Film Buff Musings

Theater Camp isn’t Waiting for Guffman, but it gets close enough to live in the same drawer. It’s a mockumentary with just enough barbed affection to dodge condescension and just enough structure to keep the bits from drifting into sketch territory. Set in a run-down summer camp devoted entirely to musical theater, the film treats jazz hands as a second language and minor vocal trauma as a career setback. The kids take it seriously. The counselors take it religiously. Every warm-up is sacred, every spotlight a birthright. And this year’s centerpiece production—an original musical honoring the camp’s founder (Amy Sedaris), now tragically in a coma—becomes the sort of meta train wreck only theater people would attempt with a straight face. The show is a perfect joke, built entirely from earnestness and delusion. Some of the other material doesn’t hold quite as well. There are inspired one-liners and extended gags that hit, but they’re interspersed with stretches that feel more like filler than buildup. A “let’s save the camp” subplot creeps in to add stakes nobody asked for. It’s not terrible—it’s just when the movie starts to feel a little generic. But when Theater Camp sticks to what it knows—picking apart the language of overzealous performers and the unintentional comedy of backstage ego management—it settles into something that works. The cast, many of whom have been through this world or at least survived a few callbacks, nail the small stuff: the clenched smiles, the teary self-discoveries, the group hugs that somehow still feel like competitions. This movie doesn’t always sing, but it stays on key. If you’ve ever cried over a call sheet or watched someone warm up for an off-book table read, this knows exactly who you are.

Before the gunfire and the police chases and the mythologizing, what Thelma & Louise gets right—right away—is the landscape. The American Southwest, with its sun-bleached highways and empty, dust-bitten expanses, is more than just a backdrop here. It’s an emotional climate. If you’ve ever driven those roads, you’ll recognize the solitude. Ridley Scott, not known for understatement, shoots it all with painterly precision—arid and endless and somehow glowing. Into this world roll two women looking to escape lives that have quietly strangled them. Thelma (Geena Davis) is married to a man who speaks to her like she’s a kitchen appliance. Louise (Susan Sarandon) is a waitress with a spine of steel and a past she doesn’t discuss. They’re not outlaws yet—they’re just driving. The break comes early, at a roadside bar. Thelma lets loose a little, dances with a smooth-talking cowboy. He follows her to the parking lot and tries to assault her. Louise intervenes—with a gun. That one act fractures the trip. What began as a weekend getaway becomes a flight. The police are out there, and so is the possibility of justice, but neither woman believes it would work in their favor. So they keep going. They meet a shirtless drifter (Brad Pitt, very nearly levitating off the screen), a nervous state trooper, a leering trucker, and a string of anonymous men whose usefulness, at best, runs out quickly. Thelma gains clarity with each passing hour. She starts to enjoy the blur. Louise, once the confident one, begins to fray. The closer they get to the edge, the less there is to go back to. The friendship is the thing—they’re not just running together, they’re transforming in tandem. The men are footnotes. The car is freedom. The crimes become commentary. It’s a smart, nervy, sometimes brutal film. A feminist Western in a muscle car. And its ending—famously, defiantly over the cliff—is one of the rare finales that earns its legend without apology. There’s a strange sort of peace in it.

This is a comedy that seems to hover ten feet off the ground, gliding from one moment of inspired lunacy to the next. Even when a gag doesn’t quite connect, the momentum carries you forward—because something even funnier, possibly far grosser, is waiting just ahead. And when it lands, it really lands. The best scenes are also the most revolting, but what makes them work isn’t shock value—it’s the sheer mortification etched across the actors’ faces. It’s not the situation that’s funny, it’s how deeply, helplessly awful it must feel to be in it. Ben Stiller plays Ted, a high schooler with too many teeth and not enough luck, who manages to score a prom date with Mary (Cameron Diaz) after helping out her autistic brother. Then comes the zipper incident—an agonizing disaster that turns a romantic evening into an emergency-room fiasco. It’s hard to watch. It’s also hard to stop laughing. Years pass. Ted never lets go of Mary, and hires a sleazy private investigator named Pat (Matt Dillon) to track her down. Pat does, but he quickly decides to keep her for himself, and the film becomes a competition between increasingly unhinged men all circling around the same impossibly sunny woman. The satire isn’t subtle—these guys are stalkers, creeps, and pathological liars—but the tone is so buoyant that the movie sidesteps discomfort by never pretending any of them are particularly admirable. Most of the time, they’re punchlines themselves. Diaz plays Mary with almost eerie composure, like someone who’s long since adjusted to the absurdity that follows her. Dillon leans into the smarm, Stiller is constantly flailing, and the rest of the cast, including Chris Elliott and Lee Evans, only add to the mayhem. There’s also Jonathan Richman floating around like a Greek chorus with a guitar. Why not. There’s Something About Mary wears its R-rating proudly, but there’s a sweetness baked into the anarchy. I shouldn’t feel good laughing at half of what’s on screen—but I do. And I suspect the characters, even years later, probably would too.

A grim, efficient true crime documentary about a crash so horrifying it verges on incomprehensible. In 2009, Diane Schuler drove a minivan the wrong way down the Taconic Parkway, colliding head-on with another vehicle. She killed herself, everyone in the other car, and all but one child in her own. The survivor remembers almost nothing. Liz Garbus’s film lays out the facts methodically—interviews with family members, investigators, EMTs, and friends—and carefully traces Diane’s final hours. The central question is both obvious and elusive: why did she do it? There’s a likely explanation. It doesn’t paint her kindly. The film acknowledges it, circles it, but doesn’t press too hard—perhaps out of compassion for the family, who seem paralyzed by denial. Their grief is real. So is their refusal. The interviews are raw, sometimes chilling in their evasions. Structurally, the film holds tight—until a still image of Diane’s body breaks the spell. It adds nothing. It feels cruel. But outside of that misstep, the restraint is admirable. There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane isn’t interested in dramatization. It’s not after gotcha moments or catharsis. It’s a portrait of grief chasing a version of truth no one’s ready to name.

From the same filmmakers—and some of the cast—that skewered summer camp movies with Wet Hot American Summer comes another genre takedown, this time aimed squarely at romantic comedies. They Came Together doesn’t just parody the format—it pulls it apart and holds up each piece, one ridiculous trope at a time. The premise is deliberately bare-bones. Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler play Joel and Molly, two New Yorkers recounting to friends over dinner how they met. What follows is a hyper-literal retelling of every expected plot point: the awkward meet-cute, the instant dislike, the gradual thaw, the big misunderstanding. They don’t just perform the clichés—they announce them. “We hated each other at first,” Molly cheerfully confesses. Their first moment of connection is a shared love of “fiction books,” treated like a soulmate-level revelation. The joke isn’t just the reference—it’s how little effort it takes for the genre to seem ridiculous when stripped of its usual packaging. The humor swings between pointed and proudly dumb, often in the Airplane! tradition. A snooty waiter is accused of having a pole up his butt—then turns to reveal exactly that. Later, Rudd and Poehler both show up to a party dressed as Benjamin Franklin—a scene that turns the classic romantic-friction trope into something completely deranged. The movie doesn’t just call out convention—it repeats it so bluntly it caves in on itself. The film is shaped like a rom-com but paced like sketch comedy, stringing together gags with just enough narrative glue to keep things moving. Rudd and Poehler are exactly the kind of actors you’d expect to see in a sincere version of this story, which is what makes it work—they play it straight while everything around them veers off the rails. With all this said, this film is not for everyone. It is proudly ridiculous, structurally repetitive, and allergic to sincerity. But for those of us who’ve sat through too many romantic comedies—who know every turn before it happens—this is basically catnip. A long, slow eye-roll turned into a movie.

They Cloned Tyrone kicks in the door with a head full of ideas and a wardrobe soaked in genre reference—part sci-fi paranoia, part conspiracy satire, part pulp-fiction remix. It’s confident. It’s stylish. And it stalls almost immediately. Fontaine (John Boyega), a stoic drug dealer with a short fuse and fewer words, finds himself thrown into an unlikely trio with Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), a flamboyant pimp with a monologue for every occasion, and Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), a sex worker with sharp instincts and zero patience for nonsense. Their discovery: a hidden government operation under their neighborhood, complete with cloning, brainwashing, and fast food that comes with behavioral side effects. It should work. The premise is tight, the setup strange in the right ways. But the film puts its cards on the table too early, leaving the rest of the story with nowhere much to go. Instead of building, it meanders. Scenes drag with style but little drive—rich in aesthetic, thin on momentum. The characters are drawn as types—on purpose—but kept there too long. Fontaine stays locked down. Slick Charles keeps the banter going. Yo-Yo is left to connect the dots for everyone, including us. Their dynamic has potential, but the film keeps cutting it short. There are flickers: a line that cuts, a moment that turns weird in a good way, a beat that finally finds the rhythm the rest of the movie keeps reaching for. But they’re scattered. Nothing quite connects the way it should. Visually, the film leans into murk. The interiors are dim, the streets barely lit, and whole sequences play like someone unscrewed half the bulbs before the cameras rolled. It feels less like style and more like a test of how long you’re willing to squint. The ambition is real. The concept is there. But They Cloned Tyrone keeps circling the same handful of ideas without finding a shape that sticks. It looks like a statement, but plays more like a setup that never quite finds its punchline.

A blind beggar sits beside his dog and tells a story that no one believes. He says he was once Ahmad, king of Bagdad. The dog was a boy named Abu. Magic turned them both into metaphors. Or possibly just reminders. Either way, The Thief of Bagdad begins as a tale told from the gutter and ends in the clouds. This is Arabian Nights by way of Technicolor spectacle—restored palaces, painted skies, and a cast of characters carved out of myth. The villain is Jaffar (Conrad Veidt), an evil sorcerer who speaks in a whisper and deals in curses. He banishes Ahmad (John Justin), transforms Abu (Sabu) into a dog, and hypnotizes a princess (June Duprez) without ever raising his voice. His idea of persuasion is letting people imagine the alternative. The plot moves like a dream someone is actively trying to remember: loosely connected, emotionally exact. There’s a flying carpet, a mechanical horse, a towering genie released from a bottle with no interest in granting favors, and a series of visual effects that still manage to astonish. Every backdrop looks like it was drawn in colored smoke. Every transition is either a miracle or a trapdoor. If parts of this feel familiar, it’s because Disney raided the place in 1992. Aladdin lifted freely—not just the costumes and sets, but the overall template: street kid with a good heart, sorcerer with a staff, ruler in exile. The difference is tone. This one plays its fantasy straight, with wonder instead of wisecracks. There’s a constant sense of movement—through cities, over oceans, into the sky—and none of it drags. Even the slower sequences feel possessed by momentum. It’s a film so drenched in imagination that logic stops applying, not because it’s careless but because it’s enchanted. The logic here belongs to fairy tales and ancient spells. The result is one of the great adventure films: surreal in places, stirring in others, and always teetering between fable and hallucination. It’s the rare adventure film that doesn’t just imagine the impossible—it makes it feel handed down.

Gino is a shoeshiner. Quiet, polite, barely visible. So when he volunteers to take the fall for a mob hit he didn’t commit, nobody looks too closely. He’s old. He’s broke. He seems like the type. But Jerry—the low-level wiseguy assigned to chaperone him—starts to notice something. Gino doesn’t act like someone who’s being coerced. He acts like someone with a plan. And that’s when things stop going to plan. Instead of delivering Gino to his handlers and calling it a day, Jerry takes him out of town. One last hurrah. A few nice suits, a trip to Lake Tahoe, some blackjack. He’s not supposed to. He just wants to. The kindness is unspoken, and so is the risk—but it’s there, ticking underneath every scene. Jerry thinks he’s giving an old man a taste of freedom. But Gino never really seems like he’s playing along. He seems like he already knows how this ends. This was Mamet’s follow-up to House of Games, and in some ways it feels like the inverse. Where that film was slick, tense, all angles and schemes, Things Change moves quiet and sideways. There’s no con here, just a strange, low-simmer bond between two men stuck in a deal neither quite believes in. Don Ameche plays Gino like he’s made of quiet refusals—too gentle to be suspicious, too still to read. Mantegna, in one of his best performances, gives Jerry a jittery decency that slowly starts to overpower his survival instincts. It’s not a film of revelations, just recognitions. Little shifts. A growing sense that something deeper is happening between the jokes and detours. Mamet doesn’t press for drama—he lets it drift in. The result is a character piece disguised as a shaggy mob comedy. It’s funny, yes, but softly. And it lands in a place you don’t expect, with a final beat that feels strange, earned, and oddly moving.

A slow-motion collision of fate and fallout, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing holds happiness to the light—tilting it, inspecting the damage, watching the glare shift. Meaning slips. Cost rises. Fairness stays out of reach. The story accumulates like coffee rings on a table—faint at first, then etched into the grain. There are five stories, loosely stitched—characters who never quite meet but live inside the same invisible weather system. John Turturro plays a philosophy professor trying to explain happiness while grading with a red pen and punishing whimsy like it’s done him personal harm. Matthew McConaughey plays a prosecutor who runs a stop sign, hits someone, and drives off. No one sees it. No one stops him. But guilt finds him anyway—slow, creeping, hard to shake. Alan Arkin fires a relentlessly cheerful coworker just to see if anything can wipe the grin off his face. Clea DuVall plays a cleaning woman who believes in kindness until it kicks her down a staircase. Each storyline brushes up against the others without forcing a collision. The Sprechers—Jill and Karen—don’t build the puzzle to impress. The pieces just fit. The dialogue drifts, interrupts itself, jumps tracks mid-thought. Characters talk like they’re trying to name a feeling that won’t sit still. Arkin chews his words like they taste off. McConaughey starts to shrink. DuVall tries to hold herself together without quite knowing what fell apart. The title promises thirteen conversations, but it plays more like one—passed along, distorted, half-remembered. The camera keeps its distance, catching what people do when they think they’re alone. Guilt bleeds into regret. Selfishness slips into chance. Cause and effect bend sideways, change shape, wander. Catharsis never shows. But something small shifts while you’re not looking.

A harmless retread of Big dressed in lip gloss and magazine layouts, 13 Going on 30 moves briskly but never digs deeper than the surface it’s polished to a shine. Jennifer Garner stars as Jenna, a socially awkward teenager in 1986 who, after one humiliation too many, wishes she were thirty, flirty, and thriving. Cue the time jump. She wakes up in 2004 with a corner office, a vague job in fashion media, and no memory of the intervening seventeen years. It’s a decent setup. Unfortunately, not much is done with it. The film tiptoes around the darker implications of her fast-track adulthood—Jenna, it turns out, is kind of awful. Cold to her parents. Cutthroat at work. Prone to affairs. And now, mentally 13, she’s confronted by a life she didn’t build but still has to occupy. There’s some fish-out-of-water fun, including a moment of genuine discomfort when a half-naked boy toy strolls into her apartment, expecting… something else entirely. Disoriented and overwhelmed, she tracks down her childhood best friend Matt (Mark Ruffalo), now a struggling photographer who’s understandably confused by the reappearance of the girl who ghosted him in middle school. He’s skeptical for about thirty seconds, then rolls with the whole time-wish scenario like it’s not even the strangest part of his week. What keeps the film watchable is Garner herself. She commits to the wide-eyed naivety of a 13-year-old in a grown-up body without making it creepy or forced. Ruffalo brings his usual hangdog charm, though he’s running on autopilot. The supporting cast mostly exists to react, deliver exposition, or slip in the occasional one-liner—none of them feel like they’re living lives outside Jenna’s storyline. All in all, the film is not funny enough, not sharp enough, and not weird enough to stand out. But it’s genial, short, and just self-aware enough to coast by. The Thriller dance number helps.

Before Hitchcock became Hitchcock™—master of suspense, collector of blondes—he made The 39 Steps, a brisk, clever thriller that helped invent the modern spy movie without ever loosening its tie. The premise is now genre furniture: an ordinary man stumbles into an extraordinary conspiracy and ends up running from both the police and the real villains. But in 1935, it still cut deep—and Hitchcock, already fine-tuning the tension, orchestrates it with the grace of a waltz and the speed of a getaway. Our accidental hero is Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), so generically composed the film doesn’t waste a second pretending he has a past. He’s less a man than a placeholder—until the bullets fly. He attends a London vaudeville act, where a few shots ring out, panic spreads, and he ends up taking in a nervous young woman (Lucie Mannheim) who claims to be a spy. She has secrets. She’s being followed. She mentions something called “The 39 Steps.” Then she’s murdered mid-explanation, and Hannay is left holding the bag—and the mystery—and sprinting toward the nearest border. What follows is a breathless scramble across Scotland: moors, manhunts, close calls, and one deeply unimpressed blonde (Madeleine Carroll) handcuffed to his bad luck. It’s a thriller, a screwball, a reluctant romance—and Hitchcock balances it all with the touch of a pickpocket. The setpieces are brisk, clever, and cut on the inhale: a music hall assassination, a train escape, a political rally with the wrong speech and the right timing. Everything clicks. The plot is full of improbable corners, but that’s beside the point. It isn’t about logic so much as momentum, and The 39 Steps moves like it’s got a deadline. The mystery works. The tension builds. And beneath the cloak-and-dagger beats, Hitchcock’s favorite theme is already taking shape: the wrong man, on the run, framed by forces too big to name and too indifferent to care. This film is a masterclass in compression—lean, wry, and fleet-footed. Often copied but rarely caught.

A heist film so lacquered in style it makes most others look like pencil sketches. Steve McQueen stars as Thomas Crown, a millionaire thrill-seeker who masterminds a daylight bank robbery with the ease of someone assembling a model train set—no fingerprints, no witnesses, and no motive beyond sheer recreational cunning. Jewison presents the heist as an intricate ballet of timing and anonymity, stitched together with a mosaic of split-screen panels that jitter and converge in rhythmic precision. It’s more than a clever flourish—it’s the film announcing its taste for elegance over exposition. But once the crime is in the rearview, the energy slackens. Faye Dunaway enters as Vicki Anderson, an insurance investigator with a wry detachment and a near-clinical interest in her suspect. She suspects Crown from the start—it’s not a mystery, it’s a slow burn—and her flirtation might be a tactic, or just a way to pass time until someone makes a move. Their relationship, pitched as a psychological duel, turns suspiciously plush. The cat-and-mouse game mostly plays out over cocktails and chess, and the sexual tension is too tidy, too mutual, too composed. It should simmer; instead, it exhales. Still, the film knows how to pull focus. That glider sequence—Crown floating above it all while “The Windmills of Your Mind” loops in melancholy circles—is a moment of cinematic drift that doesn’t need to connect to anything. It just hovers, beautiful and irrelevant. The Thomas Crown Affair loses its edge the moment it falls for its own characters, but as a capsule of late-’60s cool—slick suits, clever cuts, and conspiracies lit like magazine spreads—it earns its place.

A perfectly serviceable cog in the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor: The Dark World is the kind of entry that plays to the base without offering much to anyone peering in from the edges. For the die-hards, it’s a comfortable continuation; for the rest of us, it’s a glossy interlude—easily digested, just as easily forgotten. More consistent in tone than its predecessor, which awkwardly tried to balance Norse melodrama with fish-out-of-water slapstick, this sequel settles into a mostly grave register. The stakes are galactic, the skies are dark, and the special effects—polished to within an inch of their rendering power—are as seamless as ever. The plot lurches forward as ancient Dark Elves, led by the murky and unmemorable Malekith (Christopher Eccleston, buried in prosthetics and monotone), awaken from eons of slumber with vague plans to obliterate light itself using a mystical force called the Aether. Naturally. Tom Hiddleston’s Loki remains the franchise’s sharpest edge, and even in a glorified supporting role—imprisoned for the whole New York fiasco—he manages to inject some badly needed wit and theatrical flair into the proceedings. Chris Hemsworth, ever the good sport, does what he can to lend gravitas to Thor’s golden-boy nobility, but the film seems most alive when it’s letting Loki slither around the margins. It’s all well-mounted, occasionally clever, and never offensively dumb. But like so many second-tier Marvel entries, The Dark World feels engineered not to disappoint more than it’s designed to thrill. You can enjoy it while it’s on—but don’t count on remembering what realm anyone was fighting over by the time the credits are finished.

It’s oddly reassuring that Hollywood still churns out movies like this—dead-eyed, overlit thrillers where the plot feels reverse-engineered from a generic poster. Those Who Wish Me Dead is not just bad; it’s confusingly, energetically bad, the kind that mistakes incoherence for suspense and ends up flailing through a forest of clichés, both literal and structural. The premise is barely legible at first. We’re dropped into the middle of a manhunt without any context—two grim-faced hitmen (Nicholas Hoult and Aidan Gillen) are chasing an accountant (Jake Weber) and his son (Finn Little) across the country, but the film withholds basic facts for so long it starts to seem like it forgot them. Meanwhile, in what feels like a second movie entirely, we meet Hannah (Angelina Jolie), a haunted firefighter exiled to a lookout tower after failing to save a group of children in a past blaze. Naturally, the accountant gets himself killed in the woods, and Connor, the now-orphaned child, stumbles into Hannah’s care just in time for the gunmen to arrive and the flames to rise. They bond in that curiously frictionless way only possible in Hollywood action fare—trauma as shorthand, bullets as therapy. Hannah shifts into protector mode, ducking bullets and outrunning fire with an almost mythic stamina, though the film never bothers to make her feel human. Also chasing them, for some reason, is lightning—actual lightning, as though the sky itself had a screenplay credit. The film’s only real value is ironic. It’s the kind of movie that practically begs for a DIY Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment—dumb enough to mock, bland enough not to resent. Jolie smolders. The forest burns. Nothing matters.

The Three Amigos are silent film stars in matching rhinestone charro suits who ride horses like trained dancers and belt their own theme song with more gusto than sense. Their names—Lucky Day (Steve Martin), Dusty Bottoms (Chevy Chase), and Ned Nederlander (Martin Short)—are about as subtle as their salute, which is elaborate, inappropriate, and hard to forget once you’ve seen it. They were legends of the silent screen until the studio tossed them out. Then comes a telegram from a remote Mexican village, pleading for help against marauding bandits. The villagers think they’re hiring heroes. The Amigos think they’ve booked a live gig. So they pack their costumes and ride in, ready to perform—just not in the way anyone expects. This is not a high-IQ comedy, nor does it pretend to be. Plenty of gags collapse mid-delivery. But the ones that land tend to stick—possibly because they bypass cleverness and aim directly for your inner 12-year-old. That’s the age I was when I first saw this, and the film remains a capsule of dumb brilliance, where a man can still learn the meaning of “plethora” and an animatronic turtle can softly wish you goodnight. Martin and Short are game, elastic, and clearly having the time of their lives. Chase, by contrast, seems to be calculating the exact moment his contract allows him to leave the set. Even so, he delivers the occasional deadpan line with lethal timing. The songs, courtesy of Randy Newman, are a secret weapon. There’s something almost heroic about how seriously they’re performed despite being mostly nonsense. Three Amigos plays like a spoof of old Hollywood westerns written by someone who loves them a little too much to be mean. It’s silly, lopsided, and half-asleep in places—but there’s warmth in its stupidity. Not a classic, but a classic to someone. Maybe even me.

They sit just outside town like they’ve been waiting for a fight: three red billboards in a row, black block letters stamped across them like bruises. RAPED WHILE DYING. AND STILL NO ARRESTS? HOW COME, CHIEF WILLOUGHBY? Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, the woman who rents them—a mother whose daughter was murdered, and who’s done being told to be patient. She doesn’t weep. She files complaints, flattens withering priests, and at one point threatens a dentist with his own drill. It’s not vengeance. It’s motion. She’s not looking for justice—she just refuses to sit still. The signs rattle the town like an air horn at a funeral. Some people back Mildred. Others call her cruel. Most just want her to stop making things so visible. Woody Harrelson, as Chief Willoughby, is no villain—just a man out of options, who knows decency doesn’t come with answers. He treats Mildred kindly, but she treats kindness like a trap. Harrelson plays him like a man already halfway to resignation—polite, tired, and quietly aware that nothing he says will fix any of this. Rockwell shows up with the impulse control of a lit firecracker in a mailbox. He plays Officer Dixon—violent, defensive, not nearly as complicated as the movie sometimes pretends, but fascinating anyway. His tantrums give way to half-formed conscience. Then that falters too. Redemption isn’t really on the table, just rearranged failure. It’s a thoughtful film with plenty to say about how Americans metabolize violence—but it doesn’t always say it cleanly. The dialogue isn’t always natural—it performs, postures, stops just short of a monologue. Small-town life feels less like a community than a mood board—familiar types, sharp pivots, and dialogue tuned a little too carefully to be accidental. Still, McDonagh gets something right about rage: how it keeps moving after sympathy has run out. Three Billboards isn’t about closure. It’s about pain that refuses to stay quiet—and the people who finally quit pretending it might.

Here’s a movie engineered to make you go dawww—three adult men, lifelong bachelors, trying to care for an abandoned infant without so much as a parenting manual or an emotional roadmap. And I’ll admit it: it works. It worked on America in 1987, too, earning the title of that year’s top-grossing film, which tells you something about the enduring appeal of watching men bungle diaper changes and coo at bassinets like they’ve just discovered fire. Our three caretakers, in order of most to least charming, are Tom Selleck as Peter, a suave architect; Steve Guttenberg as Michael, a cartoonist with a soft touch and soft features; and Ted Danson as Jack, a self-absorbed actor who has the charisma of a man late to his own audition. (I adore Danson in nearly everything, but here he seems like he’s in the wrong film, or perhaps just playing the wrong man.) The setup—woman leaves baby on doorstep, roommates must scramble—is absurd. These men are comfortably middle-aged, well-off, and yet still living together like it’s sophomore year. And the mother’s disappearing act belongs to another century, when women dropped off infants before succumbing to consumption. But logic isn’t the engine here—warmth is. And Selleck, in particular, sells the transition from confused bachelor to accidental father with moments that feel surprisingly grounded. His grocery store scene, where he earnestly asks strangers for help with baby formula, is played just right—bewildered but not buffoonish. Unfortunately, the film eventually detours into a plot about a misplaced box of heroin, and the entire tone topples. What could have been a gentle comedy about found family gets sideswiped by a cop show subplot that feels imported from an entirely different movie. Still, even with the detour, there’s pleasure in watching these three men navigate late-night feedings and unearned responsibility. You’ll roll your eyes. You’ll also probably smile.

A sequel that takes a wrong turn from the get-go and never recovers. Worst of all, the film fails to recapture the only reason the first one worked: the daww-factor chemistry of its cast. Even the reliable presence of Tom Selleck isn’t enough to salvage it. As the title suggests, the baby from the first film, Mary, is now five years old. Peter, Michael, and Jack (Selleck, Steve Guttenberg, and Ted Danson, respectively) continue to raise her as a cheerful trio, with her biological mother Sylvia (Nancy Travis) also living with them. Their unconventional family setup alarms the faculty at Mary’s kindergarten, who fear it might somehow damage her socially. (Welcome to Western society: where the fewer adults in a child’s life, the better.) Things shift when Sylvia accepts a marriage proposal from Edward (Christopher Cazenove), a cartoonishly well-bred British aristocrat with plans to move her and Mary to England. Peter, secretly in love with Sylvia, tries to play supportive while slowly unraveling. Sylvia feels the same way, but no one says anything, because the film prefers frictionless misunderstandings to actual tension. Then Jack and Michael discover Edward’s real intentions for Mary: a remote boarding school with all the warmth of a correctional facility. What follows is obvious and halfhearted: a last-ditch attempt to stop a wedding, a handful of slapstick beats that land with a thud, and a resolution that feels pre-loaded. The romance is limp, mostly because the film can’t be bothered to make a case for it. And the jokes—when they show up—are either recycled or barely staged. Whatever strange alchemy held the first one together has evaporated. This is what a sequel looks like when it’s assembled out of habit.

A surprisingly decent and—if such a word can be applied here—noble tribute to the Three Stooges. The Farrelly brothers keep the premise exactly as ridiculous as it ought to be: Moe, Larry, and Curly, raised in a Catholic orphanage, learn it’s going under and set out to save it. They have no plan, no money, and barely a functioning grasp of reality—but they have mallets, staple guns, and the kind of unbreakable optimism usually found in cartoons. Chris Diamantopoulos, Sean Hayes, and Will Sasso play it straight—or as straight as anyone wearing a bowl cut and getting slapped every five minutes can. They’re at a natural disadvantage. The original Stooges honed their timing in vaudeville, night after night, before ever stepping in front of a camera. This trio had to rehearse it cold on a soundstage and hope for the best. But they do better than expected—close enough to the rhythms, loose enough to stay funny, and committed enough not to break the spell. The plot takes a detour when Sofía Vergara shows up in full femme-fatale mode, heels and all, offering them a chance to earn the exact amount they need—by killing her rich husband, who, conveniently, is another former orphan. She slaps each of them in perfect sequence, and they sign on without blinking. Murder isn’t the joke. The fact that they treat it like a car wash fundraiser is. The highlight, weirdly, is Larry David in a nun’s habit—scowling, shouting, and eventually crushed by the Stooges during a rooftop repair gone wrong. They try to revive him with a bucket of water. There’s a rock in it. He takes it. It gets a laugh. The whole thing feels like a sincere throwback performed under laboratory conditions. There are bits that work—honestly, a few work very well—but they’re scattered, and the film leans too hard on sentiment to fill the gaps. A tribute, yes. A resurrection, not quite.

In a world fixated on results, she pauses. Because wishing—like storytelling—is never only about what you want. Tilda Swinton plays Alithea, a narratology scholar who studies myths the way stargazers read constellations, searching the dark for familiar shapes and coded warnings. She’s alone at a conference in Istanbul when she picks up an odd-looking bottle in a shop, peers into its filigree, and releases a djinn (Idris Elba) who’s been waiting a few millennia for someone to listen. Alithea’s not the usual mark. She doesn’t swoon or stammer or speak her dreams aloud. She’s cautious, curious, and already familiar with how these stories tend to end: disaster, distortion, poetic irony. Most stories about wishes end with someone being punished for asking in the first place. But she listens. That’s what she’s trained to do. And what she gets are stories: of ancient courts and lost loves, of betrayal, imprisonment, and longing that doesn’t expire. The djinn unspools them like a man uncorking memory. Whether he’s real or imagined—just another flicker of Alithea’s overstimulated mind—is left purposely vague. The film isn’t out to solve anything. The ancient settings are marvels—lush, theatrical, designed like memories stitched together from silk and ash. Swinton holds it all together with that dry, amused detachment of hers. Elba gives the djinn the weary eloquence of someone who’s lived too long inside other people’s stories—part narrator, part ghost, and three thousand years of unfinished business. It drifts toward abstraction in the final stretch, a little shapeless, a little unmoored. But the atmosphere holds. You don’t walk away with a moral. Just the sense of having been told something, and maybe not understanding it all, but liking the sound of it anyway.

Another entry in the indie canon of anxious white suburban teens grappling with a peculiar tic and the soft dread of being alive. But Thumbsucker—despite its well-worn setup—finds something quieter and more precise to say. What rescues it from the pile is not just sensitivity, but restraint: it doesn’t shout its meaning, it lets it hover. Justin Cobb (Lou Taylor Pucci) is seventeen, intelligent, socially awkward, and clinging to a secret that would humiliate him if exposed—he still sucks his thumb. At school, he disappears into bathroom stalls to find relief. At home, he’s subject to spontaneous thumb inspections from his gruff, emotionally stranded father (Vincent D’Onofrio). His mother (Tilda Swinton), meanwhile, is busy orbiting a rehab facility and inching closer to a minor TV celebrity (Benjamin Bratt), as though distraction were a form of self-actualization. Justin floats through debate club, coached by a dryly encouraging Vince Vaughn, and sets his sights on a classmate, Rebecca (Kelli Garner), while trying to keep his compulsions out of sight. There’s a dentist played by Keanu Reeves who tries hypnosis. There’s Ritalin. There’s failure, and then another attempt. The arc is low-stakes but recognizably human—less about curing a behavior than living beside it. The film isn’t out to change lives. It’s too modest, too knotted in its own ambivalence for that. But there’s a quiet pulse running beneath it, and a streak of dark, dry humor that keeps it from going soggy. The characters feel specific, slightly sad, and faintly ridiculous, which is to say they feel real. And the ending, while not seismic, lands with just enough grace to close the loop. A soft-spoken, touching film about the thousand paper cuts of coming-of-age. It might have played well at Sundance, but it earns the distinction.

For years, Thunderball was the highest-grossing entry in the Bond series—and it isn’t hard to see why. It’s opulent, confident, and fronted by Sean Connery at full wattage: smooth, amused, and just a little mean. The film opens with Bond brawling in a chateau with a SPECTRE agent disguised as a grieving widow, then escaping via jetpack. The tone is set early: serious enough to be thrilling, silly enough to grin through it. The plot, officially, involves a hijacked bomber and two stolen nuclear warheads held for ransom by the international crime syndicate SPECTRE. But the story is mostly incidental. The villain, Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), wears an eyepatch and owns a pet shark. He stages boardroom executions, issues thinly veiled threats in seaside villas, and gets magnificently baited by Bond over lunch—calmly chewing while Bond, mid-meal, drops that he spent the night with Largo’s companion. This gamesmanship—civilized, cruel—is among the film’s best features. Where the film starts to sink is in the underwater sequences—sumptuous, overlong, and clearly where most of the budget went. They’re choreographed with the precision of a nature documentary and about as thrilling. Fists move like they’re swimming through syrup, and the tension evaporates every time the camera plunges back beneath the surface. At 130 minutes, the film doesn’t so much build suspense as float in it. The nuclear threat exists in theory, but it’s hard to feel alarmed when everyone’s just paddling in circles with their rubber flippers. But Thunderball has presence. It feels big in the way Bond films are supposed to: yachts, casinos, sunlit peril. Connery is unflappable, the one-liners mostly land, and the film moves with the confidence of a franchise stretching its legs. The spectacle outweighs the clutter. For all its indulgence, it remains one of the more exuberant and memorable chapters in the series.

A superhero movie for kids—though it feels less like a children’s film than something pitched in a boardroom by people who haven’t spoken to a child in years. Based on the British puppet series from the 1960s, Thunderbirds tries to modernize the concept with live action, a younger cast, and enough gadgets to stock a toy aisle. What it doesn’t bother with is character, momentum, or anything resembling charm. Alan Tracy (Brady Corbet) is the youngest in a family of public-service billionaires who operate International Rescue, a secret organization that uses rocket ships and high-tech vehicles to save lives around the globe. His father, Jeff (Bill Paxton), leads the team and doesn’t think Alan is ready for the job. While Jeff is off in space, a villain named The Hood (Ben Kingsley) breaks into the island base, traps the adult team, and tries to use their technology to stage disasters and make himself the hero. It’s up to Alan and his teenage friends to stop him and take back control of the island. It should be breezy fun, but instead it feels mechanical and overworked. The humor is loud and obvious. The characters are types more than people. Every scene pushes forward like it’s checking something off a list. The visuals are bright to the point of garish, with makeup so thick it looks like everyone’s wearing a rubber mask. Even the action—what little there is—feels weightless, like it’s been choreographed with toy models in mind. There’s potential in the material, but this version feels like a missed opportunity aimed at an audience presumed too distracted to notice how little is actually happening. Some kids might enjoy it. Most others—especially anyone older than ten—deserve better.

Thunderheart Loosely based on the 1973 Wounded Knee standoff, it shows up dressed like a crime thriller—badges, guns, a body in the dirt—but underneath, it’s something else. Slower, stranger, angrier. An indictment wrapped in dry wind and silence. This is a story about what the government did, what it looked like, and how easy it is not to see it. Val Kilmer plays an FBI agent sent to South Dakota to investigate the murder of a tribal council member. He has a drop of Sioux blood—just enough for the Bureau to hand him the assignment with a smirk and call it sensitivity. He arrives as a tourist in his own ancestry: clean-cut, detached, convinced he’s above whatever local bitterness he’s about to find. But the land has a long memory. The people know better. And the truth, once glimpsed, doesn’t unstick easily. As a thriller, it holds. The pacing is tight, the plot layered just enough, the danger steady and low to the ground. But what lingers is what most films won’t show. The camera doesn’t flinch from the rusted trailers, the empty cupboards, the bullet holes in drywall. It lets you see the residue—what centuries of broken promises actually look like. The poverty isn’t staged for sympathy. It’s part of the weather. There’s dignity in these characters, but no romance. Just hard living and harder choices. Graham Greene, in particular, carries entire scenes with a glance—worn, wary, and too familiar with betrayal to waste breath on complaint. Where the film falters is in its caution. For a story willing to take liberties with fact, it stops short of real boldness. Kilmer, competent but chilly, charts his transformation with too much calculation. We get the beats: awakening, allegiance, disillusionment. But it plays more like a shift in posture than in soul. You want fire. You get form. Still, Thunderheart remains one of the few studio films willing to walk this ground at all—and to do it without condescension. It doesn’t frame the reservation as a backdrop, but as the point. It sees what’s still standing after the cavalry leaves and the headlines fade. And while it pulls back from a full reckoning, it gets close enough to scorch. It could have been more. It could have shaken the room. Instead, it raises its voice, then lowers it again. But even that—spoken clearly and in public—is more than most films manage.