Film Buff Musings

The FBI, in its infinite wisdom, has created a covert unit of guinea pigs—weaponized, chatty, and equipped with surveillance-grade earpieces. One wears shades. Another hacks computers. A third talks like he’s been bingeing cop dramas. A fourth is a girl. The plot is driven by appliances behaving badly. A tech mogul plans global takeover via smart toasters and homicidal blenders. There’s betrayal. There’s a mole. Possibly also a literal mole. The CGI has that mid-2000s plastic sheen and blends reasonably well with the live-action cast, who mostly drift in the background without asking for much attention. This isn’t their story. It’s about rodents running missions out of a government-issued van. The film sticks to its cartoony action-adventure lane, but it does pause briefly for a pet store sequence that actually got a grin out of me—these hyperintelligent operatives caged, priced, and sized up for doll clothes by kindergarteners. From there, it returns to form: slick, noisy, and indifferent to memory. Dialogue functions. Scenes happen. Character traits cycle in and out. G-Force isn’t trying to impress so much as finish the assignment, which it does, mostly by keeping up the pace. Guinea pigs might be underrepresented in talking-animal cinema, and maybe they shouldn’t be—but this wasn’t the film that would start the trend.

The country is in shambles, the people are starving, and the President of the United States is out for a joyride. Not a metaphor—a literal joyride, grinning like a man with no particular agenda beyond enjoying the perks of high office. Walter Huston’s Judson Hammond is a lightweight, a man whose greatest skill appears to be ignoring national catastrophe with the ease of someone turning down the volume on a radio broadcast. But then he’s in a car crash, enters into a coma, and then comes divine intervention. Suddenly, he’s risen, glowing with purpose, eyes blazing with the conviction of a man who’s either been touched by an angel or suffered an unreported head injury. This is government by celestial decree. One minute Hammond is a glad-handing figurehead, the next he’s a prophet in a three-piece suit, declaring war on poverty, steamrolling Congress, and making Prohibition-era gangsters disappear through means that wouldn’t be out of place in a dictatorship. Whatever cause-and-effect logic usually governs character development is tossed aside in favor of divine recalibration. The film treats his transformation as destiny: no moral struggle, no hesitation, just a sudden and total conversion from political mediocrity to messianic leadership. As drama, it’s lumbering. The dialogue is pure tin, the supporting characters barely exist, and the script operates on the principle that governing a country is a matter of willpower rather than process. But as an artifact of its time, it’s something else entirely—a plea, a wish, a hallucination born out of economic despair. The filmmakers aren’t interested in whether a benevolent dictatorship is a contradiction in terms; they’re too busy fantasizing about an America where solutions arrive as thunderbolts and the only real political argument is whether change should come through Congress or the barrel of a gun.

A film with its spine so straight it could pass a military inspection, Gandhi moves from one historical moment to the next with the diligence of a documentary narrated by a man who respects the material too much to embellish it. The artistry is functional, the structure strictly linear—aside from the opening assassination sequence, which serves less as a dramatic flourish and more as a historical formality, ensuring no one watching will be too surprised when the film eventually circles back to it. At 191 minutes, it asks for endurance, but the subject is weighty enough to justify the bulk. The story begins in 1893, with young Gandhi—lawyer, gentleman, first-class ticket holder—unceremoniously ejected from a train in South Africa, his presence in the privileged section deemed unacceptable by men whose power is upheld by nothing more than centuries of entitlement. The humiliation ignites something in him. He doesn’t grab a rifle or raise an army; he stays, resists, and becomes a force greater than any weapon. The British empire has ruled for centuries by meeting opposition with violence. Gandhi dismantles it by offering the opposite. The film follows his rise with methodical reverence—nonviolent protests, hunger strikes, negotiations that shift between symbolic victories and crushing betrayals. The narrative moves with the careful pacing of a lesson plan, each act another essential chapter in the historical record. But then there’s Ben Kingsley, transforming a stately, bullet-pointed biography into something nearly transcendent. He embodies Gandhi, with a physicality so effortless it feels as though the man himself has been resurrected. The voice is calm, the presence electric, the eyes carrying the conviction of someone who understands the moral weight of every action he takes. Even when the filmmaking settles into safe, respectable rhythms, Kingsley keeps Gandhi from ever feeling like a history class assignment.

Sidney Lumet’s Garbo Talks starts with promise—an offbeat comedy-drama about a devoted son chasing an impossible dream—but gradually loses its way. The premise is irresistible: Anne Bancroft plays Estelle Rolfe, a loud, fearless activist whose terminal diagnosis pushes her to pursue one final wish—meeting Greta Garbo. Her son Gilbert (Ron Silver), mild-mannered and long accustomed to cleaning up after her, sets out to track down the most reclusive star in Hollywood history. Bancroft, radiant even as her character faces death, gives the film its soul. Estelle is a force of nature, laughing at authority, scoffing at limits, making her decline all the more painful. Silver plays Gilbert with the right mix of exasperation and devotion, but his supposed transformation—the shy, dutiful son learning to take charge—never quite materializes. He searches, he sacrifices, but he remains emotionally restrained, as if waiting for the script to give him something bigger to play. The film juggles poignant and whimsical but struggles with the balance. Early scenes suggest a lighthearted quest, full of quirky detours—Harvey Fierstein hamming it up, Hermoine Gingold delivering a droll aside—but as it turns serious, the energy drains. The final stretch reaches for profundity but settles for something vague, as though the film itself isn’t sure what Gilbert was supposed to learn. Bancroft is magnificent. The rest—forgettable.

Slightly more tolerable than the first, though that’s like preferring a stubbed toe to a cracked rib—sure, you’re walking, but you’re still wincing. Maybe it only feels that way because this time the setting is London, and at least the backdrop isn’t actively working against you. Jon Arbuckle (Breckin Meyer, still blinking his way through every scene) is about to propose to his girlfriend (Jennifer Love Hewitt, phoning it in from Heathrow) when she jets off to a veterinary conference in the UK. He follows. Garfield (voiced by Bill Murray, who sounds like he’s been tricked into it again) and Odie sneak into his luggage—because why not—and they all end up in England. There, Garfield is mistaken for his lookalike: Prince, a pampered estate cat with a title, a manor, and a household inexplicably filled with barn animals. The two switch places. Garfield gets the royal treatment. The plot follows suit—plodding, linear, no surprises. The humor is muscle memory. Garfield hates Mondays. Garfield loves lasagna. Not jokes—just references, delivered like the setup and punchline were handled by someone else. There’s no rhythm, no turn—just brand recognition with a British accent. Garfield convinces the staff he belongs, though why they’re running an aristocratic pet commune is left politely unexamined. Billy Connolly, stuck as the villain, throws himself at the material with grim professionalism—stumbling, shouting, and suffering an endless parade of groin shots. He’s better than the movie, which only makes it worse. You can almost see the paycheck in his eyes. It isn’t aggressively awful—it’s too formulaic for that. Just cheap, padded, and preloaded, like something piped into the backseat of a rental car to keep the kids from asking how long the drive is.

A fat orange cat with an ego problem meets a dog who doesn’t speak. That’s the setup. Garfield: The Movie doesn’t try to improve it—it just stretches the idea to feature length and trusts the name to carry the rest. The comic strip, for all its repetition, had its timing. A clean setup, a throwaway punchline, and Garfield eyeing the reader like he’s the only one paying attention. That’s gone here. What’s left is a digitized cat wandering through a live-action movie that doesn’t seem to know how to use him. Bill Murray provides the voice—dry, detached, vaguely annoyed—but even he can’t rescue a script that reduces Garfield to a mascot with punchlines. At one point, he sings a parody of Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” retitled “New Dog State of Mind.” It’s not the worst moment—just one more scene that seems quietly ashamed of itself. Garfield’s world shifts when his owner Jon (Breckin Meyer) brings home a dog named Odie. Garfield sulks. Odie wags. Eventually, Odie is kidnapped by a local TV host (Stephen Tobolowsky), who wants a new act and decides this is the dog to build it around. The logic is thin. The villainy is thinner. Inexplicably, Garfield is rendered in cartoonish CGI while the rest of the animals remain live action, giving the film a strange half-real quality it never resolves. It doesn’t help the comedy, but it does make the movie feel like it was built from mismatched parts. The bones of something better might be in here, but they’re buried under noise. There’s no rhythm, no wit—just noise with branding.

Often called Buster Keaton’s best—and if it isn’t, it’s close—The General still holds up as both a stone-faced comedy and a surprisingly tense chase, even by modern standards. Keaton plays Johnny Gray, a lovestruck Georgian rejected by the Confederate Army because he’s more valuable behind an engine than a rifle. His sweetheart (Marion Mack) takes this as cowardice. So when Union spies steal his train—taking her along for good measure—Johnny does the obvious thing: hijacks another locomotive and pursues them, alone, straight into enemy lines. What follows is lean and relentless: a single chase, stretched to feature length, built from real locomotives, collapsing bridges, loose cannonballs, and Keaton’s calm refusal to look impressed by any of it. He climbs, dangles, and outwits obstacles with the kind of practical stunt work that still makes modern green screens look a little embarrassed. The pleasure is how direct it all is: no filler, no detours. Just a man, a runaway train, and one problem after another, each solved with slapstick timing and improbable nerve. It’s as tight a silent spectacle as anyone ever made, and funnier for how little Keaton tries to milk it. The General remains proof that silent film can be both thrilling and dryly hilarious when the right man’s at the throttle—and the right man never once cracks a smile.

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell set the screen to a rolling boil, tossing off lines like they’re too amused to take any of it seriously. The film hands them a simple setup, but they stretch it into a playground of glamour, wit, and effortless comedic timing. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes isn’t just a showcase for Monroe’s iconic performance of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”—though that number, a perfectly calibrated explosion of satin, sparkle, and self-parody, could have carried the film on its own. The song, the staging, the dazzling pink gown—Monroe doesn’t just cement her Hollywood image; she engraves it so deeply into pop culture that it’s still being referenced decades later. But even beyond that famous sequence, the film sparkles. Monroe and Russell play Lorelei and Dorothy, best friends, showgirls, and polar opposites in the romance department. Lorelei has her sights set on wealth—her dream man isn’t just handsome but financially bulletproof. Dorothy, on the other hand, values brawn over bank accounts, eyeing men like they’re prize stallions. Their latest adventure takes them on a cruise to Europe, where Lorelei plans to marry her besotted, rich-but-hopelessly-nebbish fiancé, Gus (Tommy Noonan). His father, suspicious of gold-diggers, sends a private detective to tail her, setting off a domino effect of misunderstandings, mistaken identities, and musical numbers so charming they practically carry the film from scene to scene. For all its broad comedy and playfully shallow ambitions, the film lands somewhere unexpectedly thoughtful. Lorelei, so easily dismissed as a materialistic bombshell, turns out to be sharper than anyone gives her credit for, and the final moments slip in a wisdom that feels almost surprising. But mostly, it’s just flat-out fun. Whether you come for the musical spectacle or the breezy comedy, this one delivers—a classic that’s still every bit as watchable today.

Subtlety isn’t Jordan Peele’s strong suit, which sounds like a complaint until you see how well he weaponizes the obvious. Get Out opens on a scene that might as well be labeled: “Thesis statement, in motion.” A young Black man alone in a quiet white neighborhood. A creeping car. Images of Trayvon Martin immediately spring to mind. The worst kind of familiarity. This isn’t so much not a jump scare as it’s recognition. From there, it slides into a warped Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a Black photographer, is headed to the country home of his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams). She hasn’t told her parents he’s Black. Not because they’re racist, she insists, but because it “shouldn’t matter.” And yet, it does. The parents go out of their way to emphasize how proud of how not racist they are. The dad talks about wishing he could vote for Obama a third time. He brings up a family member who lost to Jesse Owens at the Olympics—as if that proximity lends cred. It’s all meant to put Chris at ease, but it does the opposite. Peele shoots the whole thing like a slow-building panic attack. Everything’s a little too friendly. A little too rehearsed. The servants stare too long. The dinner conversation turns too fast. Chris can feel something tightening, and we can feel it too. When the movie finally reveals what’s happening, it’s grotesque in the best way—an idea so deranged you almost wish you hadn’t asked. The only voice that cuts through the fog is Rod (Lil Rel Howery), Chris’s best friend back home. He checks in by phone, comic relief and truth-teller rolled into one, saying exactly what the audience is thinking but with more profanity. He’s funny—very, very funny—but also the only one who actually gets it. While the others overanalyze, Rod just sees what’s happening and names it. When the horror hits—really hits—it’s grotesque. Kind of funny. Shouldn’t be. But that’s Peele: Hitchcock with a twitch, satire that bruises, B-movie tension welded to real-world fear. Get Out isn’t content to disturb—it wants you rattled and alert. That it became a box-office hit without softening its edges might be the most surprising twist of all. But the twists in the movie are pretty good, too.

At over four hours long and seemingly uninterested in attracting anyone outside of Civil War devotees, Gettysburg is less a film than a battlefield immersion—dialogue-heavy, beard-forward, and composed largely of men standing around, speechifying in long, reverent blocks of prose. It is, to be clear, not for the casual viewer. But for those even mildly inclined toward Civil War history, it offers a surprisingly absorbing window into one of the most pivotal confrontations in American military lore. There’s almost no concession to mainstream storytelling. Characters are introduced not through action, but declaration. Everyone seems to speak in carefully prepared remarks. Soldiers on the cusp of battle offer philosophical asides about God, country, and the burden of command. You begin to suspect they’ve all been rehearsing monologues in their tents. And then, suddenly, the speeches give way to strategy—and the strategy gives way to the violence itself. When the battle arrives—particularly the staging of Little Round Top—it lands with the kind of clarity and scale you don’t often see in historical dramas. Jeff Daniels, playing Union Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, leads the 20th Maine in a harrowing defense that stands as the film’s emotional and tactical high point. It’s a rare moment when the film sheds its formality and simply lets the momentum carry it. The staging is meticulous, and for sheer Civil War reenactment value, it’s unmatched. Costumes and period detail are scrupulously maintained, and the location work is impressive. You never doubt the effort. What’s less convincing is the way these characters talk when they’re not fighting—as if they’re auditioning for bronze plaques. The reverence can be exhausting. But it’s also sincere, and the film never pretends to be anything other than what it is: a sprawling, deeply earnest monument to history. Gettysburg isn’t casual entertainment—it’s homework for enthusiasts. But those who stick with it may find themselves unexpectedly caught up in the rhythms of its devotion. Not cinematic in the traditional sense, but sweeping, detailed, and remarkably steadfast in its purpose.

A documentary that reaffirms what should have already been obvious: Ghislaine Maxwell was no passive bystander, no helpless pawn in Epstein’s orbit, but a fully committed architect of exploitation. Filthy Rich doesn’t unearth much new information for those who already watched the headlines play out in real time, but it does something arguably more important—it locks the focus squarely on the survivors, where it belongs, and lets them dismantle any lingering illusions about Maxwell’s role with cold, unwavering clarity. It’s all here—the legal dissections, the procedural breakdowns, the timeline of Maxwell’s downfall, laid out with workmanlike efficiency. Lawyers untangle the technicalities of her sentencing. Journalists chart her years of complicity, her rapid descent, her eventual conviction. But the film’s real authority rests in the testimonies, the voices of the women Maxwell helped trap. They tell their stories with the kind of blunt force that makes the forensic details of the case seem almost extraneous. For variety, the film steps into Maxwell’s privileged past—her overstuffed childhood, the omnipresent weight of her father’s influence, the way she pivoted from one powerful, domineering man to another, as if her life had been scripted for her in advance. The psychology is intriguing, the patterns unmistakable, but there’s no neat equation that converts her personal wounds into an explanation for the empire of abuse she helped sustain. The filmmaking itself is serviceable—occasionally sleek, mostly functional—but the material doesn’t require much embellishment. Filthy Rich exists to reinforce what should never be in question: without Maxwell, Epstein’s empire would have had fewer victims, and Epstein himself would have had fewer defenses. The documentary’s success is in its refusal to grant her anything resembling sympathy.

Some film productions unravel gradually. Ghost in the Noonday Sun imploded before the cameras even started rolling. It was a comedy about pirates, but the real plundering happened behind the scenes—budget cuts, broken equipment, and Peter Sellers treating the entire endeavor like a contractual obligation he had every intention of escaping. Director Peter Medak, decades later, still looks like a man trying to process the exact moment his life went off course. The film’s first mistake: actually filming on the open sea. The second: casting Sellers at his most volatile moment of his life. Sellers arrived in Cyprus already unraveling, heartbroken over Liza Minnelli, allergic to professionalism, and wielding his power like a maniac who had just discovered his ability to ruin lives. He refused to share the frame with Thomas Baptiste. He faked a heart attack to take a long weekend. He oscillated between manic enthusiasm and total sabotage, seemingly at random. Medak, still young enough to think brute persistence could overcome total disinterest, nonetheless pressed on. The finished film, by all accounts, was unwatchable. No distributor wanted it. It surfaced a decade later, a curiosity at best, a cautionary tale at worst. Medak’s documentary, part therapy session, part career autopsy, recounts the disaster with the precision of a man who has replayed every disastrous moment in his mind for forty years. The stories are gripping, the sense of tragedy real. Sellers, an actor so brilliant that people tolerated his worst instincts, seems less like a troubled genius and more like a man who realized, too late, that he could no longer tell the difference between his talent and his destruction. A must-see for behind-the-scene disaster looky-loos.

A supernatural comedy that treats its premise like an excuse rather than an opportunity, Ghost Writer follows Angela Reid (Audrey Landers), a writer who moves into a beachfront house once owned by silver-screen siren Billie Blaine (Judy Landers), who died under mysterious circumstances 30 years earlier. Angela soon discovers Billie never quite left—the actress’s ghost still lingers, glamorous and spectral, determined to uncover the truth behind her demise. What follows is part amateur sleuthing, part haunted house antics, but mostly a series of setups that hinge on the same joke: Angela, talking to Billie in public, being mistaken for someone who’s lost her mind. The murder mystery, when it remembers to be one, takes a backseat to sitcom-level banter and a steady rotation of familiar character actors. John Matuszak and David Doyle pass through, George “Buck” Flower does his usual grizzled bit, and Joey Travolta—whose main credit in life is being related to John—shows up as a guy named Beejay, an unfortunate name choice if ever there was one. Nothing about Ghost Writer is particularly bad, but nothing about it is particularly inspired either. The supernatural flourishes are tame, the comedy lands with a polite thud, and the pacing drifts without ever picking up enough energy to feel like the story truly matters. It’s the kind of film that plays best as background noise, existing somewhere between harmless and forgettable.

Three parapsychologists—Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis)—lose their Columbia University funding and, rather than fade into academic obscurity, pivot to running a ghost-catching business. The equipment is unregulated, the science is dubious, and the startup capital consists of Ray taking out a third mortgage on his parents’ house. At first, their biggest obstacle is lack of clientele. Then, spectral activity in New York skyrockets, and suddenly, they’re in high demand. But the flood of hauntings isn’t random. A demonic force is gathering power, Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) has been chosen as its vessel, and the Ghostbusters—who have been winging it the entire time—are now expected to save the world. A comedy that treats the supernatural with equal parts spectacle and irreverence, Ghostbusters works because the writing is sharp and the actors sharpen it even more. Bill Murray, slouching through the film like a con artist who got his PhD by mistake, delivers every line as if he’s three jokes ahead of everyone else. Aykroyd plays Ray as the overgrown Boy Scout of the paranormal, endlessly enthusiastic, while Ramis, armed with a deadpan delivery and a calculator watch, makes Egon the film’s quietly hilarious backbone. Ernie Hudson arrives as Winston Zeddemore, the only one who treats ghostbusting as a normal job—hiring on with zero interest in the pseudoscience, only to end up riding shotgun for the apocalypse. The supernatural threat escalates from mildly creepy (a floating librarian) to utterly ridiculous (a possessed Rick Moranis sprinting through Central Park in a rumpled blazer), culminating in Gozer the Gozerian giving the world a choice of its destructor. Ray, in a moment of catastrophic nostalgia, accidentally summons the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man—50 feet of pure, doughy menace stomping through Manhattan like an overgrown parade balloon gone rogue. The film never pretends that any of it makes sense, which is exactly why it works. The ghosts exist to be caught. The Ghostbusters exist to be funny. And Ghostbusters still exists because, nearly forty years later, that equation hasn’t stopped working.

A nostalgia-laced resurrection of the Ghostbusters name, Afterlife operates under the assumption that if a generation was raised on it, they must want to inherit it. The past isn’t just revisited—it’s dusted off, repackaged, and passed down like a family heirloom, now relocated from New York’s skyline to an Oklahoma dust bowl where the ghosts have been waiting, politely, for their cue. Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), a socially maladjusted science prodigy, has no clue her grandfather Egon was a Ghostbuster, though she’s about to learn fast. When her broke and embittered mother (Carrie Coon) drags the family to Egon’s abandoned farmhouse, she stumbles across the remnants of his life’s work—ghost traps, proton packs, an Ecto-1 that runs on decades-old nostalgia. Paul Rudd, as a summer school teacher who recognizes the Ghostbusters logo like a long-lost relic of human history, serves as the film’s unofficial translator for those under 40. Reitman approaches the material reverently, pressing the old iconography back into service—Mini Stay Puft Marshmallow Men, a Terror Dog or two, even a spectral presence or three. The ghosts look great, the action moves well, the kids handle their roles with more enthusiasm than the film really earns. The finale, a reunion engineered with the precision of a stage-managed encore, comes together in a haze of glowing nostalgia, a last hurrah for characters who aren’t quite ready to let go. It plays, it works, but it rarely surprises. The jokes are pleasant, the callbacks generous, the emotional beats carefully placed. It knows how to honor the past, but not how to move beyond it.

The Ghostbusters, washed up and out of work, reduced to party tricks and birthday clownery, stumble back into business when a subterranean river of pink sludge starts feeding off New York’s signature hostility. The city, as it turns out, is its own worst enemy. Now there’s a talking painting with a medieval warlord trapped inside, whispering world-domination schemes to a sniveling museum curator. Ghosts are rattling their chains again. Proton packs are back in vogue. But something’s missing. The first Ghostbusters was a miracle of timing and tone. This one is less miraculous, more mechanical—a greatest-hits tour that keeps the band together but never finds a new song. The jokes land here and there, but the rhythm feels a little off. Bill Murray, once the slouching prince of ironic detachment, spends much of the movie looking half-interested in his own scenes. Sigourney Weaver’s Dana is back, this time with a baby to imperil. The villain, Vigo the Carpathian, mostly glowers from the confines of his portrait, a figure of unspecific menace who wants an infant to reincarnate himself but never bothers to be particularly terrifying about it. Rick Moranis and Annie Potts, playing love-struck oddballs, steal a few scenes, and Peter MacNicol, working a bizarre accent and a near-fanatical devotion to overacting, injects the film with something close to energy. The haunted babysitter sequence has a flicker of inspiration. The rest feels like the film is amusing itself, occasionally us, but never as much as it should. The finale—piloting the Statue of Liberty through the streets of Manhattan like a patriotic float with a vendetta—tries to replicate the goofy grandeur of Stay Puft but lacks the same weird brilliance. The cast still clicks, the premise still holds, but the magic is thinner this time. It’s good enough to rewatch, but good enough is all it is.

Part sun-bleached teen comedy, part cultural sparkplug—*Gidget* is credited with kicking off the surf craze that would wash through early ’60s pop culture. Seventeen-year-old tomboy Francine (Sandra Dee) wanders into it almost by accident, finding herself in a world that, at the time, belonged almost entirely to men. She’s small enough that the resident beach bums nickname her “Gidget”—short for girl midget—but what she lacks in size she makes up for in stubbornness. She keeps paddling out, wiping out, and coming back until she earns her place on the waves. It wouldn’t be a teen movie without a romance, and hers is with Moondoggie (James Darren), a college boy with the good looks and vague ambitions of a paperback hero. Their flirtation is light, frothy, and not built to linger in the memory, but Gidget herself is. The script treats her like more than a swimsuit on a surfboard, giving her quirks, agency, and a sense of humor. Dee’s performance sells it—bright, bubbly, and magnetic without turning saccharine. Around the edges, there’s Cliff Robertson as “The Big Kahuna,” a weathered surfer who follows the sun year-round, drifting between beaches like a man allergic to winter. He’s the film’s most intriguing figure—half mentor, half cautionary tale. The Four Preps show up, too, as guitar-toting surfers, performing “Cinderella” right there on the sand and lending their voices to the title theme that bookends the film. *Gidget* isn’t built for depth, but it catches its wave and rides it—buoyant, breezy, and still charming more than six decades later.

A sugar-dusted musical with a curious aftertaste, Gigi offers glamour by the yard—painted salons, Paris in soft light, and songs so precisely stitched they almost distract from the premise. Almost. It opens with Maurice Chevalier cheerfully serenading a park full of little girls about their future eligibility, smiling like he’s in on a joke that no longer plays. “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” once read as charming; now it’s somewhere between ironic and alarming. Times change. The movie doesn’t. Gigi (Leslie Caron) is bright, curious, and just unruly enough to worry her elders—who’ve set their sights on turning her into a courtesan. Her great-aunt (Isabel Jeans) oversees the curriculum: posture, etiquette, and how to catch a man without looking like you’re trying. Her grandmother (Hermione Gingold) looks on, fond and complicit. In this world, marriage is beside the point. Maintenance is the prize. Gigi resists, at first quietly, then not so quietly. Enter Gaston (Louis Jourdan), a Parisian aristocrat with too much money and too little to do, drawn to Gigi’s refusal to flatter. They’ve known each other for years, but suddenly the script shifts—he sees her not as a child or a friend, but as something he might acquire. She considers whether she’ll let him. It’s a negotiation wrapped in lace and orchestrated like courtship. It’s a tricky story—made trickier by how extravagantly it’s dressed. Vincente Minnelli directs with such visual confidence that the contradictions slide by easily, especially when the characters rarely question the world they live in. But Gigi does. That’s the real tension—not whether Gaston will commit, but whether she’ll accept the role she’s been tailored for. She doesn’t rage against it. She just won’t smile while it’s being fastened on. Caron plays her like a kitten among show dogs—alert, clever, increasingly unwilling to sit still. She gives the film spine without dimming its sweetness. Jourdan lets discomfort seep through his charm, and Chevalier keeps things airy, even when the lyrics give you pause. Gigi doesn’t challenge its contradictions—it dances past them in pearls and gloves. But Caron keeps it just grounded enough to keep you watching. What begins as powdered confection ends with a peculiar kick: a musical that soothes, distracts, and quietly complicates its own fantasy.

A perfectly serviceable entry in the second-string screwball canon—lively, likable, and just eccentric enough to pass the time, though never quite sharp enough to graduate to the big leagues. What it lacks in bite, it makes up for in bounce. The real reason anyone seeks this one out is Lucille Ball, still pre-legend, but already working the angles. She plays Dot, a working-class secretary with a quick temper and a sturdy handbag, who finds herself and her family unexpectedly seated in a theater box—thanks to her brother Pigeon (Lloyd Corrigan), a cheerful dope who “found” the tickets rather than purchased them. Turns out the box already belongs to the Herricks, a moneyed clan with matching attitudes. When they attempt to reclaim their seats, Dot responds the only way a proper screwball heroine would: by smacking one of them—Stephen (Edmond O’Brien)—with her purse. Of course, he turns out to be her new boss. She walks in for her next assignment, sees him behind the desk, and starts mentally packing. Instead, she explains the mix-up, he softens, and a professional relationship begins—with personal complications barreling in behind. Both Dot and Stephen are technically spoken for, which in this genre means the clock is ticking until at least one of them gets cold feet and the other starts falling in love. The titular “gob” is Dot’s fiancé, a Navy man played by George Murphy with just the right mix of cornball charm and cartoonish bravado. He’s got a party trick—contorting himself into four extra inches of height—that makes about as much sense as the romance plot but is arguably more entertaining. Scene for scene, the film is easygoing and agreeable. No big laughs, but plenty of small ones—chuckles, smirks, a few fond head-shakes. The energy is quick, the misunderstandings mild, and the stakes featherweight. It’s not a discovery, but it is a curio: a glimpse of Ball’s comedic timing warming up, wrapped in a brisk, pleasant farce that knows not to overstay its welcome.

A woman dead on the side of the road, no name that sticks, no past that makes sense. A boy kidnapped from his school desk, spirited away by a man with a talent for slipping through cracks. The stories twist together like roots beneath the surface—tug one, and the ground shifts under the whole thing. Girl in the Picture tells its true crime saga with a grip firm enough to squeeze the breath out of you. Franklin Delano Floyd, a man who collects aliases like souvenirs, sits at the center like a stubborn stain, but the film refuses to give him the narrative throne. The girl—who she was, who she was made to be, who she should have had the chance to become—that’s the story. And what a story it is. A sequence of names that never fit, a life erased and rewritten so many times it practically dissolves under scrutiny. The details—grimy, baroque, piling on top of each other like a hoarder’s nightmare—would seem overwrought if they weren’t ripped from reality. Borgman lays them out with the pacing of a crime novelist, each revelation just slightly worse than the last. True crime junkies, those hardened to the genre’s usual litany of atrocities, might find themselves momentarily disarmed. The film isn’t interested in shocking for the sake of it. The horror has a purpose, and that purpose is her. The payoff? Not justice, not really. But clarity. The shape of a life reconstructed from the ruins, a face pulled from the blur. The film grips its subject the way an investigator grips the last clue that makes everything click. And once it does, you realize—nothing about this was ever going to be simple.

Kristen Wiig, unraveling with a mixture of resignation and bad judgment, gives Girl Most Likely a performance sharper than the movie knows what to do with. It wants to be an acerbic character study but keeps tossing in zany side plots like a gambler doubling down on a losing hand. The result isn’t bad—just uneven. Imogene (Wiig) had promise once. A playwright with awards to prove it, she now coasts on past potential while life moves on without her. When her boyfriend dumps her—not with a dramatic exit, but with an absence so complete it feels like an eviction—she stages a suicide attempt as a last-ditch effort to win him back. The attempt fails in every way imaginable. Instead of rekindling his interest, she wakes up in a psychiatric hold and is promptly released into the custody of her mother (Annette Bening), a gambling-addicted hurricane in human form. Zelda’s house in Atlantic City is packed with eccentrics, each of them a walking argument for Imogene to get out as soon as possible. Matt Dillon, gloriously committed to nonsense, plays Zelda’s new boyfriend, who may or may not have been a CIA assassin (he certainly believes he was). Her younger brother (Christopher Fitzgerald) is socially awkward but functional, more grounded than the rest of the household despite spending most of his time building a human-sized crab shell. Darren Criss’ Lee, the boarder who now occupies Imogene’s childhood bedroom, is the closest thing to a stabilizing force—he sees the dysfunction, but he’s adapted to it rather than trying to escape. The film’s best moments lean into Wiig’s ability to make despair look ridiculous, such as her hapless attempt at shoplifting a library book or her indignation at being reduced to a “crisis person.” But the movie doesn’t quite decide if it wants to let her spiral or pull her back up, and the result is a tonal shuffle between snark and sentimentality. The core message—that the people who actually care about you aren’t necessarily the ones you spend your life chasing—is clear enough, just tangled in the film’s wilder detours. The script doesn’t fully stick to either its acidic instincts or its softer heart, but Wiig and Bening wrangle it into something worth watching. A film that works in fits and starts, but when it hits, it’s surprisingly funny, and maybe even a little touching.

Emily Blunt, rattling through the film in a fog of liquor and bad decisions, makes self-destruction look like an endurance sport. Her Rachel doesn’t drink for fun—she drinks with a sense of purpose, with the grim determination of a woman chasing oblivion like it owes her money. Her daily train ride offers a front-row seat to the life she lost: her ex-husband (Justin Theroux), now playing house with a new wife (Rebecca Ferguson) and their newborn. But she’s not watching them. Her gaze locks onto a house just down the track, where a picture-perfect couple—Scott (Luke Evans) and Megan (Haley Bennett)—go about their business, oblivious to the audience peering in. In Rachel’s mind, they are the thing she never quite had, the proof that love, real love, exists. Until Megan shatters the illusion by kissing another man. Something in Rachel snaps. Or maybe it was always snapping, and this is just the moment it finally breaks. She steps off the train, stumbles into the night, and then—nothing. Blackout. The next morning, she wakes up bruised, bloodied, and missing a few crucial hours. Megan is missing, too. The connection between these two facts is the film’s engine, revving through a series of recollections that shift like sand underfoot, the past sliding into the present, memory colliding with reality. Tate Taylor, assembling the puzzle with a sleight-of-hand approach, makes sure the pieces never quite settle until they need to. Flashbacks elbow their way in, rewiring events, nudging the truth just out of reach. It’s pulp, but pulp that knows how to dress for the occasion—noir in suburban daylight, intrigue polished to a commuter-friendly shine. Blunt, staggering through it all, turns Rachel into something beyond the standard unreliable narrator. She’s unreliable to herself, double-crossed by her own mind, a detective too drunk to trust her own witness statements. The mystery keeps its grip, the performances keep things steady, and the film keeps its train firmly on the tracks—though not without a few thrilling jerks and sudden stops. A little Gone Girl, a little Hitchcock-by-way-of-paperback-thriller, and thoroughly entertaining in its own right.

A painting, no matter how exquisitely lit, is not a narrative, but Girl with a Pearl Earring does its best to convince you otherwise. The film moves with the hush of an art museum after closing, every frame arranged like a still life that hasn’t quite decided to move yet. The light is perfect. The colors are exquisite. The emotions—well, they exist somewhere between a held breath and a slow exhale, neither forming nor dissolving. Scarlett Johansson plays Griet, a servant girl with quiet intelligence and a face built for mystery. Her expression—watchful, unreadable—does half the work, and her presence does the rest. Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) sees something in her, though whether it’s inspiration, fascination, or simply the convenience of an obedient muse is left to interpretation. He watches, absorbs, then places her within his world like one of his carefully composed objects. She grinds his pigments, mixes his colors, steps just close enough to his art to feel like she belongs in it. And then, of course, he paints her. The film glides through this imagined history with a patience usually reserved for drying oil paints. The romance, such as it is, stays in the margins—a brush hovering just above the canvas, never quite touching. Firth plays Vermeer as a man so consumed by his work he forgets to exist outside of it, his wife (Essie Davis) as a woman seething at her own irrelevance. Griet, caught in their storm of silences, becomes a study in restraint—too aware to be naïve, too powerless to make a move. It’s gorgeous, no question. The interior shots are glowing pockets of candlelight, the streets of Delft look pulled straight from a Dutch masterpiece, and every object seems precisely where Vermeer himself would have placed it. But beauty alone doesn’t carry weight, and when all is said and done, Girl with a Pearl Earring remains exactly what it was at the start—a composition of glances and gestures, lovely to look at, intriguing to consider, but never quite stepping beyond its own frame.