Film Buff Musings

The acting is wooden, the dialogue sounds dubbed from another dimension, and the costumes all but scream late-’60s department store catalogue. But underneath the polyester and stiffness is a tightly constructed, occasionally nerve-shredding thriller with a taste for fast edits and well-composed dread. Carol White plays Cathy Palmer, a young woman who arrives in San Francisco and quickly falls in with Kenneth (Scott Hylands), a man with the wary-eyed intensity of someone who might propose marriage or lock you in a basement. She chooses the former, then the latter becomes more plausible. When she discovers she’s pregnant, she ends it—both the pregnancy and the relationship. Kenneth does not take this well. Cathy flees, starts over, marries a clean-cut politician, and tries to file Kenneth under “bad memories.” But he lingers. Or rather, the film lets him linger: barely glimpsed in reflections, shadows, crowds. The script keeps things brisk—short scenes, abrupt transitions, no wasted motion. It saves its oxygen for a drawn-out, legitimately suspenseful climax that makes good on the slow simmer of paranoia. Cathy’s panic feels real, even when the performances don’t. The film’s editing and cinematography do more of the emotional heavy lifting than the actors, and the stylization often works in its favor—heightening the dreamlike, unshakable anxiety. It’s a film out of time in more ways than one: dated but also dated off-kilter in such a way that adds to its effectiveness. A forgotten footnote in the thriller canon, but worth seeking out for those with a taste for unearthed curios and a tolerance for stiff line readings.

A landmark of the Czech New Wave, and one of its most mischievously enduring. Over half a century old, shot in a different language under a different political system, and yet Daisies still feels oddly familiar. Its two heroines—twentyish, reckless, fluorescently bored—flit through life like it’s a joke they’re already tired of. Not much has changed. There’s not much plot, not that it matters. The girls—Marie I and Marie II—decide, in the first few minutes, that since the world is spoiled, they will be too. That’s the mission statement. What follows is a series of loosely strung episodes: seducing lecherous old men, ordering extravagant meals and ditching the bill, cutting paper dolls, dancing in underwear, giggling at nonsense, and treating seriousness like something to be mocked, then mimicked, then abandoned. The logic is dreamlike, the behavior performative, and the point—as far as they’re concerned—is the pointlessness. It ends with them eating at a banquet table set for a party that never arrives, then climbing on top and tearing through it like anarchic debutantes. It’s symbolic, probably, but also tactile and giddy and strange. Like much of the film, it means exactly what it means in the moment—and then disappears. The filmmaking doesn’t behave. Jump cuts, color filters, freeze frames. Montages that accelerate like someone sat on the fast-forward button. Noise barges in, then disappears. You get cutouts, machinery, tableaus with no setup. It doesn’t build; it rattles forward. But it keeps you watching. The two leads do the rest. They don’t act like they’re in a film. They act like this is how they live—and someone, regrettably or not, decided to document it. Their giggling isn’t for you. It’s for each other. Technically an arthouse film, but it plays more like a prank—a visual tantrum wrapped in political satire, wrapped again in existential comedy. They don’t just break the rules; they pull the thread and watch everything come undone, laughing as they go. Decades later, the mess still feels freshly made.

A Faust story in cleats: a middle-aged baseball fan makes a half-serious deal with the devil so his hopeless Washington Senators can finally beat the Yankees. The devil—going by the name Applegate—shows up in a bowtie and a smirk, and the terms are simple: youth, talent, and a shot at glory, in exchange for a soul he plans to collect later. Joe Boyd becomes Joe Hardy (Tab Hunter), a clean-cut slugger who turns the Senators into overnight contenders. But Applegate isn’t interested in happy endings, and he sends in backup: Lola (Gwen Verdon), his right-hand seductress, tasked with severing Joe’s emotional ties to the life he left behind. Verdon, carrying over her Broadway role, brings the film’s most commanding presence. Her performance of “Whatever Lola Wants” is controlled, deliberate, and just sharp enough to make everything around it feel slightly underplayed by comparison. The rest of the musical numbers range from solid to serviceable. The screenplay moves efficiently, never meandering, but also never risking much. The film sticks close to its stage origins—you can feel the proscenium in nearly every frame—but the direction is polished enough to keep it from feeling static. What it lacks in cinematic inventiveness, it makes up for in rhythm and clarity. It’s not essential, but it’s tightly built and consistently entertaining. A studio-era musical with a sly premise, a few standout moments, and just enough bite to keep the sugar from taking over.

One of the most alluring things about Dancer in the Dark is how naturally it blends whimsy and despair. Things a film about blindness, poverty, betrayal, and capital execution—and yet, all along the way, it drifts into something softer, stranger, and almost sweet. Not enough to dull the impact, exactly, but just enough to make the hurt feel different. Set in 1964 Washington, it follows Selma (Björk), a Czech immigrant working in a factory while slowly losing her vision to a degenerative condition. Her twelve-year-old son has the same diagnosis, and she’s saving every cent for an operation that might spare him. She rehearses for a local production of The Sound of Music in her spare time, though even that begins slipping from reach. Selma’s undoing comes from misplaced trust. Her neighbor, Bill (David Morse), a policeman drowning in debt, learns where she hides her savings. What starts as a small act of kindness spirals into something far more brutal. The second half of the film becomes a long descent—with no turns, no detours, just a grim straight line to the bottom. And yet, in the middle of all this, the film sings. Selma’s inner life erupts into musical fantasy: factory sounds become rhythm, ordinary people burst into choreography. These aren’t polished numbers—they’re jagged, percussive, and deeply internal. The songs, written by Björk, sound like they were built out of machines and memory. They don’t lift the film out of reality—they break into it like sudden daydreams, exposing the one place Selma still feels safe. Von Trier shoots with a handheld, lo-fi texture that feels more like surveillance than storytelling. The musical sequences don’t offer escape; they feel like ruptures—interruptions that reveal how much Selma needs the fantasy just to endure the present. The ending is among the most wrenching ever filmed. It doesn’t come with revelation or reversal. Just the slow, precise cost of being good in a world that doesn’t reward it. Dancer in the Dark isn’t tidy, and it isn’t kind. But it’s singular—full of contradictions it refuses to resolve. Björk’s performance, aching and otherworldly, holds it all together. She doesn’t perform the role so much as dissolve into it—like the film is happening to her in real time, and we’re just watching her try to survive it.

A lusciously photographed period drama with a surprisingly breezy gait and a heroine who manages to be both a proto-feminist icon and a historical figure who actually lived. Catherine McCormack plays Veronica Franco, a 16th-century Venetian courtesan whose wit proves as dangerous as her beauty—a lethal combination in a time when either could land you in court. Literally. At first, Veronica balks at the prospect of joining the courtesan class—she’s in love with Marco (Rufus Sewell), the son of a senator, but she’s not wealthy enough to marry him. Her mother (a regal Jacqueline Bisset) reveals that she, too, once earned her living through seduction, and nudges her daughter toward the same path. Veronica proves a quick study. Her education involves poetry, politics, pillow talk, and social subterfuge—and she excels in all of them. Her popularity grows; so does her roster of lovers. And so does Marco’s discontent. Much of the drama filters through Marco’s possessiveness, presented as tragic longing. But his yearning begins to ossify into resentment, even if the film stops short of calling it what it is. Meanwhile, it’s Veronica who holds the screen, bearing the story’s intellect, defiance, and emotional firepower—effortlessly. Filmed in Venice and Rome, Dangerous Beauty is drenched in elegance. It knows how to frame a candlelit hall, how to choreograph a flirtation, and when to let the camera stay with McCormack’s quietly amused expressions. The love scenes are steamy but never tawdry; the palace intrigues light but not weightless. It’s not revelatory, but it’s easy to get swept up in. Stylish and engaging, it doesn’t ask you to take it as gospel—just to enjoy the spectacle and consider what it meant for a woman to speak this freely, and this well, in a world designed to silence her.

Michelle Pfeiffer stars as LouAnne Johnson, a tough-talking ex-Marine who walks into a classroom full of “at-risk” teens, armed with nothing but determination, a leather jacket, and a budget for extravagant field trips. Dangerous Minds takes the inspirational teacher blueprint and smooths out anything remotely challenging, replacing it with the soft glow of Hollywood uplift. Education isn’t about teaching here; it’s about vibes—earnest speeches, grand gestures, and the occasional karate demonstration. Learning happens between amusement park outings and lavish dinners, because nothing breaks the cycle of systemic failure quite like a complimentary three-course meal. Pfeiffer gives it her all, though it’s not clear what “all” really means in a movie this committed to shortcuts. She’s charismatic, no question, but LouAnne isn’t a character so much as a collection of cool teacher moments. The script doesn’t care what she’s actually teaching. It barely cares about the students at all. They exist in broad strokes—tough but secretly vulnerable, skeptical but deep down eager to be saved. They don’t grow so much as they are rescued, shaped into better versions of themselves through LouAnne’s sheer force of will. The film believes in itself, but that belief mostly manifests in piling on clichés with the confidence of someone who thinks sincerity is a substitute for truth. The system doesn’t fail students—no, they just need the right person to show up and believe in them. No one struggles with academics in a meaningful way. No one rejects the teacher’s methods for reasons that actually hold up. The transformation arrives on schedule, complete with uplifting music and no lingering questions about what happens to these characters next. Earnest, sure. Watchable, certainly. But Dangerous Minds isn’t a movie about teaching—it’s a fantasy about what teaching should look like. The real thing is messier, harder, far less cinematic. This version comes with a soundtrack and a pep talk.

A horror film with a strong concept and just enough style to keep it moving, Daniel Isn’t Real asks what happens when a childhood imaginary friend grows into something much darker. Luke (Miles Robbins) has a rough start—he witnesses a mass shooting as a child and soon “meets” Daniel, an imaginary friend who seems to know exactly what he needs. At first, Daniel is comforting. Then he starts making demands. Violent ones. After Daniel nearly kills Luke’s mother (Mary Stuart Masterson) with an overdose, Luke traps him inside a toy house and tries to move on. Years later, Luke is floundering. His mother’s mental illness has worsened, school is slipping away, and isolation has hardened him. Out of desperation—or muscle memory—he unlocks the house, and Daniel (now played by Patrick Schwarzenegger) returns. He’s charming, sharp, and initially helpful. But the turn is quick. The advice becomes manipulation. The boundary starts to dissolve. The film knows how to build a mood, and there are a few unnerving images. But it keeps Daniel’s nature too vague—demon, psychosis, metaphor—it raises the question, then leaves it hovering. What’s left is atmosphere without an anchor. Still, the premise holds. Daniel Isn’t Real doesn’t quite decide what Daniel is or what he’s after, but it circles the idea with style. The result isn’t a full descent—more a stylish spiral. Not great, but hard to shake.

A disaster flick that doesn’t bother pretending it’s anything else, and honestly, that’s half the fun. Pierce Brosnan, twinkle-eyed and vaguely weary, shows up as Harry Dalton, a volcanologist whose eyelid twitches only when a whole town is about to roast. He sizes up Dante’s Peak—a pretty postcard of a place—and gently informs the local council they’re perched on a time bomb. Nobody listens, because selling molten-lava-free charm is how they keep the brochures shiny. Harry naturally clicks with the town’s level-headed mayor, Rachel Wando (Linda Hamilton). She’s conveniently unattached, with two kids bred specifically to wander off at the worst possible moment. Early on, a pair of tourists discover the hot springs have a surprise setting: death by slow boil. It’s a nasty little moment that lets you know this movie will deliver bodies when it says it will. Once the mountain decides to blow, everything else does too—bridges, highways, civic good sense. Brosnan charges through lava flows and collapsing roads with the calm of a man who’s handled more dangerous scripts, because he certainly has. There’s a grandma who refuses to leave her cabin and ends up paddling through a boiling lake. Dante’s Peak rolls out every box on the disaster film checklist, but all goes down easy. Nothing deep, nothing tricky—just solid, well-paced mayhem and a bit of end-of-the-world romance thrown in for good measure. You won’t quote this movie at parties, but if you want to see Pierce Brosnan outrun lava for two hours, this’ll do you just fine.

I’m not the type to swoon over superhero movies—especially the brooding, hyper-serious ones that act like capes need footnotes. But The Dark Knight earns its gravity. It doesn’t just go dark for effect—it digs in. What it uncovers is bleak, propulsive, and razor-precise. At the center is Heath Ledger’s Joker, and there’s a reason he eclipsed the entire genre. Ledger doesn’t play him so much as let him leak through the cracks—half vaudeville, half threat. The voice is pinched and nasal, like a balloon with a grudge, and the performance is stitched together from tics, gasps, and something unplaceably wrong. That pencil trick lands like a joke—then hits like a murder. Bale’s Batman is still brooding and gravel-voiced, but more cornered, less in control. He pins his hopes on Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), a straight-shooter with a taste for grandstanding. Eckhart is excellent—his fall from gleaming D.A. to Two-Face isn’t a pivot, it’s a slow collapse. The tragedy isn’t that he changes, but that he was always this close to tipping. Nolan directs like he’s assembling a pressure chamber. Setpieces arrive with snap and menace: a freeway ambush, a hospital demolition, an interrogation that flips the power dynamic in a heartbeat. But it’s not spectacle for its own sake—every beat tightens the screws. The Joker doesn’t want power. He wants erosion. He wants proof that ethics are a mood. By the time we get to the ferries—wired to blow, loaded with civilians and convicts—the film has outgrown its genre. It’s not about saving the day. It’s about whether there’s anything left to save. It’s bleak, sure. But exhilarating. And for once, a film this grand doesn’t feel inflated. It just burns clean. The Dark Knight isn’t just the peak of the trilogy—it’s one of the few blockbusters that treats tension like currency and never overspends.

Bruce Wayne is limping. Gotham is too. After the sleek panic of the last installment, this one starts like an epilogue that forgot it already happened. Eight years have passed. The suit’s in storage. The billionaire’s got a cane and a death wish. But the city still remembers Harvey Dent—maybe Nolan does too—and the film feels both pulled forward and weighed down by ghosts it won’t name. Christian Bale returns as a Batman worn thin—hunched over, hollow-eyed, like he’s been haunting his own mansion. When Bane (Tom Hardy) shows up in a sheepskin coat and a voice like a Victorian teapot with vendettas, the plot doesn’t thicken so much as calcify. He crashes the Stock Exchange, drains Bruce’s finances through fraudulent trades, buries the cops underground, and installs himself as Gotham’s wheezing prophet of destruction. Hardy plays him like he’s reading scripture through a broken speaker. It works. You don’t root for him, but you listen. He fills the frame like an architectural feature—immovable, ridiculous, terrifying. The film wants to mean something—deeply, constantly. There are speeches, orations, proclamations. Everything is underscored, bolded, underlined in triplicate. A few lines even try to sound tossed off, like the film knows it’s caught navel-gazing and is pretending to stretch. Nolan’s direction is precise but joyless, like a scientist performing surgery on his own thesis. The fights hit their cues. The explosions show up on time. There’s scope, but not much surprise. Even the twists feel arranged, as if folded into the blueprint from the beginning. Anne Hathaway gets to slink through in black leather, wisecracks lacquered over her cynicism. Marion Cotillard floats in, gives an impression of depth, and floats back out. Michael Caine resigns. Joseph Gordon-Levitt prowls through debris and principle. And somewhere in there, the film does loop-de-loops to justify a nuclear subplot that plays like a bureaucratic stress dream. But it holds. Not gracefully, not briskly—but it holds. Bane gives it ballast, menace, and something approaching theater. He’s the only one who seems to enjoy being here. The rest slog toward the finale like it’s a requirement, not a release. The trilogy ends not with catharsis, but with a long breath held too long and let out too carefully. The trilogy ends not with catharsis, but with a long breath held too long and let out too carefully. It doesn’t soar, but it arrives—spent, self-serious, and resolute in its own gravity.

Dark Victory is prestige melodrama—studio-bound, solemn, and engineered for maximum tear absorption. But it works, mostly because Bette Davis gives it voltage. She plays Judith Traherne, a fast-living Long Island heiress who laughs off her dizzy spells until they start piling up. A bad fall, a rushed diagnosis, and suddenly she’s under the knife. The operation is called a success. But it isn’t. The doctor (George Brent) decides to tell her it was anyway, figuring it’s better if she doesn’t know what’s coming. The story plays out along familiar tragic lines, but Davis cuts through the sentiment with something sharper. Her performance runs hot without boiling over, and there’s a quiet shadow across every scene—Judith knows something’s wrong, even as everyone insists otherwise. For 1939, this was bleak stuff. Warner Bros. reportedly balked. Davis didn’t. She had the star power to push it forward, and she was right: the film was a hit and earned her one of the cleanest, most controlled Oscar-nominated performances of her career. The ending goes full curtain-drop, but the movement toward it has rhythm and precision. Judith’s transformation—from reckless to composed—isn’t subtle, but Davis plays it like she’s earned the stillness. There’s no manipulation in it, just clarity. The supporting cast has its footnotes. Humphrey Bogart shows up with an accent that comes and goes, mostly to tend the horses. Ronald Reagan, billed as Alec Hamm, delivers on at least half of that name. They hover at the edges. The charge is elsewhere, and Davis never lets it slip.

Dave is a political fairy tale in the Capra mold—idealism wrapped in comedy, cynicism kept at a safe distance. It isn’t out to eviscerate Washington’s moral failings so much as imagine a world where decency and common sense might actually prevail, and against all odds, it works. The film coasts on sheer charm, a brisk, untroubled fantasy about a good man stumbling into power and making things right, buoyed by Kevin Kline’s impeccable dual performance. Kline first appears as President Bill Mitchell—slick, calculating, thoroughly transactional. And then there’s Dave Kovic, a cheerful, small-town temp agency owner who happens to be his spitting image. When Mitchell suffers a stroke and is quietly moved out of the picture, Dave is installed as a puppet president by the coldly pragmatic Chief of Staff, Bob Alexander (Frank Langella, at his most villainous, practically licking his chops in every scene). The plan is simple: keep Dave on script, keep the real power in the hands of the insiders, and let the American public remain blissfully unaware. But Dave—earnest, sincere, incapable of playing politics the way he’s supposed to—starts to enjoy the job a little too much. More compelling than the political mechanics is Dave’s evolving relationship with the First Lady, Ellen Mitchell (Sigourney Weaver). She doesn’t notice the switch at first—who really looks at her husband anymore?—but when Dave’s guileless enthusiasm slips through, when he glances at her legs like an actual human being rather than a man checking off a list of obligations, she senses something different. Her icy distance melts, replaced by something closer to curiosity, then warmth, then something she hasn’t felt in years: respect. This isn’t sharp political satire; the humor plays broader, closer to a well-tuned sitcom than a scathing indictment of Washington. But that’s part of the appeal. Dave doesn’t pretend to be a darkly cynical takedown of the system—it’s content to be light, funny, and occasionally moving. It imagines, just for a moment, what might happen if a person with a soul wandered into the highest office in the land, and somehow, it makes the fantasy feel good enough to believe in.

The Earth cracks, the sky rages, Manhattan gets swallowed whole, and yet the movie drifts along like a snowflake refusing to land. A climate disaster epic where the disaster plays out in slow motion, The Day After Tomorrow throws every cataclysmic event it can muster onto the screen—floods, tornadoes, instant deep freeze—but never figures out how to make any of it feel urgent. The destruction is impressive, the science is nonsense, and the characters are mostly waiting around for the next effects sequence to tell them what to do. Dennis Quaid, playing a climatologist with a heroic streak, warns that the world is days away from collapse, though his warnings are met with the kind of disbelief that exists only in disaster movies. Meanwhile, his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) is trapped in a New York blanketed in ice, huddling in the Public Library with fellow survivors, where the most pressing concern is deciding which books to burn for warmth. Occasionally, someone ventures outside, only to be met with either a wall of snow or, in one rather bizarre tangent, a pack of CGI wolves. The storm does its part—drowning cities, snapping landmarks in half, flash-freezing bystanders mid-sentence—but the film never settles into anything resembling real tension. Twister gave us tornadoes with personality, chasing Bill Paxton down highways; The Day After Tomorrow treats its weather as a brute force, an unthinking, all-consuming avalanche of pixels. The cold arrives in dramatic bursts, killing some instantly while leaving others with just a chill, depending on what the script demands. Quaid embarks on a frozen trek to rescue his son, a subplot that feels less like a perilous journey and more like a logistical exercise in getting one actor to another. Snow falls, water rises, governments relocate, and yet, for all its spectacle, the movie feels weirdly passive. The world is ending, but mostly, these people just wait it out.

The Holland Tunnel explodes, and Daylight treats it like the end of days staged on a studio backlot: concrete slabs crash in rhythmic sequence, fireballs twist just shy of logic, and somewhere in the middle of it all, Sylvester Stallone sweats like a man trying to rescue his own filmography. The setup is clean, if hilariously contrived. A freak accident turns a Manhattan–Jersey tunnel into an underground tomb, trapping a discount sample pack of humanity: an ex-con, a neurotic playwright, a pair of retirees, a dog that earns its close-up, and a handful of people who clearly won’t survive the next act. Stallone plays Kit Latura, ex-EMS and current walking guilt complex, who swan-dives into the wreckage for redemption—and because the script needs a point man. The sets are grimy enough to impress—a cross between Ninja Turtles world-building and a theme park ride that’s been leaking for years. One corridor features spinning fans that rotate on their own timers like an obstacle course designed by a bored sadist. The laws of engineering take a vacation. So does realism. But the spectacle chugs along, and Stallone, even with dialogue that sounds like it was scratched into a protein bar wrapper, moves with the wounded dignity of a man who once knew what an arc looked like. Nobody’s here for nuance. The survivors weep, flail, occasionally give speeches about how much they want to live—though not quite enough to avoid splitting up at the worst possible time. The camera swoops. The water rises. The dog, miraculously, makes it. What’s surprising is how well the thing holds together in spite of itself. The pacing slips into a gear that feels automatic but not lazy—just mechanical in that oddly watchable ’90s way, like a cologne commercial with life-or-death stakes. It’s entertainment by attrition: the dialogue falls apart, the logic melts down, and somehow you’re still watching. Buried beneath the noise is a movie that fills the frame with conviction, even if it isn’t sure what to do once it’s filled. Daylight doesn’t rise to anything great—it just keeps moving, long enough for the oxygen to run out.

Imagine Top Gun with stock cars instead of jets and a lot more left turns. Tom Cruise plays Cole Trickle, a hotshot open-wheel driver recruited into the world of NASCAR, where he arrives with raw talent, no stock car experience, and an ego that’s already idling in high gear. He’s a blank slate with fast reflexes and no patience—great for drama, thin for character. Early on, he butts heads with Rowdy Burns (Michael Rooker), a seasoned driver who doesn’t so much mentor Cole as body-check him around the track until they’re both injured and forced into détente. The real mentor is Harry Hogge (Robert Duvall), a crusty crew chief who teaches Cole how to handle a car without treating it like a battering ram. Nicole Kidman shows up as Dr. Claire Lewicki, a neurosurgeon who treats Cole after a crash and gradually becomes his romantic interest. She’s introduced with professional gravity—questioning the risks of the sport, confronting him about fear and control—but not long after, she’s trackside in a sundress, reduced to the supportive girlfriend role with the occasional pep talk. The racing scenes are well-shot and loud enough to rattle your fillings. You hear the engines. You feel the vibrations. But the film never quite figures out what to do when the cars aren’t moving. The drama between races is sketched in formula: setbacks, minor breakthroughs, and a last-lap showdown that lands exactly where you expect. Nothing hits too hard or sticks too long. Days of Thunder isn’t unwatchable. Cruise is watchable by default, and the production doesn’t skimp on flash. But it’s a slick machine with no real traction—a sports drama that moves fast and says little, hoping horsepower will carry it across the finish line.

A romance that starts with laughter and ends in wreckage, Days of Wine and Roses drinks deeply from its own despair. Jack Lemmon’s Joe Clay, a bright-eyed PR man with a talent for schmoozing and a bottle permanently within reach, introduces Lee Remick’s Kirsten to the pleasures of a casual drink. She hesitates at first—preferring chocolate to brandy—but soon joins him, and together they build a marriage on clinking glasses and easy intoxication. Social drinking turns habitual, then essential, and while Joe crashes first, Kirsten isn’t far behind. Blake Edwards, better known for light comedies, directs with the precision of someone who understands that real tragedy doesn’t need embellishment. The descent into alcoholism isn’t just a series of bad choices; it’s the slow erosion of willpower, the loss of small battles long before the war is recognized. Joe is the first to spiral—drinking on the job, losing work, making empty promises—but Kirsten, once the steadier presence, eventually falls harder. They fight to pull themselves out, but while Joe grabs for a lifeline, Kirsten clings to the current, letting it drag her away. Lemmon gives a performance so raw it stings—eyes darting, hands twitching, voice always just shy of pleading. He plays Joe like a man who once had confidence but now only knows how to fake it. And Remick, delicate but devastating, isn’t just his enabler; she’s his reflection, his perfect accomplice, until she isn’t. The final act is a slow severing, Joe choosing sobriety, Kirsten choosing the bottle, the love between them no match for the addiction that’s taken root. Some call it melodrama, but there’s nothing exaggerated about this kind of ruin. It’s not just the big, operatic breakdowns—the trashed greenhouse, the locked apartment door—it’s the quiet resignation, the way desperation turns to routine. Days of Wine and Roses isn’t content to show two people destroying themselves; it makes you understand why one of them won’t stop.

A movie about nothing in particular, except for the way a single night can feel like an entire era when you’re young enough to believe summer might last forever. Texas, 1976—the last day of school, a stretch of golden hours where the only real concern is what happens after dark. Next year’s seniors roam the town with paddles in hand, hunting incoming freshmen who can’t do much but run. The girls prefer their own rituals, humiliation as performance art. Somewhere, a house party is rumored, though the details are always vague. The ones on the bottom rung take their beatings and learn the rules. Wiley Wiggins’ Mitch Kramer, all hair and nerves, spends the night in avoidance mode—until he doesn’t, when he realizes that pain is currency and survival is initiation, and it’ll eventually be over. Cristin Hinojosa’s Sabrina gets pulled into the upperclassmen’s orbit with less collateral damage, folding into their world with a little wide-eyed hesitation but no real protest. Everyone’s trying something on for size, seeing how it fits. And then there’s McConaughey’s Wooderson, drifting along on the fumes of high school nostalgia, the guy who never left because, for him, nothing better ever came along. The teenagers don’t fully clock what he represents yet—an expiration date they don’t think applies to them. Give them time. Linklater doesn’t push for laughs or force a grand thesis. The humor is incidental, the drama unspoken. The kids don’t come to big realizations, don’t grow up all at once, don’t wake up different people in the morning. The night just happens, and they roll with it, spinning their wheels in the glow of streetlights, moving forward even when it doesn’t feel like they’re moving at all.

A Superman movie by way of talking animals, which somehow manages to flatten both concepts at once. Super-Pets takes the iconic figures of the DC universe—caped heroes, ancient grudges, and a fully stocked rogues’ gallery—and reworks them into a chirpy, candy-colored diversion. It’s not awful. Just inoffensive, indistinct, and hard to imagine anyone over the age of eight feeling particularly attached to it. The story opens with Superman and his loyal dog Krypto saving the day together. But when Superman grows closer to Lois Lane, Krypto slips into an emotional spiral—a mix of jealousy, loneliness, and species-based identity crisis. That’s interrupted when the Justice League is captured by Lulu, a guinea pig escapee from Lex Luthor’s lab, who gains powers through orange kryptonite and begins zapping cages while outlining a grand plan of personal vengeance dressed up as world domination. To save his best friend, Krypto teams up with a group of shelter animals who’ve also been zapped by the same orange kryptonite: a pig who can grow and shrink at will, a hyper-speed turtle, a squirrel with electrical powers, and a rescue dog with indestructible skin and no time for bonding exercises. Cue training montages, reluctant teamwork, and a climactic aerial showdown—followed by a tidy lesson about friendship. The humor sticks to familiar terrain: toilet water, furniture chewing, pet puns, and the occasional wink at DC lore. Batman, Wonder Woman, and the others make brief appearances, mostly to be gently spoofed and then shelved. As a talking-animal movie, it’s neither especially funny nor especially cute. As a DC adaptation, it’s thin on invention—more likely to amuse casual viewers than anyone with a comics subscription. It’s all watchable in that “loud colors and fast edits” kind of way, but nothing about it sticks. It fills time, clears out, and leaves behind nothing but a faint paw print.

Slick, shadowy, and just self-serious enough to sell it, Dead Again plays like Hitchcock with a reincarnation fetish. The ending doesn’t deliver a jolt—it exhales. But what comes before is a stylish knot of past lives, psychic echoes, and sharp objects passed down like fate. Branagh directs himself as Mike Church, an L.A. private eye with a busted Saab and an accent that keeps changing zip codes. He’s hired to look after a woman who doesn’t speak, doesn’t remember her name, and turns up at an orphanage looking like she wandered out of a silent film. That’s Emma Thompson—tender, twitchy, and eventually doing a Brooklyn accent so mangled it could be charged with assault. But she’s compelling, and so is the setup. The investigation leads to a hypnotist (Derek Jacobi, purring like he knows where the bodies are buried) who believes in past lives and isn’t shy about it. A few sessions later, and the mute mystery woman may or may not be the reincarnation of a 1940s pianist’s wife—stabbed to death with a pair of scissors in one of those glorious black-and-white flashbacks that wear their melodrama like a fur coat. Everyone gets two roles: past and present. Branagh plays tortured and twitchy in both, sprinting through his lines like someone triple-parked. Thompson’s better in the present, but she commits hard either way. Even Robin Williams shows up, uncredited, to deliver reincarnation theory with the gravitas of someone who read a single Carl Jung paperback and never got over it. It looks great. Gothic staircases. Expressionist lighting. Music cues that swoon and stab. The mood is dialed to eleven, and that’s half the fun. The other half is watching it try to outsmart itself—sometimes succeeding, sometimes just getting dizzy. The resolution could’ve used one more twist, or maybe just fewer monologues. But even when it overreaches, it’s still reaching. Dead Again doesn’t quite unlock the vault it promises, but it knows how to jiggle the handle.

Four college kids, too impatient to wait for the next ferry to Block Island, hire a local fisherman to take them across—because in horror movies, any transportation secured after dark is guaranteed to be a mistake. The warning signs are there, but they brush them off, assuming money solves problems rather than creates them. Soon enough, they’re at the mercy of a crew that isn’t just giving rides for extra cash; they’re smugglers with a plan, and that plan doesn’t involve letting their passengers see the sunrise. A movie like this should go for broke—crank up the hysteria, let the villains chomp through their dialogue, stage the kills with the kind of deranged creativity that makes bad movies good. Instead, Dead Sound drifts listlessly, never ridiculous enough to be entertaining, never competent enough to be suspenseful. The villains, supposedly hardened criminals, act like they’re running a scam they don’t particularly enjoy, and the victims, despite their supposed terror, react as if they’ve just realized they left their phone at a restaurant. The murder sequences—normally a lifeline for a thriller like this—are as uninspired as they come. A knife is waved, a gun is fired, someone stumbles into a conveniently placed pool of blood, and the movie moves on, barely registering its own body count. One moment, though, deserves special mention. A character, mortally wounded and floating in the ocean, gasps out his final words before slipping beneath the surface—only not quite. Still afloat, still inconveniently visible, he subtly kicks himself underwater, a self-removal so obviously awkward it becomes the film’s most memorable moment. That sums up Dead Sound perfectly: a thriller without urgency, a horror movie without horror, a film that barely seems interested in its own premise. The tension never builds, the danger never presses in, and even the boat seems reluctant to reach its destination.

The old chestnut about humans using only ten percent of their brains may be junk science, but it’s great pulp bait. Stephen King mined it into The Dead Zone, and David Cronenberg turned the novel into this chilly, oddly dignified supernatural thriller. Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) is a schoolteacher who wakes from a five-year coma with a gift, or curse, that comes through the touch of his hand. Touch someone, and he can see pieces of their past, present, or future. The first “present” is a shock: clasping a nurse’s hand, he tells her her house is on fire and her daughter’s in danger. That’s the kind of power that can make you useful or unbearable, and Johnny drifts between the two, solving crimes, exposing secrets, and quietly breaking under the strain. His fiancée (Brooke Adams) has married someone else. His own body is giving out. Walken tempers his oddness here—still distinct, but stripped of the tics. Johnny isn’t thrilled to have this ability, but he doesn’t whine about it either; he uses it when he thinks it matters, even when the cost is steep. One vision forces him to weigh whether killing a man in the present might save thousands in the future. For Cronenberg, it’s tight-laced—the camera glides, the violence is brisk, and the dread works its way in sideways, the way a bruise blooms hours later. Johnny’s visions come in jolts—brief, sometimes violently sharp—but they serve the story instead of swallowing it. It’s among the most grounded of King adaptations, carrying the novel’s melancholy along with its menace. By the end, the power has nothing left to give but its cost. Cronenberg keeps the camera steady and lets you feel it closing in.

You’d think a movie about Reagan-era arms dealing—directed by William Friedkin, no less—would show up with sharper knives. Instead, Deal of the Century slinks in with a butter spreader and a smirk. Chevy Chase plays an arms dealer by way of his usual deadpan golf pro routine, trading war machines like he’s hawking used Buicks. He walks through the movie like someone who misplaced his script pages but decided to wing it anyway. His character, Eddie Muntz, peddles weapons to Third World despots while cracking wise and avoiding moral reflection. After his business partner dies in a plane crash during a shady overseas demo, Muntz returns to the States to chase the contract of a lifetime: brokering the sale of the Peacemaker, an unmanned fighter jet with onboard AI and the temperament of a firecracker. The weapons manufacturer is run by a war profiteer with a god complex and a PR team, and they treat the sale like a papal coronation. Sigourney Weaver, playing the dead partner’s widow, gets roped into the proceedings for reasons that are tenuous at best, though she earns one of the film’s few memorable moments by plugging a bullet wound in Muntz’s cast-wrapped foot gushing blood with a wine cork. Gregory Hines shows up as another arms rep whose grasp of basic decency is a liability in this business. Somewhere in here is a farce about the unholy marriage of capitalism and carnage, but the movie keeps dodging its own premise. For a film that practically gift-wraps its subject matter—moral rot, war as business, American exceptionalism sold by the crate—it never quite digs in. The tone is off, the satire fuzzy, and even Friedkin seems bored behind the camera. You wait for the movie to get mad or weird or alive. It doesn’t.

Meryl Streep, radiant even when rotting, plays Madeline Ashton, a movie star whose career is wilting at the same rate as her youth. The solution arrives in the form of a sleek, sinister enchantress (Isabella Rossellini), who offers her an elixir of eternal beauty, with one caveat: take care of the body, because it’s the only one she’ll ever have. A warning that barely registers before Madeline takes a swan dive down the staircase, smashes into a heap, and then—disoriented but upright—rises again, her head twisted grotesquely backward, a woman less resurrected than recklessly reassembled. Bruce Willis, playing against type as her spineless, perpetually perspiring husband Ernest, watches in horror. A once-promising plastic surgeon, now reduced to working on corpses—he’s been drowning in alcohol and regret for years, and this does not improve his outlook. Then comes Helen (Goldie Hawn), a woman scorned, a woman plotting, a woman still seething fourteen years after Madeline stole her fiancé. She, too, has taken the potion, and she, too, is discovering that immortality is less glamorous than advertised. Zemeckis builds the film like a gothic funhouse, every frame overstuffed with ornate set design, every gag escalating toward some new grotesquery. Madeline and Helen aren’t so much rivals as two vipers locked in an ouroboros of vanity and vengeance, hacking at each other with shovels, blowing holes through each other’s torsos, yet somehow always finding new ways to keep going. The special effects, astonishing for their time, push the film into cartoonish brilliance—bodies fold, snap, and contort with the reckless elasticity of Looney Tunes, except here the damage is permanent. It’s all so wickedly funny, so outrageously macabre, that it feels like Hollywood testing the absolute limits of what a big-budget comedy could get away with in 1992. And the actors—Streep, Hawn, Willis—commit fully, diving into their roles with a precise, physical silliness that makes the whole thing click. Streep, in particular, delivers a performance so deliciously vain and oblivious that it feels like a precursor to her Devil Wears Prada persona, but with more blunt-force trauma. The film builds and builds, spiraling toward a finale that isn’t just dark but perfectly, brutally fitting. A story about people willing to sell their souls for eternal youth, only to realize too late that eternity isn’t the prize they thought it was.

A fake documentary with a premise designed to rattle, though what it mostly rattles is the patience. Upon release, it was dismissed by right-wing pundits as a liberal revenge fantasy, but that gives it too much credit—there’s no real bite here, no urgency, no sense that the filmmakers knew what they wanted to say beyond the initial shock of the setup. The assassination of George W. Bush should send the country into an uncontrollable tailspin of paranoia, retaliation, and media frenzy, but Death of a President doesn’t trust the chaos. It sidesteps it completely, opting instead for the plodding mechanics of a whodunit wrapped in the droning seriousness of a true-crime documentary. It moves with all the gravity of a History Channel reenactment, its talking heads delivering lines with the stiffness of bad improv, its dramatic recreations lacking tension or immediacy. The actors playing Bush’s inner circle react as if their boss has merely been sidelined by the flu, their grief so muted that it turns the assassination itself into a procedural inconvenience rather than a world-altering event. Somewhere in all this, the film attempts political commentary—something about post-9/11 surveillance, civil liberties in freefall, racial scapegoating—but it’s all so timidly gestured at, so clumsily handled, that the ideas barely form before dissolving into the static. A film like this should provoke, unsettle, ignite conversation. Instead, it meanders through its own premise like a student project that lost confidence halfway through. Death of a President could have been scathing, thrilling, infuriating—anything but this.

It starts like a twisted road trip. Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega play Elliot and Ridley, a father and daughter driving through the Canadian Rockies when they hit something with the car. Not a deer. Not a moose. A unicorn. White, glowing, bleeding purple, and not entirely dead. While Elliot goes off to find something to finish the job—eventually returning with a tire iron—Ridley reaches out and touches its horn. She gets a vision like she’s been flung down a cosmic tunnel. The moment passes. The creature goes still. Elliot thinks it’s done for, pulls a Harry and the Hendersons, loads it into the car, and they continue on to their appointment. That appointment is with Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), Elliot’s boss—a dying billionaire in the middle of estate planning. They pull into the driveway. Inside: rich people, stilted conversation, tuna canapés. Outside: something thrashing in the backseat—loud, violent, impossible to ignore. The unicorn isn’t dead. And then it gets weirder. Ridley’s acne clears up. Elliot’s eyesight returns. Both of them had contact with the unicorn’s blood. Odell, ever the opportunist, dabs a little on his tongue—and by morning, his terminal illness isn’t terminal anymore. He smells profit. But one miracle leads to many problems. The sky goes radioactive. More unicorns arrive. Not the glittering, noble beasts of legend. These things growl, stalk, and gore. The Leopold estate turns into a unicorn-infested death trap—Jurassic Park by way of Lisa Frank. The movie starts strange and ends loud. The tone buckles. The jokes vanish. The fantasy gets teeth. It wants to juggle comedy, horror, and surrealism, but mostly just drops the pins. It had a killer setup. Then it settled for a creature feature.

Kenneth Branagh, determined to carve his name into Agatha Christie’s legacy, reconstructs Death on the Nile as a grand, gilded murder mystery—luxurious, elegant, and strangely weightless. The drama unfolds aboard the SS Karnak, where jealousy, betrayal, and champagne flow in equal measure, and where the only certainty is that someone won’t be disembarking alive. The film should simmer with intrigue, its opulence masking the rot beneath. Instead, it drifts along like a pleasure cruise, too polished to feel dangerous. Poirot, invited aboard by his friend Bouc (Tom Bateman) and Bouc’s aristocratic mother (Annette Bening), finds himself among the kind of people who mistake wealth for invincibility. Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot), an heiress with more diamonds than foresight, has stolen Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) from his ex, Jacqueline (Emma Mackey), who now follows them across continents, a vision in blood-red satin, watching, waiting. A honeymoon already thick with resentment reaches its natural conclusion: first an attempted murder, then the real thing. Poirot, ever the watchful detective, sifts through the wreckage, untangling betrayals from coincidences and misdeeds from outright crimes. The cast, decked out in silk and shadows, does what it can—Emma Mackey smolders, Gal Gadot glows, Armie Hammer looks nervous—but the chemistry never combusts. The 1978 adaptation gathered icons who radiated star power; this one feels like a display of expensive ornamentation, gleaming but inert. The pyramids loom, the river stretches, the Karnak glides, and the murders happen on schedule, yet the tension dissolves before it ever has a chance to settle. A murder mystery too enamored with its own reflection to notice the knife in its back.

Sword-and-sorcery schlock isn’t known for its enlightened worldview, but Deathstalker takes things to a level so grotesque that even the usual genre defenses—escapism, camp, excess—start to feel flimsy. Every frame seems locked in a contest with itself to see just how much lechery can be crammed into a single film reel. This isn’t just a testosterone-fueled power fantasy; it’s a power fantasy with a nasty streak, wallowing in misogyny so blatant that it stops feeling mindless and starts feeling hostile. Our hero, Deathstalker (Rick Hill), is the standard bronzed, loinclothed brute whose moral code exists somewhere between self-interest and doing whatever he wants. He’s gallant enough to stop a woman from being assaulted—then immediately takes the would-be rapist’s place. Before things go too far, he’s summoned by an exiled king who promises power in exchange for reclaiming a stolen throne from the evil sorcerer Munkar. The villain, a shriveled magician with a taste for cruelty, is supposedly dying and hosting a grand tournament to select his successor, guaranteeing two things: copious amounts of staged violence and an unrelenting parade of unclothed women. Lana Clarkson’s Kaira, an apparent ally, distinguishes herself through two modes of battle—one with a sword, one in bed, and both topless. That’s about as much development as she gets. Deathstalker hacks his way through the usual array of barbarians, beasts, and magical nonsense, all while the film insists on being as leering as possible. The editing is choppy, the dialogue sounds like it was lifted from a half-baked Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and the soundtrack pounds away at the eardrums like an overenthusiastic war drum. It’s campy, sure, but even camp needs variation—something beyond an unbroken commitment to sleaze. The film barrels ahead with a smirk, drunk on its own depravity, never stopping to consider that sometimes, even a sword-and-sorcery romp needs a moment to breathe.

Whatever connection this has to the original Deathstalker is purely theoretical. Same title, same loinclothed hero, same enthusiastic disregard for female costuming. But where the first film was a dreary, mean-spirited slog, this one tosses self-importance overboard and paddles off into full goofball territory. The result is a cheap, sloppy, but thoroughly enjoyable send-up of the sword-and-sorcery genre—aware of its own ridiculousness and smart enough to embrace it. John Terlesky takes over as Deathstalker, replacing the previous film’s humorless slab of muscle with someone who actually seems to be having fun. His version of the hero is cocky, smirking, and fully aware that none of this should be taken seriously on any level. The film follows suit, cramming itself with ham-fisted double entendres, slapstick brawls, and moments where even the actors can’t keep a straight face. At one point, Terlesky and Monique Gabrielle break into giggles at the end of a scene. Instead of cutting or saving it for the blooper reel, the film just rolls with it. It works. Anything goes here. The plot—functional, if barely necessary—sees Deathstalker rescuing Reena (Gabrielle), a whiny but determined seer who claims to be a princess usurped by a magical clone. The villain, Jarek (John LaZar), has conjured this unstable doppelgänger to keep her out of the way, and now she needs a hero to fix things. Deathstalker, initially more invested in stealing, drinking, and preening, takes the job, setting off on an adventure filled with rubbery monsters, clumsy duels, and a stubborn refusal to button a shirt. Gabrielle isn’t much of an actress, but the film seems aware of that, giving her a character whose primary skills are pouting and posing. Deathstalker II is a movie that finally understands that the sword-and-sorcery genre is inherently silly and plays to that strength. It might be dumb, but it’s fun—something its predecessor never figured out.