Film Buff Musings

A romantic comedy served with a sports-movie garnish—light, breezy, and just self-aware enough to know it’s playing both games. Paul Bettany is Peter Colt, once a legitimate British tennis contender, now hanging on for what’s clearly his last Wimbledon. His ranking has slipped, his confidence is threadbare, and he’s coasting toward polite retirement. Then the front desk at his hotel hands him the wrong room key. He opens the door and finds Lizzie Bradbury (Kirsten Dunst), America’s latest tennis prodigy, in the shower. She’s less offended than curious, clocking him as a familiar face, and their banter clicks into place before either of them can think better of it. What starts as a flirtation turns serious—serious enough to rattle Lizzie’s father (Sam Neill), who warns that relationships during tournaments derail her focus. But while she keeps winning on autopilot, Peter starts playing like the clock has rewound a decade. Every match sharpens him; every set feels like one more delay on the inevitable. The chemistry between Bettany and Dunst isn’t electric, but it’s warm enough to make the courtship worth following. He gives her wry steadiness, she gives him restless energy, and together they keep the thing watchable even when the script gets a little too pleased with itself. The tennis scenes have just enough bite to keep the sports angle from feeling like set dressing, and the romance never tips into outright sap. Still, it’s a little too cute for its own good, the sort of film where you can see the Hollywood ending jogging toward you from the first serve. It’s likable, lightweight, and perfectly serviceable for a quiet evening—an unremarkable date movie with just enough topspin to keep it from going out of bounds.

A ghost story set inside the Winchester Mystery House—a real San Jose mansion famous for its architectural chaos and spiritual mythology—should have atmosphere built in. Staircases to nowhere, doors that open into nothing, rooms sealed mid-construction: the place practically haunts itself. But Winchester, while occasionally intriguing, settles for a grab bag of formula scares and squandered promise. Helen Mirren, cloaked in mourning black and steely composure, plays Sarah Winchester, heiress to the repeating rifle fortune and sole curator of this ever-expanding maze. Convinced she’s being haunted by the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles, Sarah believes that constant construction—walls added, halls rerouted, stairways built for no one—keeps the ghosts disoriented, if not exactly at peace. Enter Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke), an opium-drowsed skeptic hired to assess her sanity. He arrives to investigate but winds up hallucinating almost immediately—as the film wastes no time dragging him into its ghostly mechanics. At first, Sarah seems like a garden-variety eccentric. But as the creaks intensify and the house begins to move on its own, Price starts to question whether he’s diagnosing delusion or falling victim to it. The premise has teeth. But the film undercuts itself with an overreliance on jump scares and a pace that never fully locks in. There’s a story here about grief and guilt and the cost of violence, but it gets flattened into a sequence of hallway shocks and orchestral stings. For a film about restless spirits, the stakes feel oddly weightless. Mirren is reliably commanding, but the script leaves her stranded. Instead of exploring Sarah’s complexity—her guilt, her resolve, her quiet unraveling—she’s often reduced to warning the men around her, then waiting to be rescued by them. It’s a waste of a compelling character and a formidable actor. Still, the film isn’t without strengths. The production design is polished, the costumes period-precise, and the house itself—vast, surreal, and structurally deranged—is a visual standout. You just wish the story had known how to inhabit it.

There’s a great deal to enjoy in The Wind and the Lion—handsomely mounted, smartly acted, and occasionally even rousing—but it comes up short of being anything close to profound. Still, I find myself drawn to it. It scratches the itch for embellished historical fiction with a light dusting of geopolitics, the kind of movie that knows it’s playing fast and loose with the truth and doesn’t much care, as long as the flags wave wide and the speeches come loud. The material is tricky, to be fair. It has more in common with Lawrence of Arabia than most films would dare, framing its protagonist as both a hero and a figure of discomfort depending on which side of history you’re reading from. That Lawrence managed to walk that tightrope was something of a miracle. This one wobbles more, but at least it still makes it across. Sean Connery plays Raisuli, a Moroccan Berber tribal leader (or insurrectionist, or terrorist, depending on who’s doing the labeling), whom President Theodore Roosevelt—played with bullish, overstuffed charisma by Brian Keith—refers to as the last of the Barbary pirates. When Raisuli kidnaps American widow Eden Pedecaris (Candice Bergen) and her children to provoke political upheaval, the film sets the stage for a culture clash that teases real complexity but never quite dives in. The strongest scenes are the quiet ones between Raisuli and Pedecaris, whose mutual curiosity might have made for a compelling, even subversive, two-hander. But Milius seems more interested in staging cavalry charges. The battle sequences, while impressively mounted, grow repetitive. The film keeps pausing for action when it ought to be drilling deeper into character. Still, the performances help. Keith’s Roosevelt is bombastic and oddly endearing. Bergen gives Pedecaris more backbone than the script probably intended. And Connery—miscast by every metric, politically and ethnically—still manages to be oddly magnetic, even when his accent wobbles. The Wind and the Lion isn’t quite epic, and it isn’t quite intimate. But it does know how to hold the screen. Even when it loses the plot, it rarely loses your attention.

Winter Passing is a quiet little film about damaged people living in cluttered spaces, nursing wounds they mostly pretend not to have. It’s moody, slow, and periodically teeters on the edge of insufferable—but just when it threatens to go under, Zooey Deschanel saves it with a dry, bruised performance that cuts the gloom with sarcasm and bite. Deschanel plays Reese, a theater actress by title, but mostly a chain-smoking drift of a person, scraping by in New York with the help of hard liquor and harder drugs. She’s the daughter of two reclusive literary giants—one now dead (by suicide), the other barely functioning. When a literary agent offers her a check in exchange for her parents’ old love letters, she declines on principle. Then she remembers she has no money and few remaining scruples. So she heads home to Michigan. What she finds there is not the austere household of her youth but a semi-feral version of it: her father (Ed Harris) is unshaven, distant, and mostly silent, now sharing the house with two eccentrics she’s never met. One of them is Will Ferrell, playing against type as a soft-spoken ex-Christian rocker with a heavy-lidded sadness and no apparent sense of personal boundaries. He’s weird, but disarmingly sincere. The arc plays out more or less as expected: buried resentments, fragile reconciliations, letters found, old wounds reopened. But the script is literate, the characters are sketched with care, and the performances hold. Harris gives his usual brand of quiet collapse, Deschanel grounds the film with caustic honesty, and even Ferrell manages to find something human in his shambling loner. It’s a film of half-finished thoughts and heavy silences, punctuated occasionally by a wistful guitar. There are too many brooding interludes and the emotional beats are a little too neatly timed, but there’s something worthwhile in the messiness. It understands that grief doesn’t always look like wailing—it often looks like withdrawal, or distraction, or a joke that lands just a little too hard.

It’s difficult to muster much ill will toward a Disney feature this well-meaning. The animation is polished, the mood is gentle, and the premise—on paper—is workable. But Wish, the studio’s centennial offering, plays like a commemorative medley that keeps forgetting to bring something new to the table. It’s not a celebration so much as a stitched-together souvenir. Ariana DeBose voices Asha, a seventeen-year-old girl living in the kingdom of Rosas, where wishes are surrendered to the crown and kept under lock by the ever-smiling King Magnifico (Chris Pine). He claims to protect them—until he doesn’t. Any wish that doesn’t align with his tightly curated image gets buried, rejected, or quietly erased. Naturally, this erodes the kingdom’s collective hope. Naturally, a glowing star crashes from the sky to help. Asha, the designated spunky heroine, ticks the usual boxes but doesn’t leave much of a mark. She’s fine. Kind. Determined. Mostly defined by the problem she’s there to solve. The film gestures toward urgency—a kingdom darkening under suppressed dreams—but the stakes never quite click. It’s a rebellion dressed in pastels, too decorous to sting. Visually, it’s a hybrid: hand-drawn texture layered over computer animation, painterly but soft-edged, like concept art that’s been politely cleaned up. It’s charming to look at. Just not particularly arresting. The songs—written by Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice—are fine but not exactly the kinds of songs you leave humming. They’re pleasing enough, until you try to hum one and realize you’ve retained nothing but static. Wish isn’t a misfire so much as a safe shuffle through familiar ground. It doesn’t offend, but it rarely enchants. For a film about the power of dreams, it’s surprisingly easy to sleep through.

Don’t mess with ouija boards—especially if you’re a smug blond prep in a suit who corrects people on pronunciation. Brandon, the character in question, insists it’s “wee-jah,” not “wee-jee”—because, he explains, “oui” and “ja” mean yes in French and German. What a snot-nose, but he did incidentally divulge the most interesting thing I got out of Witchboard, so now you don’t have to watch it. But if you do, prepare for disappointment. The setup’s standard issue: a séance goes wrong, something dark shows up. Brandon—buttoned-up, serious, the kind of guy who probably alphabetizes his beliefs—claims to regularly speak with the ghost of a 10-year-old named David. As a party trick, he summons David using his ex-girlfriend Linda (Tawny Kitaen) as the conduit. Jim (Todd Allen), Linda’s current boyfriend—a construction worker with a mullet and no patience for the occult—mocks the whole thing. Loudly. The spirit reacts. The board twitches. Brandon’s tires get slashed. Why Brandon’s car and not Jim’s? Because Brandon was “in charge of the board.” That logic doesn’t hold for long. The spirit shifts focus. Jim nearly dies at work. A sheet of drywall falls. A friend is crushed. Meanwhile, Linda keeps talking to “David,” who might not be David anymore. It should be fun. The premise has potential. But the film doesn’t build. The scares don’t accumulate—they just show up, one by one, and disappear. There are jump scares, but they play more like alarms than payoff. The acting is stiff, the script is cornmeal pulp, and the tone has no direction. Still, it looks better than it should. The picture is sharp, the lighting polished. You keep waiting for something messy or strange to match the setup—a real scare, a gruesome effect—but the movie stays mild. Unbothered. Like it was never aiming higher than passable. A few side characters gnaw the scenery like they’re being paid by volume, which maybe explains the cult following. But this isn’t the fun kind of junk. It doesn’t spin itself into gold. It just hangs around—creaky, half-lit, like a party trick that won’t shut off.

The setup is great. Three women—Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer—live in a coastal Rhode Island town, recently separated from their husbands by way of divorce, abandonment, or death. They’re restless, bored, and unaware they’re witches. Then one night, over drinks and offhand fantasies, they conjure the man they think they want. Enter Jack Nicholson. Not exactly who you’d expect, but the film commits. Nicholson plays Daryl Van Horne, a smirking millionaire with no social graces and a talent for monologuing. It’s never explicitly stated, but he’s clearly meant to be the devil—or at least something close. He arrives uninvited, buys the local mansion, and quickly inserts himself into the lives of all three women. One by one, he seduces them, promising liberation but mostly offering disruption. The women become more self-possessed, but curiously slow to recognize the source of the strange phenomena starting to ripple through town. At one point, a tennis ball zips around mid-air like it’s been hijacked by a Warner Bros. animator. No one seems especially interested in unpacking that. The film nods toward ideas about female power and repressed desire, but never really follows through. Still, it’s worth watching. Sarandon, Pfeiffer, and Cher are all excellent, adding more dimension than the script gives them. Veronica Cartwright nearly steals the movie as a shrill religious zealot unraveling in real time. And Nicholson—sweaty, frenzied, clearly having a blast—does everything but levitate. It doesn’t quite come together. The tone slides around, and the supernatural angle feels more like a gimmick than a through-line. But it’s sharp in places, weird in the right ways, and just stylish enough to hold your attention.

Without Limits is a well-made, straightforward sports film about Steve Prefontaine—one of those rare athletes whose talent was matched only by his stubbornness. Billy Crudup plays him with the right mix of ego and idealism: a runner who wants to lead every race from the front, refuses to pace himself, and sees compromise as a form of surrender. Naturally, this puts him in conflict with his coach, Bill Bowerman (Donald Sutherland), who sees running as both a science and a craft. Bowerman is soft-spoken but exacting, more likely to lecture about shoe design than deliver a pep talk. He doesn’t force Pre to change so much as wait for him to grow into the idea that someone else might be worth listening to. Their dynamic—clashing philosophies in quiet tension—is the heart of the film. Crudup keeps the performance grounded. He doesn’t play Prefontaine as a myth, but as a difficult, sometimes brilliant young man who was never all that interested in being managed. Sutherland gives Bowerman a kind of wearied dignity, more mentor than motivator, and possibly the most patient man in Oregon. The film plays things straight. No stylistic flourishes, no detours into heavy-handed moralizing. It tells its story with focus, letting the training sequences, race footage, and fractured camaraderie speak for themselves. It doesn’t reach for transcendence—but it doesn’t fumble the fundamentals either.

Witness for the Prosecution is a masterclass in courtroom suspense, and the best Agatha Christie adaptation ever committed to film. It’s everything you want from Christie at her most devious: sharp characters, airtight plotting, and a finish that redefines the phrase “twist ending.” But the real magic is in Billy Wilder’s execution, which plays the whole thing like a violin string drawn tighter by the minute. Charles Laughton, never more commanding, stars as Sir Wilfred Robarts, a barrister fresh off a heart attack and under strict medical orders to avoid any form of excitement. Naturally, he takes on a murder case within the hour. Laughton plays him with equal parts pomposity and brilliance—a man whose wit is only matched by his appetite for cross-examination and brandy. His foil at home is an overbearing nurse (played with perfect comic timing by Elsa Lanchester, Laughton’s real-life wife), whose attempts to keep him healthy are met with snide rejoinders and hidden cigars. The case involves Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), an affable charmer accused of murdering a wealthy widow. The circumstantial evidence is damning, but Sir Wilfred senses something else at work. Enter Christine (Marlene Dietrich), Vole’s inscrutable wife—steely, unreadable, and always one step ahead. Whether she’s protecting her husband or carefully setting him up is left for us, and the jury, to decode. Wilder directs with precision. The courtroom scenes are brisk and charged, crackling with tension and wry humor. Every reveal is timed like a metronome. Every exchange counts. He also draws out one of Laughton’s finest performances—less showy than usual, but no less commanding. His Sir Wilfred doesn’t grandstand; he calculates, tightens the noose, then waits for his moment to snap it shut. The film builds to a final reveal that’s too good to spoil and too well constructed to see coming. It’s not just clever—it’s audacious. And it works. Witness for the Prosecution is a perfect storm of material and filmmaker. It moves like a thriller, thinks like a chess match, and delivers like a stage play performed with knives. Generations later, this film still stuns.

Some movies fade with repetition. The Wizard of Oz sharpens. It’s less a film than a shared memory—lodged in the national consciousness somewhere between nursery rhymes and lullabies. More Americans have probably seen it than any other film, and yet it still plays like something discovered, not assigned. I’ve seen it dozens of times. I never get tired of it. The magic holds. It begins in dusty black-and-white Kansas, where Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland), a headstrong farm girl with too much spirit for her surroundings, spends her days pestering her guardians and playacting with the farmhands. But after a skirmish with the local terror Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton), who wants her dog Toto put down, Dorothy runs off—only to be swept up in a tornado that drops her house (and herself) into the Technicolor fantasia of Oz. From there, it’s a journey through poppies, witches, and the iconic Yellow Brick Road, picking up a brainless Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), a heart-hungry Tin Man (Jack Haley), and a skittish Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) along the way. At the far end lies the Emerald City, guarded—sort of—by the fearsome Wicked Witch of the West, also played by Hamilton in a performance that has terrified generations. What’s remarkable is how present the emotions still feel. There’s awe, whimsy, dread, joy, and that aching melancholy tucked into “Over the Rainbow,” sung with such yearning by Garland it all but stops the film in its tracks. The Witch and her flying monkeys remain genuinely unsettling. The production design, drenched in color and imagination, hasn’t dulled with time—and neither have the songs. It’s more than a fairy tale. It’s a fable rendered in light and music, absurdity and fear, all stitched together with sincerity. And like the best stories, it still finds a way to hit you where it counts.

Anna Fox (Amy Adams) is housebound, heavily medicated, and on more than a first-name basis with her wine rack. She’s agoraphobic, possibly paranoid, and spends most of her time watching her neighbors from behind the safety of her living room window. Her latest fixation: the new family across the street—the Russells. A quiet teenage son, a stern father, and a woman named Jane (Julianne Moore), who shows up one night with a bottle and some breathless conversation. They bond. Or at least Anna thinks they do. Then Anna sees Jane stabbed to death through her window. She reports the murder, only to be met by a different Jane entirely—this one played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, very much alive and claiming never to have met Anna. The police are skeptical. The husband (Gary Oldman) is hostile. The son is polite and unsettling in equal measure. And Anna, with her cocktail of meds and wine-fogged memory, can’t quite prove what she knows she saw. The film might borrow liberally from Rear Window, Gaslight, and every “unreliable narrator in a brownstone” story you can think of. But it moves with confidence, and Joe Wright gives the material some style—lots of color washes, camera tricks, and a constant sense of off-kilter dread. The mystery unfolds at a satisfying clip, even if the final act pushes into pulpy excess. Adams does what she can, though her performance feels a shade too soft for the character. Anna’s fragility is there, but her desperation never quite lands. The movie needs her a little messier, a little more unmoored. And the resolution—convenient, tidy, and laced with movie logic—feels like a letdown after so much well-staged ambiguity. Still, as a glossy, mid-tier thriller with a talented cast and a few good jolts, it holds together. Not essential, but entertaining enough—especially if you keep your expectations in check and your wine glass full.

The hook is sharp, almost too neat. Ramona (Danielle Deadwyler), newly widowed and holding it together by habit more than faith, lives with her two children on a farm that looks peaceful by design—golden fields, quiet mornings, a house that seems to exhale calm. Then one afternoon, they see her: a woman in black, planted in the middle of the yard like she’s waiting for the house to make the first move. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t move. She simply waits. The tension is quiet but steady—less about shocks than atmosphere. The film doesn’t lean on jolts; it lets the unease settle, slow and granular, until something finally moves. The most striking moment: the woman in black approaches Ramona’s daughter, whispering “I will never hurt you” while her shadow writhes behind her, like it’s ready to peel away. But apart from an effective moment or two, the rest plays like a polished echo of better films. It’s handsomely shot, confidently framed. The pacing is patient, almost to a fault. There’s room to breathe, but not much to uncover. Hints of grief, guilt, perhaps something mythic—but they don’t accumulate. They just drift. Its weakest move is the ending—abrupt, underwhelming, a classic shaggy-dog finale that discards the premise without resolving anything. It reaches for meaning, then loses its nerve. It keeps you watching, even if it’s never quite sure why you are. But it ends like a question that never expected an answer—nicely shot, emotionally recessed, and unsure whether it meant to go anywhere at all.

It opens with fire—torches lit, blades drawn, a wall of women moving like one organism. General Nanisca (Viola Davis), chin set and eyes unreadable, leads the charge. No one blinks. By the time the first body hits the dirt, it’s clear—this isn’t a costume drama. It’s a war cry in gold earrings. There really was an all-female regiment in 19th-century Dahomey—fighting off rival empires and European slavers. The film grabs that piece of history and runs with it: battle scenes, slow-motion showdowns, and honor-bound speeches that carry across the savanna. The setup is sturdy. The enemy: the Oyo Empire, armed and allied with Portuguese traffickers. The defense: the Agojie, trained under Nanisca’s watch, ruthless and exacting. Thuso Mbedu plays the newest recruit, too defiant for marriage, too raw for war, and just impulsive enough to make the cut. Lashana Lynch gets the best lines. John Boyega struts around as the king, mostly decorative, and not unaware of it. The film builds its mythology like it’s laying bricks—cleanly, proudly, and without much room for mess. That includes its approach to Dahomey’s own role in the slave trade, which gets one scene and a fast moral turnaround. The character work is serviceable, never searing. But Davis never falters. She’s bone-tired, commanding, clenched like she’s holding back a history the movie doesn’t always want to tell. It looks good, moves fast, and knows where to place a drumbeat. But when it ends, the gaps show. The arcs feel polished but not fully dimensional, the emotions pressed flat beneath too many plot points. It gestures at complexity, then barrels past it. A warrior. A mother. A monument. And a film just strong enough to keep her centered, not enough to make everything else matter.

Romantic chemistry is often claimed, rarely felt. But when Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy share a booth in Woman of the Year, talking in half-sentences, leaning closer, dropping their voices to near-whispers—it doesn’t feel like acting. It feels like eavesdropping. They don’t even kiss. Yet it’s one of the most intensely intimate scenes ever captured on film. Their secret, of course, is that it wasn’t a performance. They were falling in love in real life. This was the first of nine films they made together, and it starts things off with a crackle. The film is light on its feet, clever, and often very funny—thanks in part to dialogue that hums with sharp little lines. (Though not without a few unfortunate wartime gags, including one clunker about a man’s turban that hasn’t aged well.) Hepburn plays Tess Harding, a political columnist at a New York paper who can hold court in half a dozen languages and make global affairs sound like common sense. Tracy is Sam Craig, the sportswriter who shares her masthead and does not appreciate her suggestion—made during a radio interview—that baseball should be suspended during the war effort. They exchange public barbs. The editor calls them in to settle it. Instead, they fall for each other. Sam takes Tess to a baseball game. Tess invites Sam to cocktail parties where he stands around baffled while she chats in fluent Russian or Greek. Their courtship is less opposites attract than styles collide—her worldliness and intellect against his working-class directness. But their rhythm works. You believe them as a couple because there’s tension and release in every conversation. What doesn’t work, unfortunately, is the ending. After building Tess up as independent, brilliant, and comfortably un-domesticated, the film undercuts her with a final sequence so regressive it barely feels like the same movie. Hepburn famously hated the new ending, and it’s easy to see why. The studio, anxious about the film alienating housewives or threatening traditional gender norms, forced a rewrite. The result is a comedy of domestic humiliation that turns its heroine into a punchline. Still, for the first 90 minutes, Woman of the Year is nearly sublime. The chemistry between Hepburn and Tracy is the kind directors dream about and screenwriters can’t manufacture. Even with the wrong ending, it’s a film worth seeing for how right the rest of it is.

Visually lush and emotionally volatile, Women in Love is the sort of film that feels disjointed on purpose—stitched from fragments of behavior, argument, longing, and collapse. A more linear adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel might’ve been possible, but Ken Russell didn’t want cohesion. He wanted vibration. The result is a work of strange restraint—especially for Russell—impressionistic rather than plotted, and far more controlled than the carnival of excess he’d unleash in his later films. What the film lacks in structure, it recovers in charge. Scene by scene, it thrums—emotionally, erotically, sometimes both. The loose thread follows two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen (Glenda Jackson and Jennie Linden), and the men they fall into orbit with: Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed), pressure and restraint in human form, and Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates), a man of ideas trying to outtalk his own instincts. It’s a film about love, but not the kind that resolves. There’s something else beneath it—volatile, magnetic. Especially between Rupert and Gerald. Whatever’s pulling at them stays unnamed but never unclear. The infamous nude wrestling scene between them plays like a seduction disguised as sport: firelight, sweat, the quiet concentration of bodies grappling for something beyond dominance. It’s homoerotic, unquestionably. And in the context of the 1920s setting—and the 1969 release—it’s as far as such a relationship could go onscreen without making a declaration. But the tension is there, and Russell doesn’t blink. Glenda Jackson won her first Oscar for Gudrun, and she’s magnificent—icy, unreadable, and then suddenly feral. Jennie Linden’s Ursula is softer, more open, but not without corners. Bates gives Rupert a watchful calm, like he’s waiting for a thought to finish forming before deciding whether to trust it—or dismantle it. Reed, always boiling, moves through the film like he’s trying to keep from tearing his own skin off. The cinematography—by a young Billy Williams—is all motion and light: golden fields, wintry stillness, decadent interiors. It’s hypnotic, even when the structure isn’t. Which is most of the time. This isn’t a film that builds to anything. It accrues. It trembles. It doesn’t add up in any conventional way—but it leaves you rattled, even if you can’t quite explain what did it.

Women Talking is, in the literal sense, exactly what it promises: a group of women, in a barn, talking. But the stakes couldn’t be higher. They’ve been drugged and raped by the men in their isolated Mennonite colony—repeatedly, systematically—and now, for the first time, they’re deciding what to do about it. Stay and forgive? Stay and fight? Or leave, and risk everything else? It plays like a philosophical chamber piece staged in denim and headscarves. Sarah Polley shoots with muted colors and measured stillness, as if any excess might tip the whole thing off balance. The setup is stripped down by design. There are no flashbacks, no re-enactments of the assaults—just the aftermath, spoken aloud in plain terms, often for the first time. The tension isn’t in what happened, but in what to do next. The drama comes from argument, not action. The women debate, interrupt, contradict, console—sometimes fiercely, sometimes with surprising tenderness. But mostly, they argue. The cast is exceptional, though the script doesn’t always give them the room to be. Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley handle the fury. Rooney Mara, the quiet ache. Ben Whishaw floats in like the colony’s resident ally—present but deferential, like he knows he’s lucky to be here at all. The performances do a lot, even when the dialogue starts to feel more sculpted than spoken. There’s weight here, and urgency, but also a kind of rigidity that holds the film at a fixed pitch. It’s relentlessly solemn, sometimes to a fault. As drama, it can feel airlocked. As a thought experiment, it’s quietly radical. The film isn’t asking what justice looks like—it’s asking what survival costs when justice isn’t even on the table. For all its gravity, Women Talking does manage something rare: it gives voice to fury without making a spectacle of it. The barn may be quiet, but there’s nothing hushed about what’s happening inside.

Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) is an English professor with a stalled novel, a failing marriage, and an unfortunate habit of making bad decisions in slow motion. Seven years ago, he published a well-regarded book. Now he’s 2,600 pages into a follow-up that refuses to end—an unedited sprawl he lugs around like a dead limb, dragging it through faculty parties, half-hearted affairs, and escalating personal crises, usually while wandering in a pink bathrobe and a haze of pot smoke. Enter James Leer (Tobey Maguire), a morbidly gifted student with a suitcase full of lies and a talent that threatens to outpace his professor’s. Grady recognizes something familiar in him—not just the literary instinct, but the avoidance, the slipperiness. Together, they spend a weekend dodging consequences in what amounts to a stylish, offbeat academic farce. Grady is also having an affair with the university chancellor, Sara (Frances McDormand), who’s married to Walter (Richard Thomas), the head of the English department. James, meanwhile, “borrows” a priceless piece of Walter’s memorabilia and accidentally shoots his dog. Grady decides to cover for him, because one bad decision deserves another. Douglas gives one of his best performances—shambling, self-defeating, wry. He takes what could be a smug, washed-up cliché and turns him into someone deeply human. Maguire, as the precocious and pathologically evasive James, plays against his usual sweetness, and it works. He’s a mess of contradictions: attention-starved but self-contained, manipulative but weirdly sincere. The film walks a tricky tonal line—equal parts literary satire, low-key crime caper, and melancholic character study—and it rarely missteps. Hanson keeps the pace measured, the mood buoyant, and the world populated with the sort of eccentric, fully realized characters that only seem to exist in the shadow of tenure. Wonder Boys isn’t a film about greatness. It’s about stalling out, screwing up, and occasionally stumbling into something worthwhile. It doesn’t glorify the writing life—it just lets it unravel beautifully.

I usually welcome a superhero movie that slows down long enough to build character. But Wonder Woman 1984 doesn’t slow down—it stalls. The action takes a backseat to long, ponderous stretches of story that seem to think they’re doing character work, but mostly just pad the runtime. By the time anything actually happens, I’ve mentally drifted two scenes ahead. It’s been seventy years since the events of the first film. Diana (Gal Gadot) is living quietly in Washington, DC, working at the Smithsonian and occasionally slipping into Wonder Woman mode to foil crimes in a blur of golden rope and slow motion. Her colleague Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) is a timid gemologist who idolizes Diana’s poise and presence. When Barbara gets her hands on a mystical relic—the Dreamstone—she casually wishes to be like Diana. And wouldn’t you know it, she starts to become just that, superpowers and all. Meanwhile, Diana wishes her long-dead love Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) back into her life, and the wish is granted—his consciousness arriving via the body of another man, a detail the film mostly sidesteps. The film never figures out what to do with its villains. Pedro Pascal plays Max Lord, a desperate TV huckster who turns into a kind of wish-fueled genie. Wiig eventually morphs into Cheetah, though her transformation is less a descent into villainy than a bout of bad behavior that gets corrected with a firm talking-to. Neither is threatening. Both are portrayed as fundamentally decent people who just need reminders of who they used to be. Gadot is still a strong presence, and there are moments—brief ones—when the movie hints at something more soulful or strange. But they’re buried under clutter. The tone lurches, the stakes feel arbitrary, and the plot resolves with a glowing speech about truth and love that plays more like a campaign ad than a climax. It’s not without ambition, but it’s stranded in its own good intentions.

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm is a misfire, especially for anyone hoping for the same spark that lit up Tom Thumb—even with Russ Tamblyn back on hand to reprise his signature bounce. The film has its charms, but they arrive inconsistently, buried between stretches of meandering sentiment and fantasy sequences that don’t always earn their runtime. The framing device follows the Grimm brothers—Laurence Harvey and Karlheinz Böhm—as they sit hunched over their desks in a castle, commissioned by an unnamed Duke to document his family lineage. Instead, they keep slipping off-task, transcribing fairy tales picked up from local townspeople. Folklore doesn’t pay, at least not yet, but they can’t help themselves. One of them even trades away his last bread money for a story about a strange little man named Rumpelstiltskin. It’s this struggle—between practical duty and creative obsession—that forms the glue holding the film’s three major fantasy sequences together. That glue, unfortunately, doesn’t always hold. The live-action segments drag, and two of the fantasy episodes—“The Dancing Princess” and “The Cobbler and the Elves”—are pleasant enough, but mostly forgettable. The songs in the Elves sequence are particularly limp, and not even the charming stop-motion flourishes can fully resuscitate them. But then there’s “The Singing Bone.” That one delivers. Terry-Thomas plays a preening, cowardly knight who sends his bumbling squire (Buddy Hackett) into a dragon’s lair to do the actual fighting. The tone is gleefully broad, the performances are just right, and the stop-motion dragon—glittering with gem-encrusted scales—looks good enough to frame. When it stares at Terry-Thomas’s backside and licks its lips, it brought out my inner seven-year-old. I laughed out loud. It’s pure silliness, perfectly pitched. This is a film for completists and fantasy die-hards—uneven and bloated, but not without its moments. If nothing else, “The Singing Bone” justifies the trip.

Fred Rogers didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t grandstand. He didn’t sell toys. And yet he managed to speak directly to millions of children, for decades, in a tone so gentle it could’ve been mistaken for background noise—if not for the fact that every word he said actually meant something. This documentary gets that. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? traces the unlikely career of a man who looked at television—the same box that sold sugar cereal and shouted toy commercials—and thought, maybe this could be something more. He was a Presbyterian minister, quietly devout, and believed that children deserved more than cartoons and clamor. They deserved acknowledgment. That was the whole secret. He treated children like people. The film moves through his life with a kind of measured grace—interviews with his wife Joanne, his sons, former castmates, producers, and, in archival footage, Rogers himself. They speak plainly. So does he. What emerges isn’t a haloed portrait but something more grounded: a man with purpose, with patience, with a mission that never required him to say the word “mission.” There’s a fascinating stretch that examines Rogers’ relationship to the LGBTQ+ community—how his support was quiet, coded, and (by modern standards) too restrained. But the film doesn’t let him off the hook or drag him for it. It just points to the line he lived by: “I like you just the way you are.” No disclaimers, no footnotes. I teared up a few times. Not because it’s manipulative—it isn’t—but because there’s something unnerving about watching that much sincerity without irony. It’s rare. Disarming. Maybe even radical.

A dismal movie. And intentionally so. The mood, the color palette, the silence between lines—it all reeks of deliberate discomfort. Kevin Bacon plays Walter, a recently paroled child molester trying to blend back into a society that has no interest in letting him blend. He finds a job. He finds a place to live. The apartment overlooks an elementary school. How he was able to live there without setting off every alarm in the justice system, we’ll never know. Walter stares out the window a lot. Battles with himself. Justifies what he did by insisting it wasn’t violent, as if that’s a moral distinction worth defending. His parole officer (Mos Def, playing it bone-dry and bitter) drops in now and again—not to help, really, but to remind him that, frankly, he should still be in prison. The film circles this character—slowly, nervously. It’s not asking for sympathy exactly, but it is asking you to sit with him, to entertain the idea of rehabilitation. Meanwhile, Walter strikes up a relationship with a co-worker (Kyra Sedgwick), which the film treats as an emotional breakthrough, though it mostly plays like a script contrivance. He can’t be all bad, see? He’s sleeping with someone his own age now. There are good performances here. Bacon, in particular, is haunting in the role. His twitchy restraint suggests someone constantly on the verge of something—remorse, relapse, or simply vanishing. But that’s where the film stalls. It wants to be provocative but keeps its gloves on. It tiptoes up to the edge of something transgressive, then pulls back and settles into Oscar-hopeful ambiguity. It’s bold in subject, not in execution. Bleak and not illuminating.

Just when you thought there was only one way to play Scrabble—slowly, politely, across a vinyl board on your aunt’s dining room table—it turns out there’s another. This documentary introduces the alternate universe: high-stakes, sleep-deprived, tournament-level Scrabble, where the players treat seven-letter words like blunt instruments and nothing is off the board except casual conversation. Word Wars follows four eccentrics as they prep for the 2002 National Scrabble Championship in San Diego, where $25,000 and years of arcane word-memorization are on the line. These aren’t weekend hobbyists. They’re full-timers. Unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise unbothered by conventional schedules—and in many ways, perfectly suited to that very specific kind of single-minded obsession. There’s Joe Edley, the stone-faced veteran who calmly describes seeing anagrams in highway signage. “Right Lane” becomes “Earthling,” and just like that, he’s in his own head for the rest of the drive. Then there’s G.I. Joel—so nicknamed not for military service but for chronic gastrointestinal issues. Marlon Hill smokes pot, theorizes endlessly, and views Scrabble as a lens through which to decode society. And Matt Graham, perpetually broke and just this side of meltdown, looks like he wandered in from a Beckett play and stayed for the bingo racks. The film doesn’t push an agenda—it just watches, patiently. The tone is playful, but not mocking. There’s affection in how it frames these players, who live in a world of obscure words and almost-pathological competitiveness. And their interactions—half banter, half passive-aggression—are as compelling as any final round. It’s a small film, maybe even a frivolous one, but it finds real weight in its characters. They play to win. They also play because they might not know how to do anything else.

Quinn (Sabrina Carpenter) has done everything right. GPA: spotless. Volunteer work: check. Musical talent: cello. She’s got the résumé of a model applicant—at least, that’s what she thinks. But her college dreams take a hit when a recruiter from Duke (Michelle Buteau, gleefully blunt) tells her that checking all the boxes won’t cut it anymore. She doesn’t need polish—she needs “pop.” Something with edge. Something unexpected. Panicked, Quinn blurts out that she’s on the school’s nationally ranked dance team. She is not. She hasn’t danced since kindergarten, when a ballet recital ended in tragedy and tulle. Worse still, the current team captain (Keiynan Lonsdale) already hates her, and it’s not the kind of grudge that gets settled with jazz hands. But with her Ivy League future suddenly dangling, she decides to double down on the lie—forming a scrappy rival team with help from her best friend (Liza Koshy) and a conveniently handsome choreographer (Jordan Fisher). Cue the training montages. Cue the cuts to feet. The plot is preposterous, but the film knows it. Work It bounces along on sheer energy and sharp delivery, packed with one-liners and just enough sincerity to keep it afloat. The dialogue pops, the cast clicks, and everyone seems to be having such a good time that you start to buy into the whole thing, even when the story starts coloring a little too far outside the lines. The romance subplot doesn’t add much, and the midsection sags under the usual second-act friction, but it’s hard to complain. This isn’t high art—it’s a sugar rush in movie form. And like any good dance number, it’s all about timing, charm, and landing on the beat.

Here’s a romantic comedy with a brain—funny, sharp, and rooted in the kind of character-driven storytelling that Hollywood mostly gave up after the 1940s. Think His Girl Friday, but with shoulder pads and a synth score. Working Girl takes the glass-ceiling fairy tale and dresses it in pinstripes, hairspray, and a touch of grit. Melanie Griffith is Tess McGill, a Staten Island secretary with a raspy voice and an MBA’s worth of ambition. She’s been biding her time, taking night classes, waiting for someone to notice. After batting away a marriage proposal from her sleazy boyfriend (Alec Baldwin) with the perfect rejoinder—“If you want another answer, ask another girl”—Tess pitches a smart merger idea to her boss (Sigourney Weaver), who smiles, nods, and plans to steal it. Classic. But when said boss breaks her leg on a ski trip, Tess sees an opening. She cuts her hair, borrows her clothes, and starts operating a few rungs above her pay grade. She enlists the help of Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), a mergers and acquisitions guru who doesn’t realize she’s technically still a secretary. Their business arrangement starts to look like something more—until, inevitably, the truth threatens to catch up. Nichols directs with a light touch but never loses sight of the stakes. The dialogue snaps. The pacing moves with purpose. And the cast is nearly perfect. Griffith plays Tess with a mix of nerves and resolve that never tips into caricature. Ford dials down the alpha-male shtick and finds something more human. And Weaver—icy, brilliant—is the kind of villain you’d still want on your résumé. A corporate Cinderella story that doesn’t condescend to its heroine. She doesn’t need a fairy godmother—just a better pair of shoes and the chance to be taken seriously.

The formula is intact: gadgets, gunfire, a high-speed chase through London, and a villain with a neurological quirk. The film opens with Bond hijacking a Q-branch speedboat and tearing through the Thames—over docks, under bridges, through a fish market, and briefly up the side of a building. It’s excessive, but well-staged, and easily the highlight of the first act. The plot this time concerns an oil pipeline, a kidnapping, and a terrorist named Renard (Robert Carlyle) who, due to a bullet lodged in his brain, can no longer feel pain. He’s less menacing than advertised. More of a concept in a trench coat than an actual threat. The plan, as far as it can be followed, involves rigged pipelines, faked deaths, and nuclear sabotage. Bond is tasked with keeping an oil heiress safe, only to discover she may not be the one who needs saving. The twist doesn’t surprise. The pacing doesn’t help. Pierce Brosnan, in his third outing, holds the center capably. He’s slick, well-tailored, and less stiff than usual. But the film surrounds him with too much: MI6 subplots, family backstories, scientists with two lines of dialogue, and Denise Richards as nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones—a casting choice that’s never really explained, only accepted. By the final act, the plot is dragging multiple characters behind it like loose luggage. Still, the film does offer Bond some striking scenery. The globe-hopping is a plus, with sequences filmed in Spain, Azerbaijan, and Istanbul, giving the illusion of scale even when the story stays flat. There’s style, and the occasional flash of momentum, but it never quite locks into focus. The elements are all there. They just don’t connect with much force.

A strange and lovely little film—warm, sharp, and just eccentric enough to feel like something passed around in whispers. The World of Henry Orient follows two Manhattan schoolgirls, Val (Tippy Walker) and Gil (Merrie Spaeth), who develop a feverish fixation on a pompous, tightly wound concert pianist named Henry Orient. Played by Peter Sellers in full nervous peacock mode, he’s a womanizer, a fraud, and a walking nervous breakdown. But for all his scene-stealing, he’s barely the main character. The film belongs to the girls. And they’re a delight. Socially adrift but creatively unstoppable, they traipse through Central Park and midtown side streets like they’re the stars of an unpublished novel. They invent imaginary backstories, speak in code, and scribble down operas in which they are both heroine and savior. Their mischief masks deeper cracks—Val’s home is elegant and sterile, run by an emotionally absent mother (Angela Lansbury, icily perfect), while Gil’s is warm but chaotic, held together mostly by love and Tom Bosley. Nora and Nunnally Johnson’s script does something rare: it actually gets the rhythm of teenage girlhood. The friendship feels specific, instinctive, and a little unhinged in all the right ways. Walker and Spaeth aren’t professional actors, but they’re exactly what the film needs—bright, fast, and oddly touching, even when they’re just goofing off in matching trench coats. There’s a bump, though. A recurring gag involving fake Eastern accents and conical hats—played for laughs, but clumsy and dated in a way that yanks you out of the moment. Especially strange, since the target of the impression isn’t even Asian. Still, it’s a charming piece of oddball nostalgia. A coming-of-age film that skips the Big Lessons and leans instead into the magic of codependent adolescence. And Sellers, when he does show up, is as unhinged and operatic as the girls imagine him to be.

Count me among the 90 percent of humanity that’s a sucker for stories about eccentric underdogs with obsessive, oddly specific passions. The World’s Fastest Indian is one of those: a warm, offbeat biopic about Burt Munro (Anthony Hopkins), a motorcycle-obsessed New Zealander with a garage full of tools, a head full of dreams, and a heart that’s—well, literally giving out on him. Burt’s fixation is the Indian motorcycle, which he’s been modifying for decades to go not just fast, but record-breakingly fast. He’s already made a name for himself in Australia and New Zealand, but that’s not enough. For true validation, there’s only one destination: the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, Mecca for anyone chasing a land-speed record. Of course, getting there is half the movie—and nearly all the charm. Hopkins plays Munro as a walking contradiction: stubborn but genial, modest but quietly audacious. He mumbles, tinkers, charms, and barrels forward like a man on borrowed time—which he is. His cross-country trek through the U.S. has the gentle absurdity of a travelogue stitched together from diner booths, roadside motels, and baffled strangers who don’t quite know what to make of him. Then comes the Salt Flats, and the film shifts gears. The racing sequences aren’t overblown—they’re clean, bright, and just kinetic enough to make your heart speed up with his. The film never tries to overinflate itself. It’s a celebration of perseverance over spectacle, of grit over grandeur. A simple, sturdy story about a man who refused to sit still. And by the end, you kind of want to stand up and cheer.

Lance Clayton (Robin Williams) is a failed novelist moonlighting as a high school poetry teacher. His class is sparsely attended, under threat of cancellation, and his writing career is equally grim—he hasn’t published so much as a paragraph. His best friend and colleague, Mike (Henry Simmons), casually lands a story in The New Yorker on his first try, and Lance takes the blow with the quiet despair of a man used to finishing last. At home, things are somehow worse. His teenage son, Kyle (Daryl Sabara), is an open sewer of a human being—sex-obsessed, casually hateful, and committed to offending everyone in earshot. He drops slurs like punchlines, hates all music, and seems to exist solely to make other people miserable. And yet Lance, despite all instinct and evidence, loves the kid. Maybe because he’s his son. Maybe because there’s no one else who will. He’s also dating Claire, a beautiful fellow teacher who treats their relationship like a confidential memo. She refuses to go public, and Lance floats through their romance with the same mixture of disbelief and caution that defines the rest of his life. He’s surrounded by people who ignore him, tolerate him, or forget he’s there. And then, everything changes. It wouldn’t be fair to say how—World’s Greatest Dad pivots hard into black comedy territory, borrowing a structural turn from Heathers but stripping it of its gloss. What follows is darker, grainier, and far more acidic. The satire cuts deeper because it never stops to soften the blow. Writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait has something real to say about opportunism, grief, and the strange ways people decide who’s worth admiring. Williams gives one of his most quietly devastating performances. No grandstanding, no gooey life lessons—just a man crushed under the weight of unmet potential and stunned by what people finally notice him for. This is a pitch-black, deeply uncomfortable film—and it’s also one of the most interesting things he ever did.

A clever and candy-colored Disney entry, Wreck-It Ralph might not have Pixar’s emotional calibration, but it more than makes up for it with speed, imagination, and a surplus of charm. Ralph (voiced with sweet exasperation by John C. Reilly) is the designated villain in an old-school arcade game that looks a lot like Donkey Kong. He’s been smashing buildings and getting tossed off rooftops for thirty years—and he’s sick of it. All he wants is to win a medal for once, maybe be the hero. Trouble is, he’s not coded that way. So he does what any glitch-aware video game character would do after hours: he abandons his game and goes rogue, crossing into neighboring machines while the arcade sleeps. It’s Toy Story for the joystick crowd, complete with game-jumping logic and retro cameos. The most vibrant detour takes him to Sugar Rush, a sickly-sweet racing game soaked in pink frosting and gumdrop geometry, where he meets Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman, gleefully sharp), a glitch with her own aspirations of racing legitimacy. The story is brisk, the jokes fly, and the digital world-building is genuinely inventive. Some emotional beats are plugged in with default settings—this isn’t aiming for Wall-E pathos—but it’s hard to complain when the pacing’s this lively and the visuals this bright. It’s more an energy drink than a meal, but it goes down easy. Wreck-It Ralph might not rank among Disney’s finest, but it’s an immensely likable ride through a world where loyalty matters, glitches have potential, and even a wrecking ball gets to dream.

Like many spoofs before it, Wrongfully Accused hurls every gag it can think of at the screen and hopes something sticks. But unlike Airplane!, The Naked Gun, or Hot Shots!—all of which had me giggling start to finish—this one mostly thuds. The hit rate is low, the desperation is high, and you can almost see the flop sweat forming behind every punchline. It’s not for lack of effort. It’s for lack of inspiration. Still, I have to admit: the bits that work tend to lodge in the brain with the persistence of better comedies. I think of the scene where Ryan Harrison (Leslie Nielsen) is chased by a train—not along the tracks, but by the train itself. It derails, pivots, stalks him like a bloodhound. At one point, Harrison thinks he’s safe, only to have the train peek out from behind a boulder. That’s funny. That’s inspired lunacy. The rest, though, is a slog. As you might guess from the protagonist’s name, the targets here are The Fugitive and Patriot Games. And sure, those are ripe for parody. Nielsen, once again, brings his deadpan A-game to material that barely qualifies as a B-minus. He commits—he always does—but even he can’t resuscitate every limp visual pun and tired innuendo. Overall, the movie is a mess, but it’s not without its moments. If you’re a Nielsen completist, surely there’s some fun in watching him sprint through this nonsense with total conviction. I just wish the movie around him gave him more to work with.