Film Buff Musings

Stardust Memories doesn’t so much pay tribute to 8½ as try to crawl inside it, unzip it, and wear it like a costume. Stardust Memories is less a riff on Fellini than a nervous breakdown in black-and-white—a self-loathing valentine to the art of making movies, or maybe just to the feeling of being misunderstood by people who paid to love you. Allen plays Sandy Bates, a successful filmmaker best known for light comedies, now straining to make something more “serious.” His latest project—an experimental film set on a train, full of melancholy and metaphors—isn’t going over well with the studio. “Too depressing,” they tell him. “Too honest,” he says back. Meanwhile, he’s trapped at a seaside retrospective of his own work, dodging autograph hounds, sycophants, and wide-eyed fans who mostly want him to repeat the funny lines from the early stuff. The camera gets swarmed by these faces—lumpy, eager, cracked like character studies carved from deli meat—pressing in like they’re trying to crawl into the frame. The jokes come in glimmers. Some are clever, a few land, most pass by like old neighbors you don’t really miss. The rhythm is fractured, the tone unsure, and the relationship throughline—between Sandy and Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling), a fragile ex whose mental health declined during their time together—is too underfed to register as a true emotional anchor. Allen denies it’s autobiographical, but there’s little distance between the man on screen and the one behind the camera. Stardust Memories is adored by some of Allen’s most devoted fans. He claims it’s among his best. But it doesn’t invite you in—it waves from a locked room, hoping you’ll mistake alienation for profundity. I didn’t.

A clunky sci-fi mess that somehow kicked off one of the most corntastically lovable TV franchises of the ’90s and 2000s. (And for the record, I adore that series.) The movie, though, is mostly a faceplant in slow motion. The premise still holds. The execution trips over itself. James Spader plays Daniel Jackson, a tweedy, soft-spoken Egyptologist brought in to decode a giant ring etched with constellations and cosmic squiggles. Turns out it’s a Stargate—a galactic shortcut that flings people across the universe in less time than it takes to cue up a monologue. Leading the expedition is Jack O’Neil (Kurt Russell, grim-jawed and buzzed to military perfection), a colonel with a death wish and no discernible sense of humor. Tagging along are a few extras whose primary duties involve reacting to explosions or being erased by them. On the other side: a discount Tatooine ruled by Ra, an alien dictator disguised as an Egyptian sun god with cheekbones sharp enough to slice fruit. The locals speak ancient Egyptian and live under interstellar feudalism, waiting for our Earthlings to light a match under the regime. The setup wants pulp adventure. What it delivers is a two-hour trudge through caves and exposition dumps, with mythology that barely registers and dialogue that sounds dubbed from a less exciting language. It’s Chariots of the Gods by way of slow-motion Dune, minus the personality, the stakes, or the basic pulse. There are moments worth salvaging. The Stargate spins. Ra’s spaceship gleams. But the pace sags, the tone dithers, and the climax feels like a shrug in widescreen. It hints at spectacle, then settles for beige. Still, Stargate deserves some retroactive thanks. It left behind just enough narrative scaffolding to support something better. The television series took that scaffolding and ran—funny, nimble, full of life. The movie stumbled so the show could sprint.

An alien drops in, rifles through a lock of hair and a photo album, and comes back wearing the face of a dead husband. You’d expect horror, or at least hysteria. What you get is Karen Allen blinking through the shock like she’s just walked into the world’s most elaborate grief therapy session. The early scenes are spooky in a lonely-cabin sort of way—quiet, tender, and charged with the threat of something smarter than us trying very hard not to knock over the furniture. Jeff Bridges, wide-eyed and weirdly graceful, plays the visitor like a child impersonating a man impersonating a husband. He learns to speak by mimicking daytime TV, drives like he’s taking the DMV test in a dream, and treats a traffic light like it’s giving him contradictory instructions. He’s polite. Curious. Prone to sudden volume spikes. Allen plays it beautifully—part hostage, part tour guide, part widow trying not to scream at her resurrected husband for pronouncing “greetings” like a Bond villain. But then comes the shift. The government closes in—not with alien protocol, but helicopters, rifles, and enough bureaucracy to guarantee a standoff. What started as an extraterrestrial courtship tilts toward a road movie with sirens in the rearview and time running out. The romance keeps pace, but just barely. The whole thing swerves between sci-fi parable and roadside melodrama, but Carpenter—who rarely gets sentimental unless explosions are involved—commits to the premise with a straight face. The result is a film that’s too melancholic to be a romp, too warm to be cynical, and just peculiar enough to make you wish more alien invasion stories stopped for coffee and awkward small talk. Not exactly exhilarating, but strangely lovable—like watching E.T. grow up, lose his glow, and rent a Buick.

On the surface, Starship Troopers is pure pulp: a gleaming, hyper-violent space romp where fascist dreamboats blast giant insects into exploding heaps of goo. It plays like a live-action recruitment ad—polished, loud, and proud to be stupid. And yet, beneath all that carnage and gunmetal, there’s something far more deliberate: a satire so deadpan it risks being taken at face value. Paul Verhoeven takes Robert A. Heinlein’s famously authoritarian novel and adapts it with a near-sociopathic level of sincerity. The uniforms recall Triumph of the Will by way of Calvin Klein. Propaganda segments crash into the narrative like commercial breaks from a parallel universe. Everyone smiles too much. Everyone salutes too hard. It’s not just camp—it’s camp weaponized. The characters are drawn with a plastic sheen. Casper Van Dien, all square jaw and blank stare, plays Johnny Rico like a GI Joe prototype. Dina Meyer is the tough-but-loyal squadmate. Denise Richards beams her way through tactical flight school with beauty-pageant optimism. Jake Busey grins like a man born without fear or subtext. They all deliver their lines with the wide-eyed clarity of people who’ve never questioned a single thing they’ve been told. And then there are the bugs—towering, skittering monstrosities that tear through flesh and armor in set pieces staged like high-gloss war pornography. The violence is gloriously excessive, staged with such flair you almost forget how hollow the cause is. That’s the point. Verhoeven gives the audience everything it thinks it wants, then turns the volume up just enough to make the edges start to show. As spectacle, it’s relentless. As critique, it’s razor-edged. Starship Troopers may look like a Saturday morning cartoon dipped in blood, but it’s also a parody hiding in plain sight—less a celebration of militarism than a Trojan horse packed with irony and bug guts.

A lightly absurd behind-the-curtain farce from David Mamet—less snarling than his usual fare, but every bit as quick on its feet. State and Main drops a full Hollywood circus into a sleepy Vermont town and lets the mutual annoyance unfold frame by frame. The visiting production, a glossy period piece with the suspiciously generic title The Old Mill, hits a snag before the first shot: the titular mill burned down decades ago. A small oversight, apparently, but the producer’s answer is to bulldoze logic until something sticks. Meanwhile, the hapless screenwriter (Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing vulnerable exasperation to perfection) tries to salvage a script that refuses to cooperate, all while half-falling for a sharp local bookshop clerk (Rebecca Pidgeon) who seems more amused than dazzled by the chaos. Floating above this polite disaster is the film’s leading man (Alec Baldwin), a self-important golden boy with a fondness for booze and, more problematically, teenage girls—one of whom (Julia Stiles) flirts just enough to keep everyone nervous. Holding the entire circus together—barely—is William H. Macy’s director, a smooth-talking brute whose solutions usually make matters worse, from clueless rewrites to half-hearted apologies to the townsfolk whose patience dwindles by the hour. Films about film crews blundering through quaint communities aren’t new, but Mamet’s version benefits from dialogue that snaps without feeling labored and a cast that knows exactly how to bend each line without cracking it. The stakes stay silly, the grin never fades, and the gentle digs at artistic compromise and showbiz egos still land. A charming, small-scale satire with just enough teeth—more chuckle than belly laugh, but worth it for the cast alone.

Fin (Peter Dinklage) wants to be left alone. A train enthusiast with dwarfism, he inherits a defunct New Jersey depot and moves in, expecting silence, solitude, and maybe the occasional passing freight. What he gets instead is foot traffic. Joe (Bobby Cannavale), a one-man food truck operation with too much energy and nowhere else to park, sets up just outside. Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), a local artist with a drifting focus and a reckless approach to intersections, nearly hits Fin with her car—twice—then tries to make it up to him with awkward conversation and baked goods. A schoolgirl (Raven Goodwin) also starts showing up, mostly fascinated by his trains but undeterred by his unwillingness to chat. The plot is modest, almost stubbornly so, but the film’s rhythm matches its subject: life doesn’t rush, but it keeps showing up. The comedy is quiet and unforced, built on personality rather than punchlines. What keeps it from tipping into sentimentality is how well the characters are drawn—not “quirky,” just convincingly odd in the ways real people are. Dinklage, in particular, plays Fin with a clipped wariness that makes his slow thaw convincing. The Station Agent is about loneliness, but more than that, it’s about the inconvenience of being seen. Fin wants to vanish into the background. Everyone else keeps knocking.

You could watch Staying Alive as a cautionary tale—what happens when a gritty, era-defining character study gets scrubbed clean, slicked back, and choreographed into something that vaguely resembles a self-help fantasy with sweatbands. The sequel to Saturday Night Fever trades blue-collar Brooklyn for Broadway ambition, with Tony Manero (John Travolta) now auditioning, waiting tables, and teaching the occasional dance class—though you wouldn’t know it from how little the film seems to care about the details of how he survives. His real job, evidently, is strutting. Gone is the restless disco king in a dead-end job. This version of Tony wears Lycra and stares at mirrors, pining after a dismissive starlet (Finola Hughes) while stringing along the far more grounded and, frankly, too-good-for-him Jackie (Cynthia Rhodes). Their relationship, already on shaky ground, is stretched thinner by a love triangle that barely holds together between rehearsal montages and pep talks. The drama is weightless, the dialogue sounds like motivational slogans, and the climactic number—Satan’s Alley, complete with inferno lighting and loincloths—feels like an aerobics class in the fifth circle of hell. Travolta sells it with full-body sincerity, even as the choreography appears to have been mapped out by someone simultaneously directing a cologne commercial and a gladiator musical. Frank Stallone, meanwhile, not only shows up to sing “Far From Over,” but also hangs around in a minor role, as if even he’s not sure when to leave the set. There’s no grit here, no funk, no sense of place—just a lot of fog machines and flexed triceps. Whatever Saturday Night Fever had—pulse, pathos, working-class ache—Staying Alive repackages into a motivational poster. You can watch it once for the spectacle of Travolta’s earnest squint and the madness of the final performance, but one spin is plenty.

A comedy-drama that moves like small-town weather—sunny one minute, a storm the next, and everyone still shows up for their hair appointment. In a Louisiana parish so tightly knit you could crochet with it, the gravitational center is Truvy Jones’ (Dolly Parton) beauty shop, a place where gossip gets the same meticulous attention as a French twist. Truvy has just taken on an apprentice, Annelle (Daryl Hannah), who arrives looking like she’s been raised in a cupboard. The chatter this week is Shelby’s (Julia Roberts) wedding—lavender-pink bridesmaids, groom named Jackson (Dylan McDermott), and a mother, M’Lynn (Sally Field), who keeps her daughter’s life wrapped in protective bubble wrap because of Shelby’s diabetes. It’s a crowd you want to watch even when they’re not doing much. Olympia Dukakis plays the sly ex–First Lady of the parish, who can butter you up while aiming the knife. Shirley MacLaine, as Ouiser, is a professional malcontent who travels with a large, untrainable dog as if to underline her point. She practically hijacks the film—every line drips with the satisfaction of being right and misunderstood at the same time. Even the men get their strange grace notes: Sam Shepard, for instance, in full ornithological war with the birds in his magnolia tree. Herbert Ross directs with a kind of lacquered lightness—you feel the scenes glide even when the story stumbles into tragedy. The tone never gets syrupy; the women still tease, the hair still gets done, the coffee still pours. It’s long been filed under “for housewives,” maybe because the men here are decorative at best, but it plays bigger than that. It’s about the pleasure and necessity of a good ensemble, about the fact that grief and humor aren’t opposites—they’re neighbors who borrow sugar from each other.

Step Dogs is one of those low-budget talking-dog movies that knows exactly what it is—and couldn’t care less. Two mismatched pets, one pampered and one gruff, get tossed into a newly blended family, and before long they’re defending the house from jewel thieves. That’s the arc. The whole thing plays like a discarded Disney Channel pilot that got turned into a feature because someone had leftover costumes and a deadline. The setup is prefab: two newly married humans combine households, and their pets—one a yappy, accessory-laden Pomeranian (clearly modeled after Beverly Hills Chihuahua), the other a Southern-accented German Shepherd who sounds like Larry the Cable Guy—are forced to share space. The Shepherd keeps calling the Pomeranian a cat. It’s mildly funny the first time, but by the twentieth, it’s just noise. There’s also a priceless diamond, for reasons never explained, stored casually in the family home. When two cartoonish thieves show up, the dogs must suddenly team up to defend the place. The movie briefly becomes Home Alone with paws: pratfalls, booby traps, and burglars mugging like community theater rejects. There’s no charm, no surprise, no momentum—just a string of tired gags recycled from better family films and replayed without any sense of timing. The voice acting is loud but flat. The visual effects barely register. The humans feel like cardboard cutouts waiting for their scenes to end. Still, Step Dogs knows what lane it’s in. It’s a disposable, undercooked kids’ comedy built for the digital shelf—something to click on when silence is more important than substance. It never tries to rise above that. It never really tries at all.

The film carries a reputation like a prom queen wears a tiara: awkwardly, and a little off-center. You walk expecting elegance, menace, a glittering satire with teeth. What you get—for a while—is Connecticut in beige: pretty lawns, polite neighbors, direction that moves like a PTA meeting, and cinematography with the personality of a casserole. Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) arrives, camera in hand, husband in tow, and immediately scans the town like she knows it’s lying. She’s not wrong. The other wives smile too wide, talk too slow, and clean as if it’s the only language they know. Her new friend Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) seems normal—sharp, funny, refreshingly human—until she starts to change in ways Joanna can’t explain. The men, meanwhile, retreat nightly to their private society, where the women aren’t quite sure what goes on—but whatever it is, it changes people. Ross plays Joanna like a woman studying the exits. She’s perceptive without posturing, skeptical without theatricality. Prentiss brings a looseness the town can’t absorb—quick wit, messy charm, a little too much honesty. Which makes it all the more chilling when that personality is stripped away and replaced with compliance. The husbands never need to raise their voices. They already have what they want: compliance mistaken for harmony. The message isn’t buried: control masked as civility, domesticity framed as duty, and a town where men speak and women vanish behind the curtains. The reputation may be sharper than the film itself, but what’s on screen knows exactly what it’s saying—and says it with a smile.

By the time this remake rolled around, The Stepford Wives had already been absorbed into the pop culture bloodstream. The 1975 original may have saved its secret for the final reel, but in 2004, that curtain’s already been yanked. To its credit, the film doesn’t waste time pretending otherwise. But just because you skip the mystery doesn’t mean you get to skip the tension. What we’re left with is a sleek, confused production that tries to repackage social satire as broad comedy—and ends up tripping over both. Nicole Kidman plays Joanna Eberhart, a glossy TV executive whose career implodes after a humiliating scandal. Her husband (Matthew Broderick, checked out in pressed khakis) suggests a clean slate in Stepford, Connecticut—a gated community that looks like it was built by Rockwell and maintained by Valium. The men spend their days loafing in blazers and cigars, while the women smile like showroom models and pirouette through domestic perfection. Joanna, needless to say, doesn’t blend in. Her only real companions are two other outliers: Bette Midler as a prickly, soused author, and Roger Bart as a theatrically gay neighbor whose energy feels borrowed from a different movie—though he plays a crucial role later on. The film gestures toward inclusion, but it’s just another piece of the conformity puzzle. Bart’s character, like the women, isn’t celebrated so much as reprogrammed. The original was a tightly wound thriller. This one leans hard into sitcom rhythms. It’s been said that rewrites and studio notes softened the film’s original edge, and that feels right—what’s left is uneven and often toothless. There are flickers of wit—Midler gets a few crisp one-liners, and Glenn Close clearly enjoys ruling the hive—but the whole thing plays like a premise dragged past its expiration date. You can see what this remake wanted to be—smarter, funnier, timelier. But it gets caught trying to please too many masters. The result is a satire that’s been over-polished, undercooked, and left blinking under the fluorescent lights.

No one watches Stir Crazy for the plot. You’re here to see Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder charge headfirst into nonsense and make it look like jazz. The movie lurches, stalls, forgets what scene it’s in—but the two of them keep tossing sparks like the script owes them a reaction. Pryor plays Harry Monroe, a down-and-out actor with a stomach ulcer and a sixth sense for disaster. Wilder’s Skip Donahue thinks he’s destined for Broadway but performs like a camp counselor with delusions of stardom. They leave New York in a convertible full of hope and land in a Southwestern prison after being mistaken for bank robbers—caught in clown suits, mid-promotional stunt, outside a bank that gets held up minutes later. The case against them is ridiculous. The film’s logic is worse. But the leads treat the whole setup like a dare they refuse to lose. The good stuff lives between the lines. A prison talent show with interpretive dance, off-key show tunes, and at least one routine involving a tuba. Late-night whispers in a shared cell, equal parts scheming and nonsense. Pryor rolls through scenes like a man permanently on edge; Wilder delivers lines like he’s translating from a private language only he understands. Their timing’s elastic, their rhythm jagged, and the energy feels like it could short out the lights if they ever stood still long enough. And then: the rodeo. The movie takes a sharp turn, faceplants into livestock, and doesn’t bother brushing off the dirt. Skip, without warning, is revealed to be a bull-riding savant. No training montage. No past experience. Just Wilder, flailing on a snorting beast like he’s auditioning for a Darwin Award. The tone flips. The plot caves in. It plays like a subplot smuggled in from a sports comedy that got rejected for being too weird. And still, it doesn’t fall apart. Because when the dust settles and it’s just Pryor and Wilder again—bickering in their bunks, inventing escape plans, laughing too hard at each other to stop—it works. They’re not pushing through the story. They’re pulling it sideways, scene by scene, like they’re trying to see what it can survive. They don’t break character because they never fully commit to having one. They just keep the current moving. The film makes a mess and doesn’t apologize. It skips cleanup, drops transitions, and barely holds a thought. But the mess is alive, the nonsense is kinetic, and the performances are tuned to the frequency of controlled collapse. That’s the show. Everything else is set dressing.

A time capsule best left buried. The Stoned Age is the kind of stoner comedy that confuses yelling for humor and misogyny for edge. Amateurish, proudly sexist, and casually homophobic, it plays like a prolonged inside joke between people you wouldn’t want to share a car ride with. Even for 1994, it feels like it missed its own moment—mean-spirited and lazy, without the wit or invention that gave other slacker comedies their staying power. The setup is aggressively basic: two underage burnouts, Hubbs (Bradford Tatum) and Joe (Michael Kopelow), spend a night prowling suburban streets in search of parties, drugs, and women—in that order, though it hardly matters. They strike a deal with Laine (Renee Ammann), who offers to let them into her house if they bring alcohol. What follows is a string of aimless scenes, padded out with macho posturing and banter so one-sided it’s almost cruel. Hubbs mocks Joe relentlessly, and not in a way that builds comic friction—just in a way that wears you down. There are brief flashes of comic potential. Taylor Negron appears as a disco-loving liquor store clerk and gives the role a loose, unexpected rhythm. A pair of cops wander through the night breaking up parties and reminiscing about their own teenage years, with the kind of unsolicited nostalgia that’s both funny and mildly depressing. These moments break up the monotony, but they’re never given enough oxygen to lift the film out of its rut. Instead, it keeps circling the same block—loud, leering, and convinced it’s much funnier than it is. The Stoned Age wants cult status but settles for background noise, the cinematic equivalent of a party flyer that promises a good time but only delivers a headache.

The gold standard of concert films, full stop. Stop Making Sense doesn’t just document a Talking Heads performance—it builds one. Song by song, layer by layer, until the stage practically levitates. It starts with David Byrne alone, tiptoeing into frame like he’s wandered in by accident—boombox under his arm, sneakers too quiet. He presses play. The drum machine coughs to life. Then: “Psycho Killer.” What happens next isn’t staging—it’s assembly. Tina Weymouth glides in on bass. Chris Frantz takes his seat behind the kit. Jerry Harrison plugs in like he’s joining a current. One by one, the band materializes, each arrival tightening the grip. By “Burning Down the House,” it’s a full-body experience—backup singers, auxiliary percussion, guitars, synths, and enough nervous energy to power a small grid. Controlled chaos, sound in motion, everything sweating in time. Byrne’s performance is wired, feverish, and bizarrely controlled. He jogs in place, jerks like his limbs are short-circuiting, and eventually emerges in that now-iconic oversized business suit—shaped like a filing cabinet and moving like it’s haunted by middle management. It doesn’t just look surreal; corporate anxiety given a dress code. And yet somehow he never misses a note. The whole thing is absurdly precise, but never robotic—it’s alive, twitching, euphoric. Jonathan Demme directs it like a real movie, not a concert capture. No audience cutaways, no bloated interludes, no backstage brooding. Just performance. Framing, lighting, editing—every piece is tuned to the music. When we finally see the audience, it’s at the end, bodies flailing, ecstatic. It’s a reveal and a mirror. We’re them. We’ve been dancing too—if not physically, then somewhere in the pulse. Even if you don’t know Talking Heads walking in, you’ll know them by the end. Probably love them too. It’s 88 minutes of sustained momentum—half spectacle, half sermon, delivered through sweat, rhythm, and a frontman who seems slightly possessed by genius.

A cheapie made-for-television production—reportedly one of the first ever—and it looks it. The Goliath business is already behind us, which is convenient, because staging that would’ve eaten up the entire budget and possibly half the cast. Instead, the film plants itself in the quieter aftermath: Saul grows jealous, David becomes popular, and suddenly it’s open season on Israel’s favorite harp-playing war hero. What follows is essentially Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, gender-flipped and stripped of magic. Saul is the wicked queen. David is the exiled innocent. And instead of dwarfs, he assembles a nameless band of followers who skulk around the wilderness with varying levels of beard commitment. Saul throws spears. David ducks. Saul hunts. David flees. It’s not a fight—it’s a principle. David refuses to retaliate. Not out of cowardice, but reverence. He’s got the upper hand—he just refuses to use it. The story doesn’t build to any big reversal. No poisoned apple, no enchanted sleep, no tidy kiss to wrap it all up. Just a series of moral standoffs and the slow unraveling of a king. The film ends before David ascends the throne, which makes sense narratively—this isn’t A Story of David so much as The Story of David Between the Interesting Bits. Still, there’s a kind of earnest calm to it, like a lesson plan adapted for primetime. The cast is fine. The ancient-costume atmosphere does what it can. And the location shooting in Israel adds some baked-in gravitas—if not quite heat. But this isn’t an exciting film, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s a reverent, low-simmer meditation on restraint, jealousy, and divine appointment. Watch it if you’re the sort of person who knows which Psalms were written in caves. Otherwise, you’re better off rereading the source material—or watching Snow White. At least that one has a real ending.

Storytelling isn’t designed for comfort. It’s acerbic, theatrical, and frequently hilarious in ways that feel wrong to laugh at—though that’s often the point. Todd Solondz divides the film into two vignettes—“Fiction” and “Non-Fiction”—that don’t intersect narratively but share a fascination with exploitation, authorship, and the quiet dishonesty baked into attempts at truth. The first segment follows Vi (Selma Blair), a creative writing student who turns a personal encounter with her professor (Robert Wisdom) into a short story—only to have it dismissed by her classmates as too implausible. The second centers on Toby (Paul Giamatti), a documentary filmmaker hoping to capture something “real” by filming the life of a high school student named Scooby (Mark Webber). What he ends up documenting, mostly, is his own cluelessness. Both halves hit, though the second lands harder—particularly a dinner table blow-up that begins with an awkward remark about family history and snowballs into something completely unhinged. John Goodman’s reaction is perfectly pitched, and the tension it creates is more memorable than anything in most comedies. There’s a lot here that’s funny, surprising, and intentionally uncomfortable. Even when the messages feel over-delivered, the film stays unpredictable. You don’t have to love every choice to admire how fearlessly Solondz makes them.

David Lynch steps outside his usual orbit with The Straight Story, a film so straightforward it almost counts as subversive. No dream logic, no undercurrents of dread—just a quiet, deeply humane road movie that somehow carries as much weight as anything else he’s done. It’s gentle, unhurried, and so G-rated it practically glows. Richard Farnsworth plays Alvin Straight, an old man in poor health who learns his estranged brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) has had a stroke. He decides to make the trip from Iowa to Wisconsin to see him—only he can’t drive. So he hitches a trailer to his 1966 John Deere riding mower and starts the 240-mile journey on a machine that barely goes five miles an hour. People call it impossible. Alvin just goes. What follows isn’t dramatic, exactly, but it’s never dull. He meets a handful of strangers—some kind, some troubled—and trades a few words, or sometimes just silence. A runaway, a fellow veteran, a man fixing a tractor. The film doesn’t manufacture lessons from these encounters; it just lets them happen. Alvin moves through each with patience and curiosity, and somehow leaves the world a little better than he found it. Sissy Spacek shows up briefly as Alvin’s daughter Rose, who’s been through her own quiet heartbreak. She has a stutter, a vague backstory, and a sadness that hangs in the air without needing to be explained. Her scenes with Farnsworth are lovely—tender and awkward and shot through with things they’ll never say. The cinematography by Freddie Francis is beautiful in a way that sneaks up on you. Long stretches of cornfields, empty roads, evening light stretching across the horizon—it’s all deceptively simple, and perfect for what this is. And then that ending: Alvin finally reaches Lyle’s house. They sit together on the porch. Lyle, stunned, asks if Alvin really made the trip on a lawnmower. Alvin looks at him and says, “I did.” That’s the whole movie, really. Plain, direct, and unexpectedly moving.

A raw, unsparing crime drama that belongs in the same breath as Taxi Driver, The Godfather, and Dog Day Afternoon, though it never seems to get the invitation. Straight Time doesn’t sell its grit with moody lighting or stylized violence. It just unfolds, tight and bruised, like it’s got nothing to prove. Dustin Hoffman plays Max Dembo, newly released from prison and quietly determined to go straight. He’s put under the supervision of a smug parole officer named Earl (M. Emmet Walsh), who slaps on the friendly act but radiates control. Max clocks the dynamic immediately, but still gives it a go. He finds work, meets a woman (Theresa Russell), keeps his head down. And for a little while, it looks like something might hold. Then Earl finds a burnt matchbook—a supposed sign of heroin use—and uses it as grounds to drag Max in for testing. No signs of relapse, just suspicion. Max snaps. He hijacks Earl’s car and strands him handcuffed to a highway fence, pants around his ankles, like the punchline to a joke that took too long to land. From there, Max stops pretending. He reaches out to Jerry (Harry Dean Stanton), a former partner who now has a wife and a swimming pool and clearly wants neither. Jerry perks up at the idea of getting back in the game—he’s been bored, restless, and half-dead in domestic limbo. Gary Busey appears as a loose cannon, all nervous energy and zero reliability, the kind of accomplice who makes everything more dangerous just by being there. The robberies come quick and mean. No romanticism, no swagger—just clumsy, cornered desperation. The film doesn’t make these men noble, but it refuses to make them caricatures either. It humanizes without excusing, and that’s more than most films of its kind manage. Hoffman plays Max like a man who’s always recalculating the odds, even when he knows they’re already against him. Stanton has a blankness in his eyes that says more about the cost of going straight than any line of dialogue. Everyone in this cast seems perfectly selected, right down to the smallest parts. Straight Time doesn’t plead for your attention. It just shows you how systems fail, how options collapse, and how easy it is to slip back into the one thing you were trying to leave behind.

A murder mystery set inside New York’s Hasidic community, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Melanie Griffith—words that suggest something far more gripping than what actually arrives. The film looks good, is generally well-acted, and starts with a premise intriguing enough to hold your attention. But very little follows through. A Hasidic Jew is found murdered, and while the evidence points inward—toward someone from within—the community rejects the idea outright; in their eyes, no true member could violate the commandments. Enter Detective Emily Eden (Griffith), who’s heard that before. She’s seen enough to know that belief doesn’t always cancel out motive. Griffith has taken some flak for being miscast, and it’s not hard to see why. Her voice is high, her affect is soft, and she doesn’t exactly radiate hardboiled toughness. But once you accept that, she’s not difficult to watch—her performance is competent, even appealing in its restraint. What works less is the attempted romance between her and a Hasidic scholar, a thread so half-hearted it barely exists. There’s no spark, no tension—just two people orbiting the idea of affection without ever engaging it. The mystery fares slightly better, but even that feels sidelined. The film’s real interest lies in Eden’s anthropological immersion—marveling at customs, observing rituals, asking quiet questions with wide eyes. The procedural beats exist mostly to justify the cultural tourism. It’s a well-shot, well-scored, and well-intentioned misfire. A gender-swapped Witness without the suspense, the chemistry, or the pulse.

Set in New York City at the turn of the 20th century, the movie plays the nostalgia card pretty hard—back when barbers doubled as dentists and you could buy medicinal leeches at the corner drugstore. And yet, it works. James Cagney plays Biff Grimes, a dentist with a temper and a right hook sharp enough to loosen his own fillings. When an old rival named Hugo (Jack Carson) calls up with a dental emergency, Biff considers killing him under nitrous oxide. Instead, he flashes back. The grudge goes back to Virginia (Rita Hayworth), the titular strawberry blonde, who caught Biff’s eye and Hugo’s ambition. But Amy (Olivia de Havilland), less glamorous and far more perceptive, is the one he’s better matched with—though she nearly scares him off by batting her eyes while declaring her distaste for marriage, voting, and men in general. That’s a very funny scene. Cagney spends a good chunk of the film with at least one black eye, usually from instigating. Good thing he’s not made of potatoes, as he wouldn’t be able to blacken more eyes than he has. Alan Hale Sr. steals his scenes as Biff’s father, who competes for the same pool of women as his son and with even more gusto. This is classic Hollywood tuned for speed and snap. The sets are wonderfully detailed—streetcars, stoops, shopfronts dressed just enough to feel like a memory. The tone’s sentimental, but not sugary; the direction keeps things crisp. Even the bit players feel drawn with ink. This is not a prestige picture, but the laughs are sharp, the rhythm’s quick, and it leaves you warmer than you’d expect. Second-rung, maybe—but polished brass.

Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois arrives dressed in the silk of Southern gentility, but it’s all window dressing for the trainwreck smoldering underneath. She flutters, coos, postures—but behind the belle is something far less refined. A pit viper. A live wire. A deeply damaged woman who talks of fading light and illusion while lobbing grenades at the people closest to her. The drama kicks off when Blanche, newly homeless and clinging to civility by her fingernails, moves into her sister Stella’s cramped New Orleans apartment. It’s sweltering, peeling, and a far cry from the family plantation they grew up on, which has since slipped through Blanche’s fingers under circumstances she prefers not to explain. Stella (Kim Hunter) is pregnant and tender-hearted, devoted to her husband Stanley (Marlon Brando), a short-fused blue-collar Polish-American who views Blanche’s arrival like a fox in the henhouse. He’s not wrong. Blanche is all artifice—flouncy dresses, soft lighting, half-truths. Stanley is pure appetite: beer, poker, sex, suspicion. He rifles through Blanche’s belongings looking for evidence she’s siphoning off whatever’s left of the family fortune. She, in turn, launches her own campaign—belittling him, calling him common, dropping enough barbed remarks to fray the edges of Stella’s marriage. It’s a power struggle staged in a one-bedroom apartment, with no air circulation and no exits. The film builds its tension brick by brick until it’s suffocating. Kazan directs like he’s holding the audience in a headlock. The violence—emotional, sexual, and physical—is relentless but never gratuitous. And Brando, volcanic and unfiltered, delivers a performance that practically changed screen acting overnight. His anguished howls of “Stella!” in the night are what everyone remembers, but what stays with you is the danger behind the eyes. One minute seductive, the next predatory. The rest of the cast is just as sharp. Leigh plays Blanche like a woman performing herself, aware that the role is slipping. Hunter brings warmth and confusion in equal measure. Karl Malden, as Mitch, is the only one Blanche doesn’t lie to—until she does. This is high drama with sweat behind the ears. It’s bold, claustrophobic, and aching with loss. One of the great American films, powered by performances that still rattle.

There are only a handful of enthusiasts on Earth who know what the Pan-Pacific Grand Prix is. Fewer still who participate. But within the sealed-off world of the Australian Dancing Federation, it’s the reason to get up in the morning. If it ever ceased operations, time might well stop. To win the coveted trophy, dancers must adhere to a strict regimen of sanctioned steps—foxtrot, quickstep, rhumba, and the regional crowd-pleaser, the bogo-pogo. This is supposed to be Scott Hastings’s (Paul Mercurio) year—at least according to his mother (Pat Thomson), a Federation veteran with highly specific dreams. But something comes over Scott: the impulse to improvise. The urge to stray. A scandal, by this world’s standards. Liz (Gia Carides), his longtime partner, storms off, and Scott’s chance at ballroom glory goes with her. Still, he presses on, and finds a new partner in Fran (Tara Morice), a shy beginner who works at the dance studio. She’s an amateur, and in this particular universe, the leap from beginner to serious contender is roughly equivalent to peasantry ascending to royalty. This film is so tongue-in-cheek it’s practically biting its own face, but somehow, it works. Luhrmann dials up the exaggeration—soaring camera moves, hyper-staged emotion, costumes that look forged out of Christmas tinsel—but he also treats his characters with enough sincerity that you’re never just laughing at them. Even I found myself fantasizing, briefly, about taking up ballroom. The film is often hilarious and stacked with unforgettable characters, with dancing that genuinely dazzles once the shackles come off. For all its parody, Strictly Ballroom is also a kind of celebration—of self-expression, risk, and sequins. Especially sequins. A bright, ridiculous, strangely touching original that more than earns a second viewing.

If you’ve ever wanted to watch Bill Murray mouth off to a drill sergeant, this is the movie for it. The premise is little more than that: Murray joins the Army, antagonizes authority, and coasts on a smirk. The film isn’t deep, nor does it need to be. He plays John Winger, a man who loses his girlfriend, job, and car in rapid succession and enlists in the Army more or less out of boredom. He persuades his best friend Russell (Harold Ramis) to come along, and within days, they’re stumbling through basic training—flirting with female MPs, skipping drills, and sneaking off to a mud-wrestling bar. The training sequences are loose and episodic—more pretext than plot. Then the film shifts gears: the unit is tapped to test-drive a prototype armored assault vehicle, the EM-50, and a field exercise goes predictably haywire. Their squad gets stranded near the Czechoslovakian border, and Winger and company head off on a rescue mission that involves breaching the Iron Curtain in full camouflage. What started as a low-stakes, irreverent comedy suddenly becomes a Cold War caper, complete with espionage, gunfire, and a finale that feels imported from a different screenplay. It doesn’t work. The tone veers too sharply, the pacing stumbles, and the film’s once-laid-back attitude gets buried under plot machinery. Stripes is strongest when nothing’s really happening—just griping, loafing, and barely completing drills. These are the film’s most comfortable moments, and often its funniest. John Larroquette steals scenes as Captain Stillman, a glorified man-child promoted well beyond his abilities. He’s in charge of their entire unit and the EM-50 project, and watching him attempt anything—anything at all—is comedy gold. The film doesn’t hold together by the end, but that hardly matters. The jokes are steady, the attitude casual, and the irreverence well-earned. For early Bill Murray, it’s a ride worth taking—even if it loses the map halfway through.

A sweet, slightly baffling children’s film about a polite, upper-middle-class couple—Hugh Laurie and Geena Davis, dressed as if plucked from a Sears catalog photo shoot—who decide to adopt a child. At the orphanage, they are introduced to a young candidate named Stuart, who just so happens to be an articulate mouse in a tiny suit. No one finds this odd. Except, possibly, us. The film doesn’t trouble itself with logistics. We never learn how a talking mouse ended up in a human-run adoption facility, or why the social worker (Julia Sweeney) feels the need to gently warn against cross-species placements. There’s just a mouse. He wants a family. The Littles bring him home. Their human son, George (Jonathan Lipnicki, still in his “wide-eyed with spiky hair” phase), isn’t thrilled. When he said he wanted a little brother, he didn’t think he needed to specify “non-rodent.” Worse still is the family cat, Snowbell (voiced by Nathan Lane), who finds the arrangement so personally degrading that he begins plotting Stuart’s removal. Permanently. The story moves along with cheerful efficiency—Snowbell’s plot takes shape, Stuart tries to fit in, and George begrudgingly warms up to his mouse sibling. It’s lightweight even by family movie standards, but the film compensates with charm and production design that’s almost too perfect: vivid primary colors, crisp retro costumes, and a townhouse that feels like it was designed by a team of stylists rather than architects. Michael J. Fox gives Stuart his familiar vocal persona—earnest, slightly neurotic, and endlessly likable. Davis and Laurie play their roles as if they’re acting in a lost episode of Leave It to Beaver, which fits the aesthetic. And Nathan Lane steals every line he’s given, sounding utterly exasperated by the indignities of his role in the household. There’s not much beneath the surface, but that’s fine. It’s fun to look at, frequently amusing, and remarkably sincere for a film in which a cat hires the alleyway mafia to whack a mouse in a sweater vest.

Take everything said about the first Stuart Little and brighten it half a shade. The sequel is cuter, funnier, and slightly more emotionally grounded—still a kids’ movie through and through, but with sharper timing and a bit more going on under the hood. Stuart (once again voiced with neurotic sweetness by Michael J. Fox) is still trying to figure out how to belong in a human-sized world. He’s now playing soccer with his adopted brother George (Jonathan Lipnicki), though his method of scoring—riding the ball into the net like a furry Evel Knievel—is not what most coaches would consider regulation. Still, George treats Stuart less like a novelty and more like a sibling this time around, and that shift gives the film a little more heart. Stuart’s real arc here is about fitting in—socially, physically, emotionally. The idea that being part of a family doesn’t always guarantee feeling secure in it is handled gently enough for young viewers to grasp without being lectured. And the message lands more cleanly than in the original, even if the packaging is still bubble-wrapped in animated sweetness. The plot involves a con pulled by a jewel-thieving falcon—voiced with oily menace by James Woods—and his accomplice, Margalo the canary (Melanie Griffith), who flutters into Stuart’s life and promptly into the Littles’ home. Their target: Mrs. Little’s wedding ring. It isn’t The Sting, but it moves quickly, and the visuals stay bright and engaging. The real joy, though, is Snowbell (Nathan Lane), still the funniest character in the series. Even better, the alley cats from the first film return—less menacing this time, more reluctant backup. Watching them wrestle with the indignity of helping a mouse remains a highlight. Predictable, but cheerfully so. This may be aimed at preschoolers, but even as an adult, I’m not above enjoying a few toddler-level laughs.

A rare MGM musical that trades American sidewalks for German cobblestone, The Student Prince offers barmaids, beer songs, and enough chandeliers to light a small principality. There’s plenty of atmosphere—painted skies, pressed uniforms, and one of those plots that assumes you’ll be distracted by the furniture. Edmund Purdom plays Prince Karl, stiff-backed and terminally unpersonable, sent off to a student town to acquire the common touch—preferably through moderate drinking and indirect eye contact. His new lodging is an inn owned by a kindly uncle, whose niece Kathie (Ann Blyth) serves beer with practiced grace. The romance is clean, upright, and almost entirely without pulse. They look magnificent side by side, but there’s little to suggest they belong in the same conversation, let alone the same operetta. Mario Lanza was meant to star but left the production after recording his vocals. The studio kept the recordings and dubbed them over Purdom’s performance—a voice like thunder paired with a man who stands like he’s posing for a statue of himself. The songs are lush and often lovely, but by the third act they start to feel like they belong in a more eventful movie. It’s a grand voice in search of something worth singing about. The production is handsome. The sets are polished, the costumes behave, and everyone stands where they’re supposed to. Even the beer arrives on cue. But nothing underneath it moves. The emotions are boxed in, the pacing feels like protocol, and the story advances with the urgency of a scheduled toast. There’s some early promise—a little Bavarian pageantry, a few decent drinking songs—but it slips into autopilot. By the end, you’re watching a state function in which no one knows why they showed up. It’s not bad, exactly. Just ceremonial.

The Stupids are a suburban family dressed like they’ve just left a Southern Baptist ice cream social—saturated pastels, Sunday best, and no discernible grip on reality. Their name is no red herring. They are, in fact, spectacularly stupid. But their ignorance is presented with such theatrical sincerity that, at times, it drifts into something resembling satire. Or perhaps just madness. Tom Arnold plays Stanley Stupid, a beaming patriarch whose entire worldview is filtered through the logic of a malfunctioning cartoon. When the family’s trash begins “disappearing” each week—collected by city sanitation like clockwork—Stanley launches a full-scale investigation. He suspects a sinister plot. What he uncovers, entirely by accident, is a rogue military colonel selling illegal weapons to terrorists. Not that Stanley notices. He’s too busy chasing a mythical figure named “Sender,” a nefarious presence he invented years earlier while working at the post office. He became convinced that the phrase “Return to Sender” was evidence of a shadowy mastermind interfering with the mail. Meanwhile, having neglected to mention his sudden disappearance, Stanley’s family fans out across town on their own unrelated quests, each more surreal than the last. At one point, Stanley and his daughter wander into a planetarium, believe they’ve died, and meet a janitor named Lloyd. Mistaking him for God, they fall to their knees in awe—shocked to learn they’ve been mispronouncing “The Lord” this whole time. Lloyd, unfazed, sends them back to Earth with a single commandment: “Throw your gum in the trash after you’re done chewing it. I spend a huge amount of time cleaning up gum.” For reasons I won’t pretend to understand, I laughed harder at that than I probably should have. The film has the rhythm of a sugar rush and the logic of a daydream. Think After Hours for children, scrubbed of menace and reupholstered in plastic. It’s not good, exactly—but it’s so gleefully divorced from common sense that it occasionally stumbles into the kind of absurdity that catches you off guard. And when it hits, it really does.

Suburbicon arrives with enviable lineage—an old Coen Brothers script, dusted off and retrofitted by George Clooney into a story that feels both overstuffed and undercooked. The setup is pure mid-century noir: a meek office man arranges to have his wife killed, collects the insurance, and installs her twin sister in her place. But instead of tightening the screws, the film spins in place, never building tension or clarity. Scenes arrive, stall, and exit without leaving much behind. Matt Damon plays Gardner Lodge with a kind of distracted remove, as if he’s drifting through the movie instead of driving it. The tone flattens around him, and the pacing grows sluggish fast. A single sequence—featuring Oscar Isaac as a smirking insurance investigator—briefly threatens to wake things up, but it’s over before it begins. Meanwhile, the film runs a second narrative on a parallel track: a Black family moves into the all-white neighborhood, only to be met with escalating harassment and violence. It’s a story charged with history and purpose, but here it floats outside the main plot entirely, like a powerful engine bolted to the wrong vehicle. There’s no convergence between the two threads—just juxtaposition, and not a particularly coherent one. Whatever commentary the film is reaching for—about suburban rot, repression, or complicity—gets buried under the split focus. The visuals are polished: manicured lawns, antiseptic kitchens, tailored suits. But the aesthetic precision only highlights the thematic muddle underneath. Suburbicon wants to be acid-tipped, but it never finds the right delivery system. It gestures at outrage without committing to it, and ends up talking past itself. The result isn’t provocative so much as confused—a film that keeps insisting it has something to say, but never quite figures out how to say it.

Preston Sturges didn’t know poverty, but he knew how the movies liked to pretend they did—and Sullivan’s Travels is his sharpest, strangest rebuttal. Joel McCrea plays John L. Sullivan, a studio director with a hit reel full of pratfalls and a sudden itch to be serious. His big idea? O Brother, Where Art Thou?—a bold, ponderous message movie about human suffering. Trouble is, he’s never suffered a day in his life. So he grabs a tramp’s outfit, pockets a dime, and hits the road to experience America from the bottom. But suffering’s hard to come by when the press keeps tailing you, your butler keeps bailing you out, and you can’t stop treating the whole thing like elaborate role-play. When he meets a down-and-out actress (Veronica Lake), he can’t help but help her—reflexively generous, reflexively patronizing. She sticks around anyway. They share something like romance, something like vaudeville. He plays the straight man, she slips in the punchlines, and neither one bothers to name it. Whatever it is, it clicks—and doesn’t let up. They fall into step without effort, like two people who already know the rhythm. The film itself plays dress-up, and well. It tries on slapstick, satire, realism, then swaps them out again before the seams show. The script moves like it knows how to trip and land on a punchline. McCrea keeps it steady—earnest, square-jawed, slightly embarrassed by his own sincerity. Lake doesn’t blink unless there’s a reason. Her sarcasm glides past without losing speed. Sullivan’s Travels doesn’t draw a clean line between comedy and suffering. It lets them overlap, interrupt, reshape each other—like they tend to in real life. It’s funny, but funny with something caught underneath. The joke lands, but so does the quiet after. A movie about movies that actually has something to say—and doesn’t flinch when it says it. Still smart. Still bracing. Still one of the greats.