Film Buff Musings

Two crusty millionaires get bored and decide to ruin a man’s life—for science. That’s the setup, anyway, in this razor-edged comedy about class, race, and the American obsession with bootstraps. Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche play the scheming Duke brothers, who place a bet on whether success is a matter of breeding or circumstance. Their guinea pigs: Louis Winthorpe III (Dan Aykroyd), a blue-blood snob with a townhouse, a butler, and a fiancée who looks like she was issued with the trust fund; and Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy), a fast-talking hustler faking a limp for spare change. Murphy and Aykroyd match up like a switchblade and a silk tie—Murphy smooth and quick, Aykroyd unraveling one entitlement at a time. Billy Ray slides into high society like he’s been rehearsing it in his head for years. Louis, dumped into the gutter, loses his mind in a stained Santa suit, drunk and smuggling fish. The film doesn’t hand out sympathy. It just watches, dry-eyed, as the two men swap costumes and positions like actors in someone else’s morality play. Jamie Lee Curtis, in a breakout role, plays a sex worker with a better business sense than anyone on Wall Street. She sees Louis for what he is—damaged, but salvageable—and helps him not out of romance, but ROI. She’s pragmatic, loyal, and never sentimental. It’s her film as much as theirs. The third act trades jokes for orange juice futures, but the payoff still lands. Even if the scam’s mechanics blur, the momentum doesn’t. You may not follow every move, but you feel the snap when the trap shuts. Watching two aging power brokers get cleaned out by a panhandler and a disgraced yuppie feels like justice disguised as farce—served with a garnish of caviar.

Trail of the Pink Panther was always going to be a dicey proposition: a posthumous sequel stitched together from outtakes, callbacks, and a handful of freshly shot scenes built around Peter Sellers’ absence. After Sellers’ death, director Blake Edwards salvaged leftover footage from previous entries and framed it with a new narrative about a journalist (Joanna Lumley) retracing Clouseau’s footsteps by interviewing former acquaintances and enemies. There’s a half-hearted mystery, a few guest appearances (David Niven shows up, visibly frail and—due to illness—dubbed by celebrity impressionist Rich Little), and a heavy reliance on the goodwill earned by better films. What emerges isn’t a continuation so much as a cinematic holding pattern—stalling, reminiscing, and hoping nostalgia can fill the gaps. The new material meanders, the structure barely holds, and the repurposed Sellers clips—amusing in places—feel less like lost treasures than bits that were cut for good reason. One such bit is a scene between Sellers and Harvey Korman, resurfaced here after being trimmed from The Pink Panther Strikes Again. There’s something strangely gratifying about seeing them share a frame—two masters of fluster, circling each other like dueling nervous systems—but the scene never catches fire. They’re playing the same note, in the same register, at the same time. It’s not interplay. It’s overlap. And without the right spark, even the best comic instincts cancel each other out. It’s not offensive so much as mournful: a studio-backed séance in search of one last laugh. Clouseau didn’t die with Sellers, but this film buries him anyway—complete with slideshow.

Frank Martin (Jason Statham) is a courier, the off-the-books kind. His BMW slices through the French Riviera so easily it’s as if the asphalt was poured in advance to match his movements. In the back: a black duffel, strapped and sealed—the package he’s being paid to deliver. He never opens the packages. That rule has kept him in business and out of morgues. He’s moved cash, weapons, and things better left unnamed, all without a glance inside. But this one moves—just enough to break his focus. And once you’ve seen a package move, you can’t unsee it. Inside is Lai (Shu Qi), gagged, bound, and very much alive. In that instant, Frank trades immaculate detachment for a problem he can’t just deliver and walk away from. What follows is a chase that barely pauses: BMWs threading narrow streets, gunmen trading fire in broad daylight, Frank taking apart rooms and opponents with the kind of choreography that looks effortless only if you’re the one doing it. The film doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. Dialogue just fills the air between bursts of motion. Character arcs play out in shirtless montages. The villains are European, well-dressed, and unmistakable. But the slickness is calculated—no side plots cluttering the road, no crowd of characters pretending to matter. Just fast machines, sharp fights, and a lead who moves like an off-duty assassin pressed into doing the right thing, one explosion at a time. There are detours worth noting: a bus depot brawl that turns oil slicks into stuntwork, a scuba escape staged like a luxury car ad. None overstay. It keeps moving, drops a couple of surprises, and has the sense not to explain itself. You may leave remembering only the speed, the shine, and a few perfect kicks. For a film like this, that’s not a flaw. That’s the contract.

Indiana Jones for the preschool set, starring five golden retriever puppies—each dressed to match their personality, as if Halloween came early and the theme was “adjective-based dog archetypes.” The film is narrated—earnestly, and with a hint of condescension—by a talking monkey who speaks with the cadence of a stoner philosopher. Whether he’s related to the monkey who ate the poisoned date in Raiders is never clarified, but the lineage feels spiritual at minimum. The five Air Buddies end up in Egypt—because reasons—embroiled in a quest to solve an ancient mystery and recover some vaguely defined treasure. What follows is a toddler-friendly sprint through sun-baked ruins, foam-set tombs, and trap-laden chambers. There are hieroglyphs. There’s a villain. There’s a legend. There’s also a baby camel, and a script written with all the nuance of a toy commercial voiceover. It’s the kind of movie that feels like it should come bundled with a Happy Meal. And yet—for what it is—it moves. The plot loosely mimics the shape of a real adventure film, filtered through paw prints and preschool pacing. The adult actors deliver their lines like they’ve come to terms with the job. The dogs hit their marks and stay in place long enough for the animators to dub in dialogue. It’s not good, necessarily. But it is exactly what it sets out to be: a direct-to-DVD franchise installment made to entertain toddlers and—perhaps unintentionally—amuse the adults trapped in the room with them.

An indisputable classic and still one of the most piercing films ever made about the slow, stupid poison of greed. Humphrey Bogart plays Dobbs, an American drifter frying under the Mexican sun, begging coins and blowing them just as fast. When the prospect of prospecting turns up, he latches on—alongside Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), a fellow down-and-outer, and Howard (Walter Huston), an old-timer who knows the land, the labor, and exactly what gold does to men. They head for the Sierra Madre with a pocketful of supplies and just enough optimism to get them moving. And yes, there’s gold in them thar hills—but also Gila monsters, gunmen, and the kind of slow-burning mistrust that no map can get you around. The real threat isn’t hiding in the hills. It’s already in their packs—ego, doubt, the slow itch of mistrust. The deeper they dig, the more it seeps out. Gold doesn’t change people. It strips them. What begins as wary cooperation turns brittle, then poisonous. The film clocks every shift—the glances, the silences, the way a friendly gesture starts to look like a setup. It’s an adventure, technically, but it moves like a character study and tightens like a noose. The acting is legendary. Bogart’s transformation—from scrappy survivor to hollow-eyed madman—is one of his finest performances. But it’s Walter Huston, directed by his son John, who walks off with the picture. As Howard, he’s part crank, part prophet, part desert coyote—laughing, rambling, and somehow seeing everything before it happens. It’s a role that shouldn’t work and somehow becomes the soul of the film. The ending is perfect. Not triumphant, not tragic—just right. Like the rest of the movie, it understands that fate doesn’t always need to punish. Sometimes it just shrugs. Classic Hollywood filmmaking, no question. Rugged, cynical, sharply observed. One of the greats.

Tommy (Steve Buscemi) doesn’t spiral—he slowly unspools. An alcoholic with nowhere to be, no plans to get there, and no illusions about how it’s all going. Dumped by his girlfriend of eight years and fired from his job as a mechanic, he drifts through the days orbiting the titular dive bar, part mascot, part ghost. He drinks, mutters, wanders. Then drinks again. Life tosses him a couple of dubious lifelines: a job driving an ice cream truck left behind by a recently deceased relative, and a maybe-too-familiar reconnection with his ex’s teenage niece (Chloë Sevigny). Neither helps. But Tommy isn’t looking for help. He’s just trying to pass time without tripping over it. Buscemi, who also wrote and directed, filters the film through a slack, sardonic haze—threading it with dry humor, low-grade regret, and just enough friction to keep you leaning forward. The drama doesn’t crash in. It drifts—quiet, slouched, and a little off-kilter. The supporting cast (Mark Boone Junior, Debi Mazar, and a sharp flash of Samuel L. Jackson) populates the neighborhood with faces that feel worn-in and specific, the kind you spot across a bar and instinctively clock as trouble. This isn’t a redemption arc. It’s a slow float in circles, where change is less likely than getting another round. Not quite a great film, but a sharp one—modest, bleakly funny, and unexpectedly inviting. You wouldn’t want to live in Tommy’s world, but for 95 minutes, it’s worth the visit.

Aaron Sorkin approaches history the way a show dog trots into a ring: with polish, poise, and the conviction that everyone’s already watching. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is courtroom drama by way of pep rally, and somehow, that suits it. The film compresses, embellishes, and redecorates the 1969 trial of seven Vietnam War protesters into a parade of indignation, theatricality, and rhetorical one-upmanship—with just enough truth poking through to keep it grounded. Sorkin’s dialogue snaps its fingers in perfect rhythm with itself. Every character talks like they’ve been waiting for this cross-examination their whole lives. Frank Langella, as Judge Julius Hoffman, doesn’t just hold a gavel—he wields it like a personal letter opener. Watching him unravel judicial decorum, one contempt charge at a time, is practically performance art. And then there’s the scene that stops being theatrical and becomes grotesque: Bobby Seale, denied counsel, chained to his chair and gagged in open court. It happened. The film dares you to believe it. The ensemble seems genetically engineered to handle the script’s velocity. Sacha Baron Cohen, playing Abbie Hoffman, turns every sentence into a curveball with topspin. He doesn’t just provoke; he performs provocation. Eddie Redmayne’s Tom Hayden, meanwhile, seethes politely and adjusts his posture. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II gives Bobby Seale an unmovable presence, even when bound, and Mark Rylance—as the defense attorney perpetually trying to stop the courtroom from setting itself on fire—manages to speak volumes just by watching everything disintegrate. Sorkin treats the trial not as a legal proceeding, but as a civics seminar in costume—one where the past conveniently speaks in present-tense warnings. It’s rousing, self-aware, and utterly uninterested in subtlety. Still, it delivers the spectacle: radicals with microphones, a system rigged from the start, and the thrum of political performance masquerading as justice. History filtered through a typewriter—and just stylized enough to make you clap between outrage.

The trip begins as a luxury cruise for the obscenely rich—models, moguls, arms dealers, influencers—all floating through a fantasy tailored to their appetites. The drinks are endless, the ocean is spotless, and the crew smiles like it’s part of their anatomy. One passenger demands the entire staff take a swim. The head steward nods like it’s protocol and starts handing out towels. Upstairs: champagne. Downstairs: smiles stretched tight as rope. It’s a great setup, and for a while the film rides it well—an upstairs-downstairs farce with designer luggage and blackout sunglasses. The guests flaunt, the workers vanish, and the captain (Woody Harrelson), drunk and quoting Marx, drifts in like a subplot and steers straight into disaster. Dinner turns into performance art: oysters, retching, collapsing toilets, and enough bodily fluids to warrant a hazmat team. It’s grotesque, juvenile, a little smug—and brutally effective. The shipwreck doesn’t arrive as a twist. It arrives like a thesis. When the survivors wash up on shore, the real inversion begins. Abigail (Dolly de Leon), a cleaning woman from the lower decks, can fish, build fires, and portion out pretzels. Suddenly, that’s power. The yacht’s hierarchy crumbles faster than the guests’ moral resolve. The beautiful people adapt quickly—flirting, groveling, realigning their loyalties like they’ve done it before. Because they have. The final act quiets down but keeps its edge. The spectacle fades, the structure holds. De Leon plays Abigail with the calm of someone who’s been studying the game from the sidelines and knows exactly when to move. The rich aren’t chastened. They’re pliable. They’re marketers. Survival, it turns out, just gets branded like everything else. Triangle of Sadness overstays in places, but when it lands, it draws blood—and the system thanks you for your participation.

Leave it to early-’80s Disney to make a movie about computer programs look cooler than real life. Tron isn’t just a tech demo with delusions of grandeur—it’s a strange, striking vision of a world rendered in neon vectors and circuit-board minimalism. The story is thinner: Jeff Bridges plays Flynn, a gifted software engineer digitized and zapped into the mainframe, where he finds himself battling a totalitarian program called the Master Control. Every piece of software has a human form, modeled after its programmer, which turns the mainframe into a digital army of doubles—some fighting to survive, others to dominate. Narratively, it’s skeletal. A quest. A few allies. A villain absorbing programs like corporate takeovers. But what Tron lacks in story, it makes up for in skin—gleaming, otherworldly skin stretched over light cycles, glowing discs, and user-versus-program duels. The effects, primitive now, still feel bold. The actors stay flesh-and-blood, but the landscape looks conjured by a sleep-deprived graphic designer with a God complex—and that’s a compliment. The mix of live action and early CGI was a gamble then, and somehow still feels risky now. There’s not much emotional pull, and the exposition sticks out like half-written code, but the vision is singular. You don’t come to Tron for story beats or character arcs. You come because someone at Disney looked into a circuit board and saw a cathedral made of light and sound.

A helium balloon of a movie. Troop Beverly Hills lifts the bare bones of Private Benjamin and wraps them in leopard print and shopping bags. Shelley Long, sprayed stiff with hairspray and twice as eager as the script deserves, plays Phyllis Nefler—a Beverly Hills socialite who decides, in a mild panic over her crumbling marriage, that the path to personal worth runs through a troop of overprivileged preteens. So she wades in—designer boots first—to wrangle a gaggle of heiresses who wouldn’t know a sleeping bag from a dry cleaning bag. Their idea of wilderness survival looks suspiciously like spa nights and merit badges for things like “shopping sense” and “gardening in couture.” But line them up for cookie sales and they’ll blitz the neighborhood like pint-sized hustlers, shaking down every mansion gate with more persistence than the IRS. Betty Thomas hovers nearby as a rule-obsessed scoutmaster, appalled that Phyllis’s rhinestone brigade even exists. She barks orders, despises sequins on principle, and at one point sniffs the breeze like Patton at dawn and deadpans, “I love the smell of cookies in the morning,” borrowing Apocalypse Now for a bake sale gag that lands harder than it should. It’s silly, but it gives all this fluff a brick wall to bounce off. Everything drifts toward a final cookie war: luxury camouflage versus militant discipline, with Phyllis and her girls conning their way past the establishment by sheer charm and suspicious credit limits. It’s not sharp enough to be satire and too sly to pass for wholesome kids’ fare—it’s a sugar rush about how a feathery socialite can, with just enough wardrobe changes and exactly zero survival skills, trip her way into being a semi-competent mom. In Beverly Hills, that counts as triumph enough.

A modern stab at the old sword-and-sandal epics—Technicolor swapped for sandblasted bronze, everybody oiled up like a bodybuilding contest in a kiln. From Homer’s Iliad: a stolen wife, a pile of bodies in the distance. Helen of Sparta (Diane Kruger) runs off with Paris (Orlando Bloom), Troy’s prettiest prince, and her husband, Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), treats it less like heartbreak than a declaration of war. Armies move. Cities burn. All over what amounts to a lovers’ quarrel with better costumes. Brad Pitt’s Achilles is Greece’s ultimate weapon—a killing machine with a tan—and the movie knows it. The battles sprawl—shield walls press forward, swords ring like struck bells, extras crumple in elegant slow motion. Petersen stages it with enough conviction to make you forget you’re watching men in leather skirts. It works, mostly. The story is preloaded with betrayals, reversals, and grand gestures, and the production throws them at you like offerings to the gods. But for a three-hour slab of mythmaking, it’s less towering than it should be. And Pitt, instead of channeling Heston’s granite, plays Achilles as if the heel isn’t the only soft part—shedding tears, nursing wounded stares, and letting sentiment leak into a role that should run on ego and bloodlust. Achilles is meant to be terrifying with one flaw. Here, he’s touchy with several. Still, as historical war pageants go, it delivers enough spectacle to keep the couch from swallowing you. Swords clash, ships burn, empires crumble—just don’t expect the gods to be watching.

Rooster Cogburn shows up looking like he’s been carved out of trail dust—eyepatch, whiskey breath, and a voice that could sand wood. John Wayne plays him like he’s just cashing in on years of practice, and the Academy made it official—awarding the Duke his one and only acting Oscar. Equal credit ought to go to Charles Portis, the novelist who created him, and Marguerite Roberts, the screenwriter who adapted him for the screen. Cogburn is only subtly multi-dimensional, but he’s vastly entertaining to watch—bluff, stubborn, and not above a bit of bluster to get his way. Mattie Ross (Kim Darby) is a teenage girl with a boy’s haircut and a will that could split granite. Her father’s been murdered by Tom Chaney (Jeff Corey), a hired hand gone bad, and she wants him caught—not by some local lawman, but by the meanest one she can find. That’s Rooster. He agrees to hunt Chaney down but forbids her to come. The order lasts about as long as it takes her to saddle a horse. Along for the ride is Texas Ranger La Boeuf (Glen Campbell), who pronounces it “Le Beef” and has his own reason for chasing Chaney: the man killed a Texas state senator and wounded the senator’s dog. The setup’s pure Western—posse, manhunt, bad blood simmering in the heat—but what makes it sing is the friction. Wayne plays off Darby like a man trying to shake loose a burr in his boot, and she refuses to be shaken. Campbell’s La Boeuf is the wild card, part swagger, part chafed pride, wedged between them like an awkward dinner guest. The film’s midsection drags a touch, but that’s bracketed by a strong start and an even stronger finish. When it hits, it’s sharp and clear—a Western about people, not postcard landscapes or obligatory shootouts, with egos and temperaments crashing against each other in a space so wide it almost swallows them whole.

A spy comedy with the budget of a war movie, True Lies tries to juggle domestic farce and international espionage and mostly just gets fingerprints on both. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Harry Tasker, a government operative posing as a beige computer salesman to his wife Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis) and teenage daughter Dana (Eliza Dushku). He vanishes for days with just enough explanation to pass the smell test. Helen, restless and boxed in by routine, starts spending time with Simon (Bill Paxton), a sweaty used car salesman posing as a secret agent to seduce bored housewives. It’s not romance so much as relief—she finally feels like she’s in on something. Harry catches wind of this and misreads it as infidelity. Rather than confront her, he reroutes the full resources of a U.S. counterterrorism unit to tail his wife, invent a fake mission, and drag her into it, hoping to scare her straight. The ethics are paper-thin, but Cameron plays it like a screwball caper with automatic weapons. Eventually, an actual terror plot elbows its way in—nuclear warheads, rooftop chases, mid-air stunts—and Helen ends up in the thick of it, still playing along until Harry’s dangling from a helicopter, whispering sweet nothings between gunshots. By then, she’s already deep in spy drag, heels and all. Tom Arnold plays Harry’s partner, the designated wisecracker, but nearly every character seems to be on the same joke loop, so he registers more irritating than funny. Even Schwarzenegger’s deadpan zingers, usually reliable, feel like they were pulled from a backup list. The dialogue isn’t sharp—it’s just serviceable. The characters aren’t drawn so much as outlined, then filled in with punchlines and plot points. Still, when True Lies stops trying to be clever and just detonates everything in sight, it kicks into gear. James Cameron conducts the final act like a man trying to level a city block—an indulgent, high-gloss demolition of buildings, bridges, and narrative restraint. It’s messy, ridiculous, and executed with complete conviction.

Blood-streaked fairy tale or coke-fueled bullet ballet—it’s both. True Romance is pure Tarantino on paper: a fanboy fantasy spliced with kung fu references, Elvis worship, comic book lore, and shootouts scored to Hans Zimmer’s glockenspiel. But Tony Scott’s behind the camera, sanding the edges clean. The result is fast, slick, and more coherent than it has any right to be. Christian Slater plays Clarence, a comic shop clerk with a kung fu fixation and a voice in his head—specifically, the ghost of Elvis (Val Kilmer in gold lamé spirit form). One birthday night at a near-empty theater, he meets Alabama (Patricia Arquette), a call girl with a giggle, a leopard-print coat, and no interest in going back to work. Romance blooms in under five minutes. By the next morning, he’s killed her pimp (Gary Oldman, a Rastafarian Nosferatu) and accidentally walked off with a suitcase full of cocaine. What follows is part lovers-on-the-run fantasy, part underworld zoo exhibit. Clarence and Alabama bounce from Detroit to L.A., trying to unload the drugs while gangsters, movie producers, and low-level morons close in. Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken share a scene so tense and theatrically deranged it practically severs itself from the rest of the film. Brad Pitt shows up as a permanently stoned roommate more beanbag than man. James Gandolfini gets a moment of motel-room brutality that lands like a brick. It’s a parade of character actors behaving badly. Tarantino’s script, written before Reservoir Dogs, already carries his tics—pop culture as religion, dialogue as performance, violence like a firecracker in a broom closet. With him directing, it might have been grungier, less polished. Scott gives it a candy-colored crime-saga sheen. Not a great film—too baggy, too infatuated with itself—but a milestone of ‘90s indie cinema, alive in VHS rentals and dorm-room posters.

“We accept the reality with which we’re presented.” Ed Harris says it as Christof, the soft-spoken despot in charge of the longest-running TV show in history. His creation is Seahaven—a town so spotless it could have been ironed—sealed under a sky that’s painted, lit, and weather-controlled. For thirty years, the only thing real in it has been Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey). Everyone else is on payroll. His wife. His best friend. The guy who waves from across the street. It unravels slowly. A stage light labeled “Sirius (9 Canis Major)” drops from a cloudless sky. The radio accidentally starts calling his movements like a horse race. Extras pass him, double back, and pass him again. The whole place starts to smell like a set. Carrey plays Truman as cheerful on command and restless by nature. The comic elasticity is there, but it’s in the pauses—half-formed suspicions, the tightening of his face when the seams show—that you can see the gears turning. His compass is an “extra” (Natascha McElhone) who once slipped him the truth before the producers spirited her off the set. Fiji becomes the dream, because that’s where they said she went. Peter Weir keeps the tone in delicate balance: the satire cuts, the comedy disarms, and the escape story works even if you ignore the meta. Seahaven is part Norman Rockwell, part department-store display—perfect lawns, sunlight that comes from a dimmer switch. It’s beautiful in a way that makes you want to scratch at it. Seen today, it’s almost clairvoyant. Before Big Brother, before Instagram stories, before we started branding ourselves for strangers, here’s a movie about a man whose life has been flattened into content—and how hard it is to leave a prison that feels like home. Seen today, it feels clairvoyant. Before reality TV went for volume, before social media turned everyone into a brand, here’s a story about a man whose life has been flattened into content—and how hard it is to leave a prison that’s comfortable. The ending is simple, perfect: a door, a bow, and the sound of someone refusing to keep playing along.

A gloriously warped dark fantasy that begins with life’s dullest horror—everyone dies—and twists it into something both foul-mouthed and oddly tender. In Tuesday, Death shows up not with a scythe but as a half-rotted macaw whose feathers look taxidermied mid-mildew and whose voice gargles out like an old sink drain gasping for help. It can bloat to the size of a minivan or shrink to lint, whichever inconveniences you more. Its sole errand: scoop up Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a terminal fifteen-year-old who’s too exhausted to flinch. But Tuesday, already too close to death to fear it, talks the bird into giving her a little more time—just enough to properly say goodbye to her mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Death, perhaps foolishly, agrees. This small reprieve quickly turns into a headache for the reaper. Zora—grief-stricken, fiercely protective, and very aware that this grimy macaw is no ordinary houseguest—takes one look and decides she’s not losing without a fight. She pummels it, sets it on fire, then swallows it whole, as if swallowing Death itself might spare her daughter. What follows isn’t random weirdness for its own sake but a tight, strange fable about the futility of trying to shut mortality out. The film sticks to its own off-kilter rules and never drifts into needless side plots once its bizarre premise is set. Louis-Dreyfus is magnetic—her usual comic snap stripped away to show something raw, stubborn, and all too human. Petticrew holds it steady with a wary grace, her eyes saying she’s already half at peace with the bird and the void behind it. This is that rare high-concept fable that sticks the landing: no cheap twists, no syrupy final lesson, just a clear, peculiar look at how we dress up our fear of death as something noble. One of the strangest, most beautifully sure-footed films I’ve seen in a long time.

Tom Hanks, deep in his affable goofball prime, finds an unlikely match in a drooling, barrel-chested Dogue de Bordeaux named Hooch—an animal with the physique of a linebacker and the etiquette of a frat house sink. Hanks plays Scott Turner, a meticulous small-town police investigator on the verge of trading his badge for a bigger-city post when a local murder upends his plans. The only witness? Hooch, the slobbery brute belonging to the victim. From there, the film becomes a mismatched roommate comedy disguised as a crime procedural, and it works better than it should. The plot—a forgettable stew of crooked cops and low-level mob ties—feels like narrative scaffolding, barely holding the structure upright. The romance subplot with the town’s veterinarian (Mare Winningham) is pleasant but perfunctory. These are placeholders. The real movie is the slow transformation of Turner from control freak to reluctant dog dad. What’s striking is how vividly the film animates Hooch without resorting to anthropomorphism. His attitude is legible in every grunt, growl, and slobber trail. Hanks plays the arc beautifully, shifting from horror to exasperation to attachment, then—almost imperceptibly—to love. Their dynamic is loud, messy, and unexpectedly tender. By the final act, what began as a high-concept comedy lands somewhere far more affecting. It’s not airtight storytelling, but Turner & Hooch earns its place in the buddy comedy canon by recognizing that the case doesn’t matter. The companionship does. And when the ending hits, it hits hard.

An elegant melodrama with satin in its seams and teeth just beneath, The Turning Point enters the world of ballet with grace but quickly pivots to something knottier: the ache of unrealized ambition and the quiet competition between women who made different choices, both of them paying for it in their own way. Shirley MacLaine plays DeeDee, once a rising dancer herself, who gave it up for marriage and children with fellow performer Wayne (Tom Skerritt) and now teaches pliés in Oklahoma. Anne Bancroft is Emma, the old friend who stayed behind and became a prima ballerina, all angles and precision and quiet disdain. When DeeDee returns to New York and sees Emma perform, it stirs a reckoning neither of them seems entirely prepared for. Old grievances resurface, the kind that never really went away. The script allows its characters to wound each other with elegance. MacLaine and Bancroft don’t play their scenes—they circle them. Remarks cut at a slant, never quite spoken in full, until eventually something snaps. A hallway confrontation late in the film—quick, ugly, deeply satisfying—serves as the emotional release they’ve been circling for an hour and a half. The ballet sequences are staged with reverence, but not in the glossy, coffee-table-book sense. There’s real vitality in them, and a palpable strain beneath the beauty. Mikhail Baryshnikov’s film debut is, unsurprisingly, magnetic. But even viewers indifferent to choreography will find something human and bruised in how these characters orbit each other—forever measuring the life they chose against the one they gave up. The Turning Point flirts with melodrama but rarely loses its footing. It’s a story about aging artists, faded dreams, and the kind of envy that accumulates over decades and wears pearls while doing it.

One of those films so quiet it risks disappearing if you talk about it too loudly. Two solitary Londoners—he a children’s author (Ben Kingsley), she a librarian (Glenda Jackson)—decide to liberate a pair of sea turtles from the zoo and return them to the sea. It’s not protest. Not spectacle. Just a shared, unspoken ache that needs somewhere to go. The premise is slight, but the performances give it weight. Kingsley and Jackson play repression like a duet—hesitant, flickering, self-correcting glances doing most of the work. A possible romance drifts at the edges, second-guessed by the characters themselves. They barely touch, but the emotional proximity has its own charge. Harold Pinter’s script, from a Russell Hoban story, leaves them space to breathe—maybe too much—but the restraint is part of the spell. The filmmaking is plain, almost anonymous, like a modest BBC drama of the time. And yet the absence of flash keeps you watching for subtler movements: a pause, a half-smile, the sense that change is possible but never certain. It doesn’t force catharsis. It just lets two people drift into each other’s orbit and wonder, quietly, whether they still have the nerve to alter their course. For a story about creatures needing release—human or otherwise—it moves with a peculiar grace.

The job seems simple: a private tutor (Garrett Hedlund) is hired to educate a socially maladjusted teenager (Noah Schnapp) at an isolated estate owned by the kind of money that doesn’t ask questions, just signs checks. But very little goes according to plan, unless the plan was to slowly unravel into nonsense. What begins as a vaguely gothic character study slides quickly into a kind of twist-forward storytelling that mistakes convolution for intrigue. There’s a reveal, then another, then a third that somehow undoes the first two, until the whole plot becomes less of a puzzle and more of a migraine. The central dynamic—Hedlund’s weary professional vs. Schnapp’s off-kilter rich kid—is played with the volume turned all the way up. Their confrontations consist mostly of shouting matches that aim for tension and land somewhere closer to drama club auditions. Tonally, the film can’t decide whether it wants to be a psychological thriller, a cautionary tale, or a vaguely prestige drama. It ends up doing none of them well. The stakes are fuzzy, the characters thinner than they should be, and the danger never quite makes it out of the script. There’s a germ of a good idea here, buried under five layers of revision and a third-act twist that wants you to take it seriously. You won’t.

Twelve jurors. One room. Ninety-six minutes. No flashbacks, no outside world, just the swelter of human logic and illogic bouncing off the walls. The accused—an 18-year-old boy—has been charged with murder. If found guilty, he’ll be sent to the electric chair. The verdict must be unanimous. They take a vote. Eleven for guilty. One holdout: Juror #8, played by Henry Fonda, who isn’t convinced of innocence but is equally unconvinced by how quickly everyone else wants to be done with it. He isn’t out to save the kid. He just wants to talk. And talk they do. What follows is less a whodunit than a slow erosion of certainty. The prosecution’s case, so neatly arranged in the courtroom, begins to fall apart once it’s examined up close. Eyewitnesses falter. Timelines blur. The knife the prosecution claimed was one-of-a-kind turns out to be a common switchblade anyone could buy. Personal biases start surfacing. One juror is clearly settling a score with his own son. Another can’t be bothered to care—he’s got Yankees tickets. Gradually, stubbornness gives way to doubt, and doubt gives way to something like justice. It’s remarkable how well you come to know each of them. In less time than it takes some films to establish a single protagonist, 12 Angry Men sketches twelve distinct personalities—complete with tells, tempers, and buried neuroses. That’s not just a strong script; that’s structural choreography. Lumet directs with a sense of precision disguised as simplicity. The camera shifts slowly, almost imperceptibly, as tensions mount. By the time the final votes are cast, the walls feel like they’ve moved in. Every time I revisit the film, I find myself drawn to a different moment—the same lines, the same turns, but they strike me differently depending on where I’m sitting in life. The story doesn’t change, but my sense of what matters most within it does. It’s not just a film about reaching a verdict—it’s about how we listen, how we reconsider, and how rarely those two things go hand in hand.

A group of A-list directors try to channel Rod Serling, but what comes through is mostly static. Twilight Zone: The Movie is a four-part anthology—each segment a reimagining of a classic episode, each helmed by a different name-brand director. The results are lopsided from the start. John Landis’s opener is also its most notorious. It’s a morality tale that collided with a real-life tragedy. Vic Morrow plays a bitter bigot flung through history—Nazi-occupied France, Jim Crow Mississippi—each stop delivering a tailored dose of comeuppance. But Morrow was killed during filming, and the segment was hastily completed without him. The result feels truncated and uneasy. Spielberg’s entry, about a group of nursing home residents who magically revert to childhood, plays like a nostalgia exercise that left its shoes untied. It’s cleanly staged, politely sentimental, and slips through your fingers almost immediately. You can feel him reaching for the glow of E.T., but it flickers out before it gets past the front porch. Joe Dante’s segment goes gleefully off the rails: a boy with reality-warping powers terrorizes his surrogate family, twisting the house into a pop-art madhouse of cartoon logic and suburban dread. It’s unhinged in the right way—big expressions, weirder angles, and a few rubbery horrors that look like they crawled out of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. The winner comes last. A remake of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet casts John Lithgow as a man barely holding it together at cruising altitude—until he glances out the window and sees a gremlin tearing at the wing. It’s pure escalation, claustrophobic and bug-eyed, and Lithgow sells every sweaty, seat-clutching second. The film never quite gels. It’s a patchwork of tones and ambitions—sentimental, sardonic, slapstick, shrill. But for all its inconsistency, it leaves a few fingerprints. Not a triumph. Not a fiasco. Just a strange, uneven tribute to a show that always knew how to close strong.

Two Jackie Chans should feel like an embarrassment of riches. Here it’s more like a gimmick stretched across ninety minutes, rationing out the acrobatics in favor of a comedy premise that wouldn’t fill a TV pilot. The fights arrive late and light, as if the production kept forgetting what it was selling. The twins—John Ma, concert pianist, and Boomer, low-level hood—exist on parallel tracks until the plot corrals them into the same city at the same time. Ma is there for a recital. Boomer’s being hunted by a gang boss. Primitive split-screen lets the two Chans share the frame, but the effect is more novelty than magic. The dubbing is bad in the usual way, which is to say it’s almost part of the rhythm. Most of the comedy vanishes without a trace, though two sequences earn their keep: a bathroom shuffle with Ma’s love interest, one brother clothed, the other bare, switching places until confusion becomes the gag; and a warehouse fight—Chan at last doing what he does best—flipping between crash-test cars, turning the set into a playground of moving metal and breakaway glass. One gag, one fight, and a lot of filler in between.

Twins is the kind of movie that could only have been made in 1988: pastel-washed, piano-scored, and built entirely on the charm of its premise—and the considerable charisma of its leads. Strip away the gimmick, and you’re left with a story so soft it practically evaporates. But that gimmick? It works. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito play long-lost twin brothers, the result of a hush-hush genetic experiment that gave one of them the best traits of six elite fathers—and accidentally gave the other… everything else. You don’t need to be told which is which. The joke writes itself, and the film knows it. It never pretends to be anything more than what it is: a buddy comedy based on physical contrast and tonal dissonance, with Schwarzenegger as the wide-eyed intellectual and DeVito as the streetwise grifter who’s just trying to keep his shoes clean. The actual plot—a road trip involving a stolen engine, a shady industrialist, and a half-hearted chase—is basically narrative wallpaper. It exists solely to move the two brothers from place to place so they can banter, bond, and get into mild, PG-13 trouble. And that’s fine. You don’t come to Twins for structure. You come to watch Schwarzenegger discover sarcasm and DeVito discover sincerity. They meet in the middle and make each other funnier. Schwarzenegger, best known at the time for playing monosyllabic killing machines, turns out to be a surprisingly deft comedian—earnest, precise, and genuinely likable. DeVito, of course, could deliver sardonic charm in his sleep. Together, they have something resembling chemistry, if not brotherhood, and the film milks every odd couple beat it can before coasting to its predictably heartwarming conclusion. Twins doesn’t aim high, but it’s too self-aware to sink. What could’ve played as a one-joke premise gets lifted by two actors who know exactly what they’re selling and never pretend otherwise. It’s glossy, goofy, and entirely of its time—less a film than a studio high-concept wearing sneakers. But it moves, it smiles, and you smile back.

A marriage in slow collapse, told out of sequence and filtered through a series of European road trips—Two for the Road is a romantic drama with a jagged edge, dressed up in sunshine and tailored suits. Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney star as Joanna and Mark, a couple who seem to have started falling out of love roughly five minutes after falling in. The film cuts between five different vacations they’ve taken together over the years, with time hopping like a skipping record, catching glances, arguments, and the occasional fleeting sweetness before it curdles. Hepburn plays headstrong without slipping into icy, while Finney manages to keep Mark’s cockiness just on the tolerable side of smug. They first meet on holiday—she’s en route to a music festival, he’s on a solo photography retreat—and the tone is immediately combative. That friction never leaves. Each segment reveals a new scrape or scar: infidelity, exhaustion, the suffocating arithmetic of compromise. If the dialogue sometimes veers into glibness, it’s at least well-manicured glibness, served with the sparkle of a mid-century cocktail. The structure is clever, though not always propulsive. There’s not much “plot” in the traditional sense—unless you count luggage mishaps, missed connections, and a car fire that ends in foam. The real draw is the contrast between locations and emotional tones, often within the same scene. Donen gives it a clean, sharp look, with expansive widescreen shots of French countrysides and sun-dappled backroads that make you wish the characters would stop arguing long enough to enjoy them. William Daniels nearly runs off with the film in a brief stretch as an insufferably meticulous travel companion who deserves a separate passport stamp just for comic relief. It’s one of the few laughs in a movie that otherwise views romance as a long negotiation occasionally interrupted by sex and scenery. Two for the Road isn’t warm and it isn’t all that fun, but it is elegant in its bitterness and precise in its depiction of affection gone stale. For all its breezy surfaces, it’s a portrait of love as slow erosion.

One of the few films I watch with my mouth open and my brain fully alert. 2001 isn’t just science fiction—it’s a meditation, an evolution chart, a time-lapse of human becoming. It’s astonishing from frame one and still feels like a transmission from the future. The story begins at the dawn of man, where a tribe of proto-hominids bickers over puddles and turf. Then: a monolith. Tall, silent, unknowable. It doesn’t do anything—but something shifts. A bone becomes a tool. A weapon. And with one cut—from flying femur to orbiting satellite—Kubrick leaps four million years and drops us into deep space. By the time the monolith reappears on the moon, humans are poking around in suits and whispering behind sealed doors. No one knows what it means. Maybe they’re not supposed to. Just as the apes couldn’t imagine space stations, maybe we’re not equipped to understand what’s next either. Most of the film takes place aboard a sleek, rotating vessel en route to Jupiter, crewed by two astronauts and HAL 9000—the ship’s onboard AI, who insists he’s incapable of error. That’s where things start to bend. HAL doesn’t malfunction so much as overthink. He listens too closely, reasons too precisely. Then the crew starts dying. It’s all built on quiet—on implication and control. The suspense coils in the stillness, in the spaces between sounds. And just when the structure seems stable, the film steps off the map. Dialogue fades, story dissolves, and you’re left drifting through image and sensation. It doesn’t guide you. It just opens a door and lets you fall through it. The ending has been called surreal, ambiguous, opaque. It is all of those. But it’s also extraordinary. You don’t watch it for answers. You watch it for what it stirs up. It’s not a conclusion; it’s an evolution. Visually, it still stuns. The sets are precise, mechanical, lived-in. The effects haven’t aged so much as settled—they feel embedded in time. And the classical score, originally temp music, became permanent by accident—a happy fluke that now feels intrinsic to the film’s DNA. This isn’t Star Wars. There are no dogfights, no punchlines. It moves slowly. It asks you to wait. But what it gives back is enormous. A film about before us and after us. About transformation. About reaching for something just out of grasp. Every time I return to it, I leave with something different. A new question. A strange feeling. Always awe.