Film Buff Musings

Three men. One killer. Too many alibis that sound like pickup lines. On her 30th birthday, Eva gets dumped by her long-term boyfriend and does what every emotionally disoriented millennial is supposed to: downloads a dating app. Somewhere between the hangover and the profile pic upload, her favorite true-crime podcast starts covering a serial killer who meets women the same way. The killer, we’re told, has no fingerprints, a forensic background, and an off-putting fondness for wine. She lines up three dates. Kyle, who sips rosé and talks like he’s already prepping the anniversary slideshow. Mitch, a bar owner whose kitchen accident allegedly cost him his fingerprints. And Norman, a security guy who drops forensic trivia like someone still trying to ace the midterm. None of them seem dangerous—just dangerously plausible. At first, Eva goes through the motions. But as the podcast rolls out new theories, her dating history starts to feel more curated than coincidental. She keeps seeing all three. Flirtations get second-guessed. Memories rerun with new emphasis. Compliments get cross-examined. Her instincts don’t sharpen—they shift. The setup is sharp, the conceit neat. But once the film lands its central twist—that one of these men is the killer but there’s no way to be sure who—the tension levels out. Eva cycles through her suspicions like a rerouted sitcom plot, and the story drifts into a steady, low-level loop. The laughs keep coming, but nothing cuts deep. Lucy Hale plays Eva with easy, low-key likability—sharp enough to carry the premise, relaxed enough to let it play out. The tone stays breezy, never pushing too hard in any direction. And while the film doesn’t build to much, it does hold together: a sly, mildly warped genre exercise that lets its satire peek through without overplaying its hand. F*** Marry Kill doesn’t go for the jugular—but it has fun poking around the ribs.

A cyclone of a performance from Andy Griffith, tearing through A Face in the Crowd with the force of a man discovering just how far charisma can take him. He’s plucked from a dusty Arkansas jail cell by radio producer Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), whose nose for talent is sharper than her sense of long-term consequences. She vaults him onto the airwaves, polishing his rough edges just enough to make him dangerous—then watches, paralyzed, as he outpaces his own myth. Griffith plays Rhodes like a messianic huckster—equal parts cornball philosopher and con man, selling aw-shucks wisdom to the masses while nursing a seething contempt for the rubes who adore him. Neal, heartbreakingly precise, carries the film’s center of gravity. Her Marcia is smart, skeptical, and only too late aware that she’s engineered a monster. Their dynamic is the film’s dark heartbeat: the woman who builds the man, and the man who becomes too big to be told no. Kazan directs with a blade, not a brush. The satire is merciless. The rise is fast, the fall inevitable, but the horror is in the in-between—how easily media manufactures authenticity, how quickly the public clutches onto a lie with a twang. Lee Remick, in her screen debut, plays a teenage baton twirler who floats into Rhodes’ life on a wave of girlish admiration and is quickly swept into his orbit—glamorized, elevated, and ultimately used. She’s a symbol of his power to mythologize and discard. Rhodes’ blend of populism, media dominance, and unchecked ego maps so cleanly onto later political figures that the film feels less like a relic of 1957 and more like a warning ignored. Kazan doesn’t just chart one man’s corruption—he sketches out the machinery of an entire strain of American power. A film that doesn’t just sting but scorches.

The setup is pure pulp: a grief-stricken FBI agent trades faces with a comatose terrorist in order to prevent a chemical bomb from leveling Los Angeles. And yet Face/Off doesn’t flinch. It barrels ahead, powered by operatic shootouts, identity confusion, and two performances that swing for the mezzanine. John Travolta is Sean Archer, an agent hollowed out by personal loss and professional obsession. His target: Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage), a gleeful sadist in a velvet coat who seems to enjoy terrorism for the wardrobe changes alone. When Castor is finally captured and sedated, Archer agrees to an off-the-books surgical swap—his face for Castor’s, temporarily—so he can infiltrate a prison and question Castor’s brother about the bomb. But Castor regains consciousness, finds his face missing, and forces the same surgery on himself. He doesn’t just impersonate Archer—he moves into his life like a new tenant. What follows is part action movie, part identity crisis. Woo stages the violence with a painter’s eye for absurdity: mirrored shootouts, airborne stunts, and enough slow-motion to stretch five seconds into poetry. But the real thrill is watching Cage and Travolta mirror each other’s affectations. Cage twitches with calculated glee. Travolta swipes his gestures and throws them back, warped by grief and rage. Neither one coasts. The film shouldn’t work this well. It’s preposterous, stitched together with medical hand-waving and emotional shorthand—but the commitment is airtight. Beneath the stylized bloodshed is a film about impersonation, control, and what’s left when the outer shell is stolen. Face/Off is high-concept lunacy done with uncommon conviction—and that’s rare enough to count as style.

High school is already a horror story. The Faculty just adds aliens. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers by way of teen soap and late-‘90s gore, set in an Ohio school where something’s not right. The teachers are acting different. Not meaner. Just… wrong. First it’s the gym coach (Robert Patrick, channeling leftover rage from Terminator 2), barking orders with too much intensity. Then he and another teacher are spotted pinning down the school nurse—and shoving a strange aquatic bug into her ear. After that, things escalate. A group of students—unconnected, unpopular, and all-too-aware that something’s wrong—band together to investigate. What they find is exactly what the title suggests: the faculty has been taken over by parasitic, water-hungry creatures who crawl in through the ear canal and nest in the brain. They’re organized, infectious, and efficient. The plan? Total assimilation, starting with the morning announcements. The cast is unusually strong for a film that features a monster queen morphing in a locker room. Elijah Wood plays the soft-spoken nerd with hidden backbone. Josh Hartnett coasts on bad-boy charm and drug-dealer ingenuity. Clea DuVall, Jordana Brewster, Shawn Hatosy, and Laura Harris round out the teenage resistance. Jon Stewart, looking amused to be there, plays a science teacher with a suspicious supply closet and a very bad day. The effects are gleefully gooey, the jump scares are functional, and the vibe is knowingly campy without tipping into parody. Yes, some of the CGI has aged like expired cafeteria milk. Yes, the plot is simple enough to sketch from memory. But that’s part of the appeal. The Faculty knows exactly what it is: a B-movie with a budget, a brain, and just enough teenage paranoia to carry it through. It’s silly, it’s stylish, and it earns its cult status.

Michael Moore’s mission was clear: stop George W. Bush from getting re-elected. The plan didn’t work. But Fahrenheit 9/11 stuck around—not as strategy, but as a jagged, oddly electrifying snapshot of a country stumbling through the early 2000s. Watching it now, two decades removed, what lingers isn’t just the fury—it’s the craft. The editing’s sharp. The humor’s pointed. The gallows wit hasn’t dulled with time. Yes, Moore grandstands. Yes, he pokes where it’s convenient and frames where it flatters his thesis. The much-criticized bit where he confronts members of Congress and asks them to enlist their children in the Iraq War—it’s pure performance. Nobody thinks a senator can conscript his kid. But the segment isn’t about logistics. It’s about silence. Watching elected officials flinch is the point. The film charges through a list of grievances like a man late for his own argument: Bush’s contested 2000 win, his deep ties to the Bin Laden family, the post-9/11 fearmongering that greased the wheels for war. Moore traces the leap from Afghanistan to Iraq without flinching—highlighting just how flimsy the justification was, and how willing the media and public were to accept it. The Patriot Act gets its moment, too—treated less as legislation than as a blinking red warning sign no one heeded. And through it all, there’s the cutting use of pop songs, slowed-down footage, and just enough deadpan to make the horror palatable. It’s not balanced, and it doesn’t try to be. But it’s forceful. Coherent. Funny in the bleakest sense. And if it doesn’t leave you convinced, it might still leave you rattled.

A charming but slippery little film about one of history’s stranger flirtations with the supernatural. In 1917, two schoolgirls in Yorkshire claimed to have photographed actual fairies. The images—stiffly posed, suspiciously crisp—nevertheless convinced a baffling number of adults: photography experts, spiritualists, society eccentrics, even Arthur Conan Doyle, who took them as proof of the invisible made visible. The hoax, or misunderstanding, or maybe performance art, became a national sensation and a permanent footnote in the annals of credulity. There’s real dramatic potential in all this—not just in the trick itself, but in why so many people were eager to believe it. But the film doesn’t seem particularly interested in that angle. Instead, it drifts between history and make-believe, treating the girls’ fantasy lives as just as valid—and just as literal—as the known facts. Fairies appear onscreen not as symbolism, but as glittering participants in the story, glimpsed through hedgerows and chased across streams. It’s not that the film chooses magic over realism; it simply avoids the choice. That may frustrate anyone hoping for sharper insight or historical curiosity. The psychology behind the hoax is barely touched. Motive is bypassed entirely. What the film offers instead is a soft-edged fable, dressed in storybook detail and content to drift in mystery. It isn’t trying to convince you—just coax you into wanting to believe. Visually, it’s a confection. The Edwardian countryside is rendered with storybook lushness, and there’s enough ambient whimsy to keep the thin narrative from evaporating. It’s pitched to younger imaginations, though not condescendingly, and beneath the softness is a subtler idea: that even untrue stories can carry their own kind of truth. Not in the facts, but in the feelings they stir—and in the strange human urge to see something beautiful just beyond the frame.

Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, two performers capable of setting fire to the screen, are left wandering through a film that barely reaches room temperature. They meet, they stare, they shuffle through an attraction so hushed and respectable that it feels less like passion and more like an extended handshake. An affair is supposed to be thrilling, illicit, a disruption. This one is a slow-motion drift, two people nudging their way into each other’s lives with all the urgency of a polite queue. Streep, an artist named Molly, paints things. De Niro, an engineer named Frank, builds things. Together, they create nothing. Their first encounter, a bump-in at a bookstore, leads to a second, a third, a routine of coincidence that moves like clockwork set to the lowest possible gear. The problem isn’t that they’re married—it’s that their marriages barely register. They each have spouses, vague figures in the background, structurally necessary but narratively weightless. Their unraveling is as inevitable as winter, but the film refuses to step on any toes. No screaming matches, no slammed doors, no mess. If guilt exists, it is internalized to the point of invisibility. If passion exists, it is controlled like a thermostat someone forgot to adjust. There is skill here. The dialogue moves with a naturalism that suggests people are speaking, not acting. The performances are precise, disciplined. No one is overplaying, but no one is underplaying either. Everything is played, professionally, at a level that suggests competence over compulsion. Grosbard directs as if afraid of offending furniture. The camera stays where it needs to be, the lighting flatters, the pacing is steady, and nothing—absolutely nothing—happens that might cause a viewer’s pulse to accelerate beyond a mild murmur of acknowledgment. A love affair should not be an exercise in moderation. Falling in Love steps into the fire and comes out the other side without so much as a wrinkle. De Niro and Streep move through it like actors waiting for the real movie to begin. It never does.

A high school cafeteria, an electric keyboard, a few spontaneous chords, and suddenly—an eruption. Lunch trays become percussion instruments, students climb onto tables, and a song that has no business existing outside on the streets of Manhattan this exact moment swallows the room whole. “Hot Lunch Jam” isn’t just a musical number; it’s a declaration of intent. This movie is going to move. Alan Parker, a director who never met a style he didn’t want to throttle, steers Fame with the kind of restless energy usually reserved for first-year drama students—limbs everywhere, voices competing for attention, all conviction, no hesitation. The camera doesn’t settle so much as it pounces, darting between the four-year rise-and-grind of a new class at New York City’s High School of Performing Arts. They sing, they dance, they suffer, they dream, all in rapid succession, as if personal transformation operates on fast-forward. Irene Cara, theoretically the star, plays Coco Hernandez, a triple-threat-in-training with the confidence of someone who believes success is just waiting for her to show up. She isn’t here to learn—she’s here to warm up. But life has its own script, and Coco isn’t the only one getting rewritten. There’s Leroy (Gene Anthony Ray), a dance prodigy who treats discipline like a suggestion; Montgomery (Paul McCrane), a quiet actor wrestling with his sexuality; Doris (Maureen Teefy), a bundle of nerves with a voice too big for her self-esteem. Their lives don’t intertwine so much as they tangle—in auditions, failures, and the small, daily humiliations of believing you’re special in a city built to prove otherwise. And yet, for all its movement, the film’s sharpest trick is its cutting. Classrooms bleed into street performances, auditions collapse into disappointments, fantasy barges into reality without permission. The film catches people mid-motion, mid-thought, mid-sentence, assembling a mosaic of adolescent ambition that feels like it’s being remembered while it’s still happening. The actors don’t always seem to know they’re in a musical, and Parker, to his credit, doesn’t remind them. Not every subplot can keep up. A few dramatic detours arrive gasping for breath, trying too hard to match the energy of the whole. Some emotional arcs stretch themselves thin. But Fame gets one thing absolutely right: talent doesn’t mean much without the will to survive it. These kids don’t just want success; they’re ready to fight it into submission. The film, in its best moments, does the same.

Jack Campbell (Nicolas Cage) moves through life with the detached confidence of a man who assumes every decision he’s made was the right one. He traded love for wealth, warmth for control, a college romance for a corner office, and never once hesitated. His suits are precise, his car an extension of his ego, his relationships purely transactional. For thirteen years, he has lived exactly as he intended—alone at the top, unbothered by what he left behind. Then Christmas Eve intervenes. A late-night encounter with Don Cheadle—less a guardian angel, more a celestial middle manager with a taste for disruption—yanks Jack out of his streamlined existence and deposits him into an alternate timeline where he never left his college sweetheart, Kate (Tea Leoni). Gone are the skyscrapers and status symbols. Now he’s a tire salesman in New Jersey, with two kids, a dog, and a closet full of dad jeans. He wakes up to it all with the expression of a man receiving deeply incorrect test results. Cage plays Jack’s existential meltdown at full volume—gawking at the minivan, agonizing over his salary, fumbling through suburban expectations like a corporate executive handed a grocery list. He resists, fumbles, lashes out at the absurdity of it all. His daughter, sharp-eyed and unshaken, clocks immediately that this is not her father and, with a patience the film never accounts for, quietly studies him as he flounders. But Jack adjusts, because of course he does. Cage dials back the flailing, shifting from comic bewilderment to reluctant understanding, while Leoni radiates the kind of warmth that makes the premise feel less like an exercise. The film moves smoothly, offering a handful of laughs, light reflections, and a sentimental resolution that stops short of syrupy. It borrows from It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, but without their emotional heft. A holiday fantasy engineered for easy consumption—predictable, pleasant, and just self-aware enough to make its familiarity feel intentional.

Hitchcock’s last film is an easygoing, slightly crooked caper—a bit sleight-of-hand, a bit shaggy-dog storytelling, and enough quiet mischief to forgive how leisurely it’s all played. Barbara Harris glides through as Blanche, a storefront psychic who treats séances like neighborhood theater—tips encouraged. Bruce Dern, jittery and always sniffing out an angle, is George: her part-time detective and full-time stooge, feeding her gossip so the spirits don’t have to work overtime. An ailing widow—sharp-eyed, bent by old regrets—hires Blanche to find the nephew she surrendered for adoption decades earlier. No name, no paper trail, just an inheritance waiting for the right lie to unlock it. Meanwhile, that missing nephew (William Devane) hasn’t exactly been idle. By day, he’s the picture of polite success; by night, he and his partner (Karen Black—cool, steady, unbothered) run a tidy diamond theft operation that doesn’t need a fake psychic poking around. The threads twist with Hitchcock’s usual pleasure in watching amateurs inch toward real trouble. The brakes-cut mountain road sequence rattles with old-fashioned precision—practical, methodical dread, no fuss. The rest moves through cozy living rooms, cramped apartments, and quiet graveyards as Blanche and George edge closer to crooks who’d rather keep their secrets buried. There’s a small comfort in seeing Hitchcock revisit familiar tricks: false identities, clueless meddlers, criminals in tailored jackets. The tension never tightens like it did in his classics, but it doesn’t feel like he expects it to. This is a final bow from a man who spent decades knotting our nerves—one last puzzle neatly undone before the lights go up. It almost drifts by like a non-event, but there’s a sly pleasure in that, too.

A concert hall in Technicolor, a ballet of ink and imagination, a movie that doesn’t tell a story so much as it conducts one. Fantasia is Walt Disney’s gamble on the idea that children and classical music could get along just fine without talking animals explaining the plot, that Beethoven and Stravinsky could do the work of narration, that animation—still in its infancy—had no reason to stay in its crib. It opens with musicians in silhouette, the shapes of instruments swallowed by color, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor dissolving into drifting lines and shifting shadows, an attempt to visualize the way music unfolds in the mind. The rest is more narrative but no less bold. The Nutcracker Suite swaps out Tchaikovsky’s toy soldiers for floating blossoms, shimmering fairies, and mushrooms so lively they practically rehearse between takes. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice turns Mickey Mouse into a rogue magician’s assistant, his broomstick workforce obeying only the laws of crescendo and catastrophe. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony conjures a Dionysian countryside of pastel-hued centaurs and winged horses, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring drags us through the violent, molten birth of the world, dinosaurs included. Then there’s Night on Bald Mountain, where Mussorgsky’s devil—massive, winged, and gleaming like hot coals—presides over a night of writhing spirits until dawn sends them crawling back to their graves. This was 1940. Nobody else was thinking this way. Animation had never done this, taken itself this seriously, imagined it could be a concert as much as a film. Yet Fantasia never forgets its audience. Between segments, composer and music critic Deems Taylor offers gentle guidance, explaining what’s coming, preparing young viewers for the kind of art they might not know they’re ready for. Kids sat through Fantasia and walked out hearing music differently, seeing it differently, sensing something grander in every note. That was the trick. Not just a masterpiece, but a gateway. A promise that there were symphonies to discover, and they could look like anything.

A fantastically entertaining adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book, though you’d be forgiven for mistaking it as an original Wes Anderson film that just happens to feature talking animals. Co-written by Anderson and Noah Baumbach, the script has all the expected hallmarks: tightly wound characters, oddball phrasing, and family dynamics that feel half-sincere and half-embarrassed to exist. What’s really remarkable here are the details. A character makes a seemingly offhand comment—sometimes hilarious, sometimes just odd—and suddenly it opens a wormhole into how this world operates. There’s a throwaway line about toast, or how all foxes are slightly allergic to linoleum, and you start realizing how densely imagined everything is. This isn’t just quirky for its own sake; it’s lived-in, layered, and oddly credible. George Clooney voices Mr. Fox, a charismatic schemer with a compulsive streak and a polished exterior. He’s a husband to Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), a woman who once made him promise to give up the criminal life, and a father to Ash (Jason Schwartzman), who is either misunderstood or just genuinely incompetent—it’s never entirely clear, and the film isn’t in a hurry to resolve it. Mr. Fox, naturally, can’t resist one last big job. Ignoring the advice of Stan Weasel, a twitchy real estate agent (voiced by Anderson himself), he moves his family into a picturesque tree—an upgrade from their former hole, but unfortunately adjacent to three vicious farmers who are especially hostile to foxes. It doesn’t take long before one of them shoots off his tail and starts wearing it as a necktie. The animals here dress formally, wear ties, deliver monologues, and observe basic etiquette. But beneath the corduroy and cutlery is something unshakeably feral. “I’m a wild animal,” Mr. Fox insists, more than once. He means it existentially. Visually, it’s like watching Anderson play with dioramas. His usual tendencies toward symmetry and color-coding are heightened by the stop-motion format, which allows him complete control over every twig and button. The result is tactile and strange and often gorgeous. There’s a lot packed into its short runtime, and it holds up to multiple viewings not because it’s complicated, but because it’s precise. Each time through, another strange little corner of this oddball world lights up. It’s a children’s film, technically—but like most of Anderson’s work, it’s really about adults trying to reconcile who they are with who they thought they’d be. Only here, they happen to be foxes.

The premise is irresistible: a submarine crew shrunk to the size of a microbe and injected into the bloodstream of a comatose diplomat, tasked with destroying a brain clot before time—and oxygen—runs out. A sci-fi procedural that takes place entirely inside the human body, Fantastic Voyage plays its concept straight, even as the set pieces flirt with the surreal. It should be routine—swim in, blast the clot, swim out. But there’s sabotage, of course. One of them wants the mission to fail, which gives the whole thing a murky Cold War undercurrent. The plotting is standard-issue adventure stuff—close calls, technical snafus, slow dawning paranoia—but the backdrop is novel enough to keep it afloat. Red blood cells loom like jellyfish, antibodies attack like angry white balloons, and the inner ear becomes a high-stakes no-noise zone. The cast—Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Donald Pleasence—play it earnestly, like they’ve been briefed by NASA. No winks, no wisecracks. Even Welch, costumed like a lab assistant auditioning for a Hammer horror film, keeps it grounded. The tone is restrained, which works to the film’s advantage. It feels, at times, like a clinical hallucination. What it lacks is a bit of nerve. For a film about cutting-edge science, it plays things surprisingly safe. The plot keeps its head down, the characters clock in and push things along. You start imagining what a true eccentric—Kubrick, Gilliam—might’ve done with the same bloodstream. Still, flashes of invention break the surface. The sets are cleverly designed and reasonably convincing for their era—gossamer tunnels, vascular highways, undulating plasma backdrops. The special effects don’t transcend their time, but they don’t embarrass it either. It’s a clever movie about a brilliant idea, told with just enough discipline to pass for smart. And while it doesn’t quite tap the deeper philosophical or medical strangeness buried in its premise, it’s inventive, immersive, and better acted than it needed to be. Not quite essential, but definitely worth the trip.

A reimagining of the 40-year-old television series, repackaged as horror but never quite making the exchange. The setup still holds: an island where fantasies come true, though rarely in ways the guests expect. Desire curdles into nightmare, wish fulfillment backfires, reality bends just enough to let something sinister slip through. It should be eerie. It should be strange. It should be something. Instead, Fantasy Island wanders through a maze without an exit. The island plays by its own rules, which are just coherent enough to keep things moving until they aren’t. Fantasies collide, timelines twist, and everything, somehow, connects back to a single wish. Horror drifts through the story—echoes of regret, past trauma, unfinished business—but nothing is allowed to take hold before the film pivots to action-thriller mechanics. A PG-13 rating keeps everything too sanitized to leave a mark. The scares don’t scare, the suspense never locks in, and by the time the script starts explaining itself, it’s already out of breath. Maggie Q, Lucy Hale, Austin Stowell, Jimmy O. Yang, and Portia Doubleday play guests who have booked their dream vacations but get rerouted into narrative devices. Michael Peña, stepping into the shoes of the enigmatic Mr. Roarke, plays him with a quiet detachment that suggests inner conflict but never quite makes it compelling. The original Fantasy Island balanced fantasy with morality tales; this one stacks twists until meaning gets buried under the pile. Fantasies unravel, secrets emerge, the island reveals its true purpose—all at the exact moment the film remembers it was supposed to mean something.

A solid Western with just enough grit and gumption to keep things interesting. James Stewart gives a flinty, close-to-classic turn as Jeff Webster, a taciturn frontiersman who hears about the Klondike Gold Rush and drives a herd of cattle to the Yukon in 1896, planning to sell them and buy into a gold claim. But trouble greets him at the Alaskan border in the form of a corrupt local judge (John McIntire), who seems more interested in playing frontier royalty than upholding any law—doling out rulings that feel made up on the spot and walking with the confidence of a man who’s never been contradicted twice. What follows is a slow-burning tug-of-war between Webster’s quiet defiance and the judge’s theatrical tyranny. Jeff and his aging sidekick (Walter Brennan) steal back their confiscated herd and sell it off anyway, only to stumble into a larger scheme that’s draining honest miners of their claims through legal trickery. And because no Western would feel complete without a love triangle, two women trail after Webster: one, a scrappy French-Canadian (Corinne Calvet); the other, a coolly calculating businesswoman (Ruth Roman). He doesn’t seem particularly invested in either, but the movie keeps them in his orbit all the same. Anthony Mann shoots the Alaskan frontier like it’s been chipped out of granite, then left to weather on its own. There’s no mythmaking here, no cowboy poetry—just a blunt, snow-crusted morality tale. It’s not quite top-shelf, but it moves like a well-oiled revolver: cold, precise, and not interested in charm.

A melodrama, lacquered and lit like a time capsule, but with the guts left exposed. Far From Heaven doesn’t modernize the 1950s—Haynes embalms it, then lets it sweat. Everything is period-perfect: the Technicolor leaves, the cinched waists, the way people smile with their teeth and apologize with their eyes. But the rot isn’t buried. It’s plated and served—right between the centerpiece and the salad fork. Julianne Moore, looking like a candy-colored soap bubble seconds from popping, plays Cathy Whitaker—a housewife in the Eisenhower mold, married to a sales executive (Dennis Quaid) with a tie that always matches the drapes. They’re the type of couple magazines pose on manicured lawns—white, polished, accessorized with a housemaid (Viola Davis) and two carefully mannered children. Frank, her husband, is making furtive visits to the wrong part of town—for reasons that can’t be published in Better Homes & Gardens. He’s gay, or trying not to be, and the film doesn’t treat it as scandal so much as sentence. He wants to change, thinks he should change, and when he can’t, the damage turns inward. It’s not just a secret—it’s a whole identity being smothered under neckties and business trips. Cathy finds out. And she does what the decade demands: she smiles and tries to forgive. And Cathy—well, Cathy commits a different kind of trespass. She befriends Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), her gardener. He’s thoughtful, soft-spoken, and Black, which means they can share words, but not space. One lunch in public, and she’s dropped by the country club crowd like a fur that went out of season. Moore plays Cathy like a sitcom matron trying to keep her lines straight while the seams start to fray. Her voice rises at the wrong times, her smiles hold a second too long. It’s not a breakdown—it’s etiquette failing under pressure. The film is gorgeous, but never just for show. The colors bloom and burn; the shots are composed like storybook illustrations—clean, inviting, a little unreal. Haynes isn’t parodying Douglas Sirk—he’s dragging his grace notes across sandpaper. It’s pastiche with teeth. Far From Heaven doesn’t just imitate a lost era—it dissects it, slides it under the microscope, and holds the lens steady until you wince. Every gesture means something. Every silence means more.

The Coen brothers have so many unbelievably great movies in their catalogue that picking a favorite should be difficult. And yet, I always land on Fargo. It’s drenched in irony—dark, deadpan, weirdly comforting—and nearly every scene gives you something to hang onto. A perfect line. A throwaway detail. Something that barely registers until it does. The plot’s grim: a kidnapping gone sideways, a trail of bodies, and a lot of people quietly unraveling in the snow. But moment to moment, it’s funny in a way that sneaks up—built on clipped, overly polite conversations that drift into nonsense, or sight gags so dry they pass almost unnoticed. And then there are the people. Even among films I’ve praised for character work, this one stands apart. The accents and small-town niceties hit first, but they’re not the joke—they’re just how people talk here. The performances feel so natural I forget anyone’s acting at all. McDormand plays Marge Gunderson like she’s been doing the job for twenty years and probably never needed to try very hard. She’s pregnant enough to look like she’s smuggling a pumpkin under her coat, but the film doesn’t make a thing of it. She just does the work. She asks the right questions, listens to the dumb answers without blinking, and solves the case without ever raising her voice. One moment she’s pulling over a car on a hunch, the next she’s closing multiple homicide cases using little more than observation and Midwest courtesy. One of the film’s biggest laughs is a quiet bout of morning sickness, and that says a lot: nothing in Fargo is pushed, just perfectly placed. At the center of the mess is Jerry Lundegaard, a worm in a necktie played by William H. Macy. He hires two criminals to kidnap his wife and squeeze ransom from his rich father-in-law, and from there it’s a steady tumble downhill. Macy plays him like he’s afraid the truth might stain his suit. Buscemi and Stormare, the hired help, are hilariously mismatched—one won’t shut up, the other barely speaks—and they move through the plot like men who’ve never quite agreed on what the job is. The tension builds, but the movie never gets loud. It just gets colder, quieter, and by the end, there’s not much left but bodies in the snow and a weary cop explaining basic decency to someone long past hearing it. I’ve seen Fargo more times than I’ve seen most people I’m related to, and it still hasn’t worn out. Some glance, some silence, some quiet collapse always catches me differently. A bleak little story about stupid choices—and maybe the sharpest thing the Coens have ever made.

A movie that doesn’t just embrace ’80s excess but charges straight through it, arms flailing, synth blaring, fully committed to a vision nobody asked for. Fast Forward follows an eager troupe of small-town dancers as they invade New York, convinced that neon spandex and pure enthusiasm are enough to crack the industry wide open. They sing. They dance. They wear leotards like they signed a contract with Lycra. The songs—all D-grade Michael Jackson knockoffs—thud into existence, barely registering before the next high-energy routine takes over. The dancing itself has a kind of brute-force enthusiasm, flung across the screen with an intensity that suggests neither rehearsal nor restraint. The dialogue exists mostly to give the characters something to do between routines, and the acting follows suit—shouted, overstated, performed as if subtlety might disqualify them from the next scene. Every emotional moment is pushed to the absolute maximum, as though volume itself might make the words matter. There’s entertainment here, but rarely in the ways intended. The spectacle of actors attacking their lines like they’re afraid of being upstaged by the soundtrack. The ridiculous sincerity of a movie that believes the right dance number can solve any problem. The sheer velocity with which it pushes forward, determined to fill every second with movement, music, or melodrama. The result isn’t just a bad movie—it’s an exhausting one. For lovers of kitsch, there’s a certain pleasure in watching Fast Forward commit so fully to its own ridiculousness. For everyone else, the title is less a suggestion than a survival tactic.

Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli moves through Fast Times at Ridgemont High like a man untethered from gravity, perpetually half-collapsed, his body seemingly unaware of the function of a spine. He leans, drapes, drifts—never quite standing, never quite falling. Everything about him is a protest against effort. He coasts on the centrifugal force of his own nonchalance, propelled only by the occasional need for snacks. Opposing him is Ray Walston’s Mr. Hand, a teacher who regards Spicoli not as a delinquent but as an insult to the entire educational system, a walking endorsement for mandatory military service. Hand does not roll his eyes. He does not smirk. He absorbs Spicoli’s presence the way one absorbs bad weather—with patience, with an understanding that some things in life are unavoidable, with a quiet determination to make sure somebody suffers for it. And then there are the others. Fast Times doesn’t so much follow a plot as it collects experiences, pinballing between bedrooms, break rooms, mall food courts—anywhere teenagers gather to make decisions that will embarrass them for decades. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Stacy believes adulthood operates on a checklist—first love, first time, first heartbreak—all milestones, no map. Judge Reinhold’s Brad is still puffed up with the authority of a fast-food name tag, unaware he’s already peaked. Robert Romanus, a salesman in denim, plays Damone, dispensing useless wisdom to the same girls he’s currently disappointing. Adults exist somewhere in the background, phantoms of consequence, surfacing only to issue grounding sentences or process refunds. Most high school movies go down like yearbook inscriptions, romanticizing every hallway, every pep rally, every mistake as if it belongs in a coming-of-age novel. Fast Times has no such agenda. It doesn’t frame adolescence as a golden era or a tragic fall from innocence. It simply watches, recording the rhythms of teenage life as they are: impulsive, self-important, occasionally profound, mostly dumb. Conversations unfold with the confidence of people who believe they’ve figured it all out, despite having no clue. Advice is given, ignored, repeated. Friendships form and dissolve in the time it takes to microwave a burrito. There’s a reason this film is considered iconic. It’s a coming-of-age story with sharp humor, an authentic edge, and a cast of young characters so vividly drawn they feel plucked from memory. But for me, the film belongs to Mr. Hand—unmoved, undeterred, unbreakable. He has seen these kids before. He will see them again. And if history is any indication, none of them are getting away with anything.

A gritty, unglamorous downer—and a gift if you like your character studies scraped clean of sentiment. Fat City follows Bill Tully (Stacy Keach), a washed-up boxer at twenty-nine, picking crops for cash and drinking off his regrets in dive bars that seem lit by hangovers alone. He’s got just enough pride to try a comeback, despite the fact that his body’s stiff, his spirit’s brittle, and his manager (Nicholas Colasanto) already let him down once—in a long-ago loss in Panama that Tully still hasn’t managed to stop replaying. Parallel to his slow collapse is the rise—or the illusion of one—of Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges), a bright-eyed eighteen-year-old with raw talent and none of the mileage. Ernie’s youth gives him a shot, but not much of a compass. He falls in with a pregnant girlfriend, stumbles into a marriage, and seems destined to start circling the same drain, just with cleaner shoes. Tully, meanwhile, hooks up with a slurring barfly (Susan Tyrrell, feral and unforgettable) whose husband’s doing time. It’s not a love story. It’s more like mutual consent to spiral together. John Huston directs like he’s eavesdropping, not staging—no swelling strings, no moral spotlight, just a patient eye trained on people as they drift, fumble, wear down. The film doesn’t hustle to prove anything; it just sits back and watches as life does the sanding. Keach, in what may be his finest performance, plays Tully as a man perpetually a few drinks behind his better self, who still thinks he might get back there if he just sobers up long enough to lace his gloves. By 1972, Huston was already a legend, but Fat City put him squarely in the New Hollywood conversation. It may not be his flashiest film, but it’s one of his most quietly devastating—and a reminder that he could speak the language of disillusionment fluently, even decades after The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen made him a name.

Whoopi Goldberg could sell almost anything—but too often, what she got was junk in shiny packaging. Fatal Beauty isn’t good. But Goldberg is. That’s the dynamic. She’s sharp, funny, fully committed—and stuck in a movie that mistakes noise for momentum. She plays Detective Rita Rizzoli, an LAPD narcotics cop whose idea of subtlety is kicking in a door with a wisecrack. The role was originally written for Cher—hence the mismatched surname—but it barely matters. Rita’s latest case involves a new street drug called “Fatal Beauty,” a cocaine variant laced with something that turns users violent before killing them. Her cover gets torched in the opening stretch, but the movie plows forward like nothing happened—dead dealers in alleys, missing evidence no one bothers to guard, and a well-moisturized tycoon with Capitol Hill connections who might as well be twirling a mustache. Nobody acts surprised. Everyone just nods like the plot earned its badge. The film barrels through shootouts, car chases, corporate henchmen, and slow-witted thugs in linen suits—like it’s flipping channels on its own premise. It wants to be hard-boiled, tongue-in-cheek, socially conscious, and sexy, preferably all at once. The result is mostly clutter. The romance subplot with Sam Elliott shows up like a contractual clause—bland, mechanical, and over before it starts. Goldberg, though, holds the frame. She finds energy where there isn’t any, throws away bad lines like they owe her money, and somehow makes Rita feel sharper than the film that surrounds her. She deserves a script with half her wit. What she gets is boilerplate in leather pants. Fatal Beauty isn’t unwatchable—it’s just anonymous. Another glossy cop movie with fake grit, forced jokes, and a lead too good for the material. It plays like an off-brand Beverly Hills Cop with all the personality sanded off—except for Goldberg, who never stops trying to punch through the shrink-wrap.

A dreary thriller that wants to be a slick potboiler but mostly feels like watching expensive furniture get scratched for two hours. Michael Ealy plays Derrick, a high-powered sports agent who lets himself get seduced in Las Vegas by a stranger he meets at a bar—only to discover, once he’s back to his orderly life, that she’s actually a Los Angeles police detective. Worse yet, Detective Val Quinlan (Hilary Swank) doesn’t just pop up again for awkward small talk; she’s soon orchestrating break-ins, planting evidence, and generally pulling his life apart thread by thread, all because she wants him nicely trapped where she can see him. On paper, it’s trashy fun: Fatal Attraction with a badge and a badge number to abuse. But Fatale squanders its pulp potential at every turn. Swank is certainly credible as a steely detective, but the script wants her to flip from methodical professional to full-blown maniac, and she never looks the part—there’s no sense of lurking danger, no sharp edges to the crazy. Ealy, meanwhile, paces around a tasteful modernist home and looks various shades of worried but can’t sell the idea that Derrick ever had enough spine to get himself tangled up this badly in the first place. There’s the occasional half-decent chase or late-night confrontation, but it’s all stuck in a narrative that drags instead of coils. The thriller payoffs feel more like paperwork: obligatory, unsurprising, and about as tense as a traffic ticket. A nastier or more unpredictable villain might have given all this nonsense a pulse, but what’s here is too tidy to feel like pulp and too thin to pass for noir. By the time the final double-cross shows up, I’d long stopped caring who was blackmailing whom—or for what.

A wedding is a siege. The father of the bride does not win. He barely holds the line. Spencer Tracy’s Stanley Banks thought he was safe—thought he was in charge—until the words I’m engaged detonated in his living room. Now he’s hemorrhaging money, buried under guest lists, and watching his home become a revolving door for caterers, party planners, and relatives who, through nothing but sheer gall, expect to be fed. His daughter Kay (Elizabeth Taylor) is glowing. His wife Ellie (Joan Bennett) watches it all unfold with the serene detachment of a woman who knew this day was coming the moment their daughter was born. Stanley rages against the machine. He huffs over cake prices. He recoils at the absurdity of renting chairs he already owns. He balks at Buckley’s name like he’s being asked to approve a merger. But Father of the Bride is brilliant in how it lets him lose every battle with the slow, sinking awareness that this war was decided long before he got involved. Tracy makes Stanley’s unraveling both hilarious and deeply human. His bluster sits alongside something quieter—the creeping realization that this isn’t just a wedding, it’s a farewell. Taylor is a porcelain dream, an image of 1950s bridal perfection. But Minnelli keeps the focus where it belongs—on Stanley, moving through his own house like an outsider, watching his living room transform into a reception hall, his kitchen overrun with waiters, his role in the ceremony growing smaller by the hour. And then, as if his subconscious finally stages a full revolt, the nightmare sequence arrives. Faces stretch, voices distort, and Stanley, the proud patriarch, finds himself unable to move, unable to fit into his own suit, unable to stop the wedding machine from rolling forward without him. Weddings are an exercise in watching control slip away, and Father of the Bride gets every detail right. Even six decades later, even having been through it myself, I recognize the precise absurdities that turn a simple family event into an all-consuming ordeal. Stanley Banks might not enjoy a single second of it, but the real tragedy would be missing it entirely.

Steve Martin, forever trapped in the role of the exasperated Everyman, plays George Banks as a man under siege. He thought he had time. He did not. One minute his daughter Annie (Kimberly Williams) is a kid in sneakers; the next, she’s bringing home a fiancé (George Newbern) and expecting everyone to be thrilled about it. Diane Keaton’s Nina takes the news with the steady patience of someone who always knew this day would come. George, meanwhile, sees only an itemized bill where his baby girl used to be. The guest list expands. The floral arrangements multiply. The price per head spikes so violently he may need CPR. Somewhere in the distance, swans are being procured. The movie belongs to Martin, who wears the full-body ache of fatherhood like a starched collar two sizes too small. He grumbles, sputters, gets lost in his own indignation—disaster lurking in every receipt. His attempts at resistance only make things worse, but the fight is what matters. If a man can’t rebel against a wedding where everything costs triple what it should, what’s left? Keaton, the eternal voice of reason, watches her husband unravel with the calm detachment of someone who has already accepted defeat. And then there’s Martin Short’s Franck, the wedding planner who appears to have been flown in from another dimension. The accent wobbles, the sentences take dramatic detours before reaching their destination, and he delivers every line like he’s introducing a headliner on opening night. Franck orchestrates the wedding like a Broadway showstopper; George watches his net worth dissolve into confetti. It’s a minor miracle they remain in the same film, but it works—Martin’s slow-burning hysteria clashing beautifully with Short’s hurricane-force nonsense. The original Father of the Bride played its comedy closer to the vest, with Spencer Tracy’s slow-boil exasperation giving the 1950 version a gentler touch. This one is broader, punchier, a little more caffeinated, but the story holds. A father, bewildered by the speed of time. A daughter, ready to go. A wedding, sweeping them both along. Martin makes it funny, Keaton makes it warm, and even if Short is operating on an entirely different wavelength, at least he keeps things interesting.

Some remakes breathe new life into an old story. Others, like this one, lie there, waiting to be declared legally deceased. Father of the Bride has been reimagined as a Miami-set dramedy with a Cuban-American family at its center, but no amount of cultural specificity can make up for a script that moves like it’s been tranquilized. This is a movie about a wedding, but nothing in it sparkles—not the dresses, not the dialogue, and certainly not the father of the bride, Billy Herrera (Andy Garcia), a stiff traditionalist with all the warmth of a marble bust. Billy and his wife Ingrid (Gloria Estefan) are headed for divorce, though they decide to keep that to themselves until their daughter Sofia (Adria Arjona) gets through her wedding. A noble idea, except that their marriage is barely holding together long enough to register as troubled. They have the sort of frictionless disagreements that exist only in screenplays that don’t want to deal with real conflict. Meanwhile, Sofia and her fiancé Adan (Diego Boneta) are planning to move to Mexico, a fact that Billy treats like an act of treason. Garcia plays him like a man who measures fatherhood in terms of control—he built this family, and he’ll be damned if he lets it drift outside his jurisdiction. A sharper movie might have dug into that tension, but this one is too busy arranging elaborate set pieces that play like wedding planning montages from a mid-tier sitcom. It’s nice to look at—everyone is tan, well-dressed, framed against a Miami skyline that does most of the work—but the script doesn’t know how to make these people feel like they exist outside their designated roles. The humor, when it appears, is mechanical, and the sentiment is as stiff as the tuxedos. Garcia broods, Estefan sighs, Arjona smiles sweetly, and every conversation collapses into the same flavorless back-and-forth. There have been three versions of Father of the Bride now, and each one reflects its era’s understanding of what fatherhood means. This one treats it like an obligation—a role to be played, a set of lines to be delivered, an emotional arc to be completed by the final scene. It’s competent in a way that makes it all the more frustrating. Nobody here looks like they’re having any fun, least of all the audience.

Steve Martin’s George Banks spent the last movie fighting a wedding. Now he’s fighting time itself. He dyes his hair, sells the house, deludes himself into thinking he’s young again, and just when he’s at the peak of his midlife hysteria, the universe slaps him down with the one thing no man can outpace: biology. His daughter Annie (Kimberly Williams) is pregnant. This sends him spiraling. He is too young to be a grandfather. He paces, he broods, he grips onto the last threads of his dignity—and then, in a move that feels less like fate and more like the screenwriter playing a prank, his wife Nina (Diane Keaton) announces that she, too, is expecting. Now he is too old to be a father. The film treats this double pregnancy like a warm, pastel-colored miracle, an event meant to be cooed over, but structurally, it’s a sitcom setup with the volume turned down. The first Father of the Bride had a focused, relatable premise: a wedding as financial and emotional quicksand. This one doesn’t know where to aim, so it throws everything at George at once—parenthood, grandparenthood, male vanity, real estate panic—and watches him sweat. His actions, once tinged with Everyman frustration, now feel like the wild flailings of a man who needs a guardian. Martin, ever the committed performer, plays George’s unraveling with the precision of someone who knows exactly how to pitch a punchline, but even he can’t fully sell the movie’s sentimentality. He’s supposed to be melting at the idea of a new baby, but the emotional arc feels programmed, like the script flipped a switch that said heartwarming moment here. Keaton plays along, though the film gives her little to do beyond radiate maternal wisdom. Martin Short’s Franck returns, flouncing through the frame at regular intervals, though this time he’s less of a wedding-planning tyrant and more of a walking intermission. The first film had a reason to exist. This one has a release date. It coasts on the goodwill of its predecessor, hitting all the expected emotional notes but never quite earning them. The cast is game, the visuals are glossy, and it all goes down easy enough, but by the time it reaches its grand, tearjerking finale, it hasn’t said anything the first film didn’t already say better.

A sturdy sequel, Father’s Little Dividend picks up right where Father of the Bride left off—same cast, same mood, same underlying panic over family life progressing without permission. Spencer Tracy returns as Stanley Banks, still muttering his way through domestic change like someone who wasn’t consulted about time passing. The setup is simple: his daughter Kay (Elizabeth Taylor) is pregnant, and Stanley, now demoted from Father of the Bride to Prospective Grandfather, doesn’t love the title change. “First he steals my daughter, and then he makes a grandpa out of me,” he gripes, as if grandchildren were the final insult. His wife Ellie (Joan Bennett), ever the realist, calls it a dividend—cuteness without the responsibility. But Stanley suspects better. Dividends still come with terms. There’s a slight absurdity to watching a man with that much gray hair bristle at the idea of being a grandfather, but Tracy sells it with enough sincerity that it registers less as denial than sheer resistance to becoming ornamental. The film doesn’t have the novelty of the first, but it’s almost as charming, and often funnier. There’s a sharp little moment when the in-laws start tossing out baby names like they’re picking paint swatches, and Kay, frozen in horror, bolts from the room. And once again, the father-daughter bond remains quietly believable—Tracy and Taylor have a soft, unforced chemistry that grounds the film even when the plot drifts into sitcom territory. Like the original, it includes a surreal detour—this time less Dalí and more anxiety spiral—where Stanley dreams the baby’s been misplaced, misfed, and possibly rigged with explosives. It’s funny, but it lands because it’s not just played for laughs—it’s the kind of low-grade dread anyone handed a newborn might understand. If Father of the Bride captured the panic of letting go, this one catches the uneasy afterglow—when you’re still letting go, and the milestones just keep stacking. It’s a breezy, affable continuation, and for anyone who loved the first, practically required viewing.

Jet Li plays Huo Yuanjia like a man sculpted from principle and granite—rigid in stance, slow to learn, quick to bruise. As founder of the Jin Wu Sports Federation, he begins as a hotheaded champion, less interested in honor than in making sure his name echoes louder than the bodies he drops. His fighting style barely requires movement—he all but defeats opponents standing still, like someone auditioning to be cast in bronze. The first act is pure comeuppance: glory, pride, and an avalanche of bad decisions that ends in tragedy. The film then swerves into penance. Yuanjia retreats to the countryside, where he retools his ego among rice fields and herbal teas, gazing into nothing like someone trying to remember what feelings are for. Enlightenment arrives in soft dissolves—fog, wind chimes, a few meaningful pauses between sips. By the time he resurfaces in Shanghai, he’s calmer, quieter, and still able to flatten a man without moving more than a forearm. The final stretch is a series of fights against foreign opponents, each match staged like a diplomatic chess move disguised as combat. It’s nationalism in choreographed form, but Jet Li gives the spectacle a gravity that mostly holds. His face barely registers effort; the performance lives in the restraint. The drama strains for importance—it wants to mean more than it does—but the execution is elegant. Not profound, but polished. And even when the narrative stalls, Li never does. He stays grounded, composed, and just dangerous enough to suggest inner peace might still come with a body count.

The fourth entry in Netflix’s Fear Street franchise proves yet again that a clever premise and a nostalgic setting don’t always translate into a satisfying film. Prom Queen is a slasher satire with the blood-slicked fingerprints of Heathers, Scream, and a Hot Topic accessories aisle all over it—but without the bite, wit, or menace to make any of it stick. Set in a puffed-hair version of the late 1980s, the film constructs an appealingly exaggerated high school landscape where lip gloss shines like armor and social warfare is waged in locker room whispers and gymnasium ballots. The concept is strong: candidates for Prom Queen begin turning up dead, hacked to pieces by a masked figure with an axe and a punctual sense of irony. But what sounds like black comedy gold plays flatter on screen, like a campfire story told by someone who keeps losing their place. India Fowler plays Lori Granger, the requisite outsider who signs up for the Prom Queen race to spite the ruling clique—a hairsprayed foursome who react to her presence like a food court rat. Before long, they’re being peeled off the cast list by the mysterious killer, though the film doesn’t build much suspense so much as it queues up a procession of decorative dismemberments. It’s stylish enough. The soundtrack is a mixtape of late-’80s pop hits, the wardrobe is well-researched, and the production design has the pink-and-neon sheen of a memory warped by yearbook margins. But the tone is fuzzy, the laughs are thin, and the characters are so underwritten that even the most gruesome exits barely register. It wants to hit that sweet spot of gory and giddy but can’t quite find the rhythm. Despite the slick aesthetic and solid concept, it ends up more forgettable than fatal.

A teenage gamer, three super-powered infants, and a spacefaring hero named Captain Lightspeed. That should be enough to power a movie. It is not. Fearless is what happens when a film is assembled from spare parts, each one vaguely resembling something that worked elsewhere, none of them functioning together. The plot moves, technically. The jokes exist, technically. The characters have names. But at no point does any of it feel like something anyone meant to make. Reid, a high school gamer, is moments away from conquering his favorite video game when his final mission throws a curveball: escorting Captain Lightspeed’s three infants to space daycare. Then, because movies need second acts, the babies fall out of the game and into his backyard. This is treated as an event, though not one that requires an explanation. His lab partner Melanie, whose defining trait is being present, is swept into babysitting duty. They are supposed to be working on a school project. Instead, they spend the runtime dodging laser beams and changing diapers while the movie confuses frantic energy for comedy. Animation is supposed to bring ideas to life, but this one barely stirs. The premise suggests action, movement, the possibility of fun, yet the film sleepwalks through every frame, unwilling to commit to anything beyond the idea that children are loud and things occasionally explode. The characters, interchangeable and weightless, function as placeholders rather than personalities. Captain Lightspeed, the ostensible hero, appears as a collection of vaguely heroic clichés, the sort of character who might exist on a knockoff cereal box. Even the humor feels indifferent: a few toilet jokes, a recurring Lionel Richie gag that seems to exist for its own amusement, and not much else. Children under six might be entertained by the colors, but no one else will remember this existed. It flickers for 106 minutes and disappears, leaving behind no trace beyond a mildly confused expression and the distant sound of an algorithm moving on to the next thing.

Fellini Satyricon begins like the world’s slowest procession through a wax museum where no one’s told the figures to stay still. Not terrifying—just quiet, off-kilter, and oddly formal. The people on screen are powdered, painted, bedazzled, and positioned like they’ve been choreographed by a somber fashion designer. Some move, most don’t. Nobody blinks. It’s gorgeous in that way where beauty and discomfort occupy the same room but don’t acknowledge each other. Fellini floods the frame with bodies—drifting, statuesque, wearing expressions that suggest they’ve been waiting hours for a verdict. Scenes unspool slowly, sometimes barely at all. Everything looks designed to be stared at, not necessarily understood. The color is blinding and calculated. Reds like open wounds, yellows like spoiled fruit, blues that don’t belong in nature. It doesn’t try for realism, or even coherence. Fellini’s Rome isn’t historical or metaphorical—it’s operatic filth, stitched together from scraps of ancient decadence and modern performance art. The structure is technically based on Satyricon, a Roman novel that exists in fragments. Fellini doesn’t attempt to reconstruct what’s missing—he just builds around the gaps. Characters appear, vanish, reappear with different faces or motivations. Scenes start mid-conversation and leave before anything’s resolved. It all sounds disorganized, but it plays with a kind of warped logic—like paging through a broken scrapbook and pretending it counts as biography. The final shot—a fresco of the main characters rendered in partial ruin, with pieces of the wall missing—is about as tidy as the film gets. There’s no resolution, just a sense that what you’ve seen might’ve always existed in pieces. And if it didn’t, you almost believe it should have.

Ben (Jimmy Fallon) teaches middle school, owns furniture, and eats vegetables. He passes for an adult. Then baseball season starts, and suddenly, he’s thirteen again—treating the Red Sox schedule like scripture and his Fenway Park seats like an inheritance. His apartment resembles a fan museum more than a home, his social calendar moves with the standings, and his mood swings with the bullpen’s ERA. Lindsey (Drew Barrymore) meets him in the off-season and mistakes his enthusiasm for a quirk rather than a condition. At first, it’s almost sweet. Then the season takes over. Weekend getaways are postponed for home games. Dinners turn into background noise for box scores. As the Sox inch closer to breaking their 86-year curse, Lindsey wonders if she’s in a relationship or a rivalry. Losses feel like personal betrayals. Victories justify everything. Fallon plays Ben with boyish zeal, nailing the ecstatic highs and deflated lows of a lifelong fan. Barrymore gives Lindsey both warmth and an exasperation that never turns mean. The Farrelly brothers, usually drawn to broader comedy, scale back their antics for something looser, warmer. The film benefits from real-life luck—the Red Sox’s historic 2004 World Series win unfolding just as the movie was being shot, handing the finale an authenticity no rewrite could have engineered. Other rom-coms are sharper. Other sports movies are funnier. But Fever Pitch understands that love isn’t about sacrifice so much as real estate—how much space you make for someone else’s passion and how much of yours you expect them to accept in return.