Film Buff Musings

There’s comfort food, and then there’s comfort filmmaking—Summer Camp is microwaved sentiment served with a plastic fork. It’s a reunion of campfire friends turned senior citizens—complete with canoes, crafts, and the kind of bonding exercises that probably void Medicare coverage. The place is swarming with geriatrics, but the tone stays stuck in kid-comedy mode—as if Meatballs got rebooted with bone density monitors. The premise could’ve skewed sweet, maybe even touching, if anyone involved had thought to aim higher than warm-up exercises and cafeteria-grade slapstick. Instead, we get horseback mishaps, archery accidents, and a food fight set to “Ballroom Blitz”—a slow-motion food riot staged with the enthusiasm of a flu shot. Nothing lands but the gravy, and even that feels half-committed. Of course there’s a falling out. Of course there’s a heart-to-heart by the lake. Of course there’s a promise to stay friends forever. It checks every expected box, except the one marked “Give us a reason to care.”

Summer City sells itself as a thriller, but it plays more like a long weekend with people you wouldn’t vacation with twice. Mel Gibson shows up young, tense, and barely housebroken—more beach bum than road warrior, but the glint’s already there. He’s one of four Aussie surf rats headed north for beer, beaches, and trouble, and what starts as a lazy road trip ends in rape, murder, and something vaguely resembling justice. The movie lumbers along—dune buggies crawling dusty roads, improvised conversations that go nowhere, and plenty of stock footage that feels like filler. According to reports, the producer clashed with the cast, who walked off mid-production, leaving the film patched together from whatever could be found. You believe it. The plot flails, and sudden moments of violence arrive not with impact but confusion. Still, there’s a certain charm in the wreckage. The coastline catches the eye, and the surf footage rolls on like a poor man’s Endless Summer—sunsets, slow waves, soft acoustic strums. As a movie, it barely holds its shape. But as a curiosity—in particular for a glimpse of where Mel Gibson started his cinematic journey—it has its place. Just maybe not on your television.

John Candy spends most of Summer Rental one step behind disaster—sunburned, displaced, and trapped in a rental that looks stapled together from bad ideas. He plays Jack Chester, an air traffic controller sent on leave before his nerves send someone to the wrong runway. He drags the family to Florida for what’s meant to be a four-week exhale—only to find their rental house falling apart, their neighbors hostile, and their spot on the beach swiped by richer, tanner people with better boats. Candy moves through it all like a man waiting to be hit by something—low-slung, grumbling, half-suspecting the ceiling fan’s about to fall. His wife (Karen Austin) floats beside him with the calm of someone who’s long since stopped expecting an easy trip—patient, dry-eyed, and used to being the quiet glue. Their kids orbit the chaos, mostly unbothered. No one here is aiming for transformation. They just want to survive the summer without killing each other. Plot-wise, it’s barely more than a shrug: a restaurant scuffle, minor property damage, a turf feud that escalates into a sailing contest. But it floats on Candy’s charm and the general ease of watching likable people get mildly inconvenienced. There are echoes of Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, but where Stewart seethed, Candy kvetches. He’s exasperated, not embittered. The complaints are half-hearted, the affection never in question. The jokes aren’t sharp and the stakes are laughable, but there’s a casual appeal to the whole thing—like stumbling into someone else’s family photo and deciding to stay. It’s not a comedy for the ages. It’s a comedy for the afternoon. And in its own quietly frayed way, that’s enough.

Summer School coasts by on charm, inertia, and the soft-focus glow of low-stakes ’80s comedy. Mark Harmon plays Freddy Shoop, a gym teacher blackmailed into running a summer English class full of students who’ve landed there through a mix of bad grades, poor attendance, and general academic apathy. His idea of a syllabus includes beach days, amusement parks, and the strategic avoidance of anything resembling instruction. That works—until the vice principal threatens to fire him unless the class passes their final exams. Shoop responds not with teaching but bartering: favors, free passes, and the occasional stint as a fake boyfriend to help one student fend off her overbearing father. Education, loosely interpreted. The students are drawn from familiar types—the jock, the stoner, the introvert—but there’s some actual texture to the group. Dean Cameron and Gary Riley stand out as a pair of horror buffs who spend their class time perfecting gore effects and speaking in slasher references. Others get smaller arcs or sight gags, but the film at least makes room for personality. A romance flickers in the background between Shoop and the teacher next door (Kirstie Alley), though it barely rises above the level of narrative obligation. It’s there to round him out, nothing more. The humor rarely pushes past mild, but the tone stays light and unbothered. What gives Summer School its modest appeal is its lack of strain. Harmon is easy company, the cast clicks just enough, and the climactic group effort to pass the test lands with the right kind of formulaic satisfaction. It’s a thin movie, but a watchable one—minor, likable, and just scrappy enough to stick.

The third of Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons. Casual, articulate, sunlit. Less a narrative than a condition. People drift into each other’s paths, walk a while, talk. Nothing builds. But something accumulates. Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) is a math graduate on holiday in Dinard—writing songs, putting off decisions, and already a little too set in his ways to be changed by much. The town—sunny, coastal, full of white villas and people who talk like they’ve all just finished grad school—feels like the backdrop to someone else’s coming-of-age story. But Gaspard isn’t coming of age. He’s waiting. Mostly for an on-again, off-again girlfriend who may or may not show. Then he meets Margot (Amanda Langlet), a waitress with a PhD in ethnology who seems more interested in studying people than joining them. She has a boyfriend elsewhere. Gaspard, technically, isn’t available either. But they keep walking together. And talking. Technically, things happen. They go to a nightclub—briefly. Gaspard tries to plan a trip to the island of Ouessant but can’t decide which woman to invite, neither of whom is Margot. He stalls, then stalls again. Not out of manipulation—just equivocation. He isn’t unsure. He seems to prefer things unresolved. The film doesn’t press the issue. It just watches—conversation by conversation, glance by glance, letting the rhythm unfold. The plot stays loose, almost resistant to shape. But eventually you stop expecting drama and start listening more closely—not for what people say, but how they say it. It’s not a film that moved me, exactly. But it’s honest in its texture—full of sun, waiting, and the kind of small decisions that feel oddly permanent. A postcard from a summer you half-remember being part of.

An engrossing romance and sun-dappled travelogue starring Katharine Hepburn as Jane Hudson, a middle-aged secretary from Akron, Ohio, who arrives in Venice with a movie-fed vision of beauty, romance, and maybe something unexpected. She’s a self-contained woman—cheerful, proper, and unused to being the main character in anyone’s story, including her own. Venice, filmed in glorious Technicolor, doesn’t so much seduce her as nudge her off balance, the canals and shadows seeming to whisper that it’s all right to want more. Hepburn is ideal here—nervous, giddy, and gradually unbuttoned—not in the Hollywood sense but in the quiet, believable way someone might shed a cardigan after too many espressos. Her Jane falls for Renato (Rossano Brazzi), a handsome shop owner with a flinty gaze and unhurried charm. What begins as flirtation flowers into something more, until Jane learns that Renato is married, with children. Whether or not he’s truly estranged from his wife is left intentionally vague, and Jane’s Midwestern sensibility bristles at the thought of secondhand affection. The film’s pleasures aren’t plot-driven. David Lean allows things to unfold at the speed of real experience—meandering, glowing, and occasionally bittersweet. Like many great vacations, Jane’s ends with a mixture of satisfaction and gentle disappointment, a tearful goodbye in a train station that’s touching not because it’s tragic, but because it feels exactly right. Venice, meanwhile, remains the other star: postcard-perfect but lived in, messy in all the ways that people are. You believe Jane will remember it—not for the man, necessarily, but for what she learned to want.

A love triangle, technically, though no one in Sunday Bloody Sunday seems especially good at geometry. Peter Finch plays Daniel, a gay doctor who’s too tired to be heartbroken properly. Glenda Jackson is Alex, a divorced mother who handles everything except her own emotional life with professional-grade efficiency. They’re both involved—openly, if not comfortably—with Murray Head’s Bob Elkin, a younger artist who drifts between them like a man with no forwarding address. Everyone knows what’s happening. No one throws anything. This is heartbreak on a delay—people calmly observing their own emotional erosion like it’s part of the décor. The film, directed by John Schlesinger with a kind of composed melancholy, is less about who ends up with whom than about how people make peace with wanting things they can’t have. The scenes unfold at a deliberate pace—talky, yes, but rarely static. The camera moves just enough to keep things from fossilizing, and the editing wrings surprising tension out of silences and glances. Finch is quietly devastating, never quite pleading but never fully resigned. Jackson gives a performance so tightly coiled it might qualify as aerobic. Head, meanwhile, mostly breezes through, which is either exactly what the role needs or what happens when someone ends up in the right movie by accident. There’s something novelistic about the whole thing, like a short book you didn’t expect to finish and then immediately want to read again. For 1971, its depiction of bisexuality was quietly radical. Even now, it feels unusually honest about how people settle—sometimes with each other, sometimes with themselves.

The plot may be slight, but the texture is lovely—early ’60s Manhattan rendered in polished Cinemascope, back when everything above 14th Street looked like a travel brochure. Landmarks pop out like polished miniatures, and the city seems scrubbed clean, as if it were built solely for romantic complications. No rough edges here. This isn’t the New York of tenement housing and corner bodegas. This is the aspirational version, all skyline and satin gloves. Jane Fonda, still early in her career, plays Eileen, a bright, neurotic music critic who’s recently broken off her engagement to a wealthy suitor (Robert Culp). She stayed abstinent during the relationship, and now—newly single at 22—she’s in a spiral about whether that makes her out of step with the modern dating scene. Her brother (Cliff Robertson), an airline pilot with a crisp wardrobe and a knowing smile, tries to assure her it doesn’t. He even insists he’s a virgin himself, which he delivers with such sincerity you half believe it. Fonda gives the kind of fizzy, frantic performance that would have made Carole Lombard proud. She stammers, pivots, storms out of rooms, and delivers every line like she’s trying to outrun her own nervous system. It’s a screwball turn with punctuation—tight, smart, and just this side of unhinged. One bus ride later, she meets a stranger (Rod Taylor), who also happens to be a music critic. Their meet-cute is pure contrivance, but the film knows it. The rest unfolds in a series of misunderstandings, delayed confessions, and swapped identities that wouldn’t be out of place in a ’30s farce. Everyone is attractive, well-dressed, and morally flustered. It’s light, stylish, and sly. Sunday in New York coasts on energy, good looks, and Jane Fonda’s comic instincts, and that turns out to be plenty.

Every once in a while, a film plays like it was built in a fevered trance—every line etched in acid, every frame lit like an altar. Sunset Boulevard isn’t just great; it’s delirious, immaculate, and spellbound by its own shadows. From its opening shot—Joe Gillis face down in a swimming pool, narrating his own death—it pulls you into a cracked fairytale of Hollywood delusion and never lets go. Gillis (William Holden), a sardonic, down-on-his-luck screenwriter, has nothing left to pawn but his dignity. His latest script is dead on arrival, and the studios aren’t returning his calls. While fleeing repo men in his jalopy, he veers into the driveway of a decaying Spanish-style mansion, where the vines and silence feel permanent. Inside, time has stopped—and Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is waiting. She was once a silent film queen; now she lives in velvet-draped seclusion, surrounded by fading portraits, antique fan letters, and a pet chimpanzee awaiting a funeral. She speaks in the language of close-ups and resurrection. Joe tells her he’s a writer. She tells him she’s Salome. He becomes her editor, her companion, her decoration. What begins as a transactional arrangement begins to rot into something stranger. She buys him suits, gifts him a gold cigarette case, feeds him caviar, and keeps the doors locked. Swanson’s performance is a category of its own—equal parts ghost story and drag act. Her every expression is a mask, her every line a performance inside a performance. Those eyes don’t just widen—they devour. And Holden, all bone-dry detachment and grim self-awareness, gives the film a narrator who knows exactly how it ends and still can’t look away. The narration (by a corpse, no less) casts a fog over everything—eerie, bitter, quietly amused. Wilder directs it like a requiem with punchlines: it’s noir crossed with gothic horror, filtered through a funhouse mirror. There are moments I’ve seen a dozen times that still feel newly cracked open. Sunset Boulevard isn’t just a movie about Hollywood. It’s a séance, a warning, a love letter scrawled in lipstick and framed in nitrate. And if Billy Wilder made sharper films, he never made one quite this haunted, or this hypnotic. It’s probably his masterpiece.

Rhea Perlman plays Phyllis Saroka, a Staten Island gym teacher who takes an improbable job coaching a boys’ basketball team at a New York City high school. She knows next to nothing about the game—her first move is checking out a stack of VHS tapes—but the job pays well, and the school needs a warm body with a whistle. The players, a lineup of hardened types with conveniently timed flashes of vulnerability, don’t respect her. Not at first. What follows is a mutual education: she learns basketball, they learn cooperation. Somewhere in the middle, they start winning games. How? The film doesn’t say. Training montages are thin. The actual gameplay is shot like a local access highlight reel—choppy, flat, and paced like no one on set had ever timed a layup. The premise had potential. Most movies in this genre hand the coach a clipboard and a haunted past. Saroka is different—scrappy, underprepared, more substitute teacher than field general. That angle could have worked. But the script doesn’t trust the setup, and the story skips every opportunity to deepen it. Conflicts resolve offscreen. Success arrives unearned. Perlman, to her credit, brings some bite to the role. She’s five feet tall and walks onto the court like she owns the gym. If the film had met her there—cut sharper, pushed harder—it might’ve played. Instead, it coasts. And so does the team.

A smart, slow burn of a movie about the vanishing of a place—specifically, a sun-bleached patch of coastal Florida with more history than future. Developers have moved in, flashing brochures and blueprints, ready to turn the place into a resort haven. The locals aren’t exactly resisting—but they’re not quite ready to disappear either. What follows is less a plot than a web: families, neighbors, former lovers, uneasy allies—all of them trying to figure out where they fit in the new map. Edie Falco is Delrona, a former beauty queen now running her parents’ seafood joint, and Angela Bassett is Desiree, a TV actress returning home with a husband and a past she hasn’t quite outlived. Their arcs don’t mirror each other so much as intersect, forming a kind of emotional geometry across the town’s shifting lines. Sayles doesn’t press. Conversations loop and stall and pick back up—half-spoken, fully felt. The cast is wide, but nobody disappears. Every character carries something, even when they’re quiet. Even the side characters come with their own gravitational pull, including particularly a foursome of elderly golfers—developers in polo shirts—who thread the whole film together, serving as a kind of Greek chorus in cleats. They gripe, speculate, and toast the outcome like it’s already framed on the clubhouse wall. “Nature is overrated,” one mutters, as the bulldozers inch closer. The film runs long, but it stays interesting. It’s a mosaic of people caught mid-pivot, watching their world rearrange itself. Sayles doesn’t offer solutions—just the noise of change, and the quiet ache of watching something familiar slip away.

Joe Pesci plays Louie Kritski, a second-generation slumlord raised from birth to be just that—his father (Vincent Gardenia, in his final screen role) made sure of it. The rules were simple: collect rent, avoid repairs, and never admit anything’s broken. It’s a business model built on creative neglect. But when Louie finally runs afoul of the law, the court delivers a tailored sentence: live in one of his own buildings until it’s brought up to code. No prison, just plumbing. From there, the premise unfolds exactly as you’d expect. Louie, used to showing up once a month to bang on doors and dodge complaints, is now surrounded by the very tenants he’s spent years ignoring. Slowly—very slowly—he gets to know them. Familiarity builds. His icy posture softens. But not much else changes. Pesci gives the role everything he has. That nervy, combustible energy of his is in full supply, and he’s nothing if not watchable. But even he can’t patch up the script, which stumbles through slapstick and sentiment without much in the way of cohesion. Scenes that might be meaningful come off as clumsy—like when Louie unknowingly gets roped into a fake payroll scheme by one of his tenants, or sulks over not being invited to a party downstairs. The tone never quite settles. Worse still is the film’s supposed arc. Louie’s growth, such as it is, boils down to realizing he should probably be less of a jerk. Poverty is just part of the backdrop. Larger systems never enter the frame. The moral takeaway feels less like a reckoning and more like a soft suggestion. Pesci also seems about a decade too old for the role. A man nearing fifty, finally discovering that people have lives beyond their rent checks, doesn’t register as transformation so much as arrested development. The Super wants to offer a lesson—but doesn’t seem to know who it’s for.

By the time Super Buddies shows up—the seventh and final entry of the saga—the franchise has already thrown everything it has at the wall: sports, holidays, space travel, pirate treasure. What’s left? Superpowers. This installment opens with five glowing alien rings buried in a barn and ends with golden retrievers in capes saving the world from a snarling reptilian warlord named Commander Drex. In between, there are catchphrases, mild peril, and more teamwork affirmations than a corporate retreat. Each ring grants a different ability: invisibility, super speed, strength, elasticity, and mind control, though the film shows little interest in how these powers actually function. What matters is that the puppies look heroic while zooming around and occasionally striking a pose. There’s a space dog in disguise (voiced by Michael Teigen), a kid named Bartleby, and John Ratzenberger occasionally drifting in and out of the frame. The animation remains stiff—lip movements as crude as ever—and the jokes arrive in pre-chewed form, often delivered twice, in case you didn’t find them unfunny the first time. But the film is nothing if not efficient: no time is wasted on suspense, character arcs, or narrative logic. Instead, there’s a constant churn of quips, mild action, and affirmations about believing in yourself. It’s harmless, empty, and shiny in the way a promotional balloon is shiny. For its target audience—very young children or undemanding pet enthusiasts—it’s probably enough to see golden retrievers glow and levitate. For the rest of us, it plays like a toy line’s final push before being tossed in the dust bin.

Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) is a broke plumber in Brooklyn with big dreams and a smaller client list. One freak accident later—pipes, suction, interdimensional plumbing mishap—he and his brother Luigi (Charlie Day) find themselves swallowed into the technicolor madness of the Mushroom Kingdom. Over there, a fire-breathing turtle tyrant named Bowser (Jack Black, sounding fully unhinged) wants to marry Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and destroy everything else. Naturally, Mario must learn to jump real high and break stuff with his fists. The plot barely qualifies as one—but it doesn’t really matter. The film runs on nostalgia like it’s rocket fuel. Power-up mushrooms. Koopa Troopas. Rainbow Road. Half the fun is just watching decades of gaming ephemera spring to life in motion. I caught references to Mario Kart, Donkey Kong, Luigi’s Mansion, even The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!—which I haven’t thought about since Saturday morning cartoons came with cereal commercials and rabbit-ear antennas. It’s shameless fan service, and I was shamelessly serviced. The world is bright, goofy, and weirdly comforting—like stepping into the background of your own childhood. And yes, I did squeal when Yoshi showed up. Briefly. Too briefly. The humor stays broad. The script stays shallow. Nothing clever, nothing complicated—but plenty of laughs. Even when it misses, it misses loud. And while Pixar can spin heartbreak from a sock puppet, The Super Mario Bros. Movie goes for noise, color, and a sugar rush—bright, frantic, and over before you’ve had time to ask what any of it meant. No, it’s not great cinema. But it made me happy. And that counts.

A stunt disguised as a documentary, Super Size Me follows filmmaker Morgan Spurlock as he pledges allegiance to the golden arches for 30 straight days—three meals a day, no exceptions, no salads unless they’re drenched in McDonald’s dressing. He starts in peak health. By the end, he’s lethargic, bloated, and visibly unwell. His doctors, once curious, turn visibly alarmed. One tells him to stop. He doesn’t. The premise is ridiculous on its face, but that’s sort of the point. No one’s saying this is how people eat—just that it’s not far off. Close enough to sting. Spurlock, all grins and glib charm, treats the premise like a party trick, then walks it straight into something darker: a culture where the combo meal isn’t just food, it’s ritual. Routine. A value system on a sesame seed bun. Between gulps, he bounces from cafeterias to conference rooms, chasing the logic behind it all. The school admins, the lobbyists, the dieticians, the double-fisting patrons—they’re not villains, just gears in a machine where speed equals goodness and nutrients are an optional side. The tone stays light, sometimes too light—but the impact creeps in. The stats are grim. The footage of school lunches is worse. And then there’s Spurlock, slumped on the couch, sweating through a McNugget-induced malaise like a man who’s seen too much salt. Spurlock sacrifices his body for the message, and if there’s a whiff of self-promotion in the air, he at least earns the spotlight. His health may have tanked, but the argument landed—and for a documentary built on processed meat and gallows humor, that’s no small feat.

James Garner, as Jason McCullough, strolls into the lawless gold-rush town of Calendar, Colorado, with the kind of laconic confidence that suggests he’s already sized up the whole place before the opening credits finish. He’s en route to Australia for reasons that remain vague and probably unimportant, but a murder in broad daylight delays his plans. A man’s been gunned down, and the shooter—Joe Danby (Bruce Dern)—is calmly finishing his drink. Nobody lifts a finger. Calendar, it turns out, has a vacancy for sheriff. The position has a short shelf life, either due to resignation or sudden death, and the town’s mayor (Harry Morgan) is desperate for someone brave—or dumb—enough to fill it. McCullough, who carries himself like a man who’s never once broken a sweat, volunteers. Not because he has to. Just because someone ought to. The town is at the mercy of the Danby family, headed by patriarch Walter Brennan, playing one last variation on his familiar brand of cantankerous outlaw. They’ve got the law in their back pocket and their boots on everyone’s neck. But McCullough isn’t much for bluster or bloodshed. His preferred weapon is psychology. He bluffs, prods, outsmarts. He jails Joe Danby before the jail has even been finished—just draws a chalk outline on the floor and dares him to leave it. The film is featherlight, full of deadpan reversals and casual charm. Joan Hackett plays the love interest, the mayor’s daughter, who flails through every entrance like she’s just tumbled down a flight of stairs—awkward, endearing, funny without trying to be. Jack Elam also turns up as a reluctant deputy with eyes like saucers and timing to match. This was one of the movies I grew up watching, and it holds up better than most. Garner is dry, glib, unfazed by everything, and somehow even more entertaining the less he does. It’s a western that gently parodies the genre without tipping into spoof—relaxed, clever, and hard not to enjoy.

The great British childhood fantasy, told with straight face and full heart. Swallows and Amazons follows four siblings—sensible, independent, and delightfully unsupervised—who spend the summer at a lakeside cottage and embark on what, to them, is high-seas adventure. They row to a nearby island, plant a flag, and promptly spot pirates on the horizon. The pirates, in this case, are two girls in a rival boat, armed with binoculars and grand declarations of war. The battle lines are drawn. There’s no real peril here, only the kind that feels enormous when you’re eleven and holding a telescope. The child performances are exactly what they should be: natural, slightly stiff, and occasionally surprising. They strategize, build camps, issue commands, and engage in light espionage, all with the gravity of naval officers on foreign soil. The adults hover politely in the periphery—Virginia McKenna, as the mother, offers calm approval from shore, while Ronald Fraser shows up as a rumpled uncle mistaken (not unreasonably) for an ex-pirate. The film is quiet, patient, and happily free of modern cynicism. It knows that the biggest story in the world can take place on a lake the size of a thumbprint, as long as the oars are real and the stakes are self-assigned. There is, however, an undercurrent that deserves acknowledgment. The children’s entire adventure—naming land, appointing captains, defending territory—unfolds like a colonial pageant in miniature. The film never comments on this, but it’s there, built into the bones of the story. They don’t just play; they conquer. That said, it’s a product of its era, and it certainly isn’t malicious. All in all, Swallows and Amazons is difficult to resist. It captures the sacred childhood art of turning nothing into everything—staking claims, launching fleets, declaring wars and truces before dinner. If you’ve ever squinted across water and seen more than what’s there, you’re already halfway back.

A hitman hired to sway an election by posing as a preacher should be the setup for a tight, morally tangled thriller. Sweet Jesus, Preacherman knows it has a good premise—it just doesn’t know what to do with it. Roger E. Mosley plays Holmes, a contract killer embedded in a Black neighborhood under orders to influence voters. But once he’s behind the pulpit, the role starts to take hold. He preaches well. Maybe too well. And while the film hints at a man drifting from performance into conviction, it never commits to that idea. His arc is treated like an afterthought, barely sketched in, when it should be the engine of the film. Instead, we get a scattershot sequence of genre detours—drug busts, shootouts, and vague nods to political corruption—none of which build to anything coherent. Characters appear, deliver their exposition, then vanish. Subplots trail off. Scenes lurch forward, then stall out. It’s as if the film keeps setting the table but forgets to serve the meal. Mosley, at least, holds the center. He brings a grounded intensity to a role that demands more complexity than the script seems willing to supply. His sermons have a simmer to them, and you can sense the character trying to reconcile his assignment with the authority he’s accidentally claimed. That tension—the hired gun seduced by his own disguise—is the film’s best idea. It just never gets the spotlight. There are glimmers of the movie this could have been, but they flicker and fade. What’s left is a film that gestures at internal conflict, then cuts to a car chase. There’s heat in the premise, but the execution barely smolders.

Alan Alda wrote, directed, and stars in this amiable but toothless comedy about the collision between academic integrity and studio meddling. He plays Michael Burgess, a history professor whose well-regarded book on the American Revolution is being adapted into a movie. Or rather, mined for names and costumes. By the time he sees the script, it’s been reworked into a mix of softcore romance, action set-pieces, and dialogue that seems to have been ghostwritten by a marketing department. The film crew arrives in his sleepy college town with all the subtlety of a demolition team. The director (Saul Rubinek) brushes off Burgess’s concerns with a shrug and a grin: history, he insists, is boring unless someone’s taking their clothes off or something’s on fire. No one’s interested in accuracy—just spectacle with period trimmings. Michael Caine nearly steals the film as Elliott James, the production’s preening lead actor. He treats the entire process like a personal adventure, piloting helicopters for fun, treating fencing rehearsals as combat drills, and floating through scenes as though convinced the movie hinges entirely on his presence. It’s a surreal, perfectly pitched performance that doesn’t match the rest of the film’s energy—but that mismatch is part of what makes him watchable. There are scattered highlights: a moment of unexpected pyrotechnics during a historical reenactment, a local grocer enlisted as a background extra without explanation, crew members baffled by 18th-century terminology. But the film never figures out how to organize its ideas. It wants to poke fun at Hollywood, flirt with romantic subplots, and indulge in fish-out-of-water comedy, but it rarely commits to any of them. The romantic angle, involving Lise Hilboldt as Burgess’s wary partner, fades in and out without ever feeling necessary. Alda’s touch is light, and that’s both the film’s charm and its limit. He brings a thoughtful, slightly weary intelligence to the lead role, and you can sense the frustration behind the smile—the quiet horror of seeing something personal turned into something generic. But the film keeps pulling its punches. It circles around sharper observations, then backs away. Sweet Liberty is agreeable, polished, and retreats just when it starts to get interesting.

A film so sharp it could slit your palm. Sweet Smell of Success drips with venom, every line a dagger, every glance a transaction. The story begins in the gutter and only digs deeper. At the center of it is Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), a New York press agent whose Rolodex is thinning fast. He’s slick, desperate, and too proud to admit he’s circling the drain. He exists to get his clients mentioned by newspaper columnists. That’s the game. But lately, no one’s biting. The most powerful bite in town belongs to J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), a newspaper columnist with a python’s stare and the moral temperature of a freezer. Hunsecker doesn’t run a gossip column; he runs an empire of innuendo, veiled threats, and social executions. Falco wants in—badly. And Hunsecker has a favor that needs doing. The target: a clean-cut jazz guitarist named Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), who’s dating Hunsecker’s younger sister Susan (Susan Harrison). Hunsecker despises him—not for who he is, but for who he isn’t. Falco’s task is to obliterate the relationship. He spreads a planted smear about Dallas being a pot-smoking Communist, gets him fired, and waits for the dominoes to fall. It’s a low scheme with just enough logic to be dangerous—and predictably, it backfires. The dialogue, penned by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, is diamond-cut and acid-laced. Nobody speaks plainly. Every sentence is loaded. Curtis plays Falco as a man permanently running five degrees too hot—ruthless, fast-talking, and increasingly brittle. Lancaster, by contrast, is still and watchful, the kind of man who can destroy someone just by pausing mid-sentence. And then there’s the cinematography. James Wong Howe’s black-and-white images carve Manhattan into slick corridors and glowing marquees. The film looks gorgeous, but you wouldn’t want to step inside it. The city feels less like a backdrop and more like a network of pressure points. This is a film about reputation as currency, charm as warfare, and ambition as a slow poison. It’s not just a standout of its genre—it’s the kind of film that makes lesser ones feel embarrassed to be in the same decade.

A thriller, technically. Though not one that ever breaks a sweat. Swimfan borrows the framework of Fatal Attraction, transplants it to a suburban high school, and hopes chlorine and pop-punk can mask the familiarity. Jesse Bradford plays Ben, a top-tier swimmer with a spotless transcript, on track for Stanford, and a girlfriend (Shiri Appleby) who seems custom-built for emotional stability. Enter Madison (Erika Christensen), a new transfer who knows exactly how to get attention and wastes no time making her intentions clear. One impulsive decision—an afternoon lapse in an empty pool—sets the whole thing off. Madison reads it not as a fling, but as destiny. When Ben tries to return to his normal life, she embeds herself in it with unnerving ease: slipping into his friend group, sabotaging his swim meets, hacking his email to frame him, spiking his girlfriend’s drink, nearly killing her. Whatever she can’t have, she wrecks. The film looks polished and moves quickly. The actors are well cast, and Christensen gives Madison a tightly wound intensity that holds your attention even as the plot stiffens. But the script holds back. There’s no real tension in the unraveling because everything follows a preset path. It’s suspense by numbers. Swimfan isn’t painful to watch. It’s just inert. A story of obsession with nowhere to go except exactly where you think it’s headed.

A film so wildly, stubbornly original that describing it feels like transcribing a fever dream. Hank (Paul Dano), stranded on a remote island and preparing to hang himself, is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of a corpse (Daniel Radcliffe), bobbing ashore like a bloated miracle. The corpse—dead, as corpses tend to be—is far from inert. It farts with such force that Hank straddles its back and rides it across the waves like a decomposing Jet Ski. Eventually named Manny, the body proves surprisingly multifunctional. It stores clean drinking water. It ejects objects with pneumatic force. And in one of the film’s more elaborate discoveries, when shown a swimsuit magazine, it develops an erection that points toward nearby human activity—effectively functioning as a compass for civilization. Manny also talks, slowly and with difficulty, but enough to form a bond. He doesn’t remember who he was, but he’s eager to learn what people are and why they act the way they do. Hank, lonely and certainly cracking a bit himself, takes on the role of tutor. Their friendship plays out across a patchwork wonderland of shelters and contraptions built from forest trash—a full emotional universe assembled from soda bottles and rot. Their conversations spin between strange, naive, and sincere. Manny wants to understand why people lie, why they fear intimacy, why they pretend. Hank struggles to explain, filtering his own disappointments through awkward lectures on love, shame, and bodily functions. The film’s aesthetic is a direct extension of its premise: tactile, handmade, just this side of hallucinatory. The score, composed almost entirely from human voices—layered, looped, and wordless—creates a kind of dream-choir that deepens the film’s peculiar warmth. At one point they harmonize the Jurassic Park theme, and it somehow plays like a lullaby for the emotionally stunted. It’s not perfect. It meanders, and the toilet humor can wear out its welcome. But Swiss Army Man earns its weirdness. It’s a surreal survival fable that finds something surprisingly tender in the least likely place: a friendship with a corpse that won’t stop farting.

As survival stories go, this one’s less Cast Away, more Club Med. Shipwrecked on a tropical island that borders on fantasy, the Robinsons don’t just survive—they flourish. No starvation, no existential dread, just ample lumber and a family with preposterously good instincts for carpentry. Within days, they’ve erected a multi-tiered treehouse with running water, sweeping views, and better landscaping than most suburban developments. There are flower beds, conch-shell walking paths, and a veranda that wouldn’t look out of place in Architectural Digest. The dangers are politely arranged. A Bengal tiger lurks, only to be chased off by the family dogs. An anaconda lunges, but not for long. Most of the wildlife is either decorative or domesticated—a baby elephant joins the crew like it wandered in from central casting, and soon it’s hauling lumber with the best of them. The family itself is neatly stacked: a father (John Mills), a mother (Dorothy McGuire), and three sons arranged by age—Fritz (James MacArthur), Ernst (Tommy Kirk), and Francis (Kevin Corcoran), the youngest and most committed to befriending whatever walks, slithers, or squawks. Drama arrives by way of Roberta (Janet Munro), a young woman rescued from pirates, disguised in trousers, and quickly igniting a brotherly scuffle between Fritz and Ernst. The fight stays G-rated, the romance bloodless, and the pirates cartoonishly evil—everything in its proper place. By the time we reach the animal-back racing sequence (featuring, among other things, a monkey riding a dog), the film has fully committed to its own cheerful absurdity. And unless you’re watching with a clipboard and a grudge against vintage animal wrangling, it’s hard not to grin. This isn’t a tale of hardship—it’s wish fulfillment with vines and a view.

Remaking The Front Page—and by extension His Girl Friday—is a bold move, especially if you’re standing in the shadows of Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. This version doesn’t try to match their legacy beat for beat, which is probably wise. Instead, it embraces its own 1980s flavor and gets one key thing right: fast, rat-a-tat dialogue delivered by three leads who know how to sell it. That alone takes it most of the way. Kathleen Turner plays Christy, a sharp-tongued TV reporter who returns from vacation newly engaged to a well-heeled stiff named Blane (Christopher Reeve). Back at the station, she’s greeted by Sully (Burt Reynolds), her ex-husband and current boss, who’s not taking the breakup—let alone the engagement—lying down. His sabotage is immediate and petty, but Reynolds plays it with charm and bite, and for once in this stage of his career, seems fully engaged. While the central love triangle simmers, Christy throws herself into a breaking news story involving a death row inmate (Henry Gibson) whose guilt isn’t so cut-and-dried. The journalism angle gives the characters something to bounce off, but the real focus is the volley of arguments, reversals, and underhanded tactics between the leads. Turner is perfectly in rhythm. Reynolds finds his spark. And Reeve—game, if misused—gets stuck with the film’s clumsiest gag: a vertigo attack that leaves him frozen on a high-rise ledge. It’s meant as slapstick but plays more like a cheap dig at Superman’s nerves of steel. Still, the film moves at a clip, nails its timing more often than not, and gets solid mileage from the friction between its stars. Switching Channels may not outdo its predecessors, but it doesn’t embarrass itself either—and in the right mood, it more than earns the retread.

Swordfish wants to be sleek, provocative, and dangerous. What it ends up being is a high-gloss bluff: a techno-thriller that substitutes noise for suspense and confusion for complexity. It opens with John Travolta monologuing about Dog Day Afternoon, as if trying to will some relevance into the film by referencing a better one. That’s the blueprint—big talk, bigger explosions, and no sense of how to connect them. The plot involves terrorism, money laundering, government black-ops, and a gifted hacker pulled in for one last score. Hugh Jackman plays said hacker, living in a trailer and brooding over his estranged daughter, until he’s recruited to break into a fortified government server while receiving oral sex at gunpoint. That’s the tone the movie sets for itself—vaguely edgy, proudly ridiculous, and utterly uninterested in how any of it might function off the page. The hacking scenes are particularly surreal. Jackman flails at keyboards like he’s conducting an orchestra of ghosts, while the screen fills with flying code and digital wireframes that mean nothing. It’s computing as imagined by someone who’s never touched a machine more advanced than a blender. Halle Berry, meanwhile, is given the role of the femme-fatale-with-clearance, though you’d be hard-pressed to describe what her character does beyond switching outfits and standing near plot developments. Her big reveal—meant to be shocking—is staged like a magazine spread and carries about as much narrative weight. Travolta’s villain is the real disappointment. He’s styled like a Miami club promoter and speaks in lofty riddles meant to sound philosophical but land as placeholder menace. There’s no real ideology to him, no personal logic—just a series of postures. The film tries to frame him as a necessary evil in a corrupt system, but it never does the work to make that stick. He’s not compelling, just loud. Visually, the film throws everything it has at the screen—slow-motion shootouts, explosions in mid-air, and one undeniably elaborate sequence involving a helicopter airlifting a bus full of hostages across Los Angeles. But the spectacle is hollow. You’re watching a movie about movement, not momentum. Everything spins, crashes, and bursts, but none of it matters. What Swordfish ultimately delivers is a reel of high-budget distractions tethered to a script that thinks convolution equals sophistication. It doesn’t. The film mistakes slickness for substance and ends up with neither. It’s all voltage, no current.