Film Buff Musings

A movie poured from an inkwell and sharpened like a switchblade. Sin City doesn’t bother adapting its source material—it throws it on a slab and reanimates it with digital lightning. The monochrome palette is so severe it starts to feel warm, and the spurts of red, yellow, and surgical-blue glow like warning lights in a blackout. It’s lacquered, varnished, embossed. The characters don’t have arcs—they have geometries. Mickey Rourke, playing a mug named Marv, has a face like cracked pavement and doesn’t so much walk through the city as collide with it. Clive Owen snarls his way through a rooftop opera of betrayal. Bruce Willis, in trench coat and moral agony, emerges from the other side of a pulp novel with his ideals intact and his anatomy not. Elijah Wood, silent and cherubic, slices up victims like he’s packing lunch. The dialogue is 1940s hard-boiled rewritten by a poet with a concussion. Women speak in lipstick riddles; men deliver monologues to the void. Nobody changes clothes. Nobody changes minds. Everyone bleeds. The film unfolds across four stories. Some threads work better than others; one or two seem to wander off and forget why they arrived. But the whole is hypnotic—a comic book hallucination given musculature. Violence, of course, is the coin of the realm, but it’s abstracted—blood as expression, mutilation as style sheet. It’s vicious in the way old Looney Tunes were violent: exaggerated, rhythmic, detached from weight. Sin City is a graphic novel made flesh, then sliced into pieces and rearranged until it stares back at you—coolly, cruelly, beautifully.

The Technicolor sets are handsome, the costumes swish and shimmer, but Sinbad the Sailor plays like a party where the band never shows up. The promise of exotic adventure—mystical islands, cunning rogues, dazzling escapes—is reduced here to protracted banter and the occasional half-hearted scuffle. This isn’t high-seas escapism so much as a costumed cocktail hour, and the script insists on filling it with talk. The dialogue is thick and foggy, crowding out whatever thrills might have drifted in. Swordplay is largely absent, suspense is a no-show, and the colorful side characters one hopes for in a film like this—pirates, mystics, duplicitous nobles—are rendered limp, despite the marquee talent behind them. Maureen O’Hara, radiant but underserved, plays Shireen, the not-quite-scheming consort of Anthony Quinn’s Emir, and you can almost sense the actors measuring their effort against the quality of the material. They’re too skilled to fully phone it in, but not inspired enough to elevate what’s on the page. The exception is Douglas Fairbanks Jr., whose performance as Sinbad seems spiked with some ancient elixir of mischief. He grins, struts, and sashays his way through the film like he’s in on a joke the movie forgot to write. His flamboyance is nearly enough to keep things afloat. The plot, in theory, has promise: Sinbad’s ship is seized by authorities in Basra, he steals gold to reclaim it, then sets off in search of Alexander the Great’s lost treasure. That ought to be a rousing premise. Instead, it sputters. By the end, you’re left with lovely sets, a game lead, and a gnawing sense of how little adventure actually took place.

Sing wants to hit the same notes as Fame, Footloose, or Dirty Dancing, but it mostly ends up sounding like a dress rehearsal for someone else’s show. It’s not terrible—just off-key in ways that start to pile up. Set in a Brooklyn high school prepping for a student showcase meant to unify the community, the film sells itself as a story of ambition, identity, and artistic expression. What it delivers is a pile of sitcom-grade drama and dialogue that sounds like it was transcribed off cue cards. Peter Dobson stars as Dominic, a “streetwise” kid who’s supposed to be rough around the edges but feels more mall-ready than menacing. Lorraine Bracco plays his reluctant partner and brings some ballast, but the scenes rarely give her anything to work with besides exasperation and reaction shots. The beats are familiar—some authority figures frown, a few tempers flare, and there’s a romance angle that barely clears the bar for interest. The movie keeps angling for sincerity, but it mostly fumbles the handoff. There’s a musical number or two along the way, but the payoff is the finale—“Life Ain’t Worth Living (When You’re Dead)”—a full-throttle stage number that finally gives the movie a pulse. For five minutes, it turns into the show it always wanted to be. It’s not without moments, but they’re buried under a lot of hemming and posturing. If you’ve run out of better musicals and want to try something mildly endearing but ultimately thin, Sing is an acceptable detour.

A steady, unsentimental peer into Sing Sing’s homegrown theater gang—convicts scribbling lines, barking cues, scraping together enough soul to remind themselves they aren’t just inmate numbers rattling around in a file. Coleman Domingo anchors it as Divine G, an inmate wrongfully convicted (the film reminds us, but doesn’t bang a drum about it) and a natural tragedian—brooding, protective of his big, bruised monologues. Then Divine Eye, playing himself with a promise of trouble, needles him to ditch the solemn masterpiece for a musical comedy instead. Divine G resists, but relents; the troupe’s director (Paul Raci) hammers out the new script while the inmates pick it apart from the inside. That tug-of-war between wanting gravitas and wanting a belly laugh keeps every rehearsal loose and alive. Lines crumble mid-scene. Old beefs bubble up when they shouldn’t. A lockdown seals the place at the worst possible moment. Nobody’s polished, but that raw edge is the point: for once, nobody’s scoring points for good behavior—they’re too busy trying to keep an audience awake. If there’s a soft patch, it’s Divine G’s guiltlessness—a tidy moral cushion that sidesteps the discomfort of rooting for someone messier. He might be richer if the film let the ambiguity stand. Still, Sing Sing doesn’t pretend this is prison reform in a can; it’s about how building something—on stage or out of paper and spit—can pry open a little daylight behind the bars. Not a revelation, but honest, decently funny, and lined with earned warmth—a small testament to what happens when men the world wrote off get to stand in a spotlight and remind everyone they’re still here.

If there’s a more joyful film than this, I haven’t seen it. It’s a musical, a comedy, a backstage satire, a love letter to old Hollywood, and a technical showpiece—all pulled off with a kind of ease that slips by like it’s nothing. The sets gleam. The jokes come crisp. The whole thing moves like it knows it’s the best in the room and doesn’t need to prove it. And every number still earns its applause—even if you’ve seen it twenty times and know exactly when Gene Kelly’s going to grab the lamppost, swing around, and tap through the puddles like he just invented happiness. Kelly stars as Don Lockwood, a swashbuckling silent film idol with the grin of a matinée god and a resume built on stunts, mugging, and fabricated studio lore. His rise to fame is inseparable from his lifelong best friend Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor), a pianist-turned-sidekick whose brain seems powered by rubber cement and punchlines. The public also knows Don as the romantic half of a tabloid-made couple: his onscreen partner Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), a bleach-blonde narcissist with the voice of a parrot being throttled. That voice—shrill, nasal, and hopelessly incompatible with sound cinema—is about to become a serious problem. The Jazz Singer has just premiered. Talkies are in, and Don and Lina’s latest costume drama, The Dueling Cavalier, is being frantically retooled for dialogue and synchronized audio. No one’s ready. Least of all Lina, whose delusions extend beyond diction—she believes the tabloid romance with Don is real, and cannot comprehend that he despises her. Into this flurry walks Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), a stage performer who meets Don by pretending not to be impressed by movie stars. He’s annoyed. Then intrigued. Then smitten. Kathy is smart, grounded, and entirely unimpressed by the industry’s ego parade—until she gets caught in it herself. As a favor to Don and Cosmo, she’s recruited to secretly dub Lina’s dialogue and songs, lip-syncing for the screen siren whose voice could curdle milk. You could break this film into its musical numbers and still have one of the greatest showcases in movie history. “You Were Meant for Me” is simple and dreamy. “Make ’Em Laugh” is pure comic violence—Donald O’Connor flinging himself into scenery like a human trampoline. And the title number, of course: that famously sodden solo where Gene Kelly, soaked to the bone, spins, stomps, and grins his way through one of the most iconic sequences in cinema. But the real showstopper is the one with no reason to exist, narratively speaking. The surreal, Technicolor fantasia known as “Broadway Melody”—a ten-minute detour of pure cinematic indulgence, featuring Kelly and a lethal, long-legged Cyd Charisse—is both wildly unnecessary and completely perfect. It’s the kind of excess you forgive when everything else is this good. Singin’ in the Rain is a miracle of tone and construction—cheerful but sharp, silly but never dumb, and so briskly paced it feels like it’s floating. There’s not a scene you’d cut. Not a beat that drags. It’s about a moment in film history, but somehow exists outside of time—youthful, dazzling, and utterly rewatchable.

A film that doesn’t just toe the line between discomfort and entertainment—it builds a house there and invites you in. The Singing Detective is a jagged, jittery black comedy with jazz hands, slathered in psychodrama and vintage pop. It’s sometimes funny, often disturbing, and occasionally both in the same breath. Robert Downey Jr. plays Dan Dark, a snarling pulp novelist marooned in a hospital bed with a skin condition so grotesque it doubles as a metaphor for everything unhealed inside him. Bitter, brilliant, and boiling over with misogyny, Dark sees the world as a conspiracy of betrayals, real and imagined. When he’s not lashing out at nurses and hallucinating murder plots, he’s slipping into full-blown delusions—1950s musical numbers lip-synced by his caregivers, family members, and his own fictional creations. These surreal interludes, bizarre as they are, may be the film’s finest invention. They’re shamelessly artificial, oddly elegant, and feel like the dreams of someone who’s watched too much television and still wants more. Mel Gibson, disguised in thick specs and a truly tragic combover, plays the shrink tasked with peeling back Dark’s layers. Their sessions spiral into flashbacks of childhood trauma, maternal indiscretions, and the long tail of emotional rot. It’s all very Freudian, with a twist of parody and a splash of melodrama. Not everything works—when the film misses, it doesn’t merely falter, it collapses into skin-crawling awkwardness. But Downey, brilliant even at his most abrasive, threads it all together with surgical precision. For those with a high tolerance for tonal whiplash and theatrical psychosis, there’s something perversely rewarding here. For everyone else, the impulse to look away could prove stronger than the invitation to sing along.

A time capsule with a beat—espresso counters, answering machines, and flannel as far as the eye can see. Singles finds Cameron Crowe in ensemble mode, tracing the rhythms of early-’90s Seattle through a cluster of almost-couples who talk a lot, drift more, and occasionally stumble into something like connection. It’s shaggy and affable, with glints of insight—but coming off Say Anything…, it plays more like a mixtape of moments than a story with momentum. The emotional core is Steve (Campbell Scott), a transportation planner with big ideas and lousy timing, and Linda (Kyra Sedgwick), a self-described realist whose romantic optimism keeps getting pulled out from under her. He sees her in a crowded room, makes a move at a concert, and something starts. Until it doesn’t. Their relationship stutters—early sparks, crossed signals, the occasional reset. Like two people holding the same map but following different routes. Janet (Bridget Fonda) still sees promise in Cliff (Matt Dillon), the floppy-haired frontman of Citizen Dick, though it’s hard to tell why. He tunes his guitar in her presence more often than he looks her in the eye. She clings to the idea of something deeper; he barely notices. Hoping to shift the dynamic, she schedules breast augmentation surgery—thinking maybe a change in silhouette will cut through the static. Cliff isn’t unkind. Just lost in his own feedback loop. Dillon plays him like a guy who confuses proximity with intimacy. Crowe peppers the film with asides, pop ephemera, and cameos from Pearl Jam in band tees and half-ironic smiles. It poses as a love story but drifts like a diary—restless, talky, always looking sideways. The structure barely pretends to hold. Characters nurse ambitions, rehearse intimacy, flinch at clarity. No one declares anything—they ramble, deflect, leave voicemails they regret five minutes later. It’s not a romance—it’s what you get when everyone thinks they’re being honest but keeps editing in real time. Singles isn’t as piercing or intimate as it aims to be, but it’s charming—and if nothing else, a sharply-dressed artifact of its moment.

An eerie, slow-burning fusion of Southern Gothic, musical reverie, and blood-soaked folklore, Sinners is one of the most original horror films in years. Set in the American South during the Depression, it conjures a world where spiritual longing, artistic devotion, and ancestral ghosts all simmer under the same leaky roof. It’s also a vampire movie—eventually—but that’s not the half of it. At the center is Sammie, better known as “Preacher Boy” (Miles Caton), a gifted blues musician with fingers that seem born knowing the fretboard. He’s the son of a hard-edged preacher (Saul Williams), and their conflict isn’t subtle: salvation through music or through fire-and-brimstone faith. Sammie’s path gets even murkier with the return of his cousins—twin brothers from Chicago, both played, astonishingly, by Michael B. Jordan. The effect is so seamless I had to double-check he didn’t actually have a twin. He doesn’t. The twins arrive with bootleg liquor, borrowed bravado, and a plan to open a juke joint at the edge of town. They rope Sammie into their venture, along with a piano-and-harmonica man who shows up in a liquor-scented haze—played by Delroy Lindo, inhabiting a man who’s played too many bars, buried too many friends, and drinks to keep the voices down. The music these men summon is raw, mournful, and strangely transporting. One sequence—where past, present, and future spirits share the same song—metaphorically and literally sets the place ablaze. The supernatural hums beneath everything from the start, but the film doesn’t show its teeth until the final act, when it shifts into something genuinely terrifying. The vampire metaphor—talent devoured, purpose seduced—isn’t buried. It’s right there in the blood. If the buildup drags a little, the payoff is worth it. The music is phenomenal. The horror, when it comes, is feral. But what stays with you is that feeling—somewhere between devotion and damnation—that great art always comes with a cost.

Sister Act has a premise that requires a little more narrative setup than you’d expect for a musical comedy about nuns singing Motown. Whoopi Goldberg plays Deloris Van Cartier, a Reno lounge singer who witnesses her mobster boyfriend commit a murder and promptly enters witness protection—conveniently disguised in a convent. It’s a long walk for a short setup, and the mob plot isn’t exactly the highlight. It even comes preloaded with Harvey Keitel, a reliably intense actor who plays the crime boss like he wandered in from another movie, which he probably did. The film’s real business begins once Deloris is wrangled into choir duty. Here, the mood shifts. She trades in her nightclub sequins for a habit and starts whipping the convent choir into shape, reworking old hymns into gospel-infused pop numbers with suspiciously polished arrangements. There’s some very light theological wrestling—mostly about whether soul music belongs in sacred space—but the movie’s heart is with the choir, and the choir is a hit. As a story, it’s more of a straight line than an arc. Deloris modernizes the music, wins over the nuns, and maybe even rediscovers a little purpose herself. Maggie Smith delivers her lines with the kind of arched-brow discipline that makes you think she knows she’s in a farce but refuses to act like it. The rest of the cast—especially Kathy Najimy and Mary Wickes—play to the broad comedy, and it mostly works. Whatever else can be said about Sister Act, it’s hard to hate a movie that ends with nuns in full habit bringing down the house with a reworked version of “I Will Follow Him.” It’s deeply silly, occasionally clunky, and pretty hard to resist.

Whoopi Goldberg returns as Deloris Van Cartier—now a full-blown Vegas headliner, sequins upgraded, spotlight secured. But her glittery run is cut short when the nuns from her past life turn up with a favor that only she can grant: infiltrate a struggling Catholic high school in disguise and whip the music program into shape before the school gets shut down. It’s an excuse to wedge her back into the habit, but this time the story creaks under the weight of its own templates. Inspirational teacher movie? Check. Save-the-community-institution movie? Check. Franchise comedy sequel? Check, check, and wobbly check. You almost feel for the screenwriters, forced to glue these genres together like it’s a group project that no one wanted to lead. The structure is pure connect-the-dots: the students resist, then rally; the choir finds its voice; the stakes hinge on a competition that arrives right on cue. There’s no connective tissue, just a series of motivational montages and musical drop-ins that feel parachuted in from a different movie. The kids perform in street clothes instead of uniforms—an act of “rebellion” that mostly reads as wardrobe planning. But Goldberg sells it. Even when the plot thins to gauze, she holds the center with charisma and timing. Lauryn Hill, barely introduced but impossible to miss, adds some raw vocal power and emotional texture. The musical numbers are polished, even if they don’t grow organically from the story—they’re polished enough to make you forget the plot disappeared twenty minutes ago. Back in the Habit isn’t a disaster, just a patchwork. It holds together on charm and rhythm more than writing. And sometimes, that’s enough to get to the final note.

A film aimed squarely at girls ages 10 to 14, but made with enough care and intelligence that it doesn’t self-destruct on contact with adults. The setup is pure tween wish-fulfillment: four best friends find a single pair of jeans that fits each of them perfectly, despite wildly different body types. Convinced the pants are magic, they pass them back and forth over a summer spent apart—each of them trying to figure out who they are without the usual backup. It’s a neat trick of a framing device—just enough whimsy to hang four separate coming-of-age stories on. Alexis Bledel gets the postcard version, falling for a Greek boy while on vacation with her grandparents. Blake Lively goes to soccer camp and throws herself into anything that feels like momentum—part grief, part compulsion. America Ferrera visits the father who walked out and gets a front-row seat to his new life, which doesn’t have room for her. Amber Tamblyn, stuck at home and allergic to sincerity, takes a job filming a child with leukemia and gradually lets the world in. The pants themselves aren’t much more than connective tissue. The real interest is in how each girl inches toward honesty, whether with a parent, a stranger, or herself. The dialogue sometimes veers into the language of workshops, and the life lessons come pre-underlined. But the film has something rarer than heart—clarity. It treats these girls like actual people, not greeting cards on a coming-of-age display rack. Their bond isn’t broadcast in slow-motion hugs or breathless declarations; it just shows up—in the letters, the looks, the way the jeans get mailed without needing explanation. A few moments clang and the music occasionally tries to do the feeling for us, but the emotional throughlines hold. Ferrera, in particular, hits clean—no varnish, no theatrics, just truth in small doses. It’s not a great movie, but it’s better than it needed to be, and for its intended audience, it might be exactly right.

John Hughes’ ode to teen mortification works best as a string of humiliations stitched together with sincerity and sarcasm—and Molly Ringwald, with her arsenal of eye-rolls, slouches, and muttered despair, is the perfect vessel. As Samantha Baker, she’s not queen bee or wallflower—just one of those kids who moves through high school like background noise. Half-hoping to register, half-bracing for invisibility. Her face says it all: a glance that slides off to the side, eyes narrowed just so, a sigh that shows up moments before the situation even calls for it. She doesn’t just have attitude—it’s armor. Beneath it, she’s all nerves and ache, trying not to care as much as she clearly does. The setup is sharp: it’s her sixteenth birthday, her house is teeming with relatives, and she’s braced for a little forced cheer—maybe even a botched toast from someone who barely remembers her middle name. Instead—nothing. They all forget. Every last one of them, too wrapped up in wedding prep for her bigger sister to notice. No malice, just a thoughtless omission—and one that stings harder than Sam thought she’d even realize. Sam’s life isn’t tragic—it’s just lined with these kinds of small, stupid disappointments that never quite scab over. Her dream guy (Michael Schoeffling, soft-spoken and slow-moving) is already taken by the school’s reigning bombshell, while the school’s most confident disaster (Anthony Michael Hall, flailing elbows and delusion) has her pegged as his prom date-in-waiting. The story traces the expected path—infatuations, humiliations, a dash of belated grace—but Hughes keeps the pace snappy. The dialogue bites, the edits are punchy, little sight gags are snarky, and the background characters chatter and pop like someone spiked the punch. A mixed blessing here is Long Duk Dong—an exchange student built from lazy shorthand, complete with gongs and one-note punchlines. But Gedde Watanabe plays him with such exaggerated precision—faces, pratfalls, that oddball cadence—it’s hard not to watch. The material is dated at best, offensive at worst, but his commitment is total. He’s a live-action cartoon, ricocheting through the movie like a rogue firework. The material may be paper-thin, but his delivery isn’t—his timing is so jagged and offbeat it almost becomes its own language. Whatever he’s channeling, he’s the one who seems to be having the most fun. What you take with you isn’t the story—it’s the sensation: twitchy, lopsided, unexpectedly pointed. Sixteen Candles doesn’t try to explain adolescence. It just lets you sit in it—uncomfortable, absurd, and only funny once you’ve made it out the other side.

The concept isn’t hopeless. In a near-future where cloning humans is outlawed but duplicating your golden retriever is just good parenting, The 6th Day introduces a world where the technology is miles ahead of the ethics. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Adam Gibson, a charter pilot who comes home to find his own birthday party in progress—only he’s not the guest of honor. He’s the intruder. Another Adam, identical in every way, has taken his place. The culprit is a tech conglomerate run by a man who looks like he was programmed to lack upper body strength but make up for it in smugness. Tony Goldwyn, bespectacled and gently villainous, oversees a cloning operation that has clearly crossed several lines, legal and otherwise. Before long, Adam is dodging corporate assassins and uncovering the company’s secrets the only way he knows how—by throwing people through walls and blowing things up. The opening act is sluggish, preoccupied with future-world knickknacks and a truly alarming animatronic toy marketed to children. It’s not until the second half that the film remembers it has an action star on hand, and lets him loose in a sequence of reasonably fun, if familiar, set pieces. Unfortunately, they come packaged with dialogue that sounds like it was dictated under duress. The one-liners clunk hard. Schwarzenegger is game, and occasionally even self-aware, but the film gives him little to work with beyond the usual machinery of corporate malfeasance and identity confusion. It isn’t unwatchable. But it’s mechanical, and by the end, you feel like the movie’s central innovation—making an identical copy of something—may have been more prophetic than it intended.

When this came out, audiences guarded the twist like it was nuclear launch codes. If you didn’t know it, you were protected; if you did, you were sworn to silence. The secret’s long gone now, but if by some miracle you haven’t heard it, watch the movie before someone spoils it for you. Because once you know, it’s not that the twist collapses—it’s that it starts to look faintly absurd. And the thing is, the twist isn’t even close to the best part. The real hook is Haley Joel Osment as Cole, a fragile, wary kid who sees ghosts—and not the friendly kind. They’re angry, persistent, and only visible to him. He hides it from his mother (Toni Collette), partly out of fear she’ll think he’s crazy, partly because the truth would be harder to believe. He’s a polite child, mostly, except when he’s telling his teacher—within earshot of the whole class—that the school used to be a courthouse where people were hanged, before erupting into “Stuttering Stanley!” like he’s channeling a different kid entirely. The only person he confides in is Malcolm (Bruce Willis), a child psychiatrist who initially treats him like just another troubled case. As they talk, Malcolm’s doubt erodes, replaced by something like genuine concern. Their connection becomes the film’s spine—two people circling trust, one learning to speak, the other remembering why he listens. Shyamalan’s scares are precise, almost surgical. They jolt, yes, but they also cling: a music cue bending in the wrong direction, a shadow that overstays its welcome, a shape in the corner that wasn’t there before. The kitchen scene still gets me: Cole walks in, sees his mother at the counter, and when she turns, it’s not her—just a dead-eyed woman holding out her wrists, slit and dripping. That moment isn’t just startling; it’s cold enough to stick. Even without the twist, The Sixth Sense works: as a ghost story, as a study of fear and trust, and as a rare horror film where the scariest thing isn’t the supernatural, but the isolation of having no one believe you. The ending made it famous; everything before that made it worth remembering.

A sci-fi adventure with a promising hook and nothing much to show for it but generic peril and a lot of squawking CGI reptiles. The title tips you off: 65 million years ago, a starship from the planet Somaris crash-lands on prehistoric Earth—before humans but conveniently in time for the apex of dinosaurs. Every soul on board perishes except Mills (Adam Driver, earnestly game) and a young girl (Ariana Greenblatt) who doesn’t speak his language and mostly exists to give him something noble to worry about. The good idea here—humans tangling with dinosaurs long before our evolutionary curtain call—ought to feel playful or at least novel. Instead, it’s just another monster gauntlet that might as well be set on any random, scaly planet. The creatures are digital lumps with teeth, lunging and shrieking like bargain-bin velociraptors—making you appreciate how the Jurassic Park franchise, at its clumsiest, still understood suspense better than loud chomping ever will. Driver does what he can, grunting and sweating through the jungle, wielding a laser rifle like a man who remembers he was once in better movies. There’s an attempt at father-daughter surrogate bonding that’s passable in the quiet moments but mostly exists to get squashed under the next stampede. You sense what 65 wants to be: a stripped-down survival tale with a pulpy twist. What it is, though, is ninety minutes of toothy jump scares that never once feel dangerous enough to stick in your memory after the credits roll. A fine excuse to watch Adam Driver outrun digital lizards, but that’s about it.

A moody, low-lit neo-noir with a TV-movie pulse and just enough cigarette smoke to pass for something grittier. Sketch Artist opens strong: a murder, a single witness, and a police sketch that lands a little too close to home. Jeff Fahey plays Jack Whitfield, a department sketch artist who suddenly finds himself drawing his own wife’s face (Sean Young) based on the account of a young witness—played by Drew Barrymore, in a brief role that ends abruptly. She turns up dead not long after. It should’ve been a slow-burn spiral, but the plot jams up—more tangled than tense. Everyone has a secret, and they all wait too long to talk. The noir cues are there, but the suspense keeps sliding off like it’s been badly timed. Still, there’s something faintly compelling—maybe the atmosphere, maybe the way the cast deadpans every trashy line like it’s clipped from a pulp novel. The script copies the cadence of noir, but adds a tabloid sheen and a kitchen-sink mess of motivations. Not stylish enough to be camp, not grounded enough to stick its landing. The setup works—but instead of snapping shut, it slumps, like a detective dozing off mid-interrogation.

Not officially a Beach Party movie, though it wears the same smile and forgets just as much. This time the sand is replaced with snow, the surfboards traded for skis, and Annette Funicello is absent—apart from a cameo. Frankie Avalon still turns up in red swim trunks, because brand is brand, and there’s a heated pool conveniently located at the foot of the slopes. The plot, if one must call it that, hinges on Frankie and his sidekick Craig (Dwayne Hickman) needing beginner ski lessons. Unfortunately, the only class available is for women—so naturally, they go full Some Like It Hot and cross-dress their way into comedic misadventure. This leads to a series of tepid hijinks: mistaken identities, awkward flirtations, and enough double entendres to fill a sock drawer. The gags never land with much force, and the pacing tends to idle, but the film keeps lobbing distractions at the audience like it’s trying to run out the clock. Lesley Gore shows up and sings. James Brown appears with the Famous Flames and delivers a performance so dynamic it feels like he’s briefly hijacked the whole film. The Hondells pop in at the end, back on the beach, as if to reassure us that Frankie Avalon is and shall always be a beach bum. The film’s appeal lies in the novelty of it all—mid-century teens in ski bibs lip-syncing while pretending not to sweat under those wigs. Ski Party is fluff, and not the fresh kind, but it’s at least curious fluff, preserved in Technicolor and grooving faintly to the beat of a misplaced surfboard.

If Mark Twain and Richard Pryor ever ran a long con together, it might look something like this: a smooth-talking white hustler and a sharp-eyed Black accomplice fleecing slaveholders across the South, grinning all the way to the next town. James Garner plays Quincy, a con man with a genteel drawl and a knack for invention. Lou Gossett Jr. is Jason, his partner in the scam—sold at auction as a runaway slave, only to escape and split the earnings once the dust settles. It’s the same trick in every city. It’s a scheme so audacious you can’t quite believe a major studio signed off—and for a good stretch, Skin Game rides that disbelief like a winning hand. Garner leans into his rogue routine with half a wink, but it’s Gossett who carries the weight—watchful, sardonic, and quietly furious beneath the easy banter. The best scenes are the cons themselves: tight, tense, and shot through with a kind of satirical clarity the rest of the movie can’t always maintain. Because yes, it wanders. The pacing flattens, the plot bends into digressions it hasn’t quite earned, and some of the comic detours (romantic, slapstick, abolitionist) feel like attempts to soften the premise with side quests. Even Garner’s grin starts to feel like it’s running on fumes. But every time you’re ready to count it out, the film swipes back—usually with a moment of prickly insight that lands harder than expected. Royal Dano, wild-eyed and sermonizing as John Brown, practically kicks the door in halfway through, like a man who showed up to deliver the third act of another movie and refuses to leave. And the ending, while not exactly a slam-dunk, leaves a bruise. It forces the joke into perspective: no matter how equal the partnership seems, only one of them ever gets sold. Skin Game doesn’t go for the jugular, but it nicks enough arteries along the way. It’s a satire that plays like a grin with something sharper tucked behind it—and while it doesn’t draw as much blood as it could’ve, the edge is there if you know where to look.

The skull in question belonged to the Marquis de Sade—an appropriately cursed relic, passed from one ill-fated collector to the next, leaving a trail of stylishly composed corpses in its wake. When it’s stolen from one such collector (a suitably haunted Christopher Lee), his reaction is not outrage but quiet relief. The thing has a will, he suggests. And it’s not exactly benevolent. Enter Peter Cushing, another refined gentleman of means and morbid taste, who acquires the skull as if adding it to a tea set. He, too, begins to unravel—though not all at once. The descent is measured, punctuated by visions, violent outbursts, and a sense of invisible manipulation that grows louder with each scene. The skull doesn’t float, cackle, or sprout fangs—it simply sits, staring back. Which somehow makes it worse. This is a film built for those who appreciate the finer things in horror: waxy lighting, red velvet drapery, creeping dread with a British accent. It’s not breathless, but it knows how to stalk. The camera glides through these immaculate sets like a ghost with a steady gait. The dialogue is stately, the pace deliberate, and the atmosphere lovingly embalmed. As for Cushing and Lee, their presence is the film’s greatest asset—even if they share precious little screen time. One relinquishes the skull, the other inherits its curse, and between them is a kind of spiritual baton-passing that makes the story feel mythic. No, The Skull won’t have you clutching your pearls. But it just might leave you watching your antique collection a little more suspiciously.

A sepia-streaked spectacle where every frame looks dipped in soup. Sky Captain wants to be pulp—but prestige pulp, the kind with art direction so precious it forgets to blink. The future looks like 1939 melted in a fishtank. Robots clomp through Manhattan in formation, dirigibles hang in the sky like wedding cakes, and everything is bathed in the glow of a dying lightbulb. It’s retro-futurism rendered through eye strain. The movie thinks it’s racing—across continents, into danger, toward a mystery with gears and lightning bolts—but it moves like it’s underwater. Jude Law pilots. Gwyneth Paltrow photographs. Dialogue is exchanged with the urgency of a polite brunch. Everyone looks impeccable and speaks like they’re waiting for a better script to arrive. Then there’s the pacing—ambitious on paper, but glazed in practice. The film hops from Manhattan to Shangri-La to a mountaintop lab, but each location arrives with the same temperature: tepid. Dinosaurs appear. So do rocket ships. None of it feels urgent. It’s the kind of movie where the apocalypse is mentioned like a dinner reservation. Angelina Jolie enters like a last-minute rescue mission—eyepatch, posture, clipped delivery. She’s gone ten minutes later, and the film immediately slumps back into its default setting: polite inertia. Jude Law does the square-jawed thing. Gwyneth Paltrow is styled to perfection and given dialogue that flattens on contact. Everyone behaves like they’re acting out blueprints. There’s a plot involving vanishing scientists and genetic tinkering and a plan that somehow ties them together. It never quite clicks, because nothing feels connected. Momentum stalls—everything happens, nothing builds. The film knows the moves but forgets the grip. Sky Captain dreams in sepia, talks in serials, and moves like a slideshow. It knows what the genre looks like, just not how it moves.

The first ten minutes don’t inspire confidence—another glossy Disney live-action with a “what if superheroes went to high school?” hook. Then, somewhere between the setup and the cafeteria, it starts to click. The gags begin to work, the helium-light energy takes hold, and suddenly it’s not just watchable but endearing. Disarmingly so. Michael Angarano plays Will Stronghold, a freshman at Sky High—Hogwarts with capes instead of robes. He’s the only son of The Commander (Kurt Russell) and Jetstream (Kelly Preston), two of the world’s most famous superheroes. The snag: his powers haven’t shown up yet. At Sky High, that earns him a slot in “Hero Support” (read: sidekicks), a basement track for kids with powers too weird, unimpressive, or nonexistent to headline. Like the nerds and art freaks of the superhero caste system. Will’s new friends do have abilities, though—shape-shifting into guinea pigs, glowing faintly in the dark—just not the kind that impress the hero crowd. When Will manages to get under the skin of an infamous supervillain’s son, the story slides exactly where you expect. That’s fine. Powers will surface, guinea pig disguises will prove useful. The broad strokes may be predictable, but much of the fun is in the smaller moments. Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald (Kids in the Hall alumni) pop up as a washed-up hero and the school’s unhinged science teacher. Lynda Carter appears as the principal, with just enough of a nod to her Wonder Woman past to get a grin. The school is bright, candy-colored, and too buoyant for the stakes to ever feel serious—even when danger’s announced over the loudspeaker. As kids’ fare, it’s quick, cheerful, and sly enough to keep the parents awake. For a rainy afternoon, it’s exactly the thing: colorful, ridiculous, and hard not to like.

Possibly Woody Allen’s sharpest outing before Annie Hall and an all-around gem of absurdist sci-fi satire. Allen stars as Miles Monroe, a health food store owner from Greenwich Village circa 1973 who checks into the hospital for a routine ulcer operation—only to be secretly frozen for 200 years by a pair of anxious doctors hoping to dodge malpractice suits. He thaws out in a shiny, cheerfully totalitarian future where wakes up in a future where people are docile, robots handle the drudge work, and the government’s so incompetent it needs the occasional underground coup just to stay interesting. Allen fires off one-liners like he’s trying to break a record—gags about pop culture, bad gadgets, and human vanity so durable it survives centuries. A favorite bit: Miles being shown photos of historical figures and wildly misidentifying them, mangling his own century with confident nonsense. The slapstick, meanwhile, is some of the finest he ever staged—equal parts silent-era tribute and pure neurotic frenzy. After stumbling into the path of the rebels, Miles disguises himself as a robot servant and ends up working for Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton), an artist as delightfully oblivious as he is jumpy. Naturally, sparks and screw-ups ensue, and soon they’re neck-deep in the resistance themselves—posing as doctors to foil the regime’s plan to resurrect its dictator from the only piece left after a rebel bombing: his nose. It’s ridiculous, it’s quick on its feet, and it’s packed with some of Allen’s best throwaway jokes. Keaton and Allen bounce around each other like they’ve been doing this since birth. And under the daffiness, there’s a surprisingly sweet little heartbeat: people are people, even two hundred years from now, and love survives dictators, cryogenics, and botched plastic surgery. Not bad for a movie that opens with an ulcer.

Some films subsist almost entirely on charm. Sleepless in Seattle gorges on it. It’s the kind of movie that wears sentimentality like a tailored coat and never pretends it’s doing anything else. What saves it from sugar shock is the intelligence of its construction and the disarming sincerity of its leads. Tom Hanks plays Sam Baldwin, a recently widowed architect who moves to Seattle with his young son Jonah (Ross Malinger), hoping geography will soften grief. It doesn’t. Sam is listless, staring into space, barely parenting. Jonah, fed up and determined, calls into a national late-night radio show and confesses that his dad is lonely. Sam is pulled into the conversation—reluctantly—and, in the space of a few wistful soundbites, becomes a coast-to-coast sensation. Letters arrive by the truckload. One of those letters comes from Annie (Meg Ryan), a Baltimore reporter with a perfectly reasonable fiancé (Bill Pullman, playing the platonic ideal of “nice but not right”) and a quiet sense that her life is being lived a few degrees off. She hears Sam’s voice and is undone—not because of what he looks like, but because of how he sounds when he talks about his late wife. She writes. She hesitates. She writes again. The entire film plays like a love letter passed across the country. Ephron stretches the romantic tension to the limit—keeping Sam and Annie in parallel storylines until the very last scene—but it never feels like a cheat. Hanks brings warmth and depth to a man in slow emotional thaw, and Ryan plays Annie like a romantic who’s been tricking herself into being practical. And unlike most studio fare, Seattle is allowed to be Seattle. No Vancouver stand-in, no B-roll. It’s a love story, sure. But it’s also a rare postcard from a real place.

An action-comedy for kids that’s constantly in motion but rarely gets anywhere. The Sleepover has a setup with some promise—secret pasts, hidden identities, kids caught up in a caper—but it plays more like a loosely connected string of kid-friendly stunts than anything resembling a story with rhythm or shape. Clancy (Sadie Stanley) and Kevin (Maxwell Simkins) live what they assume is a quiet suburban life, until their mom Margot (Malin Åkerman) is kidnapped. Turns out she’s a former criminal in hiding, and her past has just come calling. The kids, along with a couple of school friends, take off to find her, piecing together clues and somehow stumbling into high-tech lairs and museum break-ins like it’s all part of a slightly off-brand spy movie. There’s energy here, and the young cast does what they can to keep things light, but the movie struggles to find the right tone. It’s too broad to feel like a real thriller and too busy to register as a character-driven comedy. The humor rarely lands, and the action is staged more for noise than effect. It keeps trying to top itself with each new twist, but nothing sticks long enough to matter. Younger kids might be entertained by the motion of it all, but for anyone else, it’s mostly background noise. The Sleepover isn’t offensive or grating—it’s the cinematic equivalent of a bag of Smarties: colorful, harmless, and completely forgettable five minutes later. A premise that could have been workable, but it was burned off in one sitting.

A grim character study with the makings of something deeper, Sleepwalking hints at emotional weight it never quite carries. It’s a well-acted, nicely shot downer—bleak in that washed-out, wintry way where everything looks cold and half-abandoned. Poverty isn’t prettied up here; it just hangs in the background like part of the weather. Nick Stahl plays James, a man so quiet he barely makes an impression—until he panics and takes off with his niece, Tara (AnnaSophia Robb), after her mother (Charlize Theron) walks out and child services comes knocking. What follows isn’t a chase so much as a slow retreat, two people trying to stay ahead of the system and their own unraveling lives. Now and then, the film circles something deeper. A look, a pause, a moment that feels like it might actually go somewhere. But it always pulls back, like it’s afraid of what it might find. The characters stay frustratingly out of reach—not mysterious, just underdeveloped. In one sequence, Tara glides around a motel pool in roller skates, cigarette lit, two boys leering nearby. She loops the edge, flicks the ash, and rolls off the diving board like it’s a decision she’s already made. It’s a charged moment, hinting at something deeper, but the film refuses to press in—it just moves on. Dennis Hopper appears as the abusive father James fled years ago, and the story hints at a confrontation, maybe even catharsis. But that, too, never fully lands. What you get instead is a slow trudge through inherited damage, captured with a somber steadiness that might’ve meant more if the emotional center had been sharper. There’s no uplift here, and no real transformation—just endurance. Which is a valid angle, narratively speaking. But it makes for a film that starts bleak, ends bleak, and rarely deviates from that emotional flatline. It wants to say something about broken people, but never quite finds the words.

Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow isn’t so much an adaptation as it is a gothic playground—Washington Irving’s story ripped from the page, drained of subtlety, and refitted with fog machines, spinning blades, and buckets of blood. It’s a loose retelling, but not a careless one—burrowing into 1799 with an eye for texture, stitching colonial dread with studio gloss. Johnny Depp plays Ichabod Crane as a jittery Enlightenment man—half constable, half coroner, armed with logic, trembling behind tinted spectacles. He’s dispatched from New York to the backwater town of Sleepy Hollow, where the heads are coming off and the suspects include witches, ghosts, and a horseman with no use for small talk. Christina Ricci, pale and poised, plays Katrina Van Tassel, the local heiress who drifts toward Crane with an air of preordained romance and an occasional spellbook. She helps investigate. Mostly, she provides a spectral softness to match the film’s feverish tone. This is the first time Burton feels like he’s coloring inside Hollywood’s lines instead of drawing new ones. The mood’s intact—moonlit, mist-soaked, and styled like a lithograph bled through vellum—but the plot drifts toward the procedural, pausing only for bursts of violence and ornamental witchcraft. The story, such as it is, moves in clean, declarative lines. It’s fine. It just doesn’t haunt. Still, the spectacle hovers like a bad omen. Elfman’s score ticks and throbs, half lullaby, half dirge. The design leans into baroque excess—branches like blades, staircases groaning under candlelit dread, every frame steeped in fog thick enough to muffle the story’s running-out-of-steam wheeze. Depp and Ricci keep it steady. But it’s Christopher Walken, silent and sharpened, who steals the film as the snarling, sharp-toothed Horseman. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to. He arrives, decapitates, vanishes—like a slasher with better posture. It’s not deep. But it looks great doing what it does.

Slender Man is a compelling enough figure to deserve a proper horror film—tall, faceless, unnervingly still, and always lurking just past the point where shapes turn indistinct. But this isn’t that film. What we get instead is a gray, shapeless mood piece that mistakes confusion for mystery and atmosphere for storytelling. The plot—or approximation of one—follows four high school girls who, during a sleepover, intentionally seek out a video said to summon the elusive Slender Man. Their curiosity is morbid, their reasoning vague, and the consequences arrive almost immediately. One of them vanishes. The others begin slipping into a shared hallucinatory dread. They see things in mirrors, in woods, in the corners of classrooms. Nightmares cross over into waking life, and nothing makes much sense—not to the characters, and not to us. That might be forgivable if the film were interested in building tension, or even laying down a few breadcrumbs. But what we get is a series of disconnected images: distorted faces, flickering lights, the occasional long-limbed silhouette stretching through the fog. Slender Man appears often enough, but more as an abstract screensaver than a proper threat. He looms, but rarely does anything. The cinematography is dim to the point of eye strain, and the editing feels shaved down—like key scenes were removed mid-sentence. (There were reports of studio-mandated cuts, and it shows.) Characters barely register, the pacing floats in place, and the scares rely entirely on sudden volume spikes and visual glitches. There are kernels of an idea here—urban legend as viral curse, psychological decay passed along through media—but none of it is shaped into something watchable. Slender Man doesn’t build suspense so much as drift through fog, hoping that if it stays vague enough, we’ll fill in the terror ourselves. We don’t.

The premise sounds like something cooked up in a screenwriting class: what if a woman just barely missed the train—and her entire life changed? Sliding Doors actually follows through on the idea. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Helen, a London publicist who gets fired one morning and rushes to catch the tube. In one version of events, she makes it. In the other, the doors shut in her face. From that moment, her life splits—and the film cuts between both timelines as they unspool in parallel. The setup could’ve been insufferable. But it isn’t. There’s a strange satisfaction in watching the twin versions of Helen drift further apart—not just in haircut or boyfriend, but in mood, outlook, trajectory. It’s not always what you expect. The “lucky” version stumbles. The “unlucky” one adapts. Life throws curveballs in both directions, and part of the pleasure is seeing how they intersect, echo, or collapse on themselves. The script keeps a steady hand on the mechanics, and Paltrow makes it work. She gives Helen a kind of nimble poise—even when she’s unraveling—that sells the whole concept without ever having to wink at it. One Helen gets a makeover and a rebound. The other gets blindsided and scrambles. Both feel plausible, and more importantly, worth following. There are a few creaky joints—dialogue that resolves too cleanly, side characters cut from rom-com templates—but the film stays thoughtful, grounded more in observation than gimmick. The butterfly effect plays out with restraint, less theory than texture. By the end, it’s not just divergence that matters, but the strange ways certain moments echo—regardless of the route taken. Even if the concept is high, the emotions are grounded. It’s a romantic comedy with enough brain to match its heart.

The board game Clue gave us candlesticks, lead pipes, and daggers, but left out one perfectly viable murder weapon: the power drill. The Slumber Party Massacre is happy to pick up the slack, revolving around a killer who lugs around a massive cordless and uses it with the kind of mechanical focus usually seen in tradesmen, not psychopaths. The storyline is straightforward: a group of high school girls gather for a night of pizza and pillow fights, unaware that an escaped mental patient has decided to make them his next targets. We see his face almost right away, but learn nothing beyond his fondness for drilling and his total lack of motivation. He’s not a raving lunatic so much as a guy who looks like he should be fixing your sink. He just happens to bring a power tool to a knife fight. For a movie set at a slumber party, the party itself barely qualifies. There’s some pillow flailing, a quick topless scene, and then a whole lot of waiting around for the next generic death sequence. The film was reportedly written with a feminist bent, though you wouldn’t know it from how casually it tosses in the usual slow-mo shower scenes and half-hearted attempts at innuendo. A shot where the killer’s drill dangles at crotch level might be trying to make a point, but it mostly comes off like a crude visual gag. There’s some minor entertainment in the lo-fi kills and awkward dialogue, but it never rises to the level of true camp. The only moment that really sticks: a girl balancing a pizza box on the corpse of the delivery guy—his eyes drilled out—and still helping herself to a slice. If nothing else, the film respects the urgency of hunger.

The payoff doesn’t come until the final 15 minutes, which is usually a problem—but when the payoff involves a rockabilly killer singing original songs and slaughtering teenagers with a weapon that’s half guitar, half power drill, the wait feels oddly justified. Until then, the film floats in a dreamy sort of limbo. Courtney (Crystal Bernard), the now-seventeen-year-old survivor of the first film, has swapped trauma for rehearsal time with her all-girl rock band. They dance, goof off, and strum through enough featherweight ’80s rock to soundtrack a pimple cream commercial. The story, such as it is, veers from beachy fun to psychic unraveling as Courtney begins to experience a string of increasingly surreal visions: blood seeping from her bathroom drain, a pimple that bursts into gooey nightmare fuel, and a chicken sandwich that harbors a human hand. Her friends don’t see what she sees—until, of course, it’s too late. The killer—no longer a blank-faced driller from the first film—returns as a sort of undead greaser, part Carl Perkins, part game show host, with a leather outfit and a chrome-plated guitar whose neck ends in a whirring drill bit. He doesn’t sneak around corners—he twirls, croons, and launches into rock numbers mid-homicide. It’s silly, knowingly so, and the film doesn’t shy away from the ridiculousness. At one point, he straddles the frame like a Vegas act gone feral. For most of its runtime, the movie coasts on strange vibes and genre leftovers, but when it kicks into gear, it’s almost worth the slow boil. It’s junk food cinema—crunchy, disposable, but oddly satisfying. Not much substance, but enough madness to keep your attention wired.

Slumberland has all the ingredients of a big fantasy adventure—lavish effects, a sweeping score, a kid in search of something profound—but it rarely feels like more than a noisy collection of dream-world detours. Nemo (Marlow Barkley) lives with her father (Kyle Chandler) in a lighthouse, until a sudden accident sends her to live with her awkward, emotionally distant uncle (Chris O’Dowd). Grief pushes her into a strange dream universe, where she meets Flip (Jason Momoa), a horned outlaw with a manic grin and a plan to track down magical “pearls” that can grant wishes. That premise could work, but the film makes an early misstep: it tells us that Nemo can’t be harmed in her dreams. From that point on, everything is visually over the top but dramatically weightless. Beds turn into speedboats, elevator doors open onto swirling cities, and strange figures drift in and out, but little of it feels connected to anything real. Momoa tries to inject energy, but the role feels like a mismatch. Flip is loud, fast-talking, and constantly in motion, but rarely interesting. Some smaller ideas—like a boy who always dreams of driving a garbage truck—have more appeal than the larger story, which keeps pushing for emotion without ever really digging in. Slumberland wants to be a journey through grief and imagination, but it keeps getting distracted by spectacle. It’s not bad exactly—just a little hollow. Watchable in a pinch, but easily forgotten.

A minor entry in Woody Allen’s filmography, Small Time Crooks is a caper comedy with no real caper and only intermittent comedy. Allen plays Ray, a two-bit ex-con with a plan to rob a bank by leasing a storefront and tunneling underneath. That he also happens to be Woody Allen—neurotic, squawky, and visibly allergic to manual labor—makes the premise wobble from the start. He’s about as plausible a career criminal as he is a power forward. Still, Ray ropes in three dimwit accomplices—none more convincing than he is—and enlists his brassy wife Frenchy (Tracey Ullman) to run a cookie shop as their front. Naturally, the heist falls apart and the cookie business becomes an overnight sensation. That twist isn’t bad. Neither are some of the stranger turns that follow, including a subplot where Hugh Grant plays a Henry Higgins-type who ushers Frenchy into high society. But the story never picks up enough speed to qualify as momentum. Every development arrives with a conversational traffic jam—characters yammering over one another, dissecting jokes until they dissolve. There are laughs, though. Ullman delivers hers with a snap and a scowl, making a worthy foil to Allen’s familiar tics. But it’s Elaine May who walks away with the movie. She plays a daffy, slow-motion simpleton whose every line lands—not through punchlines, but through a kind of offbeat logic that makes her the most watchable thing in the film. The whole thing is a bit lopsided—amusing in stretches, padded in others, and never quite committed to either farce or satire. It’s not without charm. But it mostly feels like Allen noodling around with a premise he likes and getting distracted halfway through. Fans will find things to chuckle at. Everyone else may wonder how long it takes to tunnel out.

It’s one thing to be chased by something with claws or a face like shredded meat. It’s another when the terror sinks in through your own mind—calm, still, smiling. That’s the kind of horror Smile works with: not the type you run from, but the kind that waits quietly while you fall apart. Sosie Bacon plays Rose Cotter, a hospital psychiatrist who meets a deeply rattled patient describing something no textbook could prepare her for—a shape-shifting presence that wears the faces of strangers and grins like it knows what’s coming. Minutes later, the patient is dead, and the grin is now Rose’s to carry. What follows is a slow psychological descent. Rose starts seeing things—or maybe not. Friends and coworkers flash that same frozen smile. People speak in riddles. The terror doesn’t charge at her; it appears in ordinary moments, without warning, and refuses to leave. Worst of all, no one believes her, which is precisely what the thing feeding on her is counting on. Director Parker Finn brings an impressive sense of control to the dread, using warped sound design, sharp visual framing, and precisely timed reveals to keep the film uncomfortably tight. A birthday party scene involving a gift box and a wrong kind of surprise is the sort of moment that sticks. The third act pushes deeper into the curse’s pattern—how it spreads, what it wants, and what happens when you try to pass it along. Smile plays with familiar horror setups but taps into something thornier: the way trauma infects and isolates, and how easily it convinces its host they’re alone.