Film Buff Musings

Brendan Fraser is Charlie, a 600-pound English teacher who hasn’t left his couch in years and claims his webcam is broken. He’s dying—blood pressure’s a mess, heart failing—and he knows it. The whole thing plays out in a sagging Idaho apartment that feels less like a home than a lifeboat already halfway sunk: dim light, threadbare carpet, visitors who come in looking concerned and leave looking scorched. The size is part of it. But it’s not the story. The grief is. Years ago, Charlie left his wife and daughter for a man named Alan. Then Alan died—slowly, by self-denial, cornered by faith and family. Charlie started eating like he couldn’t stop. Whether to fill something or erase it, the film doesn’t say. It doesn’t have to. Now Ellie, the teenage daughter he barely knows, walks through the door with a mouth full of acid and a look that says: I’m not here for sentiment. She’s 17, furious, and sees straight through apology. Sadie Sink plays her like she’s chewing on every line before spitting it out. Charlie tries to fix things. She wants him to sit in the wreckage and look around. It’s a chamber piece with a pulse—dialogue-driven, cramped, theatrical by design. Samantha Morton shows up for one blistering scene. Hong Chau stays longer, fierce and tired, a friend doubling as nurse, witness, and occasional enabler. Nobody says quite what they mean. They circle, repeat, raise their voices just to prove they still have them. The title comes from a Moby-Dick essay Ellie once wrote—about the part where Melville pauses the hunt to catalog whale species. She says it made her sad. Charlie says it saved his life. He reads it like scripture. Maybe he always has. Fraser doesn’t play Charlie for pity. He’s gentle, formal, wrecked. It’s a performance built on restraint and pain, not spectacle. And yes, the Oscar was deserved. There’s no tidy ending. Just one final act of belief—quiet, foolish, maybe—followed by a flash of light. Not resolution. Just release.

A brisk, candy-coated chronicle that plays like a guided tour through a teenage scrapbook—narrated by the boys who filled it in. Wham! charts the rise of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley with a mix of nostalgia, clarity, and just enough edge to keep things focused. Told entirely through archival interviews and home video footage, the film wisely hands the mic to the duo themselves. It tracks their friendship from grade school to global stardom to a clean, almost polite split—no reenactments, no commentary tracks, no extra framing. And it corrects one of pop’s more persistent myths: that Ridgeley was simply along for the ride. Wham! was his idea. Michael originally saw himself as the sideman—until his otherworldly songwriting abilities started to surface, and his image began to sharpen into something unmistakable. Ridgeley saw what was coming and made the decision to step aside, letting his friend move into the spotlight that was clearly his. There are glimpses of family dynamics, Michael’s sexuality, and the machinery of the music industry, but the film doesn’t pause to analyze or editorialize. It trusts the material to speak for itself, and mostly it does. What emerges isn’t a deep dive, but something more curated: a memory that knows exactly which parts to replay. Wham! is a time capsule made by the people who were inside it. It moves quickly, stays on message, and finishes with the kind of confidence that made the group work in the first place.

It starts small. One man, one therapist, one politely unhinged houseguest. But What About Bob? doesn’t stay small. It picks up speed, skips over boundaries, and ends somewhere between therapy session and hostage crisis. And somehow, it all feels perfectly reasonable by the time we get there. Bob Wiley (Bill Murray) is a walking list of phobias—death, germs, elevators, public spaces. He thanks his goldfish for emotional support. When his longtime therapist bails, Bob gets passed off to Dr. Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss), a self-important shrink with a bestselling book and a lake house in New Hampshire. One session in, Bob is hooked. Dr. Marvin is already packing. Bob, of course, finds him anyway. Through persistence, manipulation, and an alarming amount of sincerity, he turns up at the Marvin vacation home—where he promptly becomes the most beloved person in the family. He’s invited sailing (tied to the mast for safety), helps the Marvin son (Charlie Korsmo) conquer his fear of diving, and compliments Mrs. Marvin (Julie Hagerty) on her magazine-worthy homemaking. By the time he crashes Leo’s Good Morning America interview and steals the spotlight, the poor doctor is halfway to a breakdown. Murray plays Bob like a golden retriever in human form—endlessly enthusiastic, impossible to shake, and convinced he’s making everything better. But it’s Dreyfuss who steals the movie in plain sight—his descent from smug authority to full-blown hysteria is timed to perfection and hilarious all the way down. And every attempt to push Bob away only makes Bob more beloved to everyone else in his orbit. It’s not a flashy film. The visuals are straightforward, the direction unfussy. It’s all cleanly built, every joke setting up the next, until the whole thing topples in a beautifully controlled mess. What starts with a handshake ends in fireworks, and the momentum never slips.

The title reads like a tabloid scream, but the film behaves itself—at least formally. A girl is found hanged in a Milan apartment. She’s fourteen. Officially, it’s suicide. Unofficially, there are too many details facing the wrong direction. Soon, the police are circling something bigger: a child prostitution ring with ties that run inconveniently high. Giovanna Ralli plays the state prosecutor with the clipped demeanor of someone too pragmatic to be shocked anymore. Inspectors press forward, suspects twist themselves into evasive knots, and one or two are eliminated before they can explain anything. Structurally, it’s a crime procedural. Visually, it keeps pushing off the axis. The camera rarely sits still. Conversations bounce between mirrors, stairwells, doorways. One scene begins with tea being served and ends in a hallway with the server quietly eavesdropping. The film keeps moving, but it’s always listening. Franco Delli Colli’s cinematography picks up everything the script doesn’t say. Angles feel quietly accusatory. Even a passing glance gets treated like a confession. Stelvio Cipriani’s score flips between nightclub cool and something tenser, as if the bass line is tapping its foot waiting for someone to crack. The violence, when it comes, is blunt and impersonal. A body drops off a motorcycle. A cleaver appears, does its job, disappears. There’s no escalation—just correction. Daughters isn’t flawless. The procedural plot is standard issue, and a few scenes play like filler. But what surrounds it—the framing, the pacing, the low-grade moral nausea—is sharp enough to keep your attention. It’s not interested in catharsis. It just wants you to notice who’s sweating. In Italian with English subtitles.

What Women Want is a breezy, mid-budget fantasy about a chauvinist who briefly becomes telepathic and marginally less intolerable. Mel Gibson plays Nick Marshall, a swaggering ad exec with a Mad Men complex and no apparent interest in evolving—until a freak bathroom accident involving a hairdryer rewires his brain and gifts him the ability to hear women’s thoughts. It’s the universe’s idea of a lesson. His idea is to use it for sex and career advancement. The premise walks a line between sitcom high-concept and retrograde discomfort. The film wants to reeducate its lead, but it also seems oddly charmed by his behavior along the way. Nick doesn’t just hear women—he exploits them. He seduces his therapist (Bette Midler, in a bizarre cameo), co-opts the ideas of his new boss Darcy (Helen Hunt), and positions himself as the enlightened candidate for a promotion he’s already been told he doesn’t deserve. His enlightenment arrives late, mostly because the plot requires it. Redemption comes, but it feels more like a narrative necessity than a moral reckoning. There are moments where the film threatens to dig deeper, particularly in a subplot involving Judy Greer as a neglected assistant sliding toward despair. But these detours clash tonally with the montage-ready fluff surrounding them. The same movie that gives us Gibson in pantyhose and lipstick—trying, in his own backwards way, to embody the female experience—also drops in a suicide scare like a loose floorboard. It doesn’t quite know what tone to settle on, so it tries them all. The romance between Nick and Darcy lands with a thud. They have chemistry, technically—both are charismatic, competent actors—but the relationship reads more like a studio requirement than a natural evolution. We’re told they fall in love. What we’re never shown is why. The film excels at its plush settings and easy repartee, but it ultimately keeps tripping over the arrogance it claims to be dismantling. The premise is clever, the execution sporadically charming, and the message undercut by the messenger. By the time Nick learns to listen, we’ve heard enough.

What’s Cooking? is a holiday ensemble piece that juggles four Thanksgiving dinners, each from a different cultural household, and somehow keeps most of the plates spinning. It’s less interested in intersecting storylines than in shared emotional rhythms—familial unrest, buried tensions, and the specific chaos that arrives when a holiday demands harmony. The four families—Latino, Jewish, African-American, and Vietnamese-American—don’t really intersect in any meaningful way, which initially suggests a larger thematic connection that never quite materializes. But the film isn’t about convergence so much as contrast. For most of these characters, Thanksgiving is less a celebration than a battleground dressed in autumn décor. Among the dramatic threads: a Jewish couple struggling to accept their daughter’s girlfriend; a Vietnamese father raging at his son’s politics; a Latinx family bracing for an ex-husband’s return and the guest he’s unknowingly replaced; and a sister discovering her brother’s gun stashed away like a secret waiting to detonate. Some of it plays like domestic melodrama. Some feels lifted from a mid-season prestige series. Nearly all of it arrives at once. The performances are uniformly committed, but the film has a tendency to stage every emotional beat as confrontation. There’s barely a breath between arguments, and after a while, the tension begins to feel less like dramatic pressure than structural overload. Still, the editing is a minor miracle—threading the scenes into something fluid, even when the script leans toward heavy. If the film has a flaw, it’s tonal saturation. Every family meal simmers with subtext, then boils over. By the time dessert arrives, you may be more worn out than satisfied. But Chadha’s ambition is clear, and the scope is admirable. It’s a lot to chew on—but that’s kind of the point.

What’s New Pussycat? is a swinging slab of ’60s farce that bounces between the absurd and the incoherent with the energy of a martini-soaked pinball. It’s best known for being the first produced screenplay by Woody Allen—who also appears in a supporting role—and the experience was apparently so frustrating that he swore off writing scripts he wouldn’t direct himself. Watching the film, you understand his position. There’s a lively concept somewhere in the tangle: Peter O’Toole plays a neurotic heartthrob, maddeningly irresistible to women and genuinely desperate to stop cheating on his fiancée (Romy Schneider). His solution? Therapy. His therapist? Dr. Fassbender, played by Peter Sellers in one of his broader modes—wild-eyed, wigged-out, and hopelessly obsessed with his own romantic failures. Naturally, the doctor proves to be far more unhinged than the patient, and from there, the film begins to fray. It isn’t that the movie lacks ideas. It has too many. There’s a hotel full of intersecting lovers, a chase scene involving go-go dancers, and enough manic side plots to fuel three lesser screwball comedies. Allen’s script pokes at fidelity, repression, and masculine vanity, but most of it gets drowned out by slapstick, speed, and studio zaniness. The laughs are intermittent, the pacing erratic, and the narrative harder to hold onto than a glass of champagne on a trampoline. Still, there’s an oddball charm in the full-tilt commitment to its own nonsense. Tom Jones belts the theme song like he’s declaring war, and the film—while rarely coherent—is at least trying to entertain you in every corner of the frame. It doesn’t land often, but it never really parks either. That counts for something.

What’s Up, Doc? is an old-fashioned screwball comedy released decades after the genre’s golden age—but it’s so lovingly executed, you hardly mind the delay. If it had arrived in the 1930s, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn would’ve owned it. Instead, we get Ryan O’Neal and Barbra Streisand, who do more than hold their own. They turn what could have been pastiche into something genuinely fizzy. O’Neal plays Dr. Howard Bannister, a bowtied musicologist in San Francisco for a conference, saddled with a high-strung fiancée named Eunice (Madeline Kahn). Streisand is Judy, a wild-card interloper with no clear backstory and no intention of leaving Howard alone. She takes one look at him and decides he’s hers. He disagrees—at first—but she’s undeterred. Before long, she’s impersonating Eunice, hijacking conference dinners, and somehow charming the entire academic establishment without blinking. Meanwhile, a plot involving four identical plaid suitcases unfolds in the background like a Marx Brothers gag stretched to feature length. One contains rocks. One contains top-secret documents. One holds jewels. One is Howard’s. Of course, no one can keep track of which is which. By the time the third-act car chase crashes through Chinatown and city hall, the film has fully committed to its own loopiness. If it falters at all, it’s in its occasional overreach—some of the gags stretch past delightful into delirious. But even when it overplays, it plays beautifully. Streisand is in peak form, effortlessly dominating the frame without steamrolling it. O’Neal’s straight man routine works because he doesn’t fight it. And Kahn, in her film debut, practically steals the movie with nothing but neurosis and nasality. What’s Up, Doc? is pure confection, smartly crafted, and light on its feet. A valentine to a vanished genre, made with care, charm, and just the right amount of lunacy.

The premise is sharper than the execution. Woody Allen took a 1965 Japanese spy thriller and dubbed over it with entirely new dialogue, transforming it into a parody about rival agents searching for a secret egg salad recipe. It’s a knowingly absurd setup—the kind of stunt that sounds funnier described than it often plays. What follows is less a cohesive spoof than a stitched-together series of one-liners and throwaway gags. Characters get new names like “Wing Fat,” while voice actors fire off jokes that mostly hinge on the novelty of serious faces saying unserious things. There are scattered laughs, but they’re buried under too many misfires. And while Allen aimed for irreverence, several jokes now read as casually racist, which only further dates the material. The film was originally around an hour, but the studio—without Allen’s input—extended it by inserting musical performances from The Lovin’ Spoonful. The footage is pleasant enough, but it has no narrative connection to the rest of the film and only underscores how little structure there is to begin with. Allen appears briefly, though it’s his voice that dominates. His fingerprints are unmistakable, but his comedic rhythms are still in a formative stage. This isn’t the work of a filmmaker in control of his material so much as a comic writer experimenting with a borrowed one. As a time capsule, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? is mildly interesting. As a comedy, it’s too uneven to recommend to anyone outside of Allen completists or fans of the original novelty. Even then, expectations should be kept low.

When Tomorrow Comes is a modest romantic drama that threads moments of unpredictability into what might otherwise be a standard studio love story. It opens in a New York diner, where Charles Boyer, playing a brooding concert pianist, shares a charged glance with a waitress played by Irene Dunne. From there, things unfold with a kind of offbeat fluidity: he follows her to a union rally, listens as she delivers a stirring call to strike, and then invites her sailing. That’s when the genre reshuffles. A storm rolls in, and the couple finds themselves stranded by a washed-out road, seeking refuge in a quiet church while the hurricane rages outside. It’s not quite romantic comedy territory, and the film seems comfortable letting that expectation fall away. What sets it apart isn’t its message or emotional heft—it doesn’t reach for grandeur. Instead, it finds small, unusual pleasures in its narrative detours: a political speech, a boat trip undone by weather, a candlelit interlude in a sanctuary. The chemistry between Boyer and Dunne isn’t explosive, but it’s steady, marked by respect and restraint. The film falters in the soft middle. The second act drifts a little too aimlessly, relying on charm to carry it through. But it pulls itself together in the final third, tightening the emotional stakes just when you expect it to wind down. That finish gives it a little staying power. When Tomorrow Comes isn’t a great romance, but it’s a likable one—graceful, low-key, and occasionally surprising.

An expertly mounted World War II thriller that balances spycraft, sabotage, and snowy spectacle with an almost ludicrous confidence. The plot, on paper, is simple: a team of British operatives—accompanied by a single American officer, played by Clint Eastwood—must infiltrate a Nazi stronghold in the Bavarian Alps to rescue a captured U.S. Brigadier General before the Germans can extract classified information. But simplicity is a false promise. Double-crosses multiply, disguises are shed, and the mission evolves into something far knottier than advertised. The castle itself—perched high above icy ravines and accessible only by cable car—feels pulled from a Bond villain’s dream, and director Brian G. Hutton uses the setting for all it’s worth. Snow-covered forests, torch-lit dungeons, and narrow mountain roads give the film a texture that feels colder, rougher, and more tactile than most war pictures. It’s a wintry stage for a two-and-a-half-hour game of misdirection. Richard Burton leads the cast with theatrical gravitas, delivering long expositional monologues like he’s sneaking Shakespeare into the mission briefings. Eastwood, all quiet glower and clenched-jaw pragmatism, offers the perfect counterweight. Together, they provide a portrait of masculine contrast: one a strategist, the other a weapon. The film doesn’t comment on that dynamic—it just lets them coexist, which turns out to be more satisfying than any forced camaraderie. Dialogue-heavy in stretches and brazen in its twists, Where Eagles Dare isn’t trying to be lean. It wants to entertain you with bluffs, bullets, and blizzards, and for the most part, it does. It’s a war film disguised as a heist, then disguised again as something else entirely. And that’s part of the thrill.

Where the Crawdads Sing is a flawed but absorbing Southern gothic, more romantic than mysterious, and more polished than it probably should be. Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a girl abandoned by her family and left to survive alone in the marshes of North Carolina. She grows up far from the rhythms of town life, preferring the company of birds and tidal rhythms to classrooms and neighbors. One boy teaches her to read. Another tests her trust. One of them ends up dead. By the time Kya is on the stand, the verdict feels prewritten. The town already views her as an outsider, and the trial serves more as confirmation than revelation. As Kya sits in court, her life unfolds in flashback—childhood loneliness, first love, betrayal. The performances are strong enough to hold it together, with Edgar-Jones giving Kya a watchful, inward quality that suggests a lifetime of instinctive self-protection. But there’s a disconnect between how we’re told Kya lives and how she appears onscreen. Raised in isolation, she never seems worn down by it. Her clothes are always clean. Her skin is luminous. The shack she calls home looks more staged than lived-in. Even the occasional speck of dirt appears at just the moment a plot point calls for it. These details may seem minor, but they add up. The film wants the romance of the wild without the grit. The mystery is serviceable, if a little undercooked, and the courtroom material feels rushed. Still, the emotional through-line mostly works. Kya may be too idealized, but she remains compelling. And if the film never quite earns its sense of catharsis, it at least makes you hope she finds some.

One of Paul Newman’s final screen appearances comes packaged in a film too slight to deserve him. Where the Money Is pitches itself as a clever, low-stakes heist story but mostly ambles along, content to coast on charm it hasn’t quite earned. Newman plays Henry Manning, a once-notorious bank robber now confined to a wheelchair after a supposed stroke. He’s silent, vacant, a man who seems to have retreated into himself. But Carol Ann (Linda Fiorentino), the sharp-edged nurse assigned to his care, suspects otherwise. She doesn’t think he’s broken—just biding time. After a failed attempt to rattle him with a lap dance, she tries something more extreme: she rolls him into a lake. Her husband Wayne (Dermot Mulroney) watches in horror, dives in after him—only to discover Henry’s already pulled himself ashore. From there, the plot shifts into half-hearted caper mode. Carol Ann, sensing opportunity, ropes Wayne into planning a heist with Henry as their mentor. There’s potential here: an aging criminal pulling one last job with a pair of suburban amateurs. But the film can’t seem to decide if it wants to be slick or silly, and instead settles somewhere between tepid and inert. The tension is thin, the twists are few, and the execution never matches the premise. Newman, to his credit, still has presence to burn. He plays Henry with just enough glint in the eye to remind you why he was a star for five decades. It’s a shame the film around him doesn’t rise to the occasion. A wasted premise, a wasted cast, and not enough payoff to make the job worthwhile.

A minor but intriguing artifact from the golden age of Cold War espionage cinema, notable mainly for its star: David Niven, Ian Fleming’s original choice to play James Bond. His character here, Dr. Jason Love, shares little with 007 beyond profession and passport. He’s a bit of a snob, more bookish than brawny, and deeply out of his depth. But that’s part of the appeal. Niven plays him not as a suave super-agent, but as a reluctant recruit who’d rather be at a medical conference than dodging bullets. He gets his wish—sort of. The British government taps Love for an assignment in Beirut under the tidy excuse of attending said conference. His real task is to investigate the suspicious death of another operative. It’s a flimsy justification for involving a civilian, but the film knows better than to dwell on logistics. Once in Beirut, Love meets his contact: Vikki (Françoise Dorléac), a supermodel with impeccable timing and questionable motives. Her interference causes him to miss his flight—just before the plane explodes midair. The job, it turns out, is very real. The production values are modest, the action sequences reserved, but the plot remains compelling enough to hold interest. Niven, always more comfortable with a dry quip than a drawn pistol, keeps things anchored. His version of espionage feels civilized, even when the bullets start flying. It’s not top-tier spy fare, but it’s clever, tightly plotted, and too interesting to be forgotten. As a glimpse of the Bond-that-never-was, it’s worth a look.

More quaint than most of Studio Ghibli’s catalogue, Whisper of the Heart scales things down without losing the studio’s sense of wonder. Shizuku is a curious, slightly restless teenager who spends more time buried in library books than doing her schoolwork. She notices that every title she checks out has already been borrowed by someone named Seiji. She builds him up in her mind as someone intriguing, maybe even a kindred spirit. Then she realizes she already knows him—and she can’t stand him. Seiji, it turns out, is training to become a violin maker. Their early exchanges are equal parts mockery and intrigue—he teases her for rewriting John Denver’s “Country Roads” into a more personal version called “Concrete Roads”—but the rivalry softens into something sweeter. What starts as posturing turns into mutual admiration, and then something closer to first love. The animation is lovely in the usual Ghibli way—soft lighting, open windows, and warm clutter—and while the story stays grounded in real-world concerns, it still finds time for fantasy. A statue of a cat in a top hat briefly becomes Shizuku’s muse, pulling her into an imagined world drawn from her own creative frustrations. These sequences aren’t detours; they’re reflections of the artistic impulse, the way making something meaningful can feel like stepping outside of time. It might not have the emotional sweep of Ghibli’s best, but Whisper of the Heart works on a gentler frequency. It’s about the awkward start of ambition, about taking yourself seriously enough to try. For a film about teenagers, it shows real patience—for their mistakes, their growing pains, and the dreams they’re just beginning to shape.

White Chicks begins at full volume and somehow keeps escalating—not in laughs, just in noise. Marlon and Shawn Wayans play FBI agents assigned to protect two high-maintenance heiresses targeted in a kidnapping plot. When the socialites suffer minor facial injuries and retreat from the public eye, the agents decide to assume their identities. In full prosthetic drag. As white women. Famous white women. The central joke is the transformation, which reads less as disguise than latex horror. The “white chicks” they become look more like melted wax figures caught mid-sneeze than actual human beings. That anyone in the film mistakes them not just for women, but for recognizable ones, demands either total suspension of disbelief or a shared psychosis among the supporting cast. The film offers no explanation, so take your pick. (Mine leans toward elective cosmetic surgery as plausible cover.) There’s nothing wrong with the premise. It’s broad, absurd, and undeniably memorable. But the execution collapses under the weight of its own strain. The humor leans almost entirely on race and gender clichés, delivered with a kind of frantic energy that kills any chance of surprise. The running gags—shopping sprees, sassy comebacks, botched seductions—are tired before they begin. The subplot about one agent’s crumbling marriage tries to add emotional depth, but it’s so perfunctory it feels lifted from an unrelated screenplay. Even Terry Crews, who seems to understand the tone the movie’s aiming for, can’t rescue it. White Chicks wants to be outrageous, but it can’t even manage weird. It just flails—loudly, and for 109 minutes.

Adapted from Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise is part family comedy, part disaster movie, part lecture hall satire. Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is a tenured eccentric who founded the department of Hitler studies at his Midwestern college but can’t speak a word of German. His closest colleague, Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), treats Elvis Presley with the same scholarly reverence. Jack’s wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), is quietly hooked on a drug called Dylar, which she claims helps with anxiety but keeps hidden like contraband. Life at home is a mix of academic posturing, supermarket runs, and the quiet oddities of a blended family—until a freight train derails just outside of town, releasing a massive black cloud of toxic chemicals. At first, it’s just a strange sight on the horizon. Then the sirens start, the bullhorns follow, and the family is herded into a station wagon, crawling toward an undefined “safe zone” while the cloud keeps advancing. From there, the film shifts between evacuation drama, marital mystery, and campus satire: the Gladneys navigating roadblocks and misinformation, Jack digging into the truth behind Dylar, Murray hatching a theory that somehow links Hitler and Elvis in a single cultural argument. The dialogue comes fast—layered, tangential, and laced with detours that feel spontaneous but hit with precision. They’re not jokes in the traditional sense, but the timing makes them funny before you know it’s happening. Baumbach builds a visual counterpart to all that verbal noise. The supermarket scenes—fluorescent, overstocked, and arranged like showroom displays—play as running commentary on American excess, even with the outside world choking on poison. It’s funny, surreal, and built to resist tidy interpretation. You don’t have to solve it to enjoy it. Beneath the postmodern tangents and the overlapping chatter, it’s still about a family trying to hold their shape while the world, and everything in it, tilts.

Astrid (Alison Lohman) is fifteen—wide-eyed, well-behaved, and living in the curated world her mother built for her. Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer) is a poet with cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass and an ego to match. She raises her daughter on a steady diet of beauty, control, and contempt for anyone foolish enough to disappoint her. Then she kills her boyfriend (Billy Connolly) with a cocktail of oleander and ego bruising, and lands in prison. Astrid lands in foster care. From there, it’s a pinball game through other people’s kitchens and bedrooms—each foster home a new set of rules, new emotional minefields, and new ways for Ingrid to meddle from behind bars. She dials in her disapproval like a radio signal, trying to keep Astrid tethered to the mythology of being her daughter. But with every move, Astrid slips further away. The first act promises something layered—part psychological drama, part coming-of-age under siege. But the longer it runs, the more it trades lived-in complexity for prefab misery. Astrid hardens, but in ways that feel scripted rather than earned, each trauma staged like a plot requirement instead of an inevitability. It’s not that the story shouldn’t get darker—it’s that the darkness here feels lit for effect. Lohman gives the film its best shot at transcendence—her performance is so quietly precise it feels like she’s deepening the character on her own, filling in what the script leaves blank. Pfeiffer, meanwhile, is all frost and calculated menace, a villainess in couture. The bones of a great character study are here. What’s missing is the courage to let the story sting without posing for the camera.

The story is a mess, but that’s rarely a dealbreaker in a Jackie Chan movie. He plays a superspy—specifics unimportant—who loses his memory in a helicopter crash during a mission that promptly goes sideways. He’s taken in by a bush tribe, who name him “Who Am I?” after the only thing he seems capable of saying. From there, the film pivots into a global chase involving hard drives, stolen tech, and assorted mercenaries, none of which matter nearly as much as the next stunt sequence. What follows is espionage boilerplate delivered with near-total disinterest in coherence. People want things. Double-crosses happen. There’s a weapon that might destroy the world, or just make someone rich. At one point, Chan climbs a platform in the mountains and yells “Who Am I?!” into the sky like the question might produce answers. It doesn’t. The supporting cast doesn’t help. Most are acting at the level of a training video, which—by comparison—gives Chan a kind of unintended gravitas. Fortunately, no one’s here for the line readings. The stunts are the point, and here the film earns its keep. The Rotterdam rooftop sequence—Chan sliding down the angled glass of a skyscraper without cuts or wires—is as reckless and impressive as it sounds. Later, he fights off a group of attackers in Amsterdam while wearing wooden clogs—what possessed him to put those on is never addressed—and uses them to land pinpoint kicks in the natural bullseye location on their backside. It makes no sense, looks ridiculous, and still ends up being one of the film’s highlights. Who Am I? is clunky, overplotted, and frequently absurd—but when it moves, it’s exactly what it needs to be. You sit through the setup because the good stuff always shows up eventually.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a technological marvel and a comic noir with real teeth—it isn’t just a triumph of animation, it’s a film that somehow makes cartoon logic and Newtonian physics play nice with each other. A ton of bricks to the head? A Toon shrugs it off. Leave “Shave and a Haircut” unresolved? That’s an existential crisis. The conceit is dazzling: animated characters fully integrated into live-action environments, interacting with objects, lighting, and humans in ways that still hold up decades later. But the bigger trick might be tonal. This could’ve been a novelty showcase. Instead, it’s a legitimate noir mystery—hard-boiled, tightly plotted, and emotionally grounded—just one that happens to feature talking ducks and dynamite. The film’s secret weapon is Bob Hoskins. As Eddie Valiant, a down-on-his-luck private eye with a tragic backstory and a flask in his coat, Hoskins plays it absolutely straight. He never winks. Never acknowledges the absurdity of what’s around him. That’s what sells it. He’s channeling Bogart, not mugging for laughs. And it works beautifully. Roger Rabbit, a frantic cartoon star falsely accused of murder, turns to Valiant for help. Trouble is, Valiant doesn’t work with Toons—not anymore. One dropped a piano on his brother’s head. Since then, he’s been an alcoholic mess, half-heartedly solving cases and mourning the days when things made a little more sense. But Roger’s in real danger. Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd, truly deranged) is out for blood—or rather, Dip: the only known substance that can kill a Toon, demonstrated early on in a scene that still hits like a trauma flashback. (That poor little shoe.) The rest is a glorious genre mash-up: the piano duel between Donald and Daffy Duck; the lunatic sprawl of Toontown; the high-altitude cameo from Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, floating midair as if brand licensing were no barrier to gravity. Spielberg, serving as executive producer, somehow brokered peace between Disney and Warner Bros. long enough to make it happen. And then there’s Jessica Rabbit, voiced by Kathleen Turner, drawn like a studio’s idea of a forbidden icon and framed like noir royalty. “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way,” she says—and that’s the whole movie in a line. It’s silly, yes, but it’s also sharp. It’s absurd, but never sloppy. Every gag has precision. Every scene has momentum. Roger Rabbit is a marvel of tone, of craft, of sheer audacity. It’s a cartoon with stakes, a mystery with punchlines, and a kids’ movie that doesn’t play down to anyone. The laughs are big, the twists are smart, and the whole thing feels like it was made by people who didn’t ask, “Can we pull this off?” but instead, “What if we made it impossible not to look?”

Oz Oseransky (Matthew Perry) drills teeth, minds his own business, and lives next door to a man who could kill him in less time than it takes for a tooth to glint in the light. Jimmy “The Tulip” Tudeski (Bruce Willis) is a Chicago hitman on Canadian soil, fresh from testifying against mob boss Janni Gogolak (Kevin Pollak) and still very much employable. Oz recognizes him instantly, which turns out to be the start of one life and the end of another. Within days, he’s running favors for mobsters, lying to the wrong people, and learning that panic is not a survival strategy. Perry plays Oz like a man trying to apologize his way through a minefield—flappable, twitchy, already sweating before the danger shows up. Willis is the inverse: steady, affable, the smile never leaving until it needs to. The shift from friendly to fatal is almost imperceptible, which keeps Oz guessing whether they’re sharing a joke or planning his funeral. Rosanna Arquette appears as Oz’s French-Canadian wife, hostile by default and uninterested in explaining why. Amanda Peet is a live wire as the dental assistant who treats armed robbery like a resume booster. Michael Clarke Duncan provides bulk as a mob enforcer, Natasha Henstridge adds leverage, and Harland Williams plays the kind of cop who’s always a beat behind the crime. The film shuffles them like cards in a game no one’s sure how to win, and it’s more fun watching them play than seeing who comes out on top. It’s broad, a little too pleased with its own twists, and exactly as smart as it needs to be. The laughs are easy, but they don’t feel cheap. It’s not refined, not subtle—just fast, sharp, and unwilling to get in its own way.

Stunning from its very first exchange. Martha (Elizabeth Taylor), already tipsy, demands that her husband George (Richard Burton) tell her which Bette Davis movie contains the line “What a dump!” He doesn’t know. She’s incredulous. The night is off and running. It’s 2 a.m. They’ve just come back from a faculty party. George is a weary history professor, Martha the hard-drinking daughter of the university president. They are married, bitterly so, and Martha seems to delight in humiliating him. He retaliates with passive aggression, layered in academic detachment. They don’t talk—they duel. Then she drops the real bomb: she’s invited guests. A younger couple. Drinks are expected. Conversation is optional. The couple in question—Nick (George Segal), a rising biology professor, and his fragile wife Honey (Sandy Dennis)—arrive unaware they’re walking into a minefield. George and Martha don’t tone it down; if anything, the arrival of new witnesses sharpens their performance. What begins as discomfort for the guests quickly turns participatory. Everyone drinks too much. Secrets leak. The games get crueler. The film’s critical shift arrives when Martha begins to speak about their son. It hits a nerve in George so forcefully that the air changes. He shuts it down, savagely. The question hangs: why does this upset him? The answer, when it comes, isn’t just a twist. It’s a revelation that reframes everything. The writing—courtesy of Edward Albee’s play, adapted for the screen with unnerving fidelity—is razor-edged, but never overwritten. Each line cuts and clangs with intention. Nichols, in his directorial debut, traps these four characters in a series of rooms that feel tighter by the minute, and the tension ratchets as surely as it does in any thriller. But this isn’t just well-crafted. It’s emotionally shattering. The performances are volcanic. Taylor sheds every trace of glamour and plunges headfirst into Martha’s despair and fury. Burton plays George with the quiet calculation of a man who’s turned bitterness into ritual. Together, they are ferocious. Virginia Woolf doesn’t entertain so much as confront. It makes you examine the armor people wear to survive long partnerships—and the psychic toll of stripping it away. Few films cut deeper. Fewer still do it with this much precision.

It’s The Pink Panther in a cheaper suit—Clouseau’s moustache swapped for John Candy’s grin. Candy is Harry Crumb, a private eye whose M.O. is hiding behind disguises, slipping into shaky accents, and carrying a confidence that works right up until the moment it’s put to use. Candy is no Peter Sellers, but he’s still Candy—big, affable, and willing to throw himself into a pratfall like it might fix the plot. The trouble is, the plot doesn’t care. A rich heiress vanishes. Her father hires Crumb on the glowing recommendation of Eliot Draisen (Jeffrey Jones), president of a high-end detective agency. Draisen’s also the guy who arranged the kidnapping, counting on Crumb to botch it so badly the trail never leads back to him. From there, the investigation is mostly an excuse to let Candy try on faces. The disguises come fast: Deszu Djizlas, a Hungarian salon inspector in blue corduroy, tossing out vowels like confetti; an Indian air conditioner repairman; an overweight jockey with enough padding to sink the horse; an elderly window washer with a fright wig and Groucho brows; and, for the big finish, a drag queen who could pass for Divine’s louder cousin. No explanation, no logic—just the urge to change clothes. The mystery’s thinner than the moustache glue, and the comedy rarely rises above a sight gag. But every so often, Candy finds a rhythm—an unearned swagger here, a perfectly timed double take there—that almost convinces you this could work. Almost. In the end, the movie survives on sheer good will: Candy’s willingness to sell every inch of it, no matter how hollow the inch turns out to be.

A wheezy little horror comedy with more cigarette smoke than plot logic, Wicked Stepmother is enjoyably trashy in that late-’80s way—goofy effects, loose wiring, and just enough camp to keep the lights on. Bette Davis, visibly frail and sounding like sandpaper, snarls her way through her final screen role with the same vinegar she brought to her prime. She’s playing a witch, of course, and she doesn’t bother pretending otherwise. The backstory is juicier than anything onscreen: Davis reportedly walked off midway through filming, unhappy with the production—and yet, strangely, she’s in it just enough. Director Larry Cohen rewrote around her absence with an admirably deranged solution: Davis and Barbara Carrera play a mother-daughter witch duo who can’t occupy human form at the same time. One’s a woman, the other’s a cat. They take turns. It doesn’t make much sense, but it does make for a memorable visual gag or two. Carrera throws herself into the nonsense with slinky conviction, vamping through spells and smirking through seductions. Coleen Camp plays Jenny, the appalled stepdaughter whose elderly father (Lionel Stander, delightfully crusty) has just married a woman with no visible backstory and a suspiciously serene demeanor. Jenny smells witchcraft from the start, and spends the rest of the film trying to prove it—consulting psychics, cats, and at one point The Wizard of Oz in an escalating series of supernatural tantrums. The effects are charmingly creaky, the jokes hit more than they miss, and the whole thing moves with the gleeful logic of a late-night B-movie rental. It’s a mess, but a likable one. Critics hated it, most people seem to have forgotten it, but I had a weirdly good time. Somebody had to, I suppose.

Wicker Park is stylish, well-scored, and visually polished—but its emotional core never quite clicks. Josh Hartnett stars as Matthew, a rising ad executive who ditches a business trip after catching what he believes is a fleeting glimpse of Lisa (Diane Kruger), the woman who once consumed his every waking thought before vanishing without explanation two years earlier. The chance sighting is enough to derail his life—again—and he sets off on a trail of clues that seem to point to her current whereabouts. When he finally locates the apartment, the woman inside introduces herself as Lisa—but it’s not her. It’s someone else entirely (Rose Byrne), and Matthew finds himself tangled in a puzzle that begins to unravel the very story he thought he was living in. It’s a promising hook. The identity confusion and mistaken intentions could’ve played like a slow-burn psychological thriller. Instead, the film leans hard into romantic pining, told in a nonlinear structure that muddies more than it illuminates. Flashbacks are layered atop flashbacks, each one promising revelation but often delivering only mood. Hartnett and Kruger, who are meant to carry the emotional weight of the story, never quite sell the idea that they shared anything worth chasing. Their connection feels manufactured, more imagined than felt. And the dialogue rarely rises above functional. That said, the film isn’t without assets. Paul McGuigan directs with confidence. The visuals are sleek, the soundtrack moody and insistent, and the editing has a music-video rhythm that at least keeps things moving. But style can only carry a romance so far when the romance itself is this tepid. Wicker Park wants to be hypnotic, but mostly ends up tangled in its own design. The mystery draws you in; the rest slowly pushes you back out.

Disney, on autopilot. The Wild isn’t just uninspired—it’s practically outsourced from memory. The animation is serviceable, but everything else feels like it was assembled from a kit labeled “Generic Animal Adventure, Circa 2005.” Worse, it leans heavily on story beats and character dynamics already played (and played better) in DreamWorks’ Madagascar, released just a year prior. That film at least had personality. This one has renderings. The plot is less a narrative than a vague recollection of one. A lion cub, born and raised in a Manhattan zoo, feels inferior for not having inherited his father’s roar. Dad, naturally, is a local legend—equal parts alpha male and yarn-spinning fantasist. The cub, desperate for wildness and self-discovery, locks himself in a shipping crate and is whisked away. His father and a collection of sidekick stock types—a squirrel with boundary issues, a giraffe with self-esteem problems, a koala who thinks he’s famous—set out on a rescue mission through a curiously empty Times Square and beyond. It plays like the cinematic equivalent of jingling keys at a toddler. For an audience still working on forming complete sentences, maybe it works. There are bright colors, broad pratfalls, and plenty of jokes that shout rather than land. But for anyone above booster seat age, it’s an 82-minute shrug. There’s no spark of originality, no emotional traction, and no real reason for this film to exist beyond contractual momentum. Disney knows better. They just didn’t feel like proving it.

A Southern Gothic by way of David Lynch—violent, depraved, and sweating gasoline. Wild at Heart begins as a lovers-on-the-run story, then swerves, quickly and unapologetically, into something closer to a road trip through Hell. Maybe not one of Lynch’s major works, but unmistakably his: loud, grimy, and weirdly tender around the edges. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but still feels like a detour—glorious, grotesque, and unhinged, but a detour for Lynch all the same. Nicolas Cage, in snakeskin jacket and full-body swagger, gives a performance that’s half Elvis, half psychotic break. He high-kicks, croons, fights, flirts, and occasionally mutters philosophy like a man who’s just woken from a long nap with a revolver in his lap. Laura Dern, electric and wide-eyed, meets him on every beat—angry, ecstatic, and often heartbreaking. They’re lovers, fugitives, and co-conspirators in a world that doesn’t so much oppose them as try to drown them in pulp and fire. Willem Dafoe arrives deep into the runtime, wearing teeth that look like they’ve been soaked in nicotine and vinegar, and laughing like he’s trying to peel the walls back. It’s not just a creepy performance—it’s a relief when he finally gets his face blown off. That’s the tone. The violence is frequent, stylized, and grotesque enough that Lynch reportedly had to trim one scene to avoid an X rating. Even so, the R feels like a clerical error—somehow skirting the X. This isn’t noir with flashes of surrealism—it’s psychosexual Americana with the volume turned up and the air sucked out. The Wizard of Oz references come out of nowhere. Sheryl Lee, Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, floats through in a blink as Glinda the Good Witch—like Lynch pulled her straight from one dream and dropped her into another. Cage breaks into Elvis ballads mid-monologue. People hallucinate snakes, witches, and nuclear light. It’s both over-literal and completely opaque—dream logic wrapped in desert sweat. Not a masterpiece, but a necessary detour for Lynch devotees. It’s filthy, frantic, strangely romantic, and barely holding itself together. That might be the point.

Telegraph Hill, a steep little patch of San Francisco, is home to an unlikely resident: a feral flock of red-masked parrots, non-native, unclaimed, and thriving. Also living there—at least for a time—was Mark Bittner, a former street musician turned self-appointed avian biographer. With no scientific credentials and no day job to speak of, Bittner stumbled into a kind of accidental vocation: observing this flock with the patience of a monk and the intimacy of a neighbor. Since professional naturalists had no interest in a population of escaped pets, Bittner became—by default and devotion—the world’s foremost authority on these particular birds. But what elevates the film isn’t taxonomy. It’s tenderness. He doesn’t just document the parrots—he names them, tells their stories, and maps their personalities like they’re houseguests in a long-running sitcom. There are squabbles and courtships, betrayals and reconciliations. Parrots break up. Some even rebound. The documentary is mostly content to follow Bittner as he follows the birds, and that’s to its credit. His presence is unassuming, his affection genuine, and his narration never self-serious. He speaks not as a zookeeper or scientist, but as someone who simply paid attention. And the result is quietly moving. Director Judy Irving wisely keeps the tone light, the pace unhurried, and the lens trained on the real stars: the parrots themselves, photographed with care and no small amount of charm. And in a lovely bit of life-imitates-art, Irving and Bittner would eventually become a couple—a fitting epilogue for a film about connection, both expected and otherwise. A small, sincere film. Gently funny, a little wistful, and entirely worth the time.

A neo-noir with a sunburn. Wild Things doesn’t just twist—it corkscrews, unravels, doubles back, and ties itself into a knot so elaborate it starts to look architectural. The story opens with Matt Dillon as Sam Lombardo, a guidance counselor in a Florida town where everyone sweats secrets. Two students—Denise Richards, playing a smug heiress in a wet T-shirt, and Neve Campbell, all glower and edge—accuse him of assault. He swears innocence. The case goes to trial. That’s the setup, and it’s barely act one. From there, the movie shapeshifts into something half sleazy courtroom drama, half erotic chess match. Allegiances flip. New angles emerge. The whole thing keeps tightening until it topples into satire—except no one’s laughing, because they’re all too busy playing it straight with just enough of a smirk to let you in on the game. Kevin Bacon shows up. So does Bill Murray, often hysterical as a shyster in a neck brace, just in time to throw another match on the fire. By the time you reach the end credits (don’t skip them—they’re still untangling), you’re not even sure who scammed whom. But the ride is slick, ridiculous, and strangely satisfying. Trashy? Sure. But calculated trash—bold, knowing, and absolutely committed.

The retro-futuristic set design is inventive. The costumes are eye-catching. The gadgets are elaborate. And none of it matters. Wild Wild West is a film with all the trimmings of blockbuster spectacle and none of the connective tissue that makes spectacle matter. Will Smith plays Captain Jim West, a government-sanctioned rogue with impeccable aim and no particular reason to exist beyond franchise potential. Kevin Kline is Artemus Gordon, a gadget-slinging scientist with more inventions than personality. Together, they’re tasked with tracking down Dr. Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh), a Confederate amputee turned steampunk supervillain with designs on reshaping the post–Civil War landscape in his own twisted image. Branagh, at least, seems to know what movie he’s in. He plays Loveless as a drawling, half-bodied egomaniac with scenery-chewing gusto and a wardrobe that deserves its own billing. He’s campy, committed, and the only thing here that sticks. Unfortunately, he’s surrounded by a narrative that barely exists and dialogue that mistakes noise for wit. The film is built on bits—mechanical spiders, exploding collars, disguise gags—but none of it accumulates. Characters don’t develop; they pose. The script throws around exposition and quips with the same casual indifference, hoping the sheer volume of stuff will distract from the emptiness underneath. Even Smith, riding high from Men in Black and Independence Day, can’t conjure up enough charm to paper over the dead air between jokes. By the time the giant spider rolls out, you’re already numb. This isn’t a film—it’s an expensive headache wrapped in brass plating. Millions spent, nothing gained.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is one of those films that seems hardwired into childhood memory. It’s bright, loud, and just off-kilter enough to feel vaguely hazardous—like licking a battery dressed in gumdrops. Gene Wilder, in one of his great twitchy performances, stars as the famously reclusive Wonka, a confectioner so secretive he’s replaced his human workforce with a tribe of tiny, orange-skinned assistants known as Oompa Loompas. Nobody questions it. Or if they do, they’re drowned out by the tubas. Five golden tickets are hidden in chocolate bars and scattered across the globe. The lucky finders will receive a lifetime supply of sweets and a guided tour through Wonka’s mythical factory—a place so shrouded in secrecy it makes the Vatican look chatty. Once the news breaks, the world turns delirious. Economies are upended. Chocolate becomes currency. Children are commodified. Among the hopefuls is Charlie Bucket, played with soft-spoken sincerity by Peter Ostrum. Charlie lives in a crumbling home with four bedridden grandparents and a cabbage-based diet, his odds of winning a ticket barely above zero. But this is a fable, and luck—conveniently—strikes. From there, we enter the factory: a maze of edible landscapes, color-coded rooms, disciplinary hazards, and musical interludes. The songs are catchy, the visuals inspired, and the production design full of pre-digital inventiveness. And yet, there’s always been something slightly off about the whole affair. Wonka himself operates somewhere between kindly host and psychological saboteur. The Oompa Loompas dish out moral lectures in tight verse, gleefully mocking children for everything from chewing gum to existing with a body type. It’s satire, yes, but pitched at a register that occasionally feels more cruel than corrective. Still, the film endures for a reason. It’s playful, weird, quotable, and genuinely magical when it wants to be. Kids might not absorb every message it’s putting down—but even if they don’t, the ride is unforgettable.