Film Buff Musings

Smoke Signals is a road movie without the asphalt mythos—no jukebox Americana, no muscle cars, no rock anthems to drown the silence. Just two young men in a barely functioning van, driving from northern Idaho to Arizona to collect the ashes of a man neither of them fully understands. It’s a comedy, sort of. A drama, sort of. A Native story, without footnotes. Victor (Adam Beach) is all clenched jaw and hollow anger. Years ago, his father Arnold (Gary Farmer) hit his mother and walked out, leaving behind a small house and a large hole. Now Arnold’s dead in Phoenix, and Victor—broke and brooding—feels duty-bound to bring him home. He’s joined, reluctantly, by Thomas (Evan Adams), an orphan with neat braids, buttoned shirts, and a storyteller’s grin. Thomas speaks in parables and half-jokes, like he’s got old souls on speed dial. He’s open where Victor is shut down, eager where Victor retreats. The film never pushes its emotions; it just lets them gather. Beach gives Victor a wounded stillness—like a boy who hardened too young and never figured out how to come back. Adams, as Thomas, is lightness without flippancy: strange, sincere, and deeply felt. Their rhythm carries the film. There are missteps. The script keeps reaching for pan-Indian punchlines—jokes about bartering, paperwork, “how Indians do things”—that land closer to sitcom than satire. It doesn’t kill the mood, but it cheapens it just enough to notice. Still, what Smoke Signals offers is rare: a Native story told by Native voices, in Native time. It’s modest, precise, quietly shaped. Nothing mythic, nothing explosive. Just a long drive, an old wound, and two men figuring out how to carry what they’ve inherited.

Bootlegging, burnout streaks, and Southern-fried banter—Smokey and the Bandit is the ultimate outlaw road movie, lacquered in exhaust fumes and attitude. Burt Reynolds stars as “The Bandit,” a swaggering rebel with mirrored shades and a Trans-Am that looks like it rolled straight out of a beer commercial. The job: haul 400 cases of Coors from Texas to Atlanta in under 28 hours, a task that’s not just illegal, but practically a rite of backroads Americana. Reynolds doesn’t haul the cargo—his CB partner Snowman (Jerry Reed) does that in an eighteen-wheeler. Bandit’s role is to run interference, chewing gum and blowing past cops with Trigger, his glossy black Trans-Am, skidding sideways through corners like it’s auditioning for a cigarette ad. Along the way, he picks up a surprise passenger: a jittery runaway bride named Carrie (Sally Field), aka “Frog,” who’s just left her doltish groom at the altar. Said groom happens to be the son of Texas Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason), a growling monument to ego and overreach, who makes it his personal crusade to chase them down. Gleason steals nearly every scene he’s in. His Buford Justice is pure comic authoritarianism, barking nonsense through the radio, barreling across state lines, and oozing insult with a drawl thick enough to bottle. Field, too, is terrific—funny, fresh, and palpably alive, the rare female lead in a ‘70s action comedy who looks like she’s having just as much fun as the men. And Reynolds? He’s a human grin on cruise control. The third act eases off the gas a little sooner than expected, coasting when it should be screeching. But for most of its runtime, Smokey and the Bandit is fast, funny, and freewheeling—a beer run turned joyride across the asphalt heart of America.

A sequel to Smokey and the Bandit shouldn’t have been hard. Bigger budget, bigger stunts, more cars flying into ditches—just hit replay with a little extra nitro. Instead, Smokey and the Bandit II opens with Burt Reynolds looking like he slept in a bottle of Wild Turkey and forgot how consonants work. He’s Bandit in name only—bloated, bitter, and communicating primarily through burps until a Rocky-style montage puts him back in his Trans-Am. This time, the Bandit and his CB partner Snowman (Jerry Reed) are hired to transport a pregnant elephant named Charlotte to the Republican National Convention in Dallas. Big Enos Burdette, now with political aspirations, figures an elephant-sized stunt might win him some clout. Why they need bootleggers to do it—or why this requires a cross-country sprint—is best left unexamined. Frog (Sally Field) is once again lured away from a doomed wedding to Junior Justice (Mike Henry), which reignites the fury of Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason). Gleason does his best to wring laughs out of the chase, but the material’s already running on fumes. Dom DeLuise joins in as an eccentric veterinarian meant to care for Charlotte, though most of his job involves hollering nonsense and ducking trunk swings. The energy’s off. Scenes drag when they should roar, and the jokes land with all the grace of a jackknifed rig. The original had speed and swagger; this one feels like it’s stuck in low gear with no particular place to go. You’re better off rerunning the first one—or getting in your car and driving in circles until it’s over.

Burt Reynolds appears for all of ten seconds in a dream sequence—uncredited and reportedly as a favor—and the rest of the film feels like a hangover from a party that ended two movies ago. With The Bandit off the map, the narrative hands the wheel to Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason), who was never built for solo stardom. Turning him into the protagonist is like casting Wile E. Coyote as the hero of Road Runner—only now he’s muttering, directionless, and visibly worn down, roped into a bet to haul a giant fiberglass fish named Bassett from Miami to the Republican National Convention in Dallas. The fish isn’t symbolic or clever—it’s just the latest in a series of novelty payloads, only with none of the spark or stakes of beer or elephants. Jerry Reed returns as the Snowman, but now he’s wearing Bandit cosplay—red shirt, cowboy hat, painted-on mustache—in a last-ditch effort to recapture a charisma the film knows it’s missing. Why he’s impersonating the Bandit at all is anyone’s guess, though behind-the-scenes reports suggest Gleason was originally meant to play both roles, and Reed was drafted late into reshoots. That might explain why the movie feels like a stitched-together salvage job. The low point isn’t the fish or even the limp car chases—it’s the motel detour, where Big and Little Enos Burdette (Pat McCormick and Paul Williams) inexplicably dress in drag. There’s no punchline, just flailing. One solid stunt—Gleason driving through a milk tanker, sending dairy and debris everywhere—barely breaks the fog. The film doesn’t so much misfire as sputter into the shoulder, quietly hoping the franchise flatlines before anyone notices.

The title spells it out: a plane, and snakes—lots of them. The goal isn’t subtle. A key witness is being flown to Los Angeles under FBI protection, and a criminal syndicate decides the most efficient way to stop him is to flood the cabin with a cargo hold full of venomous reptiles. Their secret weapon? A synthetic pheromone smeared onto the leis handed out at boarding. It’s just plausible enough to feel less ridiculous than it sounds. Samuel L. Jackson plays Agent Neville Flynn, a federal agent with no time for snake-based theatrics. He’s there to protect the witness, but ends up playing triage coordinator, morale officer, and reptile exterminator. The passenger list is a grab bag of disaster-movie types: a famous rapper named Three Gs (Flex Alexander), a socialite with a chihuahua in her purse (Rachel Blanchard), and a co-pilot whose sleaziness arrives before he does (David Koechner). Once the snakes are loose, all bets are off. They lunge from overhead compartments, coil around ankles, and erupt from plumbing fixtures. Oxygen masks drop—so do the snakes. The premise is outlandish, but the execution is surprisingly disciplined. The film knows exactly what it’s doing: jolts, gags, escalation. It doesn’t pretend to be more than it is, but it doesn’t phone it in either. There’s momentum, structure, and a welcome lack of smirking. For a movie designed to be ridiculous, it takes its nonsense seriously enough to deliver the goods.

The “clueless American abroad” comedy has racked up more casualties than laughs—most shelved quietly next to forgotten Rob Schneider vehicles. Snatched dodges the pile-up. It’s messy and a little frantic, but quick, mean, and funny often enough to justify itself. Amy Schumer, playing to type, opens the film fired from her job and dumped by her boyfriend—both overdue. She’s stuck with nonrefundable tickets to Ecuador and no plus-one, so she guilts her ultra-cautious mother (Goldie Hawn) into coming along. They pack sun hats. They arrive. They are promptly kidnapped. These aren’t action heroines; they’re mismatched tourists with baggage, both literal and otherwise. Schumer flails. Hawn sighs. And when push comes to machete, the daughter turns out to be surprisingly effective with a shovel. The best material is in the margins. Schumer and Hawn move through the film like they’re operating on different channels—one loud, one tight-lipped—but the dissonance gives the film its shape. Hawn, returning after fifteen years off-screen, mostly looks on in disbelief, occasionally stepping in like someone who’s survived worse and isn’t impressed. Ike Barinholtz provides good side-noise as Emily’s shut-in brother whose attempt at a rescue mission ends in a bureaucratic dead end. Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack get the sharpest laughs as fellow tourists who come prepared in ways the leads clearly didn’t. There’s even a quick swipe at action-hero posturing—a would-be savior who shows up, strikes a pose, and immediately folds. The movie isn’t airtight, but it moves. The gags come fast, a decent number land, and the whole thing wraps before it wears out its welcome. Snatched doesn’t pretend to be smart or essential. It just keeps pace—and in this genre, that’s no small thing.

The second film in the Air Buddies saga swaps basketballs for booties and heads north—way north. Five golden retriever puppies stow away in the back of an ice cream truck and wind up in Alaska, where they’re promptly enlisted to race in a high-stakes sled dog competition. Why an ice cream truck needs to travel to Alaska is immaterial. Why these puppies are allowed to race against full-grown huskies and sanctioned adult mushers is even more immaterial. This is a universe where puppies talk, logic takes a nap, and reality politely steps aside. The plot involves a boy named Adam—eleven years old, big on spirit, light on training—who forms a team with the pups and aims to win the race that no one believes he should be in. There’s a retired sled dog voiced with weary nobility by Kris Kristofferson, a sneering rival in mirrored goggles, and a third-act crisis engineered to cue the orchestral uplift. The animation on the dogs’ mouths is as stiff as ever, and the jokes are pitched squarely at the pull-up-diaper crowd—mostly pratfalls, puns, and the occasional canine catchphrase delivered like it just passed a focus group. But then something strange happens. You get a shot—crisp, ridiculous, almost poignant—of a sled slicing through snow, pulled by five puppies in matching gear, chasing some dream across a white horizon. It’s absurd. It’s serene. It works for three seconds. Snow Buddies never aspires to coherence or cleverness. It’s a digital babysitter with a fluffy cast and just enough scenery to pass for a winter adventure. Not much to remember, but nothing to resent. The Iditarod, reimagined for kids who can’t even begin to pronounce it.

As Disney remakes go, this one gets away with less sin than most—though it still can’t touch the glass-coffin purity of the original. Snow White (2025) borrows the skeleton of 1937 and slips on a little extra backstory to feign novelty. The loyalists will scowl; everyone else will shrug and settle in. Rachel Zegler does well enough as this century’s fairest—she can actually sing, looks the part, and injects just enough mischief to keep the whole affair from petrifying into museum glass. Here, she begins life in a sun-dappled kingdom with a good mother and father—king and queen, naturally—until her mother dies young and her father, lost in grief, stumbles into the arms of his next mistake: a spellbound marriage to the future Evil Queen. One war later, he’s gone too, and the kingdom darkens by the hour. Banished to the forest—where else—Snow White finds solace among woodland creatures and seven dwarfs polished up with modern CGI. They’re recognizably their cartoon selves, though the film tries to sand off a little more personality in favor of mild emotional tidbits: Dopey’s silence gets a tiny origin story no one really asked for. The surprise—if it counts—is how watchable this all is. The songs mostly hold up (Zegler has the voice to earn them), the pace never crawls, and it avoids the heavy-handed wink-and-nod updates that sink so many of its remake cousins. The dead weight is Gal Gadot’s Evil Queen. She’s easy on the eyes but never unsettling enough to justify the crown—her malevolence stops at arched eyebrows and the occasional hissed threat. As a singer, she’s also woefully mediocre. Otherwise, for all its new paint, this remake is still the same bedtime tale: simple peril, tidy magic, a happy ending pre-ordained. It won’t replace the 1937 masterpiece, but it also doesn’t disgrace its memory—which, for Disney’s live-action stable, counts as a minor miracle.

Disney’s first animated feature didn’t just break ground—it set the mold. It laid out a template of innocence, menace, and musicality that still pulses through the studio’s bloodstream. Few films can pull me back into childhood wonder as quickly as this one—deep into a world where animals beam with empathy and villains cast shadows you can feel through the screen. Snow White (voiced with helium-tinted sweetness by Adriana Caselotti) is less a character than an embodiment of virtue—so pure she makes sunlight seem coarse. She’s surrounded by smiling forest creatures, twinkling melodies, and seven squat bachelors who go from wary hosts to devoted caretakers the moment she tidies up their cottage. Their daily routine—jewel mining by day, choreographed merriment by night—is warm, familiar, and still strangely satisfying. The dwarfs may serve as comic relief, but their loyalty and protectiveness give the story its heart. Then there’s the Queen (Lucille La Verne), a gothic monstrosity of envy and bone structure. She consults a mirror not for reassurance but strategy—and when told she’s slipped to second place in the looks department, she doesn’t spiral. She plots murder. Her transformation into a crone is the stuff of nightmares: jagged lightning, bubbling potions, and a descent into something far more disturbing than a standard fairy tale hag. Even now, the Queen unnerves me—the severity of her evil sharpened by the brightness of everything she seeks to destroy. The animation, revolutionary then, still moves with a strange grace—fluid, expressive, like every background was pressed from gold leaf and fairy dust. The songs—“Heigh-Ho,” “Someday My Prince Will Come,” “Whistle While You Work”—aren’t just stuck in your head; they form the emotional spine of the film. Everything feels handmade but also impossibly polished. This isn’t just the start of Disney animated features—it’s the standard. A luminous, strange, and fearless fable that still knows how to cast a spell.

The title hints at something feral and cruel, but So Evil, So Young is more dormitory melodrama than raw delinquency. Still, for a low-budget British exploitation flick, it turns out to be oddly engaging—tame on the surface, but with enough bite to hold interest. Jill Ireland plays Ann, a posh, well-behaved girl blindsided by a trumped-up theft charge. The real thief is Lucy (Jocelyn Britton), who plants stolen jewelry on her after spotting Ann getting cozy with her ex-boyfriend. Both girls are shipped off to a Borstal—a British youth detention center with flowery curtains, communal chores, and a dress code of pale pink nightgowns. Ann keeps her composure while Lucy whispers poison in the ears of the other inmates, who waste no time turning on her. She finds quiet support in Mary (Sheila Whittingham), a guilt-ridden girl with pale eyes and nervous tics who’s been locked away for four years for a crime no one will name. Their friendship offers the film’s only real emotional warmth. Overseeing it all are two adults with clashing views: the Matron (Joan Haythorne), who believes these girls need guidance and compassion, and Miss Smith (Ellen Pollock), who runs the place like a drill sergeant in sensible heels. The ideological tension is mostly background noise—the film is more invested in cafeteria showdowns and whispered threats than institutional philosophy. The dialogue is stiff, the pacing uneven, and the soundtrack—a clinky, overeager mix of light jazz and xylophones—feels wildly misplaced. But there’s something faintly hypnotic in the film’s earnestness. It means what it says, even when it doesn’t know how to say it. Not a great movie. Not even a good one, technically. But there’s just enough here to make you stay curious.

The title overpromises. You expect pulp or parody, maybe a cheeky bloodbath with tartan wallpaper. What you get is a quirky, light-footed romantic comedy dressed in suspicion, anchored by Mike Myers at his most likably twitchy. He plays Charlie, a commitment-phobic San Francisco beat poet whose love life is a string of rhymed eulogies. One day, while buying haggis, he meets Harriet (Nancy Travis), a soft-spoken butcher with a dazzling smile and possibly a hatchet in her closet. They fall for each other quickly. Too quickly, maybe. Charlie begins to suspect Harriet is Lady X, a black widow from the tabloids who marries men only to kill them days later with an axe. She fits the profile—sort of. The tension bubbles under dinner scenes and pillow talk, though it never quite reaches a boil. This isn’t a horror-comedy, just a rom-com with sharper props. Myers pulls double duty, also playing Charlie’s conspiracy-loving Scottish father—a man who thinks the Weekly World News is journalism and says “Colonel” like he’s trying to dislodge a cough. These scenes, filled with rambling insults and low-grade Scotch, are some of the film’s liveliest. It’s not a laugh riot, and the third-act twist is visible through fog and two locked doors, but there’s something disarming about how casually the movie blends paranoia with affection. It’s stylish in an off-kilter way, and while it never really leans into the absurdity promised by the premise, it’s pleasant company while it lasts.

Soapdish is a high-gloss farce that plays like a soap opera fed through a funhouse mirror—every scandal, ego, and betrayal sharpened to a fine comic point. It’s not just a send-up of daytime drama, but a soap opera about soap operas, and somehow that layering only makes it better. Sally Field stars as Celeste Talbert, a neurotic, emotionally brittle daytime diva who’s spent years clinging to her role with a grip that’s left permanent marks on her co-stars. Her only real ally is the show’s head writer (Whoopi Goldberg, pitch-perfect), who does what she can to keep the wheels from coming off. But sabotage is afoot. A smug young producer (Robert Downey Jr.) and a bitter actress hungry for more screen time (Cathy Moriarty) hatch a plan to get Celeste booted from the show. Their gambit: introduce a repellent new storyline where Celeste’s character accidentally kills a homeless deaf-mute (Elisabeth Shue), and bury the backlash beneath the distraction of bringing back a fired co-star from decades past—Celeste’s ex-lover, played with wounded flair by Kevin Kline. What follows is a blur of betrayals, slap fights, romantic reprisals, and one disastrously timed live taping. The script keeps things brisk and barbed, and the ensemble—Carrie Fisher, Garry Marshall, Teri Hatcher, among others—plays it straight, which is exactly what sells it. Nobody mugs, nobody winks, and that’s half the reason it works. Satirizing soap operas might seem easy, but pulling it off with this kind of style and precision is rare. This isn’t a great American comedy, but it’s circling the runway. It works both as a parody and as a melodrama in its own right, and for once, the backstabbing is the best part.

Big budget, elaborate sets, and a sport that looks like lacrosse on roller skates in a gravel pit—all wasted on a story that never figures out what it’s doing. Solarbabies is Mad Max: Thunderdome for children, minus the menace, coherence, or basic sense of urgency. The world has collapsed, water is currency, and orphans are warehoused in concrete camps run like failed military experiments. Their only outlet is a nocturnal sport their warden (Charles Durning) tolerates—mostly out of apathy, until the kids stumble onto something more disruptive than a contact sport. Then a glowing orb from outer space shows up. It’s called Bodhi. It heals wounds, floats around, maybe thinks. Why it needs help from roller-skating orphans is never fully explained—aside from a vague suggestion that it prefers the pure and innocent. The film gestures toward themes—environmental collapse, state control, spiritual awakening—but never in any way that sticks. Everything stays hazy enough to feel symbolic without having to commit. There’s a lot of glowing faces (and orbs), some broad-strokes liberation imagery, and probably an environmental message. But with no real stakes, there’s nothing to hold onto beyond the production value—vehicles, costumes, matte paintings. I have a soft spot for large-scale post-apocalyptic junk. This one just picks up dust.

Eric Stoltz plays Keith, an artistically inclined high school senior who wears his emotional fragility like a denim jacket—creased, patched, and pointedly casual. He’s smitten with Amanda (Lea Thompson), the prettiest girl in school and just out of reach, though not in the way these things usually go. She’s working class, like Keith, but dating Hardy (Craig Sheffer), a coiffed trust-fund tyrant who refers to her, unironically, as his “property.” Amanda finally breaks free, and Keith moves in—earnest, hopeful, and wildly out of his depth. She agrees to go out with him, not so much because she’s interested, but because it might trigger Hardy into shape. Keith, unaware or unwilling to see this, responds by spending his entire college fund on a single grandiose date. Custom earrings, a stretch limo, candlelight—the works. It’s not romance, it’s brinksmanship. Watching this unfold, with increasingly pursed lips, is Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson), Keith’s drummer best friend who’s clearly in love with him. Her presence is the film’s pulse—restless, unpolished, and quietly devastating. She watches Keith self-destruct in real time, and still hopes he’ll figure it out before the last slow dance. The script, penned by John Hughes, toggles between breezy and clumsy—snappy in places, tin-eared in others, with some jokes that clang louder than they should. It doesn’t quite crack open Keith’s inner life, nor does it justify why someone who sketches portraits like sacred artifacts would blow his future on a date with a girl halfway out the door. But it does, in the end, arrive at something true—about longing, misdirection, and how love sometimes lives in the people who’ve been standing beside you the whole time.

There’s been no shortage of imitators, but Some Like It Hot remains peerless—a screwball farce that never breaks a sweat, even as it barrels through mistaken identities, mob hits, and a love triangle with too many moving parts. It’s fast, filthy (by 1959 standards), and somehow still feels weightless. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are Joe and Jerry, a pair of jazz musicians who witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and immediately become fugitives. Their solution: slap on heels and wigs, adopt the names Josephine and Daphne, and blend into an all-female band en route to Florida. It’s a ridiculous plan, and the movie knows it—but Wilder plays it straight, which only makes it funnier. The real trouble starts once they board the train. Sharing bunks and booze with the band proves more complicated than hiding from mobsters. Especially when Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), the group’s ukulele-playing lead singer, stumbles in—sweet, a little broken, and determined to marry rich. Joe sees an opening and invents a second disguise: a soft-spoken oil baron with a borrowed yacht and a Cary Grant accent. Meanwhile, Jerry—now firmly Daphne—finds himself being wooed by a cheerful, slightly oblivious millionaire (Joe E. Brown), and, alarmingly, begins to enjoy it. Lemmon, in particular, is a comic engine—giddy, exasperated, and never missing a beat. The dialogue crackles, the timing is surgical, and Wilder never lets the film sag, even as it pivots through gangland suspense and beachside romance. Monroe adds musical numbers and emotional shading, though even she seems slightly stunned by how much is being asked of her. And that final line—delivered with deadpan certainty—is the perfect button on a film that somehow stays breezy while in full comic sprint.

An Australian awards magnet, for reasons I’m still squinting to discern. Somersault drapes itself in the icy hush of a coming-of-age tragedy but delivers little besides frostbitten longing and an awkward silence that never quite melts. Heidi (Abbie Cornish), barely out of girlhood, is caught by her mother entangled with her stepfather—a scandal handled not with a family talk but with a boot out the door. Alone, clueless, and armed with nothing but her looks and a vague sense that sex might buy supper, she drifts through a small wintry town collecting blurry trysts and not much else. Ordinarily, I’d brace for a character study worth dissecting—maybe some cracked-open dialogue or an acid little commentary on the way small-town men pocket wounded girls like loose change. Instead, the film sits there, remote as a snow globe. Heidi floats through men, sheds tears at inopportune moments, and repeats the cycle like she’s waiting for the credits to rescue her. Dialogue is rationed out like a precious resource—a mutter here, a half-frozen confession there—but never enough to ground anyone in real stakes. By the midpoint, my curiosity wandered to practical hypotheticals: suppose Heidi looked plain, or god forbid, plain and broke—would this film find her so magnetic then? Probably not. There’s some undeniable craft in how director Cate Shortland frames the bleak outskirts and fogged car windows; a handful of scenes glow with a chilly poetry that deserves a better script to inhabit. But all the pretty blue-grey cinematography can’t unfreeze the fact that this is a shallow plunge into trauma with nothing much to say except that snow looks pretty when you’re young and lonely.

Something’s Gotta Give is a romantic comedy with better bones than most. It opens on familiar terrain—older man, younger woman, a beach house in the Hamptons—but resists the genre’s usual autopilot by actually making good on its casting. This isn’t just a vehicle for Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton. It’s a film that knows exactly what it has and uses them with near-clinical precision. Nicholson plays Harry Sanborn, a 63-year-old music mogul who treats dating like a tax shelter—stick to women under 30 and avoid all emotional overhead. That pattern hits a snag when his latest companion, Marin (Amanda Peet), brings him to her mother’s house for the weekend. Her mother, Erica (Keaton), a successful playwright with zero tolerance for Harry’s smirking charm, is less than thrilled. Then Harry has a heart attack. And the man who never stays the night suddenly has to move in. What unfolds is part screwball, part slow burn. The script walks a tightrope—flirting with discomfort (a man dating a daughter and falling for the mother), then quietly neutralizing it. The film sidesteps the worst-case optics by ensuring Harry and Marin never sleep together, and by repositioning the relationship with Erica as not just viable, but overdue. She’s sharp, grounded, and unimpressed by Harry’s usual moves. That, of course, becomes the hook. Keaton is the revelation here. Her scenes crackle with emotional precision, toggling between comedy and something quieter and more lived-in. Nicholson, uncharacteristically vulnerable, rises to meet her. Together, they make the story feel less like a fantasy and more like a detour back to reality. Yes, it’s glossy. Yes, it goes on a beat or two too long. But when it works, Something’s Gotta Give plays like a romantic comedy for grown-ups—sincere, funny, and just prickly enough to feel earned.

Pauly Shore stars as Crawl, a resident advisor at a Los Angeles university who doubles as a one-man pep rally. He takes pity on South Dakota transplant Becca (Carla Gugino), who’s homesick, shy, and about five minutes away from bolting back to the prairie until Crawl swoops in to drape her in early-’90s mall fashion, drag her to parties, and generally teach her how to loosen up—mostly by spraying charm and non sequiturs wherever he goes. When Thanksgiving rolls around, Crawl, having nowhere else to annoy, accepts Becca’s invitation to the family farm. Her parents (Lane Smith and Cindy Pickett) regard him the way one might regard a ferret let loose in the henhouse. Small towns don’t know what to do with Pauly Shore, and that’s the entire joke. Then Becca’s old boyfriend Travis (Dan Gauthier) proposes out of nowhere. She panics; Crawl, improvising with the survival instincts of a possum cornered by headlights, announces he’s her new fiancé. Naturally, the family finds this as unbelievable as it is alarming, which means he has to prove his worth by pitching in with farm chores—these go about as well as you’d expect for a man who probably can’t operate a toaster without parental supervision. It’s a decent enough setup for Shore to flail around in overalls, terrorize livestock, and wear out his welcome in under ninety minutes. Some scenes squeak out a chuckle, but most drift by on the strength of Shore’s motor mouth, which is—let’s say—an acquired taste. The romance plot is the weak link: he and Gugino have the easy warmth of siblings on a road trip, not star-crossed lovers faking an engagement. The movie isn’t awful, just aggressively medium. There’s something faintly charming about how fully it commits, but one wishes it had committed a little harder—or at least packed more real laughs between the cow pies.

This isn’t just a bad movie—it’s a hostile act. Son of the Mask doesn’t misfire so much as it detonates in slow motion, spraying cheap gags, digital sludge, and secondhand ideas in every direction. It’s less a sequel than a crime scene. Jamie Kennedy, in a performance that seems to misunderstand both comedy and charisma, takes over for Jim Carrey and delivers something close to performance art in its wrongness. When he puts on the mask, the wild, reality-bending cartoon logic of the first film turns into something manic and dead-eyed. The closest comparison isn’t Tex Avery—it’s Bill Lumbergh after three energy drinks. The more he struts through grotesquely choreographed song-and-dance numbers, the more you want the screen to go black. He plays Tim Avery, a cartoonist fumbling for recognition while his wife (Traylor Howard) is ready for a baby. Then the mask shows up. He puts it on, conceives a child, and the result is a neon demon in Pampers—half Looney Tune, half genetic mishap. The movie takes it from there, building toward a crescendo of screeching, CGI-heavy nonsense. The effects are relentless: rubberized faces, twitching eyeballs, and digital noise dialed to a level that feels less animated than agitated. It’s the visual equivalent of being shouted at in a language you don’t speak. An Exorcist parody appears midway through, offered without setup or payoff, as if the film simply remembered it was an option. The overall style flails between scenes, with each frame jittering like it’s trying to outrun its own effects. I usually pride myself on finishing even the worst movies with my sanity more or less intact, but this one felt like it was actively trying to break me. It’s loud, smug, and so deeply wrongheaded it stops feeling like a mistake and starts feeling like malice. There are bad movies. And then there’s Son of the Mask.

Blake Edwards’ final film wasn’t a surrender so much as a last, wheezing attempt to reanimate a franchise that had lost its engine. Son of the Pink Panther gives it one more try without Peter Sellers, this time by way of inheritance. Enter Roberto Benigni, playing Clouseau’s illegitimate son—Gendarme Jacques Gambrelli—an eager, rubber-limbed naif who grins through pratfalls like a man born to slip on banana peels. And honestly? Not a bad idea. Benigni’s game, physically inventive, and likable even when the material gives him nothing to lean on. The plot, which barely seems to notice itself, involves the kidnapping of a royal from the proudly fictional European nation of Lugash. Gambrelli, a low-level cop with a high-level family resemblance, inserts himself into the investigation to prove he’s got the same baffling instincts as his late father. Meanwhile, Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Herbert Lom, back again, poor soul) finds himself face to face with Gambrelli and visibly recalibrating. This is, after all, the son of the man who once drove him into an asylum. Dreyfus twitches—recognition, a flicker of dread—and then manages to pull himself together. But for now, he sets the breakdown aside and turns his attention to Maria (Claudia Cardinale, also returning), who watches the scene and politely returns his gentlemanly advances. That winning her over would technically make him Gambrelli’s stepfather is a detail best saved for another time. There are gadgets. Malfunctioning hospital beds. Exploding cars. Bad accents. Most of it whiffs. Edwards can still set up a frame, but the rhythm is slack, the gags run long, and the payoff never quite arrives. The film coasts on fumes and familiarity—less a revival than a reunion that forgot why everyone was invited. And yet, it’s not as sour as the stitched-together posthumous entries that came before. It’s forgettable but not especially painful. If nothing else, it confirms that Sellers wasn’t the only thing holding these films together—but it also seems he was the reason they flew.

Our electric blue mascot from the not-Nintendo is forced to flee his native realm of loop-de-loops, checkerboard cliffs, and idyllic floating islands. His only tool: a sack of golden rings that double as interdimensional escape hatches. With no time to waste, he bolts to Earth and hides out in rural Montana—undetected for a full decade until one lonely night he sprints around a baseball diamond so fast he triggers a regional power surge. This alerts the U.S. government, which responds with typical restraint by dispatching Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey), a twitchy megalomaniac with a warehouse of weaponized Roombas and a fondness for yelling at subordinates. Sonic, now firmly in trouble, turns to Tom (James Marsden), a local cop he’s been quietly observing from afar like a blue-furred Rear Window protagonist. Together, they embark on a buddy-roadtrip that involves bar fights, roof jumps, and the occasional detour into shameless product placement. The plot doesn’t so much develop as it shuffles forward, but there are a few decent lines scattered throughout, and the pacing at least keeps things moving. The much-publicized redesign of Sonic’s face—removing the cursed human teeth and haunted eyes—does improve the experience, if only by making him less upsetting to look at. Jim Carrey, meanwhile, seems to have wandered in from 1994, and that turns out to be a good thing. His performance is pure rubber-faced grandstanding, and for once, the film knows to let him run wild. It’s fine. I didn’t like it, but Sonic fans will get what they came for, and newcomers might find themselves only mildly disoriented. The rest of us can enjoy Carrey twirling his mustache and collecting a paycheck like it’s a Chaos Emerald.

The four grown sons of Katie Elder return home to attend her funeral. For siblings, they don’t seem to have much in common (the almost comical casting of John Wayne and Dean Martin as brothers notwithstanding), except for one thing: they never lived up to their mother’s high expectations. Not the gambler, not the gunman, not the college dropout, and certainly not the eldest—John (Wayne), who shows up last, taller than the story and twice as weathered. He hasn’t written, hasn’t called, hasn’t even looked back. But now he’s here—boots caked, voice low—expecting the past to line up and salute. Their shot at redemption comes quick. The family home’s been stolen out from under them by a corrupt land-grabber (James Gregory), whose grip on the town includes the sheriff (Paul Fix) and a few men with itchy trigger fingers. The plot doesn’t stray far from the standard western blueprint—bad men, good men, a line in the sand—but the film keeps its aim tight: the bickering, fractured loyalty between the brothers, and their reluctant slide into unity. The arguments are half the fun. The other half is watching them rediscover the part of themselves their mother never stopped seeing. You can see where it’s going a mile off, but the pleasure’s in the pacing—the way the four finally circle up like they’ve been training for it their whole lives, even if it’s just to settle one last debt on her behalf. By the time they fall back into something resembling brotherhood, you can almost see Katie smiling down on them, arms crossed, finally proud. Hardly a transformative western, but I sure enjoyed myself watching it.

It takes nearly two and a half hours to arrive at the title’s meaning, and when it hits, it’s a gut punch so brutal it almost justifies the wait. Almost. The rest of Sophie’s Choice flattens under its own weight—a love triangle, a trauma drama, a Southern coming-of-age memoir that keeps drifting off course. At its center is Sophie (Meryl Streep), a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz, now living in Brooklyn with an unstable lover (Kevin Kline, both magnetic and terrifying) and trying to pass for okay. Their third wheel is Stingo (Peter MacNicol), a young writer from the South who moves in downstairs and quickly falls in love with her—or maybe just the idea of her. He’s our narrator, though God knows what for. He’s less a framing device than a tagalong—wide-eyed, undersexed, and clearly in over his head. He says he wants the truth, but mostly he wants her attention. Her approval. Her body. What follows isn’t a clean confession—it’s a slow drip. Stories offered, walked back, revised, then replaced. Her history comes out in fragments, sharp-edged and escalating. Streep plays her like a woman who’s worn silence too long. Grief shows up in the pauses, the glances, the way she seems to carry herself around it. Even when the script meanders, she sharpens it. Her eyes carry the shame, the trauma, the buried guilt—none of it theatrical, all of it real. Still, there’s something off about the architecture. Styron’s decision—carried over from the novel—to center a Polish Catholic protagonist whose father was a Nazi sympathizer feels like a deliberate softening of the Holocaust’s core reality: that Jews were the primary targets. In Auschwitz, nine out of ten prisoners were Jewish. The shift doesn’t erase the tragedy—but it muddies the frame. There are moments of deep ache here, and one scene that’s nearly unwatchable in its horror. But even that might be a false construction—less a documented memory than an invented trauma, shaped for maximum devastation. The film doesn’t question it. Maybe it can’t. But the performance is too good, the emotion too sharp, the truth too painful to risk unpacking.

Some titles sell themselves. Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama is one of those glorious pulp arrangements that makes you say, “You son of a bitch, I’m in.” And for a while, that’s enough. This is pure trash—on purpose, by design, with no illusions otherwise. But the trash doesn’t quite sparkle. It’s got the sleaze, but none of the sizzle. The setup is a greasy twist on Aladdin and the Magic Lamp: three horny guys sneak into a sorority house, get caught mid-peep, and are sentenced to a prank-theft at the local bowling alley. The target is a trophy, naturally. But when it’s dropped, it releases an imp—a foul-mouthed gremlin that looks like a rotted Muppet and grants wishes with a catch. A couple of the characters take him up on the offer. Spider (Linnea Quigley), the film’s leather-jacketed scream queen who turns up partway through, has the good sense not to. There’s some joy to be had here, mostly in concept. The movie promises sleaze, neon, gore, and hand puppets—and it delivers all of that. Just not especially well. The imp, meant to be the film’s comic engine, spits out one-liners that fall somewhere between grating and lifeless. They’re not absurd enough to be funny by accident, not sharp enough to hit on purpose—mostly they just drift and fizzle, like smoke from a damp firecracker. There’s a respectable body count, a few cheap effects, and the requisite nudity—though by today’s standards, the film plays more juvenile than shocking. It gestures at outrageous, then slumps into neutral. The tone is stiff, the camp falls flat, and the pacing lags in all the wrong places. You can feel it reaching for cult status, grasping at that late-night cable weirdness—but it never quite earns it. Still, it’s watchable in the way certain VHS-era curios always are. There’s a kind of nostalgic grime to it—bowling shoes squeaking on waxed floors, bad hair, bad jokes, bad ideas. It’s trash, but not the kind worth treasuring.

A boy. A father. A dog. That’s the core of Sounder, though it’s dressed in the heaviness of 1930s Louisiana, where the Depression cuts deep and racism cuts deeper. Nathan Lee Morgan (Paul Winfield), a sharecropper with calloused hands and no money to show for them, steals a ham so his family can eat. He’s caught, convicted, and shipped off to a prison camp—leaving his wife Rebecca (Cicely Tyson) to keep the household running and his son David (Kevin Hooks) to piece together what’s left. The story doesn’t rush. It sits with the family. Watches them patch holes, shell beans, wait. And then, quietly, it becomes something else—a journey. David, desperate to find his father, sets off alone across the state. The dog, Sounder, limps beside him—half mascot, half memory. The farther he travels, the more he sees: people who help, people who don’t, a world much bigger than his corner of it. And he doesn’t just look—he learns. Reads. Listens. Grows. No sermon. No fanfare. Just plain, exact storytelling—acted like memory, not performance. Tyson plays Rebecca like the roof and the walls—silent, load-bearing, and holding up more than anyone bothers to notice. Winfield keeps his voice low, but the pride is threaded through every look, like he’s made a career out of not flinching. And Hooks, as David, doesn’t act like a child actor. He watches. Waits. Takes everything in like it’s his to carry, whether he’s ready or not. Sounder gets taught for the history—sharecropping, Jim Crow, prison labor—but that’s just the frame. What stays with you is quieter. The grain of the wood, the snap of dry leaves underfoot, the boy pacing his breath with the dog beside him. It doesn’t strain for drama. It doesn’t polish the story into a lesson. It just moves—patient, unforced, and stubbornly dignified. Like it knows exactly what it is and doesn’t plan on raising its voice to prove it.

An imperfect but luminously staged adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, South Pacific gathers up a few of James A. Michener’s wartime sketches and lets them drift across a Technicolor tide. The setting is a fictional island somewhere in the Pacific, where the war hangs just offshore. You can feel it inching closer, but for now, things stay oddly suspended—quiet, humid, a little unreal—as the questions start pressing in: who gets sent to the front, who stays behind, and who falls in love before the next wave hits? Mitzi Gaynor plays Nellie Forbush, a Navy nurse from Little Rock with a baked-in cheerfulness and a voice that floats when she sings and even a little when she doesn’t. She falls for Emile de Becque (Rossano Brazzi), a French planter with children, secrets, and the kind of elegant posture that suggests he irons his linens and carries regret in his breast pocket. The Navy wants him for a dangerous mission. Nellie wants to marry him. Then she hesitates. Then she changes her mind again. The romance wavers not from indecision, exactly, but from the quiet panic of someone who’s halfway into a future she doesn’t fully understand. The story is there, but it keeps getting nudged aside by songs, reverie, postcard scenery. The war subplot ambles. Some scenes just sit there, as if no one quite knew where to place them. But when the music starts up, the whole thing lifts. The use of color filters during the songs, famously divisive, is less distraction than seduction: pinks and blues bleeding into each other like the atmosphere of a remembered dream. “There Is Nothing Like a Dame,” “Bali Ha’i,” “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Happy Talk”—this is Rodgers and Hammerstein in full bloom, their melodic instincts at their most distilled. The direction isn’t exactly bold—Joshua Logan seems content to point and shoot—but the songs carry it. And while the romance feels a little lacquered, the mood is strangely transporting. South Pacific never quite finds its dramatic footing, but as a wartime fantasy pitched somewhere between operetta and propaganda reel, it gets the job done. The tropics were never this well-behaved, but they’ve rarely looked this lush.

A quiet, airless drama about a young woman’s first real heartbreak—and the narcotic fog she doesn’t realize she’s walking into until it’s already closing over her. Joanna Hogg draws from her own past here, reconstructing a romance she once endured while in film school in the early 1980s, and the result is tender, restrained, and pointedly unsentimental. Honor Swinton Byrne plays Julie, a shy film student with money, a flat in Knightsbridge, and an artistic temperament that doesn’t quite know what it wants to say yet. Then she meets Anthony (Tom Burke), a man with the kind of cultivated aloofness that passes for charisma if you’re young enough. He says he works for the Foreign Office, reads deeply, takes her to museums, and speaks with the kind of intellectual gravity that signals “bad idea” to everyone but her. They study a painting—The Souvenir by Jean-Honoré Fragonard—and it becomes their shorthand, a private metaphor for something that can’t quite be named yet. Their relationship begins like any breathless student romance. But then Anthony starts borrowing money. He nods off in bathrooms. His stories begin to slip. By the time Julie realizes how deep Anthony’s addiction to heroin is running, the damage is already contouring her life—quietly and irrevocably. The film is characterized by its simple plot and even less dramatic punctuation. Hogg prefers the cumulative ache: small scenes that stack like old letters in a drawer. The performances—especially Swinton Byrne’s gentle bewilderment and Burke’s slick evasions—carry much of the film, with a script that is precise and almost forensic in its emotional calibration. The Souvenir is a well-crafted film about how easily intelligence can be misread as depth, and how love sometimes mutates into a form of submission you don’t notice until it’s already cost you something you can’t recover.

It started with Air Bud, a dog who played basketball. Then soccer. Then football. Then volleyball. And through a steady erosion of narrative restraint, we arrived here: five golden retriever puppies in miniature space suits, stowing away on a rocket and landing on the moon. The premise is SpaceCamp repackaged for the chew-toy demographic—swap out the teenagers, lower the stakes, and everything else falls into place. The Buddies hitch a ride on a school field trip to Vision Enterprises, a private space company with security protocols seemingly modeled after a Chuck E. Cheese. They sneak into the launch bay, board the shuttle, and are launched into orbit—no alarms, no supervision, no questions asked. Along the way, they encounter Spudnick, a Russian cosmodog still orbiting from a Cold War-era mission, and receive help from a ferret named Gravity, who runs communications at mission control. All of this is played completely straight. What follows is a slow-motion parade of teamwork slogans and off-brand Looney Tunes gags. At one point, one of them farts inside his suit, inflating it, and another dog notes that he now resembles the Goodyear Blimp. That may be the film’s centerpiece. The dogs are pristine and camera-ready, blinking on cue and moving their mouths in loosely synchronized loops while voice actors deliver lines that sound like they were written in an afternoon. The animation is functional. The story floats from one obstacle to the next until the runtime expires. Even by Air Buddies standards, this isn’t very good. You’d think a premise this ridiculous might at least offer some accidental entertainment. It doesn’t. The tone is safe, the pacing flat, and the gags tired before they land. But then, disappointment assumes expectations—Space Buddies doesn’t exactly invite them. The movie delivers exactly what it promises: puppies in space, a dopey joke or two, and a safe return. The credits roll. Your toddler eats a crayon. Life continues.

It delivers what it promises: geezers in space. Not metaphorically—literally. Four test pilots, grounded in 1958 after their NASA manager (James Cromwell) replaced them with a chimp, finally get their launch window forty years later, courtesy of a failing Soviet satellite and a highly specific engineering flaw. The satellite’s guidance system, it turns out, was designed by Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood), and it’s now threatening to fall out of orbit in the most dramatic way possible. Frank agrees to help—on one condition: he goes up to fix it himself. Also, he’s bringing his old crew. That includes Hawk (Tommy Lee Jones), the hothead; Tank (James Garner), the voice of calm; and Jerry (Donald Sutherland), the resident flirt and technical whiz. Before any of them go anywhere, they have to pass the physical—a process that takes up a generous stretch of the film and supplies most of its laughs. Frank and Hawk still hold a grudge from decades past, and their training antics include wagering over who blacks out first in the centrifuge. The story is predictable, and the last act tips into sentiment and contrivance, but none of that matters much when the cast is this good. Eastwood, directing with the discipline of someone who knows exactly what the movie is and nothing more, keeps it moving. The plot is nonsense—NASA would never sign off on this—but the film gets by on the easy rhythm of its leads. It’s overlong, and the science is shaky, but Space Cowboys is never difficult to sit through. The novelty of seeing these actors go orbital is enough to carry it. Barely, but it carries.

I grew up on Looney Tunes—seven-minute blasts of mayhem, cleverness, and perfect comic timing. I still revisit them. They still work. Space Jam doesn’t. What was once sharp and chaotic in the best way now feels like a jittery, flattened facsimile, with the Tunes running around like they’ve been scripted by a focus group and caffeinated into submission. The animation is slicker, the pace louder, but all the actual fun has been filed down to the edges. Michael Jordan, meanwhile, makes his acting debut and doesn’t seem entirely sure where he is. He’s game, but stiff—like he’s waiting for someone to tell him where to stand and when to smile. The story exists to justify a collaboration between Jordan and the Looney Tunes. He ends up helping them fend off the Nerdlucks, a gang of tiny alien henchmen sent to abduct Bugs and company for life as theme park attractions. The Tunes, sensing a loophole, challenge them to a basketball game. It seems like an easy win—until the Nerdlucks bulk up into the Monstars by siphoning the talent from actual NBA stars. The talent transfer, depicted as a glowing substance that’s sucked out and stored in a glass vial, may be the film’s most inventive image. Because Jordan is off playing minor-league baseball, he’s untouched by the theft and soon recruited as the Tunes’ last hope. Cue the training montages, cartoon pratfalls, and just enough digital noise to keep the target audience from looking away. There are glimmers of fun—Bill Murray drops in and makes the most of it, and Wayne Knight mugs like a pro—but not enough to redeem the sluggish plotting or the oddly manic tone. It’s not an unwatchable movie, just a deeply underwhelming one. The Tunes deserved better. Jordan did too.

You’d think a movie called Space Truckers would have more of a following by now. It’s wacky, cheap-looking, and proudly stupid—ripe for cult status—but instead it just sort of floats there, like a busted satellite transmitting nonsense at irregular intervals. Dennis Hopper is John Canyon, a long-haul driver whose rig just happens to operate in zero gravity. The future, apparently, still needs freight haulers with CB voices and roadhouse reflexes. The plot is a slow-motion pileup: Canyon picks up a gig from a shady client and ends up carting around a classified shipment of killer robots. On board are Cindy (Debi Mazar), a diner waitress trying to reach her cryogenically frozen mother, and Mike (Stephen Dorff), her would-be fiancé. Their journey gets sidetracked by Dr. Nabel (Charles Dance), a villain with a toaster oven for a ribcage and scenery in his teeth. At one point, he activates his groin with a ripcord like he’s jump-starting a chainsaw. The effects are bargain-bin, but the design has a sort of junkyard charm—space hogs that look like rejected Muppets, floating diners blasting country music, visible wires on stuntmen. Hopper punches a guy in zero gravity, and that’s when you can see the strings. Scenes drag, lines stall, and the whole thing runs a little too long. But just when it starts to feel like a punishment, it lobs another curveball from whatever fevered brain signed off on the cyborgs. If you’re allergic to dead air or rubber monsters, this probably isn’t for you. But for the right viewer, it’s got enough wrongheaded invention to qualify as a minor cult artifact. Misguided, misfired, and occasionally mesmerizing—Space Truckers doesn’t work, but it keeps trying in ways that almost make up for it.

There’s a gag early in Spaceballs that neatly sums up why the film doesn’t quite work for me. A spaceship crawls across the screen in exaggerated slow motion. After an absurdly long wait, we reach the back, where a bumper sticker reads, “We brake for no one.” It’s a cute idea, but it floats in from the wrong universe. Since when do spaceships brake? That disconnect—between the setup and the world it’s pretending to spoof—explains a lot. The jokes are often clever on paper, but they rarely feel connected to the reality they’re mocking. They’re punchlines with no real target. This might be a Mel Brooks film, but it’s miles from Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles, where the parody had actual footing—tethered to genre, performance style, even the pulse of the original films they were skewering. Spaceballs, by comparison, feels like a grab bag. The references come fast, but they rarely build. There’s no real escalation—just a stream of sight gags, one-liners, and meta-jokes that treat Star Wars less like a cultural text than a checklist. Still, even weak Brooks isn’t without its pleasures. Rick Moranis is the best thing in the film, playing the whiny, ineffectual Dark Helmet like a villain who peaked during rehearsal. John Candy shows up in a dog suit as Barf, a half-man, half-canine sidekick whose main job is to pant and react. Brooks himself plays Yogurt, a Yoda stand-in obsessed with marketing spin-offs and lunchboxes. These aren’t deep characters, but the performances are committed, and the tone stays breezy enough to keep things from dragging. It’s not a film I laugh at so much as one I watch with mild amusement. There’s enough silliness to keep it afloat, and a few inspired moments—mainly from Moranis—to remind you what Brooks can do when everything clicks. But for a movie built on parody, it feels curiously detached from its own source. The jokes connect, occasionally. The movie, less so.

I have a pretty high tolerance for junky sci-fi comedies—aliens in rubber suits, toy-store props, dumb jokes lobbed like water balloons. But Spaced Invaders tests even that threshold. The premise isn’t bad: on Halloween night, a rebroadcast of Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds prank reaches a tiny rural town. The humans don’t fall for it—fool me once, etc.—but a passing squad of Martians does. Convinced the invasion is underway, they drop in, ready to raise hell. Instead, they land in a cornfield and get mistaken for kids in elaborate costumes. That part’s amusing, briefly. A girl (Ariana Richards) and a boy dressed as a duck (J.J. Anderson) become their pint-sized liaisons to Earth, and a few early scenes flirt with the kind of loopy charm the movie’s going for. But the Martians—rubbery oddballs with overworked voice chips—wear out their welcome fast. One does a Jack Nicholson impression, another channels Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, but none of them register as anything more than noise with catchphrases. What kills it isn’t the bargain-bin effects or the sitcom-grade plot. It’s the dialogue, which sounds like it was written by a kid hyped up on Halloween candy and ignored by the editing department. Jokes fall flat. Banter clangs. Even the “so-bad-it’s-good” factor dries up under the weight of all the noise. It wants to be a cult oddity, but it plays like recess with a fog machine and no teacher.

The title suggests a culture clash, but Spanglish mostly feels like a film at war with its own priorities. Paz Vega plays Flor, a Mexican housekeeper hired by a Brentwood family who treat her more like a live-in moral corrective than a person. She and her daughter Cristina (Shelbie Bruce) are the story’s emotional center, but the film stays fixated on the white couple upstairs. Téa Leoni plays Deborah like a walking cortisol spike in designer activewear, while Adam Sandler’s John simmers in silence, his smile stretched thin over something less manageable. The movie brushes against big ideas—assimilation, class, control—but backs away every time they start to smudge the windows. Cristina is bright, well-behaved, and entirely likable, yet Flor bristles when Deborah takes a maternal shine to her. The tension could’ve sparked something compelling about class, identity, or parental fear of cultural dilution. Instead, it mostly flickers, then gets buried under plot detours and late-breaking romantic subtext. By the time John starts gazing longingly at Flor over his culinary masterpieces, the movie has lost track of what it’s even trying to resolve. Still, the performances do more for the film than the script manages on its own. Vega is warm and watchful, and Sandler’s understated work here is among his most affecting turns. Leoni gives it everything—some of it too much—and Sarah Steele is quietly excellent as the daughter always on the verge of being forgotten. But the MVP is Cloris Leachman as Deborah’s alcoholic mother, who steals entire scenes with a glance. One of the best involves her gloating that she quit drinking and no one noticed. There are moments that hit—especially in the mother-daughter translations, where meaning has to pass through grammar drills and guesswork—but the film drifts, nudging at insight without ever quite locking onto it. It’s part observation, part filler, and rarely confident about whose story it’s actually telling.

It’s strange how a film about a 1960s girl group—clearly modeled on The Supremes—can feel so spiritually depleted. Sparkle isn’t lacking in incident; it’s packed with every variety of hardship and heartbreak the screen can handle. What it’s missing is joy. At no point does the film suggest there’s anything remotely energizing, glamorous, or even tolerable about being in the music business. If anything, it’s a warning to stay away. The plot follows three sisters—Sparkle, Sister, and Dolores—as they climb the rickety ladder of fame, only to be met with addiction, abuse, back-alley deals, and an avalanche of bad men. Everyone is either miserable by nature or miserable by design. One overdoses, one gets beaten, one tries to flee the whole enterprise. The moments where success seems within reach—fleeting bursts of applause, a flash of stage lighting—are quickly yanked away by some new calamity. The performances range from competent to numbed. No one looks like they’re enjoying themselves. Not the characters, not the actors. Sparkle herself (Irene Cara) is oddly recessive for someone whose name is the title. Even when things go well, she stares into the middle distance as if already bracing for the next blow. The music—original compositions meant to evoke the spirit of classic R&B—rarely gets there. It’s serviceable, but none of it soars. These are songs that should level rooftops. Instead, they rattle the floorboards and stop. What we’re left with is a film that confuses anguish for depth. Misery arrives in waves, but catharsis never does. It’s not raw or revealing, just overworked and emotionally airless. Being in a girl group might be hard, but it shouldn’t look this joyless.

A more polished remake of the 1976 original, but that’s faint praise. Sparkle is definitely more polished than its 1976 predecessor—slicker production, better vocals, and a clearer sense of setting—but the emotional center still feels undercooked. Jordin Sparks plays the title character, a soft-spoken songwriter with talent to spare but no idea what to do with it. Her mother (Whitney Houston, in her final role) is a former singer turned disciplinarian, hardened by regret and determined to keep her daughters off any stage. Naturally, the daughters disobey, sneak off to perform at nightclubs, and form a three-woman act modeled on The Supremes. The rise is swift, the fallout inevitable. The music, to the film’s credit, is stronger than expected—stylized but not overproduced, with a few numbers that actually land. And Carmen Ejogo, as the troubled eldest sister Sister, brings something sharp and unpredictable to an otherwise formulaic role. But the screenplay is all cliché. Characters speak in platitudes. Pivotal turns happen on cue and don’t feel earned. Most frustrating is Sparkle herself. We’re told she has the talent. We see flashes of it. But we’re never given a sense of what fuels her—why she writes, why she sings, what compels her to stay when she could just as easily walk away. She’s the title character but rarely the emotional center. As a musical drama, Sparkle gets by. As a portrait of ambition and artistry, it never really finds its footing. The emotions are dutiful, the arc familiar, and the conclusion so scrubbed and tidy it feels like an apology for the darker material it teases and drops.