still works says less about romance than it does about how easy it is to laugh at someone else’s crisis.

Refreshingly like those old Hollywood epics—Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia—with long, panoramic shots of mountains and prayer flags, a swelling orchestral score, and just enough solemnity to make you feel like you’re learning something. It doesn’t quite match those classics, but it’s closer than you’d expect. Brad Pitt plays Heinrich Harrer, a proud Austrian mountaineer who leaves his pregnant wife in 1939 to climb Nanga Parbat in British-controlled India. When World War II breaks out, he’s arrested by British forces and imprisoned in a POW camp. After several escape attempts, Harrer and fellow climber Peter Aufschnaiter (David Thewlis) manage to break free and make their way into Tibet—an isolated, rarely visited country that is less than thrilled to receive unexpected guests. Pitt’s accent is distractingly inconsistent early on, but it fades into the background once the story takes over. What follows is a cultural thaw. Harrer, initially arrogant and self-involved, gradually acclimates to Tibetan life. He befriends the young Dalai Lama (Jamyang Jamtscho Wangchuk), becomes his tutor, and settles into a life that forces him to reconsider the world beyond conquest and ego. The Dalai Lama, for his part, is fascinated by Western curiosities and peppered with questions about Hollywood, telescopes, and democratic government. The Tibetan scenes are the film’s best—patient, restrained, and visually striking. The supporting cast includes B.D. Wong and Danny Denzongpa, who don’t get much dialogue but help fill out the film’s sense of place. Thewlis, dry and unbothered, quietly grounds each scene he’s in. Some of the dialogue pushes too hard toward the inspirational, and the pacing drifts, especially in the second half. But the cinematography is consistently impressive, with vast snowscapes and temple interiors rendered in rich, deliberate detail. It’s not a story of dramatic highs or emotional turns—it simply sits with these characters long enough to track their shift in perspective. An imperfect epic, but worth the evening—especially if you prefer your character growth accompanied by sweeping vistas.

There’s something oddly admirable about a villain who doesn’t want to rule the world, destroy it, or flood it with narcotics—but simply complete his ancient coin collection. Emil Saber (Peter O’Toole), the antagonist in The Seventh Coin, has simpler goals than your average movie madman, though not saner ones. He believes he’s the reincarnation of King Herod, and he’s scouring Jerusalem in search of the final piece: a seventh, mythical coin. That coin, naturally, has fallen into the hands of two unsuspecting teenagers (Navin Chowdhry and Alexandra Powers), who are quickly pulled into a chase involving destiny, delusion, and enough overripe dialogue to rattle the subtitles. The plot is threadbare, the pacing uneven, and the budget looks like it strained to afford both Peter O’Toole and functioning lighting. Yet there’s something about it. O’Toole, for one, doesn’t phone in a second. He delivers his lines like they’re prophetic verse, striding through scenes with a kind of theatrical menace that borders on the operatic. His commitment is borderline deranged—and completely entertaining. He brings a level of gravitas that the script doesn’t begin to deserve, which somehow makes it better. The film itself vibrates between pulp and pastiche. It looks like a TV movie that got lost on its way to syndication, but then you get a shot of the Jerusalem skyline that feels unexpectedly majestic. For a film this clumsy, it has moments that flirt with grandeur. The Seventh Coin is more curiosity than gem—its tone uncertain, its script clunky, its charm accidental. But it has a loopy conviction, and in its own eccentric way, it works. Not well, but well enough to pass a slow evening, especially if you have a soft spot for movies where Peter O’Toole screams about ancient royalty while gripping priceless artifacts.

7500 unfolds almost entirely within the cockpit of a commercial airliner—a bold constraint that initially pays off. When terrorists attempt to breach the flight deck, First Officer Tobias Ellis (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) locks himself inside, leaving the cabin, the threat, and much of the film’s tension on the other side of a reinforced door. What begins with jolting immediacy soon settles into a mechanical rhythm, like the film itself is working through a procedural checklist. Gordon-Levitt is the engine here. His performance is impressively contained—sweating, pleading, fraying around the edges without ever fully losing control. The role gives him precious little to work with, but he carves something out of it anyway. He finds depth where the script only sketches. The hijackers, meanwhile, are more narrative triggers than characters. Their motivations are sketched so vaguely they barely register as people at all. They’re more noise than presence. The film’s real-time structure and tight geography suggest United 93-style immersion, but without that film’s urgency or psychological layering. A subplot involving Ellis’ girlfriend—conveniently working as a flight attendant on the same plane—is the weakest element. It adds melodramatic weight to a situation already brimming with danger, and its contrivance strains the film’s fragile realism. At under 90 minutes, 7500 moves briskly and sustains tension in fits and starts. But the concept, taut as it is, eventually runs thin. Once the cockpit door closes, the film doesn’t escalate—it loops, circling the same anxieties and tactical dilemmas until the final descent.

A gremlin on a bomber, a secret mission midair, and Chloë Grace Moretz gunning down monsters while dangling from a B-17—Shadow in the Cloud is not a film that plays coy. It knows exactly what it is: a pulpy, gonzo genre cocktail with just enough self-awareness to hold itself together. Set during the height of World War II, the film opens with Moretz’s Maude Garrett boarding a bomber dubbed Fool’s Errand, carrying a mysterious parcel she insists is top-secret. The all-male crew doesn’t like her presence, questions her credentials, and—lacking a proper seat—shoves her into the ball turret, an isolated bubble beneath the plane better suited for machine guns than polite conversation. From that vantage point, the movie slowly mutates. First, it’s misogynistic chatter crackling over the radio. Then, it’s a Japanese fighter jet. Then, something else—something crawling, lurking, tearing into the metal skin of the aircraft like it has unfinished business with the fuselage. The plot doesn’t escalate so much as lurch in increasingly unhinged directions. There are revelations, betrayals, and one or two moments that defy not only gravity but probably three or four branches of science. And yet, it works—just barely—because it commits. The film doesn’t hedge, and never asks for permission. It pushes ahead with the confidence of a B-movie that knows its strengths. Moretz holds the center with surprising authority. She looks like she was sculpted out of vintage porcelain, but when the bullets start flying, she goes feral in all the right ways. It’s the kind of performance that understands the assignment without condescending to it. Shadow in the Cloud is a mess, but a charming one—equal parts airborne thriller, creature feature, and war-time campfire tale told with a flashlight under the chin. You don’t watch it for plausibility. You watch it to see whether it can actually pull off the madness it’s selling. And it does.

A serial killer is stalking the fog-drenched streets of an unnamed European city, and Woody Allen—playing, more or less, himself in period costume—is conscripted to help find him. Meanwhile, Mia Farrow’s sword swallower has just walked out on her clown boyfriend (John Malkovich) and drifted toward a brothel, where she’s promptly mistaken for a working girl and propositioned by a moony college student (John Cusack) who offers $700 and doesn’t ask questions. Shadows and Fog is Allen’s tribute to German Expressionism, dressed in luminous black-and-white and styled within an inch of its life. The fog rolls thick. The shadows hit their marks. Every lamplight flickers like it’s been directed. And then there’s Allen himself, stammering through the frame like a vacationing neurotic who wandered into a Fritz Lang film by mistake. The disconnect is the point, probably—but it also feels like Annie Hall caught in a Murnau remake. Still, it’s engaging in fits. The dialogue has a few crackles, the set design is meticulous, and the homage mostly works if you’re fluent in the source material. Allen fans will enjoy the cadence. Cinephiles will enjoy squinting at the references. Everyone else may wonder what exactly they’ve walked into.

The shaggy sequel to The Shaggy Dog replaces teenage panic with midlife civic engagement. Dean Jones, looking perennially one crisis behind, plays Wilby Daniels—a former prosecutor turned suburban family man—who decides to run for District Attorney after his house is robbed twice and the current DA does nothing about it. Unfortunately, he’s also reacquired the cursed Borgia ring that periodically turns him into an Old English Sheepdog, which complicates the campaign but does wonders for name recognition. The plot doesn’t deepen so much as double down. One moment he’s giving a stump speech, the next he’s bolting through a courtroom on all fours or barking at a cat in the street. At one point, the dog decks a woman mid-chase—an unintentional laugh, maybe, but a laugh all the same. Later, a campaign fundraiser devolves into a tightly packed pie fight. Not everything here is funny, but it’s played confidently enough to pass. Jones plays the lead the only way he knows how: with mounting distress and the reflexes of someone who’s had furniture fall on him before. Suzanne Pleshette—previously paired with Jones in The Ugly Dachshund—plays his long-suffering wife, still somehow persuasive as the voice of reason in a movie where her husband keeps waking up covered in fur. Tim Conway floats around as a vacant-eyed ice cream vendor whose dog is occasionally possessed, Keenan Wynn does greasy political sabotage like he’s trying to win a bet, and Dick Van Patten plays an assistant who always seems to be mid-scheme. Even the nautical-obsessed neighbor (John Myhers) feels like he wandered in from another comedy and decided to stay. It’s thin, ridiculous, and, in its way, efficient. One of the better ones from Disney’s period of throwing animals into professions and waiting to see who slips on what.

In the late ’90s, Shakespeare was everywhere—recast, remixed, updated for prom crowds and postmodern sensibilities. But Shakespeare in Love took a more clever route: rather than adapting the Bard, it imagined him. Not as the immortal playwright of school textbooks, but as a broke, blocked, hopeless romantic—young Will with a quill and a deadline. Joseph Fiennes plays Shakespeare not as a towering genius but as a man frantically scrambling for ideas and barely holding his theater together. The idea that he found his voice not through divine inspiration but through a torrid backstage affair is both wildly anachronistic and completely irresistible. Enter Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), a noblewoman with a passion for the stage and a willingness to cross-dress her way into it. She auditions disguised as a man, impresses everyone, including Shakespeare himself—who, of course, falls for her long before realizing her true identity. The romance works not because it’s swooning or self-important, but because it feels alive. Fiennes and Paltrow have genuine heat, and their scenes together pulse with wit and affection. Around them, the film builds out a surprisingly intricate web of plots, subplots, theatrical rivalries, arranged marriages, courtly interference, and creative inspiration. Some of it lands more gracefully than the rest, but the film juggles its tones—romantic, farcical, satirical—with such flair that you don’t mind a few tangents. The dialogue walks a fine line between Elizabethan cadence and modern punch, and the production design practically begs you to lean in and smell the sawdust of the Globe. It’s a lavish, lived-in world that feels just stylized enough to be fun but not so fussed over that it turns into pageantry. And then there’s the cast. Judi Dench won the Oscar for her volcanic cameo as Queen Elizabeth, but even the oddball casting of Ben Affleck, as a self-important actor with a flair for melodrama, fits squarely into the film’s sense of play. Shakespeare in Love is theatrical in every sense—broad, knowing, romantic, and staged with affection. A fantasy about the creative process that doesn’t pretend to be history, just a very good story about how a very good story might have come to be.

Shall We Dance? is the kind of remake that keeps the basic steps but forgets what made the original worth watching. Adapted from the 1996 Japanese film of the same name, this version swaps cultural nuance for gloss—offering up a sleek, agreeable meditation on midlife dissatisfaction that never quite finds its pulse. Richard Gere plays John Clark, a Chicago lawyer quietly flattening under the weight of routine. Each day he rides the same train home, expression fixed, until one evening he glances up and sees a woman in the window of a dance studio—poised, remote, and vaguely haunted. That’s Paulina (Jennifer Lopez), a once-renowned dancer now instructing beginners. On a whim, John signs up for lessons. The chemistry between them never crosses into romance. It’s all subdued glances and polite small talk—measured, careful, unsaid. But it shifts something in him. Ballroom dancing becomes his quiet rebellion, a secret life that doesn’t so much upend his world as offer a small, necessary detour. Naturally, the secrecy creates problems. His wife Beverly (Susan Sarandon), sensing something off, hires a private investigator (Richard Jenkins) to follow him. The film gestures toward themes of trust, longing, and identity, but only lightly. It wants to say something about rediscovery but prefers to keep things breezy. The supporting cast, at least, provides a little lift. Stanley Tucci, as a fellow lawyer hiding his love of Latin dance, nearly walks off with the movie—ridiculous, sincere, and exactly what the film needs more of. But Shall We Dance? often mistakes poise for meaning. It’s handsomely shot, easy on the ears, and rarely unpleasant. But like the ballroom itself, it feels overly choreographed—smooth, symmetrical, and not especially revealing.

The Farrelly Brothers made their name trafficking in bodily fluids and bad taste, but Shallow Hal marks the first time their brand of broad comedy feels actively mean. What’s worse, they don’t seem to realize it. There’s a thin layer of sentiment here—an attempt at uplift, even—but it’s buried beneath a landfill of jokes that mistake cruelty for insight and physical appearance for punchline. Jack Black stars as Hal, a man-child adrift in a sea of unrealistic expectations. He’s fixated on women who look like swimsuit models and dismisses anyone who doesn’t fit that mold. His best friend, played by Jason Alexander in a hairpiece that could file its own lawsuit, is even more cartoonish—having once dumped a woman because her second toe was longer than her big toe. Then along comes Tony Robbins, playing himself and offering what passes for the film’s moral reset. In a chance elevator encounter, Robbins hypnotizes Hal so he can “see inner beauty” instead of fixating on looks. From that point on, women with warm hearts and kind souls appear to Hal as gorgeous, while the vain and vicious morph into visual gargoyles. This premise might have worked as surreal satire, or at least a twisted modern fable, but the execution is so tone-deaf it borders on hostile. Hal falls for Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow), a 300-pound woman he perceives as a willowy goddess. The film tries to sell this as heartwarming, but it can’t stop mocking Rosemary’s weight with sight gags and sound effects straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. The intended message—that beauty is skin-deep—is so clumsily handled that it backfires. Instead of challenging Hal’s worldview, the film just reframes it. He’s still obsessed with appearances; he just happens to see different ones now. Shallow Hal wants credit for evolving, but it can’t stop laughing at its own joke long enough to grow up. Whatever empathy it aims for is undone by its own punchlines. It may have heart, but it’s in the wrong place.