Film Buff Musings

Rian Johnson swaps out the drafty old mansion for a billionaire’s private Greek island, decked out with shimmering excess and architectural nonsense, a place where the rich gather to peacock and preen. This is a mystery film, sure, but it can be more aptly stated that this is a gleeful autopsy of wealth and the kinds of people who treat money like a personality trait. Edward Norton plays Miles Bron, a self-mythologizing tech mogul with the instincts of a spoiled child, who invites his closest parasites for a weekend of staged danger. A murder game, scripted, low stakes. Then there’s Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the Southern-fried Poirot with a mind like a steel trap wrapped in velvet, turns up, and the game gets a rewrite. Craig, more bemused than burdened, plays Blanc like a man who enjoys his work too much to call it work. He circles the guests—Kate Hudson’s Birdie, an influencer whose IQ would cause her concern if she knew what an IQ was; Dave Bautista’s alpha-branded talking head, a human megaphone with biceps; Janelle Monáe’s Andi, the woman everyone would rather forget. They sip expensive cocktails, trade barbs with the precision of people used to performance, and smile like they mean it. Then the real blood spills. Johnson’s trick is in the layering: flashbacks reframed, truths replaced with facades, each reveal setting the stage for the next. The mystery unfolds like a hall of mirrors—every step forward reflecting something previously missed. When the final twist locks into place, the tone shifts: what began as a cerebral game erupts into gleeful destruction, with the film taking visible pleasure in smashing the opulence it so carefully arranged. Craig, once again, reminds us that the sharpest detectives don’t just solve crimes—they strip away vanity, invention, and myth until only motive is left standing.

A Cinderella story where the pumpkin stays a pumpkin, the magic is doled out like an allowance, and the heroine walks around barefoot—not because she must, but because she’s feeling contrary. The Glass Slipper stages itself like a fairy tale told by someone who doesn’t believe in them, dressing up its threadbare sets in soft pastels and hoping no one notices the seams. The whole thing has the energy of a matinée performance where even the actors know the evening crowd gets the better show. Leslie Caron, light on her feet, heavy on the sulking, is given full permission to dance, which ought to be enough. But the choreography has all the expressiveness of a wind-up music box. She twirls, she gestures, she exists in movement but never quite in emotion. And her Cinderella, the supposed soul of the story, is just awful—whiny, sullen, petulant. The stepmother and stepsisters treat her poorly, yes, but at some point, their frustration starts to make sense. Michael Wilding’s prince drifts in, disguised but unconvincing, a royal dressed like a man who only just remembered he was supposed to be inconspicuous. He stumbles upon Cinderella’s hidden forest retreat, a place she treats like a sacred grove, and within seconds, she is berating him for trespassing. Then, just as abruptly, they have an understanding. Later, they will reunite at the ball, suddenly oblivious to each other’s faces, because that’s how the story goes. A fairy tale needs enchantment, or at least a whisper of it. This one barely musters a polite nod in its direction. Cinderella gets her dress, her dance, her slipper—but the magic feels like it left the castle long before she arrived.

Glen or Glenda is barely a movie—it’s a stitched-together public service announcement, a kink confession, and a parade of stock footage, introduced by Bela Lugosi and narrated like a séance. And yet: it’s weirdly moving. It’s also hard to see clearly. Watching it after Tim Burton’s Ed Wood distorts the experience. That film rewrote the myth—turning failure into defiance, ridicule into romance. It’s tough to watch Glen or Glenda without hearing echoes of Martin Landau’s growl or seeing the affectionate shadow cast by someone else’s movie. The sincerity feels pre-loaded. But it’s still there, under the rubble. The sincerity isn’t in the craft. It’s in the plea. Ed Wood, who directed, wrote, and stars, isn’t mocking the subject—he is the subject. He plays Glen, a man who likes wearing women’s clothes. Not gay. Not ashamed. Just drawn to the feel of angora, the silhouette of a slip. His alter ego is Glenda, the woman he becomes when the world isn’t watching. It’s a compulsion, maybe, or an identity—Wood never quite distinguishes between the two—but it’s real. And it’s a secret, at least from Barbara (Dolores Fuller), his fiancée, who stares like she’s just stepped into a room no one warned her about. When she finally accepts him—without panic, without qualification—the film becomes something close to radical. The psychologists drone on, regurgitating whatever Wood had bouncing around in his head at the time—half pseudoscience, half plea for understanding. But the message is clear: don’t punish difference. Don’t pathologize what you don’t bother to understand. The Lugosi segments exist in their own orbit. He sits in a throne-like chair, issuing cryptic warnings about green dragons and snails, as montage gives way to disjointed spectacle: stampedes, bondage, crossfades, storm clouds. It isn’t dream logic so much as collage—assembled from fragments, held together with ambition and hope. But there’s a spirit to it—nervous, raw, unfiltered. It wants something better for people like Glen. And that makes it, in its own broken, baffling way, something close to essential.

Julianne Moore plays Gloria Bell with the kind of radiance that doesn’t ask for attention—it just doesn’t blink. Divorced, mid-fifties, drifting through routines that feel inherited rather than chosen, she moves from work to yoga to the dance floor like someone hoping muscle memory might carry her somewhere new. A soft collision of loneliness and fleeting euphoria, the film isn’t quite a romance—it’s closer to an observational autopsy of what happens when two middle-aged people try to solder their fractures together for a little while. By day, Gloria clocks in at an unremarkable insurance job. By night, she disappears into disco clubs—not to meet anyone, just to move, to feel the bass in her chest, to prove she hasn’t vanished. Her children are grown and slightly chaotic. Her ex-husband has moved on. She hovers politely at the edges of their lives and fills the gaps with neon light and Donna Summer choruses. Then there’s Arnold—John Turturro at his gentlest and most exasperating—a man who claims to be free but lives on a financial leash to his clingy ex-wife and two grown daughters who treat him like a coin purse with legs. He runs a paintball park and once, in a moment of half-hearted courtship, shows Gloria how to fire a paintball gun. That’s about as raucous as things get. There’s a trip to Vegas, some awkward hotel rooms, a few bright nights that fade back into the same quiet lack both were trying to outpace. Lelio doesn’t tack on a revelation or slap a moral on it. He keeps the frame close and the premise spare, letting Gloria drift into focus as she inches toward the sour truth that loneliness and freedom often split the rent. One woman, her favorite songs, and the dance floor she can’t quite live without. A small, perceptive sigh of a film about how sometimes the disco ball spins for no one in particular.

A dynasty held together by whispers and nods, where executions are carried out with the cool efficiency of household tasks. The Godfather stretches across a decade of American crime, but its true terrain is quieter: the silence after a promise, the tension before a decision, the slow corrosion of a man who thought he was different. This is a world where power moves without fanfare—smooth as a piston, inevitable as gravity. Marlon Brando doesn’t walk through the film so much as sink into it. His Don Corleone speaks in murmured decrees, fingers tapping like he’s conducting a private orchestra. Around him, the family orbits: Sonny (James Caan), explosive and impatient, a man who solves problems faster than he can think them through; Fredo (John Cazale), shrinking in the corner like a lighter that won’t spark; Connie (Talia Shire), passed from one man’s grip to another, her grand wedding the prelude to a marriage turned noose; and Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), the calm voice of logic in a family ruled by blood and instinct. Then there’s Michael. Al Pacino begins the film standing just outside his own life—clean, composed, the college boy with a future. He’s not supposed to be part of this. But power doesn’t wait for permission. The turning point isn’t loud—it’s a quiet dinner in a modest restaurant, a hidden gun behind a toilet tank, and a look in Michael’s eyes that says the tide’s already changed. The transformation unfolds like a closing fist. He doesn’t harden all at once. He just stops looking back. Coppola builds the film with the patience of a chess master. Each scene—wedding, meeting, betrayal, baptism—is another move in a game where the players already suspect how it ends. Violence arrives with a thud, not a flourish. The famous horse’s head isn’t about shock. It’s about control. The baptism montage doesn’t juxtapose—it aligns. Business and blood, family and vengeance, prayer and murder—all of it part of the same unbroken ritual. The Godfather isn’t a fall from grace. It’s a revelation that grace was never part of the equation. The tragedy isn’t that Michael changes. It’s that the world never gave him room to be anything else. And by the final shot—Michael seated, silent, the door closing on the last flicker of the man he was—it’s clear the question was never whether he’d become his father. It was when.

Lightning not only strikes twice but digs in deeper, leaving a wound that never quite heals. The Godfather Part II isn’t just a sequel; it’s an expansion, a descent, a widening of the lens that somehow pulls everything closer. It sprawls across seventy years and three-and-a-half hours, folding time back on itself, layering past and present until they blur. If The Godfather was about the mechanics of power, this is about the price. Two stories, running parallel, echoing each other like a slow, inevitable curse. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), now the reigning patriarch, wants legitimacy—or at least something that looks like it. The family moves from New York’s back alleys to the high-rise glamour of Las Vegas, trading shadowy rooms for casino floor spectacle, but the game hasn’t changed. If anything, it has tightened, its rules more rigid, its betrayals more acute. Michael, stiff-backed, eyes dark with calculation, grows colder, more isolated, until there is nothing left but the role he plays and the silence he keeps. And then, the past. A young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro), fresh off the boat, a man who watches, waits, learns the language of power before speaking it himself. His rise is quieter, more methodical—violence not as punctuation, but as necessity. New York, early 20th century, its streets thick with hunger and opportunity, gives him what he needs: a cause, an enemy, a reason to take. His story unfolds like a memory Michael doesn’t know he has, each step forward mirrored by his son’s slow unraveling. Where the first film was a chess match, this one is something else entirely—a study in erosion, in what happens when power hollows a man out. Michael, standing at the top of the empire his father built, finds himself untouchable, unreachable. The final scene—Michael alone, his face unreadable, his fate long sealed—lingers like a specter, colder than any execution, more final than any bullet. The production exceeds even its predecessor, every frame thick with detail, every shadow holding a story. Certain moments feel endless in the best way, spaces to sink into, to absorb. It isn’t as thrilling as the first, but it doesn’t need to be. The intrigue runs deeper, the weight heavier. Stick with it to the end. It will stay with you long after.

The weight of legacy, of past sins pressing down like a hand on the shoulder. The Godfather Coda arrives with that burden already written into its bones—an epilogue to films that never needed one, a conclusion to a story that already felt closed. It’s slower in places, less operatic, sometimes even unfocused. But if it never reaches the heights of its predecessors, it at least understands their rhythm. The pacing remains deliberate, though looser. The production lush, though not quite as intoxicating. The performances seasoned, though some more than others. Al Pacino, older, wearier, still carrying the sins of two lifetimes, reprises Michael Corleone with the same icy restraint, but this time, the cracks are wider. The empire hasn’t collapsed, but its center of gravity has shifted. The family’s business dealings now involve a $600 million bid for controlling shares of the Immobiliare corporation—real estate, Vatican connections, a step toward legitimacy, or at least the illusion of it. The difference between the church and the mob is thinner than ever. Philanthropy becomes a stage prop. The more Michael tries to buy his way into redemption, the further it recedes. Meanwhile, the Corleones’ grip on the criminal underworld has loosened, and Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna), an ambitious but ultimately small-time opportunist, takes his shot. His war with the family isn’t so much a declaration of power as it is a byproduct of Michael’s fading presence—he’s still feared, still respected, but the old rules are eroding. Vincent (Andy Garcia), an illegitimate nephew with a hair-trigger temper, sees an opening and seizes it, proving himself in ways that are less about strategy and more about instinct. His romance with Michael’s daughter, Mary (Sofia Coppola, woefully outmatched by the material), complicates things further, though the film doesn’t seem entirely sure what to do with that subplot. But let’s be fair. The Godfather and Part II weren’t just classics; they were final. Coda, in its 2020 recut form, attempts to reshape the story into something more purposeful, to clarify rather than reinvent. It doesn’t elevate the film to the heights of its predecessors, but it does offer a cleaner, more deliberate sendoff. It’s still the weakest of the trilogy, but maybe that was always going to be the case. There was never a right way to end this story—only a way to watch Michael Corleone sit in the long shadow of his own making.

A glass bottle falls from the sky, and a world shifts. Xi (N!xau), a member of an isolated Kalahari tribe, sees it land like a divine gift, a message from the heavens—or so it seems. Smooth, transparent, solid in a way no gourd or piece of wood has ever been. The tribe finds endless uses for it—grinding, flattening, playing. But the gods sent only one, and scarcity breeds something new: conflict. The tribe, for the first time, has something to fight over. And so, Xi reaches a conclusion with the clarity of a man unburdened by modern rationalizations: this thing is no gift at all. It is evil, and it must go. Thus begins his journey to the end of the earth, Coca-Cola bottle in hand, a pilgrim setting forth to purge his people of the corruption of possession. The world, of course, has other plans. He stumbles into the orbit of Andrew (Marius Weyers), a well-meaning but terminally clumsy biologist, escorting a schoolteacher (Sandra Prinsloo) to her new assignment in the bush. There are guerrilla fighters, incompetent rebels who seem to have wandered in from another kind of movie. There are cars, rifles, beeping machines, and Westerners tangled up in their own chaos, stumbling through routines that make no sense to an outsider. Xi watches, puzzled but patient. The film drifts between tones, part documentary, part slapstick comedy, never committing fully to either but somehow making both work. The humor is gentle, observational—no belly laughs, just a steady stream of small, knowing smiles. A culture-clash comedy that never mocks Xi but rather lets him stand, calm and unruffled, while modern civilization flails around him. It’s a film that moves at its own rhythm, fascinated by its own premise but never in a hurry to get anywhere. A bottle falls, a journey begins, and a world that thought it understood itself gets just a little more ridiculous.

Godspell plays like the New Testament reimagined by a troupe of theater kids let loose in an abandoned New York City—wearing costumes that look like they were chosen by a five-year-old coming off a Pixy Stix bender. They gallop through the vacant city like it’s been cleared for their own Technicolor parade—climbing fountains, pounding on garbage can lids, quoting scripture between kazoo solos, and lobbing riddles like Bible school crossed with a Dadaist flash mob. At the center is Victor Garber as a gleaming, wide-eyed Jesus in rainbow suspenders and a Superman shirt, hair teased into a halo of curls, expression toggling between youth group leader and curbside mystic. Structurally, it mirrors the Gospels—disciples and all—but filtered through street performance and a kind of theatrical glee that feels equal parts devotion and dress-up. His followers, dressed in thrift-store psychedelia, orbit him like over-caffeinated apostles—acting out parables, reciting non sequiturs, and skipping down sidewalks like they’ve just escaped rehearsal. There’s no plot in the traditional sense. It moves in sequence: sermon, song, game, pratfall. But Schwartz’s music gives it shape. “Day by Day” was the hit, but every number adds something—pop-rock, ragtime, gospel—performed with theatrical verve that’s infectious enough to feel like an invitation. You’re either in or you’re not. If you’re in, you may find yourself wanting to leap into frame and join them. You’ll need to tolerate a few things: the randomness, the shrillness, the sense that these characters discovered religion and theater on the same afternoon. The tone hovers between devotional and unhinged. It’s not trying to modernize faith so much as make it kinetic. Reverence delivered through cartwheel. Scripture as group number. If the apocalypse had a youth chorus, this would be the dress rehearsal.

The monsters look massive, the humans look puny, and that’s about all the film gets right. Gareth Edwards understands scale—he knows that a kaiju battle isn’t just about giant creatures throwing each other into skyscrapers, but about how small everyone else looks in the process. Watching a monster tear through San Francisco is one thing; watching it through the windshield of a school bus filled with screaming children makes it something else entirely. This is Hollywood’s second attempt at a Godzilla reboot, a formal apology for the 1998 disaster. It’s more respectful this time. It’s still not great. The premise: nuclear energy-hungry creatures known as MUTOs awaken, wreak havoc, and stir the attention of a lumbering, ancient force of nature—Godzilla, a beast less interested in humanity than in restoring some kind of primordial balance. The plot, in theory, should have weight, should be pulpy and propulsive. Instead, it slogs through its motions, all setup with little surprise. The MUTOs serve their function, but their presence lacks real menace. Godzilla himself is an awe-inspiring presence, but kept off-screen long enough that by the time he truly arrives, the film has nearly exhausted its patience. The humans? Staring, running, occasionally making bad decisions. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, ostensibly the lead, is a black hole of charisma, his entire arc consisting of looking vaguely concerned. Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins, playing scientists who exist mostly to say things like Nature always finds a way, deserve better. Bryan Cranston, the film’s best shot at an emotional anchor, isn’t around long enough to do anything but remind us how much we’d rather be watching him. The effects are top-tier, but they don’t elevate the film beyond a technical exercise. The destruction looks real, the creatures move with weight, but in an era where digital spectacle is standard, Godzilla offers nothing beyond what’s expected. It’s big, it’s loud, it understands the basics of its source material—but Godzilla should be something more than competent. It should shake the ground.

A creature feature staged like a military briefing, where titanic monsters stomp through cities while humans either squint at radar screens or bumble into the chaos with all the survival instincts of a horror movie extra. It should be exhilarating—whole skylines collapsing in the wake of ancient gods—but somehow it feels like watching the mayhem through a fogged-up windshield. The film’s biggest crime isn’t its nonsense plot, its cardboard characters, or its generic dialogue. It’s that it makes destruction this boring. Michael Dougherty’s installment expands the monster roster—King Ghidorah, Mothra, Rodan, all the legends show up—but the action, when it arrives, is buried under layers of digital murk. Blue haze, storm clouds, debris everywhere, as if cinematography itself is afraid of letting us see what’s happening. Here and there, though, the film gives us a glimpse of its gargantuan budget—Godzilla glowing beneath the ocean’s surface, Mothra spreading her iridescent wings, Ghidorah perched atop a volcano like an apocalypse given form. The film wants to be grand, but it likes to keep muddying its own spectacle. The premise hints at something weighty: eco-terrorists, led by Vera Farmiga’s well-intentioned but wildly unhinged scientist, believe humanity is the real disease, and the Titans are the cure. Charles Dance, in full sinister pragmatist mode, isn’t the mastermind so much as a businessman capitalizing on catastrophe. The idea—a global reset, cities turned to rubble, nature reclaiming its throne—should inspire awe, but the film never lets that awe settle. The destruction is relentless but weightless, spectacular but unearned. Even the final battle, which ditches some of the haze for a clearer Boston showdown, never quite achieves the visceral impact it should. A monster movie where the monsters sometimes vanish into the mist and sometimes show up just long enough to remind you what could have been. The apocalypse arrives, entire cities fall, and somehow none of it feels real.

At last, skyscrapers suffer properly. After two MonsterVerse entries that flirted with grand-scale destruction but never fully delivered, Godzilla vs. Kong finally hands the keys to two behemoths and lets them turn whole cityscapes into their personal demolition playground. And if modern blockbusters insist on computer-generated everything, at least this one understands how to do it with style—neon-drenched skylines, glowing oceans, mountain ranges blanketed in snow. The MonsterVerse finally remembers that if everything is going to be CGI anyway, it might as well look like a comic book cover come to life. The locations are plentiful, each one an excuse for another round of oversized carnage. Deep-sea showdowns, gravity-defying caves, city-wide melees where buildings collapse with a designer’s touch. And then, a moment of pure, distilled monster-movie joy: Mechagodzilla, stepping forward like he’s been waiting for his moment in the spotlight. That’s when you know a film understands its audience—when the appearance of a character, before he even lifts a mechanical claw, is enough to send a jolt through the screen. The storyline, simplified to the point of convenience, provides just enough scaffolding for the spectacle to hang on. Godzilla isn’t rampaging aimlessly—he’s hunting Apex Cybernetics, a corporation playing god with Ghidorah’s leftovers. Monarch, ever the well-meaning bystander, hauls Kong out of Skull Island and onto the open ocean, using him as a living compass to lead them to Hollow Earth, a place as conceptually nonsensical as it is visually striking. The monsters don’t meet as carefully placed chess pieces but as walking natural disasters, pre-programmed to rip each other apart. Kong, the film’s most unexpected emotional center, gets a personality that Skull Island only gestured toward. His bond with Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the last of Skull Island’s indigenous people, is the closest this film comes to tenderness. Monarch treats her as a translator, but the real revelation isn’t that Kong can communicate—it’s that he chooses to. A creature built for destruction, pausing to speak with a child, as if there’s something left in him that still understands gentleness. It’s big, ridiculous, and just self-aware enough to let the spectacle breathe. The monsters fight, the buildings fall, and for once, the screen doesn’t apologize for its own scale.

Mae West, a woman who could melt a man’s resolve with a single word, finds herself trapped in a plot that never quite lets her take charge. She’s Cleo, a saloon singer engaged to a wealthy cattle rancher who dies before the wedding day. The land he leaves behind is rich in oil, and suddenly, Cleo’s ticket to high society is punched. This should be a goldmine for West, a role where she could spin every moment into pure charisma, but the film continually sidesteps her strengths, like someone afraid to let the star do what she does best. She enters a horse in a race, and before you know it, there are men in tuxedos, men in riding boots, and even a disapproving socialite to battle. The dialogue still carries her familiar lilt and those lines dripping with double meaning, but the script demands she juggle too many plot distractions rather than let her signature flirtations take the spotlight. Her best films let her play in the space between words, not try to navigate a convoluted series of events. Then comes the opera sequence. West, who’s usually the sharpest person in any room, suddenly finds herself wrapped in highbrow humor—sent up in a production where she’s the out-of-place fish in the silk-lined tank. The scene isn’t a misstep in its own right; it’s a comical jab at high society, but the tone feels a bit too straitlaced for a woman who excels in turning humor into art. It’s an attempt at grandeur that doesn’t quite understand her gift for irreverence. The laughs trickle in, but they don’t always land. The plot, though easy to follow, just doesn’t give West the room to truly shine. She’s still the magnetic force at the center, but the film keeps trying to make her play by the rules of a story that just doesn’t need them. It’s a perfect showcase for the way she owns every line, but it’s a missed opportunity in a film that could have let her unleash with less restraint.

Brewster’s Millions, but with orangutans. Tony Danza plays the estranged son of a circus tycoon who dies and leaves him $5 million—on one condition: he has to take care of three orangutans. If any of them croak, the money defaults to a rival zoological society, which responds by hiring a pair of low-IQ hitmen to knock off a primate. That’s the setup. The movie spends the rest of its runtime tripwiring over gags involving banana peels, food fights, and orangutans mugging like they’re auditioning for a diaper commercial. It’s nominally aimed at kids—specifically the kind who erupt with laughter at the sight of an ape in sunglasses—but even they might wonder why they’re not just at the zoo. The orangutans are directed by trainers clearly waving something off-camera, and the humans are mostly left to shout, grimace, and flail. Danza does what he can, but there’s not much to play beyond exasperation. The film earns a sliver of credit for one inspired moment: a scene set in the boardroom of the zoological society, surrounded by dead-eyed taxidermy. When a henchman proposes “taking out” one of the apes, the society’s chairman (Joseph Maher) responds with a giggle so layered in menace and politeness it’s practically operatic. It’s the one scene that briefly suggests a better, stranger movie lurking under all the shrieking. But no, what we get is mostly shrieking. A few pratfalls, some off-brand animal hijinks, and the long, slow realization that you’re watching a movie where the orangutans give the most convincing performances.

Three elderly men sit at a breakfast table on an unremarkable morning when Joe (George Burns), with the casual confidence of someone who’s already made up his mind, proposes a bank robbery. Not out of malice, not even out of desperation exactly—just as a way to shake things up, to do something while they still can. His companions, Al (Art Carney) and Willie (Lee Strasberg), are skeptical, then amused, and then—because why not—on board. The first half plays like a quiet caper. These are men with no criminal background, no plan to speak of, and no particular taste for violence. Watching them prepare is half the charm: they rehearse, bicker, wear sunglasses as disguises, and try to make sense of what it means to commit a crime when most of your life has already passed you by. They don’t need the money as much as they need the experience. But that’s only half the film. The second half unwinds what the first half built—not through twists or revelations, but through consequence. The tone shifts. The breezy mischief gives way to something sadder, more reflective. It’s not an elegant transition, and some of it feels clumsy in execution, but the attempt is sincere. The film doesn’t just want to entertain; it wants to sit with these men long enough to understand what moved them to act in the first place. The script wanders between tones—at times light, at times melancholy, and occasionally quite moving. Some scenes linger longer than they should, but the presence of Burns, Carney, and Strasberg is reason enough to stay. Whatever unevenness the film has, it’s worth it just to watch these three share a frame.

It’s part fantasy quest, part fish-out-of-water comedy, and part studio misfire. But it’s also vintage Eddie Murphy, which means you’ll probably sit through the mess just to watch him glide through it. He plays Chandler Jarrell, a Los Angeles social worker who specializes in missing children—and suddenly finds himself recruited by a Tibetan priestess (Charlotte Lewis, all business, no patience) to track down a kidnapped boy with mystical powers. He’s called The Golden Child. He levitates, revives dead birds, and is said to be humanity’s only hope against an ancient evil. That evil comes in the form of Charles Dance, shape-shifting demon and elegant sadist, whose plan is vaguely apocalyptic but mostly seems designed to keep the effects department busy. Murphy is handed a series of surreal trials: cryptic monks, glowing daggers, a cult with a bad lighting budget, and one very confused dragon lady. None of the tests are especially gripping on their own—what keeps things moving is watching Murphy treat them like a street hustler walking through a séance. His response: disbelief, flirtation, maybe cooperation. There’s also a romantic subplot, perfunctory and inert, though Murphy keeps trying to goose it into life with deadpan flirtations. His delivery is the best special effect the film has. He doesn’t push the jokes; he sidesteps into them. When told the sacred knife can only be recovered by a man with a pure heart, he squints at the temple stairs and mutters: “Only a man whose heart is pure can wield the knife, and only a man whose ass is narrow can get down these steps.” The comedy’s soft, the fantasy thinner, but Murphy walks out like he expected it. If you’ve already worn out Coming to America, Trading Places, and Beverly Hills Cop, this one’ll do in a pinch. Just don’t expect clarity—or closure.

Bond films have never been big on introspection. After dozens of entries, what do we really know about him beyond the tuxedos, the martinis, and the rotating bedroom doors? Goldfinger doesn’t change that—but it does deliver what might be the most crisply executed, gloriously implausible scheme in the entire series. Gert Fröbe plays Auric Goldfinger, a gold-obsessed industrialist whose plan isn’t to rob Fort Knox, but to detonate a dirty bomb inside it—rendering the U.S. gold reserve radioactive and skyrocketing the value of his own hoard. It’s nonsense, but the film lays it out with such clean confidence that you go along willingly. Bond (Sean Connery) is sent to investigate, seduce, infiltrate, and improvise his way through the operation—sometimes in that order, sometimes not. Then there’s Oddjob, played with silent menace by Harold Sakata. He’s a brick wall in a tailored suit, armed with a steel-rimmed bowler hat that can take the head off a marble statue. The film gives him no backstory and no dialogue—just a grin and a body count, which proves more than enough. The set pieces are tight and inventive: Bond strapped to a table with a laser inching toward his torso, a car compactor with grisly payoff, a climactic assault on Fort Knox involving gas, gold bars, and synchronized watches. Connery remains the platonic ideal of Bond—cool under pressure, unbothered by logic, and perpetually one gadget ahead of death. Goldfinger didn’t invent the Bond formula, but it codified it. The gadgets, the one-liners, the larger-than-life villains with preposterous resources—it all locks into place here. There are smarter spy films, but few that move with this much ease or swagger. It’s Bond at his most iconic: efficient, ridiculous, and just clever enough to make the absurd look plausible.

A Belgian musical with a pop-art grin and a razor tucked inside. Chantal Akerman, best known for her slow-burning meditations on time and domesticity, steps into something playful, confectionary, a shopping mall of romance and regret. The songs—a giddy synth-pop explosion—have the weight of bubblegum but the stickiness to match, and the choreography comes with a charming conceit: the performers stare straight into the camera, serenading us like they’re trying to pull us into the frame. At the surface, it’s a fizzy tangle of love triangles. Employees flirt, hearts get broken, and everyone drifts between a hair salon, a boutique, and a café, dressed like they stepped out of a fashion spread from a magazine that no longer exists. But look a little closer, and the film’s sugary coating starts to crack. An American WWII veteran (John Berry) returns to rekindle something long-lost with the Polish-Jewish salon owner (Delphine Seyrig), their romance weighted by history in a way the younger characters don’t yet understand. There’s satire tucked inside the spectacle, a barbed take on capitalism and consumer culture, where love plays out like an extension of commerce, and heartbreak is just another transaction. At first glance, the film seems to beg for comparison to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg—French, color-drenched, filled with characters whose emotions spill out in song. The resemblance is real, but the purpose is different. Umbrellas is pure romance, a film that wants you to ache along with it. Golden Eighties smiles as it breaks hearts, swaying between sincerity and detachment. The look, the tone, the structure all suggest a love story, but the film itself keeps pushing in another direction. A musical that knows how to flirt, even as it keeps its hands in its pockets. In French with English subtitles.

Produced in the mid-’70s but looking like it missed the boat from the ’50s, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is a lavish, old-school fantasy steeped in the color and claptrap of Arabian Nights mythology. Swordplay, monsters, creaking ships—none of it feels especially modern, and that’s the point. This is the kind of film where adventure comes with a matte painting and a moral, and the hero keeps his chest bare and his jaw square. John Phillip Law, blue-eyed and unbothered, plays Sinbad as a kind of seafaring demigod—half explorer, half postcard. His crew encounters a winged gargoyle who drops a golden amulet onto the ship’s deck. Sinbad, naturally, puts it on. Bad move. It belongs to a sorcerer named Koura, played by a snarling Tom Baker just before he swapped wizardry for a TARDIS. Koura wants the amulet back, and he’s willing to rot himself from the inside to get it. Ray Harryhausen provides the real magic: stop-motion marvels that twitch, lurch, and nearly steal the film. A figurehead rips free from the ship’s bow and strangles a sailor. A six-armed Kali statue springs to life mid-pose, all curved blades and deliberate menace. She doesn’t flail—she strikes with purpose, like a nightmare taught choreography. The magic isn’t subtle, but it’s meticulous: every jerky lurch and flicker is a reminder that these monsters had weight, design, and something like intent. You don’t quite believe in them—you believe in the work that animates them. The dialogue is stiff, the delivery stagey, but the tempo clips along—powered by amulets, monsters, and the kind of earnest swordplay that died with Technicolor. Not quite Thief of Baghdad, but close enough to brush its shadow.

A thriller that starts like a promise and ends like an apology. The right kind of eerie set-up—an Airbnb double-booked, the wrong mix of personalities, tension simmering under forced politeness. Kath (Winona Ryder) and Max (John Gallagher Jr.), expecting a quiet weekend, instead find themselves stuck with Greta (Brianne Tju) and Al (Owen Teague), a younger couple who act like they own the place, like they expected the intrusion. Something about them feels too amused, too entertained by the awkwardness. And then, suddenly, they’re gone. Or rather, Max and Greta are. Kath wakes up alone, told that her boyfriend left her in the middle of the night. The mystery unspools in careful increments, each revelation sliding into place like a promise of deeper unease. Kath, adrift but unwilling to let go, follows the breadcrumbs, the film shifting with her—until it doesn’t. The tension thins, the twists arrange themselves neatly, and the revelations settle in with the weight of a deflated balloon. What starts as a whisper of something dark wilts into an explanation that lands too soft, like a soufflé surrendering to gravity before anyone gets a taste. And then, the ending. A reveal so lifeless it practically slinks off the screen, draining the tension with all the dramatic force of a magician pulling an old receipt out of a top hat. The film had the right materials—mistrust, manipulation, disappearances that don’t mean what they seem—but it plays its hand without conviction, as if it lost interest in its own mystery. Ryder does what she can, her presence hinting at more history than the script allows. She plays Kath like someone who has spent too long expecting disappointment, moving through the mystery not with fear or fury but with the sheer unwillingness to let things slide. Gone in the Night sets up a game only to forget why it started playing.

Nearly four hours long and yet it gallops—as if on horseback through a burning backdrop—pausing only for Scarlett to cock her head, unleash another volley of petulance, and resume galloping. The timeline goes slack, rubbery: a wedding, a war, three deaths, a birth, a raid—all wedged between overtures and sunsets, stitched together like heirloom lace pulled taut over a barrel of gunpowder. There’s a plot, technically, but the film is more accumulation than arc, a maximalist scrapbook gilded with orchestras and backlighting. Scarlett herself (Vivien Leigh, pitch-perfect and gloriously unrepentant) behaves not so much as a protagonist but as an instinct with lipstick—preening, clawing, never learning a damn thing. She’s callow in Act I and still callow in Act IV, but now she’s been through fire, starvation, four dresses made of curtains, and the Civil War, so the petulance carries weight. Ashley Wilkes, a moist handkerchief disguised as a man, is somehow the object of her obsession, and the film—so eager to swirl in emotional crescendos—plays along, violins swelling like a fainting spell. It’s emotional arithmetic that doesn’t compute, and no one minds. Clark Gable as Rhett Butler slinks into the film like someone arriving fashionably late to his own legend. He doesn’t act opposite Leigh so much as joust with her, each scene a verbal saber match conducted in drawing rooms with chandeliers trembling from the friction. Romance is supposedly the goal, but what we’re watching is mutual demolition with perfect posture. They scorch through each exchange like vaudeville stylists trapped in a doomed opera, giving face and innuendo as if that’s how people actually seduced one another before antibiotics. Visually, it’s a Southern epic dipped in marmalade: the skies flare orange and lilac, columns gleam, and every other shot looks plucked from the illustrated Bible your grandmother refused to part with. Max Steiner’s score, meanwhile, hurls trumpets at everything—birth, betrayal, staircase tumble—as if unsure which moment deserves the emphasis, so why not all of them? And yet, under the silk and pageantry, there’s something hollow where the reckoning ought to be. The genteel plantation life gets brushed in Vaseline and nostalgia, its brutality folded into the scenery like an unspeakable secret behind the curtain. It’s not that the film is unaware—it simply declines the invitation to interrogate its own fantasy. There’s spectacle here, yes, and lots of it, but what it seems to be admiring most isn’t love, nor war, nor pride—it’s the grandeur of being looked at.

Robin Williams, all grin and firepower, hijacks the film with the urgency of someone who’s been handed both a mic and a live grenade. As Adrian Cronauer—Air Force radio DJ parachuted into mid-’60s Saigon—he barrels through punchlines, impersonations, and cultural commentary like a man dodging sincerity by speed alone. The movie clears the lane, and wisely so. There’s plot, allegedly: Cronauer’s antics delight the troops and give ulcers to the brass, all while forbidden rock ‘n’ roll spills from the studio like heresy. Williams spins his scenes into controlled implosions—equal parts slapstick, satire, and sudden, breathtaking pivots into grief. He slips from mania to melancholy with the rhythm of someone flipping channels in their own brain. Bruno Kirby turns up as a tone-deaf lieutenant obsessed with polka and protocol, a man so unfunny he begins to resemble performance art. His line readings deserve their own rating system. But the film—charmed by its own contradictions—never decides what game it’s playing. It gestures toward anti-war commentary but never makes eye contact. The romance subplot, with a reserved Vietnamese woman who seems more concept than character, feels imported from a different, less aware movie. Tuan, her brother and Cronauer’s friend, hints at complexity, but his storyline detonates with more narrative utility than emotional weight. There’s also the matter of the humor—some of it aged like milk. Asian caricatures are played for laughs with the kind of broadness that flattens whatever goodwill the film tries to summon. The setting is window dressing, a paper-mâché jungle on which Williams gets to scrawl graffiti. Still, for all its half-measures and tonal confusion, the movie lives on the strength of one man doing everything all at once—and somehow pulling it off. It’s a war film that forgets the war but remembers the broadcast.

A true-crime procedural whispered into the void, The Good Nurse follows ICU nurse Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), whose suspicious new coworker, Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne), leaves a trail of bodies behind him so neatly tucked into charts and IV drips that nobody blinks until it’s far too late. The film, like its villain, keeps everything quiet—almost pathologically so. No operatic reveals, no sweaty showdowns. Just fluorescent lighting, policy documents, and the hum of moral discomfort filed under “miscellaneous.” There’s something respectable about refusing to sex up serial murder, but this one commits so fully to procedural grayness it forgets to pulse. What should be the slow squeeze of dread becomes something more dutiful, like auditing patient records in real time. Even the institutional rot—so clearly central to the story—is handled with bureaucratic courtesy. Hospital execs pass the killer along like a bad pen, and the film acknowledges this but rarely with enough energy to make it sting. Redmayne gives Cullen the unsettling quiet of a man folding himself into the wallpaper, blinking too often and apologizing for existing. It’s an eerie performance—suggestive, careful—but so muted it verges on background noise. Chastain, meanwhile, plays Amy as someone surviving by emotional triage, her warmth flickering under exhaustion. She and Redmayne share brittle, cagey scenes that could’ve caught fire but mostly smolder politely. The film’s most potent theme—the banality of evil buttressed by corporate liability—is there, faintly. But rather than pressing into outrage, The Good Nurse files the horror under restraint. It documents instead of dramatizing, leaving you with the feeling of having read a thorough case study… just one printed in grayscale.

A killer-child thriller with a pedigree and a gimmick: cast Macaulay Culkin against his halo and watch the room go cold. On paper, sure. On screen, not really. Elijah Wood plays Mark, newly bereaved and shipped to Maine to stay with his aunt and uncle (Wendy Crewson, Daniel Hugh Kelly). Cousin Henry (Culkin) greets him with a cherub’s smile and the moral compass of a trapdoor. In public he’s sugar; in private he tests the edges—dropping a mannequin off an overpass to cause a pileup, aiming a homemade crossbow where no weapon belongs, sending his little sister (Quinn Culkin) onto treacherous ice. He keeps the parents charmed and pins the blame on Mark, who’s already adrift in grief and—worst thread in the movie—starts projecting his dead mother onto his aunt, a notion the film plays with a straight face when it needs a red pen. The premise has history (The Bad Seed did this with actual nerves), and casting Culkin as a sadist could have been inspired if the tone had any control. Instead the cruelty arrives as set pieces, the suspense evaporates in close-ups that should chill and don’t, and the big cliffside finale asks for operatic horror after ninety minutes of wobbling toward it. I didn’t shiver; I winced. Mostly I felt secondhand embarrassment for a cast working harder than the material deserves.

Good Will Hunting scrubs floors, solves unsolvable equations, packs a brain built for Nobel prizes into a life full of cheap beer and back-alley bruises, and keeps the emotional doors locked with all the deadbolted precision of someone who’s been hurt early and often. He’s discovered, accidentally, after solving a hallway math problem at MIT—something meant to stump graduate students, not janitors with assault charges. Professor Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgård) wants to mentor him, or at least drag the talent out of South Boston and into polite society. But Will prefers his friends, his bars, his fights. Then comes the catch: after clocking a cop during one of his usual flare-ups, he’s offered a deal—math sessions with Lambeau, and therapy. Enter Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), the one therapist Will can’t rattle, whose silences carry more weight than a roomful of clinical jargon. Williams plays him with the slow ache of someone who’s lived through loss and doesn’t need to prove anything anymore. The scenes between them feel less like breakthroughs and more like emotional sparring—strategic, bruising, strangely warm. Skylar (Minnie Driver) is the med student who sees through Will’s bravado, and their romance has a rough-edged sweetness—two whip-smart people testing each other with banter and baggage. Chuckie (Ben Affleck), Will’s best friend, gets a moment so startling in its emotional clarity that the movie pivots around it—truth from the least likely source. Van Sant doesn’t press. The film lets its dialogue breathe—smart, profane, and never trying too hard to impress. It’s a story about someone running from everything he could be, and the few people brave enough to stand in his way.