Film Buff Musings

A Cold War submarine thriller told entirely from the Soviet side, K‑19: The Widowmaker is a curious project—not just because it’s a Hollywood film with no American heroes, but because it takes that setup completely at face value. It’s earnest, mechanical, and—when it clicks—genuinely gripping. Set in 1961, it follows the maiden voyage of the K-19, the USSR’s first nuclear missile sub, rushed into commission and barely held together. The mission is simple: break through Arctic ice, fire a test missile, then patrol the North Atlantic within striking range of Washington. Harrison Ford, attempting a Russian accent that fades in and out like a dying signal, plays Captain Vostrikov, brought in to replace the crew’s original commander (Liam Neeson) and assert Party authority. The men aren’t thrilled. What follows is familiar: narrow corridors, sharp glances, rising unease. But once the reactor coolant system fails, the movie shifts from military routine to procedural panic. The threat isn’t external—it’s the sub itself. Radiation leaks. Sacrifices are made. No alarms, no swelling speeches—just sweat, urgency, and orders shouted into stale air. It’s a stuffy film, both literally and tonally, but there’s something oddly satisfying in its devotion to claustrophobia. The tension builds in slow, queasy pulses—some effective, others dulled by repetition. It never quite shakes its own rigidity. But for genre devotees—submarine completists, Cold War gloom enthusiasts—it’s a solid entry: serious, sealed tight, and mostly unblinking. Not quite thrilling, at least not consistently, but the pressure holds.

Kevin Spacey plays Prot, a man in tinted sunglasses who appears at Grand Central Station calmly informing bystanders that he’s from a planet called K-PAX, 1,000 light years away in the Lyra constellation. He isn’t raving. He speaks with the unhurried precision of someone outlining a commute. When he starts correcting a police officer’s astronomy, he’s quietly escorted to a psychiatric hospital and classified as high-functioning delusional—the clinical way of saying: rational, articulate, and completely out of his mind. But Prot doesn’t act like a fantasist. He answers every question with steady calm, speaks in the clipped, bemused tone of someone indulging slower minds, and spins out astronomical theories so advanced that Dr. Powell (Jeff Bridges) has to phone an observatory just to follow the logic. Prot is either deeply informed or disturbingly good at improv. He also claims he’ll be leaving Earth on July 27—and taking one fellow patient with him. Powell, sensing the date may mark something far more earthbound (and final), begins digging into who Prot really is. While Powell hunts for answers, Prot glides through the ward like a visiting sage, listening, soothing, gently reframing. It’s Cuckoo’s Nest without the cruelty, rebellion, or edge—just a soft mist of cosmic metaphor. Spacey anchors it all with a kind of cryptic benevolence, more magnetic than the movie around him, which toggles between metaphysical parable and trauma study without ever fully committing to either. The central mystery—Is he or isn’t he?—hovers like it matters, though by the end it hardly feels like it does. K-PAX has its watchable moments, and it’s not without ambition. It wants to be profound and comforting at once, but it’s too cautious to pull off either. Just ambiguous enough to pass for insight, and just neat enough to avoid anything messier. A cosmic shaggy-dog story dressed as revelation—half-sketched, half-serene, and gone by morning.

Will Ferrell, peddling vitamins and childhood baggage, plays Phil Weston—a man whose formative years were shaped by his father Buck (Robert Duvall), a silver-haired tyrant who treats youth soccer like war games with juice boxes. When Buck snatches Phil’s son for his own team without so much as a warning kick, Phil doesn’t whine—he retaliates, clipboard in hand. His new squad is the league’s least promising: fidgety, unfocused, and barely soccer-adjacent. Enter neighbor Mike Ditka—playing himself—who signs on not because he loves soccer (he doesn’t), but because he enjoys irritating Buck more than most people enjoy vacations. Ditka storms the field with NFL energy and a bottomless cappuccino, coaching kids like he’s prepping them for Sunday Night Football. Phil spirals. He trades self-doubt for matching tracksuits, mainlines espresso like it’s his birthright, and starts barking at referees like a man trying to retroactively parent himself through organized athletics. Ferrell, in full twitchy bloom, turns masculine insecurity into slapstick pathology. The arc runs from pushover to tyrant to confused human again, and the movie lives in the whiplash. The framework is familiar—underdog team, volatile coaching duo, sports-as-healing—but it’s played with such full-volume absurdity that the usual soft-focus moralizing barely registers. The plot doesn’t so much develop as rush forward, powered by caffeine and humiliation, with a few misty-eyed lessons folded in like napkins. A kids’ sports movie disguised as a therapy session in cleats, Kicking & Screaming isn’t profound, but it’s fast, loud, and strangely watchable. The funniest thing isn’t the soccer—it’s watching grown men implode over past grievances while their ten-year-olds look on, waiting for the orange slices.

Kid Colter exudes a peculiar allure, an earnest family adventure that propels itself beyond its inherent limitations through sheer conviction. The acting is stiff, the premise wildly implausible, yet it remains watchable from start to finish—a minor miracle swathed in flannel and sincerity. Jeremy Shamos plays Justin Colter, a Boston teenager dispatched for a summer in the Pacific Northwest with his outdoorsy father, Bill (Jim Stafford). Their relationship brims with a wholesomeness that feels almost radical now. They hike side by side, exchange heartfelt wisdom, and even break into song—literally—when Bill, a real-life country musician, pulls out his guitar to serenade his son about paternal love. Then the plot veers. Justin stumbles into a spy plot—yes, really—and is kidnapped by agents who stash him in the woods with a pair of backwoods brutes apparently contracted to kill a teenager. From here, Kid Colter morphs into a boy-versus-wilderness survival tale replete with gadgets, booby traps, and vague government intrigue. The tonal shift is abrupt, replacing the movie’s gentle rhythm with cartoonish momentum. It might have been stronger if it had simply stayed in the father-son lane, letting its sweetness be the story. Instead, it tries to braid espionage into an after-school special and concludes on a note so bleak and strange it feels at odds with everything before it. The ending gestures at disillusionment, maybe paranoia, and loosens whatever emotional clarity it spent the first hour building. Still, there’s something admirable about it. Shamos is a likable presence—sharp, decent, watchful. His transformation into a junior mountain man has a scrappy appeal, especially for younger viewers who might see themselves in his quiet resolve. The movie doesn’t quite know what it is, but you can feel it trying. And in its own clunky, crooked way, it works—just not how or where you’d expect.

Kidco is a pint-sized ode to capitalism, less a kids’ movie than a sugar-coated pamphlet on deregulation. Imagine Atlas Shrugged rewritten in crayon and performed by middle schoolers in saddle shoes. Scott Schwartz (he of A Christmas Story tongue-on-a-flagpole fame) stars as Dickie, a 12-year-old entrepreneur with a gift for monetizing anything not bolted down. After getting caught running a Keno racket at school, he’s forced to pivot—no more cons, only commerce. Opportunity arrives in the form of horse manure. Literally. His father owns a ranch, the local fertilizer company’s been gouging rates, and suddenly Dickie sees gold in the compost pile. He recruits his siblings, forms a company, and starts undercutting the market. Their first client: a country club. Then the orders pile in. They become local celebrities, give interviews, make bank—and then, of course, the IRS arrives with clipboards and sour faces. The climax unfolds in court, where Kidco goes head-to-head with the government in what can only be described as a playground libertarian’s fantasy sequence. By the time Dickie declares, “The United States could have been the greatest country in the world, but they had to go and bust Kidco,” you half-expect Ronald Reagan to leap out of the jury box for a standing ovation. The filmmaking is clumsy, the dialogue often sounds like it’s been workshopped by a sixth-grade debate team, and yet the sheer weirdness keeps you watching. It’s impossible to loathe a movie this earnest about entrepreneurial manure. And while its politics are ridiculous, its confidence is—oddly—infectious.

A mid-budget Canadian thriller with a high-concept title and a cast that offers gravitas at a discount: William Shatner, Hal Holbrook, and Van Johnson, all delivering performances that hover between professional and slightly stiff. The Kidnapping of the President plays like a Cold War-era TV movie scaled up just enough to resemble a theatrical release. The tone is serious, the stakes are global, and the execution lands somewhere between Mission: Impossible and an airport paperback. Shatner stars as Jerry O’Connor, a Secret Service agent in constant motion. He storms through rooms, barks orders, and squints so hard it feels like he’s trying to out-think the script. Say what you will about Shatner, but he never plays passive. There’s a kind of conviction in his presence—an insistence that every threat be met with furrowed brows and maximum temple strain. The premise is straightforward. Terrorists have planted a bomb in a truck and taken the President of the United States—played with composed authority by Hal Holbrook—hostage. Their goal is regime disruption. The film’s goal is suspense. It gets halfway to both. Van Johnson appears as the Vice President, who’s quietly maneuvering through the chain-of-command implications back in Washington. His role is less about screen time than function, but it matters. The film cuts between Holbrook trapped inside the vehicle, Shatner glaring at maps, and various government aides standing in dark rooms whispering things like “We’re running out of time.” The script is rudimentary, but earnest. Dialogue tends toward the utilitarian, and the pacing lurches from urgent to sedate and back again. There’s no real momentum—just a sequence of grim declarations, televised countdowns, and the occasional explosion to remind you it’s technically an action movie. And yet, for all its missteps, The Kidnapping of the President holds your attention. It’s the kind of film you put on while folding laundry and end up watching to the end, almost in spite of yourself. The plotting is predictable, the suspense manufactured, but it scratches a certain B-movie itch. You could talk over most of it without missing anything vital, and in the right company, that might actually enhance the experience. It’s not a good movie, but it’s oddly watchable. And it’s a testament to Shatner that even in a film this shaky, he gives it everything he’s got. The man could glare a national crisis into submission.

A deliriously blood-soaked mixtape of every movie Quentin Tarantino ever rented twice—kung fu flicks, grindhouse pulp, spaghetti westerns, anime, revenge melodrama—stitched together with a samurai blade and dipped in style. Kill Bill: Volume 1 doesn’t so much borrow from its influences as swan-dive into them face-first, grinning through every gash and geyser. Uma Thurman plays The Bride, a former assassin left for dead after her old colleagues—on the payroll of one Bill (David Carradine)—crash her wedding rehearsal and do everything but stick a bow on the body. Four years later, she jolts awake from a coma and limps out of the hospital with one item on her to-do list: kill Bill. But Bill’s not exactly on speed dial, and before she can get to him, she’ll have to slice her way through his roster of lethal subordinates—who also happen to be her former coworkers. What follows is less a linear narrative than a blood-spattered opera in chapters. The Bride first clashes with a former colleague turned suburban mom (Vivica A. Fox), in a kitchen where the knives are as accessible as the cereal boxes. Later, she storms a Tokyo nightclub to confront O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), now a yakuza boss with a trauma file and a battalion of sword-wielding bodyguards in tailored suits. There’s also Gogo Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama), a schoolgirl with a steel ball on a chain and no moral center. Every scene is its own genre exercise, and somehow they all cohere—thanks largely to Tarantino’s compulsive eye for rhythm, language, and precisely how long a decapitated head should roll. It’s stylized, savage, and ridiculous by design—but never boring. The humor is arch, the dialogue florid, the editing surgical. Whether the two-volume release was a financial ploy or an artistic decision (probably both), it’s clear this thing was meant to be taken in doses. This is just the first swing of the blade—Volume 2 is where the blade starts to twist.

The second half of Quentin Tarantino’s blood-splattered revenge saga trades the comic-book mayhem of Vol. 1 for something sharper and stranger: a pulp epic that slows down just enough to savor its characters before they all kill each other. It kicks off, fittingly, with The Bride (Uma Thurman) reminding us where we left off—her hit list mostly ticked off, her katana still hungry, and Bill (David Carradine) still breathing somewhere out there. Thurman’s voiceover, drenched in Tarantino’s ornate verbiage, is almost a bonus: a fairy tale recap, equal parts romantic and homicidal. What follows is less a parade of showy bloodletting—though there’s still plenty—than a patient unspooling of grudges, betrayals, and old wounds you can feel throbbing under the monologues. If the first film was kung fu choreography and arterial spray, this one’s coiled tension and barbed conversation. The Bride’s journey detours through the mountain lair of Pai Mei (Gordon Liu, magnificent parody and homage rolled into one), a kung fu master with a beard that could pass for its own weapon. What he teaches her—discipline, humility, and a very nasty trick with her fingers—proves useful when she squares off against her nastiest rival yet: Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah, channeling snake venom with a smile). Their trailer fight is the ugliest, funniest, most deliciously savage showdown Tarantino ever cooked up, capped by an unforgettable, literally eye-popping flourish. And then there’s Bill. No big final duel in some neon-lit dojo, no slo-mo death ballet—just a hushed, wounded conversation between two killers who were almost something gentler once. Carradine brings a sad, mythic weight to a man you half wish The Bride wouldn’t finish off, even knowing she must. It’s tempting to tally up Tarantino’s homages—kung fu flicks, Sergio Leone, grindhouse grit—but it barely matters when the final product feels so singular. Vol. 2 isn’t just the payback chapter; it’s the bruised, surprising soul of the whole bloody saga.

A film like this doesn’t need embellishment—it just needs to get out of its own way. The story, drawn from history so brutal it barely needs dramatizing, follows two journalists—American Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) and Cambodian Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor)—as they try to cover the U.S. bombings in Cambodia, only to watch the country fall into the hands of the Khmer Rouge. For Schanberg, there’s a plane out. For Pran, there isn’t. It’s hard not to be pulled in. The images are wide and cruel: golden landscapes scorched by something invisible, children staring back from the other side of freedom. When the film is clear-eyed, it’s devastating. And when it falters—when the pacing slackens or Mike Oldfield’s synth-laced score starts yelping over the wrong scene—it’s frustrating, because you can feel the power sitting right there, waiting to be let through. Waterston gives it his all, sometimes too much of it—he performs like a man who’s read the script a few too many times. Ngor, a doctor with no acting experience and a survivor of the very genocide being depicted, doesn’t have to try. He just exists inside the role, and every step he takes through those muddy fields registers as real. History stops being distant and starts staring back—and he’s right in its path. The film visits the actual Killing Fields only briefly, but once is enough. This is hardly a subtle film, but subtlety would’ve been a lie.

It’s one of those premises that sells itself: Arnold Schwarzenegger, all grit and granite, goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher. Cue the mayhem, right? Or at least some hilarity involving glue sticks and nap-time insubordination. But Kindergarten Cop doesn’t do nearly enough with its golden setup, spinning a potentially sharp comedy into something woefully soggy and half-cooked. Schwarzenegger plays John Kimble, a Los Angeles detective with a trench coat full of grunts and a vendetta against a drug dealer so cartoonishly evil he should come with a decoder ring. The case takes him to Oregon, where the dealer’s ex-wife is hiding out with their son, and Kimble’s best way in is through a chalkboard and a row of juice-box warriors. The film is front-loaded with promise—Schwarzenegger stomping through lesson plans like he’s prepping for a hostage rescue—but then the script hands him a scene where he sighs, slumps on a park bench, and mutters that the children are “walking all over him.” By that point, the kids have done little more than squeal, stack blocks, and deliver non sequiturs about anatomy. You’d think he’d been waterboarded. There’s a romance, of course—Penelope Ann Miller as the sweet teacher-slash-mother-slash-plot device. There’s a partner (Pamela Reed) who gets all the lines that sound like they should’ve come from a better comedy. And there’s a climax involving fire alarms, gym mats, and a predictably shirtless villain played by Richard Tyson, whose ponytail does most of the emoting. It’s not a bad time, exactly. There’s a warm glow over everything, as if someone smeared Vaseline on the lens and whispered, “Family-friendly.” And Schwarzenegger, baffled by finger painting, is a good enough joke to carry things partway. But the script runs on autopilot, and what should have been a riot ends up more like recess—passably amusing, vaguely structured, and overlong by at least 20 minutes.

The Kindergarten Teacher follows Nira, who teaches kindergarten, reads poetry, and drifts through a life that feels quietly misaligned. Then one afternoon, a boy in her class—five, maybe six—stands up during free play and recites a poem. Not a jingle, not a rhyme about birds or balloons, but something raw and strange, the kind of thing that might float out of the mouth of a lonely spinster in a third-floor walk-up. The boy, Yoav, becomes her fixation. She writes down his poems, begins reciting them in her adult poetry class. At first, it’s not vanity she’s chasing—just confirmation. That these words, this eerie beauty, aren’t figments of her own projection. But validation gives way to obsession, and soon Nira is inserting herself into Yoav’s life with a quiet but growing intensity. She questions his nanny. She investigates his father. She volunteers to babysit. She becomes the only one willing to recognize what she sees as genius. And that’s the problem. Lapid’s film inches toward discomfort with eerie grace. Dialogue is minimal, silences loaded. Nira is neither villain nor martyr; she’s a vessel for a peculiar kind of hunger—one that longs to protect something luminous before the world drowns it in mediocrity. But what starts as a noble impulse turns possessive, then vaguely coercive, and eventually disturbing. The narrative resists melodrama, trading it instead for long, static takes and clinical detachment. The unease comes not from dramatic music cues or narrative twists, but from the sense that we understand Nira’s motives—and that they’re not entirely wrong. The line between nurture and control becomes porous, and watching her cross it is what gives the film its slow, bruising power. Uncomfortable, yes. But unusually thoughtful. A story about art, obsession, and the dangerous impulse to cultivate brilliance by force. In Hebrew with English subtitles.

There’s Yul Brynner in gold-trimmed robes and bare feet, occupying the screen like it was built just to reflect him back. His King Mongkut is imperious one moment, inquisitive the next—equal parts sovereign and stubborn schoolboy. He doesn’t so much command the frame as make it feel slightly too small to contain him. Brynner’s performance cuts through the brocade and fanfare, shaping The King and I into something sharper than its silk and sweetness suggest. The premise is as delicate as a fan dance: an English schoolteacher named Anna (Deborah Kerr, all corseted poise and moral backbone) arrives in 19th-century Siam to educate the King’s fifteen children. Her curriculum includes Western geography and etiquette, which confuses the children (“Snow?” one asks, reasonably, “If it existed, wouldn’t we have seen it?”). Anna clashes with the King—on customs, on gender roles, on nearly everything—but they gradually develop a relationship defined by mutual fascination, mild exasperation, and one waltz too many. Rodgers and Hammerstein lace the film with their usual elegance, though the songs feel more serviceable than sensational. “Getting to Know You,” “I Whistle a Happy Tune,” “Hello, Young Lovers”—lovely, but lacking the emotional combustion of the duo’s finest work. Still, the production is a feast: lavish sets, meticulous costumes, and one jaw-dropping interlude—Tuptim’s retelling of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, filtered through a Siamese aesthetic, as if Harriet Beecher Stowe had been rewritten by a troupe of royal dancers with a flair for theatrical metaphor. The romance never quite smolders—Rodgers and Hammerstein seem oddly shy here, perhaps because they grafted the love story onto material that didn’t need it. But the cultural exchange is where the real story lives. Respect, misunderstanding, correction, growth. An imperialist fantasy, yes, but with an unusual grace note: the idea that power means little without curiosity, and learning might just go both ways.

There’s nothing quite like The King and the Mockingbird, a French animated marvel that pirouettes between fairy tale, satire, and surrealist playground. Directed by Paul Grimault and adapted from a Hans Christian Andersen story, the film took three decades to finish—and every frame feels like it waited patiently to be seen. The story begins in a kingdom ruled by a narcissistic, cross-eyed tyrant, so universally despised he keeps no mirrors and collects only paintings that flatter. At night, his artwork comes alive. In one corner of his private gallery, a shepherdess and a chimney sweep fall in love and escape their gilded frames, hand in hand. But trouble stirs when a portrait of the king—corrected eyes and all—steps down from its perch, overthrows the real monarch, and begins hunting the couple with all the obsession of a jilted stalker in velvet robes. Enter the mockingbird. Wise, feathered, and blessed with the sort of withering sarcasm monarchs tend to deserve, he becomes the unlikely revolutionary, siding with the lovers and sabotaging the king’s ever-escalating schemes. The visuals shift constantly—expressionist towers, Escher-like staircases, mechanical lions, a silent dystopia beneath the castle—and it’s not hard to see why Hayao Miyazaki lists this film among his inspirations. The animation has the texture of a dream where logic gives way to feeling, and machines creak like metaphors waiting to happen. The King and the Mockingbird might have taken thirty years to complete, but its imagination doesn’t show its age. It’s romantic, subversive, and unmistakably handmade—a fable not just about tyranny, but the quiet revolt of beauty, love, and wit. For animation historians, it’s essential. For everyone else, it’s a reminder that animation, at its best, doesn’t just dazzle—it rebels.

Big, joyless, and shaped like prestige—but without the pleasure. King Arthur doesn’t retell the myth so much as drag it backward through a history book and leave the poetry behind. No dragons, no wizardry, no courtly round table—just boots in the slush of a retreating Roman frontier. The magic is gone. What’s left is cavalry strategy, imperial fallout, and the occasional lecture on freedom. It trades wonder for mud. Arthur, now a Roman cavalry officer stationed at the empire’s edge, is sent north to retrieve an imperiled Roman family. His knights—Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, and the rest—are repurposed as fellow conscripts, though the film gives them so little character shading they might as well be named Sword #1 through #6. Guinevere (Keira Knightley) is introduced in chains, covered in ash, and reemerges as a face-painted warrior with a bow and the sort of leather wardrobe that only exists in Hollywood archaeology. She joins the fight. No one blinks. To its credit, the film commits to its pseudo-historical framing. The scale is substantial, the battle choreography clear and brutal. There are siege weapons, galloping charges, sweeping aerial shots. But spectacle without tension is just noise. The script trudges through exposition, trying to assign moral complexity to a plot that barely registers as a story. What’s meant to feel gritty and revisionist ends up drained of energy—and oddly self-serious, like someone trying to win an argument about a legend no one told them they had to fix. It’s not the worst idea for an Arthur movie. Just the least entertaining.

Trying to recount King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is like waking from a particularly vivid nap and attempting to explain your dream before it dissolves. It begins with a siege on Camelot involving elephants the size of office buildings, a collapsing stone bridge, and a sorcerer-king who sacrifices family members to an aquatic octo-witch. This is not your father’s Arthurian tale. Jude Law plays Vortigern, whose path to power is paved in ritual murder and gothic mood lighting. He kills his brother, the king, and claims the throne. Meanwhile, the rightful heir—young Arthur—is raised in a brothel, developing fast hands, street smarts, and a reluctance to believe in anything larger than himself. But fate drags him back into myth the moment he yanks Excalibur from the stone and promptly faints. From there, Guy Ritchie takes the wheel and floors it. The story ping-pongs through time with jagged flashbacks, jaggeder montages, and jaggedest voiceovers—narration so sped-up it feels like someone accidentally hit 1.5x playback. Arthur tries to toss the sword into the ocean. The Lady of the Lake promptly tosses it back. There’s a rebellion. A training sequence. A hallucinatory trip into sword-powered trauma. At one point, Arthur slashes through a dozen soldiers with such feral precision it’s like the sword is swinging him. Charlie Hunnam growls, glowers, and occasionally grins through the confusion, while Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey, shrouded in mystery and exposition, speaks like she’s just woken from a vision. And while none of it makes much narrative sense, the film has a berserk confidence. But it’s also messy and difficult to make heads or tails of, and while there’s some appeal in the grime-and-sorcery aesthetic, and Hunnam does a fine job trying to hold the center, the whole thing feels like it was edited with a stopwatch and storyboarded on napkins. The result is less a reimagining than a barrage: a big, clanging spectacle that wants to be mythic but doesn’t slow down long enough to feel like anything more than noise.

They remade King Kong with the same skeleton, padded it with thirty extra minutes, and still ended up with a film that somehow feels smaller. The bones are familiar: a voyage to a mysterious island, a wall meant to keep something enormous at bay, a beauty plucked from the outsiders to be offered up as sacrifice. But the muscle is different. In place of a crazed filmmaker chasing exotic footage, we get Charles Grodin as a smarmy oil executive convinced Skull Island is hiding a fortune in crude. Along for the ride is Jeff Bridges as an idealistic environmentalist who already suspects there’s something oversized moving through the jungle—though Grodin’s sure he’s just a corporate spy. Halfway to the island, they haul in a life raft carrying Jessica Lange—bubbly, ambitious, and claiming her yacht exploded under mysterious circumstances. When they reach Skull Island, the locals, walled in against what’s out there, take a keen interest in their new blonde visitor. To them, she’s not a guest—she’s an offering. It’s a capable update, but it never catches the primal charge of the 1933 original. The widescreen color photography is handsome, the then-modern effects serviceable (though the ’33 stop-motion still astonishes in its raw, hand-built way). The pace is looser, the action less breathless, and while the fantasy still works, it doesn’t demand rewatching. Not essential Kong, but not disposable either. If you like creature features, it’s worth a single climb up the wall.

At 188 minutes, Peter Jackson’s King Kong isn’t just a remake—it’s a monument. Not so much a reimagining as an epic inflation. What began life as a scrappy genre picture now arrives dressed like a Biblical saga, and spends over an hour tiptoeing around its titular beast. The ape is a no-show until Act II, but not for lack of build-up: Jackson takes his time introducing the humans—cast to perfection, developed to adequacy—and has them shuffle through Depression-era soundstages with wide-eyed awe and florid exposition. Carl Denham (Jack Black, opportunistic and borderline manic) is a fledgling filmmaker with a talent for running from financiers and talking over everyone else. When his backers threaten to pull the plug, he steals his own reels and charters a ship to Skull Island, dragging along a scriptwriter (Adrien Brody, playing the reluctant romantic) and a struggling vaudeville actress named Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), who looks like she just stepped out of a silent film and into a bad idea. The film divides cleanly into three movements: the voyage, the island, and the aftermath. The Skull Island sequence is the main attraction—a CGI bacchanal of vine-covered cliffs, insect pits, and predators the size of locomotives. There’s one scene involving a dinosaur stampede that plays like a rendering test that forgot to be finished—actors digitally skittering through the chaos like marionettes dodging bowling balls—but otherwise, the effects are sumptuous. Kong himself is the masterpiece: a scarred colossus with a hunched gait and mournful eyes. His face does more acting than half the cast. Back in New York, we get the obligatory downfall. Kong in chains, Kong on stage, Kong on the Empire State Building doing what must be done. Jackson sticks the landing—not because it surprises, but because it knows not to try. Bloated, yes. But also weirdly sincere. An oversized adventure that treats spectacle like scripture, and a monster movie that’s less interested in destruction than in melancholy. It’s too long, too much, and often too proud of itself. Still, when Kong swats at biplanes and sways above Manhattan with Ann in his palm, there’s that rare thing: grandeur that feels earned.

Rupert Pupkin isn’t a stalker. He’s a professional—just ask him. All he needs is a stage, a captive audience, and the host’s chair, preferably still warm. Robert De Niro plays Pupkin as a man so wrapped up in ambition that reality barely gets a foot in the door. He isn’t dangerous in the traditional sense—he’s courteous, patient, eager to please—but everything he says has the disjointed rhythm of someone rehearsing life instead of living it. Rupert Pupkin wants to be famous, specifically as a late-night talk show host. His method is less bootstraps than boomerang: he aims for the top and expects to land there on charm, persistence, and whatever delusion is driving the engine. He latches onto Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), a national celebrity and the host of the show Pupkin wants to co-opt. When polite stalking doesn’t work, he escalates—eventually teaming up with an equally obsessed Sandra Bernhard to kidnap Langford and hold him hostage until Pupkin gets a shot at the spotlight. His big break, televised at gunpoint. Scorsese plays it straight, which makes it funnier. The setups feel normal—talk shows, limos, waiting rooms—but everything’s just a little off. The satire isn’t loud. It hangs there quietly, like someone laughing a little too late at their own joke. Fame, entitlement, the illusion of intimacy—it’s all played straight. It’s just tilted enough to make you shift in your seat. De Niro’s performance is uncanny. He doesn’t play Pupkin like a caricature of madness. He plays him like a man who thinks he’s being perfectly reasonable. Lewis is exceptional too—stoic, withdrawn, visibly exhausted by the weight of being wanted. And Bernhard is a chaos agent in heels and lipstick, leaping between sensual and unhinged with a grin. The movie flopped in ’83. It’s now one of Scorsese’s most reappraised films—and one of his quietest triumphs. No violence, no mobsters, no gunfire. Just desperation, ambition, and the uncomfortable clarity of a camera that doesn’t look away.

Before Shaolin Soccer turned him into a global phenomenon, Stephen Chow made King of Comedy—a film that, despite the title, often feels more like an exercise in tonal confusion than comic invention. Chow stars as Wan Tin-Sau, an aspiring actor who treats his day-player background gigs with the zeal of someone preparing for Hamlet. He’s earnest to a fault, obliviously pedantic, and so tethered to “craft” that he becomes a punchline within the film industry he worships. Naturally, this makes him a perfect candidate for greatness. The humor is there, technically—oddball, deadpan, occasionally surreal—but it doesn’t always register. Unlike the elastic slapstick and genre fusion that made Shaolin Soccer a hit with international audiences, King of Comedy feels tightly tied to a cultural sensibility I couldn’t quite access. Maybe that’s on me, a “dumb American,” as the film might suggest between the lines. But it’s hard to shake the sense that Chow hadn’t yet figured out how to translate his comic instincts beyond a local audience. Wan Tin-Sau himself is also something of a barrier. He’s not quite sympathetic, not quite funny, not quite anything. His single-mindedness reads more as alienating than endearing, and while his rise from background filler to accidental leading man has its moments, the arc feels oddly disconnected—an origin story sketched in pencil and never quite inked. There is, however, one brief highlight: a Jackie Chan cameo that nods to his own early days as an uncredited extra. It’s a quick gag, but for fans, it’s a welcome surprise—more amusing than most of what surrounds it. In the end, King of Comedy plays less like a finished film and more like a test reel. The ingredients are visible—ambition, absurdity, meta-commentary—but the mixture never quite sets. It’s a film with flashes of personality, but little staying power. You see where Chow is heading. He’s just not there yet.

King Rat is a prison-camp drama less interested in heroics than in hierarchies—the kind that emerge when institutions collapse and survival becomes an individual sport. Set in a Japanese POW camp during World War II, the film inverts the traditional military chain of command. Outside the wire, rank determines everything. Inside, it’s all about hustle. George Segal plays Corporal King, a smooth, unflappable American who’s turned black marketeering into an art form. He trades, he brokers, he charms. While British officers wither under the rules they’re still trying to enforce, King flourishes by ignoring them. Segal plays him with the kind of easy arrogance that invites both admiration and unease. He’s not a villain, exactly—just someone who figured out the game faster than everyone else and decided not to share the manual. Around him are men too broken, principled, or cautious to follow suit. Some envy him. Others tolerate him out of necessity. A few try, with varying degrees of success, to resist his pull. The camp becomes its own microstate, with King as its de facto merchant prince—distributing favors, medicine, and morale in exchange for quiet allegiance. The film is episodic by design, moving from moment to moment rather than building toward a single dramatic peak. That works in stretches, especially when the moral ambiguity is allowed to hang in the air. But the structure softens the impact. Scenes drift. The tension sags. When the war ends and King is suddenly irrelevant, the film lands on a final irony that should sting more than it does. Still, the core idea is strong: that power is situational, that ethics bend under pressure, and that even the most adaptable survivors eventually run out of context. King Rat may sprawl, but when it hits, it cuts deep.

An engaging slice of vintage imperialist adventure, King Solomon’s Mines (1937) marches through the African continent with maps in one hand and myth in the other. Cedric Hardwicke, all stiff upper lip and weather-beaten composure, plays Allan Quartermain—a seasoned British explorer who treats danger like a familiar dinner guest. His mission is to locate the legendary mines of King Solomon, rumored to be packed with enough treasure to bankrupt gold itself. The film doesn’t break any narrative ground, but it covers a lot of terrain: dusty savannas, jungle thickets, parched deserts, and tribal kingdoms with populations large enough to justify their own census. It’s a scenic tour of danger and wonder, all lavishly mounted, with production values that outpace many of its contemporaries. Paul Robeson shows up, solemn and magnetic, and sings a few numbers along the way. His voice still echoes like it was carved from a canyon wall, though the songs themselves don’t quite rise to the occasion—less spiritual uplift, more narrative filler. Still, his presence adds a gravity the movie sometimes forgets it has. Tensions escalate in the final third when Quartermain and company cross into forbidden territory and encounter the film’s most memorable figure: Gagool, played with delicious menace by Sydney Fairbrother. A malevolent crone wielding a giraffe’s tail like a conductor’s baton, she need only flick it toward someone to seal their doom. Her personal army takes care of the logistics. The story doesn’t dig especially deep, but it delivers the spectacle: battles, betrayals, treasures that glint ominously. And though the colonial gaze is firmly in place, the movie remains a compelling time capsule—a sturdy artifact from a time when adventure meant maps, machetes, and the slow creep of moral ambiguity hidden beneath khaki.

A crude sports comedy with a decent hook, Kingpin casts Woody Harrelson as Roy Munson, a bowling prodigy turned one-handed washout after a hustling stunt goes south in the late ’70s. Fifteen years later, he’s reduced to schlepping gear out of his trunk and nursing the kind of hangover you don’t sleep off—only endure. Then he spots a ticket back: Ishmael (Randy Quaid), a towering Amish farm boy with perfect form, hayseed manners, and the instincts of a baby goat near traffic. The setup plays like a parody of The Color of Money, with beer guts and polyester swapped in for sleek cues and brooding swagger—and for a while, it rolls fine. The Farrelly Brothers go all-in on sight gags, sleaze, and their usual affection for human wreckage: plaid pants, nicotine breath, motel carpeting that looks like it sweats. Harrelson leans into the grime with gnarled conviction, while Bill Murray slinks through as rival bowler Ernie McCracken, sporting a grin that could stain linoleum and a hairpiece built for wind resistance. It’s funny—sometimes. The flashback of young Roy bowling in his backyard is a sharp touch, like Rockwell by way of Rip Taylor. But the film keeps stepping on its own timing. For every strike, there’s a misfire: a lazy gross-out, a bit that won’t die, a subplot that trails off mid-reel. The tone slips, the pacing wheezes, and too many jokes fizzle before they connect. You laugh, but it’s a delayed reaction. The movie jabs at its targets—bowling culture, sleazy mentors, Middle America in novelty socks—but never quite connects. It’s not the kind of comedy that sticks with you. It just drifts by in a waft of Aqua Velva and stale Bud Light.

The war’s still on, but Kings Go Forth is less concerned with enemy fire than the kind you catch standing next to someone better-looking. Frank Sinatra plays Lt. Sam Loggins, a straight-arrow officer posted in the French Alps. Routine duty, mud, tedium. Then along comes Sgt. Britt Harris (Tony Curtis)—smiling, swaggering, and just reckless enough to stroll into a minefield like he’s out for a smoke. He disobeys orders with a grin and somehow walks away clean. Even Loggins, watching from the sidelines, can’t quite hate him—there’s style to the recklessness. Then Monique appears. Played by Natalie Wood with grace and quiet resolve, she’s a local girl who seems demure at first—until she isn’t. There’s more to her than either man expects. Loggins makes the first move—earnest, a little stiff—but gets blindsided when she calmly reveals she’s half Black. It’s a detail the film treats with surprising directness, especially for 1958. While Loggins stalls, Harris swoops in, horn in hand—literally. One jazz solo later, he’s in her orbit and halfway to fiancé. What follows is less about who gets the girl than what kind of man thinks he deserves her. Harris is magnetic but slippery, all surface. Loggins broods and hesitates, noble to the point of paralysis. Monique, meanwhile, walks the fine line between character and symbol. Wood does what she can, but the script keeps her boxed in—more catalyst than equal player. The resolution lands with a certain grim logic, but it doesn’t shake the sense that the film’s playing with real themes—race, identity, integrity—without fully digging in. Still, there’s something in the tension, the alpine melancholy, and the way the triangle never quite balances. Not a lost classic, but a film worth revisiting.

So reverent it could’ve been funded by the Queen herself. The King’s Speech is prestige cinema with polished shoes and perfect posture—no irony, no satire, just a steady gaze on duty, lineage, and the sheer terror of public speaking. My instinct is to roll my eyes. But that’s too easy. Because it’s also confident, well-structured, and beautifully acted—even when it plays like the royal family’s most flattering diary entry. Colin Firth stars as Prince Albert, Duke of York—“Bertie” to the brave or the familial—and eventual King George VI, a man who stammered his way into a role he never asked for. Geoffrey Rush plays Lionel Logue, the blunt Australian speech therapist brought in to help untangle Bertie’s voice before the monarchy buckles under the pressure of a radio broadcast. Their early meetings aren’t cute. Bertie speaks down, Lionel refuses to flinch. It’s class warfare disguised as therapy. Bertie behaves like Lionel has parked himself too close to the crown—snappish, condescending, quietly cruel. It’s uncomfortable, and the film never really calls it what it is. But Bertie’s crisis isn’t just personal—it’s dynastic. A royal family built on ceremony and silence now has to conquer the airwaves. And Bertie, already burdened by the disappointment of a father (Michael Gambon, cold and spectral), the steadfast vigilance of a wife (Helena Bonham Carter, precise and knowing), and a brother who abdicates with a tan and a shrug (Guy Pearce), is suddenly at the center of everything. Logue’s methods—equal parts drama class and talk therapy—chip away at the armor. What emerges isn’t transformation but grit. The film doesn’t reach for psychodrama; it simply observes a man trying to function while the country waits to hear from him. There are grace notes: a volley of expletives, a coronation rehearsal turned sparring match, a friendship that builds through stubbornness more than sympathy. And beneath it, the idea that a stammer doesn’t disqualify a voice—it just makes speaking that much harder, and that much more necessary. It’s not great filmmaking, but it behaves like it is. Handsomely composed, tightly paced, and held upright by two superb performances. Regal, in its restraint. And entertaining enough to almost forget how carefully it’s curtsying.

Alfred Kinsey might not be a household name, but his fingerprints are all over modern American culture. In the 1940s, he did the unthinkable: he asked Americans to talk about sex, then he listened—and published the results. What followed was less a scandal than a national mirror held uncomfortably close. Kinsey is the story of the man behind the research—methodical, unflinching, and baffled by how little the scientific community knew about one of the most common human experiences. Liam Neeson plays Kinsey not with fire, but with surgical steadiness. He’s a scientist first, emotionally awkward and intellectually relentless, introduced studying gall wasps with the same obsessive rigor he’ll later apply to human sexuality. When Kinsey’s curiosity turns from insects to people, he doesn’t approach it with moral judgment or social caution—just questions. And data. Lots of data. His wife Clara, played by Laura Linney in a performance that’s quietly devastating, provides the film’s emotional ballast. Their relationship is prickly and intimate, defined by mutual respect and constant recalibration as Kinsey’s openness about sex—professionally and personally—begins to erode the boundaries most couples would rather leave standing. Bill Condon’s film is brisk and articulate, hitting the biopic formula without being strangled by it. It’s interested in ideas, not just timelines, and it treats its subject matter not as titillation but as cultural archaeology. There’s an ensemble of recognizable faces—Peter Sarsgaard, John Lithgow, Timothy Hutton—but the spotlight never wavers from the question at the film’s core: how did one awkward academic end up changing the entire conversation around sexuality? It doesn’t play like scandal. It plays like revelation. And in its smartest moments, Kinsey suggests that confronting taboo isn’t an act of defiance—it’s an act of curiosity, stripped of shame, and hungry for truth.

A miracle of hand-drawn animation and folk storytelling, Kirikou and the Sorceress is that rare animated film that refuses to condescend. Rooted in West African folklore and rendered in sumptuous color and fearless detail, Michel Ocelot’s film feels like a fable whispered around a fire—only with sharper dialogue and brighter ink. It opens in a grass hut, where a pregnant woman reclines in silence—until a voice calls out from within. Her unborn son, Kirikou, introduces himself and demands to be born. She tells him if he can speak, he can exit on his own. So, he does—emerging upright, self-sufficient, and already irritated by inefficiency. He insists she bathe him, then decides he’d rather handle it himself. Kirikou, for all his size (picture a newborn the height of a mango), is an unstoppable force. Precocious doesn’t begin to cover it—he’s a philosopher-warrior in a baby’s body, sprinting across the savanna to confront the sorceress Karaba, who has cursed his village and consumed most of its men, including his father. His uncle is next—unless Kirikou, fast as a hare and twice as stubborn, can intervene. The film strikes a miraculous tone: playful, lyrical, occasionally deadly serious. Kirikou’s boasts are outrageous, his victories improbable, and the joy of watching him outwit adults never runs dry. The villagers shift from scolding to song, and what begins as a simple quest spirals into something generous and mythic. Yes, the film is unflinching about nudity. No, it’s not remotely salacious. The human form is presented without judgment, as it is in many African traditions—matter-of-fact, unadorned, without a whisper of shame. That it caused a modest stir in the U.S. says more about our hangups than the film’s intentions. Kirikou’s confidence might be pint-sized, but it’s seismic. He barrels through fear, custom, even genre expectation, in search of truth. The result is something rare: an animated film that respects its audience’s intelligence as much as its culture’s folklore.

Utterly filthy and just as funny, Kiss Me, Stupid plays like a farce scripted by a grudge. It’s got the rhythm of a sex comedy and the soul of a back-alley deal, and I smiled viciously through most of it. Few comedies are this amused by their own bad behavior—fewer still earn it. The idea behind it is outrageous, a little bit evil, and very, very funny. Ray Walston plays Orville Spooner, a piano teacher and amateur songwriter with a fragile ego and a knockout wife, Zelda (Felicia Farr). When Vegas crooner Dino (Dean Martin, barely pretending he isn’t Dean Martin) passes through Climax, Nevada, Orville and his lyricist Barney (Cliff Osmond) see an opening—both for career advancement and catastrophic decisions. Barney, conveniently also a mechanic, sabotages Dino’s car to keep him in town. Orville, convinced the lecherous lounge lizard will make a move on Zelda, picks a fight with her and sends her to her mother’s. Then he hires local sex worker Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak) to pose as his wife. It’s a deranged setup, and the film charges ahead with sick glee—dragging its characters deeper into moral quicksand with every scene. The dialogue stings. The laughs are often loud and sometimes ugly. Dean Martin is a leering delight, Kim Novak gives Polly more dignity than the film probably deserves, and Walston looks like he’s about to break into a flop sweat in every scene. It runs long—two hours is a stretch for a story that’s essentially one long bad decision—and the ending, steeped in irony though it is, doesn’t quite land. But none of that dulls the effect. The film has a nasty glint in its eye, and watching it play out is half horror, half thrill. You don’t root for these characters so much as watch them squirm. Still, I enjoyed the hell out of it. Wilder doesn’t go soft, and the movie never blinks. It’s vicious, perverse, and entirely amused with itself—and I was too.

Two men in a cell. One talks; the other listens. It’s Brazil, under dictatorship. Valentin (Raul Julia) is a political prisoner—half-starved, upright, and unwilling to bend. Luis (William Hurt) is in for morals charges—light on his feet, quick with a story, and made of stronger stuff than anyone guesses. The guards want information from Valentin. Luis is asked to help extract it. He doesn’t exactly refuse—he just has other plans. Most of the film stays in that cell. Luis passes the time recounting old movies—Nazis, doomed love, velvet shadows—and the film cuts away to his imagined reels in dreamy bursts of Technicolor kitsch. They aren’t just distractions. They’re his defense, his seduction, his contribution to a world where escape comes frame by frame. Valentin plays the cynic, but the two form something between camaraderie and complicity. It’s talky, theatrical, and deliberately confined. But it pulses with tension—emotional, political, erotic. Hurt plays Luis with disarming elegance, never begging for sympathy but somehow earning it. Julia grounds the story, his weariness edged with conviction. Both are excellent, and the power struggle between them shifts gradually—then flips. The film slips a bit in the final stretch, padding its lead-up and softening the final blow. But when the ending hits, it lands hard. A final fantasy, then a final silence. When the spell breaks, what’s left is clarity.

Susan (Suzanna Ling) keeps tarantulas the way other girls keep diaries—quietly, obsessively, and with escalating implications. She’s a soft-spoken teenager with a thousand-yard stare, living above a mortuary and seemingly fine with it. Her best friends have eight legs, and when her stepmother starts squashing them on sight, it’s not just cruelty—it’s provocation. The stepmother’s sins don’t stop at arachnophobia. She’s also carrying on an affair and plotting to kill Susan’s father, which earns her the full treatment: a darkened bedroom, a sudden infestation, and a heart attack timed with theatrical precision. After that, Susan doesn’t just mourn—she adapts. She learns what a tarantula can do in the right hands, and who else might deserve one. She moves carefully. A few bullies. A nosy neighbor. Her uncle’s girlfriend. Anyone who pushes her gets pushed back—slowly, softly, and with something hairy under the bed. Susan isn’t evil. She’s polite, pale, and eerily calm. But there’s no real question who’s in control. The premise is better than the picture. The pacing drags like a bad dream, the kills are muffled, and the tone never fully commits—to horror, camp, or melodrama. It plays like a regional riff on Carrie and Willard—same revenge setup, less conviction. The tarantulas are there, but the fear never kicks in. The acting’s wooden, the tone drifts, but still, there’s a kind of sincerity to the film. It doesn’t bluff. It’s just one quiet girl, a collection of spiders, and a rising body count no one seems too eager to question. It doesn’t build to much—a limp finale, a vague suggestion of madness—but it has a kind of sticky charm. Not good, not quite bad enough to be great, but oddly memorable. If you’ve ever wanted to see a shy mortician’s daughter weaponize her pets and quietly terrify an entire small town, it’s here. You just have to wait for it.

A strange relic with the outline of a risqué farce and the pacing of a sermon, Klondike Annie is less a film than a cautionary tale about what happens when the censors win. The Production Code didn’t just declaw Mae West—it gagged her, rewrote her punchlines, and left her staggering through a film that keeps hinting at scandal without ever delivering. West plays Rose Carlton, a sultry chanteuse with a past and, we’re meant to believe, blood on her hands. She flees to Alaska after dispatching her abusive lover—though the killing, once a central motivator, has been trimmed so thoroughly you won’t realize it even happened until someone coughs it up halfway through like a deleted scene. On the voyage to Nome, Rose assumes the identity of a dying missionary and lands in town not as a headliner but as a moral reformer. One minute she’s vamping in a feathered hat; the next, she’s quoting scripture to miners who clearly would rather she hadn’t. It might’ve worked as satire or subversion—West saving the soul of the frontier with a wink and a shimmy—but too much has been stripped away. She still tosses off the occasional wisecrack, and her screen presence remains uniquely elastic (slinking one second, sermonizing the next), but the role asks her to change her spots, and the film can’t justify why she should. Victor McLaglen turns up as a blustery sea captain who barks his lines like a man trying to win a shouting contest with a foghorn, but even he can’t drag the movie out of its self-made purgatory. The oddity of it all keeps you watching, but there’s little to recommend beyond curiosity. The film flirts with naughtiness, flinches, and folds—West, of all people, reduced to playing nice.

Alan J. Pakula’s Klute moves like a whispered confession—slow, guarded, and shadow-drenched. It’s a mystery on paper, a character study in practice, and a masterclass in performance, thanks to Jane Fonda, who takes what could’ve been a cautionary archetype and turns it into something fiercely alive. She plays Bree Daniels, a New York call girl with theatrical ambitions and a therapist on retainer, and there’s not a moment where she doesn’t seem smarter than the men paying for her company. Donald Sutherland, as the titular private investigator, is recessive to the point of vanishing—deliberate, stoic, allergic to personality. He’s investigating the disappearance of a Pennsylvania businessman and following the trail into Bree’s orbit, but the procedural spine of the film is just an excuse to observe her. The plot pulses in the background like a forgotten alarm while the camera lingers on Fonda—smoking, performing, unraveling. Her Bree is guarded but articulate, composed but vibrating with anxiety. The film doesn’t ask her to be likable. It gives her the space to be unknowable. Pakula builds dread with silence and static, favoring dark apartments and grainy tape recordings over shootouts or revelations. The tension here is sexual, psychological—danger that feels like it’s breathing on your neck. And while the central mystery could be mistaken for a red herring in a trench coat, it’s the atmosphere and Fonda’s performance that keep it compelling. It’s not fast, and it’s not comforting. But Klute carves something jagged and distinct out of the noir template—less about solving a crime than trying to understand why someone like Bree Daniels still has to armor herself to be heard.

Richard Lester made The Knack …and How to Get It between A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, and it shows. The film has the same antic energy and jump-cut momentum, like it’s been caffeinated from both ends. It’s not about much, exactly—just a few Londoners chasing love, or the idea of it, while older onlookers gawk from the margins like the world’s most confused Greek chorus. Michael Crawford plays Colin, a shy, tightly wound schoolteacher who’s decided he needs to learn how to attract women. His flatmate, Tolen (Ray Brooks), has “the knack”—women flock to him for reasons that may or may not exist outside his own ego. Tolen offers advice with the smug detachment of someone who’s never had to think twice about anything. Colin, on the other hand, treats courtship like a math problem he’s been handed without the formula. Into this mix comes Nancy (Rita Tushingham), a sweetly spacey newcomer to the city who’s trying, without much luck, to find the YWCA. Every stranger she asks offers a different route, all of them useless. Eventually, she crosses paths with Colin, and the film shifts into a loopy, slightly surreal romantic scramble—complete with voiceovers, sudden asides, and the kind of visual jokes that feel like a French New Wave film that wandered across the Channel and got seduced by British absurdism. At one point, the trio is pushing a bed frame down the street and parking it at a meter. They feed the meter. The film barely blinks. And then there’s a moment that plays less smoothly today. Nancy thinks she’s been raped—though what actually happened is deliberately left fuzzy—and begins saying “rape” to everyone she meets. One woman, without missing a beat, replies, “Not today, thank you.” It’s meant as absurdist farce, and it plays that way, but it’s also one of those jokes that lands differently depending on the decade. Still, it’s hard to hold a grudge. The Knack is breezy, inventive, and completely unbothered by the idea of narrative cohesion. You watch it for the style, the rhythm, the sense that anything might happen in the next thirty seconds. And often, it does.

The opening scene tells you everything you need to know. A packed jousting arena, peasants chanting to Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and one background extra gnawing a turkey leg like it’s game day at a stadium. A Knight’s Tale doesn’t just reject historical accuracy—it leaves it slumped in the mud and rides off, whooping. This isn’t 14th-century Europe. It’s a Renaissance Fair that wandered into a glam-rock concert and liked the acoustics. Heath Ledger plays William Thatcher, a low-born squire with enough nerve to strap on his dead master’s armor and bluff his way into a sport reserved for nobility. He fakes credentials, invents lineage, and starts winning—partly on grit, partly because nobody bothers checking IDs when the lances start flying. His biggest obstacle isn’t the rules, but Count Adhemar (Rufus Sewell), a pedigree snob with real jousting skills and a jaw clenched tight enough to slice parchment. And of course there’s a love interest. Shannyn Sossamon, all angles and veils, plays Lady Jocelyn—the kind of movie princess who wears elaborate headpieces but doesn’t mind a man who lies professionally. William woos her with the usual grand gestures and fake poetry, all while dodging Adhemar’s glower and the occasional lance to the ribs. The film stacks its supporting cast with rowdy charm. Alan Tudyk yells a lot and throws punches. Mark Addy plays the straight man, mostly. But it’s Paul Bettany who runs off with every scene he enters, sauntering around as Geoffrey Chaucer—naked, broke, and talking faster than his dignity can catch up. Whether he’s threatening a gambling creditor with “poetic vengeance” or announcing William like he’s headlining a medieval Vegas residency, he gives the film a pulse of self-aware madness that keeps it bouncing. The plot is pure sports movie with a coat of chainmail. The underdog rises, the rival sneers, the romance kicks in, and the jousts hit hard and often. It’s not even a little bit subtle—and that’s the point. The anachronisms aren’t mistakes—they’re the whole design. That’s either annoying or delightful, depending on your tolerance for electric guitars in a feudal setting. The movie shouldn’t work. And yet, like a crown made of bottle caps and bravado, it sort of does.

A cabin in the woods. A vacation for three. Two dads, one daughter, and an afternoon that starts with grasshoppers and ends with prophecy. The door knocks. The apocalypse follows. They arrive like landscapers with a message from God—shirts tucked, eyes pained, carrying weapons that look handmade and illegal. Four strangers. No connections. No mercy. They break in, tie the family up, and deliver their pitch with the calm of people who hate what they’re saying: one of you must die—Eric, Andrew, or Wen—but the choice has to come from the parents. Willingly. If no one volunteers, humanity is finished. Floods, fires, pandemics—seen in visions, now echoed on the news. Each time they refuse to offer one of themselves up, another disaster arrives—precise, brutal, and impossible to write off as coincidence. The brilliance is in the setup. Shyamalan doesn’t tip the scales. No dramatic music. No whispered certainty. Just four strangers asking the worst question you can ask a family, and seeming dead serious about the answer. Dave Bautista, hulking and hesitant, moves like he got the orders and spent the whole drive hoping they’d change. Behind him, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn, and Rupert Grint wear the same expression—like they rehearsed for something noble and arrived at the wrong scene. The tension works because it stays close. No global panic, no aerial shots of disaster. Just a house, a TV, and the worst decision anyone could be asked to make. Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge play it like a couple that’s already endured too much—suspicious, exhausted, and suddenly tasked with saving a world that’s never done them any favors. The resolution arrives, neat and conclusive. Too conclusive, maybe. What started as a question ends like a riddle with the answer taped on. But the tension still works, because it isn’t really about the world ending. It’s about watching two parents get cornered by a question no one should have to answer—and knowing one of them will.

A King Kong movie without the Empire State Building, without the beauty-and-the-beast longings, without even a whiff of moody monochrome. This time, Kong stays put. It’s 1973, Nixon is packing up, and a soon-to-be-defunded secretive government agency called Monarch sees its last chance to mount a mysterious expedition to a newly discovered island hidden behind an eternal storm. With a military escort in tow—led by Samuel L. Jackson’s Colonel Packard, a man who’s still itching for one last war—they break through the clouds and drop seismic charges on sacred ground. Kong answers swiftly. No teasing, no fanfare—just a skyscraper-sized gorilla swatting helicopters like flies with a grudge. John Goodman plays Bill Randa, the Monarch official orchestrating this mess with just enough conviction to keep us from questioning why any of it is happening. Tom Hiddleston, miscast as a tracker named Conrad, moves through the jungle like he’s just discovered foliage for the first time. Brie Larson, saddled with a half-developed war photographer role, gets to lock eyes with Kong once or twice—empathy exchanged through sheer proximity. But it’s John C. Reilly, playing a WWII pilot stranded on the island for nearly thirty years, who walks away with the movie. He’s the only one who seems to understand he’s in a monster movie and not a trauma drama. The action is plentiful, the monsters inventive, and the spectacle polished, but none of it cuts particularly deep. Kong is present, massive, mournful, and the CGI earns its paycheck. The film does one thing right: it never forgets whose name is on the poster. Everyone else is just trying not to get stomped.

If Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a K-pop phase and a merchandising empire, you’d get K-Pop: Demon Hunters—glossy, frantic, and possessed by the spirit of someone who really, really loves choreography. The trio at the center—Huntr/x—are international superstars with a second gig as magical demon-slayers. Their stadium shows double as supernatural sealants, powered by enchanted relics and enough vocal force to keep the barrier between realms intact. Their fiercest rivals, the Saja Boys, aren’t just smug—they’re demonic. And when Huntr/x’s lead singer starts losing her voice, the cracks start to show, both in the group and the dimension they’re barely holding shut. One of them is hiding a secret, and it’s not just a strained vocal cord. The plot is more decorative than structural, but the film’s energy doesn’t wait for logic. It moves on rhythm, flash, and volume—each sequence cut like a music video with a threat problem. The world-building doesn’t always track—how one demon-singer’s presence doesn’t immediately collapse the seal she’s helping sustain is never quite explained—but the film hardly pauses long enough to ask. The animation borrows from Spider-Verse's playbook: layered, hyper-saturated, spliced with pop-art detail. Staggered frames, punchy transitions, shadows that seem to perform. It’s engineered chaos, but also affectionate—like a limited-edition soda ad that accidentally tells a story. What holds is the affection—for the genre, for the spectacle, for the idea that performance might actually keep evil at bay. It’s overloaded, occasionally incoherent, but never lazy. And it pushes its premise hard enough to earn the meltdown of a finale, where concert staging collapses into pop-fantasy boss battle, and no one bothers pretending that’s a problem.

Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman), riding high from a promotion at his Madison Avenue ad agency, comes home ready to share the news—only to find his wife Joanna (Meryl Streep) with her bags packed. She’s leaving. No dramatic blow-up, no scandal, just a quiet, surgical unraveling. She says she can’t do it anymore and walks out, leaving Ted with their five-year-old son, Billy, and a freshly shattered routine. What follows isn’t melodrama but something knottier: a portrait of parental discovery, trial by fire, and emotional reassembly. Ted, who once treated parenting like a part-time gig, is forced to learn the rhythms of daily fatherhood—feeding, bathing, comforting, and answering the impossible questions of a boy who can’t understand why his mother disappeared. He burns the French toast early on; a later scene where he nails the dish shows just how far he’s come. The script is unflashy but acutely observed. It doesn’t swing for grand gestures—it watches, patiently, as Ted and Billy forge something bruised but real. Hoffman is electric—frayed, vulnerable, deeply human. Streep, with far less screen time, builds a performance of quiet, devastating intelligence. She doesn’t play Joanna as a villain but as someone cracked down the center, unsure whether returning is a kindness or another form of damage. The courtroom scenes veer into the schematic—especially one suggesting that therapy is grounds for unfitness—but the emotional throughline stays sharp. By the time the judge delivers a verdict, the film has already delivered its own: love is learned, and so is letting go.

A misfire on nearly every level, Krippendorf’s Tribe isn’t just embarrassing—it’s the kind of studio comedy that ages in dog years. Richard Dreyfuss stars as an anthropology professor whose wife has died, whose research has stalled, and whose conscience exits stage left the moment he realizes he’s out of grant money and out of time. The solution? Fake it. He invents a “lost” New Guinea tribe named Shelmikedmu (a syllabic Frankenstein of his children’s names), dresses himself and his kids in brownface, and stages elaborate rituals in the backyard—then passes the footage off as ethnographic gold. The scenes revolve around slapstick and improv—Dreyfuss can still take a pratfall with flair—but the premise is radioactive. The humor leans on fake tribal gibberish, invented customs, and loincloth choreography that isn’t just ethnically tone-deaf—it’s completely baffled by its own joke, if there even was one. Lily Tomlin turns up as a rival academic with better ethics and worse luck, barreling off to New Guinea to expose Krippendorf’s fraud. Meanwhile, Jenna Elfman is stuck playing the plucky new professor who buys into the lie—and, inexplicably, starts falling for the man telling it. There are moments that gesture toward sharper satire, but what’s on screen feels cheap, clueless, and deeply misjudged. Whatever it meant to skewer, it ends up embodying—with broad comedy, bad optics, and a criminal misuse of shoe polish.

Sword and sorcery with laser beams. Krull is one of those early ’80s genre mashups that lurches forward with total sincerity and absolutely no sense of moderation. Medieval pageantry collides with sci-fi oddities: kings deliver prophecies, wise men wield glowing staffs, and villains arrive via spacecraft carrying weapons that shoot red bolts of light. Somewhere in there is a Cyclops, a lava pool, and a spider the size of a pickup truck. The film centers on Colwyn (Ken Marshall), a prince so clean-cut he seems molded from vinyl. His marriage to Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony) is supposed to unify two warring kingdoms on the planet Krull, but before the vows are even complete, an alien army crashes the event and kidnaps the bride. She’s taken to the Black Fortress—a shape-shifting structure that looks like Dracula’s castle crossed with a paperweight—and Colwyn sets off to retrieve her. The story is formula in full regalia. Colwyn gathers a ragtag crew that includes escaped convicts, a quietly mournful Cyclops, and a magician whose powers mostly involve turning himself into livestock. The legendary Glaive—introduced early with a flourish—is promptly shelved for most of the runtime, like a toy put back in the box until the final act. But the film is gorgeous to look at. Mountains cut from matte painting dreams, cloaks that shimmer with the weight of wardrobe budgets, and effects that still surprise in moments. James Horner’s score is an unrelenting brass section determined to convince you something important is happening, whether or not the script agrees. The movie has no real momentum, but there’s something watchable in its stubborn commitment to spectacle. Krull may not stir much emotion, but it throws everything on the screen with wide-eyed conviction—and sometimes, that’s enough to keep you watching.

Stephen Chow may have been handed a fatter wallet after Shaolin Soccer, but it’s to his great credit that he didn’t trade in his lunacy for prestige. Kung Fu Hustle is a living cartoon, loony and lyrical, as if Once Upon a Time in China had been redubbed by Tex Avery and choreographed by Road Runner. Gravity gets tossed out in the first act and never returns, which is fine, because who wants Newton when you’ve got flying landlords and magical guqin assassins? Chow plays Sing, a low-level grifter with big plans and small talent, who, along with his reliably useless sidekick (Lam Chi-chung), dreams of joining the fearsome Axe Gang. Trouble is, they’re not nearly mean or competent enough. Their fake tough-guy routine backfires when they stir up trouble in a slum called Pig Sty Alley, where the residents—unassuming, barefoot, and weirdly invincible—turn out to be kung fu demigods in retirement. The Axe Gang retaliates, but no amount of synchronized axe-swinging can prepare them for a landlady who moves like a Looney Tune tornado or a tailor whose kicks could flatten a building. What begins as a spoof of gangster tropes morphs into a wuxia epic crossed with a slapstick opera, delivered with such bravura that even the absurdity starts to feel mythic. It’s all played at a pitch just below hysteria, and yet there’s a sweetness hiding under the digital mayhem. Chow’s hero’s journey is half-parody, half-genuine awakening, and by the time he’s punching through reality itself, the movie has somehow earned it. A delirious symphony of flying fists, bad haircuts, and spiritual redemption, Kung Fu Hustle is a love letter to every kung fu movie ever made, mailed express with a rocket-powered stamp.

Jack Black voices a chubby, noodle-slurping panda with delusions of grandeur—which is to say, he’s playing Jack Black in animal form. The panda in question is Po, a daydreaming kung fu obsessive who lives above his father’s noodle shop and is expected to inherit the family ladle. His father, through reasons the second film will explain more, is a goose. Po doesn’t want to serve soup; he wants to throw punches. Unfortunately, he’s out of shape, overexcitable, and—until he’s accidentally chosen as the Dragon Warrior during a public ceremony—entirely unqualified. The decision insults the Furious Five, a team of elite martial arts students who’ve spent their lives training for the title. It also frustrates their mentor, Master Shifu (voiced by Dustin Hoffman), who now has to teach a panda who wheezes after climbing stairs. The real threat arrives in the form of Tai Lung, a snow leopard with abandonment issues and a black belt in destruction. Once a favored pupil of Shifu, Tai Lung was denied the Dragon Scroll and responded by burning down most of a city. He’s now broken out of prison and is heading back to reclaim what he thinks should have been his all along. The scroll, incidentally, contains the “secret” to limitless power. This is a polished and lively movie that moves briskly, delivers a few decent lessons about self-belief, and rarely slows down long enough for you to notice how little of it really matters. The animation is slick, the action scenes are sharply choreographed, and the pacing never stumbles, even if the emotional content is feather-light. The emotional stakes are light—too light, probably—but the tone is chipper, and the film keeps a good rhythm. It’s easy to watch. The whole thing moves with the logic of a fortune cookie—vague, enthusiastic, and weirdly convincing.

Steve Oedekerk, borrowing a page from What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, unearths a half-forgotten Hong Kong martial arts film (Tiger & Crane Fists), dubs over the dialogue, splices in new footage, and casts himself as the lead—playing, essentially, a parody of every kung fu hero imagined by Westerners who never made it past the opening credits. With digital tinkering and a bottomless bag of juvenile gags, he assembles a feature-length riff on genre clichés, slapstick tropes, and narrative non-sequiturs. The Chosen One—a martial arts drifter with a tragic backstory and a prophetic tongue—encounters a villain named Master Pain (who insists on being called Betty), a love interest who speaks almost exclusively in breathy coos, and, in perhaps the film’s most bizarre set piece, a drawn-out kung fu brawl with a CGI cow. Limbs fly, udders lash, and the laws of physics call in sick. It’s not clever, but it’s hard to forget. The joke-per-minute rate is high, but so is the whiplash. Oedekerk throws everything at the screen with the enthusiasm of a teenager let loose in an editing suite. A few gags work—often by sheer force of repetition or sheer weirdness—but most hover in that murky space between knowingly stupid and just plain stupid. It’s not a film so much as a string of bits stitched together with erratic glee. There’s real technical ingenuity in how he blends new footage with the old, and Oedekerk’s physical comedy instincts are solid, but cohesion isn’t part of the design. Fans of this film don’t love it in spite of the nonsense—they love it because of the nonsense. For everyone else, it’s 81 minutes of baffling enthusiasm, narrated by a man fighting a cow.