Film Buff Musings

That landmark hippie Broadway musical—a flower-child time capsule soaked in incense and moonlight—finally made it to the screen a decade after the fact, and while it arrives slightly out of step with its own era, Hair still has its rhythm. Miloš Forman directs with a looseness that doesn’t dilute the material so much as let it float a little. The songs still slap. The choreography spills out of Central Park, Washington Square, even the steps of power, as if the whole city caught the spirit and burst into motion. At its center is Claude (John Savage), a fresh-faced draftee from Oklahoma who arrives in New York like a deer at a discotheque. He falls into the orbit of a ragtag band of countercultural misfits led by Treat Williams, whose performance as Berger carries a manic conviction that can’t quite be categorized—part holy fool, part stoned-out ringmaster. These are your prototypical anti-establishment angels: broke, free-loving, criminally spontaneous, drug-prone, allergic to authority, and cheerfully bent on wrecking polite society’s dinner plans. The plot hinges on Berger and company intervening in Claude’s path to war. They crash a garden party. They break into military compounds. They chase a rich girl (Beverly D’Angelo) whom Claude sees once and decides he’s in love with. The whole film glides between satire and sincere longing, often within the same sequence, and Forman treats the material with a kind of fond irreverence—he’s not worshiping the era, but he’s not mocking it either. Would Hair have hit harder in 1969? Undoubtedly. In 1979, the glow has dimmed, the revolution commodified, and the protests already turned into commemorative buttons. But as a film, it still pulses with enough musical invention and visual invention to justify itself. It isn’t the essential cultural document the stage version might have been, but it’s far from a relic. It moves, it sings, it throws itself into the air, and occasionally, it soars.

John Waters, the self-proclaimed Pope of Trash and no stranger to scandalous filmmaking, pulls a dazzling sleight of hand with Hairspray: he trades in his X-rated anarchy for PG-rated pop, and somehow loses none of his edge. The result is a candy-colored swirl of social satire, teen rebellion, and gloriously bad hair, all spun into a near-perfect cinematic confection. Set in early 1960s Baltimore, the film follows Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake), a “pleasantly plump” teenager with big hair, bigger dreams, and a rhythm no gym teacher can contain. Every day after school, she and best friend Penny (Leslie Ann Powers) sprint home to catch The Corny Collins Show—a local teen dance program broadcasting rock ‘n’ roll to the suburbs. When auditions open for new dancers, Tracy doesn’t just try out—she owns the floor, securing a spot on the show and quickly dethroning reigning princess Amber Von Tussle (Colleen Fitzpatrick), a blonde tyrant with a tap shoe up her ego. Tracy’s rise from outsider to TV sweetheart is swift, but it’s her outspokenness that gives the film its spine. When she throws her weight behind integrating the program—black dancers were only allowed on once a month—the stakes rise. Suddenly, The Corny Collins Show becomes a battleground for social change, and Tracy the unlikely face of a movement. It’s subversion with a beehive and a beat. The cast is stacked with oddball brilliance. Divine, in a riotous dual role, plays both Tracy’s housebound mother Edna (a role later played on Broadway by Harvey Fierstein and John Travolta, but never better than here) and the villainous TV station owner Arvin Hodgepile. Debbie Harry snarls as the racist Velma Von Tussle, Sonny Bono phones in a kind of square-jawed sleaze, and Jerry Stiller is pure deadpan gold as Tracy’s dad. Everything moves with the exaggerated precision of a pop-art comic strip. The costumes are loud, the dance numbers louder, and the script delivers laughs without undermining the film’s surprisingly sharp political undercurrent. Waters, ever the provocateur, doesn’t just poke fun—he gently shoves. And while it’s lighter than his earlier work, Hairspray still brims with the gleeful chaos of someone who grew up loving trash but decided to recycle it into something joyful. It’s a satire, a musical, and a time capsule—with a message that still rattles. And yes, the music’s irresistible.

Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet isn’t just unabridged—it’s practically upholstered. Clocking in at over four hours and using the full text, it’s likely the most exhaustive adaptation ever put on film. The setting has been bumped from the 16th to the 19th century, mostly (it seems) to justify filming in bright, gold-dripping palaces instead of gloomy stone castles. Which, honestly, is fine. The film looks magnificent, and the grandeur adds a sense of scale that matches the language. The cast list reads like a Branagh dream journal. Derek Jacobi brings a precise, coiled menace to Claudius, and Julie Christie’s Gertrude feels more haunted than complicit. Kate Winslet, as Ophelia, gives a heartbreakingly lucid descent into madness. And then there are the cameos—Jack Lemmon, Charlton Heston, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams. Somehow it doesn’t feel like stunt casting. The ensemble coheres in a way that feels curated rather than crowded, and even the more surprising appearances fold into the rhythm of the thing. Branagh himself takes the lead and plays it without hesitation. His Hamlet isn’t mopey or tortured so much as grandly spiraling—a man whose intellect outruns his grief until it all snaps. It’s a commanding performance that refuses to shrink to fit anyone’s idea of modern subtlety, and that’s part of what makes it so effective. There’s so much happening—text, staging, camera movement, mirrored halls, ornamental gowns—but the spectacle rarely overwhelms. It enhances. The filmmaking is maximalist, yes, but meticulously shaped. If there’s a flaw, it’s only that the second half stretches the limits of attention, but even then, it rarely falters. The film maintains a remarkable momentum, especially considering its length and density. In a cinematic landscape that usually trims Shakespeare down to the bone, Branagh does the opposite—and makes the case that there’s value in letting the play breathe in full. Hamlet has been filmed countless times, but rarely with this kind of scope, intelligence, and cinematic nerve.

One of Woody Allen’s best, Hannah and Her Sisters follows three sisters and the men tangled up in their lives—some drifting in, some actively making things worse. It’s structured like a novel in chapters and moves with such ease that you have to pause sometimes to appreciate how intricately it’s been woven together. There are affairs that overlap, secrets that bleed through, people who fall in and out of love while wearing the same tired expressions on their faces. At the center is Hannah (Mia Farrow), calm and competent to the point of disquiet. Her husband, Elliot (Michael Caine), is in love with her sister Lee (Barbara Hershey), who’s living with a reclusive, acid-tongued artist (Max von Sydow) and quietly looking for an exit. The third sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest), is restless, unemployed, and ricocheting between bad dates and worse career plans. These lives intersect across two years of Thanksgivings, betrayals, reconciliations, and the kind of slow-motion disillusionment people mistake for growth. It’s one of Allen’s most serious films—possibly his most emotionally grounded—but still dotted with big laughs. Most of those belong to Allen himself, playing Mickey, Hannah’s hypochondriac ex-husband who spirals into an existential crisis after a medical scare. He tries on religions like Halloween costumes, flirts with suicide, and is ultimately rescued not by revelation but by a Marx Brothers movie. Chicken soup may heal the body, but Duck Soup heals the mind. What stands out is how the film treats its characters’ confusion without sanding off the edges. It understands how hard it is to know what you want—harder still to act on it—and how absurdly easy it is to make a mess of the people around you. The performances are sharp, with Caine and Wiest in particular playing contradiction without commentary. But it’s Allen’s script that holds everything in place: dry, melancholic, and fully aware that resolution isn’t the same as clarity.

A fantasy wearing clogs and a permanent smile, Hans Christian Andersen isn’t interested in history—it’s interested in enchantment, and Danny Kaye obliges by spinning through every frame like a man convinced reality is just an obstacle to rhythm. This isn’t biography; it’s musical myth-making, embroidered with pastels, greens, and the giddy earnestness of a child’s favorite bedtime tale told on a sugar high. Kaye’s Andersen is a cobbler who’d rather narrate fairy tales than mend soles, which gets him exiled from his prim little village after the children start skipping school and quoting him instead of their schoolbooks. Off he goes to Copenhagen, where he flirts with the theater, moons over a ballet dancer, and invents The Little Mermaid between sighs. The narrative meanders, waiting for the next excuse for Andersen to spin another familiar tale. Frank Loesser’s songs do the legwork, and they’re good enough to make you forget the script has lost the thread. “The Inch Worm” comes out of nowhere and lodges itself somewhere between lullaby and existential math lesson. “Thumbelina” glides by like a watercolor on wax paper. The film doesn’t build so much as accumulate—a scrapbook of moments designed to be remembered more than followed. Hans Christian Andersen is a strange, lyrical thing, stitched together with old-world gentleness and Hollywood studio gloss. When it stalls, it stalls prettily—and usually with a song. And while it never quite convinces you the man was real, it makes a good case that his stories were, and still are.

Helen (Ellie Kemper) is newly divorced and just self-aware enough to know she needs a personality reset, so she signs up for a back-to-basics Appalachian Trail survival course. Unfortunately, the trail has more structure than the movie. What should feel like a whimsical step toward renewal ends up trudging in circles, tripped up by a support cast that seems personally offended by the idea of human decency. The group dynamics—an opportunity for warmth, tension, growth—somehow curdle into something pettier. The instructor treats amateur hikers the way a drill sergeant might treat a clumsy houseplant, and most of the others aren’t far behind. The script thinks these people are delightful eccentrics. They’re not. They’re sour, brittle, and fond of passive-aggressive sniping dressed up as enlightenment. Kemper works with what she’s given, which turns out to be a lot of damp dialogue and pep talks that land with the grace of a tossed shoe. Her Helen is supposed to be finding herself, but the film keeps elbowing her out of her own journey with little sitcom flare-ups and personality monologues that feel like they were copied off a whiteboard in a corporate empathy seminar. Even the nature shots—ordinarily a safe bet—feel framed for stock footage. It’s clean, it’s bright, it’s devoid of texture. Like the movie, it exists mostly to look like something deeper is happening.

Without its mashup of pop staples—spanning the ‘60s through the early 2000s—I doubt Happy Feet would have done much for me. There’s real joy in hearing Elvis, Queen, and Prince bounce off penguin beaks, and the film uses its musical catalogue with a sense of theatrical excess that mostly works. Nostalgia’s the hook, and it carries far more emotional heft than the screenplay itself. At heart, this is The Ugly Duckling in formalwear, with a dash of Footloose and Finding Nemo stitched into its tail feathers. Mumble (Elijah Wood), born into a world where song is currency and identity, can’t sing a note. What he can do is tap—shuffle, leap, stomp—his way into complete social exile. In this Antarctic colony, dancing isn’t just frowned upon, it’s viewed as the kind of deviance that might disrupt the ecosystem. The penguin elders—led by Hugo Weaving in full spiritual-bluster mode—blame Mumble’s rhythmic outbursts for the mysterious fish shortage, and exile him to flap his freak flag elsewhere. George Miller directs with more tonal ambition than he probably needed. What starts as a musical comedy with glossy feathers swerves sharply in the final act into environmental alarm. After Mumble’s journey brings him face-to-face with humans (via a stint in captivity at a marine park), the film pivots into a commentary on overfishing and ecological responsibility. The message is welcome, though the narrative stitching is rough. The humor is genial—never sharp, but never grating. I didn’t laugh, but I smiled often enough to suspect the film earned it. The animation holds up reasonably well—slick and expressive, even ambitious for its time. You can feel the effort in the mass choreography, the textures of snow and ice, the sheer scale of the musical numbers. The voice cast does its part: Wood is earnestly wide-eyed, Robin Williams flips between wise elder and manic sidekick with his usual vocal gymnastics, and Brittany Murphy, Nicole Kidman, and Hugh Jackman lend surprising vocal chemistry to the mating rituals. And there’s real warmth in the supporting performances, even when the dialogue veers into syrup. Happy Feet might not glide elegantly from point to point, but it dances with enough conviction—and enough music you actually want to hear—that it’s hard to write off. A bit ungainly, sure, but not without heart. Or rhythm.

Adam Sandler returns to the green with a sequel no one needed but plenty will watch—because sometimes nostalgia is enough, especially when it comes with a 9-iron and a beer gut. Happy Gilmore 2 is a bloated, uneven, and occasionally inspired follow-up to the 1996 original—a film that was never particularly sharp to begin with, but had just enough rage and weirdness to make it stick. This one’s looser. Flabbier. And almost proud of how little it cares about narrative shape. The movie wanders through a staggering number of cameos, tribute appearances, and deep-cut callbacks to a film that, let’s be honest, mostly worked because Sandler yelled at golf balls and punched Bob Barker. Here, the plot is barely present—less a story than an excuse to check in with old characters, dead ones included, and let Sandler stumble back into his swing. The setup: Happy (Sandler) married Virginia (Julie Bowen), had kids, and briefly flirted with adulthood. But after a freak golf accident takes her life, he spirals into tabloid infamy and full-time alcoholism. This, of course, sets the stage for a comeback. Not one grounded in logic or emotional truth, but one that gives Sandler an excuse to break windows, growl at opponents, and remind everyone that the backswing is still strong—even if the knees aren’t. It’s not as consistently funny as the original, and it knows it. The jokes show up in bursts—some sharp, some lazy, some barely written—but often funny enough to make you smile. A line hits, a visual gag works, a cameo surprises you just enough to feel like a payoff. For anyone who grew up with the original, it’s a strange kind of comfort. Not essential, not particularly elegant, but it goes down easy.

The Beatles are already winded when the film begins—all four sprinting down a London street, chased by a tidal wave of shrieking girls, tripping over curbs and barely dodging the crush. From there, they tumble into a train car as if it’s all part of the same breath. What follows isn’t a story so much as a loosely fastened excuse to watch the most famous four-piece in Britain tumble through a day’s worth of obligations, diversions, sound checks, misdirection, and prankster detours—all while keeping an eye on Paul’s grandfather (Wilfrid Brambell), a gleeful saboteur with a gift for wandering off at exactly the wrong moment. Richard Lester doesn’t direct so much as lob the camera into the scene and let it ricochet around. The black-and-white cinematography gives it the illusion of fly-on-the-wall realism, but the editing pulses with energy and invention. Dialogue darts around like it’s been passed between smart-alecks all day before arriving deadpan and impeccably timed. The jokes don’t so much build as detonate quietly and move on. Each Beatle, playing a version of himself that feels both natural and just slightly exaggerated, finds his own rhythm. Lennon snipes like a man with too many good lines to keep to himself. Harrison drops dismissals so dry they qualify as policy. McCartney moves through scenes with an easy composure, like someone for whom things naturally fall into place. And Starr—who somehow emerges as the emotional center—wanders off into a brief solo adventure that turns the movie briefly reflective, even wistful, before snapping back to jokes about haircuts and handcuffs. The songs aren’t staged; they erupt. They mime in train compartments, dangle off scaffolding, whirl through studio sets like no one gave them blocking. It’s performance stripped of pretense—music videos before anyone needed to invent them. And yet the film never flattens into a playlist. It dances on its own logic. A Hard Day’s Night isn’t chasing meaning or momentum—it’s chasing movement. A pop-cultural sideswipe dressed as a documentary, disguised as a farce. Not yet swallowed by significance, the Beatles here are still boys—fast, funny, and impossible to pin down. The camera catches them mid-air, and for 87 minutes, it’s enough just to watch them fly.

Of all the Andy Sidaris films I’ve subjected myself to—and there are more than any decent person should admit—Hard Ticket to Hawaii is one of the more coherent. Which isn’t a compliment so much as a curiosity. For once, I could actually follow a narrative. It has beginnings, middles, endings—even cause and effect, if you squint. The protagonists are two generously endowed heroines with feathered blonde hair and khaki hot pants—equal parts Barbie and Rambo—who spend the film firing every weapon you can fit into a duffel bag. Their troubles begin when they mistakenly intercept a shipment of black market diamonds, delivered via remote-controlled helicopter to a Hawaiian island. That single hiccup sets off a domino effect of gunfire, rocket launchers, nunchucks, throwing stars, and bare midriffs. And somehow, it all plays as relatively casual. The pleasures here are what you’d expect from Sidaris—women in peril who rarely seem perturbed, and men who flex more than they speak. But beyond the obvious draw (let’s not pretend—they come bare and surgically enhanced), the self-aware absurdity occasionally breaks through like a ray of lunacy across a fog of deadpan nonsense. One scene involves an assassin who spends his days on the beach pretending to play frisbee—until it’s decided he must be eliminated. The deed is done by swapping his normal frisbee with one lined with razor blades. And then there’s a cancer-infected snake that escapes its enclosure, terrorizes the island, and eventually explodes in a toilet. That’s one of the film’s clear highlights. As low-budget exploitation goes, this one’s surprisingly watchable, if only because it’s occasionally aware of its own stupidity. The rest is wallpapered in wooden acting, canned dialogue, and shootouts that appear choreographed by someone who’s only ever seen guns on lunchboxes. Still, if you’re in the mood for trash—true, glistening, utterly brainless trash—I wouldn’t recommend this, per se, but it has its moments.

The costumes and sets are so lavish—pinstripe suits, feathered gowns, Art Deco fixtures—that it feels less like a movie and more like someone spent the entire budget recreating a dream version of 1930s Harlem, then forgot to write anything interesting to happen there. It’s a film designed to dazzle the eye and test the patience. Richard Pryor plays Sugar Ray, a cool-headed gangster running a Harlem nightclub and illegal casino with his surrogate son and right-hand man Quick (Eddie Murphy), who dresses impeccably and kills quickly, usually in that order. A crooked cop (Danny Aiello), fronting for crime boss Bugsy Calhoune (Michael Lerner), tries to muscle in for a cut. But Sugar Ray and Quick, unimpressed with extortion as a business model, decide to fight back. That’s the plot, give or take a few shootouts. The bigger problem is that Harlem Nights, despite its all-star comic pedigree, drags itself scene to scene with all the enthusiasm of a tax seminar. The dialogue alternates between limp threats and low-effort barbs, with an overreliance on the phrase “crazy bitch” that starts to feel like placeholder text someone forgot to rewrite. You keep waiting for the cast to ignite—but most of them look half-asleep in three-piece suits. There are flickers. Redd Foxx, squinting through glasses thick enough to read the future, nearly steals his scenes by doing very little and doing it just right. And there’s a bruising, mid-film brawl between Della Reese and Murphy—kicks, punches, gunshots, and a kind of comic energy that the rest of the film badly needs. For five minutes, it comes alive. Given the cast—Murphy, Pryor, Foxx—it’s not wrong to expect brilliance. But the result feels more like a soft-focus vanity project with a great wardrobe and little of consequence to say. Beautiful, sure. But shapeless. Flat. The kind of film that makes you wish someone had taken the talent aside and asked, “Can we start over?”

A jet-black comedy wrapped in sunflowers and set to Cat Stevens, Harold and Maude is about a young man obsessed with death and an elderly woman obsessed with life—though neither would put it quite that way. Harold (Bud Cort) is a pale, well-moneyed twenty-something who spends his days staging increasingly elaborate fake suicides to unsettle his aristocratic mother and short-circuit a series of arranged dates. He fakes hangings, stage-dives into open caskets, and—memorably—chops off his own hand mid-dessert. It would play like morbid sketch comedy if not for the strange clarity behind it: Harold isn’t just acting out; he’s conducting experiments in detachment. Death is the only thing that feels real to him. Then there’s Maude (Ruth Gordon), a 79-year-old whirlwind who steals cars, liberates trees, and treats authority like a polite suggestion. The two meet at a funeral—Harold’s favorite pastime—and strike up a friendship that deepens into a romance, one that may raise eyebrows but somehow makes emotional sense. The film hints at the physical component, but treats it with a kind of mischievous tact: the idea is what matters, not the particulars. The central relationship is more than just a curiosity—it’s a lesson in perspective, buried inside a movie that’s constantly pulling up wildflowers and placing them in the viewer’s lap. Harold is all affect and rituals; Maude is all instinct and improvisation. He rehearses death. She performs life. It’s a match made in nowhere the movies usually go. Hal Ashby directs with a light touch and a sharp eye, letting the weirdness bloom without commentary. The visuals are clean but never sterile, and the soundtrack—almost entirely Cat Stevens—serves as the film’s emotional thermostat, flipping between melancholy and uplift with alarming grace. That it manages to be funny, poignant, and a little profound all at once is part of the magic. Harold and Maude doesn’t plead for you to find it moving—it just marches to its own strange rhythm, scattering ashes and daisies along the way.

Harry is a Sasquatch—taller than a refrigerator, shaggier than a conspiracy theory, and now strapped to the roof of a suburban family’s station wagon. The Hendersons hit him with their car while driving home from a camping trip, assume he’s dead, and bring him back like a lawn ornament in rigor mortis. He wakes up in their garage. Things deteriorate from there. What follows is a film unsure of what it wants Harry to be. He’s a menace, then a mascot, then a misunderstood symbol of something or other. He wrecks furniture, eats plants, looks wounded. The Hendersons, meanwhile, shift from panic to devotion without passing through anything resembling development. One minute they want him gone. The next, they’re pledging eternal loyalty through tears and woodwinds. The makeup is excellent—Harry’s face moves with uncanny precision—but the film doesn’t give him a character so much as a series of reactions. Kevin Peter Hall plays him with a kind of slow-motion gentleness the script doesn’t know how to use. John Lithgow, gamely exasperated, handles most of the film’s reaction shots. His job is to look horrified, deliver the occasional moral, and keep the suburban panic running on schedule. His character begins the movie startled and finishes it overwhelmed. The rest of the family is mostly wallpaper. Eventually, the film remembers it needs conflict and dispatches Jacques LaFleur, a French-Canadian tracker who enters with the severity of someone delivering a war crime indictment. David Suchet plays him without a hint of irony, which is strange only because the rest of the film operates on pratfalls and pancakes. He skulks through backyards with a tranquilizer gun and speaks like he’s been chasing this creature since childhood, and possibly also through therapy. The final stretch aims for grandeur—emotion, consequence, closure—but feels preassembled. The sentiment appears on cue, but nothing before it seems to know it was coming. Harry makes an impression. The movie around him vanishes almost immediately.

The books had barely cooled on bookstore shelves before the movie arrived, reverent as a cathedral tour and about as sprightly. Chris Columbus directs like a man leafing through blueprints—no detours, no improvisation, no smudges. What was spry on the page is inflated here into a gleaming, 152-minute diorama, where every sentence comes with a demonstration and every discovery is announced like it’s breaking news. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) lives under the stairs with the dead-eyed resignation of someone being punished for a crime he doesn’t remember. Then along comes Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane), an enormous man with a motorcycle and a mission, who informs him he’s a wizard and whisks him off to a boarding school disguised as a gothic theme park. There, Harry meets Ron (Rupert Grint), Hermione (Emma Watson), a bunch of animated props, and a stack of plot devices that resemble teachers. Spells are cast, secrets whispered, and dark forces hinted at—but mostly, we watch children wander through carefully lit corridors, listening to adults explain what they’re already looking at. Radcliffe spends the film in a sort of polite astonishment, as though he’s still surprised to be on camera. Grint is all freckle and flinch, while Watson overenunciates like a girl who’s memorized the entire script—including everyone else’s lines. Their performances are wobbly but forgivable; they’re figuring it out as they go. The grown-ups, however, arrive fully formed: Maggie Smith parses every glance like it’s punctuation, Alan Rickman slides syllables across the floor like spilled ink, and Richard Harris floats through his scenes as though carried by memory alone. For all its overexplanation, the film works—largely because it believes in its world more than it believes in the camera. Hogwarts is a place where logic has taken the semester off, and the best parts of the film lean into that: staircases that relocate mid-step, ghosts that interrupt dinner, professors with secrets stacked like nesting dolls. It’s not nimble, and it’s rarely subtle. But for a film this long, this literal, and this smitten with its own mythology, it’s surprisingly easy to get swept into. Sometimes, spectacle is enough.

Whatever awkward enchantment the first film offered—half movie, half exhibit—this second installment sheds its museum lighting and starts behaving like something with a pulse. Chris Columbus, still directing with the reverence of a tour guide who’s memorized every plaque, benefits this time from tighter plotting and a mood that trades awe for something closer to narrative propulsion. Harry’s back, slightly taller, marginally less stunned, and once again caught between schoolwork and supernatural sabotage. Dobby, the house elf with the facial tics of a sleep-deprived puppet, materializes in his bedroom like an apologetic warning label and tells him to stay home. Of course, he doesn’t. Hogwarts still calls, and this time it’s echoing with dark whispers, slamming doors, and students who’ve gone stiff as department store mannequins. The three leads no longer perform like they’re afraid of being corrected mid-line. Radcliffe blinks less, Watson pauses for effect, and Grint has stopped flinching every time someone says “spell.” They’re not polished, but they’ve been adjusted—tuned slightly closer to actual human tempo. The mystery—pulsing behind trapdoors and hissing through pipes—gives the plot a spine, which the first film badly needed. There’s blood on the wall, whispers behind the stones, and a creature in hiding that sounds like a dying teapot. For once, the danger has some teeth. Not fangs, exactly, but something more than polished veneers. And then there’s Kenneth Branagh, sauntering through like a man who thinks the film is about him. As Gilderoy Lockhart, he preens, stammers, self-mythologizes, and sparkles with the kind of self-satisfaction that usually ends in a public apology. He’s so committed to his own fiction that when it begins to unravel, he doesn’t so much panic as improvise. The film is still longer than it has any right to be, but the seams don’t split as loudly this time. There’s pace. There’s shape. And there’s Dobby, wringing his little hands like a Dickensian intern auditioning for your pity. He’s pure animation, but the eyes are persuasive and the misery oddly touching. Chamber of Secrets doesn’t improve on the first so much as brush the dust off. The polish is the same, but this time there’s heat underneath the surface—just enough to make the machinery feel alive.

Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), now in his third year at Hogwarts, barely makes it back to school before the whole world starts wobbling. Word spreads that Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), a dangerous prisoner and alleged Voldemort loyalist, has escaped from Azkaban—the wizarding world’s high-security holding cell—and is headed straight for Harry. To make matters worse, the soul-sucking, faceless wardens of the prison—Dementors—have taken up residence around campus like floating panic attacks. They claim to be looking for Sirius. They also seem perfectly happy to destroy Harry in the process. And still, homework must be done. What’s remarkable is how much more tightly wound this entry feels, despite the darker tone and weightier themes. Director Alfonso Cuarón—fresh off of Y Tu Mamá También, and no one’s idea of a children’s filmmaker—delivers the most cinematic installment yet. He takes a meandering, often episodic novel and reshapes it into something lean, rhythmic, and emotionally direct. The running time is shorter than the first two films, yet it feels like more happens—because it does. Scenes flow into each other with purpose. For the first time in the series, there’s a sense that the camera is telling the story, not just reporting it. Visually, it’s the first of the films to truly breathe. Gone is the polished wax museum aesthetic. In its place: damp stones, ragged trees, clouds that look like they’ve been punched. The production design lets in wind, shadow, and time. The film isn’t afraid of stillness. When Harry finally executes the Patronus Charm—a scene that could’ve played as mechanical triumph—it feels strangely personal, even operatic. The image of him standing by the lake, wand raised, shimmering light bursting out like memory turned to armor—it’s one of the few moments in the entire franchise that flirts with something like sublimity. The child actors are, by this point, competent and occasionally quite good. Emma Watson softens Hermione’s brilliance with flickers of doubt. Rupert Grint has figured out that Ron is funnier when he doesn’t try so hard. Radcliffe, still the least expressive of the trio, continues to do serviceable work as the narrative’s reluctant vessel—but let’s not pretend Harry himself is all that fascinating. He’s a cipher with a scar. Thankfully, the adults keep the corners of the frame humming. David Thewlis brings weary wisdom as Professor Lupin. Alan Rickman stretches every line like taffy. And Gary Oldman, equal parts haunted and electric, nearly hijacks the movie with his twitchy, fractured intensity. This is the film where the series grows up. Not with a speech or a tonal shift, but with a thousand little choices: a lurching time-travel structure that actually works, a refusal to over-explain, and an atmosphere that favors suggestion over certainty. Cuarón doesn’t just move the pieces around better—he reimagines the board.

The studio wanted two movies. The book barely gave them one. Deathly Hallows – Part 1 is the series at its most airless—half a finale stretched to full length, like butter scraped over too much bread. There’s mood, and there’s brooding, and then there’s this: three teenagers wandering the wilderness like disaffected models in a magical North Face ad. The whimsy’s gone. So is Hogwarts. So is Dumbledore, who died last installment but whose absence hangs over this one like a silence no one knows how to fill. Voldemort’s in charge now—or at least seated at the head of a fascist dinner party, monologuing about domination with all the flair of a genocidal headmaster. The radio plays death tolls. The sky stays gray. Even the spells sound tired. The plot leans heavily on fresh additions. There’s a sword that can destroy Horcruxes. A wand more powerful than any other. New rules, new histories, all arriving just in time to move things forward. It doesn’t feel expansive so much as improvised—like the story is solving puzzles it built for itself one scene earlier. There’s momentum, but it’s forced to explain itself at every turn. There are scenes that work. Hermione erasing herself from her parents’ memories is quiet and devastating. The animated tale of the Deathly Hallows carries a strange, funereal beauty. And yes, Dobby returns—still weird, still brave, still heartbreakingly devoted to Harry, who responds with the only gesture this film seems equipped to offer: a solemn burial. But the pacing drags. The tone is serious, the stakes are real, and the mood never lifts. It’s less a film than a holding pattern. You wait—for Ron to stop sulking, for Harry to stop brooding, for the real story to finally resume. Between the shapeshifting heists and the slow trudge through the woods, it edges into Zhivago territory: windswept gloom, aching silences, romances that never quite ignite. You can feel David Yates reaching for grandeur, but what he needed was sweep. If he was going to make a film about waiting, about loss and transition and unspoken grief, he might’ve followed Zhivago’s lead and given it visual scale—something to match the gloom with grandeur. Instead, we get mood boards and mist. Still, not a misfire. The cast has settled in, the tone stays steady, and a few moments even leave a mark. But the rest drifts like an overture stretched thin—too slow, too cautious, too conscious of being the prelude to something bigger.

For all its loping charm, Hatari! is, at least in part, an unintentional documentary about how zoos once filled their exhibits—with ropes, jeeps, and a lot of nerve. No stunt doubles, no animal handlers tucked out of frame: just John Wayne and company bouncing across the African plains in dusty trucks, slinging lassos at full gallop. If the ethics feel dated—and they do—it’s because the film predates that conversation entirely. The animals aren’t maimed on camera, though a crocodile is shot off-screen after stalking one of the crew. Still, you spend half the time marveling at the spectacle, and the other half wishing someone would cut the rhinos a break. And yet, those extended chase sequences—jeeps swerving through grasslands while giraffes, buffalo, ostriches, and rhinoceroses are pursued with comic determination—have a strangely hypnotic pull. There’s real danger in them. And exhilaration, too. The realism is undeniable, and Hawks, ever the professional hangout artist, structures the film around this blend of immediacy and camaraderie. The plot, such as it is, exists mostly to string together banter and beast-chasing. John Wayne plays Sean Mercer, the taciturn head of the operation, although it’s Red Buttons as “Pockets”—an improvisational mechanic with a developing fondness for whiskey—who gives the film its pulse. Into this boy’s club arrives Elsa Martinelli as Dallas, a fashion photographer with a fondness for elephants and a wardrobe ill-suited to the savanna. Her arc from outsider to surrogate elephant mother is oddly endearing, not least because it’s paired with Henry Mancini’s immortal “Baby Elephant Walk”—a tune so sprightly it could sell safari hats to skeptics. There’s also a gentle, barely threatening love triangle, some stunning location photography, and a tone so relaxed it practically reclines. Hawks doesn’t drive the film so much as steer it around the dust clouds. It ambles, pauses for a drink, tells a joke, then chases another giraffe. And you go with it—not because you’re gripped, but because you’re curious what might wander into the frame next. I wouldn’t call it essential viewing, exactly. It’s the sort of film you watch once, remember in fragments—elephants, jeeps, Mancini—and then forget for a decade or two before circling back out of sheer curiosity. Once every twenty-five years feels about right: not because it demands revisiting, but because its odd blend of spectacle and leisure eventually starts to sound appealing again.

A documentary framed as a true-crime cautionary tale and viral-video autopsy. Caleb “Kai” McGillvary was Internet-famous before he’d even finished telling the story that made him so. A two-and-a-half–minute clip—part roadside interview, part stand-up routine—went viral in 2013, showing him grinning, gesturing, and recounting how he stopped a 300-pound man from assaulting a woman by swinging a hatchet. The details were wild, the delivery stranger still. Overnight, he was “the hatchet-wielding hitchhiker,” a meme turned folk hero. Jimmy Kimmel called. Daytime producers circled. And almost immediately, the cracks showed. On and off set, Kai’s behavior veered from charming to erratic to outright alarming. Within months, the public rescue narrative had curdled; within a year, he was in prison for murder. The documentary retraces that short, chaotic arc—viral fame, media feeding frenzy, and the uncomfortable truth of what happens when an unstable man gets treated like a novelty act. Not every interview works—some subjects go big, chewing their soundbites like they’re auditioning for a true-crime reenactment. And the film stops shy of digging into certain questions it raises about exploitation, culpability, and the machinery of online celebrity. But it still holds your attention: a real-time look at how quickly we can crown a hero, and how little thought goes into what happens after the coronation.

An immersive, over-designed carnival ride of a haunted house movie—gimmicky, sure, but oddly watchable. The Haunting, loosely inspired by Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, doesn’t try to terrify so much as envelop. And what it lacks in legitimate scares, it compensates for with sheer architectural madness: spiraling staircases, gaping fireplaces, and frescoes that seem to follow you with their eyes. Lili Taylor plays Eleanor, a fragile insomniac whose life has worn her down to the soft edges. She’s invited to the mansion under the pretense of a sleep study run by a behavioral researcher (Liam Neeson), who has his own quietly manipulative agenda. A few others arrive as fellow guinea pigs, including Owen Wilson’s affably clueless dudebro and Catherine Zeta-Jones as a flamboyant bohemian with a closet full of leather. The cast is likable—maybe too likable for what’s meant to be a nerve-jangling ghost story—and their chemistry smooths over some of the film’s more laughable moments. From the moment the guests arrive, the rules are made clear: ask the caretakers for anything you need, but only during daylight. After dark, the house is off-limits, even to the locals. It’s not exactly subtle, but it gets the point across: this place has history, and it doesn’t want company. The plot flirts briefly with ambiguity—are the ghosts real, or is this all some elaborate psychological experiment?—but quickly abandons that in favor of CGI cherubs, haunted bedposts, and whispering wallpaper. A missed opportunity, really, because that uncertainty might have added texture to what becomes a fairly standard procession of supernatural visitations. Still, Jan de Bont commits to the opulence, and the film, in its own clunky way, barrels toward a conclusion that feels satisfying, if not especially haunting. It’s not a great horror film, but it’s a perfectly entertaining one—grandiose, silly, and enjoyable in the way theme park attractions are: a little too much, a little too loud, but undeniably fun.

Hawaii is three hours of piety, pageantry, and very determined righteousness, yet somehow it floats. Maybe it’s the scenery—those islands practically shoot themselves—or maybe it’s the peculiar gravity Max von Sydow brings, playing a New England missionary with a voice like a sermon carved in stone. He’s Abner Hale, a man so consumed by religious conviction he can barely stomach the idea of enjoying himself, even in paradise. Before boarding the boat to Maui, he marries Jerusha (Julie Andrews), not out of love or even practicality, but because the church wouldn’t dream of sending a single man to an island where women are known to swim out to ships in the nude. God might forgive temptation, but the board of missions clearly doesn’t. Jerusha is all quiet resolve and buried exasperation, played by Andrews with a softness that manages to absorb most of Abner’s rigidity without vanishing beneath it. It’s a sharp left turn for her—this coming fresh off singing in the Alps and floating above London—and she navigates it with more grace than the material probably deserves. You can see her thinking her way through every scene: calculating propriety, emotional cost, and the peculiar weight of choosing this particular life. The plot doesn’t unwind so much as pile up. There’s the Hawaiian queen (Jocelyne LaGarde, radiating regal gravity), who agrees to dissolve her marriage to her brother to meet Christian standards. There’s cultural whiplash, scripture-thumping, and enough colonizing to make your stomach turn a little—even if the film itself plays it straighter than it needs to. The Hawaiians adopt what they find useful, discard the rest, and Abner walks around looking personally betrayed by history. And yet, Hawaii—for all its solemnity and starch—never quite bores. Von Sydow broods like a man who’s never not praying, and George Roy Hill keeps the rhythm loose enough that the more historical footnotes sneak in with surprising elegance. There are too many subplots, too many moral lectures, too many scenes where everyone stares thoughtfully into the sunset—but it moves. You don’t watch it twice, unless you forgot the first time. But once is enough to see how much conviction and contradiction a single film can carry.

This dreary successor to Hawaii (1966)—a film that was itself surprisingly elegant for all its missionary chest-thumping—adapts the later chapters of James A. Michener’s sprawling novel, and loses most of the earlier film’s moral tension in favor of agricultural strategy, immigration logistics, and long, humid conversations about land ownership. Charlton Heston stars as Whip Hoxworth, a gruff seaman turned land baron who inherits an unpromising patch of Hawaiian soil and decides to build an empire the old-fashioned way: by smuggling pineapple plants from French Guiana and conscripting a steady flow of Chinese and Japanese laborers to do the planting. Heston, eternally carved out of granite and righteous fury, delivers a performance that is forceful, magnetic, and—as always—almost completely unyielding. He’s a commanding presence, sure, but not an especially sympathetic one. Whip may see himself as a paternal benefactor, but what we’re watching is still indentured servitude under new branding. The film seems to want it both ways: to indict colonial exploitation while also basking in the myth of the rugged entrepreneurial hero. And the script does no one any favors. Characters lob casually racist remarks across dinner tables like it’s parlor talk. Whether these reflect historical attitudes is beside the point—they’re often tossed in with so little context or consequence that they become numbing. Compared to Max von Sydow’s morally tortured missionary from the first film—misguided, yes, but operating under a sincere (if colonial) ethical framework—Hoxworth is a cigar-chomping capitalist who bulldozes through the islands with very little inner life beyond profit and patriarchy. There are glimpses of something deeper in the film’s supporting players—Tina Chen and Mako, in particular, find moments of grace and frustration that register vividly—but these are swept aside in favor of political maneuverings and plantation economics. And unless you have a soft spot for the inner workings of the early pineapple trade (or Heston shouting at the Pacific), there’s not much here to hold your attention. It’s not unwatchable—Gries keeps things moving, and the scenery’s never bad—but the soul has gone missing. What once felt like an uneasy reckoning with history now plays like a brochure for empire with the fine print scribbled in the margins.

The premise drifts somewhere between cockeyed and outright ridiculous, but He Laughed Last still gets by on the strength of its offbeat casting and a curious tonal tightrope walk between gangster noir and Technicolor farce. The film takes place in the Prohibition era, but any real grit is replaced by slapstick, show tunes, and nightclub lighting that glows like melted candy. Alan Reed (better known as the original voice of Fred Flintstone) plays Big Dan Hennessy, a mob boss who’s equal parts teddy bear and menace, with a soft spot for elaborate practical jokes. His reign ends unceremoniously via assassination, courtesy of his No. 2 man Max Lassiter (Jesse White), whose aspirations exceed his charm. Max assumes the empire is now his—but in a twist that sounds like a Borscht Belt setup, the will leaves everything to Big Dan’s sweetheart, a feathery-voiced nightclub singer named Rosie Lebeau (Lucy Marlowe). Rosie may look like an ornament, but she’s not easily rattled. With the help of some well-placed allies in the organization, she keeps the rackets in line, even as Max circles like a vulture in a zoot suit, trying to woo her into marriage. One assumes it’s less about love than inheritance—Big Dan being, inconveniently, un-marriageable to him. Enter Frankie Laine, playing a nightclub owner with a golden baritone and a noble streak. He croons “Danny Boy” and a few other numbers between plot machinations, and while he’s hardly a conventional leading man, his presence lends a strange sincerity to the otherwise daffy proceedings. This was Blake Edwards’ first film as both writer and director, and while you can see him still working out the kinks—pacing is clunky, gags are hit-or-miss—there’s something cheerfully bizarre about the whole enterprise. It doesn’t quite work, but it never stops trying. And with a lineup of character actors mugging like they’re on borrowed time, that counts for something.

A bus crash dispatches five souls—one driver goes straight to celestial bookkeeping, while the four passengers get reassigned to haunt a newborn in San Francisco. It’s not punishment exactly, just inefficient celestial logistics. The baby is Thomas, and these ghosts—seductive, needy, manic, and noble in equal proportions—become his private entourage. They feed him lullabies, interrupt his nap schedule, and hang around long enough to confuse the psychiatrists. But when his parents start throwing around phrases like “institutional care,” the ghosts vanish—poof, gone—without a whisper. It’s the film’s only real emotional scene, and they botch it by making the ghosts look like cowards in polyester. Years later, Thomas (now Robert Downey Jr.) has become a merger-happy executive in the mold of late-capitalist Scrooge, minus the moral rot. The ghosts never left; they just stopped saying hello. Now, for reasons both metaphysical and deeply convenient, they realize they can possess his body. What follows is part identity crisis, part holy relay race: each ghost commandeers Thomas for one last errand. Closure by committee. The concept is already high-risk. But instead of playing with tone or structure, the film doubles down on whimsy so cloying it feels medicinal. Downey, though, gives it everything: writhing, moonwalking, sobbing on command. He tap-dances between personalities like a man auditioning for a séance, and there are brief, flickering moments where his comic instinct pulls the film into something resembling life. But not often enough. The rest is arranged with all the care of a department-store window. Plot holes so large they could register their own ZIP code. Motivations that seem pulled from a hat. One ghost’s big unfinished task? Singing lead vocals in a bar. Another wants to apologize. A third just needs a pep talk. It’s all dressed in high-gloss sentiment, but the movie doesn’t earn the tears it requests. It wants poignancy without tragedy, catharsis without mess. Heart and Souls believes in the power of redemption, but forgets to make the case for watching any of it happen.

Its heart might be in the right place, but Heart of Dixie rarely finds a rhythm worth marching to. Set in a fictional Alabama college in 1957, the film positions itself on the trembling cusp of the civil rights movement—but chooses to view the upheaval almost exclusively through the soft focus of white sorority girls who have only just begun to notice there’s unrest outside the garden party. Ally Sheedy plays Maggie, a sheltered student whose vague discontent is sparked by witnessing a Black boy being beaten in the street. She follows it up with a concerned house call to his mother, who briskly informs her that good intentions don’t come with backstage passes. Maggie walks away rattled, as though awareness itself were a satisfying character arc. The movie wants to be a genteel coming-of-consciousness tale, but mostly it drifts through polished dorm rooms and scenes that breeze along with niceties but rarely conviction. There’s a handsomely staged Elvis concert recreation, and a few nice flourishes in the cinematography, but they feel like borrowed spectacle in a story that can’t decide what story it’s telling. What lingers isn’t the brutality of the era or the complexity of Maggie’s awakening—it’s the pervasive sense that the film is narrating from behind a velvet rope, safely insulated from the turmoil it gestures toward. For a movie about change, it’s curiously incurious.

A slasher wrapped in rom-com foil, Heart Eyes is slyer than it first appears—even if it occasionally fires wide. A masked killer is prowling Los Angeles, targeting couples on Valentine’s Day, and the latest pair don’t quite qualify. Ally (Olivia Holt), a cynical ad designer, and Jay (Mason Gooding), a marketing consultant brought in to salvage her tanked campaign, have just met. They aren’t in love. They aren’t even friendly. But one impulsive kiss—staged to unsettle Ally’s smug ex—gets them flagged as romantic partners, and suddenly they’re being hunted by a psychopath with a red marker and a relationship agenda. Their meet-cute is basically a workplace collision: Ally just pitched a tone-deaf Valentine’s campaign glorifying doomed lovers, and Jay’s been brought in to clean it up. He thinks she’s reckless. She thinks he’s self-righteous. Their chemistry isn’t the good kind. Then the killer shows up—and now they’re spending every moment together, dodging knives and trying to decode the logic of a lunatic. The setup is ridiculous, but the film threads the needle. The kills are stylish without being overblown, and the script finds humor in the space where horror and brand cynicism collide. Holt and Gooding sell the opposites-at-odds dynamic, and the dialogue gives them just enough acidity to keep it interesting. Heart Eyes toys with slasher tropes and romance clichés without falling into parody. It knows its genres and pulls from both without overselling either. The satire lands just shy of sharp, but it’s present, especially in how the film skewers the industry’s effort to market romance like it’s edible glitter. It’s not revelatory, but it moves well. Not quite scary, never fully swoony, but flirty, bloody, and just strange enough to work.

There’s a certain kind of well-meaning adaptation that mistakes solemnity for insight. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter wants to say something human and profound, but it’s so tightly corseted in tidy moralism and telegraphed empathy that it leaves no space for the characters to breathe—let alone evolve. Alan Arkin, playing a deaf-mute named John Singer, wanders through the film like a saint in pressed slacks. He listens, nods, offers housing, offers hope. He exists only to carry other people’s sorrows in his coat pocket. The people he draws in are broken or lost or aching for some unnamed something. A teenage girl (Sondra Locke) who wants greatness without a shape. A Black doctor (Percy Rodriguez) who’s committed to treating only the Black community, rigid in principle but unraveling in private. His daughter (Cicely Tyson, riveting in her small scenes) doesn’t want his legacy and tells him so, with a quiet fire that nearly singes the edge of the film. But for all the dramatic potential, nothing deepens. These aren’t characters who reveal themselves slowly—they’re symbols on delivery. Every conversation has the faint ring of a parable. The plot, drawn from Carson McCullers’ 1940 novel, skims the surface of big themes—race, disability, alienation, longing—but opts for a straightforward, tear-stained presentation rather than a lived-in study of how people actually change. It doesn’t help that the script doesn’t trust the audience to get there on their own. One late soliloquy spells out the film’s central message with such clarity and finality it might as well be written in all caps across the screen. It’s that brand of self-aware poignancy that trips over its own shoelaces: heartfelt, yes, but also strangely inert. The actors are frequently better than the material. Arkin brings a watchful stillness, Locke is affecting in her confusion, and Rodriguez finds shading in a role that could’ve easily been all sermon. But the real surprise is Tyson, who cuts through the film’s softness like a blade—no grand speeches, just quiet refusal. There are sketches of something moving here, but the framework holds everything at a distance. It’s not that the heart is missing—it’s just so carefully displayed it never feels like it’s beating.

The plot zips from continent to continent, but the film never really gets off the ground. Heart of Stone wants to be the first chapter in a glossy, globe-trotting franchise—the Mission: Impossible of the Netflix age—but it’s all passport stamps and no story. Gal Gadot plays Rachel Stone, a mole inside MI6 who’s actually working for an ultra-secret peacekeeping agency called The Charter. Her assignment: recover a powerful A.I. weapon (called, with a straight face, “the Heart”) before it ends up in the wrong hands. Spoiler: it already has. Gadot has the posture for this kind of thing—poised, polished, able to leap out of planes without mussing her hair—and the Lisbon car chase almost justifies the broadband surcharge. But the film keeps tripping over its own exposition. Characters speechify in code, the plot unspools like it’s trying to run backwards, and the stakes are more algorithm than emotion. Even the double-crosses feel automated. There’s style here, sure—drones zip, motorbikes roar, Gadot lands on her feet—but the script has no rhythm. It sounds like three screenwriters passing notes to each other under fluorescent lights. What should feel sleek and high-stakes ends up bloated and flat, like someone copied their favorite spy movie and forgot to include the part where you care.

Ridiculous almost to a fault—and yet thrilling in a way only Eastwood at full boil can deliver. Heartbreak Ridge plays like a testosterone injection to the brainstem, and it’s easy to see how Major Payne could parody it nearly beat for beat a decade later without changing much beyond the cadence. Clint Eastwood plays Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway, a walking slab of gristle and contempt, who’s been too long in the Corps to tolerate the soft edges of military bureaucracy. Assigned to a ragtag recon platoon full of slackers and gym rats, Highway barks, punches, and insults his way through basic reform—building discipline one humiliation at a time. He’s surrounded by incompetence, naturally. Everett McGill’s pencil-spined Major Powers snarls from behind a desk, embodying everything Highway despises about modern command. Meanwhile, the platoon cycles through two musclebound challengers, both of whom learn the hard way that it’s unwise to underestimate an old man with a mean right hook and nothing to prove. The film’s final act shifts gears into a rousing deployment to Grenada, where Highway’s men finally get to test out their freshly-honed toughness. The sequence doesn’t aim for realism—it plays like G.I. Joe with slightly better lighting—but it’s cleanly staged and emotionally satisfying, especially when the chain of command finally gives way to common sense. It’s laced with retrograde attitudes (the abundant homophobic references are at a point that goes cringeworthy) and Eastwood’s usual anti-authority sermonizing will hit audiences differently—but this is also a brisk, funny, and effective film. Call it a combat cartoon, built from clichés, but it’s delivered with conviction.

The movie opens with Sigourney Weaver seducing a schlubby car kingpin in order to fleece him in court—so far, so promising. She’s Max Conners, grifter deluxe, with a closet full of wigs and accents that never quite belong to any country with a government. Her daughter-slash-partner-in-crime, Page (Jennifer Love Hewitt), is the bait: cleavage, pouts, and a moral compass pointing squarely toward payday. They specialize in staged marriages, engineered affairs, and swift divorces lubricated by settlements. It’s a gig. Their latest mark is Ray Liotta, flammable as ever, who reacts to betrayal with the volume of a man who’s had one too many vowels stolen from his name. He’s quickly replaced by a richer, more combustible target: Gene Hackman, playing a tobacco magnate who coughs like he’s actively dying on screen—and doesn’t care, because death, like taxes, is for other people. Hackman gives it everything. He oozes nicotine, lasciviousness, and the kind of gall that smells like old money and new lawsuits. But just when the scam hits its groove, Page meets a bar owner (Jason Lee) whose biggest crime is being… decent. Naturally, he’s hiding three million dollars and a conscience, so she tries to run her own solo operation with all the stealth of someone knocking over slot machines with a broomstick. There are good actors doing tightrope routines here, trying to stay funny without slipping into self-parody. Some manage. Weaver bites down hard and sells it with her jaw. Liotta combusts like a man born to combust. Hackman gurgles his way to the finish line with lungs made of sandpaper. But Hewitt and Lee, given the romantic center, generate all the heat of two mannequins discussing shared custody. The con is sleek, the rhythm uneven. Jokes pile up like unpaid parking tickets—some flash, others stall out mid-delivery. And yet the whole thing moves along with a kind of showbiz inertia, buoyed by veteran performers trying to hold a tattered balloon aloft with pure will.

Michael Mann’s Heat is a meticulously engineered crime epic—hardwired for intensity, but running not on flamboyance or pulp, rather on cold circuitry and long glances over urban sprawl. The film deals in bullet spray and bank jobs, yes, but its soul is found somewhere in the silence between gunshots and the men who fire them. Robert De Niro plays Neil McCauley, a career criminal so calculated and composed you could set a watch to his emotional disengagement. Al Pacino, as LAPD Lieutenant Vincent Hanna, meets him blow-for-blow in volume, volatility, and coffee-shop philosophy. Their characters are adversaries in theory, but practically variations on the same blueprint—obsessed, solitary, increasingly eroded by their respective callings. Their long-awaited sit-down, over diner mugs and shared inevitabilities, is less a showdown than a dual confession. And it’s the spine of the movie. The rest unfolds with a weighty inevitability—heists planned with mechanical precision, tail jobs and stakeouts that stretch like chords before a snap. Mann gives everything a mineral sheen. The famous bank robbery sequence isn’t just bravura filmmaking—it’s a symphonic barrage, all echoing gunfire and abrupt mortal stakes, filmed with such spatial clarity that it practically vibrates. You don’t watch it, you submit. But this is not a film of just plot mechanics. There’s a personal ledger running parallel to every crime and counter-crime: McCauley’s fragile, near-salvaged romance with a woman (Amy Brenneman) who still thinks he might be salvageable himself; Hanna’s unraveling domestic life, where his wife (Diane Venora) can’t compete with the intensity he reserves for murder scenes and manhunts. These quieter passages don’t dilute the film’s impact—they expand it, giving the bloodshed emotional subtext rather than just crimson splash. Not every subplot rivets. Not every side character earns the time Mann grants them. But the film achieves its own kind of symphonic sweep—cool, muscular, and strangely mournful. Even at nearly three hours, it never quite drags, because its focus is as relentless as the men at its center.

High school cruelty rarely gets a shrine this glossy: Heathers builds one, salts the ground around it, and invites you to find something funny in the wreckage. Winona Ryder, giving disaffection a perfect haircut, is Veronica—smart enough to hate her friends, not quite brave enough to leave them. Her inner circle is three perfectly groomed apex predators, all named Heather, each treating the rest of the student body like a snack bar for their ego. Into this bright hell walks J.D. (Christian Slater), who talks like a pulp detective and smolders like a boy who’s never met a red flag he didn’t iron. Veronica, half-mesmerized, half-bored with the Heathers, slips into his orbit and decides that maybe Heather Chandler (Kim Walker) would do the world a favor by exiting early. Drain cleaner in her mug takes care of that. A forged suicide note turns her into a martyr overnight. Soon, everyone wants a piece of the tragedy. Students who couldn’t stand Heather parade their grief. Suicide becomes fashionable. Veronica panics; J.D. doubles down. More bodies drop, but the film can’t decide what game it’s playing—sometimes it’s a black comedy, sometimes a teen soap, sometimes it tries on horror. After a while, you stop knowing if it wants to jab at high school cruelty, freak you out, or just stack up bodies for the shock value. And that’s the real snag: it has a wicked premise, but the tone never stays put long enough to leave a mark. It pokes at how teenagers glamorize pain but settles for cheap shocks instead of sharper insight or actual satire. The laughs run out, and so does its nerve. A cult relic, sure, but more noisy than cutting. High school deserved a meaner, sharper eulogy than this—one vicious enough to match how cruel teenagers can be and how much fun audiences have watching them get what’s coming. Heathers hints at that film, then pulls back just when it should push harder.

Death, mistaken identity, body-swapping, pro football, and one unfortunate billionaire with a murder-happy wife—it’s all in there, swirled together like a scoop of metaphysical Neapolitan. Heaven Can Wait remakes Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) but does it with a warmer glow, a slicker suit, and Warren Beatty’s star wattage turned just shy of blinding. Beatty plays Joe Pendleton, a quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams who’s in peak form and about to start the game of his life when he’s yanked—prematurely—from his body by an overeager celestial escort (Buck Henry), trying to save him from an accident he was never actually meant to die from. By the time they realize the error, Joe’s body has been cremated, leaving him—well, stuck. So Mr. Jordan (James Mason), the courtly afterlife administrator with the bedside manner of a retired stage actor, offers Joe a temporary fix: the recently deceased body of a corrupt tycoon whose personal life resembles a third-rate opera. Joe, still very much Joe on the inside, wakes up in this new shell and promptly decides he’s going to reclaim his football career, set the company straight, and fall in love with a principled schoolteacher (Julie Christie) who initially thinks he’s the villain she’s protesting. Meanwhile, the tycoon’s wife (Dyan Cannon) and henchman (Charles Grodin) are still trying to kill him—though they’re understandably puzzled as to why their target keeps turning up alive and unexpectedly benevolent. It’s all very airy and ridiculous, but never thin. The humor plays low to the ground, the timing is precise, and the cast is perfectly matched to the material. Cannon is gloriously unhinged, Grodin sweats bullets in slow motion, and Jack Warden as Joe’s old coach delivers the film’s quietest emotional gut-punch with a single double take. Beatty plays it wide-eyed but never vacant—his version of Joe is noble, a little baffled, and somehow magnetic even while reincarnated in someone else’s bathrobe. The ending folds up with a note of melancholy, and it works because the film never oversells its sentiment. Heaven Can Wait treats death as logistics, romance as destiny, and identity as a flexible concept—as long as the right soul shows up with a decent spiral.