Film Buff Musings

Four stories sprawled across Morocco, Mexico, Japan, and a pocket of the States—linked by a single rifle and a handful of people who should’ve known better. Each piece, taken alone, holds its tension: well-acted, sometimes uncomfortably raw. Stack them together, though, and the film keeps elbowing you to see a grand design that mostly circles one idea: make trouble, spend the rest of your days patching up the damage. The strongest crackle comes from Morocco. Two restless shepherd boys test their aim on a passing tourist bus and shred an American couple’s vacation in a heartbeat. Cate Blanchett leaks away her color on a dusty rug while Brad Pitt, hair flecked with gray and every bit the haggard husband, tries to summon help from a village that barely has aspirin. Back in California, their housekeeper Amelia (Adriana Barraza, aching with quiet worry) does the unthinkable because she has no real choice—she takes their kids to her son’s wedding across the border. By the time the dust settles at the border, she’s left holding the blame for choices that were never really hers. Across the world in Tokyo, a deaf teenager (Rinko Kikuchi, impossible to ignore) staggers through grief, raw hunger for connection, and the kind of reckless acts that fill the void for a while. Her father’s old hunting trip gifted that rifle to a Moroccan guide, which technically ties it all up, though the film barely cares if you catch the connection. Iñárritu steers it with the hushed intensity of a man convinced he’s solving humanity: scratchy news footage, police raids, satellite calls pinging across time zones. It’s gripping in flashes, but the big message slips away: a swirl of misunderstandings that, when boiled down, says only this—don’t hand your rifle to just anyone, pay attention to your children, and remember: most tragedies need no cosmic plan, just poor judgment and bad timing.

Diane Keaton, the patron saint of charming neurosis, turns Baby Boom into a pressure cooker of ambition, anxiety, and apple sauce. She plays J.C. Wiatt, a high-powered, shoulder-padded New York executive with a corner office, a killer instinct for corporate strategy, and exactly zero time for distraction. She’s sleek, efficient, and career-driven in a way that ’80s movies loved to portray as a warning sign. And then she gets an inheritance—not stock options or a Swiss bank account, but a full-fledged, cherub-cheeked, diaper-clad infant named Elizabeth. It’s a prank from the universe, courtesy of a wildly irresponsible estate plan. J.C. responds the way any upwardly mobile, boardroom-hardened professional would: by attempting to return the baby like an unwanted Christmas gift. But fate, bureaucracy, and Keaton’s ever-escalating exasperation intervene, and before she knows it, she’s trying to broker a merger between her life and this tiny, giggling hostile takeover. She also loses her beau (Harold Ramis), who was perfectly content with J.C. the corporate dynamo but significantly less interested in J.C. the woman with baby food stains on her blazer. When her career finally ejects her like an underperforming stock option, she does the unthinkable—packs up, moves to Vermont, and, after a brief period of rural suffering, accidentally becomes a baby-food tycoon. What makes Baby Boom work isn’t just Keaton, though she is, of course, the gravitational center of every scene. It’s that the film, for all its screwball energy, is also slyly sharp, threading pointed observations about workplace sexism and Yuppie hypocrisy between the sight gags and pratfalls. The real joke isn’t J.C. fumbling with motherhood—it’s the world’s sheer, blithe confidence that she was never supposed to have both power and happiness. And that’s where Baby Boom quietly subverts its rom-com packaging. J.C. doesn’t adapt to this new life—she outsmarts it. Reinvents it. Owns it. Some of the early goofiness could have been dialed down, but by the time she’s standing in a boardroom, coolly rejecting a corporate buyout with a baby on her hip and Vermont snow on her boots, the film has already delivered its thesis: success doesn’t look the same for everyone, and the people who tell you it does usually have a vested interest in keeping it that way.

Nicole Kidman carries Babygirl like a live wire—controlled, volatile, and completely in command. It’s the kind of performance that shapes the film around her, whether it’s ready or not. She plays Romy Mathis, the CEO of a robotics company who moves through the world with polished precision and quietly mounting dissatisfaction. Her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a theater director who radiates good intentions and vague disinterest, offers little in the way of friction. Then comes Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a much younger intern whose gaze isn’t aggressive but unignorable—curious, calm, and a little too confident. Their dynamic builds not from flirtation, but resistance. Romy visits his hotel room under the pretense of shutting things down. She’s already lost that argument. What follows isn’t a seduction; it’s a quiet rearrangement of power. She’s his boss, many times over—but when the door closes, he takes control. He knows what she wants, maybe before she does, and plays the role she’s spent her adult life pretending she doesn’t need. There’s no coercion here, but there is gravity. She falls, and the film never looks away. Dickinson is fine—credible, restrained—but the imbalance suits the film. Romy has something to protect. Samuel has nothing but time. He doesn’t push; he waits. And Kidman, as always, gives the fall shape. Romy isn’t naïve or reckless—she’s aware. She walks into the fire because, for once, she wants to feel what it’s like to burn. Babygirl skirts scandal but never panders to it. What it’s actually interested in is power: how it moves, how it flips, how it erodes the very people who hold it tightest. The sex is secondary. The charge comes from watching Romy loosen her grip on control, one decision at a time, until she’s no longer the one steering. There’s no fallout scene, no handwringing. The tension lives in the suspension—how long she can keep the two versions of herself from colliding. Kidman makes that question feel urgent. The rest of the film, wisely, lets her lead.

A trio of career morons kidnap a baby from a mansion and promptly misplace him. The baby, serene as a Buddha and twice as unbothered, crawls through construction sites, taxis, parks, and department stores while the crooks trail behind, face-first into steel beams. It’s Home Alone by way of The Incredible Journey, if the pet were furless and the route guided by a picture book. The baby’s parents are loaded, the nursery looks like a Saks display window, and Cynthia Nixon—doing something faintly British and vaguely flustered—plays the nanny, as if wealth requires you to sound like you outsourced childcare from the Mary Poppins district of London. The baby’s favorite storybook, Baby’s Day Out, becomes the film’s loose roadmap: he sees a pigeon in the book, then follows one onto the roof; he sees a bus, then boards one; there’s a gorilla, so he ends up in a zoo. He sees, he goes. That’s the structure. Joe Mantegna, outfitted with an East Coast accent despite being based in Chicago, plays the lead kidnapper. He gets electrocuted, trampled, smashed, bitten. Whatever crime his groin committed, the film makes sure it pays in full. His accomplices fare worse. The movie doesn’t worry. The violence is slapstick, the danger’s ornamental. But watching a real baby—however staged—crawl through job sites and traffic isn’t funny. It’s child endangerment set to a chirpy score. There’s a glimmer of an idea—innocence triumphing over idiocy—but it’s padded out with pratfalls, sugar, and unexamined tone. The jokes don’t connect, the danger’s constant, and the whole thing drifts by like a paper boat—neat on the surface, soggy underneath. The baby’s cute. The movie isn’t.

Adolescence, already a minefield of hormonal crises and social humiliation, hardly needs the added inconvenience of a satanic cult. But here we are. The Babysitter plays like Home Alone on Red Bull and Halloween candy, gleefully tossing its twelve-year-old protagonist, Cole (Judah Lewis), into the kind of nightmarish scenario that would make a lesser kid wet himself and call it a day. But Cole—poor, neurotic, easily spooked Cole—has one thing going for him: his babysitter, Bee (Samara Weaving). In every conceivable way, she is too cool for him. She quotes movies, indulges his dorky sci-fi twaddle, and treats him like a pint-sized equal. She is also the last person you’d expect to be leading a blood ritual in the living room. But there she is, straddling some hapless guy—one moment, making out with him; the next, jamming two knives straight into his skull. Bee and her impossibly attractive friends, it turns out, aren’t just killing time. They’re killing. Something to do with a blood pact with the universe. Cole should be asleep upstairs, blissfully unaware, but he’s not. And once they realize it, he’s suddenly the next sacrificial lamb. What follows is a parade of grisly slapstick, McG directing as if he’s on a personal mission to see how much arterial spray can be played for laughs. The answer, it turns out, is a lot. People don’t just die; they explode. Blood doesn’t just flow; it splashes in big, cartoonish arcs, as if Jackson Pollock had a thing for human viscera. Weaving, a horror-comedy MVP, makes Bee the kind of cult leader who could charm you into signing up for weekly meetings before you realize too late that the entry fee is your soul. Lewis sells Cole’s evolution from terrified kid to unlikely action hero with just the right amount of bug-eyed disbelief. Absurd, over-the-top, and completely in on the joke, The Babysitter works because it commits. Horror, comedy, satire—a case study in why you should always spray a little holy water on your child’s caretakers, just in case. It goes for broke, drenches itself in ridiculousness, and makes it work.

Horror-comedy sequels are a strange breed. They either double down on the insanity or stumble over their own self-awareness that they forget to be fun. The Babysitter: Killer Queen doesn’t just trip—it faceplants. Two years have dragged by since that night of satanic bloodshed, and Cole (Judah Lewis) is still stuck picking up the pieces—though everyone else insists there were never any pieces in the first place. His parents think he’s a head case, his classmates avoid him like he’s contagious, and even Melanie (Emily Alyn Lind)—who knows exactly what really happened—pretends he’s crazy just like everyone else. But guilt can look a lot like pity, which is how Cole finds himself invited to a lakeside rager he really should have skipped. Naturally, it all goes south fast. Melanie isn’t just in on the secret—she’s loving it. Cue the carnage. Cole barely has time to blink before he’s bolting through the woods with Phoebe (Jenna Ortega), a sharp, no-nonsense transfer student with her own issues and zero patience for nonsense. They tear through a neon-soaked, music-video wilderness, chased by cultists who are somehow back from the dead because… well, does it matter? Logic taps out early. The first movie was a bloody cartoon held together by Samara Weaving’s wicked charm (which is mostly missing here). Killer Queen wants that same spark but mostly sputters—some stale gags, clunky pacing, blood splatter that just sits there waiting for laughs that don’t come. Ortega livens things up, but even she can’t save a sequel too busy rehashing old bits to cook up anything new. It’s less a killer queen than a tribute band stumbling through the encore.

A well-meaning but irredeemably lackluster romantic comedy, The Bachelor sets up a classic screwball premise and then proceeds to bungle it at every turn. Chris O’Donnell plays Jimmie, a bachelor inching toward thirty, who learns that his recently deceased and perpetually irritable grandfather (Peter Ustinov, delivering the film’s funniest moments in a mere handful of scenes) has left him a lucrative estate—on one condition. He has to be married before his thirtieth birthday. Which, of course, is only a few days away. Timing couldn’t be worse. Jimmie’s proposal to his longtime girlfriend Anne (Renée Zellweger) has just gone down in flames—ending not with a heartfelt vow, but with him blurting out “you win” as she walks out the door. With Anne out of reach, and the clock ticking, he turns to the next best (or worse) idea: revisiting a list of ex-girlfriends in search of someone willing to marry him on the spot. The results are less zany than inert. A few lines earn mild chuckles, but most of the dialogue floats by like filler. A single inspired visual—O’Donnell fleeing down the streets of San Francisco, pursued by a sea of women in wedding dresses—briefly jolts the film to life, but it’s a spike in an otherwise flatline experience. O’Donnell’s performance is stiff, Zellweger is stranded, and the story lands with all the charm of a legal clause being fulfilled. What should have been a madcap countdown to love ends up a listless jog to a foregone conclusion.

The best thing Bachelor Party does—besides proving that 1980s studio execs would greenlight anything if it involved Tom Hanks and a beer tab—happens right up front. Hanks plays a motor-mouthed, overgrown class clown who treats his fiancée’s (Tawny Kitaen) uptight parents like his own private sport. He pokes, he smirks, he torpedoes their sense of order with the smug precision of a guy who knows exactly how much they despise him and plans to enjoy every second of it. Naturally, they try to buy him off. He laughs it off. He’s not quitting love—or this game—anytime soon. Then the bachelor party hits, and so does the nosedive. What kicks off as a zippy, wiseass comedy disintegrates into a bloated buffet of gags that don’t build so much as sprawl—like stacking cheap fireworks in a trash can and hoping for a grand finale. They don’t. The first act promises wit; the rest delivers frat-house noise: strippers, barnyard animals, a donkey, more strippers—each new bit shakier than the last. Nobody bothered to pick the best ideas; they just shoved in everything the budget could half-afford. Hanks, to his credit, stays charming even as the film rips seams around him. And the soundtrack fizzes with pure 1980s pop excess, the only thing that keeps the thing bouncing along. Too bad the movie drinks itself stupid long before it remembers to be funny again. It’s a party that shows up sharp, blacks out early, and wakes up wondering where all the fun went.

It’s a parody of 1960s beach party movies filtered through the lens of 1980s neon excess. Everything is pastel, hairsprayed, overlit. The soundtrack opens with Dick Dale and Stevie Ray Vaughan covering “Pipeline,” which tells you exactly what kind of fusion we’re dealing with: surf rock in a Members Only jacket. Back to the Beach is what happens when middle-aged squares parody their former square-ness. Frankie Avalon plays a retired teen heartthrob turned car salesman; Annette Funicello plays a homemaker in the Donna Reed mold, minus the tranquilizers. They’re in on the joke, but just barely. They find one goofy groove and ride it all the way through with humor that is broad, irreverent, and self-aware. This isn’t sharp enough for real satire, but it’s also too knowing to play straight. The film skewers genre tropes with cheerful exhaustion—surfboards, jealous boyfriends, musical numbers, all strung together with arch jokes and cameos. Bob Denver, Don Adams, Jerry Mathers—wandering through like they’re lost on a studio backlot tour. It’s strange watching an ’80s movie nostalgic for the ’60s version of nostalgia. A Möbius strip of throwback energy: a film for viewers who miss movies that once pretended the world was all beach towels and bongo solos. That audience may be small, but the film doesn’t care. It just wants to be liked. Some of it works. I laughed more than once—especially at Avalon, who treats his hair like a sacred object and drops lines like “You guys get your haircut at the Braille Barber College?” with the misplaced confidence only decades of self-branding can buy. Paul Reubens, appearing in full Pee-wee Herman regalia to perform “Surfin’ Bird,” is impossible to resist. The director’s music video background shows, but that’s fitting. The movie treats musical interludes with the same priority it gives plot: not much. But that’s the spirit of the original beach movies. The difference is this one knows they were ridiculous—and doesn’t mind.

A film so watchable you hardly notice how perfectly it’s put together. Back to the Future is one of those big crowd-pleasers that feels light but doesn’t waste a minute. Michael J. Fox plays Marty McFly, a suburban kid with a guitar, a skateboard, and no real respect for curfews. His unlikely partner is Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd, eyes wild, hair worse), a local crackpot whose cluttered garage hides one invention that actually works for a change: a time machine built out of a stainless steel DeLorean. For once, Doc’s tinkering actually works. He unveils his masterpiece: a time machine built from the unlikeliest vessel—a stainless steel DeLorean. Before he can show it off properly, a band of Libyan terrorists shows up demanding the stolen plutonium Doc used to power the flux capacitor. Shots are fired, Doc drops, and Marty—thinking faster than he ever did in class—jumps behind the wheel, floors the gas, and hits 88 mph, which flings him straight back to 1955. Landing in Eisenhower’s America is bad enough. But one misstep—a car accident that should have involved his father—means Marty has accidentally derailed the moment that led to his own existence. His meek dad (Crispin Glover, beautifully squirrelly) can’t summon the nerve to court his mother (Lea Thompson, playing the sweet-and-sultry paradox to perfection). Worse, she now has eyes for the new boy in town—her future son. Stuck in the past with no spare plutonium and an awkward Oedipal snag, Marty enlists the younger Doc Brown to jury-rig the DeLorean back to life and, more pressingly, to push his father into just enough backbone to win his mother back. The stakes: either a successful high school dance or Marty blinking out of existence altogether. Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale run this premise with a clockmaker’s precision. The script bounces flawlessly between slapstick, tension, and genuine warmth. Fox and Lloyd play off each other like they’ve been doing it forever—though the movie wisely never explains how a teenage skate punk and an aging nuclear hobbyist ended up best friends. Some mysteries don’t need solving. It’s no stretch to say Back to the Future hasn’t dulled a bit. The big scenes still pop like champagne corks, the jokes snap right on cue, and the time-loop tangles stay just complicated enough to feel clever without turning your head to mush. As a kid, I wore out my VHS copy. As an adult, I’d still hop in that DeLorean any day.

A sequel so wacky and nimble you almost forgive its occasional stumbles—Part II picks up right where the first left off and throws Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) thirty years forward to the neon-smeared, hoverboard-infested “future” of 2015. Their mission: prevent Marty’s hapless son from landing in jail and derailing the family line. Of course, nothing stays simple when a DeLorean is involved. The plan goes sideways when an elderly Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson, still sneering at maximum volume) steals the time machine and delivers his younger self a sports almanac crammed with future game results—basically handing him a license to get rich and ruin Hill Valley. Marty and Doc return to 1985 only to find it twisted into a fever dream of casino towers and Biff-branded corruption. The future sequences, by design, are mostly an excuse for sight gags and day-glo gadgets; Zemeckis and Bob Gale never bother pretending this 2015 is an actual prediction so much as a playground for flying cars and self-lacing sneakers. Some of the bits are pure fun (the hoverboard chase holds up surprisingly well); others, like the extended dinner scene with Marty’s future family—where Fox plays multiple roles at once—drag on longer than they need to. When the film clicks, though, it clicks hard: tense chases, paradox-laden close calls, and a time travel puzzle box that loops back into the first film’s events with an almost show-offy precision. It’s more convoluted than its predecessor and a touch more gimmicky, but the energy never drops for long. Fox and Lloyd still bounce off each other like they never left the first set, and Thomas F. Wilson’s multiple Biffs remain some of the more underrated comic villainy of the 1980s. Even with its bumps, Part II manages to be both a middle chapter and a loopy meta-commentary on the very idea of sequels—bigger, messier, and yet impossible to resist if you’re already strapped in for the ride.

A finale that trades neon and hoverboards for dust and six-shooters without losing its bounce. Part III drops Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) squarely in the Old West, where the local welcome committee includes swinging saloon doors, suspicious whiskey, and Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson, happily back to his old loutish tricks). True to form, the DeLorean works until it doesn’t. One ripped fuel line strands Doc and Marty in 1885 with no gasoline for decades. The solution? Hitch the world’s least aerodynamic car to a steam locomotive and trust the tracks to hold until they hit 88 mph. The runaway train climax is every bit as tense as the original clock tower stunt—just with more dynamite and cowboy hats. In the middle of shootouts and standoffs, Doc does the unthinkable: he falls in love. Mary Steenburgen drifts in as Clara Clayton, a smart, warm schoolteacher who listens to talk of time travel and Jules Verne and makes an aging inventor wonder if he’s been looking in the wrong direction all along. Their romance brings a bit of softness that keeps all the pratfalls and gunplay from wearing thin. Zemeckis and Bob Gale pull off one last round of paradoxes, barroom scraps, and DeLorean close calls with the same offhand wit and easy confidence that made the first two so rewatchable. Fox and Lloyd keep the heart of it all beating—one part sci-fi daydream, one part Western farce. It’s a third act that genuinely earns its goodbye. Fewer gizmos, more steam and horseback chases, but the same scrappy spark that kept the whole thing rattling along. Not a bad place for two accidental time travelers to ride off into the sunset.

Hollywood loves to mythologize itself, and The Bad and the Beautiful does it with the heat of a klieg light and the venom of a backlot grudge. Critics tend to fall hard for movies about moviemaking—perhaps because, as the old adage says, you write best what you know. Vincente Minnelli certainly knew this world, and what he delivers here is one of his sharpest, most intoxicating melodramas: a portrait of ambition, betrayal, and celluloid dreams soured by ego. Kirk Douglas is a Category 5 hurricane in a producer’s suit, playing Jonathan Shields, the estranged son of a reviled studio head so disliked he had to hire extras for his funeral. Jonathan, more magnetic than likable, sets out to build a Hollywood empire and uses people—passionately, cleverly, and inevitably—to get there. One such pawn-turned-partner is Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), an aspiring director who attends that infamous funeral and winds up making a string of low-budget hits with Jonathan before they aim higher. Their ascent is backed by Harry Pebbel (Walter Pidgeon), a studio executive who understands the business, if not always the people in it. The narrative is cleverly structured around three testimonials, each peeling back another layer of Shields’ legacy: his calculated romance with a vulnerable starlet (Lana Turner), his collaboration with a gifted writer, and his professional implosion. Turner is devastating, Gloria Grahame flits through with Oscar-winning brevity, and Douglas ties it all together with a performance that dares you to hate him and nearly gets you to love him. Cinematographer Robert Surtees keeps the camera in motion, chasing drama through corridors and dressing rooms like it’s chasing ghosts. The result is glossy, brutal, and often electric. It’s a movie about how movies get made—and how people get broken in the process. A must for Golden Age aficionados and anyone who suspects the real drama happens offscreen.

A washed-out Little League team coached by a man who drinks beer out of the can before noon doesn’t scream heartwarming, but The Bad News Bears gets there anyway—by way of profanity, fistfights, and forfeits. Walter Matthau plays Morris Buttermaker, a former minor leaguer whose career highlight was striking out Ted Williams during Spring Training. These days, he’s a pool cleaner with a cooler full of beer in the backseat and zero interest in personal growth. He’s bribed into coaching a last-minute team by a city official, who points out that none of the parents wanted the job. What he gets is a dugout full of kids who can’t hit, won’t pass, and treat teamwork like a rumor. Buttermaker doesn’t clean them up. He just shows up, lights a cigar, and occasionally tosses grounders. The cast of kids is rough-edged and specific: Chris Barnes as Tanner, whose vocabulary is 90% insults; Alfred Lutter as the nerdiest pitcher alive; Jackie Earle Haley as Kelly Leak, a chain-smoking delinquent with a swing like a wrecking ball; and Tatum O’Neal as Amanda Whurlitzer, the team’s secret weapon and Buttermaker’s best bet for something resembling strategy. Vic Morrow plays the other team’s coach—a disciplinarian in baseball whites who makes Buttermaker look like Mister Rogers by comparison. His coaching style involves intimidation, yelling, and what seems to be emotional warfare on his own son. The film’s final stretch is unusually satisfying in its refusal to tidy up. Winning isn’t the point. Getting through the season without bloodshed, maybe. Somewhere along the way, Buttermaker stops coasting and the kids stop flailing. Nobody turns into a paragon. They just get slightly better at hitting the ball and slightly less terrible to each other. It’s scrappy, profane, and weirdly heartwarming—mostly because it never stops feeling real. The dialogue doesn’t pander, the pace never sags, and the sentiment never condescends. It’s a Little League movie with tobacco stains and genuine bite.

There’s a certain kind of horror that doesn’t scream—it smiles. The Bad Seed taps into that unease, wrapping its terrors in crisp manners and starched dresses. At the center of the film is Rhoda (Patty McCormack), an eight-year-old so unnervingly perfect that her dimples might as well be warning signs. The film introduces the unsettling notion that some people aren’t shaped into monsters by circumstance—they’re simply born that way. Modern horror has since taken this idea much further, but there’s still a quiet menace about this film that seeps in like a slow gas leak. Rhoda is the textbook definition of too good to be true. She’s a perfect child in the way dolls are perfect—meticulously assembled, eerily unchanging, a little too polished around the edges. She beams, she curtsies, and she calls adults by their full names. But when a schoolmate drowns under deeply suspicious circumstances, her mother, Christine (Nancy Kelly), starts piecing together a truth so awful that it threatens to crack her in half. Kelly plays Christine as a woman unraveling one frayed nerve at a time—her voice rising, her hands wringing, her posture collapsing under the weight of her worst fears. Her performance is pure theatrical melodrama—heightened, frantic, and perhaps a bit campy—but there’s something compelling about watching her psyche bend under the strain. And then there’s McCormack, whose performance is unnervingly precise. Every giggle and honeyed line delivery is an act of quiet psychological warfare. Her best scenes come opposite Leroy (Henry Jones), the apartment’s handyman and the only person who sees through her act. Their exchanges bristle with cat-and-mouse tension—except Leroy thinks he’s the cat when it’s actually the other way around. The film stumbles in its final moments—undone by a tacked-on, Hays Code-mandated attempt at cosmic justice, which lands with all the grace of a studio executive scribbling MUST PUNISH EVIL in red ink. It’s an odd, deflating note for a film that otherwise simmers with the unsettling suggestion that sometimes, evil just is. The Bad Seed might not shock by today’s standards, but it still holds power—not because it screams, but because it leaves a question hanging in the air: What if the monster is already inside your house, dressed to the nines, smiling sweetly, and asking for a glass of milk?

Bad Words is a one-joke movie, but the joke works well enough to carry it—at least for me. Jason Bateman goes full-bastard as Guy Trilby, a forty-year-old man who finds a loophole in the National Spelling Bee rules and storms through a field of pint-sized prodigies. He doesn’t just out-spell them. He humiliates them, swears at them, and dismantles their fragile confidence with the calm focus of a mob enforcer moonlighting as a stand-up comic. Why does he do it. There’s an explanation, but it’s about as rewarding as an expired vending machine snack. Not that it matters—what works is Bateman gleefully torching these overachieving kids, one by one. Then, by accident, he picks up a sidekick: Chaitanya Chopra (Rohan Chand), a tiny, bowtie-clad optimist who refuses to go away. Their mismatched friendship is fun to watch and oddly sweet—until the movie pushes the nastiness too far. It’s not the insults that spoil it (being mean is the whole point). It’s the bits that tip from dark comedy into something sour, like Guy taking Chaitanya to a prostitute—a scene so uncomfortable even the actors look like they’d rather not be there. The film gets so caught up in shock value it forgets the payoff. Still, Bateman—deadpan, foul-mouthed, never apologizing—holds it together. If the idea of a grown man treating a middle school spelling bee like a scorched-earth grudge match sounds fun, Bad Words delivers. If not, consider this fair warning.

A dry, charming little comedy that drifts in like sea mist and lingers longer than you’d expect. Charles (Tim Key), the resident oddball and recent lottery winner on a speck of Scottish coastline, decides to cure his solitude by reviving his and his late wife’s favorite folk duo—McGwyer Mortimer, once a husband-and-wife act, now two strangers sharing a discography and a handful of old regrets. Herb McGwyer (real name Chris Pinner, played by Tom Basden) arrives first, under the impression he’s been hired for a lavish solo gig. He’s half-right: the pay is obscene, but the audience is one man nursing memories and an unnecessary supply of chutney. Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan), the ex-wife and arguably the band’s stronger half—vocally, at least—turns up next, not exactly thrilled to find herself ambushed into a forced reunion. Key and Basden, who co-wrote the script, pitch the whole affair with a perfectly straight face and a drift of throwaway asides. Charles tosses off lines like, “Houston, we have chutney—and that’s not a problem,” or introduces a rain-soaked guest as “Dame Judi Drenched.” It’s silly, but it works, because the film knows exactly when to lean into its own oddness without sinking in it. The humor stays dry, awkward, never desperate. Underneath, it’s about the brittle ties people cling to long after time and disappointment should have snapped them clean. A few old bruises get poked, a few new bonds get stitched together, and for a story that begins with a man bribing musicians to his island, it wraps up on a note that feels genuinely human. If there’s a gripe, it’s the ending: a touch too neat, like someone fussed too long over the bow on a gift that didn’t need wrapping. But that’s easily forgiven. It’s feel-good, and with a film this gentle, this well-acted, and this fond of people in all their faintly ridiculous honesty, that’s more than enough. A small, generous ballad—just eccentric enough to feel true.

A sharp, unapologetically silly satire that opens with one of the funniest cold starts in Allen’s career—Howard Cosell narrating a political assassination in the fictional republic of San Marcos as if it were the Super Bowl. The comedy hits before the title card even fades. Back in New York, Fielding Mellish (Woody Allen) lives the kind of life that wouldn’t fill half a résumé: testing office products, eating TV dinners, and tripping over his words with Nancy (Louise Lasser), a politically engaged activist. She wants a man of action. He’s a man of stationery—literally. Still, infatuation nudges him into her world, and before long he’s boarding a flight to San Marcos, thinking a brush with revolution might be the shortcut to her heart. Once there, the story mostly stumbles from one setup to the next—uprisings, coups, propaganda drives—until Mellish becomes the target of a staged assassination attempt by the country’s fascist leader, eager to blame the opposition. The politics are pure caricature, banana-republic tropes milked for laughs. That’s the point. Allen keeps it in the zone between anarchic and meticulous, every scene there for the setup and the punchline—whether it’s Mellish nodding blankly through revolutionary rhetoric, blundering into a jungle ambush, or running his own sham trial. The final act’s courtroom sequence could be its own short film: Mellish defending himself, cross-examining witnesses, and working the jury like a borscht-belt comic in a suit two sizes too big. The politics aren’t incisive—Allen’s not dissecting revolution so much as using it as wallpaper for neurotic slapstick—but the pace is quick, the laughs keep coming, and even the smallest throwaways—the march of a soldier, the bark of an order—are tuned to keep the silliness airtight.

Without the right cast, Bandits could’ve been a drag. With Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett, it’s a getaway worth burning gas for. Blanchett, especially, feels airlifted in from a screwball past—her timing sharp enough to cut ribbon, her mood swinging from arched to rattled in half a breath. Lombard would’ve admired the snap; Hepburn would’ve chased her to the next scene. Joe (Willis) and Terry (Thornton) meet in prison, stage an escape, and wing their first heist: a late-night visit to a bank manager’s home that turns into breakfast, then a casual walk to the branch to clean out the vault. The trick works so well they make it their calling card, soon earning the tabloid name “The Sleepover Bandits.” It’s all smooth until Kate (Blanchett) barrels in—restless, quick on the uptake, and allergic to being left out. She folds herself into the job, and before long the robberies are running alongside a low-grade love war over who’s calling the shots. The triangle works best when it stops behaving—spats over plans that feel like foreplay, bursts of flirting that double as reconnaissance. But the script keeps rounding off the corners, avoiding the kind of messy sparks that might leave a blister. It’s still funny in bursts and sharp in places, and the ending arrives with just enough style to make the trip worthwhile. The robberies may be the hook, but the real currency here is personality—and the cast spends it freely.

A shaggy screwball vehicle for W.C. Fields, The Bank Dick doesn’t build momentum so much as wander into it. Fields plays Egbert Sousé (accent grave over the “e,” he insists), a walking hangover in a rumpled suit who stumbles from one civic responsibility to the next—accidentally stepping in for a film director on set, then just as accidentally foiling a bank robbery. For his trouble, he’s offered a job as a security guard at the very bank he can’t stop fleecing. Within minutes, he’s embezzled $500 to invest in the “Beefsteak Mine,” which should tell you just how seriously he takes the role. The plot unfolds like someone reading a newspaper out of order. But that’s beside the point. The film runs on gags, not gears—Fields muttering insults under his breath, slurring through elaborate lies, and dragging his long-suffering family behind him like carry-on luggage. The jokes come fast, if not always cleanly, and there’s a kind of ragged perfection to the way Fields moves: half a stumble, half a swindle. It’s not always consistent, and the comic setups don’t always pay off. But when they do, it’s golden. A highlight: a perfectly timed exchange between Fields and Shemp Howard, who plays a bartender. “Was I in here last night, and did I spend $20?” “Yeah.” “Oh boy, what a load off my mind. I thought I lost it!” Fields is the show, and the film knows it. If The Bank Dick isn’t quite in the top tier of Hollywood comedies, it’s still an undeniable pleasure—loose, unpredictable, and proudly indifferent to anything resembling structure.

The Banshees of Inisherin is a breakup movie, just not the kind with love letters, infidelity, or tortured longing. There’s no dramatic confrontation in the rain, no teary-eyed monologue—just one man, with zero warning or explanation, deciding he no longer wants to be friends. And on an island as small as Inisherin, where routines are sacred and companionship is as much a necessity as a pint at the pub, that’s not just an awkward social hiccup—it’s an act of war. Colm (Brendan Gleeson), a brooding folk musician with airs of an intellectual, has decided he’s done. With what? That’s the question. He mutters something about wasted time and dull company, but there’s a deeper rot under the surface—some quiet existential horror gnawing at his soul. He isn’t sure, and neither is the audience, but in the meantime, his solution is to cut loose his lifelong drinking buddy, Padraic (Colin Farrell), which he does with all the gentleness of a guillotine drop. Poor Padraic. So sunny, so guileless, so utterly unprepared for this existential slap to the face. He spends the entire first act of the film wandering around the island with the wounded look of a puppy whose owner has inexplicably stopped coming home. At first, Padraic thinks this is all a mistake. Surely Colm doesn’t mean it. So he pesters, pleads, and pokes at the edges of Colm’s resolve. But Colm isn’t bluffing. In fact, he’s so committed to his newfound monkish solitude that he issues an ultimatum: every time Padraic so much as speaks to him, he will cut off one of his own fingers. But then, horrifyingly, he actually follows through. Beyond its mesmerizing leads, the film boasts a supporting cast just as compelling. There’s Siobhán (Kerry Condon), Padraic’s sharp-witted sister, whose intelligence and quiet despair make her an observer to the madness rather than a participant. There’s Dominic (Barry Keoghan), the town’s fool and perhaps its only truly honest man. And then there’s the island itself—windswept, ancient, watching these small, stubborn people with the kind of indifference that makes their grievances, however all-consuming, feel microscopic. This is a deceptively simple film that infects you with its humor that is so dry that it practically crumbles, all the while the slow-building horror creeps in like fog over the island’s jagged cliffs. McDonagh, with his gift for gallows humor and sudden, bracing violence, has crafted something that feels ancient—like a fable etched into stone. Farrell, soft-eyed and open-faced, is heartbreaking as a man forced to confront the unbearable notion that he simply isn’t worth knowing. Gleeson plays Colm with the quiet resignation of someone who has already made peace with his own undoing. The meaning behind The Banshees of Inisherin is ultimately up for debate, but like the best poetry, it leaves you turning it over in your mind long after its final word has faded.

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is less of a movie and more of a pink-and-turquoise hallucination set to steel drums. It’s a pastel-soaked, midlife crisis adventure where logic is optional, the script is stitched together with non sequiturs, strange musical numbers, and a deathly pale supervillain who lives in an underground lair. And somehow, it works—or at least, it works well enough to keep the laughs coming. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo play Barb and Star, two middle-aged best friends who dress like a Florida gift shop exploded on them and speak in a never-ending swirl of Midwestern niceties. Their conversations, meandering and delightfully pointless, include debates on the most beautiful name (spoiler: it’s “Trish”) and writing heartfelt fan letters to Sally Field. They live in a bubble of cozy routine—until their furniture store jobs are axed, and they decide, in a rare act of spontaneity, to take a vacation to the fictional tourist haven of Vista Del Mar. Vista Del Mar is what happens when a brochure for a Florida timeshare comes to life. It’s a resort town so aggressively cheerful that guests are welcomed with a choreographed musical number, and Richard Cheese pops up to croon a lounge song about boobs. Everything is a little too turquoise, a little too laminated, a little too much—but that’s the joke, and it’s a good one. Beneath all the kitsch, something sinister is brewing. Enter the villain—a ghostly white, bowl-cut-sporting supervillain (also played by Wiig) with a vendetta against the entire town. She was bullied as a child in Vista Del Mar, and now, naturally, she seeks revenge via a swarm of highly aggressive, possibly genetically enhanced mosquitoes. Her plan is absurd, her lair is absurd, and her performance is so attractively weird that it somehow holds everything together. While the humor leans heavily on randomness, Wiig and Mumolo’s sheer commitment and the film’s relentless oddball energy make it hard to resist. It feels like Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion got thrown into a blender with an unused Austin Powers script and a handful of Skittles. And frankly, I’m glad it did.

Barbarella would be the collective martini-fueled daydream of the 1960s. This is a psychedelic slip of a movie—an interstellar burlesque of shag carpeting, vinyl jumpsuits, and mid-century erotica, all swirling in a lava lamp haze. The plot exists in the loosest sense. Jane Fonda, radiant and unbothered, glides through a plasticine cosmos in pursuit of rogue scientist Durand Durand (yes, that’s where the band got their name), who’s threatening to unleash a vaguely defined doomsday device. But no one is here for the plot. What holds this together is Fonda, who plays Barbarella like she was born knowing that gravity was optional. She is equal parts wide-eyed curiosity and knowing sensuality. Don’t mistake her for some helpless space ingenue, though. She’s an adventurer, rolling with the strangeness of her surroundings as if planet-hopping in thigh-high boots is just another Tuesday. Plenty of male filmmakers have crafted fantasies around impossibly beautiful women navigating worlds of pleasure and peril, but Fonda doesn’t just play along—she dictates the terms. Whether writhing her way out of a zero-gravity striptease or short-circuiting a villain’s orgasm-powered torture machine, she moves with the kind of self-possession that turns camp into conviction. The production design indulges in a collision of Swinging Sixties kitsch and sci-fi delirium. Barbarella’s spaceship features wall-to-wall fur rugs, her wardrobe changes with every scene (often for no reason beyond aesthetic enhancement), and every set looks like it was decorated by a designer who ran out of budget far sooner than running out of ideas. Bob Crewe’s impossibly groovy score infuses the film with a lounge-lizard energy, a soundtrack so intoxicatingly smooth that it feels less like background music and more like a direct invitation to pour a cocktail and sink into its electric-blue haze. Logic is beside the point when you have evil dolls, an ice queen in a leather catsuit, and a city fueled by liquid essence of evil. Barbarella doesn’t end so much as it drifts away, like a glittering soap bubble that refuses to pop.

Barbarian plays by no rules but its own. Detroit, a city of ghosts and gutted dreams, sets the stage for a horror film that mutates constantly, slipping from psychological unease into full-bodied terror, then into something stranger still. Tess Marshall (Georgina Campbell), practical but perhaps too trusting, books an Airbnb in a neighborhood abandoned by time. The house itself is modern, sleek, and disarmingly pleasant. Outside, the other houses are nothing but boarded-up windows, caved-in rooftops, and shifting shadows. To make matters worse, there’s already a man inside. The place was double-booked. His name is Keith (Bill Skarsgård)—all awkward politeness. An uneasy truce takes hold, the night unfolding in strained civility, uneasy silences, and a slow-dawning sense of something being terribly off. The film lets this tension simmer—until it doesn’t. Without warning, it ruptures, not with a simple twist but with a plunge, as if the ground itself has vanished beneath your feet. Justin Long’s sudden arrival throws a grenade into the atmosphere. He plays a washed-up sitcom star, arrogant and oblivious, his presence both hilarious and repulsive. His introduction isn’t just comic relief; it reframes the horror, exposing a deeper rot beneath the surface. Zach Cregger, coming from a comedy background, directs with the instincts of a magician who enjoys watching his audience squirm. He stretches tension to its limit, then breaks it with a shock that lands like a gut punch. The film builds toward something primal and grotesque, pushing further than expected, refusing to let the audience relax. The humor is cruelly timed, the horror relentless. The terror feels like freefall, the laughter an involuntary reflex. Each moment pulls you deeper into something relentless and exhilarating. Barbarian doesn’t just unfold—it drags you into its madness and leaves you staggering out, breathless and wrecked.

A big-budget meta-fantasia built around a plastic icon, Barbie is part satire, part studio spectacle, and part brand maintenance exercise—though you’d be forgiven for not knowing where one stops and the next begins. Margot Robbie plays what the film calls “Stereotypical Barbie”—the blonde, smiling flagship model who lives in Barbieland, a pink, polished matriarchy where every Barbie is a career woman and every Ken is decorative background noise. That balance shifts when Ken (Ryan Gosling, dialed up to “himbo enlightenment”) visits the real world and returns with ideas—specifically, patriarchy, which he doesn’t fully understand but likes the sound of. Soon Barbieland is overrun with horses, beer, and denim, and the film shifts from ironic sparkle to something stranger: a treatise on gender politics wrapped in musical numbers and toybox logic. It’s unusual for a mass-market children’s film to use the word patriarchy, let alone to name-drop Proust and capitalism in the same breath. The ambition is real. So is the contradiction. For every clever jab, there’s a concession—to audience, to brand, to the fact that Mattel still has final cut. The result is sometimes foggy, like watching a tug-of-war between sincerity and self-preservation. But even when the ideas bend under the weight of studio compromise, there’s something worthwhile in the effort. This Barbie isn’t dreaming of weddings or tiaras—she’s contemplating existential dread. That’s progress. Young viewers might not catch the satire, but they’ll see something rare in a heroine asking what she wants to be, rather than who she belongs to.

Barefoot in the Park is light, frothy, and endlessly charming, with just enough bite to keep it from floating away. Adapted from Neil Simon’s play, the film is a brilliant showcase for two stars so perfectly in sync that they turn even the most trivial bickering into verbal jazz. Robert Redford, buttoned-up and sensible, plays Paul—an up-and-coming lawyer whose idea of excitement involves tax codes and a good Scotch. Jane Fonda, all breathless enthusiasm, plays Corie, his new wife, who sees a six-flight walk-up with no heat, a hole in the roof, and a kitchen the size of a postage stamp as just part of the adventure. They’ve just come off a six-day honeymoon at the Plaza, where love was easy and room service kept reality at bay. Now they’re wedged into real life, where the water pressure is terrible and the bohemian upstairs neighbor (Charles Boyer) insists on climbing out windows instead of using doors. This is a film that lives and dies by rhythm, and Redford and Fonda nail it. They volley Simon’s dialogue back and forth with a precision that feels almost musical—bickering one moment, seducing the next, unraveling by the third act. Redford plays exasperation like a man trying to keep his tie straight in a hurricane. Fonda moves like quicksilver, a whirlwind of romantic idealism who believes a spontaneous barefoot stroll through the park can fix anything. They’re irresistible together. The film overindulges here and there. Some moments push whimsy past its breaking point, and a few scenes linger when they should cut and run. But even at its most meandering, Barefoot in the Park is the kind of confection that never quite melts away. It’s funny, it’s sexy, and it has two of the most luminous stars of their era circling each other like they were born to spar. Not every film needs to be profound. Some just need to be this much fun.

Barry Lyndon is an exceptional film about an unexceptional man who lived an unexceptional life. Of course, Stanley Kubrick could turn a dead leaf blowing down the street into an existential meditation on fate, so this must have been a breeze for him. He takes this indifferent, drifting life and stretches it across three hypnotic hours, crafting a film so meticulous, so unwavering in its gaze, that it achieves something close to alchemy. It is sprawling, it is stately, it is perversely funny. And somehow, it is also gripping. Ryan O’Neal, often dismissed as too bland for the role, gives exactly the performance the film needs—so reserved, so affectless, that he seems barely tethered to the world around him. His Redmond Barry, later Barry Lyndon, does not seize opportunities so much as he tumbles into them, a man of middling intelligence and moderate charm who survives by adapting to his surroundings like a well-dressed parasite. He wants wealth, so he marries into it. He wants status, so he mimics it. He believes himself destined for greatness, but his story is not one of destiny—only a series of chance encounters and small, cumulative failures, all moving him toward an end he never quite sees coming. Kubrick does not sentimentalize Barry, nor does he judge him. He observes. He studies. He places him in a world so vividly realized that the film feels like a lost artifact, a forgotten painting that just happens to move. The cinematography is miraculous—composed almost entirely in natural light, its images glow like oil portraits, flickering candlelight, every frame painstakingly arranged like a still life of aristocratic decay. The 18th century is not recreated here so much as resurrected, fully and completely, its silks and wigs and powdered faces masking the rot underneath. Everything about Barry Lyndon moves at a deliberate pace. It does not hurry, and it does not force emotion. It drifts, much like its protagonist, toward inevitable decline. And yet, Kubrick’s cold precision—his almost clinical refusal to embellish—somehow makes the film even more enthralling. The beauty of it lulls you in, the emptiness of it unsettles you, and the sheer mastery of its craft makes you sit back in awe. This is not a rise and fall. It is a long, slow unraveling. And it is brilliant.

Barton Fink is a Hollywood satire that slips into something stranger—part psychological horror, part surreal comedy, part waking nightmare. It begins as a story about artistic ambition and studio politics, then drifts into a haze of paranoia, writer’s block, and inexplicable menace. It is sharp, unsettling, frequently hilarious, and just as frequently baffling. John Turturro, with his unkempt hair and nervous energy, plays Barton, a high-minded New York playwright brought to Hollywood on the promise of prestige and a steady paycheck. He believes in writing for the common man, yet he holes up in a nearly vacant, stifling hotel where the wallpaper peels and the only conversation comes from a studio executive (Michael Lerner, a fast-talking human steamroller) and a relentlessly jovial insurance salesman (John Goodman) whose voice booms through the thin walls. The studio assigns him to write a Wallace Beery wrestling picture. He has no idea how to begin. The producer barely cares. Just deliver something usable. Barton sits. He stares. He writes nothing. His world shrinks to his hotel room, where the air is thick and the heat never relents. The more he struggles with the script, the more unreal everything feels—objects shift slightly, noises take on an eerie weight, and time moves with a strange elasticity. The Coens balance this slow-building unease with darkly funny touches: a bed so loud it seems to protest its own existence, a bellhop (Steve Buscemi) who appears only long enough to remind everyone that service here is purely theoretical. Roger Deakins’ cinematography gives the hotel an oppressive, uncanny beauty—every shot composed with surgical precision, every shadow deepening the sense of isolation. The film doesn’t just depict writer’s block; it sinks into it, stretching each moment into something almost hypnotic. As Barton Fink moves forward, the absurdity escalates, the humor turns sharper, and the atmosphere becomes suffocating. The Coens push the story past the point where a resolution would typically arrive, letting events spiral without offering a clear explanation. Some will find that frustrating. Others will find it brilliant. It is both.

The year 1977 brought ballet icon Mikhail Baryshnikov an Oscar nod for The Turning Point—and also put him in front of network television cameras for this stage-bound take on The Nutcracker. Aired on CBS, it’s more limited than lavish, but anchored by performances that cut through the static. Shot on a modest budget with all the usual constraints—soft resolution, a boxy 4:3 frame, and a camera darting after the choreography like it’s chasing spilled mercury—it’s more a captured event than a film. A holiday special beamed in from another era. Still, it works. The Arabian sequence is gone, trimmed for time or taste, but the rest unfolds in familiar shape: Clara, her beloved toy, a dream that slips into nightmare and waltzes out again. Velvet drapes, candlelit sets, oversized rats with cutlery. A bit of voiceover drops in now and then to walk us through it, though the ballet itself is vivid enough to manage that on its own. And then there’s Baryshnikov. Even confined to a television frame, he draws the eye without demanding it. Gelsey Kirkland is poised—if a little too mature for Clara—but she pairs beautifully with Baryshnikov, turning the pas de deux into something half-romantic, half-transcendent. The production never quite escapes its medium—TV choreography is still stage choreography, just awkwardly cropped—but there’s a sleepy elegance to it. It doesn’t aim for greatness—just grace, and mostly finds it.

Adapted from Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase, The Bat is a solid little mystery-thriller with a few sharp twists, a tidy runtime, and the added bonus of Vincent Price doing what he does best—smiling thinly while hiding something. Price plays Dr. Malcolm Wells, a physician with flexible ethics who listens patiently as his banker friend confesses to stealing a million dollars—and then offers to split it with him if he’ll help stage his death. Malcolm agrees in spirit, but with a minor revision: he kills the man instead and plans to keep the money for himself. The problem? He forgot to ask where it’s hidden. Meanwhile, there’s a killer on the loose—a mysterious figure in a black bat costume, slashing his way through women and drawing headlines as “The Bat.” (The original stage play, incidentally, was one of the inspirations for Bob Kane’s Batman.) Into this mix arrives Cornelia Van Gorder (Agnes Moorehead), a mystery novelist renting the very house where the murder took place. She hears things. Her maid is attacked. Strange men show up asking questions about the walls. Soon the house is crawling with suspects, secrets, and light hysteria. None of it’s revolutionary, but it’s well-structured and confidently made—clearly a B movie, but one with atmosphere, polish, and a few moments that work. The mystery plays fair, the atmosphere keeps its shape, and Price is fun to watch even when he’s just loitering ominously. It’s a cozy, cobwebbed comfort—a minor thriller with just enough teeth to keep it fun.

The franchise needed a clean slate. After the neon-and-nippled meltdown of Batman & Robin, Nolan’s reboot doesn’t just restore order—it builds a myth from the ground up. That means spending a long stretch rewatching pearls hit pavement. But if we’ve seen this origin before, we’ve never seen it treated with this much care—or this much gravitas. Christian Bale steps in as Bruce Wayne, all clenched jaw and buried guilt. The murder of his billionaire parents left a scar he never bothered to hide, and now he’s looking for meaning in monasteries and prison cells. Liam Neeson plays his philosophical mentor, offering a crash course in justice and theatricality. Back in Gotham, the family business is thriving, but Bruce prefers the company of Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox, whose R&D toys include a tank in disguise and a prototype for indestructibility. Once Bruce becomes the Bat, the film shifts into noir mode: a city rotting from the inside, a hallucinogenic drug making the rounds, and a psychiatrist nicknamed Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) who wears a burlap sack like it’s standard clinical attire. If the villains feel more like trial runs than showstoppers, that’s because they are. This is less a standalone film than a carefully placed first brick. But the structure holds. Nolan directs like a man with a blueprint and a deadline. The tone is deliberate, the action clean, the mood pitched somewhere between pulp and parable. It’s not the most fun Batman has ever been, but it might be the most grounded. And for a reboot, that’s its own kind of superpower.

A solid, sometimes stunning war film about the 1940 air campaign in which the Royal Air Force kept the Nazis from turning Britain into a runway. The Battle of Britain isn’t subtle—it plants its flag early, lines up its squadrons, and plays like a two-hour salute. You get the rousing score, the clipped British accents, the occasional command barked across a tarmac. If you’re not on board for that kind of thing, you’re probably circling the wrong airfield. The cast is stacked—Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard, Christopher Plummer, Michael Caine—but no one’s here to chew scenery. These are duty-bound performances, all flinty resolve and furrowed brows. Dialogue is mostly functional. The drama, when it surfaces, is understated to the point of vanishing. The characters serve more as uniforms than people, which, in a film like this, sort of makes sense. But the flying is the reason to watch. The aerial combat scenes are genuinely breathtaking—real planes, real skies, no CGI lifelines. The dogfights are staged with clarity and weight, and the cinematography somehow finds room for both spectacle and elegance. There’s a scale to it that doesn’t get attempted anymore, probably because of the cost—this was one of the most expensive war recreations of its kind, and nobody’s tried to top it. You can practically smell the fuel and feel the cockpit rattle. It’s not particularly emotional, and it never tries to be. There’s a certain stiffness to the whole enterprise—as if the film knows it’s part museum exhibit, part tribute reel. But for war film devotees, plane junkies, or anyone who still finds magic in the silhouette of a Spitfire banking into sunlight, The Battle of Britain delivers. You don’t watch it for complexity. You watch it for the sound of engines climbing and the sky turning into a battlefield.

A spoof of a series that never took itself seriously, Baywatch arrives sunburned and overinflated. The lifeguards still sprint in slow motion, but now there’s a CGI yacht fire, a digitally composited jet ski chase, and ocean water that somehow looks retouched. A movie about beach rescues didn’t need special effects; this one practically chokes on them. The story—a drug ring operating off the beach—sounds fine in theory, although that’s far too overused in films like this. Dwayne Johnson plays Mitch, lifeguard-in-chief and part-time Navy SEAL, apparently. Zac Efron is Brody, an Olympic swimmer with a DUI and the look of someone who peaked in a cereal commercial. They bicker, they bond, they try to make “beach” sound like a certain curse word. None of it quite sticks. Then there’s Ronnie, played by Jon Bass, the schlubby tech guy who somehow fumbles his way onto the team and never recovers. He spends the movie falling over things and eyeing Summer (Alexandra Daddario) like a dog who’s read one too many pickup blogs. The movie thinks it’s cute. It’s not. His whole arc plays like someone slowly losing an argument to their own impulses. And when he talks—he really talks—it’s like he’s filling space with words and hoping no one notices the structure’s made of Styrofoam. Priyanka Chopra Jonas steps in as the villain, a real estate mogul-slash-drug queenpin with a yacht, a plan, and the kind of detachment that suggests she read her lines in the car on the way over. She’s not bad. She’s just elsewhere—like she’s already on to her next gig and politely waiting for this one to end. That’s the bigger issue: everything drags. The film flirts with parody, nudges at satire, even throws in a few self-referential gags. And then it just… coasts. Scenes stretch, jokes thud, and you can feel the energy bleed out between slow-motion montages. It plays like a sizzle reel that got greenlit by mistake, then padded with abs, pratfalls, and the vague hope that someone would clean it up in post.