Film Buff Musings

A country club comedy, technically. A sports movie, if you insist. But Caddyshack has no patience for structure, no use for decorum, and no obligation to respect the game of golf. The plot—such as it is—tacks a coming-of-age story onto the mayhem, following an ambitious caddy (Michael O’Keefe) as he grovels for a scholarship under the watchful, wrathful eye of Judge Smails (Ted Knight). Knight, the embodiment of old-money resentment, clutches his club and his moral outrage with equal intensity, scowling at the intrusions of the uncivilized. Rodney Dangerfield, in the form of a human air horn, provides the intrusion. His boorish tycoon crashes into the country club like a salesman who knows the product is himself, dispensing insults with the confidence of a man who has never received a consequence he couldn’t buy off. Chevy Chase saunters through, half-enlightened, half-asleep, playing golf as if he’s only vaguely aware of the concept, and somehow that’s enough to win. And then there’s Bill Murray, the walking subconscious of the movie, the wild-eyed groundskeeper whose personal Vietnam involves one very determined gopher. He speaks in monologues no one asked for, concocts assassination attempts with the precision of a mad scientist, and stares into the middle distance as if waiting for a prophecy to reveal itself. There’s an unmistakable air of danger in his scenes, like the film itself is unsure whether he’ll remain confined to his subplot. Not every joke works. Some stumble in, unsure of themselves, while others announce their presence with the subtlety of a marching band. But this is not a movie designed to be measured. It is loud, crude, and spectacularly indifferent to refinement. No effort is made to reconcile its tonal whiplash, no apology given for its refusal to behave like a well-mannered comedy. It moves, it shouts, it lurches forward without a roadmap, and in the end, golf remains its least interesting feature. Caddyshack wasn’t here to pay respect to the game. It was about who gets to ruin it.

A hostage comedy that never figures out how serious—or how funny—it wants to be, Cadillac Man strands Robin Williams in a role that asks for desperation, wit, pathos, and charm, then forgets to give him a script worth juggling. He plays Joey O’Brien, a slick-talking Queens car salesman drowning in debts, ex-wives, and a missing teenage daughter. Just as his life hits peak unravel, a jealous biker with a machine gun (Tim Robbins) storms the showroom, convinced someone there is sleeping with his wife. What follows is a kind of discount Dog Day Afternoon played for laughs: Williams steps into the role of accidental negotiator, improvising confessions and soothing his captor like a man who’s closed more deals than therapy sessions. It’s a decent setup. Williams even finds a few moments to flex that patented verbal ricochet—half-hustler, half-empath—but the film never settles into a rhythm. The tone flattens where it should spark, the tension fizzles before it builds, and the characters—aside from the leads—are barely types, let alone people. There’s the faint sense that this was meant to be sharper, edgier, faster. Instead, it coasts on sitcom logic and clumsy reversals, mistaking noise for momentum. Robbins, saddled with a cartoonish manic streak, gives a performance that never quite connects, and the resolution feels like it was plucked from a file labeled “reasonable endings: insert here.” Cadillac Man has flickers of what could’ve been—a manic workplace satire with real stakes—but it ends up as a loud stall, idling in neutral and hoping the cast will distract you from the fumes.

A film about revolution that moves like a highlight reel. Cadillac Records wants to give you the whole Chess Records story—the backroom deals, the brilliance, the backstabbings, the men who sold their souls for a Cadillac. But it barely stops long enough to let its musicians breathe before racing to the next milestone, the next tragedy, the next stroke of genius. The result is a film that’s all music, no pause, history played in fast-forward. The cast does the heavy lifting, because they have to. Jeffrey Wright’s Muddy Waters carries himself like a man who knows he’s the foundation of something bigger than himself. Columbus Short’s Little Walter, brilliant and broken, plays the harmonica like he’s wringing the last drops of blood from his own nerves. Mos Def’s Chuck Berry isn’t just a showman—he’s a magician who figured out how to turn rebellion into a three-minute pop song. Eamonn Walker’s Howlin’ Wolf stares down a room like he already owns it, and Beyoncé’s Etta James swings between divine and self-destructive with a voice that could knock a brick loose from its mortar. The music is untouchable. That part, at least, Cadillac Records gets right. The problem is what happens between the songs. The film is too busy covering ground to let its characters live in their moments. Chess Records was a breeding ground for tension, for brilliance colliding with business, for friendships that curdled and feuds that never got settled, but here, it all plays out like a series of bullet points. Struggles are introduced and resolved like a band cycling through a setlist. A film about blues shouldn’t be afraid to sit in its own mess, to let a moment stretch. But no—the film is already on to the next gig, the next betrayal, the next hit record. It plays the history, but it doesn’t hold the note.

A film as homegrown as a church potluck, stitched together with the kind of Midwestern earnestness that forgives a multitude of sins—including a clunky opening and a finale that wheels itself out on sheer good-natured momentum. California Dreaming begins with a simple premise: Ginger (Lea Thompson) wants one thing for her 40th birthday—to skip Branson this year and take the family RV all the way to a California beach she visited as a teenager. Stu (Dave Foley), her affably resigned husband, and Cookie (Lindsay Seim), their skeptical daughter, aren’t exactly thrilled, but they go along with it, because Mom is Mom, and Mom gets what Mom wants. The problem is they barely make it past Omaha before a string of mild calamities hijacks the trip. The first act moves like a church fundraiser raffle—slow, awkward, and uncertain of how much enthusiasm it can reasonably expect from its audience. But once the film stumbles into its own rhythm, it finds a kind of helium-huffing goofiness that, while hardly revelatory, is at least watchable. The script is little more than extended family bickering, but it is the right kind: snippy without being vicious, petty without being toxic, the kind of passive-aggressive backseat arguing that has fueled generations of cross-country vacations. There is even something resembling depth buried under the lighthearted dysfunction. Ginger and her sister-in-law (Patricia Richardson) harbor just enough residual resentment to keep things interesting, and though the film flirts with actual emotional stakes, it never lets things get too raw. This isn’t that kind of movie. The final act bogs down in forced sentimentality, those obligatory “family bonding” moments that arrive like preset GPS coordinates in movies like this. At this point, resistance feels as futile as scolding the tide for rolling in. Still, Lea Thompson and Dave Foley hold this thing together with pure likability. Even in something as rickety as California Dreaming, they make the trip bearable. The film itself is a harmless diversion, an RV spinning its wheels, a vacation that probably sounded a lot more exciting before it started.

Neil Simon writes like a man who never lost an argument, and California Suite is proof—four stories, one luxury hotel, a revolving door of verbal warfare. Some guests arrive with flair, some stumble through the lobby, but all are here to bicker, snipe, and unravel under the California sun. It begins with the film’s worst segment. Jane Fonda and Alan Alda, playing a divorced couple debating their daughter’s future, deliver the kind of polished, over-rehearsed dialogue that belongs in a Broadway preview, not a messy human interaction. Alda fires off quips, Fonda counters with exasperation, but it never feels like an actual conversation—just actors waiting for their turn to talk. The film barely survives the first 20 minutes before moving on, and thank God it does. Then, the real show begins. Maggie Smith and Michael Caine arrive with the only story that matters: a brittle, boozy British actress, up for an Oscar she resents needing, and her sharp-eyed, closeted husband, whose patience for her complaints is hanging by a thread. She drinks, sulks, and lashes out. He dodges, deflects, and occasionally lets his guard down long enough to remind her he still cares. Their chemistry is acid-laced champagne, every line a perfectly calibrated blow. Smith won an Oscar for the role, and if her character had been real, she might have broken it over someone’s head. Walter Matthau takes a detour into slapstick, waking up next to an unconscious prostitute just as his wife (Elaine May) arrives at the hotel. He sweats, stammers, throws a sheet over the problem, and does everything but set off a fire alarm to avoid being caught. May, unimpressed, doesn’t need theatrics to win the scene. The punchline is inevitable; the fun is watching Matthau sink himself. Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby close it out as vacationing friends who turn their hotel stay into a battle royale, their wives looking on with expressions that scream “never again.” Pryor keeps the energy high, but the segment circles the drain—two men fighting, louder, meaner, but never funnier. Simon’s best scripts cut like a blade. California Suite isn’t his sharpest, but when it connects, it leaves a mark. Some segments drag, but the highs—Smith, Caine, Matthau squirming under his own bad decisions—make the trip worth it.

A documentary about the late-night psychic hotline queen who once promised to “call me now!” to millions of insomniacs—Miss Cleo, draped in headwraps, eyes flashing, accent thick enough to cut with a butter knife. The commercials were everywhere in the late ’90s and early ’00s, offering “free readings” to the lonely and curious. Free, of course, only until you picked up the phone. The scam was as old as show business: Cleo was the face, but the real operators were a corporate boiler room squeezing thousands out of callers—many depressed, many desperate, all hoping for a voice to tell them something worth believing. The accent? Fake. The persona? Invented. Cleo herself wasn’t even Jamaican; the patois was as authentic as a Halloween store costume. Eventually the operation collapsed under lawsuits and bad press, Cleo vanished from public view, and when she died of cancer in 2016, most people assumed she’d been gone for years. On paper, she’s a fascinating subject—part con artist, part cultural curiosity, part victim of the very machine she helped sell. But the film can’t decide what it’s after. Is this a profile of a woman or a postmortem on a scam? It skims when it should dig, pads when it should cut, and ultimately leaves the sense that the most interesting thing about Miss Cleo was her ad campaign.

A spy movie that’s less thriller and more well-researched term paper. A Call to Spy recounts the work of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) with precision but all the urgency of an instructional video. Sarah Megan Thomas plays Virginia Hall, a woman whose wooden leg disqualifies her from diplomacy but not from wartime espionage. Sent to France under the guise of a journalist, she builds a resistance network and gathers intelligence—but the film, like its protagonist, remains composed at all times. Noble, yes, but at the cost of tension. Spy thrillers thrive on danger—the wrong glance, the botched escape, the enemy lurking just offscreen. This one treats intrigue as a formality. Scenes unravel with careful restraint, never quite tightening the screws, never making the stakes feel immediate. The film respects its real-life heroes so much that it keeps them locked behind glass. Thomas delivers a strong, understated performance, and the historical accuracy is commendable. But espionage without suspense is just paperwork in a trench coat. A Call to Spy informs, honors, and proceeds with dignity. What it never quite does is thrill.

Camp Hell sells itself as a teen horror movie—demons, nightmares, a possessed boy with something clawing at his soul. But what it actually delivers is something queasier: a cracked portrait of spiritual repression disguised as moral instruction. The kids are already trapped long before anything supernatural shows up. A girl chats with a boy; a priest calls her a whore. The demon doesn’t have to pounce from the shadows—the adults are already doing the damage. It’s weirdly effective as a teen melodrama, less for what it says than for what it accidentally reveals. The supernatural stuff feels superfluous—an excuse for the movie to exist in the genre aisle—while the real horror comes from watching authority twist guilt into doctrine. Reality is worse than whatever creature’s supposed to be lurking in the woods. It’s not especially polished—editing is erratic, performances are uneven, and the tone swerves like a transmission with a grudge. But there’s a crooked conviction underneath. What probably started as a standard teen horror flick ends up playing better as an accidental exposé on religious overreach. The demon is just window dressing. The real horror is in how easily authority shames, controls, and warps. It’s a strange film—misguided, sometimes clumsy—but more gripping when it drops the act and just shows the damage.

Canadian Bacon plays like a farce, but what sticks is how much of it no longer feels far-fetched. Released in 1995 during the Clinton years, it reads less like a Clinton-era curiosity than a forecast of the post-9/11 mood—where foreign policy seemed increasingly shaped by optics, polling, and manufactured threats. Alan Alda stars as a floundering U.S. president who, desperate to boost approval ratings, decides to gin up hostilities with the only available country left: Canada. It’s a ludicrous setup, but Michael Moore (yes, that Michael Moore) directs with a surprising knack for comedic timing and structural economy. The tone walks a line between slapstick and political satire, and more often than not, it works. The jokes are broader than the border they mock, but they land. One of the film’s best scenes has the president phoning Russia to suggest a Cold War reboot, only to be told, with perfect deadpan: “You’re in charge of the world now. Don’t be such a sore winner.” It’s that kind of film—silly on the surface, sharper underneath. John Candy, in his final screen role, plays a small-town sheriff who rallies his clueless buddies into a grassroots “invasion” of Canada. His over-the-top patriotism, delivered with affable bluster, anchors the absurdity. Candy somehow makes the premise feel plausible—not serious, but recognizably American. Canadian Bacon was shrugged off at the time, too goofy for political junkies and too pointed for slapstick purists. But in hindsight, its barbs feel unusually well-aimed. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t always trust its own intelligence, but it’s smarter than it looks—and funnier than it has any right to be.

Can’t Buy Me Love plays like a social experiment rigged for maximum hairspray exposure—Ronald (Patrick Dempsey), a gangly lawn-mowing dweeb, strikes a deal with Cindy (Amanda Peterson), the school’s blonde aristocracy, after she annihilates her mother’s $1,000 white suede outfit. By sheer movie logic, Ronald happens to have that exact amount in cash. His proposal: she pretends to be his girlfriend for a month, and in return, her financial crisis disappears. Popularity, as the theory goes, is a matter of optics, and if Cindy presents Ronald as worthy, the school will fall in line. And fall in line they do. Ronald, who once moved through the halls like an overlooked extra, is suddenly the center of attention, swapping his baggy sweaters and telescope for sunglasses and an attitude. The transformation works too well—drunk on status, he dumps his old friends, struts around like a discount Tom Cruise, and adopts a condescending smirk that makes you root for his downfall. His social power even manifests in accidental ways. Eager to impress at a dance, he unknowingly lifts moves from an anthropology documentary instead of American Bandstand, flailing and stomping like a man with full-body Wi-Fi interference. And because high school runs on unearned confidence, the crowd follows, mistaking cultural appropriation for cutting-edge choreography. Where the film fumbles is in its reluctance to commit to satire, swerving at the last minute into a neatly packaged moral lesson. Popularity is meaningless, self-respect is priceless, and life will always reset to its natural order just in time for prom. The after-school special packaging flattens what could have been a sharper takedown of high school social politics, but the ‘80s time-capsule elements still have their appeal. Dempsey is likable even at his most oblivious, and Peterson does what she can with a script that treats her like a plot device. It’s watchable, ridiculous, and frustratingly close to being something smarter—if only it had the nerve to finish the experiment instead of grading it on a curve.

A true crime story about writing a true crime story, Capote isn’t just about the making of In Cold Blood—it’s about what that making cost. For Truman Capote, it wasn’t just a book. It wasn’t research—it was a six-year descent into performance, persuasion, and quiet emotional blackmail. You can see every bit of it—every wince, every calculation—flicker across Hoffman’s face like he’s trying to hold the story together with charm and nerve. Hoffman doesn’t impersonate so much as disappear. The voice is there, the affect, the theatrical drawl—but the performance is something deeper. He plays Capote as both puppeteer and prisoner: brilliant, calculating, deeply wounded, and fatally curious. One glimpse of a front-page headline and he bolts to Holcomb, Kansas, dragging Harper Lee (Catherine Keener, serene and watchful) along for credibility and cover. The murders—four members of a farming family, shot point-blank—are horrifying, but Capote’s interest isn’t justice. It’s narrative. Character. Pathos. He finds it in Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.), a killer with a broken childhood and a poet’s vocabulary. Capote reads him like a tragic antihero. He also reads him like a bestselling payday. The longer the appeals drag on, the more conflicted he becomes: comforting the man while quietly needing his execution to finish the book. Empathy becomes performance. Kindness becomes currency. It’s not just morally queasy—it’s devastating. Bennett Miller directs with eerie control—no flash, no fuss, just mood and mounting dread. The moral reckoning isn’t loud; it accumulates. By the end, Capote isn’t triumphant—he’s wrecked. He got the ending he wanted. And it hollowed him out. Biopics rarely cut this deep. Capote doesn’t lionize or scold—it watches. And what it sees is a man undone by his own genius, unraveling thread by thread, sentence by sentence.

There’s nothing especially novel about this second standalone Captain America film—at least not on the surface. The First Avenger leaned into its WWII setting with retro-futurist design, blunt patriotism, and the rare Marvel film that looked like it had been styled on purpose. The Winter Soldier drops Steve Rogers into modern-day D.C., strips away the period texture, and leaves him wandering through another gray slab of Marvel architecture. Visually, it could be anything. It just happens to star Captain America. Still, it holds together. Despite the flat aesthetic—and the fact that this might be the only Marvel film without even a visual gimmick—it moves like a polished action thriller and never really drags. Chris Evans once again suits up in patriotic spandex and clutches the vibranium shield. This time, the enemy isn’t an obvious foreign threat but a ghost from his past: Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), long presumed dead, now reappearing as a brainwashed assassin known only as the Winter Soldier. His programming comes courtesy of Hydra—a fascist organization that’s been burrowing inside S.H.I.E.L.D. for decades, waiting to flip the switch on a global surveillance state. That plan, led by the seemingly respectable Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), involves eliminating threats before they happen. Which, naturally, includes Captain America. The film borrows heavily from ‘70s political thrillers—not just in casting Redford, but in the way it pits institutional decay against individual conviction. Steve Rogers, raised on war bonds and Allied propaganda, now finds himself working for an organization he barely recognizes. He missed Vietnam, Watergate, and everything that came after, but he’s catching up fast. The film doesn’t hand him easy answers. This is a surprisingly clear-eyed turn for the MCU. The plot moves well enough, even if it rarely tightens its grip. The moral questions don’t get buried, but they do get crowded—wedged between shootouts, fireballs, and the usual digital noise. Still, the film is about something: disillusionment, loyalty, and what it costs to stay principled when the system around you isn’t. It’s not my favorite Marvel film. It’s not even especially enthralling in any particular moment. But it’s slick, watchable, and just smart enough to count itself as a unique entry in the series—not through invention, but by stripping everything else away.

A horror film that drifts like an untethered ghost, Carnival of Souls unfolds with the eerie detachment of a dream that refuses to explain itself. The story begins with a crash—three women plunge off a bridge in a car that never resurfaces. Hours later, one of them, Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), emerges from the river, dazed, unharmed, and seemingly unconcerned. Whatever happened beneath the water is a question the film declines to answer, though the rest of it plays like an extended response. Mary leaves for Utah, where a job as a church organist awaits, but something is wrong in ways that can’t be easily defined. A man with hollow eyes (played by director Herk Harvey) watches her from mirrors, bus windows, and dark corners, smiling like he knows something she doesn’t. Strangers speak to her, but their words pass through her as if she isn’t really there. The churchgoers sit in silent ecstasy while she plays the organ, their vacant bliss more unnerving than outright horror. The film moves with the hypnotic unease of German Expressionism, evoking Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, where shadows stretch and reality warps but nobody ever outright declares that something is wrong. There are no jump scares, no monsters leaping from corners—just a creeping sense that Mary is slipping out of the world and that nothing she does will stop it. And then, the finale lands like a shock to the system, not because it surprises but because it confirms what was suspected all along. Carnival of Souls never raises its voice, never lunges, never insists on terror. It simply drifts toward the inevitable, as quietly and inescapably as a bad dream. It’s easy to see why this film has endured—cheaply made, weirdly timeless, and filled with images that burrow under the skin long after the film itself has faded.

A movie that moves like a sugar-rushed toddler at a theme park—loud, relentless, and convinced that forward momentum alone counts as entertainment. Carpool throws one mild-mannered businessman (David Paymer) into a moving vehicle with a manic wild card (Tom Arnold), adds several kids for maximum exasperation, and lets physics handle the rest. Arnold plays a failing circus owner whose botched robbery at a gourmet pastry shop leads to an impromptu carjacking. Instead of a clean getaway, he ends up stuck with Paymer’s overworked dad and a van full of children, each assigned precisely one personality trait. The script doesn’t care why any of this is happening—it just wants bodies flying, voices raised, and enough prop-based gags to suggest Home Alone was studied like scripture. Most jokes skid out on impact, but every so often, one gets up and dusts itself off. Whether the laughs are intentional or accidental is beside the point. Paymer, looking every bit like a man who just wanted a normal morning, plays the straight man with professional exhaustion. The kids alternate between mischievous and shrieking. Arnold, meanwhile, operates at full volume, committing to the bit like he’s been promised a bonus based on decibel level. Carpool runs purely on slapstick and stunt work, an exasperating mess of a film that mistakes chaos for comedy. If caffeinated exuberance alone could will a movie into competence, this one might have had a shot. Instead, it delivers 90 minutes of frantic nonsense. This is the kind of movie that only holds up if you first saw it through the forgiving lens of childhood. For everyone else, it’s a relic from an era when a minivan in distress was considered a viable comedic engine.

A made-for-TV Carrie remake inflates itself with unnecessary backstory, exaggerated telekinetics, and a title character who seems less like a bullied teen and more like something that crawled out of a séance. It takes the lean, brutal horror of Brian De Palma’s 1976 version and restages it with the subtlety of a community theater production that just discovered strobe lights. Angela Bettis plays Carrie as a creature of preemptive vengeance. Sissy Spacek’s Carrie could pass as an ordinary girl, her damage buried under a layer of hopeful naïveté. Bettis, on the other hand, moves through scenes like she’s been hexing the town for years. The script doesn’t help. Instead of a slow, terrifying emergence of power, this Carrie is practically supernatural from the start. A childhood flashback has her summoning a meteor shower, as if the filmmakers thought telekinesis limited to a gymnasium wouldn’t be impressive enough. Then there’s the locker room scene, originally a slow-motion nightmare of embarrassment. De Palma’s version made Carrie’s horror palpable, her fear as raw as the humiliation that followed. Here, she simply collapses while the girls immediately start chanting “Period!” in synchronized absurdity. Instead of escalating cruelty, it plays like a scene from a bad avant-garde play—vague, weird, and impossible to take seriously. A good remake sharpens, reinterprets, justifies its existence. This one slaps a fresh coat of paint on a masterpiece and calls it an update. The original had menace, rhythm, a creeping sense of dread. This has a checklist, a few bad ideas, and the faint whiff of missed opportunity.

Gary Cooper in a screwball comedy is a bit like a stiff drink at a children’s party—technically allowed, but not quite in sync with the tone. He plays the title role in Casanova Brown, a mild farce built on a plot that sounds like it should be zanier than it is: a man discovers, via cryptic letter, that he may have a child he didn’t know about—and that the mother, his ex-wife, plans to put the baby up for adoption. The setup arrives in clumps. Casanova, a college professor, was briefly married to Isabel (Teresa Wright), but her astrology-obsessed mother declared the union cursed, and the marriage was swiftly annulled. Now he’s on the verge of proposing to another woman (Anita Louise), despite warning signs from his father (Frank Morgan) and a general air of cosmic interference. Then comes the letter—from a maternity hospital—and off he goes, only to find Isabel recovering from childbirth and determined to give the baby away. Casanova, alarmed and newly paternal, decides he might prefer to keep the child himself. There’s some sweetness baked into that arc—a man clumsily discovering he wants to be a father—but the execution is soggy. The pace ambles. The dialogue rarely crackles. And while Cooper is competent, his natural reserve works against the material; he doesn’t flail, which in a comedy like this, he sort of needs to. The premise invites disorder. The film settles for polite puzzlement. It’s also a minor miracle this slipped past the Hays Code: a child born out of wedlock, smuggled past the censors by way of annulment technicalities and whispered implications. But even with that slight scandal, the story never pushes very hard. It’s genial, shapeless, and just off enough to make you wonder who thought this counted as a romp. Classic Hollywood completists may find something to appreciate—chiefly Cooper playing slightly against type—but most viewers will file it under “curiosities,” watched once and never revisited.

Martin Scorsese’s Casino sprawls like a crime ledger written in gold ink and splattered with blood—chronicling the rise and implosion of mob-run Las Vegas with the kind of obsessive detail that feels less like storytelling and more like a case file annotated by a compulsive insider. Robert De Niro plays Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a Chicago bookie sent west to run the Tangiers Casino with exacting control. He’s good at it—almost pathologically so. Every suit, security feed, and handshake is a variable to be managed. The film pauses often to explain how things work: how card counters are spotted, how politicians are courted, how suitcases of cash vanish into the desert heat. It’s part tutorial, part cautionary tale, delivered with Scorsese’s usual snap and paranoia. Joe Pesci, as Nicky Santoro, arrives like a storm cloud with a knife in its pocket—volatile, profane, and hypnotic. Where Ace plays to win, Nicky plays to dominate, and his scorched-earth tactics begin to splatter everything in range. Then there’s Ginger. Sharon Stone is electrifying as Ginger McKenna, a hustler who wraps herself in mink and emotional sabotage. Her spiral from grifter to addict to live wire is so precise it feels like the movie starts sweating with her. Their marriage, already brittle, begins to crack the minute her ex-pimp (James Woods, spectacularly greasy) shows up again, and the descent from champagne and diamonds to screaming matches and custody threats is both operatic and claustrophobic. Casino isn’t a love letter to Vegas—it’s a slow-motion collapse lit up like a billboard. A place built on illusion, drained dry by greed, then left to rot under the lights. The film runs long, narrates heavily, and mirrors Goodfellas in more than a few ways—but it’s no pale imitation. If Goodfellas is a sprint through the mob’s bloodstream, Casino is an anatomical map of its most diseased organ. Scorsese shoots it like he can’t stop cataloging the damage, even as the whole thing falls in on itself.

Tom Hanks spends most of Cast Away talking to a volleyball and somehow never looks ridiculous. That’s the magic trick. He plays Chuck Noland, a FedEx efficiency expert who treats time like currency—until his cargo jet slams into the Pacific and he suddenly has nothing but time. The pilots drown, the plane vanishes, and Chuck washes up on an uninhabited island, where the only ticking clock is in his own head, counting down to madness or mastery over coconuts. The survival arc hits all the expected waypoints—fire-making, spear-fishing, shelter-building—but Hanks keeps it from playing like a stripped-down instructional video. He flails, rages, and weeps, but even at his lowest, there’s a flicker of goofy resilience. A lesser actor might have played Chuck as a man crushed by solitude, but Hanks turns loneliness into a performance. Wilson, his blood-smeared volleyball, isn’t just a coping mechanism; he’s a scene partner—one of cinema’s most unexpectedly affecting pairings between man and object since Fred Astaire danced with a coat rack. Director Robert Zemeckis handles the spectacle with precision—the plane crash is harrowing, but it’s the silence of the island that does the real work. No swelling score, no expository voiceover, just the crash of waves and a man figuring out how to survive. Cast Away earns its place among the great survival films, not for its how-to guide on staying alive, but for the way it strips a man to his bones and lets us watch as he stitches himself back together. Hanks has won Oscars for more celebrated performances, but none required this level of control—two and a half hours, mostly alone, without a single moment of dead air.

A Western that tips its hat, fires a shot, and then stumbles over its own spurs, Cat Ballou wants it both ways—playing the genre straight while winking at it from the saloon bar. Jane Fonda, bright-eyed but already carrying the sharp intelligence that would set her apart, begins as an innocent schoolteacher and ends as an outlaw, her father murdered, her idealism burned to embers. She hires a gunfighter to even the score, only to find he’s a half-pickled relic, barely able to stay upright, let alone fire a shot. The joke, of course, is that both the gunfighter and her silver-nosed nemesis are played by Lee Marvin, who staggers, slurs, and guns his way to a Best Actor Oscar. But it’s Fonda who holds this thing together, charting Cat’s Joan of Arc-style transformation with a confidence that gives the film more edge than its broad comedy suggests. Marvin, though, is the one having the most fun—one minute sprawled across a whiskey barrel, the next miraculously upright and deadly, a man whose reputation has been running on fumes for years. His silver-nosed villain, a ghostly enforcer with an unshakable calm, feels like he wandered in from a much darker movie. The rest of the cast, unfortunately, barely registers—Michael Callan, allegedly a love interest, is so weightless he could’ve been edited out entirely without changing a thing. The film takes its time getting into gear, and the laughs don’t always hit as hard as its reputation suggests. But then there’s Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye, the film’s roaming Greek chorus, strumming and harmonizing their way through a theme song so catchy it practically carries the movie on its back. The story meanders, but that melody never does—by the time it plays for the last time, Cat Ballou feels like a half-remembered folk tale, a Western with its tongue in its cheek and a tune stuck in its head.

After Star Wars turned science fiction into a bankable obsession, every studio scrambled for a piece of the galaxy. Disney, ever the opportunist—and already seasoned in talking animals and vaguely scientific contraptions—greenlit this oddball hybrid: part space-age fantasy, part standard-issue family comedy, with a plot that hinges on a telepathic cat fixing horse races to fund spaceship repairs. The cat in question, Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7 (mercifully nicknamed Jake), arrives on Earth via emergency landing. His ship’s busted, the repairs will cost $120,000, and luckily he has a collar that lets him levitate objects, read minds, and communicate in clear, if exasperated, English. He teams up with a mild-mannered physicist named Frank (Ken Berry), who reacts to all of this with the kind of cheerful passivity that Disney had been churning out in their movies for decades. Despite its interstellar premise, the film operates in the same tonal universe as That Darn Cat! or The Absent-Minded Professor: a few comic stunts, a chase or two, a sprinkling of Cold War-era espionage, and the inevitable military types who take far too long to realize they’re being outsmarted by a feline. The era may have changed, but the machinery hasn’t—this is firmly in line with the kind of genial nonsense Disney had been turning out for years. But the strangest choice—by far—is that the film hinges on gambling. To raise money, Jake uses his powers to manipulate horse races and clean up at pool. It’s played for laughs, but considering this is a children’s movie, it’s hard not to wonder how “telekinetic betting fraud” made it past the pitch meeting. There’s amusement to be had, but it’s light and largely forgettable—space-age nonsense dressed in Disney’s usual house style. Note: for M*A*S*H fans, there’s a bit of an Easter egg in seeing Harry Morgan and McLean Stevenson share the screen again—Morgan having replaced Stevenson on the show after the third season. It doesn’t add much, but it’s there.

A Tennessee Williams adaptation, which means bourbon-soaked regret, unspoken tragedies, and a mansion full of people who love each other just enough to make the resentment unbearable. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof isn’t polite about it either—it grabs hold in the first scene and doesn’t loosen its grip until it’s sure you’ve absorbed every accusation, every plea, every poisoned half-truth muttered under breath. The play’s rawest edges might be sanded down for 1958 audiences, but the script still cuts, and with Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, and Burl Ives spitting fire, every syllable stings. Big Daddy Pollitt (Ives), all bluster and girth, steps into his 65th birthday party like a man expecting the world to stand at attention. His eldest son, Brick (Newman), barely upright and fortified with enough whiskey to keep any real conversation at bay, abhors his wife, Maggie (Taylor), with a quietness that feels like a scream. She, radiant and clawing for affection, throws herself at the marriage like someone trying to pull a drowning man to shore. Meanwhile, Brick’s sister-in-law (Madeleine Sherwood), aggressively fertile, drags her passel of children around like proof of her superiority, a walking sermon on everything Maggie lacks. For all the venom, the film holds something softer at its core. These people might spit at each other, but they don’t yell just to hear their own voices. Big Daddy and Brick’s confrontation is a collision of raw nerves—a father pushing, a son recoiling, the weight of a lifetime of unspoken things crushing the space between them. Ives, a bellowing force of nature, devours the screen, while Newman, his fury locked behind clenched teeth and a glass of liquor, lets his eyes tell the story. And then there’s Taylor—glossy, magnetic, delivering every line like it’s both a seduction and a challenge, a woman who refuses to be dismissed. The script is sharp enough to cut, but Tennessee Williams never forgot that misery is best served with a chaser of dark humor. The dialogue snaps, sometimes in ways so biting they pull a laugh from the gut before the brain has time to catch up. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof sweats and aches, pushes and pulls, and leaves you feeling like you’ve spent two hours locked in a room with people whose flaws are as fascinating as their attempts to fix them. It’s glorious.

A movie that doesn’t run so much as glide—effortlessly, weightlessly, as if it’s figured out some trick of physics the rest of us missed. Catch Me If You Can moves like a con in progress, charming you so completely you don’t realize how much it’s getting away with. Spielberg, usually a director of grand spectacle, scales it down here, trading bombast for buoyancy, showmanship for sleight of hand. And at the center of it all: Leonardo DiCaprio, grinning like a kid who just realized nobody’s checking his hall pass. Frank Abagnale Jr., all polished nerve and precocious audacity, isn’t just a con artist—he’s an escape artist, slipping into new identities with the ease of a man shedding an old skin. Pilot, doctor, lawyer, substitute French teacher, master forger of checks and personas—he plays them all so convincingly that even he seems unsure where the performance ends. But Spielberg, ever the sentimentalist, never lets the film forget: under the crisp suits and forged documents, Frank is just a kid, running from a family that’s already slipped through his fingers. His father (Christopher Walken, heartbreakingly small in a role that asks him to loom large) is the first and last mark Frank ever wanted to impress, a man who loses everything and still somehow insists he’s just waiting for a stroke of luck. And then there’s Tom Hanks, who plays Carl Hanratty like he was born to be the guy who stays late at the office and forgets to loosen his tie. A fraud investigator who takes forgery personally, Hanratty spends years chasing Frank, not because the money matters but because the lie offends him. Hanks gives him the stiff-backed determination of a man who’s never been the smartest or the quickest but wins because he refuses to lose. And yet, somewhere in the years-long pursuit, an understanding settles between them—Carl the only person who seems to know Frank well enough to see through him, Frank the only person who keeps Carl from spending Christmases alone in his office. The phone calls between them—part taunt, part confession—are as sharp as the film’s best set pieces. Slick, jazzy, and cut to an energy that never wears out, Catch Me If You Can works so well you almost don’t notice how tightly Spielberg is pulling the strings. Every frame, every note of John Williams’ playfully sly score, every shift in con is handled with such precision it’s easy to forget just how much precision is involved. The whole thing plays like the best kind of magic trick: by the time you realize how good it is, it’s already slipped right past you.

The Bond-spoofing pets return, earpieces in tow. This time, the threat is Kitty Galore—a furless ex-agent of the feline spy syndicate M.E.O.W.S., now gone rogue and bent on species-wide revenge. She’s introduced in disguise as a small dog—specifically, a cocker spaniel—slipping past security to steal government codes. Because she’s going to hijack a satellite, and what you need to do that is secret codes. The plot involves a sonic device ominously dubbed “The Call of the Wild,” which, once activated, will turn every dog on Earth into a snarling liability. The goal is to sever the human-canine bond entirely, leaving cats to inherit the Earth. Not all cats support this plan—some are even helping the dogs stop it—but the message is clear: trust no whiskers. To prevent interspecies meltdown, an unlikely coalition is formed. There’s Diggs, the German Shepherd with more enthusiasm than judgment; Butch, the grizzled handler who’s seen too many bad leashes; Catherine, a Russian Blue cat with diplomatic immunity; and Seamus, a pigeon who contributes less than he thinks. Together, they globe-trot through a series of spy-movie-inspired set pieces, minus the intrigue or urgency. The characters are expressive and animated well, but their personalities aren’t particularly distinct or infectious. The one-liners kind of hit the floor. That said, they’re caught in a quickly paced and slickly produced film that at least tries to sell the absurdity with a straight face. The tone is sincerely deadpan, and the internal logic of this canine-feline espionage network is more thought-out than you’d expect. The film’s most successful stab at the Bond aesthetic comes early, with an opening credits sequence set to a Shirley Bassey cover of “Get the Party Started.” It’s ridiculous, but oddly committed. I’m surprised I enjoyed the movie as much as I did. It’s not exactly memorable, but it is clever—and for a kids’ film about secret-agent house pets trying to stop a hairless cat from launching a satellite-based mind-control device, that’s saying something.

By most reasonable standards, Caveman is not a good movie. And yet I liked it—more than I can comfortably explain. It’s dumb, but dumb on purpose. Like a group of talented people realized the material was unsalvageable and decided to throw themselves into it anyway, full-body sincerity and foam clubs included. Ringo Starr plays Atouk, a scrappy outsider exiled from his tribe after lusting a little too obviously after Lana—his chief’s impossibly glamorous mate (played by Starr’s real-life wife, Barbara Bach). In banishment, he teams up with a prehistoric ragtag crew that includes Dennis Quaid, Shelley Long, and Jack Gilford. They wander the wilderness dodging stop-motion lizards, speaking in toddler gibberish, and accidentally inventing boiled eggs and some loose version of communism. The central joke—that prehistoric movies were already ridiculous, so why not make one even dumber—mostly works, depending on your tolerance for pratfalls, claymation dinosaurs that crow like roosters, and the sight of Ringo smearing a giant insect across Quaid’s face or flinging his wife into a steaming pile of dinosaur dung. Critics panned it. Most audiences ignored it. But I had a good time. The cast knows exactly what kind of nonsense they’re in, and rather than play above it, they wade in headfirst—grunting, flailing, and having a ball.