Film Buff Musings

A glossy thriller that ultimately lacks thrills, this film drags through its 99 minutes with half-baked intrigue and disjointed plotting. Katie Holmes plays Katie, a graduate student crushed under intense academic pressure and teetering on the edge of a breakdown. To make matters worse—or perhaps stranger—her long-lost ex-boyfriend, Embry (Charlie Hunnam), who vanished two years ago, now seems to be haunting her, fleetingly appearing in the distance in public places. Is he a phantom of her frayed nerves, or is something more sinister at play? The film toys with this question but never commits, as the story unfolds in stilted fits, with no rhythm or tension to sustain the suspense. The twist ending, when it arrives, feels flimsy and unearned. Benjamin Bratt, as the weary detective investigating Katie’s claims, delivers such a disengaged performance that you almost wonder if he realizes he’s in a thriller. Holmes, to her credit, does what she can with a thinly sketched role, but she ultimately comes off more like the ghost than she does the haunted. While this film boasts polished production values and a cast of recognizable faces, it amounts to little more than a big shiny ball of nothing. A stylish but lifeless snoozer.

The monsters don’t play along. That’s the trick. Dracula is still Lugosi’s stone-faced nobleman with a taste for necks and long pauses. Frankenstein’s Monster thuds around on pure muscle memory, Glenn Strange dragging his feet like he’s halfway through a second shift. And Lon Chaney Jr. sweats and snarls his way through lycanthropy like a man personally offended by the moon. No winks, no comic adjustments. Just horror, unchanged and non-negotiable. Then Abbott and Costello show up—two men clearly not briefed on the genre they’ve wandered into. Costello plays a freight handler who discovers his latest shipment includes a coffin with Dracula in it. A second crate holds Frankenstein’s Monster, currently offline and tucked into a wax museum like it’s just another mannequin. Dracula, never one to sit idle, plans to reboot the Monster with a fresh brain—Costello’s, ideally. Abbott, clinging to procedural logic, mostly shouts at whatever’s nearby. Costello replies with escalating disbelief. That’s the rhythm. The plot is barely more than a delivery system, but it moves quickly and knows when to duck. What makes it tick is Universal’s decision to bring back the original monsters, fully intact. These aren’t parodies—they’re franchise veterans playing it as straight as ever. That’s what lets the comedy work. Abbott and Costello aren’t mocking horror clichés; they’re reacting to actual horror performances that refuse to acknowledge they’re in a comedy. Some gags repeat. A few stall out. But the central dynamic—two vaudevillians fumbling through a world that takes itself dead seriously—keeps it upright.

A children’s movie you can spot as a knockoff before you even press play—like picking up a cheap toy and pretending to be shocked when it snaps in half. Complaining you’ve been shortchanged feels redundant. But even by the forgiving standards of talking dog fare, this one digs deeper than most. The plot: a brainy kid stumbles onto a secret chemical swiped from his uncle’s lab. One careless experiment later, his dog turns invisible and—because why stop there—develops a telepathic talent for wisecracks. Naturally, the bumbling crooks who lost the chemical in the first place come sniffing around to get it back, bringing with them the usual pratfalls, fart jokes, and at least one banana peel in the right place at the right time. The cheap-looking production pads itself out with a few schoolyard bully scenes and half-hearted chases before it remembers to roll the credits. The only flicker of novelty is in the casting, if you squint: fans of The Office might pause, momentarily startled, to spot Robert R. Shafer—Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration himself—taking a break from the walk-in freezers to chase a CGI canine through suburban yards. It’s faintly amusing in a “what’s he doing here?” way, but that’s about it. Even by the loose rules of invisible, wisecracking dog cinema, this scrapes the bottom. There aren’t many worse ways to spend 90 minutes, even with kids in the room. Recommendation: hide the remote, and read a book.

There’s every reason this should’ve been cloying. The setup practically begs for sap: a wealthy man-child befriends a sad, strange kid and learns to care about something other than himself. It’s the kind of logline that usually arrives pre-soaked in treacle. But About a Boy dodges all of it. It’s funny, sharp, and full of heart that never feels store-bought. The characters aren’t types—they’re odd, flawed, and completely watchable. And their redemption arcs, against all odds, actually make sense. Hugh Grant, in what may very well be the best performance of his career, plays Will Freeman—a terminally idle bachelor coasting on royalties from a Christmas song his father wrote decades ago. Will has never worked a day in his life and doesn’t plan to anytime soon. He spends his time curating meaningless relationships and practicing emotional detachment. Then he meets Marcus—twelve, awkward, kind-hearted to a fault, and completely unequipped for the social minefield of adolescence. Played by a very young Nicholas Hoult, Marcus is too weird to blend in and too sincere to fake it. They collide under false pretenses—Will fakes fatherhood to date single mothers, Marcus sees Will as a potential fix for his depressed mom (Toni Collette). Neither plan works. But what happens instead is something better: they become, reluctantly and then completely, necessary to each other. Marcus pulls Will out of his bubble of self-regard and into something that resembles a life. Will teaches Marcus how to survive middle school without losing every ounce of dignity. There’s a plot here, but the heart of the film is in the mess—watching two people who don’t quite know how to be human slowly figure it out together. The supporting performances are lovely—Collette as the exhausted, overly earnest mother, Rachel Weisz as the first woman Will might actually like for more than ten minutes—but the real chemistry is between Grant and Hoult. Somehow, this strange little bond, born out of mutual manipulation and social desperation, ends up feeling honest. Even moving. About a Boy is the kind of film you want to live inside. Not just visit—move in, kick off your shoes, stay awhile. This is a funny movie without being brittle, warm without tipping into syrup, and sharp enough to understand that growing up rarely follows a straight line. The sentiment works because it never feels forced.

It’s remarkable how few films know how to end. Fewer still find a way to stop—cleanly, quietly, without speech or ceremony—and still leave you gutted. About Schmidt does. I won’t tell you how. Just that it’s wordless, sudden, and it floors you. A single image, and you see it all: who this man is, what he’s been holding in, and why it still aches—even if most of his life barely made a ripple. Jack Nicholson, in one of his most unadorned late-career performances, plays Warren Schmidt, a freshly retired insurance man already fading from view. One of the first scenes has him alone in a sterile office, watching the second hand crawl toward five. Forty years on the job, and this is the sendoff: a cardboard box, a handshake, and a room that already belongs to someone else. Home doesn’t offer much more. His wife talks too much, his daughter keeps him at arm’s length, and retirement reveals itself as one long stretch of beige nothing. Out of boredom—or inertia—he signs up to sponsor a child in Africa after seeing an ad on TV. He’s told to write letters. So he does. These become the film’s narration: rambling monologues of regret and complaint, addressed to a six-year-old who probably can’t read and certainly won’t care. He writes about his wife, who just bought a high-end RV he didn’t want. Then she dies. No warning, no buildup—just gone. The camper becomes his escape plan. He hits the road, headed for his daughter’s wedding, which he disapproves of entirely. Her fiancé (Dermot Mulroney, spectacularly repellent) sells waterbeds and wears a mullet, and Schmidt can’t understand how this is her future. She doesn’t want him there. He shows up anyway. The road trip doesn’t heal him. It offers no wisdom. Just motel carpets, tourist traps, and a visit to his childhood home—which has become a tire shop. At one point, he tries returning to work. They’ve moved on without blinking. The film doesn’t pity him, or punish him. It just watches him drift. He doesn’t transform. He doesn’t soften. He just keeps going. What else is there to do? Nicholson plays it low and hollow, without reaching for sympathy. Schmidt isn’t mean, just unmoored. The humor is dry, offbeat, sometimes surreal, but nothing is softened. The laughs don’t clear the air—they cut through it. Alexander Payne, who co-wrote and directed, gets this kind of emotional stall, where nothing moves but something’s clearly going bad underneath. About Schmidt is sad, precise, a little cruel, and strangely gentle. Then it ends. Not with a flourish. With something small. And if you’re not careful, it knocks the air out of you.

Given Hollywood’s murky standards for historical accuracy, this still clocks in at maybe a two out of five—but I digress. The title promises lunacy: Lincoln, mid-Gettysburg Address, flinging an axe through a vampire mid-air. That movie doesn’t exist. This one does—and it plays it almost entirely straight. The concept is pulpy, the execution weirdly dutiful. It opens with young Abe witnessing his mother’s death—poisoned, he’s told, by a creature of the night. Years later, fueled by vengeance and armed with righteous cheekbones, he trains under Henry Sturges (Dominic Cooper), a vampire with a past and a moral code. Cue montages, silver-tipped axes, and a steadily growing pile of bodies. Abe moves to Springfield, picks up law, politics, and Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and tries to build a life. But the vampires—led by plantation overlord Adam (Rufus Sewell)—have other plans. They’re not just lurking; they’re embedded. Feeding on the enslaved. Stoking war from the shadows. The Civil War becomes a proxy conflict between the living and the undead. There’s no satire, no smirk, no Confederate bloodsuckers aside from vague Southern slaveowners—like the filmmakers tiptoed around actual historical figures for fear of offending anyone still clinging to the Lost Cause. You expect irreverence. You get a brooding Lincoln in a trench coat, jumping off trains in slow motion. The tone’s all wrong. It plays like a prestige drama that wandered into the wrong universe and started slashing vampires out of obligation. The action has its moments: axe-fu on horseback, flaming trestle fights, vampires vanishing into ash. But it’s all momentum, no spark. You wait for it to break form. To laugh, to twitch, to bare a satirical fang. Nothing. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has the bones of a cult classic—but it stands there, straight-faced, shiny, stiff. All premise, no pulse.

An over-the-top carnival of a movie featuring a scene where rock god David Bowie sings and dances atop a giant typewriter. This film has such an unrelenting eye for style that you might just call it visual gluttony. The sets are so vividly colored and intricately detailed that they practically scream for attention. But this sensory overload, while dazzling, can also be a double-edged sword. When paired with hyperkinetic cinematography and staging, it often left me feeling dizzy and disoriented. Still, when the film can catch its breath and find its rhythm, it becomes wildly—almost recklessly—delightful. The real draw here isn’t the plot or even the visuals—it’s the trifecta of rock royalty: David Bowie, Ray Davies, and Sade Adu. Their presence is magnetic, and their contributions to the soundtrack are spectacular. The music, an intricately polished blend of rock and jazz, shines brightest on Bowie’s title track—a joyous, slightly offbeat anthem. Bowie also delivers one of the film’s most memorable performances as a devil-may-care advertising executive, serving as a seductive mentor to Colin (Eddie O’Connell), a young photographer drawn into the glittering but soul-sucking world of commercial photography. There’s Bowie offering champagne-soaked luxury with one hand while also pulling Colin closer to artistic bankruptcy with the other. Why he doesn’t resist is he’s under the spell of Crepe (Patsy Kensit), a stunning muse but the only way to her heart is through materialism, meaning Colin must have access to cash and fast. This romantic subplot, while well-drawn out, ultimately doesn’t quite land thanks to the lack of chemistry between Colin and Crepe—beneath the glitzy surface, it seems more lukewarm at its core rather than electric. But even with that fundamental flaw, the film’s unapologetic madness—its chaotic, glorious excess—is difficult to resist. Ultimately, a wild, messy ride—sometimes brilliant, sometimes nausea-inducing—but never dull and absolutely unforgettable.

A sturdy mystery-thriller that could’ve used a tighter grip on its pacing. It drifts as often as it delivers, but when it locks in, it works—and Clint Eastwood’s presence alone almost makes up the difference. One glare from him could strip paint, and here it’s aimed squarely at the halls of power. Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, an aging, high-tech cat burglar working the mansion of billionaire Walter Sullivan (E.G. Marshall, in his final role). He’s mid-heist when an unplanned guest walks in: the President of the United States (Gene Hackman), drunk and tangled up with Sullivan’s much younger wife (Melora Hardin). What starts as clumsy seduction turns violent. Then the Secret Service storms in and shoots her dead. The Chief of Staff (Judy Davis) arrives within minutes, takes in the scene, and orders it staged as a burglary gone wrong. Conveniently for them, there was an actual burglar on-site. Less conveniently, he escapes with a key piece of evidence. From there, it’s a chase. The feds work to pin the murder on Luther; Luther works to stay ahead of them and reconnect with his estranged daughter, Kate (Laura Linney), without getting her caught in the crossfire. The setup is far-fetched, but it’s the right kind of far-fetched—one that lets you savor the mechanics of a man outwitting an entire political machine. The problem is in the tempo: the thrills come in bursts, with stretches in between that feel padded rather than tense. Still, the cast keeps it steady. Hackman is all oily charm, Davis could cut glass, Linney gives Kate a wary warmth, and Eastwood moves through it like a man who’s been casing rooms for decades. It’s flawed, but it works often enough—watchable, sometimes gripping, the way stories about power, cover-ups, and the wrong man in the wrong place tend to be.

An amiable, if slight, entry in the realm of teen sex comedies, this film might even strike a chord of catharsis for students grappling with the pressures of higher education. The premise has a certain mischievous charm: Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long), a resourceful but perpetually underachieving high school senior, is rejected by every college he applies to. Rather than disappoint his overbearing parents, he hatches a desperate scheme—he invents a college: the South Harmon Institute of Technology. He even goes so far as to procure a dilapidated mental hospital, hastily dressing it up as a makeshift campus, and enlists his friend Sherman (Jonah Hill) to craft a website. However, the website is so convincing that it inadvertently lures hundreds of students into signing up. Like Bartleby, they too were deemed unfit for more traditional schools. This is a premise that should have been ripe as a tongue-in-cheek takedown of the rigid expectations foisted upon young adults. Instead, it prefers to set its sights on broad comedy and cheap laughs. The result is a film that feels just as underachieving as its protagonist. At least Justin Long’s laid-back charm makes Bartleby an easy character to root for. Jonah Hill, here in an early role, delivers some of the film’s few genuinely funny moments with a neurotic energy that serves as a good counterpoint to Long’s smooth charisma. Lewis Black, as the curmudgeonly dean of the fictional college, brings his signature brand of volcanic fury. The rest of the cast, however, is left adrift in paper-thin roles—Blake Lively reduced to the token love interest and Maria Thayer to the obligatory quirky best friend. Despite its flaws, there’s a certain breezy charm to it. It’ll make you smile much sooner than laugh, but sometimes that’s enough.

Plot-wise, this is your standard Jackie Chan concoction—a fizzy cocktail of spy conspiracy and slapstick comedy, stirred vigorously by Chan’s irrepressible charisma and the kind of fight choreography that feels less like combat and more like a kinetic physics demonstration. Chan plays Buck, a mild-mannered exercise equipment salesman who somehow stumbles into a sprawling conspiracy that catapults him from the clamorous labyrinth of Hong Kong to the sun-dappled, bustling streets of Istanbul. It’s a plot that feels like it was assembled in a rush from leftover spy movie tropes, but in a Jackie Chan movie, you don’t always mind—plot is merely the thin thread holding the action together: the stunts, the fight choreography, and the signature martial-arts-inspired slapstick. The film’s most memorable sequence feels like a playful wink at Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, as Chan finds himself evading attackers on the narrow streets of Istanbul—completely nude. He scrambles to preserve his modesty with whatever comes to hand: garbage can lids, laundry fluttering on lines, and an assortment of conveniently placed props. This film came later in Chan’s career, when his stunts were becoming less daring and less energetic by necessity. While we’re seeing Chan rest on his laurels a little bit, and there’s not much to bet on with the plot, there’s still plenty here to please Jackie Chan’s fans.

Jim Carrey doesn’t just play Ace Ventura—he devours him, spits him back out, and dances on the remains. He’s all giddy elasticity, a human cartoon that shouldn’t work in live action but somehow does—or almost does. Watching him twitch and twist his way through this featherweight mystery is like seeing a Tasmanian devil learn to walk upright: it’s a marvel of physical comedy. The film itself, however, stands in the corner looking sheepish, while Carrey flails around as the life of a party no one else in the cast seems to know they’re attending. The supporting actors mostly stand aside, expressionless, as if waiting for him to finish up so they can deliver their next line. The premise—a pet detective tasked with recovering a kidnapped dolphin—is just ridiculous enough to work. A shame the movie can’t decide if it wants to play along or slink into the shadows. Its critical failing, however, is Sean Young’s big moment, which involves a “twist” so tasteless it’s as if the filmmakers thought transphobia was the height of wit. Even in 1994, those gags reeked of something sour; today, they’re like digging through a roach-infested trash can. So much of this film is roundly awful, but Carrey… He’s a dynamo—an Energizer Bunny gone feral. You can’t help but chuckle at times as he contorts his way through interrogation scenes or greets strangers with his infamous, over-enunciated “Alllllrighty then!” But Ace Ventura is a movie that doesn’t deserve its star. It coasts entirely on the novelty of Carrey’s performance, and it doesn’t take long before you realize the ride isn’t going anywhere. You might laugh, you might cringe, you might wish you’d watched literally anything else—but for better or worse, you probably won’t forget you saw it.

This sequel edges out the original, though not by much. It opens with a Cliffhanger parody, where Ace Ventura (Jim Carrey) bumbles his way into dropping a raccoon off a mountain—a gag so miscalculated it’s hard to imagine who thought it would work. A raccoon’s death isn’t any funnier than a human’s. But once that ill-advised opener is out of the way, the film finds its footing, delivering some laugh-out-loud moments—more than its predecessor, for my money. Still, the fundamental flaw remains: the comedy is completely lopsided. The supporting cast exists solely as set dressing, their only function to stand aside while Carrey barrels through the film with his rubber-faced, whirlwind antics. This is essentially a one-man show, and while Carrey is a dynamo, the lack of balance makes the humor feel a little thin. There’s one exception: the infamous mechanical rhinoceros scene. Ace, trapped inside the metallic beast, must escape, and the only exit is—of course—through the rhinoceros’s rear end. What follows is a spectacle so ridiculous you might as well call it brilliant: Carrey shrieking, spasming, and contorting as he claws his way out of the rhinoceros’s narrow “birth canal.” Passing tourists look on in mounting awe, convinced they’re witnessing the miracle of a live rhino birth—only to be greeted by the sight of a sweaty, delirious man screaming from the wrong end of nature. The scene works because it finally lets Carrey’s manic energy collide with our universe. The tourists’ stunned reactions are plausible and ground the absurdity in reality. It’s the rare moment in an Ace Ventura film where he feels less like a cartoon character in his own world and more like a bizarre alien navigating ours. But that’s all too little, too late. In the end, leave this for fans of Carrey’s boundless energy. Apart from that one scene, the film never grounds itself well enough to become a true comic masterpiece. It’s a frenzied ride but one that wobbles far too much on unsteady legs.

This made-for-television drama opens with a pastoral scene so idyllic it could hang on the wall of a dentist’s office: an extended family enjoying a sunny outdoor meal, exchanging smiles, and chatting about summer plans on the family farm. But, of course, this syrupy slice of Americana doesn’t last. It ends with a crash on a dirt bike. The victim is Joseph (Mickey Rourke), the eldest son, who ends up in the hospital with his spinal cord irreparably severed. Unwilling to accept his fate as a quadriplegic, Joseph turns to his brother Leon (Ron Howard) with a plea: to end his suffering with a bullet. Leon, torn but devoted, eventually relents, setting off a chain of events that drag him into a grim, plodding march through an arrest and trial. The premise has potential—assisted suicide is a rich topic for cinematic exploration—but this film handles it with all the grace of a wrecking ball. It reduces life with quadriplegia to a bleak, unrelenting nightmare: staring at ceilings, waiting for bedsores, and little else. The movie never pauses to consider the resilience, dignity, or even humor that so many real people in such circumstances discover. Instead, it peddles nihilism so thick and shallow that it borders on irresponsible. That this aired on prime-time television is almost mind-boggling. The producers seem to have been gunning for controversy, but they land squarely in bad taste. Even an over-sweetened, cliché-ridden “inspirational” story would have been preferable to this thoughtless and condescending depiction. For those seeking a darker, more complex take on the subject, The Sea Inside (2004) offers a far more intelligent and humane exploration than this dreck.

The Addams Family is about as good as anyone could have reasonably expected from a movie based on a 1960s sitcom—possibly better, given how easily these adaptations usually go off the rails. The set design alone is enough to recommend it: a lavish Gothic playground outfitted with trapdoors, cobwebs, and a color palette that looks like it was filtered through dried blood. Tim Burton was offered the job but passed to make Batman Returns, which may be the most Addams-esque detail of all. The plot—something about a long-lost Uncle Fester, possibly amnesiac, possibly an imposter—is functional but forgettable. It’s the framework holding up the real appeal: deadpan one-liners, gleeful morbidity, and the most perfect casting to ever emerge from a project with this many cobwebs. Raul Julia plays Gomez like a debonair madman, Anjelica Huston glides through the film like a haunted perfume ad, and Christopher Lloyd contorts himself into a wholly unhinged Fester. But the masterstroke is Christina Ricci as Wednesday, a pint-sized nihilist with a voice like a guillotine. The script relies heavily on puns—many of them groan-worthy, most of them on brand—but it’s the visual comedy and the throwaway gags that stick: a swordfight over breakfast, a school play turned bloodbath, a family séance held with full theatrical commitment. Sonnenfeld shoots it all with a steady, affectionate eye, never overselling the joke. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a fully realized one—and that’s rare in adaptations this self-consciously kooky. You don’t watch The Addams Family for the story. You watch it for the pleasure of spending time in a house where electrocution is foreplay and homicide is a family hobby.

That rare sequel that knows exactly what didn’t work the first time and doesn’t bother repeating it. Gone is the muddled inheritance plot; in its place is a cleaner, meaner triptych of storylines—each playing to the franchise’s real strength: gleeful, deadpan cruelty. The hook is a new baby, Pubert—rosy cheeks, Gomez’s mustache, and the general temperament of a cursed Victorian doll. His arrival sends Wednesday and Pugsley (Christina Ricci and Jimmy Workman) into a homicidal tailspin, leading to their banishment to a relentlessly cheerful summer camp run by WASP caricatures straight from a sitcom pilot. There, the film peaks with a warped Thanksgiving pageant featuring Ricci’s Wednesday torching colonial myths and a set made of crepe paper. The line between social satire and juvenile revenge fantasy dissolves completely—and that’s the point. Meanwhile, Joan Cusack shows up as Debbie, a woman with one goal (Fester’s money) and one method (murder). She pretends to be a nanny, seduces him, and makes repeated attempts to kill him, none of which the Addamses take personally. She’s essentially a Lifetime villain dropped into a comedy and plays it straight through. Ricci remains the franchise’s secret weapon. Her flat affect and surgical line readings cut through every scene like wire. The rest of the cast orbits her with practiced indifference, reacting to violence and lunacy with all the urgency of checking the mail. There’s no attempt to deepen the mythology or reframe the characters—just a course correction. The jokes are sharper, the satire better aimed, and the tone more consistent. It’s a sequel that stops pretending it needs heart and instead finds its rhythm in polite menace. Not quite subversive, but confident enough not to flinch.

This movie wants to be a dark, twisted comedy, but it stumbles over one major obstacle: Meg Ryan. Don’t get me wrong—she’s America’s sweetheart, the human equivalent of a Hallmark card, effortlessly charming in anything fluffy. But here, in a role crying out for venom, she feels like a daisy planted in a poison ivy patch. Instead of bringing the edge the film desperately needs, she exudes sweetness like it’s leaking out of her pores, almost apologizing for her presence in a movie about stalking. It’s as if the producers, terrified of alienating her rom-com fanbase, decided to put her in a “dark” role but bubble-wrapped the edges to keep it safe. Ryan’s Maggie joins Matthew Broderick’s Sam, an astronomer whose picturesque life is shattered when his childhood sweetheart Linda (Kelly Preston) trades him in for a French restaurateur (Tchéky Karyo, oozing smarm). Devastated, Sam spirals into unhinged obsession, squatting in an abandoned building across the street from his ex’s new love nest and turning their apartment into his personal live-streamed soap opera. He’s soon joined by Maggie, Anton’s equally scorned ex, and the two form an unlikely alliance—a screwball comedy duo lost in a Hitchcockian premise they clearly don’t grasp. The problem is tone. The film wants to be edgy but pulls its punches, coating its deeply creepy premise in candy-colored gloss and playful montages that pretend Sam and Maggie’s antics are just “quirky.” And yet, somehow, Broderick and Ryan keep it watchable. He’s all boyish, neurotic charm; she’s magnetic despite being a glaring tonal mismatch. Together, they manage to steer this misfire away from total disaster. Ultimately, Addicted to Love is a movie too timid to fully embrace its darkness or dig into the implications of its premise. It’s a stalking story that wants you to think it’s a rom-com—a mix as unsettling as it is occasionally amusing.

Adult Best Friends plays like a platonic breakup movie disguised as a buddy comedy—less about shared laughs than the slow, quiet process of drifting apart. Written by and starring Katie Corwin and Delaney Buffett (with Buffett directing), it’s a small, sometimes scrappy film that hits more notes than it misses, even when the seams start to show. Katie and Delaney, playing slightly fictionalized versions of themselves, are best friends inching toward thirty with wildly diverging ideas of what adulthood looks like. The rift, though never openly discussed, is clear: Katie’s boyfriend, John (Mason Gooding)—thoughtful, available, and almost suspiciously tolerant of Delaney’s thinly veiled disdain. When John proposes, Katie says yes, then promptly avoids telling Delaney by corralling her into a girls’ weekend back in their hometown. It’s framed as a sentimental detour. It’s really a delay tactic. The Airbnb they rent is its own subplot, run by a rule-happy landlord who lives in the basement and hovers like a sitcom side character who never got the spinoff. He’s genuinely funny—played big, but never overplayed—and his scenes add just the right touch of chaos to break up the emotional claustrophobia. The acting can feel a bit green, and the whole thing has a faintly handmade quality—loose, a little uneven—but that looseness works in its favor. There’s a real earnestness here, and it helps smooth over the moments that feel less refined. The ending ties things up with a bow it probably doesn’t need, but the emotional notes hit. It’s a film about a kind of intimacy that doesn’t come with instructions—and how sometimes the hardest thing isn’t the falling-out, but pretending you’re still all-in.

Brad Anderson (Keith Coogan) hits the teenage jackpot when his parents hire Chris Parker (Elisabeth Shue)—the prettiest girl in school—to babysit. His obnoxious buddy Daryl (Anthony Rapp) invites himself over for what promises to be a boring night of ice cream and bad TV. But fate has other plans. Chris gets a frantic call from her best friend Brenda (Penelope Ann Miller), who has stranded herself in downtown Chicago. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Chris drags the kids along to rescue Brenda, turning what should have been a simple operation into a screwball odyssey. The mishaps start out strong, tapping into something genuinely fun—a babysitter and her charges navigating the wilds of a big, dangerous city. It’s a clever premise, and the early scenes have some sly charm as the group faces big-city dangers. But halfway through, the film veers into implausibility, with Chris and the kids stumbling onto a blues club stage to sing their way out of trouble, then scaling a skyscraper. Until that dive into slapstick, there’s enough here to amuse if your expectations are low. Elisabeth Shue is effortlessly likable, and the film’s unmistakably 1980s vibes and adventurous spirit lend it a warm, nostalgic glow. If you’re looking for Ferris Bueller-level escapism, you might be left wanting, but as breezy, throwaway entertainment, it’s a harmless ride.

Some films earn cult status slowly, gathering stray admirers over the years. Buckaroo Banzai showed up already wearing the jacket. It’s a pulpy sci-fi comic book hallucination—clunky, uneven, occasionally baffling, and utterly singular. Watching it feels less like following a story and more like flipping through issues from a comic book series no one bothered to finish—half superhero origin, half alien invasion, with the margins scribbled over by stoned physics majors. Peter Weller stars as Buckaroo Banzai, a half-Japanese neurosurgeon/rock star/particle physicist/race car driver who splits his time between lecturing at think tanks and battling interdimensional warlords in a band with his backup scientists, the Hong Kong Cavaliers. He’s stoic, unreadable, and cool in that overdetermined, affectless way that seems to come pre-packaged with cult status—like Spock got a perm and learned rhythm guitar. The plot—if that’s what we’re calling it—involves the Oscillation Overthruster, a gizmo that lets matter slip through solid surfaces and into the elusive 8th Dimension. Buckaroo gives it a go by launching his rocket car through a mountain and returns with gelatinous alien stowaways clinging to the undercarriage like interdimensional barnacles. Turns out they’re from Planet 10. And not all of them are friendly. Enter Dr. Emilio Lizardo—once a brilliant physicist, now a feral asylum patient possessed by John Whorfin, a fascist alien war criminal exiled to our dimension. John Lithgow, in one of the most unhinged performances ever committed to film (and remember, this is John Lithgow we’re talking about), plays Lizardo/Whorfin like he’s channeling Mussolini by way of Looney Tunes. He shrieks, he snarls, he limps, he rants in a strangled Italian accent—and he’s clearly having the time of his life. So am I. The President appears strapped to a spinal suspension rig. The aliens are all named John—every single one. (“John Smallberries.” “John Bigboote”—pronounced “Bigboo-tay,” as he is forced to constantly remind people.) There’s a watermelon wired to lab equipment. No one explains it. The film doesn’t so much build a world as pelt you with one, piece by piece, like confetti from a malfunctioning dimension cannon. It’s messy. Gloriously so. The tone ricochets—solemn sci-fi one minute, bug-eyed lunacy the next. Some gags land with pinpoint precision; others crash into the plot like space junk. And yet, there’s a kind of lunatic cohesion to the madness. Every frame seems to dare you to stop watching—and many people probably did. But for the rest of us, there’s something irresistible about a film that keeps yanking one loony idea after another out of its hat like Mary Poppins on a sugar bender. Is it good? Not exactly. But it’s weird, it’s original, and it commits to every second of its own madness. Which is more than you can say for most movies. Buckaroo Banzai may barely dip into the 8th Dimension, but it’s taken up permanent residence in the realm of cult legend.

Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood is a dream of a hero. He’s sly, swaggering, impossibly good-looking, and illustriously masculine—even in green tights and a feathered cap. He’s utterly infectious as he banters, duels, and leaps through Sherwood Forest with a rakish grin. The film hits its stride right away, as Robin assembles his Merry Men—each encounter bringing a delightful mix of comedy and bravado—whether he’s sparring with Little John on a log or outwitting Friar Tuck into piggybacking him across a river. When he’s trading barbs with the delightfully slimy Prince John (Claude Rains) or matching wits with Basil Rathbone’s icy Sir Guy of Gisbourne, the film effervesces with wit and energy. This film is vastly entertaining, but it stumbles in only one arena: the romance. While Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (as Maid Marian) look like a dream together, their love scenes are the film’s weak link—they feel curiously anemic next to the rollicking action. De Havilland does fine otherwise as Lady Marian—her transformation from aloof aristocrat to brave ally is an engaging turn for the character—but she doesn’t seem to share much chemistry with Flynn. Nonetheless, this is a fantastic adventure film. From the famous archery contest to the daring prison escape orchestrated by Marian and the Merry Men, the film moves with a breathless pace, throwing in one dazzling Technicolor set piece after another. A pure escapist delight that refuses to grow old.

A sugar-dusted throwback that plays like a Saturday morning cartoon inflated to feature length, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle is thin, loopy, and often aimless—but hard to dislike. The once-beloved moose and squirrel have been stewing in syndication since 1964, but get yanked out of animated limbo when Cold War has-beens Fearless Leader (Robert De Niro) and his sidekicks Boris (Jason Alexander) and Natasha (Rene Russo) reemerge with a scheme to hypnotize America through bad television. In a moment of logic that barely qualifies as logic, the FBI decides the best countermeasure is to reanimate two cartoon relics. Still hand-drawn and cheerfully out of sync with the real world, Rocky and Bullwinkle cross the dimensional divide without fanfare. The plot mostly serves as a delivery system for puns, pratfalls, and slapstick gags—many of them pulled straight from the original series, along with the same narrator voice, still as fond of wordplay as ever. There’s not much momentum, and even less character development, but that hardly feels like a failing. What are we really hoping to uncover about a squirrel in flight goggles? The animation/live-action blend is awkward in places, but the film never stops to worry about it. It’s too busy tossing out one-liners, nudging the audience with half-smiles, and committing fully to its own cartoon logic. It’s not sharp, and it’s certainly not necessary—but it’s breezy, good-natured fun.

The future looks immaculate and functions like a maze. No one’s happy, no one explains anything, and Charlize Theron is here to shoot, somersault, and maybe dismantle a regime—if she can remember why. She’s Æon: assassin, acrobat, rebel in latex. Her orders are simple—eliminate the top man in a walled-off, plague-survivor utopia. But nothing stays simple. The job tilts, the script goes foggy, and suddenly she’s wading through half-erased memories, déjà vu romances, and a government clinging to power through clone cycles and history rewrites. The film looks like it was designed by a team of fashion photographers on sedatives—smooth surfaces, architectural poses, characters arranged like concept art with very vague motivations. Theron plays it deadpan, which works better than you’d think. Emotion would only get in the way of the gravity-defying flips, tranquil line deliveries, and sustained confusion. Her character is grieving, glitching, and maybe reincarnated; best not to ask too many questions. The action is watchable in that mid-2000s slow-mo, wide-angle way. Cities gleam. Grass looks synthetic. One operative has prehensile feet. It’s explained, briefly, and then ignored—just one more oddity in a world where visual novelty trumps logic. There’s a genuine premise buried under the sleek abstraction: humanity survives only through cloning, and the powers that be are too attached to control to restore nature’s course. But the film keeps its big ideas trapped under glass, murmuring them through exposition dumps while the camera circles Charlize Theron in yet another beautifully staged hallway. Theron tries. You can’t say she doesn’t. But she’s acting opposite plot points, not people. The characters are more diagram than personality, the world-building more vibe than function. The movie gestures at identity, autonomy, and historical memory, but not so much as themes—more like visual motifs, glimpsed through frosted plexiglass. Æon Flux isn’t incompetent. Just airless. It moves, it gleams, it avoids meaning with great style. Which makes sense. It started as an avant-garde MTV cartoon and ended up as a screensaver with delusions of depth.

The setup’s there, the shadows are right, and Rita Hayworth smolders—but Affair in Trinidad still lands with a thud. It’s a botched noir, watchable mostly for its surface pleasures: the lighting’s lush, the mood holds, and Hayworth knows exactly how to wear a spotlight. She plays Chris Emery, a nightclub singer in Trinidad and Tobago who gets word that her husband has been found dead—apparently a suicide. But when the police poke around, they discover his skull was cracked before the gun went off. That’s not suicide. That’s murder with punctuation. The prime suspect is Max Fabian (Alexander Scourby), a family friend with a not-so-secret fixation on Chris. The authorities nudge her into playing femme fatale for the greater good: cozy up to Max, turn the heat up, and see what slips out. Meanwhile, her late husband’s brother Steve (Glenn Ford) shows up, full of grief and suspicion, and starts his own side investigation. The plot thickens—or at least simmers—though mostly it just reheats leftovers from Notorious without matching its bite. There are moments worth seeing: Hayworth performs “Trinidad Lady” barefoot, looking every bit the star Columbia promised she’d still be. But the film’s engine sputters. The mystery drags, the tension deflates, and the third act limps along like it forgot where it was going. What should tighten instead unravels, and by the end, it’s hard to care who did what or why. Marketed as a spiritual sequel to Gilda—same leads, same sultry framing—Trinidad doesn’t earn the comparison. It borrows the gloss but forgets the grit. And without grit, noir doesn’t cut.

On the eve of World War I, deep in German-controlled central Africa, a German military raid leaves British missionary Rose (Katharine Hepburn) and her brother Sam (Robert Morley) stranded in the jungle. When Sam succumbs to illness, Rose hitches a ride with Charlie (Humphrey Bogart), a scruffy, gin-soaked captain of the barely seaworthy African Queen. What begins as an uneasy partnership hurtles toward a madcap mission: navigate an “unnavigable” river and blow up a German gunboat with torpedoes improbably cobbled together from Charlie’s surprisingly well-stocked boat. This film was a childhood favorite of mine, and even now, it’s as exhilarating as ever. Sure, Bogart and Hepburn might have been better cast a decade earlier (the poster does everything it can to shave off a few years), but their chemistry absolutely simmers. Watching them bicker, banter, and slowly warm to each other is the heart of the movie. Bogart is the cynical, hard-drinking everyman, Hepburn the stuck-up and proper missionary. Opposites never attracted better than this. They’re magic—not in grand gestures but in the subtle moments: the glances and grudging smiles. Of course, poking holes in the plot is easy—Charlie just happens to have torpedo materials lying around? However, logic isn’t really the point. The joy of this film is to revel in its impossible journey, its even unlikelier romance, and a pair of acting legends who make you believe every wildly implausible second. Who cares about realism when the whole ride feels like a rollercoaster of old-school movie magic?

Every great director deserves at least one film that’s completely unhinged. After Hours is Martin Scorsese’s—a darkly comedic urban nightmare that turns a harmless night out into an odyssey of misfortune and absurdity. Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a meek data entry analyst, begins his descent innocently enough: over coffee, he meets Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), a beguiling and mysterious woman who gives him her number and invites him to her loft. When he arrives, though, it’s her roommate Kiki (Linda Fiorentino) who greets him—a paperweight artist crafting bagels out of plaster. Kiki nonchalantly ropes Paul into helping with her latest project: a paper-mâché sculpture of a man cowering in terror, who, much to Paul’s discomfort, looks disturbingly like him. From there, Paul’s night spirals into an escalating nightmare. Subway fares inexplicably rise, making them just barely out of reach. A sympathetic bartender (John Heard) offers to help but locks himself out of his register, sending Paul to fetch the key—where he’s promptly mistaken for a burglar by suspicious neighbors. Every attempt at progress drags Paul deeper into a surreal, seedy labyrinth, as if the city itself is conspiring to keep him trapped. While the film might seem insubstantial at first glance, it’s charged with sharp, fantastically entertaining dialogue and a plot so twisty and arbitrary it becomes oddly addictive. Does any of this mean anything? Probably not. But meaning isn’t the point. This is Scorsese cutting loose, delivering a heady cocktail of discomfort and delight. A darkly comic gem. A film that’ll keep you guessing—and wincing—until the bitter end.

Forbidden passion, set against the lush but suffocating opulence of 1870s New York. However, this isn’t merely a love story—it’s a study of the steep price paid for either conforming to or rebelling against society’s unyielding rules. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Newland Archer, a man who knows his place as a model gentleman and is engaged to the woman society deems a model lady—May Welland (Winona Ryder), the product of old-money privilege: sweet, simple, and utterly predictable. But then comes Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), May’s cousin, unofficially exiled from high society by scandal. Ellen’s sharp opinions and casual defiance of the suffocating rules of their world make her everything May is not—enigmatic, worldly, and untethered—and Newland is instantly captivated. Martin Scorsese transforms the costume drama into a grand opera, with the camera swirling and sweeping, capturing sidelong glances, subtle flickers of longing and restraint, and every deliberate sumptuous gesture. Day-Lewis conveys Newland’s quiet turmoil as a man suffocating under the weight of his own good breeding. Pfeiffer’s Ellen is luminous, a kind of tragic goddess just out of reach, while Ryder’s seemingly guileless May conceals subtle, manipulative cunning beneath her innocence. Scorsese’s achievement here is remarkable: he turns what might have been another stiff period piece into a biting comedy of manners. The absurdity of a world where propriety outweighs passion is laid bare, but the film never mocks its characters. Instead, it aches for them, caught in a web they didn’t spin and cannot escape.

Age of Summer tries to capture that golden haze of coming-of-age nostalgia, but it fizzles faster than a bonfire at high tide. It has all the right ingredients—beaches, bullies, and first crushes—but the execution feels like watching a Polaroid develop in slow motion, only to realize the picture wasn’t worth taking. Set in 1986, it follows Minnesota (Percy Hynes White), a gangly Midwestern transplant who joins a junior lifeguard program on the California coast. At first, it’s all sun, sand, and potential. He bonds with Woods (Jake Ryan), the smallest kid in the group and an easy target for bullies, and the two form a scrappy underdog alliance that’s genuinely endearing—until the movie inexplicably drops Woods from the story, leaving you wondering if the filmmakers forgot he existed. From there, Minnesota drifts into a half-hearted romance with Brooke (Charlotte Sabina), the requisite blonde dream girl. The film’s most grating misstep is its narration, which over-explains every moment, hammering you with clunky insights about growing up and letting go, as if it doesn’t trust the audience to figure it out. Still, it’s not all bad. The cinematography is luminous, bathing the California coast in warm nostalgia, and there are fleeting moments of genuine charm. But the clichés pile up like driftwood, and the resolution is as weightless as the summer breeze it tries to capture. Like a beach day cut short, Age of Summer leaves you wistful for what could have been.

A mystery that has its claws in you for nearly the entire runtime—right up until an ending that dithers when it ought to deliver. But for once, it’s the road, not the final signpost, that matters: Agnes of God steers its crime and confession into the shadows of a psychological noir, echoing the thornier corners of Hitchcock’s more hardboiled side. Agnes (Meg Tilly), a fragile novice cloistered away in a convent, stands accused of smothering her newborn moments after delivery. Her claim that the child was born of a virgin conception lands her not in prison but under the professional scrutiny of Dr. Martha Livingston (Jane Fonda), a court-appointed psychiatrist who happens to be an ex-Catholic with a deeply buried grudge against the faith she left behind. Livingston, armed with rational explanations and thin patience for miracles, crashes up against Mother Miriam Ruth (Anne Bancroft, in full iron-willed mode), who guards Agnes like a hawk and fears Livingston’s modern science is less diagnosis than quiet exorcism—of both Agnes’ mysteries and her tenuous bond with God. It’s a pressure-cooker of a triangle: a secular investigator, a devout protector, and at its center, a young woman whose buried traumas flicker out one unsettling detail at a time. Tilly, especially, is a revelation—floating between childlike naivety and something far more damaged, with just enough ambiguity that every revelation lands like a confession you’re not sure you wanted to hear. The resolution hedges its bets a bit too politely, but the atmosphere and performances do the heavy lifting. A moody, carefully knotted mystery that loses its nerve in the last breath—yet lingers for how well it toys with belief, doubt, and the little chasm in between.

I once thought the final 20 minutes of this adult fairy tale—Steven Spielberg’s vision shaped from Stanley Kubrick’s original conception—should have been relegated to the cutting room floor. Now, I see them as a profoundly moving, almost operatic coda that’s so heartbreakingly bittersweet I couldn’t quite tell if my tears came from joy or sorrow. (And yes, I literally sobbed like a toddler with a broken toy.) The premise is pure heartbreak dressed in sci-fi drag: David (Haley Joel Osment) is a robot who not only looks like a real boy but also experiences emotion like one. Most strikingly, he’s capable of love. He’s the first of his kind—a prototype in a world of cold, utilitarian machines. Placed with a couple whose son is cryogenically frozen due to a terminal illness, David’s role is simple: be the replacement. However, when the real boy recovers, innocent sibling rivalry erupts, but it quickly spirals into something darker. One child is fragile, flesh and blood; the other, practically indestructible. Unable to cope with the imbalance, his “mother” does the unthinkable: drive David to the woods and abandon him like an unwanted puppy. The scene is devastating—thanks to Osment’s uncanny ability to mimic a machine while making its heartbreak feel shatteringly real. From there, the movie morphs into a neon-lit dystopia. Inspired by Pinocchio, David embarks on a quixotic quest to find the Blue Fairy, convinced she can make him a real boy and win back his mother’s love. Along the way, he teams up with Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a preening, magnetic sex robot with a survival instinct sharper than his wardrobe. Messy and overstimulating at times, this film is also wildly ambitious. Beneath the spectacle lies something raw and haunting: a meditation on love, longing, and the cruel, beautiful futility of being human. A flawed masterpiece, but one that lingers with a bittersweet aftertaste.

A limp, scatterbrained attempt at a Vietnam-era action comedy that can’t figure out whether it wants to be a rollicking buddy romp, a sly exposé of clandestine war profiteering, or an accidental PSA on how not to waste Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. It settles for being none of the above. Downey plays Billy Covington, a civilian helicopter jockey with no interest in combat medals—he prefers stunts for the news cameras. One reckless maneuver later, his license is yanked and, because logic is a scarce resource here, he’s snapped up by Air America: a “civilian” airline discreetly bankrolled by the CIA to fly rice, guns, and just enough heroin to pay off the right people across Laos. Once in country, Billy is paired with Gene Ryack (Gibson), a veteran pilot who’s so familiar with the corruption that he barely bothers to roll his eyes at it anymore. What should be combustible—rogue Americans running dope and dropping bombs off the books—just sort of floats by in a haze of underwritten banter and midair slapstick. Gibson and Downey Jr. are game, but they’ve got nothing to play with except stale jabs at the brass, a few low-flying stunts, and the kind of forced quips that get stapled onto scripts after a test screening tanks. The stakes are microscopic, the action feels imported from a cheaper movie, and any attempt at anti-war cynicism gets drowned out by the film’s urge to be “fun.” The real smuggling operation isn’t the heroin—it’s funneling two bankable stars through ninety minutes of filler and pretending it adds up to a comedy. File under: a crash course in squandering charm, budget, and plot, all at cruising altitude.

At this point in the Air Bud franchise, it’s less about what sport the dog plays and more about which ones are left. Baseball gets the nod this time, and the results are more or less what you’d expect from the fourth entry in a series built on the image of a golden retriever with professional-level hand-eye coordination. Josh (Kevin Zegers) goes off to college, which leaves his younger sister Andrea (Caitlin Wachs) feeling abandoned and vaguely melancholy. Her solution is to join the school baseball team. Buddy, naturally, tags along and discovers yet another hidden talent. He chases down fly balls, trots the bases, and—in a scene that defies logic, physics, and probably several safety codes—swings a bat with his mouth. The film doesn’t explain how; it just cuts to the outfield and pretends it happened. There’s also a mystery about disappearing dogs, including Buddy’s own pups, but it’s handled with such minimal interest you almost forget it’s happening. The script mostly just nudges the characters from scene to scene, and the emotional throughlines—Andrea missing her brother, finding her footing—are gestured at rather than developed. But you don’t show up to the fourth Air Bud movie for character work. You show up for the dog, and Buddy is a good dog. It’s silly. It’s thin. It’s kind of likable. The movie sticks to its assignment: fuzzy cuteness, canine competence, easy stakes, light athleticism, all at an easily digestible ninety minutes. There are worse ways to burn an afternoon—for example Air Bud: Golden Receiver—especially if you’re watching this with delightfully squealing toddlers.

By the fifth Air Bud movie, the franchise is operating on reflex. This time, Buddy plays volleyball—because there was nothing else left—and once again gets pulled into a tournament as a last-minute substitute. The film remembers it’s about a sports-playing dog around the same time the characters do: “Oh right, isn’t that dog that’s been lurking around supposed to be useful?” Most of the runtime follows Andrea (now played by Katija Pevec), who’s heartbroken that her best friend is moving to California—having previously been heartbroken that her brother went off to college, which led her to take up baseball. Here, she chooses volleyball. Because Americans will do anything, including try new sports, to avoid therapy. And volleyball, unlike baseball or football from earlier installments, is a sport a dog could conceivably play. This should’ve been the fun one. You’d think a dog spiking volleyballs would at least offer some novelty, maybe even joy. But the film barely bothers. The games are rushed, sparsely staged, and framed in a way that suggests the filmmakers had access to neither time nor choreography. Buddy’s big moments are treated like obligations—fleeting glimpses of what should’ve been the whole point. Meanwhile, a pair of criminals are attempting to use Buddy—and a parrot owned by the secretary from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Edie McClurg, who gets top billing here)—to steal a priceless diamond. It makes no sense, but the film seems convinced it qualifies as a subplot. The story doesn’t build so much as drift. Spikes Back marked the end of the original Air Bud run, before the franchise handed things off to the next generation with Air Buddies. It didn’t go out strong. It just went out.

The weirdest Toy Story sequel ever—and not one you’d want Pixar anywhere near. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll starts with a premise so bizarre it’s almost perversely enchanting: Nozomi, a blow-up sex doll (Bae Doona), inexplicably comes to life. One moment she’s an inanimate partner to her lonely owner Hideo (Itsuji Itao)—wine, dine, and deflate—but then, suddenly, she’s a walking, talking doll, her body plastic and precariously vulnerable to puncture wounds, but her heart filled with wonder. It’s like if Pinocchio’s Geppetto had an X-rated imagination. Nozomi’s journey becomes a surreal coming-of-age tale and existential odyssey. She takes tentative steps into the world with a vague, vacant expression and stiff limbs. Lines on the backs of her legs hint at her origin, and her innocence turns every encounter into a wide-eyed revelation. She even lands a job at a video rental store (yes, those still existed in 2009) and falls for her co-worker Junichi (Arata), whose idea of courtship involves inserting a VHS tape like a love letter. But for all its whimsy, the film ultimately runs out of gas. Kore-eda flirts with profound questions—what does it mean to be human? Is love reserved for the living?—but the narrative meanders far too much. A particularly grim scene where Nozomi confronts her designer adds nothing but a bleak reminder of her origins and is delivered without the faintest touch of humor or grace. The premise alone guarantees a niche audience, and Bae Doona’s tender, understated performance almost holds it together. The film’s oddity is its prime appeal, but it’s also its undoing. This film is like a helium-filled metaphor floating just out of reach: curious to watch but ultimately weightless.

This is the kind of innocent family fare Disney used to churn out with assembly-line precision in the 1990s, but this one comes with a secret weapon: Kevin Bacon. He plays Jimmy Dolan, a disgraced basketball coach grasping for a last shot at redemption when he hears of a prodigy in an out-of-the-way Kenyan village. He packs his bags and heads off, convinced the player is his ticket to restoring his flagging career. His plan is simple: charm the locals with a little loudmouthed American hubris and secure his star player. Predictably, it doesn’t quite go that way. Dolan barrels into Kenya swaggering, clueless, and oozing entitlement. Loud, brash, and culturally tone-deaf, he’s insufferable at first. But this is Disney, where redemption arcs come pre-packaged. By the end, he’ll have learned teamwork, gained a respectful understanding of other cultures, and done just enough soul-searching to wrap his journey in a tidy, feel-good bow. The script might feel as thin as a souvenir postcard, but the visuals and music more than pull their weight. The African landscapes are so lush and vibrant you can sink into them, especially when paired with the beautiful soundtrack—a lively mix of music spanning the continent. Kevin Bacon is the glue holding this lightweight film together. He throws himself into the role with a conviction the material barely warrants, making it hard not to root for him even as the plot falters. It’s not a slam dunk—more like a three-pointer that circles the rim, flirts with glory, and ultimately wobbles out. Still, it’s a painless way to pass the time. Good for the kids, especially the basketball-inclined.

A movie with a cast featuring Brendan Fraser, Steve Buscemi, and Adam Sandler had the raw material for a gleefully irreverent comedy. Instead, it’s a loud, lumbering dud. Fraser, Buscemi, and Sandler play The Lone Rangers, a heavy metal band whose name is supposed to be ironic (plural “Rangers” contradicting the whole idea of being “Lone”). Frustrated that no one will give their demo a spin, the trio decides the only logical solution is to take a radio station hostage and demand airplay. It’s a harebrained scheme that might have been fun to watch play out, but the execution is far more tedious than zany. Buscemi, with his long hair, bug-eyed intensity, and plastic Uzi, looks the part of a deranged rocker, but the movie gives him little to do beyond sneer. Fraser is stuck playing the earnest, well-meaning lead, radiating affable dullness, while Sandler—presumably cast for comic relief—fades into the background like a roadie no one asked for. The movie leans heavily on gags about how dimwitted these guys are, expecting the audience to forgive their idiocy because of their “hearts of gold.” But the jokes are flat, the pacing drags, and the premise wears thin quickly. The only true laugh comes courtesy of a phone call from Beavis and Butt-Head, who declare with deadpan precision: “You suck.” This is a movie that wants to be a screwball comedy for the rock-and-roll crowd, but it never rocks, never rolls, and barely stumbles.

The mother of all spoofs—that is, if Mel Brooks is the father—this film doesn’t just parody the disaster movie genre—it mercilessly detonates it. Gags fly out at you like the speed of sound, and they hit almost every one of its targets squarely on the bullseye. A relentless barrage—sight gags, puns, pop-culture riffs—hits you so fast the next joke lands before you’ve even recovered from the last, a pace that turns the film’s takedown of the airline industry into gleeful, almost therapeutic chaos for anyone who’s ever cursed a delayed flight or gagged at in-flight food. Robert Hays is Ted Stryker, a washed-up fighter pilot with PTSD and a drinking problem so literal it involves drenching himself in whatever he tries to sip. He boards a flight to Chicago, determined to win back his ex, Elaine (Julie Hagerty), but the in-flight calamities come hard and fast: the crew goes down after tainted meals, Ted’s past trauma explodes into flashbacks, and the airplane becomes a deathtrap only he can save—all while the film gleefully shreds every melodramatic trope it can get its hands on. The jokes are iconic, almost mythic now: Ted and Elaine’s flashback romance spinning into a Saturday Night Fever parody; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, in moonlighting as a co-pilot, growling to a child about the frustrations of being mistaken for himself; and Leslie Nielsen, granite-faced, turning “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley” into the most perfect comedic deadpan of all time. It’s lunacy played straight, a film that leaves a trail of wreckage that’s somehow hilarious every time you revisit it. The genius lies in how poker-faced the cast is while delivering all the lunacy—Nielsen, Peter Graves, and Lloyd Bridges deliver ridiculous lines as if they’re performing King Lear, which makes every joke hit even harder. And of course, there’s the indispensable role of Stephen Stucker—a tiny part, but not a small one—as the human grenade of the control tower, joyfully wreaking havoc everywhere he turns up. All in all, Airplane! is one of cinema’s foremost, deliriously anarchic masterpieces. No matter how many times I’ve seen it (a dozen at least), it always leaves me gasping for air between belly laughs. A parody so perfect, it’s only ever been equaled by Mel Brooks—and only a couple of times.

Against all odds, this sequel to Airplane! gets airborne—despite the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker crew being nowhere near the controls. Writer-director Ken Finkleman steps into their big shoes with one goal: to mimic the original’s rapid-fire, anything-goes style. While he does a respectable job, it doesn’t come close to the same laugh ratio as the original. But Airplane! was a comedic miracle, and Airplane II makes a valiant effort—I laughed more than I expected to. This time, the airplane goes to space, opening the door for sci-fi parody alongside the usual airport gags. Ted Stryker (Robert Hays, still perpetually flustered) is back—this time on a lunar shuttle. Elaine (Julie Hagerty, as breathily sincere as ever) returns too, now engaged to one of the pilots, leaving Ted in an emotional tailspin. Disaster strikes when the shuttle’s malfunctioning AI—a sly 2001 reference—sends the craft hurtling toward the Sun. The cast returns to their deadpan best: Lloyd Bridges is hilariously deranged, Peter Graves delivers ridiculous lines with stone-faced aplomb, and Stephen Stucker is as absurdly silly as ever. Newcomer William Shatner, as a moon base commander, deadpans with the best of them. The gags come fast and loose, though not as densely packed as in the original. Some land perfectly, some miss entirely, and others feel like reheated leftovers from the first film. Still, the ratio of hits to misses is better than most spoofs you’ll come across, and even when a joke sinks, the relentless pace ensures another that might hit is already on its way. At 85 minutes, Airplane II: The Sequel doesn’t overstay its welcome, even if it occasionally sputters. As a Xerox of the original, it’s sharp enough to forgive the smudges.

This is less a disaster movie than a soap opera with wings. It was a huge hit at the time, but audiences today are more likely to recognize it as the blueprint for the merciless 1980 spoof Airplane!. Back in 1970, though, this movie launched a genre all its own: the modern all-star disaster melodrama. These films—The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), and Airport’s own three sequels—didn’t just dominate the box office; they carved out a genre, cementing disaster melodramas—the character-driven calamity—as a cornerstone of 1970s cinema. Airport unfolds in the tightly wound microcosm of its titular location, a self-contained ecosystem where the stakes are always high, and everyone is trapped in an endless loop of crisis management. The story stretches across a tangle of interconnected vignettes, all set against the snow-clogged bustle of an airport, with calamities—one sprouting after another like weeds after a storm—matched only by the intensity of its characters tasked with quelling them. Burt Lancaster plays Mel Bakersfeld, the airport manager whose life is a cascade of professional disasters while his personal life quietly crumbles in the background. Dean Martin plays Vernon Demerest, a suave, almost insufferable pilot caught in a not-so-secret affair. George Kennedy’s Joe Patroni—a character so amiable he’d carry through the sequels—is the gruff yet lovable maintenance chief, solving one problem at a time with grease-stained hands and deadpan grit. And Helen Hayes steals the show as a wily elderly stowaway whose charm is so disarming you almost root for her to keep sneaking aboard planes. What makes Airport work is its unabashed confidence in its melodrama. It doesn’t rush to thrill you—it strolls through its plots with the self-assurance of a film that knows you’ll stick around to see how its threads come together. The suicide bomber subplot brims with tension, but much of the joy comes from the little things: Lancaster barking orders, Martin pretending he has a conscience, and Kennedy growling his way through another near-impossible task. The film is dated, but hardly in a bad way. This isn’t so much spectacle—it’s atmosphere. Watch it for the vintage glamour, the slow burn, and the sheer pleasure of a genre taking its first, wonderfully overstuffed flight.