Film Buff Musings

A lo-fi comic oddity aimed squarely at those who find brilliance in the absurd, J-Men Forever is less a movie than a stitched collage of vintage serials and relentless punchlines. In the spirit of What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, Woody Allen’s earlier experiment in cinematic overdubbing, this one raids the vaults of 1940s adventure reels—those square-jawed relics of moral clarity—and lays a completely new track over them: a wild tale of rock-and-roll corruption and cultural collapse. The villain, now reimagined as the sinister Lightning Bug, seeks to undermine American decency using his deadliest weapon yet: music with a backbeat. Enter the J-Men—Hoover’s finest—tasked with saving the nation through clipped dialogue, suspect logic, and exaggerated patriotism. The concept is ridiculous and intentionally so. It plays like the dream of someone who grew up on Commando Cody, passed out during Cheech and Chong, and woke up in a radio booth manned by anarchist DJs. The humor is broad, juvenile, and often obsessed with gags about sex, drugs, and bodily functions—but it’s also weirdly quotable, fast-paced, and never less than committed. There’s something oddly compelling about the way it crashes Cold War sincerity into countercultural chaos, like Joe McCarthy trying to police FM radio and forgetting what decade it is. It’s not aiming for sharp satire, just volume and momentum. And in that sense, it delivers. The “performances” are mostly archival footage with new voice work, but the voice work is the performance—frenzied, relentless, and clearly the product of someone enjoying themselves. If you once taped Dr. Demento off the radio or quoted Firesign Theatre into a cassette deck, this is your holy text. Everyone else may just sit there, baffled, wondering what frequency they’ve stumbled onto.

Gilliam’s directorial debut flings Michael Palin through a world that looks scraped off the underside of a trebuchet. He’s Dennis Cooper, the dim but hopeful son of a cooper, with a face made for disappointment and a crush on Griselda Fishfinger—a woman who chews with her mouth open and regards him with the warmth of old broth. When his father dies mid-insult, Dennis sets off for the city to make his fortune. What he finds is plague, gatekeepers, and a population that treats hygiene like folklore. Also: a monster. The Jabberwock, some twitching, jawed contraption that resembles a bat, a lizard, and a coat rack caught in a windstorm, is snatching villagers out of existence. The King—doddering, distracted, often facing the wrong direction—organizes a tournament to find someone willing to fight it. Dennis, through poor timing and worse luck, winds up closer to that honor than he intended. The film operates like a medieval septic system: noisy, foul, and prone to clogs. Characters speak in ellipses and dried phlegm. Nobles weaponize their sedan chairs. A former cooper, now unemployed, beams while explaining how amputating his own foot was a business strategy. The princess pines for Dennis, who, ever loyal to Griselda (who remains deeply uninterested), stares blankly and waits for the plot to reintroduce itself. It’s Holy Grail by way of infected hay. Less structure, more wandering. The sets are caked in filth, the dialogue chews its way forward, and the story gets buried beneath the mess—but the mess is unusually specific. You don’t watch Jabberwocky so much as survive it. But even when it reeks, the joke sticks.

A glossy, overextended take on *Jack and the Beanstalk*, this version trades simplicity for scale—stretching a lean fable about beans and sky monsters into a full medieval spectacle, complete with royal succession drama, enchanted relics, and an army of digitally rendered giants waiting in the clouds. It’s not bad. It’s just overbuilt. Nicholas Hoult plays Jack, a farm boy sent to town to sell a horse—no cow this time—and comes back with a handful of beans handed off by a frantic monk. The monk, it turns out, was trying to keep them out of the hands of Roderick (Stanley Tucci, in a wig), a power-hungry noble who needs the beans to reach the giants’ realm. Once there, he steals a magical crown that grants command over the giants—step one in his plan to seize the throne. Apparently waiting in line wasn’t dramatic enough. Tucci adds some welcome friction—breezily villainous, mildly theatrical, and clearly in control. Tomlinson’s princess is framed as independent and bold, though the plot keeps dragging her back toward the tower. Ewan McGregor arrives in full armor and full charm, mostly to get captured on cue. The film looks expensive. The beanstalk grows. The giants stomp. The castles gleam. The action moves, the pacing holds, and the story checks every expected box. It’s all competent—just not especially alive. There’s scale, but little momentum. Style, but no real tension. It unfolds exactly as expected: loud, polished, and never in doubt. The real mystery is why this movie needed to exist at all. It gestures at grandeur, but never builds on it. What’s left is a story that feels twice as long as it should, and half as necessary as it wants to be. Serviceable, mildly entertaining, and instantly forgettable.

There’s a moment in Jackass: The Movie where Johnny Knoxville, clad in smirk and leather jacket, rents a perfectly good car, drives it straight into a demolition derby, and then returns the totaled wreck to the rental company—windshield gone, frame crumpled, paint job transformed into postmodern sculpture—and insists, with absolute calm, that the damage was “minor.” It’s the kind of prank that teeters on performance art, if performance art involved more whiplash and fewer permits. I laughed hard. Not every bit earns that reaction, but enough do that I watched the whole thing with my hands over my face and at least one eye open. The film is the theatrical extension of the MTV series, though “extension” may be too polite a word—it’s more like the show got drunk, fell into traffic, and came out the other side giggling and missing a tooth. There’s no plot. Just a rotating cast of pain-proof man-children subjecting themselves to ever-more deranged stunts in the name of entertainment and what might loosely be called science. The quality varies. A man dressed as a mouse flings himself across a floor of set mousetraps: inspired. A razor-wielding prankster randomly scalping clumps of his friends’ hair: less so. Then there’s the hardware store sequence, where one of the crew defecates in a display toilet. The setup is oddly elegant, the payoff strangely flat—he forgets to ask for toilet paper, which feels like a punchline waiting to be claimed. The film functions as a test of both physical resilience and your tolerance for projectile vomiting. It’s not made for everyone—it’s barely made at all—but there’s an impish joy in watching people do what no one sane should. What makes it weirdly watchable isn’t the gore or the groans, but the sheer audacity of thinking these ideas up in the first place. That, and the fact that they commit—not in some grand cinematic sense, but in the way a daredevil commits to a shopping cart ride down a flight of concrete stairs. Whether you laugh or recoil depends on your maturity level, your lunch, and how far removed you are from the inner 12-year-old who once thought the word “fart” was the height of comedy. I am, it turns out, not far removed.

Someone murders an heiress in her Pacific Heights mansion—tied to the bed, slashed with surgical precision—and leaves behind a typed note, unsigned but eerily familiar. Her husband, Jack Forrester (Jeff Bridges), handsome and vaguely tormented, inherits her fortune and the glare of a homicide investigation. He’s arrested. He claims innocence. He hires Teddy Barnes (Glenn Close), a defense attorney who used to prosecute but now bills by the hour and trusts nobody. She takes the case with conditions—chiefly, that he’s telling the truth. Jack, as it happens, is less concerned with truth than tone, and his brand of wounded suaveness works faster than the legal process. Their relationship turns intimate, off the record and ethically murky. The closer she gets to him, the blurrier the evidence becomes. Typewritten notes begin appearing again—same font, same threat—possibly forged, possibly not. The case drags her back into old professional entanglements, including a combative rivalry with district attorney Thomas Krasny (Peter Coyote), who’d rather convict than converse. The courtroom sequences are sharp, cut to rhythm, and given weight by Robert Loggia as Teddy’s grizzled investigator. But what’s less convincing is the way the film handles Teddy herself. She’s introduced as seasoned and skeptical, but falls for her client with a speed that suggests either narrative hurry or selective amnesia. The case pivots on credibility—hers, his, the prosecution’s—and the film sometimes treats that credibility like a prop to be moved when convenient. The twist arrives as expected: clean, functional, and hard to miss if your eyes are open. Still, the movie moves well and looks expensive. It’s a thriller that holds your attention, even as it asks you not to ask too much of its characters.

The first talking feature didn’t announce itself with monologues or speeches, but with a tossed-off line that sounded like showbiz breathing through its teeth: “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” And suddenly, you had. The screen—until then a pageant of gestures and piano scores—cracked open and let a voice slip through: brassy, precise, all pulse and polish. Mostly, though, it’s still a silent film, with sound reserved for those moments when Al Jolson opens his mouth and music pours out. The numbers arrive stitched to a few murmurs of dialogue, like a gramophone clearing its throat before the melody begins. Jolson sings with the self-conviction of a man performing for his own portrait—slow ballads lacquered in sentiment, uptempo ones snapping just enough to show the frame. The story, built with the simplicity of a stage set, follows Jakie Rabinowitz, son of a stern Orthodox cantor who expects him to carry on the family’s sacred tradition. Jakie has other plans. Drawn to jazz and vaudeville, he leaves home, adopts the stage name Jack Robin, and builds a career on applause and reinvention. Years later, just as he’s about to star in his Broadway debut, word comes that his father is gravely ill. He’s pulled between two obligations—one to the synagogue, one to the stage—and the film waits, quietly, to see which one he chooses. Two musical numbers are performed in blackface—common on the vaudeville circuit at the time, and framed here less as caricature than as a convention of period performance. The film doesn’t dwell on it or mine it for comedy, and while the effect is jarring to modern eyes, it’s clearly part of Jack’s onstage persona, not used for punchlines. It complicates the film’s legacy, but not its significance. Still, the moment holds. The Jazz Singer isn’t great drama—it’s a transitional object, half relic, half revelation. But when the sound hits, even briefly, the medium shifts under your feet. You’re watching the old world step aside to make room for the new, one syncopated verse at a time. Whatever its flaws, the film changed the temperature of the room—and the industry never went silent again.

It begins, as all exile stories should, with a mule, a rifle, and a man who looks like he mistook solitude for salvation. Robert Redford’s Jeremiah Johnson rides into the Rockies not with grit but with a kind of stubborn vacancy, like someone trying to will himself into myth by sheer geographical removal. He’s a soldier gone soft around the eyes, hoping the wilderness might forget what he’s seen—or what he’s failed to become. Nature, of course, has other plans. The mountains don’t kill him. Not at first. They humiliate him. He burns his fish, botches his traps, forgets how cold feels until it nearly erases him. His early missteps aren’t tragic—they’re instructional. Nature’s syllabus is brutal, but not without its tutors. Enter Bear Claw (Will Geer), a mountain man with a coyote’s laugh and eyes like frozen sap, who teaches Jeremiah how to trap, hunt, survive—how to belong without asking. Jeremiah collects a kind of family without ever quite becoming a patriarch. A mute child, all broken stare and stillness, becomes his shadow. A wife, Swan, comes with a peace treaty and teaches him how to live in one direction without apology. They build something—not a home, exactly, but a rhythm: chopping wood, gutting fish, letting seasons pass without commentary. A quiet kind of domesticity, snow-covered and stitched with sighs. Then, with no announcement, the film shifts. Something is lost—burned, maybe, or buried beneath an avalanche of implied violence. The camera doesn’t linger. Jeremiah’s grief arrives as motion: slower, colder, more deliberate. He doesn’t scream. He walks. He rides. He kills. Not in rage, but as if retracing a map that now reads only in blood and weather. He becomes, in his silence, a man so tightly drawn he could vanish in profile. Pollack doesn’t hurry the transformation. The film unfolds like a frostbitten diary: terse entries, wind-scoured pages, the occasional burst of color—a fire, a memory, a rifle crack. Dialogue is rationed. Emotion is not. When Jeremiah nods to an old friend across a snowbank, it lands with the weight of ten monologues. What the film withholds, Redford wears on his face, which by the end looks less like a movie star and more like driftwood that’s learned how to blink. Jeremiah Johnson isn’t a western, exactly. It’s a study in erosion. A man rubs against nature until one of them smooths out—and in this case, it’s the man. The film doesn’t chase catharsis. It offers acceptance: of hardship, of loss, of the strange peace that comes when nothing is left to prove.

Uneven in spots but packed with moments so ridiculous they’re hard not to laugh at. Steve Martin, in the breakout role that turned his “wild and crazy” stage persona into big-screen currency, plays Navin R. Johnson—a sweet dim bulb raised by Black sharecroppers in Mississippi. He’s blissfully unaware he’s their only white child until, one night, a lounge jazz riff drifts from the radio and he decides he’s meant for something bigger, somewhere past the next bus stop. He sets off for St. Louis, where the radio broadcast came from—though he’s willing to drift wherever the road wants him—collecting odd jobs and stranger misadventures like pocket change in a glove box. He pumps gas, attracts the rage of a half-competent sniper (M. Emmet Walsh, deadpan and sweaty), and works himself into a lather about oil cans, mistaking the shooter’s bad aim for a vendetta against motor oil. He lands a carnival gig, gets walloped by an over-possessive stunt biker (Caitlin Adams), and, by accident more than brilliance, invents the Opti-Grab—a nose clip for glasses that makes him rich before it ruins him. Along the way, he wins over Marie (Bernadette Peters, slyly sincere), the only person who sees Navin’s bottomless innocence as something worth keeping. The plot isn’t so much written as loosely stitched—a clothesline for sketches and nonsense, all carried by Martin’s half-dazed, half-manic grin. Carl Reiner directs like a man who knows exactly when to step aside and let Martin chase the next punchline. The Jerk is sloppy and rarely tries to be anything else. But when it’s funny, it’s explosive—Martin working a vein of slapstick that makes him feel like Jerry Lewis’s spiritual cousin, only with a sweetness that keeps it from wearing out its welcome. Not a great film, but impossible not to laugh at—often out loud, sometimes harder than you’d comfortably admit.

Tom Cruise plays Jerry Maguire like a man who’s been speaking in slogans for so long he’s forgotten how normal sentences work. One night, an attack of integrity hits—he writes a 25-page memo about bringing empathy into sports management, the kind of manifesto you might find wedged into a used self-help book. The office cheers. Then fires him before lunch. All he walks out with is a goldfish, Dorothy Boyd—an accountant who mistakes his unraveling for conviction—and a single client: Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a mercurial wide receiver with the pitch of a preacher and the patience of a toddler. “Show me the money” becomes both war cry and eulogy for Jerry’s former life. Dorothy has admired Jerry from afar, and his public collapse only deepens her belief that there’s something honest buried under the salesmanship. She follows him out the door, bringing her son and her savings, and somewhere between conference calls and shared desperation, they drift into a relationship. She’s efficient, soft-voiced, and unreasonably tolerant of Jerry’s slow-motion identity collapse. Their courtship unfolds like a series of crossed wires and misfired sentiments—one part affection, two parts existential rebranding. Zellweger gives the role an ache that pulses between lines, while Cruise sheds his gloss by degrees, revealing someone who’s not sure if he’s a fraud or just unfinished. Gooding, meanwhile, detonates every scene he enters, barreling through locker rooms and talk shows like a man chasing his own myth. He’s ridiculous and magnificent, a contradiction wrapped in endorsements. His performance is the movie’s irregular heartbeat, and it works. Director Cameron Crowe lets the structure wobble without tipping, giving the characters room to flounder and flare. Emotions aren’t delivered—they leak, stammer, double back. Jerry Maguire plays like a romantic comedy written by someone who accidentally told the truth and then had to build a movie around the consequences.

Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl isn’t a disaster—it’s just lost. A sentimental left turn from the man who once gave us foul-mouthed slackers arguing about Star Wars logistics in a convenience store, this one arrives with diapers, daddy issues, and a suspiciously tidy sense of healing. The heart’s on the right side, yes, but so is the sugar bowl, and someone’s spilled it all over the script. Ben Affleck, never allergic to stiffness, plays Ollie Trinke, a widowed publicist who loses his wife (Jennifer Lopez, gone before the opening titles are cold) in childbirth and promptly checks out of fatherhood like it’s an event he forgot to RSVP to. Diapers go to his dad (George Carlin, softening into paternal gruffness), while Ollie resumes his career in crisis mode, until it combusts in public. Then: small-town purgatory, job at city hall, and seven years of slowly remembering he’s supposed to love his daughter. Raquel Castro plays Gertie with precocious snap—sharp for her age but written like someone who’s read a few too many parenting books over her father’s shoulder. She’s cute, sure, but the movie counts on that a bit too heavily. Enter Liv Tyler as a grad student moonlighting at a video rental store and written with the kind of low-stakes quirk that exists mostly to nudge the plot forward. Her relationship with Ollie is less romantic arc than narrative lubricant. Smith, for his part, reins in the profanity but also forgets to replace it with much else. The jokes, when they show up, are safe and dusted with sentiment. There’s the occasional spark—usually when Carlin’s around—but too much of it feels like a sitcom pilot stretched past its emotional endurance. It wants to be tender, funny, sincere—and it manages pieces of all three—but they’re assembled with the elegance of a Hallmark card rewritten by someone halfway through a long nap. Watchable, occasionally sweet, but more formula than feeling.

This documentary about evangelical youth camps doesn’t come with narration, but it hardly needs one. The images speak fluently. Children cry, convulse, chant in tongues, and raise their hands skyward in church services that look less like worship than rehearsals for some unspoken emergency. To the uninitiated, it may feel like a performance—but Jesus Camp isn’t interested in theatrics. It’s about strategy. It’s about children being groomed for spiritual warfare, under the warm guidance of adults who believe the culture must be saved and that politics is just another pulpit. Becky Fischer, the central figure and organizer of these religious boot camps, speaks with affable confidence. Her calling, she tells us, is to awaken the “chosen generation”—children who will grow up to dismantle secularism, one prayer and one ballot at a time. These camps, held in Missouri and North Dakota, are where scripture is infused with ideology and kids are encouraged to preach as boldly as they play. We follow three such children: devout, bright-eyed, and already fluent in evangelical-speak. They dance, bowl, giggle—but always in service of the mission. One insists her dance must glorify God, not tempt the flesh. Another pauses mid-frame to evangelize to a fellow bowler. It’s innocence repurposed, ritualized. Their homes echo the same intensity. One mother teaches her children that the earth is 6,000 years old, showing them a creationist video that shrugs off climate change as secular hysteria. Science, in this world, is a competitor. Ewing and Grady stay out of the frame, letting the material unfold without interruption. And it does. The film never mocks or editorializes—it simply watches, and that’s often enough. Its flaw is its focus. These believers are so extreme they threaten to seem marginal, when in reality, the marriage between religion and politics thrives far beyond charismatic corners. Still, as a close-up on indoctrination in real time, Jesus Camp is hypnotic, measured, and ultimately more chilling than any horror film with special effects.

A faith-based crowd-pleaser that sticks close to the standard playbook: wayward youth, instant redemption, a pastor reminded that Jesus didn’t mind dirty feet or public trouble. It hints at rougher patches here and there but never risks pushing the faithful out of their comfort zone. Kelsey Grammer supplies the gravitas as Chuck Smith, a buttoned-up California pastor whose Sunday crowd is more senior luncheon than spiritual revival. That changes when his daughter picks up Lonnie (Jonathan Roumie), a wandering hippie who talks about Jesus like he’s waiting for him to appear at Woodstock. Lonnie moves in, drifts into the church, and drags a parade of barefoot believers behind him—much to the horror of the regulars who prefer their sermons without tie-dye and tambourines. Chuck bristles, then warms up to the influx once the pews stop looking empty. Lonnie’s style turns louder, the crowds multiply, and before long, the free spirit starts enjoying the spotlight a bit too much for a man claiming to live hand-to-mouth for the Lord. Meanwhile, there’s Greg (Joel Courtney), a young burnout who trades his stash for a baptism and tries to preach a little too soon. The film runs longer than it needs to, smoothing over any leftover doubt or discomfort. Conversion fixes nearly everything, struggle politely stays off camera. Still, for its intended flock, it’s soft-hearted and gently rousing, with just enough retro haze to keep the cynicism at bay. Grammer keeps it sturdy when the younger cast threatens to drift into greeting-card territory. No surprises here, but for those who like their miracles tidy and their hippies housebroken by the final prayer, it does the trick.

There are thrillers, there are procedurals, and then there’s whatever this is—a three-hour exorcism of trust, staged as a courtroom drama, and delivered with the urgency of someone who just finished connecting red string across their living room wall. Kevin Costner plays New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, the lone public official in America who apparently found the Warren Commission less than satisfying. Garrison doesn’t buy the official line—Lee Harvey Oswald, lone gunman, three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. He finds it all too convenient. Too improbable. The alleged assassin barely qualified as a marksman, and yet somehow landed three surgical shots, one of which may or may not have bent around corners. Witnesses heard gunfire from other directions. The man who killed Oswald had ties to nightclubs, mobsters, and possibly house pets with CIA clearance. Oliver Stone shoots the film like he’s trying to simulate a panic attack—grainy recreations, archival footage, black-and-white inserts, and montages that move faster than most people read. It’s overwhelming by design. There’s a persuasive momentum to it, whether or not you believe a word being said. The film doesn’t prove a conspiracy so much as smother the absence of one. Costner, as Garrison, is the sober anchor in a swirl of suspicion. He plays the part like a moral weathervane, pointing always toward decency, even as he starts sounding less like a prosecutor and more like someone who’s read too many memos. But he grounds it. Supporting roles are filled out with character actors and familiar faces—Tommy Lee Jones as a leering businessman with questionable hobbies, Joe Pesci in a wig that deserves its own trailer, and Donald Sutherland as a government operative who appears long enough to throw gasoline on everything. At just over three hours, it’s a sprawling film that doesn’t really pause—it just accelerates. The facts, quasi-facts, and outright speculation blur so effectively that even viewers with a working knowledge of the case may leave unsure of what they actually know. That’s the trick. Stone isn’t arguing for one theory—he’s arguing against the idea that there’s only one. Whether you buy any of it is almost beside the point. JFK isn’t about answers. It’s about the crackle of doubt, the thrill of pursuit, and the paranoia that seeps in when the pieces never quite line up.

A truck-stop fable that mistakes mullet maintenance for character development, Joe Dirt gives us a lead who’s memorable mostly because he’s hard to forget—not because he’s worth remembering. David Spade plays the title character, a mop-bucket philosopher with a surgically affixed wig and the misplaced cheer of someone who doesn’t realize the world gave up on him years ago. Abandoned at the Grand Canyon as a child, Joe has spent the rest of his life bouncing from odd job to oddball encounter. His saga unfolds in a radio booth, as he recounts his story to a dismissive DJ (Dennis Miller), whose interjections manage to be both intrusive and useless—delivered with the practiced condescension of someone convinced they’re killing, even as the room stays silent. Joe’s misadventures include near-death experiences, brushes with criminals, and a detour involving gator wrangling, but none of it adds up. The tone flips between sentimental and scatterbrained, never settling long enough to hit a groove. Spade plays it straight, which helps a little, but the material never meets him halfway. The jokes fizzle, the plot gestures toward uplift but never earns it, and any attempt at heart is buried beneath the script’s uncertain smirk. For a film that spends so much time insisting Joe matters, it never quite manages to prove it.

First, the good news by way of some bad news: Dennis Miller is in this movie. That’s bad. But the good news is he’s only in it twice—briefly enough to spare us too much dry heaving at his dreadful ad libs. Now for the rest of the bad news: even without Dennis Miller, Joe Dirt 2 is a punishing, laughless sequel to a film that wasn’t exactly crying out for one. David Spade returns as Joe Dirt, the acid-washed, mullet-headed burnout still peddling jokes that were worn out the day they were written. Joe is now a happily married father of three—until a tornado flings him into what may or may not be an alternate timeline, where Brandy (Brittany Daniel) doesn’t know him and his entire life seems to have been erased. It’s a time-travel story by default, though the film makes no attempt to explain how or why. From there, Joe stumbles from one dead-end encounter to the next: he chats with a vaguely mystical talking coyote, gets picked up by a shotgun-toting loner with murder on his mind, and tangles with a biker gang led by a nearly unrecognizable Mark McGrath. The film could’ve embraced its weird premise and gone surreal, but it settles instead for recycled gags and warmed-over redneck clichés. One early joke consists entirely of Joe’s coworkers farting in his face—capped off, inevitably, by a lingerie model doing the same, as if that were somehow the comedic high point. Spade can be funny when he has material with a pulse, but here he never finds a rhythm. He doesn’t so much play Joe Dirt as haul him out of storage and hope nobody remembers he wasn’t funny to begin with. This isn’t just a bad sequel—it’s a sad reminder that nostalgia without jokes is just noise.

Tim Allen could sell a midlife crisis in his sleep, which is basically what Joe Somebody asks him to do. He plays a decent, unremarkable office drone—divorced, mild, full of dad energy—who gets socked in the face over a parking spot. His daughter (Hayden Panettiere) watches it happen, which is the part that really stings. The punch comes courtesy of Patrick Warburton, playing a corporate bully with seven years at the company and no patience for the ten-year parking rule. Shamed and nursing both his pride and his nose, Joe decides to challenge his attacker to a rematch. Word gets around. Suddenly, the office that barely noticed him before starts treating him like a folk hero. He’s getting invited to lunches. People cheer him on when they pass him in the halls. It’s ridiculous, of course, but the movie plays it straight—as if fistfights are a viable path to self-worth. His daughter, being the voice of reason and twelve, tells him it’s a terrible idea. She’s right. Instead of taking the hint, Joe hires a washed-up martial arts star (James Belushi, damp with regret) to whip him into shape. Somewhere between the punching drills and ego pushups, he starts catching feelings for a quietly decent coworker (Julie Bowen), and the movie shifts into soft-focus dating territory—half romance, half filler, not entirely unwatchable. There are a few moments that work. Allen knows how to look quietly fed up without tipping into bitterness. But the story never quite gathers steam. It coasts into the final act without building to much of anything. Not terrible—just faintly embarrassing, like watching someone argue with a vending machine.

What John Q. lacks in plausibility, it tries to compensate for with pulse—and Denzel Washington, doing what Denzel Washington does even when the script is reaching for nobility with a butter knife. He plays John Q. Archibald, a factory worker, husband, and doting father to Mike (Daniel E. Smith), a sweet-natured boy whose heart is literally too big for his body. When Mike collapses mid–Little League game, the diagnosis is swift and terminal: cardiomegaly. A transplant is the only hope. John assumes his insurance will carry the weight—until it doesn’t. His employer, in a quiet act of corporate cruelty, has quietly downgraded his health plan, stripping out anything that might save a life. And so, the film pivots from domestic anxiety to hostage thriller. John, cornered by bureaucracy and staring down a $250,000 price tag, locks down the emergency wing of the hospital and demands that the lead surgeon (James Woods, always ready to play unlikable) put his son’s name at the top of the transplant list—preferably with a scalpel. What follows is a by-the-numbers standoff, complete with negotiators (Robert Duvall), smug hospital administrators (Anne Heche), blaring news vans, and a growing crowd of working-class onlookers who begin to treat John like a folk hero in a janitor’s uniform. It’s Dog Day Afternoon with health forms, minus the queasy complexity. Cassavetes directs with blunt instruments. Every ethical dilemma is underlined, every speech delivered like a closing argument. But still, there’s something raw about it. You feel for John not because the film earns the tension, but because Denzel makes you believe this man’s dignity is the last thing holding him upright. The plot may spiral into fantasy, but the outrage feels real. John Q. isn’t a great movie, but it’s a potent diagnosis of a system that quietly turns desperate people into threats. And for a moment—however contrived—it lets one of them push back.

A yo-yo swings, a tape measure lunges, and Brendan Fraser expectorates into the lens like he’s brushing for box office. This was 2008’s idea of immersive—3D not as depth but as projectile. Watch it in 2D and you can still see the ghost of every gimmick, flickering like an actor who forgot they were cut from the scene. Fraser, unfailingly earnest even when physics is tapping out, plays Trevor Anderson, a geologist-slash-bachelor-uncle who discovers his long-missing brother may have tripped into the Earth’s digestive system. The missing man believed Verne’s novel was a field guide rather than fiction, and left behind a trail of half-explained sensors and metaphysical breadcrumbs buried under Iceland. Cue the nephew (Josh Hutcherson), equal parts wisecrack and plot ballast, and a trip north where the ground opens up like it’s in on the pitch. They fall through the crust and into the film’s real ambition: an excuse to string together glowing mushrooms, flying piranha-birds, and geologic set pieces that obey the laws of cartoon. The story is less a progression than a trampoline—characters drop in, bounce through sequences, and land nowhere in particular. At one point they’re rafting across magnetic rocks; at another, surfing molten lava like its theme park foam. There’s passing talk of underground civilizations, but the script abandons questions the minute they slow the pacing. Fraser sells lines like “We’re going deeper!” His gift, still intact, is making nonsense sound urgent. The movie zips along in bright, buoyant loops. It’s not science fiction so much as digital spelunking, powered by pixels and whatever remaining goodwill Fraser has to give. It doesn’t stop to explain itself because there’s nothing holding it together but momentum and green screen. The laws of nature are set aside, the story forgets to make sense, and still—it moves.

More for the sci-fi archivist than the casual viewer, Journey to the Center of Time is a low-budget curiosity that plays like a B-movie experiment dressed in surplus lab coats. Scientists stare grimly at blinking consoles, make declarative speeches while barely shifting posture, and spend much of their time reacting to blinking lights or staring at rear-projected chaos just offscreen. The premise has some sci-fi meat on the bone—time travel gone awry, experiments that launch the crew both forward and backward through history—but the execution gets stuck somewhere between speculative theater and a reel of stock footage waiting for context. The script lobs terms like “matter displacement” and “time differentials” with the confidence of someone skimming a textbook, and the performances often feel like line readings disguised as dialogue. Somehow, tension builds. Credit the editing, or the repetition of actors shouting “We’re accelerating!” while clocks spin and visual effects try their best. We get stop-motion dinosaurs, desolate futurescapes, and temporal jump cuts that almost suggest narrative momentum. But just as the film starts to piece together a storyline, the final act dissolves into pseudo-philosophical fog. Time folds in on itself, characters speculate wildly, and the attempt at a profound conclusion arrives dressed in technobabble and existential static. The ending reaches for gravitas but mostly just collapses into murk. There’s no emotional payoff, no arcs—just loops and theories and a romance subplot the film seems to forget, then remember, then abandon. It’s a cerebral curtain call without a brain. Still, there’s historical value here—for genre completists, film historians, and lovers of speculative fiction at its most budget-conscious. But if you’re waiting for it to sweep you away, you’ll likely find yourself, like the characters, staring at a blinking screen and wondering what year it’s supposed to be.

In the distant future of 2001, humanity has finally achieved peace on Earth—and, more impressively, figured out how to pronounce “Uranus” without triggering fits of laughter. A crew of international astronauts (all white, all curiously similar in accent and affect) is dispatched to explore the solar system’s seventh stop. Their destination is a planet that behaves less like an alien world and more like a lucid dream gone sideways. At first, the terrain appears eerily familiar. One crew member stumbles across his childhood home. Others encounter women from their past, draped in gauze and drifting through the landscape like perfume ads with selective amnesia. Something on the planet is responding to their thoughts, conjuring fantasies, memories, and unresolved mental clutter. You’ll have to wait a bit, though, to discover what alien presence is behind it all. The acting is decorous to a fault. Dialogue moves in clipped, declarative bursts, as if everyone’s afraid of interrupting the exposition. The special effects rely on lighting gels, recycled props, and a persistent haze that substitutes for atmosphere. Released just before Star Trek hit the airwaves, the film shares that era’s taste for speculative fiction with a philosophical fringe: ideas about memory, desire, perception, and control, dressed in space helmets and mini-dresses. It doesn’t fully explore its concepts, but you can feel it trying to think—pausing for meaning between the effects—and there’s a weird appeal in the effort. For casual viewers, it may feel clunky or unspooled. For sci-fi completists, it’s a pocket-sized relic with strange ambition. And for film historians, it’s another entry in the Cold War canon of speculative cinema, where outer space often mapped uncannily well onto the inner one.

Two brothers on a road trip make the mistake of thinking they’re in a comedy. Lewis (Paul Walker), cautious and clean-cut, is driving cross-country to pick up a girl. Fuller (Steve Zahn), recently sprung from jail and never not in overdrive, talks him into installing a CB radio—an antique toy for provoking long-haul truckers. Masquerading as a lonely woman named “Candy Cane,” they prank a driver into thinking he’s got a motel hookup waiting in Room 17. The driver shows up. Room 17 is occupied by a belligerent stranger. By morning, the man is hospitalized and missing his jaw. The trucker—known only by the name Rusty Nail—knows who’s responsible. And he wants them to know that he knows. From there, the road stops feeling safe. The brothers become prey, pursued by an unseen driver who speaks in a syrupy monotone and seems to know their every move. A third passenger enters the mix—Venna (Leelee Sobieski), Lewis’s maybe-something friend—and with her, the stakes tilt. Rusty Nail doesn’t kill out of impulse. He plays with his food. The genius of Joy Ride is in its simplicity. A truck. A voice. The endless uncertainty of whether the vehicle next to you is following—or just driving. Director John Dahl strips the thriller down to headlights, taillights, and speaker static. The tension doesn’t erupt; it tightens. Rusty Nail is never shown clearly, and that’s the point. He exists in the spaces between scenes, watching, waiting, calling when it matters. Zahn brings the motor-mouthed panic, all reckless charm and escalating guilt. Walker plays straight man with surprising sincerity. Sobieski, less a love interest than a third pressure point, adds quiet dread. But the real star is the truck: an unstoppable machine with no face and a radio signal. This is a story about a joke gone wrong—and the slow, relentless consequences that follow when the punchline turns around and starts driving behind you.

A sex comedy in the same way an air horn is a musical instrument, Joysticks makes a lot of noise and very little sense. Its idea of fun is a gaggle of local sexpots tormenting a puffy nerd (Jim Greenleaf) while a sweaty businessman (Joe Don Baker, practically steaming) tries to shut down the local arcade for corrupting his daughter (Corrine Bohrer sporting a Valley Girl accent that sounds like a helium leak in a tanning bed). There’s a plot, loosely: Baker wants the arcade gone, the kids want their games, and the film wants to throw as many cleavage shots and joystick puns at the screen as it can before the credits bail it out. What passes for comedic invention is usually just someone squealing, groping, or falling over. And yet, buried somewhere in the wreckage is ten solid seconds of actual delight: Jon Gries, leading a punk gang of arcade-addicted misfits, gliding down the street on tiny motorcycles like a biker gang assembled by a toy company. It’s brief, it’s stupid, and it’s the only thing here with a pulse. There’s some mild nostalgia in seeing the vintage cabinets—Pac-Man, Defender, a few beeping relics—but even that starts to feel like a consolation prize. Joysticks wants to ride the early-’80s arcade boom straight into raunch comedy territory, but it forgets to bring the jokes. Or the raunch. Or the comedy.

Three hours of courtroom scenes and yet it doesn’t feel a minute too long. Judgment at Nuremberg is a heavy, deliberate film—epic in length, but almost meditative in rhythm. Set during the postwar tribunals, it explores the lingering question of accountability: not just whether atrocities occurred, but how far up and down the chain of command guilt can—or should—be traced. At its core is a troubling dilemma. Should judges who served under the Nazi regime—many of whom were seated well before Hitler rose to power—be held more responsible than those who simply followed orders? After all, they had the authority to object, even if it meant forfeiting their positions or worse. The film never pretends these questions have easy answers. Instead, it builds its case in long, careful strokes. Spencer Tracy plays Chief Judge Haywood, an American appointed to oversee the trial, who takes a particular interest in one of the defendants: Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster), a former jurist once held in international esteem, now on trial for endorsing state-sanctioned executions. Lancaster plays him like a man in permanent recoil—intellectually aware of his guilt but unwilling to voice it outright. The acting across the board is remarkable. Maximilian Schell, in a breakout role, paces the courtroom with a kind of frantic precision—less grandstanding than desperation disguised as confidence. Judy Garland appears just once, pale and trembling, recounting what the system did to her in a few clipped sentences that hit harder than most closing arguments. Montgomery Clift also turns up for a key scene that’s raw and unsettling in its quiet devastation. What could’ve been didactic is instead riveting. Stanley Kramer’s direction is straightforward but unflinching, letting the performances and ideas speak for themselves. And while the dialogue occasionally veers into speechifying, it rarely feels false. These are characters trying to make sense of the unspeakable using the only language they have left: the law.

Renée Zellweger doesn’t play Judy Garland so much as flicker through her—twisting herself into a performance stitched together from flinches, clenched teeth, and too many years of stage lighting melting through the skin. There’s a shot—brief, cruel, unforgettable—of her stalking down a backstage corridor toward the spotlight, her expression folding in on itself, suspended between purpose and a weariness too deep to label. It’s not poise. It’s muscle memory staggering on its last leg. The film stays late in the story. Garland is broke, exhausted, uninsurable. The crowds back home have started to remember her as a problem. London still remembers the voice. So she’s flown across the ocean and slotted into a residency that promises steady money, late call times, and an audience that claps first and complains later. She arrives like a singer chasing a cue card. Sometimes she catches it. Judy is built like most polite biopics: vintage filters, supportive scene partners, measured flashbacks to the MGM machine that dosed her with amphetamines before she could spell them. Her teenage self drifts in and out of view—soft-focus, lips pressed into a smile, a child sealed in amber and sold by the ounce. It’s respectful. It’s soft-spoken. It walks directly through the middle of the frame. Zellweger is the spectacle. She doesn’t push the emotion—she releases it in splinters. The songs arrive imperfect, bent at the edges, and all the more devastating for it. Each performance is less a showstopper than a last gasp—a voice unspooling mid-air, grasping for the next note before her throat closes around it. The film itself is a capable eulogy. She turns it into something shakier and more alive. Not a comeback. Not a warning. Just a woman trying to hold her ribs together long enough to reach the microphone.

Hollywood takes endless flak for recycling ideas, and yet when it cooks up a high-concept original about Arnold Schwarzenegger getting pregnant, it’s met not with applause, but punchlines. And sure, Junior is ridiculous—but it’s also reasonably entertaining, held together by the sheer novelty of watching Schwarzenegger cradle his belly like a hormonal linebacker and complain about swollen nipples with the sincerity of someone discovering empathy one trimester at a time. He plays Dr. Alex Hesse, a fertility scientist working with Danny DeVito on a breakthrough drug. When their research hits a bureaucratic wall—courtesy of a scowling Frank Langella—they go rogue and test it on the most obvious choice: Arnold himself. Naturally. Emma Thompson enters as the gawky romantic foil, a fellow researcher who trips over Bunsen burners and falls into love. One thing leads to another. Preggernator. What sells it isn’t the script, which follows a disappointingly safe arc from scientific misconduct to miracle baby to neatly resolved third act. It’s the performances—particularly Schwarzenegger’s, which is oddly committed, even touching in spots. He underplays the comedy and lets the weirdness stand on its own, which somehow makes it funnier. DeVito does his usual flustered schemer routine, and Thompson, charming in spite of the material, adds a dash of screwball warmth. The movie ultimately settles for sentimentality where it could have leaned harder into satire. The premise begs for more social commentary or at least some real comic bite, but instead, it opts for sitcom logic and predictable payoffs. Still, for a film that could’ve collapsed under its own premise, Junior stays upright. Not great. Not forgotten. But for ninety-odd minutes, it almost convinces you that morning sickness might build character.

The premise should’ve written itself: Pauly Shore, professional goofball, trapped in a jury box and making a farce of civic duty. That’s it. That’s the whole idea. But Jury Duty manages to botch even that. Shore plays Tommy Collins, a trailer-park slacker effectively evicted when his parents drive off with the only bed he owns. In search of free room and board, he responds to a jury summons he’d already tossed. The case: a fast-food worker accused of murdering several coworkers. The stakes are high—Shore is here for the buffet. He starts by voting “not guilty” just to prolong his hotel stay. Then he latches onto the idea that the defendant might actually be innocent—and promptly forgets why he was voting that way in the first place. The film never tracks the shift; it treats it like organic character growth. A scene where he accidentally flips the verdict after convincing everyone else? Not even attempted. It’s not that Shore’s brand of obnoxious doesn’t fit—it’s that no one around him seems to notice. He stalls, grandstands, asks to review the same piece of evidence five or eight times, and the other jurors just blink at him. The setup begs for tension—some friction, a breakdown, at least a raised voice. Instead, they sit there like they’ve been sedated. If the movie won’t even let him get on their nerves, what are we doing? There’s a limp romance with Tia Carrere, a redemption arc that registers more as detour, and a last-minute twist that may genuinely qualify as one of the dumbest choices a comedy has ever made. The film toys with parody—maybe a 12 Angry Men spoof was the goal—but it never builds a real gag. Everything flattens out. No energy, no escalation. Shore’s fans might cling to nostalgia—but this film makes his trademark mugging feel inert. Complaint after complaint, no payoff. If asking to review the same piece of evidence again and again counts as humor, someone please get Shore a better punchline.

A romantic comedy with spectral trimmings, Just Like Heaven is as light as its title suggests—wholly implausible, mildly formulaic, but charming—floating on the strength of its premise and the chemistry between two leads who seem just amused enough to make the contrivance feel warm. Reese Witherspoon plays Elizabeth, an overworked doctor on the verge of a major promotion when she’s suddenly struck by a truck. Months pass. Her rent-controlled San Francisco apartment—gorgeously staged, of course—remains furnished but newly available on the market. Enter David (Mark Ruffalo), a grief-stricken landscape architect still recovering from the death of his wife. He moves in and promptly discovers that the apartment comes with a spectral roommate who insists the apartment is still hers and believes David is some sort of squatter. She doesn’t know she’s a ghost—or something like it. David, not exactly the spiritual type, consults a bookstore clerk with metaphysical leanings (played by Jon Heder in what might be described as Gen-X New Age cosplay), and from there, it’s a classic opposites-attract setup dressed up in ghost logic and rom-com buoyancy. The plot does exactly what it’s designed to do: mix-ups, revelations, emotional softballs. But the film never overplays its whimsy. Witherspoon gives Elizabeth a professional edge that softens gradually, and Ruffalo balances melancholy with a dry, shrugging charm. Together, they carry the story through its featherweight crises with enough likability to give the predictable destination a pleasant landing. It’s all fluff, but fluff with structure—a cocktail of Topper and Ghost, ideal for anyone who prefers their romance mild and their hauntings rent-controlled.

Brittany Murphy glows in Just Married—which only makes it more painful to watch her stranded inside a script that mistakes volume for humor and rudeness for edge. She plays Sarah McNerney, a well-bred heiress who impulsively marries Tom Leezak (Ashton Kutcher), a mouthy radio traffic reporter with no discernible redeeming qualities beyond a full head of hair. Her family despises him—loudly, unapologetically, and, frankly, understandably. Still, off go the newlyweds on a European honeymoon that starts with an attempted Mile High Club disaster and spirals into a slapstick gauntlet of broken beds, electrocuted genitals, and toilet water. It’s not just that every mishap is louder than the last. It’s that none of them are funny. The film careens from one catastrophe to another with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, pausing only to let Kutcher’s Tom berate hotel staff and sneer his way through scenes with Murphy, whose charm is wasted trying to spark chemistry with a human eye-roll. What’s more frustrating than the script’s laziness is the character it gives Kutcher: not just boorish, but actively unpleasant. By the time he’s tearing into another concierge or lobbing passive-aggressive jabs at Sarah, you begin to sympathize with her wealthy parents. She really could do better. Murphy tries—she always does. There’s a flicker of warmth beneath the wreckage. But it’s not enough to salvage a film that thinks humiliation is the same as punchline. Unless you’re working through a Brittany Murphy completist phase—and no judgment if you are—there’s little reason to subject yourself to this.

A crummy teen romance with a dopey premise and even dopier execution, Just My Luck imagines a world where fate operates like a party trick—and intelligence is optional. Lindsay Lohan plays Ashley, a junior PR associate with absurdly good fortune. She wins raffles by walking past them, never waits in line, and treats luck like a personal brand she’s tired of wearing. Across town, Jake (Chris Pine) manages a British band called McFly and can’t catch a break—though how he landed a gig managing a prepackaged pop act with a frontman who sings like he’s pinching his nose is a question the film doesn’t pause long enough to ask. The plot hinges on a masquerade ball, where Ashley’s firm is hosting a record executive and Jake sneaks in hoping to score a moment of career-changing luck. They kiss—just once, mid-dance, masks on—and their fortunes swap. Ashley’s charmed life short-circuits. Jake suddenly gets noticed. And we’re left watching a woman adjust to the horrors of average luck, which mostly means making a series of idiotic decisions. She tosses a flaming hairdryer into a wet bathtub. She waxes a floor in stilettos. She mocks an art piece at its own unveiling and is shocked when the artist hears. It’s a montage of choices that would get most people sued, fired, or dead. She catches on that her luck was stolen via kiss, but doesn’t know by whom, so she kiss-attacks a string of suspects like a rom-com predator. When she finally re-encounters the real culprit—Jake, of course—there’s a flicker of romantic chemistry, or at least the musical cue for it. Too harmless to fully hate, but too clumsy to enjoy, Just My Luck stumbles through its own setup and manages to be both cartoonish and light on laughs. It’s not the worst thing you’ll ever watch—but you’ll question why you didn’t change the channel.

Twelfth Night in a letterman jacket—cross-dressing, mistaken identity, unrequited love, and one of the more convincing gender disguises in ‘80s teen comedy. Terry (Joyce Hyser) is a high school journalist who suspects her article got rejected not for quality, but for gender. So she cuts her hair, borrows some boxers, transfers schools, and rebrands herself as “Terrence”—male student, undercover writer, and unwitting object of romantic confusion. Her brother (Billy Jacoby), a teen perv in training, offers helpful lessons in locker-room swagger, and Terry blends in surprisingly well. She fumbles showers, sidesteps locker-room exposure, dodges an aggressive girl with a crush, and quietly pines for a sweet, slightly dopey guy named Rick (Clayton Rohner), who thinks she’s just his oddly sensitive new best friend. Meanwhile, Rick is busy nursing his own crush on the school’s queen bee, and Terry watches in silence as he confides in her about it. Add one possessive boyfriend, a gym teacher preaching the gospel of bowling with glassy-eyed fervor, and William Zabka doing his patented karate-adjacent high school villain routine, and you’ve got the setup. The journalism contest—Terry’s whole reason for cross-dressing—mostly vanishes after act one, only reappearing in the eleventh hour like a thread someone forgot to tie off. Ordinarily, that’d be a problem. Here, it’s a feature. The detour becomes the movie: how she blends in, what she observes, how everything shifts when she’s no longer perceived as a girl. The laughs come not just from mistaken identity, but from watching her navigate the dumb, weird pressure of masculinity. The movie doesn’t dig deep—it’s not that kind of teen comedy—but it’s sharper than expected, and buoyant enough to float past its own contrivances. The side characters are pure ‘80s cafeteria excess in the best way: a geek with a thing for amphibians, two stoners claiming alien heritage and a beer-based mission, and a journalism teacher who unknowingly undercuts her entire theory by saying exactly what the last one did. The whole thing plays like cinematic junk food—salty, ridiculous, gone too fast—but it’s good junk food. The kind with better seasoning and smarter packaging.