Film Buff Musings

It’s really not bad, but it’s more subdued than it probably should be. Disney’s live-action redo of Lady and the Tramp isn’t among their worst—it’s no Pinocchio—but it still lands in that now-familiar remake zone where everything feels strangely cautious and a little too polished. The story follows the original closely. Lady is a pampered cocker spaniel living the good life—fancy house, doting owners, and not a care in the world. Then a baby shows up, and suddenly she’s not the center of attention anymore. One misunderstanding leads to another, and before long she’s muzzled, chased, and out on the street. That’s where she meets Tramp, a scruffy stray who’s made a lifestyle out of not getting attached. They wander the city, dodge trouble, eat spaghetti in an alley, and—against all odds—start to fall for each other. It’s not a bad setup, but the mood is off. The lighting is dim, the pacing slow, and the supposedly emotional moments come and go without much feeling. There’s a sense the film is trying to mean something, but it never quite gets there. Even the romance feels like it’s just running through familiar motions, without anything new underneath. It’s also a little too heavy for kids. The dog pound scenes are uncomfortably bleak, and the overall tone is quieter and more downcast than the story really needs. Probably why Disney sent it straight to streaming—it looks good on the homepage, and longtime fans might give it a glance, but that’s about it. It’s a handsome remake with nowhere to go—watchable in the moment, forgettable five minutes later, and unlikely to mean much to anyone who wasn’t already in love with the original.

A glossy black-and-white MGM musical, half-forgotten and mostly for good reason—though completists of the studio’s golden era may want to circle back. The story follows a husband-and-wife songwriting team through success, separation, and the thin suggestion of reconciliation. It’s framed by divorce court—presided over by Lionel Barrymore with the animation of a marble bust—which lets the plot wander into flashbacks and musical detours without ever committing to either. Ann Sothern plays Dixie, a sharp lyricist who teams up with composer Eddie (Robert Young) and quickly launches his career. They marry, thrive professionally, and fall apart personally when Eddie drifts toward nightlife and nouveau-riche indulgence—things Dixie finds more exhausting than glamorous. The romance plays dutiful, more like a draft than a relationship. Eleanor Powell isn’t the focus, but she’s threaded throughout—present in key scenes, always watchable, and the only one moving at full velocity. As Dixie’s friend Marilyn Marsh, she taps alongside a dog without losing the spotlight, and later headlines the “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” sequence: a Busby Berkeley fantasy of shadows stretching to the ceiling and the Berry Brothers exploding into a tangle of limbs—spring-loaded, rubber-jointed, practically airborne. The plot pauses, the spectacle takes over, and the film finally does what it was built to do. Lady Be Good coasts on production value—costumes, choreography, and a steady stream of musical contributions, including Gershwin and a then-new standard by Kern and Hammerstein. “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” which won the Academy Award, plays over images of a prewar Paris that would’ve already felt nostalgic in 1941. The storyline may be thin, but when the movie sings, it sings with conviction—and when Powell dances, it forgets what it was ever trying to say.

A first-person film noir, shot entirely from the detective’s point of view—like a hard-boiled radio drama strapped to a GoPro. The camera is Philip Marlowe. When he’s hit, it lurches. When he looks in a mirror, Robert Montgomery looks back. Everyone else talks straight to the lens, like suspects practicing alibis. It’s clever. For about ten minutes. The plot—once you see past the novelty—is standard-issue Chandler: a missing woman, a magazine editor with too many motives (Audrey Totter), a few corpses, and a round of blackmail, beatings, and evasive glances. Marlowe’s been hired under false pretenses. Everyone lies. Everyone stalls. It’s the kind of mystery where the answer barely matters—it’s the detours that count. But here, the detours feel staged. The gimmick strangles the mood. Performances get flattened into camera addresses, and even the shadows feel blocked. A noir is supposed to feel like a trap closing in. This one plays like a novelty ride that forgot to end. Still, there’s something charming about watching 1940s décor blur past your field of vision. A fully lit Christmas tree in a murder room. A gloved slap right into the lens. A kiss that looks like an optometrist’s exam. It’s not boring—it’s just locked into its own stunt. Seen through the eyes of a man no one wants to talk to.

An incoherent attempt at madcap comedy, and a wasted opportunity to see Sophia Loren, Paul Newman, and David Niven in the same film. Though if you had to guess which one doesn’t quite belong, you’d be right. Newman, playing a swaggering anarchist named Armand, seems stranded from the start. He was, simply put, the wrong actor for a madcap comedy—too controlled, too inward. If you want to see what it looks like when an actor drowns without the benefit of dying in water, here’s your chance. He broods, preens, and plays every scene like he’s waiting for the film to change its mind—like if he stays still long enough, it might turn into something he knows how to play. Loren, better suited to the material, at least looks like she belongs—but the film gives her little to do beyond gliding through scenes with elegance and detachment. She’s striking, but never especially engaged. She plays the title character, a laundress turned aristocrat, recounting her younger years in flashback. She once loved Armand, the revolutionary, but married Lord Dellingham (Niven) instead—trading risk for status. Niven stays cool and unbothered, like a man who’s done this before and knows not to get too involved. Peter Ustinov, who also wrote the script, seems more enchanted by settings than scenes. Castle Howard stands in for the European elite, the costumes are perfect, the lighting generous. But the pacing drags, and the film spends more time admiring itself than figuring out how to be funny. There’s a long tradition of 1960s comedies that spun excess into entertainment—The Great Race, Tom Jones, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Lady L wants to be in that lineup but misses the mark entirely. It gestures toward wit and mischief, but never finds the rhythm. A lost opportunity, and one best left buried.

Rodney Dangerfield, game as ever, is stuck inside a script so vacant you can practically hear the echo. He plays Chester Lee, a schlubby middle manager promised a promotion if he agrees to coach the girls’ soccer team his company sponsors. He says yes, figuring it’s ceremonial—the team had a winning season, and surely the toughest part will be remembering the players’ names. Cue the misfits: the returning star is gone, and the replacements are well-meaning but hopeless. With no coaching instincts and little time before the first game, Chester ropes in his fiancée’s son, Matthew (Jonathan Brandis), a standout player with a schoolboy crush on one of the girls. Chester convinces him to pose as “Martha,” complete with wig, headband, and jersey, so the team might have a shot at not being completely humiliated. Somehow, the film thinks this qualifies as clever strategy. Dangerfield tosses off a few decent one-liners, likely ad-libbed, but most of the gags arrive pre-deflated. The soccer scenes are chopped together with the energy of a rehearsal reel, and the emotional arcs seem traced from memory rather than written. The kids are sweet, the adults cardboard, and the plotting marches ahead like a motivational seminar in cleats. There’s something bleakly compelling about how confidently it doubles down on its premise—like no one stopped to ask if dressing a teenage boy in drag to salvage a youth soccer season might need a second pass. Dangerfield keeps swinging, but Ladybugs is a comedy in name only: misjudged, slack, and as flat as the turf.

This is the kind of movie Westerners might put on to say they’ve “seen a Bollywood film,” only to find themselves four hours older and—if they’ve stuck with it—unexpectedly moved. Lagaan is an epic, yes, but one with dirt under its fingernails. It runs roughly the length of Gone with the Wind, though instead of asking us to reassess the virtues of plantation life, it introduces us to Bhuvan (Aamir Khan), a spirited farmer in 1890s British India who dares to stand up to colonial cruelty with a bat and a ball. Bhuvan lives in a drought-stricken village, already at the brink of hardship, when the sadistic Captain Russell (Paul Blackthorne) demands triple lagaan—the agricultural tax they can scarcely afford. Bhuvan challenges the captain to a game of cricket, with a simple wager: if the villagers win, their tax is waived for three years; if they lose, they’re crushed under the weight of the empire’s indulgence. It’s madness. It’s also the only option they have. The rest of the film follows a familiar underdog arc, but the unfamiliarity of the setting—and the sport itself, at least for Western viewers—makes it feel newly minted. The villagers are novices. Some have never even seen a cricket ball, let alone held one. Their only edge arrives in the form of Russell’s sister (Rachel Shelley), who, in a minor act of rebellion, teaches them the basics of the game. She’s also drawn to Bhuvan, which complicates things slightly—especially for Gauri (Gracy Singh), his sweet-natured love interest. The love triangle is oddly underfed for a film of such length, but that’s almost a relief. What matters here is the match. And what a match. The cricket game itself could be screened as its own film—a full-blown third act stretched to operatic proportions. You could watch a Hollywood rom-com in the time it takes to bowl a few innings, and yet, thanks to its patient character work and infectious sincerity, you don’t mind. Even if you’ve never watched a second of cricket in your life, Lagaan makes the stakes legible. It’s not about the rules; it’s about survival, pride, and collective grit. While it cleaves to genre convention—ragtag team, training montages, last-minute suspense—it never feels cynical. This is a film that believes in every beat it plays. And maybe that’s why it works: because in a world stacked with defeats, it dares to deliver a triumph that actually feels earned.

I’m not a card-carrying Ferrellist, but his movies tend to work on me. There’s usually a sense of unhinged invention—a daffy commitment to nonsense delivered with such sincerity that even the flimsiest premise somehow lifts off. Which is why this one feels like a missed flight. The Land of the Lost should be exactly my speed: a genre mashup with science-fiction gobbledygook, dinosaurs, and a brain fried sunny-side up. Instead, it flails. Ferrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a disgraced paleontologist whose belief in tachyon energy and wormholes lands him on morning talk shows. Anna Friel is Holly Cantrell, a grad student expelled from her program for backing his theories. Together, with a roadside attraction owner (Danny McBride), they trace a tachyon spike to a tourist trap and fall through the multiverse. Where they land is an aggressively curated surreal landscape—deserts that border jungles that border volcanoes, with a few haunted strip malls in between. It’s the kind of place where every wayward object Earth ever misplaced—airplanes, Big Boy statues, neon signage—has washed ashore. There are Sleestaks, glacial lizard monks who hiss like choir members with bronchitis. There’s a monkey-boy named Cha-Ka (Jorma Taccone), who attaches himself to the group like an unwanted roommate. And there are dinosaurs, whose intelligence flickers on and off like a dying light bulb. Some of this works in small, twitchy doses. The film isn’t completely bereft of laughs—Ferrell squeezes out a few, even while shackled to a script that feels designed by committee. There’s a moment involving hallucinogenic fruit that nearly lifts off, and another where he rants inside a desert gift shop with the delirium of a man who’s just been told the punchline of a cosmic joke he doesn’t understand. But these flashes are scattered, and the film doesn’t build—it lurches. It throws everything at the wall, hoping something sticks, but even the stickiest bits feel like fragments of a better idea. Even if this is a movie about being lost, it shouldn’t feel quite so aimless.

Also released as Soldier of Fortune, though Laser Mission has a better ring to it—even if it sounds like a mistranslated video game. It does involve a laser. And a mission. So technically accurate. Brandon Lee plays Michael Gold, a freelance operative sent to convince a vaguely German laser specialist (Ernest Borgnine) to defect to the U.S. before the KGB grabs him. They grab him. Then Michael teams up with Alissa (Debi A. Monahan), whose main qualifications is that she has a giant blond perm and looks great in a blue dress, to get him back. The plot is barely stitched together, but that’s part of the fun. Dialogue arrives in fragments, like the cast are reading fortune cookie slips one at a time. The action is relentless in that late-’80s way—choppers, shootouts, car crashes—and Lee, to his credit, plays the lead with a kind of nonchalance—not mocking the material, just politely declining to treat it seriously. The film is scored to a theme song that feels like it was genetically engineered in a lab to represent 1980s action cinema: heavy pop-rock, guitar solos at unnecessary moments, and lyrics that sound vaguely contractual. If this movie had a smell, it would be gasoline and hairspray. Halfway through, the film takes a detour into the desert and meets a drunk prospector with a bottle of Jack Daniels and no clear connection to anything. Ironically, he appears to be the soberest person in the film. Laser Mission is pure nonsense, but it’s fun nonsense. It doesn’t slow down, it doesn’t overthink, and it ends up more entertaining than a lot of films that try much harder.

What The Last Castle lacks in subtlety, it tries to make up for with clenched-jaw intensity and the thud of military metaphors dropping like sandbags. The setup—Robert Redford as a disgraced general squaring off against James Gandolfini’s power-drunk prison warden—practically begs for comparisons to chess, which the film eagerly supplies by occasionally cutting to an actual chess match just to make sure you’re keeping up. The one thing that isn’t high on this movie’s list of priorities is believability. You wouldn’t need a background in military procedure to notice that nothing about this prison resembles anything remotely real. The chain of command looks more like summer camp with rifles. Guards casually “accidentally” kill inmates. Protocol is whatever the scene needs it to be. But it’s entertaining. Redford plays the general with weary, quiet authority, unimpressed by the warden’s collection of antique war relics or his insecure need for approval. Gandolfini, puffed-up and dangerously deferential, starts as a sycophant and quickly swerves into sadism. The movie becomes a series of provocations and counter-moves: a rubber-bullet execution here, a defiant flag-raising there, all leading toward a large-scale rebellion orchestrated like a siege from within. It’s silly. But it’s gripping. The story barrels forward with just enough craft to distract from its lapses in logic. By the time the final act hits, you’re either rolling your eyes or leaning forward. I found myself doing the latter. Don’t come to this film looking for nuance or realism. But if you’re in the mood for a watchable, high-gloss standoff between institutional ego and quiet defiance, it gets the job done. Popcorn helps. So does ignoring every question that might pop up in your head that begins with “Wouldn’t they just…”

It’s the Alien template, reheated: a crew of scientists on a remote outpost—in this case, Mars—stumbles across a contaminant that turns people into monsters. The difference is, this one plays it straight. Too straight. You’ve seen this movie before, and this version doesn’t argue otherwise. The infection comes via space bacteria, and before long the crew members are dropping and reanimating with zombie-like aggression. What follows is a familiar shuffle of containment attempts, frantic shouts, and ill-advised solo excursions into the Martian dust. It’s all handled with competence—clean visuals, decent pacing, and a solid central presence in Liev Schreiber, who gives more than the film really needs. But there’s no spark to any of it. The tension simmers but never spikes. Back in the ’80s, a premise like this would have come dressed in rubber suits and synth stabs—Inseminoid, Galaxy of Terror, Forbidden World—cheap, gory, and full of nervous energy. Those films knew they weren’t breaking ground, so they threw glitter and guts at the screen. This one opts for restraint, which might be admirable if it weren’t also so forgettable. There’s nothing glaringly wrong here. It moves, it looks good, and nobody embarrasses themselves. But the thrills stay lukewarm, the story sleepwalks, and it’s difficult to imagine who this was really for.

Two Navy lifers get stuck with the sort of assignment nobody wants: escort an 18-year-old screw-up from Norfolk, Virginia, to a military prison in Maine. The kid, Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid, all elbows and uncertainty), is going away for eight years—dishonorable discharge and the whole kit—for stealing forty bucks from a charity run by a senior officer’s wife. A petty crime, punished like it was treason. His escorts—Signalman First Class Billy “Badass” Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and Gunner’s Mate First Class Richard “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young)—size him up, see the raw deal, and decide the trip north shouldn’t just be cold trains and Navy chow. They stretch the route. Burgers and milkshakes. A bar crawl. A joyless visit to a brothel. A crash course in how to throw a punch without breaking your thumb. For a while, Meadows loosens his shoulders, even laughs. Buddusky and Mulhall start to like the kid, maybe more than the job allows. Nicholson’s electric—swaggering, foul-mouthed, grinning like trouble, and letting the mask drop just long enough to show the man beneath. Young gives Mule a quieter gravity, the steady rudder to Nicholson’s full sail. Quaid makes Meadows more than a hapless recruit; there’s a half-formed man in there, trying to surface before the Navy locks the door behind him. Hal Ashby shoots it loose and lived-in, the kind of film that lets you forget the script and believe you’re just watching people kill time on the way to a bad ending. It’s coarse, funny, and quietly bruising—a road movie with no illusions about where the road ends. By the time they turn Meadows over, you feel the same pinch they do: the trip’s over, and the rest is nothing but gray walls.

This is the kind of film that knows how to build the tension—but then misplaces the fuse. Jonathan Demme’s The Last Embrace starts strong—with sweat in the palms and paranoia in the air—but somewhere along the way, it forgets what kind of thriller it meant to be. The setup is tight: Roy Scheider plays Harry Hannan, a government agent unraveling after his wife is killed mid-mission. Months later, he’s released from a mental facility and immediately suspects someone’s trying to finish the job. A shove in front of a train—maybe deliberate, maybe not. A chokehold on a stranger (a fresh-faced Mandy Patinkin)—maybe justified, maybe not. A government contact (Christopher Walken, all quiet menace) assures him there’s no hit out. But Harry’s not convinced. Neither are we. The film runs on grit and uncertainty—a neo-noir flavor with a psychological twist: what if the hero’s instincts are sharp, but his mind’s the problem? Scheider is steady as ever, all coiled nerves and haunted eyes, but the story around him starts to drift. What begins as a spiral of gaslighting and surveillance eventually detours into a half-baked revenge plot with historical baggage and cryptic symbols. Demme directs with style—grimy lighting, fractured rhythms—and the climax at Niagara Falls is a showstopper, pure Hitchcock by way of American anxiety. But tension only works when you can trace its source. The Last Embrace loses that thread. The deeper it goes into Harry’s unraveling, the more the film blurs—not in a deliberate, disorienting way, but in a structurally slack one. You’re meant to feel suspense. Instead, you feel slightly lost. By the end, the questions matter less than the atmosphere holding them up. Demme stacks the scenes with precision—quiet surveillance, unreadable stares, tension threaded through the background. The story may drift, but the tone stays sharp. The Last Embrace builds its case like it plans to solve something, then changes the subject mid-sentence. You stay with it anyway.

In fits and flickers, this film edges toward brilliance. The set-up alone is a marvel: Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), a shy, era-obsessed fashion student from the English countryside, arrives in London with big dreams and a suitcase full of vintage vinyl. She’s not just enamored with the 1960s—she lives for it. The style, the swagger, the sound. It’s not nostalgia. It’s devotion. Modern London, however, greets her with a shrug. Her classmates are indifferent, the city is alienating, and she quickly trades her college dorm for a creaky room in a house run by a stern elderly landlady (Diana Rigg), who enforces rules like “no men after dark” and rents out décor that hasn’t changed since Carnaby Street mattered. But to Eloise, this isn’t a red flag. It’s a time capsule. At night, things shift. She dreams—at least, it seems like dreaming—of a young woman named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a poised and radiant presence who haunts the same streets in the Swinging Sixties, basking in nightclub lights and whispers of fame. Each dream plunges Eloise deeper into Sandie’s life, until she’s not just watching—she’s following. Wearing her clothes. Feeling her fears. The past is no longer a fantasy. It’s bleeding through the wallpaper. For a while, Last Night in Soho dances between eras with style and suggestion. But then it buckles. What begins as a psychological mystery, rich with color and eerie momentum, devolves into a rote horror climax filled with shrieking spirits, flaming bedsheets, and a kitchen-sink twist involving a character who, until then, seemed like a background extra. The dread sharpens, but the storytelling flattens. Tension gets swapped for chaos, subtlety for volume. Still, it’s hard not to admire the journey. The performances are committed, the soundtrack immaculate, the production design soaked in atmosphere. It doesn’t quite land, but it almost dazzles on the way down.

Michael Mann, a director usually busy choreographing men with guns into existential standoffs, sets his camera loose in 1757 and ends up with a historical romance that sprints like a war film and sighs like a silent movie. It’s vigorous and unapologetically swoony—long rifles, longer stares, and strings that swell as if paid by the note. Set during the French and Indian War, a time when colonial powers treated continents like poker chips, the story pitches its tent in the crossfire. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Hawkeye, a white man raised by Mohicans, with a kind of stilled urgency that makes everyone else seem like they’re muttering in rehearsal. He’s not caught between two worlds so much as skimming past them, ducking imperial orders and riding shotgun with moral relativism. Madeleine Stowe’s Cora—restrained, clipped, elegant in her disapproval—is the daughter of a British general and the unwilling centerpiece in a romance that doesn’t blossom so much as erupt sideways. The script doesn’t waste time with courtship. They look at each other, and it’s war and wilderness from there. The romance is framed with the same ferocity as the gunpowder. Mann films pursuit like it’s the only human activity worth capturing—men racing through forests, women barreling toward danger, enemies leaping from rocks like stagehands gone rogue. It’s a western in a waistcoat, all blood and conviction, with Day-Lewis playing it like a man who would rather sprint through brushfire than waste a sentence. What Mann brings to the material is velocity masquerading as meditation. The action doesn’t climax so much as crest and keep going, while the emotional currents paddle hard beneath. There’s a sense that everything is in motion—people, loyalties, empires—except the landscape, which just watches. For all its talk of honor and betrayal, the film is less interested in moral bookkeeping than in momentum and the raw sensation of being chased. And yet, it’s still romantic in a way movies rarely are: breathless, unembarrassed, and built for the big screen.

Screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich, adapted from McMurtry’s novel. Both men operating at full voltage. The setting is Anarene, Texas—bleached, dust-blown, and barely hanging on. It’s 1951. The Korean War is warming up overseas while everything local cools into inertia. The protagonists are teenagers, technically, but not the sanitized kind. They drink beer, smoke cigarettes, fumble through sex or the pretense of it, speak plainly when they’re not too scared to speak at all. This isn’t Leave It to Beaver. This is what happens when the American dream slips behind a gas station and takes a nap. We begin with Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges), two high schoolers walking through wind that never stops. They pass boarded windows, half-lit cafés, and old-timers who critique their football game like it meant something. The marquee reads Father of the Bride, Spencer Tracy dreaming aloud about a wedding the likes of which nobody in Anarene will ever afford. Sonny slouches in the back row beside a girlfriend he’s not sure he even likes, while Duane fumbles his way into the arms of Jacy (Cybill Shepherd), the blonde every boy in town can’t stop looking at. Sonny, for what it’s worth, wishes he were Duane. But this is Anarene—you get what’s left. Shot in widescreen black-and-white, the film looks antique and ageless at once. Every gust of wind seems to peel another layer off the town. The high school dances echo with defeat. The diner flickers like it might not make it to morning. People cheat, confess, leave, come back, and leave again. Time doesn’t pass here—it recedes. It’s a movie about loss, but without ceremony. First innocence goes. Then purpose. Then the movie house closes. The performances are quiet and lived through. Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman both won Oscars, and they deserved them. Ellen Burstyn and Eileen Brennan hover in the margins with lines that cut deeper than expected. Jeff Bridges, practically glowing with youth, already looks like he’s rehearsing for disappointment. Shepherd, in her first film, nails that brittle mix of vanity and vulnerability that makes Jacy more than just the town’s idea of a future. This is one of those rare American films that documents the death of something without trying to resurrect it. It doesn’t mythologize. It observes. It listens. It waits for things to fall apart, and then it keeps watching. And it might be the most honest portrait of a disappearing rural America ever committed to film.

A kind of glitter-dusted cousin to The Wrestler, The Last Showgirl follows the final act of a woman who’s long since outlived the spotlight. Pamela Anderson plays Shelly Gardner, a former headliner at Le Razzle Dazzle—a fading, French-style topless revue that once glittered with old-school Vegas glamour and now feels like a misprint from another era. Vegas moved on—burlesque shows took over, Cirque expanded into empire territory, and Le Razzle Dazzle became the last rhinestone holdout. Shelly, now 57, is still onstage when the curtain falls for good. Retirement isn’t just looming—it’s already arrived. She’s not ready to trade sequins for service aprons. Her friend Annette (a wonderfully vinegar-soaked Jamie Lee Curtis), who once danced beside her, now slings cocktails on the floor. Shelly could follow that path—many do. But she keeps resisting, half out of pride, half out of muscle memory. Orbiting her are people caught between support and frustration. Her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd) has little patience for the years spent backstage and on the margins of a profession she never asked to inherit. Then there’s Jodie (Kiernan Shipka), a younger dancer who sees in Shelly not just a mentor but a stand-in for something missing. The film never quite delivers the emotional impact it seems to be building toward—its tenderness is more ambient than piercing—but it’s compulsively watchable, and sometimes quietly absorbing. Anderson gives a performance stripped of irony, vanity, or the high-gloss persona that once defined her. It’s unvarnished, emotionally direct, and quietly disarming—the kind of work that would’ve seemed unthinkable thirty years ago, and now feels like a long-delayed reveal. The Last Showgirl doesn’t break new ground, but it’s attuned to the quiet disorientation of life after relevance—what’s left when the spotlight moves on, and you’re still standing in its afterglow.

For a farewell, it’s almost too generous. The Last Waltz isn’t just a concert film—it’s a declaration of legacy, wrapped in velvet and lit like a cathedral. The Band, that famously democratic Canadian-American outfit, steps away from the stage with a grandeur that feels both earned and faintly amused by its own mythmaking. There are no showboats in The Band. That was their whole trick—five musicians, none of whom pushed forward too hard, all of whom knew exactly when to hang back. Their songs were less about solos than about space. And yet, for this final performance, recorded Thanksgiving Day 1976 at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, they’re joined by a parade of guests so luminous you’d think it was a Rock & Roll Valhalla casting call. Dylan swaggers in. Van Morrison bursts like a barstool firework. Joni Mitchell floats through the rafters. Clapton, Muddy Waters, Neil Young, Ronnie Hawkins, Neil Diamond—each gets a number, none overstays. Scorsese doesn’t simply document the concert—he directs it. With camera moves choreographed to chord changes and lighting that treats the stage like sacred ground, the whole thing feels composed in real time. You don’t just watch the show; you’re placed inside its pulse. The cinematography is lush, unhurried, oddly intimate. It’s not about the crowd’s energy—it’s about the performers’ farewell, framed with reverence and restraint. Between songs, there are backstage interviews. The Band, weary but eloquent, talk about honky-tonks, touring vans, the endless pull of the road. They speak not like legends but like men who’ve had enough. It’s oddly moving, hearing artists explain not why they started, but why they’re stopping. There are flashier concert films. Louder ones. But The Last Waltz plays like a curtain call for a whole era of American music—pre-arena, pre-sponsorship, pre-irony. If you’ve ever loved a vinyl groove or a guitar played without tricks, this is essential. Not just a document. A finale.

The kind of B movie that slipped into the public domain before anyone remembered to misplace it on purpose. Most surviving prints look like they’ve been rescued from a church basement, projected onto a bedsheet, and recorded through a screen door. But the film itself is surprisingly spry—for a budget-bound jungle caper that thinks Sierra Leone is a ficus and a bongo loop. John “Dusty” King, whose screen presence is mostly in the name, plays a paleontologist with the posture of a crooner and the instincts of a prop. He’s joined by Mantan Moreland, whose role—nominally assistant, functionally entertainment system—makes quick work of the dead space between plot points. Nazis show up. A nightclub singer named Nona Brooks (Arline Judge) arrives with luggage and zero patience. Someone mentions secret papers. There’s a chief named Mojobo who speaks flawless Oxford English, just to keep things educational. And somewhere in the last reel, a man in a gorilla suit stumbles in like he took a wrong turn at a costume party. Things are in motion, technically. The whole affair clocks in at just over an hour, which might sound painless until you feel each minute settle in like sand in a shoe. The story runs in circles, then narrates them. But every time the pace sags—or starts to organize itself—Moreland appears, mercifully, with a line reading like he’s slipping it past the director. He doesn’t rescue the film so much as pickpocket a few laughs on the way out. Is it good? No. Is it interesting? Almost. But there’s a flicker of life here—a performance tuned to a sharper frequency, straining against the nonsense like a jazz riff under a slideshow.

Epic doesn’t quite cover it, though the runtime certainly tries. Lawrence of Arabia spans three and a half hours and the better part of a continent, yet it remains strikingly intimate in its portrait of a man who isn’t sure where he ends and his myth begins. There are battles, sieges, alliances struck in blood and broken over sand—but none of that hits harder than the look in Peter O’Toole’s eyes when he realizes he likes the killing. T.E. Lawrence begins as a British officer with a flair for disruption, sent into the Arabian desert during the first World War on what sounds like a diplomatic errand. His mission is to unite the Arab tribes against the invading Turks—a geopolitical house of cards that would require miracles, messiahs, or both. Lawrence, with his dry wit and princely airs, tries to be both. He rides camels like a poet, speaks in riddles no one asked him to solve, and somehow earns the allegiance of Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness, dusted in moral ambiguity), Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif, magnificent), and the volcanic Aduba abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn, sneering through his mustache like it’s a weapon). The desert is filmed as both expanse and trap. You can see why Lawrence loses himself in it—how the mirages start to feel more credible than memory. The cinematography doesn’t just capture the landscape; it exposes it, stretches it, and dares you to measure a man against it. Peter O’Toole, impossibly blond, impossibly blue-eyed, plays Lawrence not as a hero or a lunatic but as someone who’s only now realizing the two might be adjacent. He carries the role with such unsettling ease that it stops feeling like performance and starts to feel like confession. Legend has it the desert haunted him long after shooting wrapped. It shows. The film’s first half feels alive with possibility—crossings, victories, applause. The second half is quieter and far more damning, as Lawrence begins to reckon with the machinery of empire and the parts of himself it’s pulled loose. By the end, he’s a man both revered and discarded, celebrated and unclaimed. There are cleaner war epics. Shorter ones, too. But few dare to ask what victory costs once the sand settles and the cheering stops.

Julianne Moore and Pierce Brosnan look every bit the part—chiseled, glossy, ready for a frothy battle of wills—but whatever chemistry they had was clearly left behind at the poster shoot. What’s billed as a sparring-match romantic comedy plays more like jury duty with flirtation. They’re rival divorce attorneys. She’s buttoned to the neck in monochrome suits; he’s a swaggering charmer in cufflinks and smirk. She finds him reckless and smug. He finds her clenched, morally upright, and allergic to joy. So of course they fall into bed. And of course the movie treats this as inevitability, not interest. There’s a briskness to the script—it doesn’t dawdle, and it seems to know where the beats go—but the laugh lines land with a shrug, or worse, a blank stare. Jokes arrive, make their presence known, and quietly excuse themselves. The courtroom banter plays like off-brand Sorkin. The romantic friction has the heat of an insurance seminar. Parker Posey and Michael Sheen are on hand to provide color but end up shading outside the lines, as if they manifested from a more daring draft that never got approved. What’s most bewildering is how little spark exists between Moore and Brosnan—two actors with wit to spare, stranded in a film that gives them nothing to do but pantomime attraction like it’s in their contract. The whole thing moves efficiently, like a train running on schedule toward a destination nobody cares to visit.

A man alone in a gray coat, matching his expression, his apartment, and the silence he lives in. That’s Jef Costello—played by Alain Delon with the stillness of someone already halfway to being a ghost. Le Samouraï is a minimalist noir so precise it moves like it’s trying not to leave footprints. Jef is a contract killer, methodical to the point of abstraction, who carries out a job at a nightclub, only to find himself seen—maybe—by a handful of witnesses, including a coolly unbothered pianist (Cathy Rosier). The lineup is inconclusive. No one can agree on his face. So he walks. But not far. The police, led by a hawk-eyed commissaire (François Périer), tail him. His employers, nervous that his survival might lead back to them, try to erase him. So now Jef is doing what noir protagonists always end up doing—scrambling to figure out who ordered his erasure before the erasers arrive. Except here, everything feels quieter. More inevitable. Like a ritual instead of a chase. Jean-Pierre Melville drains the genre of its usual heat. There are no wisecracks, no sudden outbursts, no femme fatales with switchblade banter. Just corridors, shadows, mirrors, and men watching other men from across the street. Delon’s performance—stylized, remote, almost spectral—anchors the whole thing in a kind of trance logic. He barely speaks, and when he does, it sounds like he’s whispering to fate. The film is taut, beautifully bleak, and almost hypnotically restrained. A noir in structure, a meditation in tone. If it weren’t so gripping, it might disappear entirely.

There’s something wonderfully unsanded about Leadbelly—a biopic that never bothers to varnish its subject or round off the corners. Directed by Gordon Parks with equal parts grit and reverence, the film traces the rambling, rage-prone life of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, whose twelve-string guitar would become both salvation and signature. Roger E. Mosley gives a performance that feels lived-in, not constructed—gruff, impulsive, magnetic without trying to be. Leadbelly isn’t packaged as a saint or a symbol. He’s a man with a chip on his shoulder and a tune in his gut, always drifting, always ready to swing—whether fists or chords. The film follows his journey through the early 20th-century South, where every room seems to have a door he’s not allowed to walk through, and every encounter threatens to turn violent. But this isn’t just a catalogue of hardship. It’s also funny, musical, and often startlingly warm. There’s a scene in a bar where Leadbelly, full of drink and ego, throws down a musical challenge—only to be trounced by an old man and his twelve-string guitar. He’s humbled, but also electrified. That sound becomes his sound. Later, on a train, he pulls a knife on a fellow passenger during a tense standoff, only to learn he’s nearly stabbed Blind Lemon Jefferson. Minutes later they’re jamming like old friends. These moments feel too odd to be invented, and Parks doesn’t treat them like folklore—just part of the messy business of living. The final stretch gets a little wobbly, perhaps too eager to close the arc neatly, but it doesn’t undo the power of what came before. The music—raw, bone-deep—is recreated beautifully, not as pastiche but as pulse. Leadbelly doesn’t polish history; it lets it play in the key it was written.

It’s less a film than a museum of misplaced intentions, rattling with Victorian bric-a-brac and sealed off from coherence. Alan Moore’s literary supergroup—dragged from dusty copyright shelves and bound into a reluctant alliance—makes it to the screen in name only, their complexities traded for steam cannons and a script that seems to believe banter is a substitute for character. Sean Connery, in his final leading role, wears his Quatermain like an old suit pulled from a cedar chest—still tailored, but no longer breathing. He’s the thread meant to hold this ensemble together, though the ensemble is barely sewn. Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah) pilots his ornate submarine like he’s commuting through a studio backlog; Mina Harker (Peta Wilson) is both chemist and vampire, though mostly reduced to brooding in good light; Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend) preens like a cologne ad with a tragic subplot; and Dr. Jekyll (Jason Flemyng) is allowed to morph into Hyde with the enthusiasm of a mascot undergoing heatstroke. The Invisible Man, here named Skinner (Tony Curran), mostly disrobes to remind us he’s there. Tom Sawyer, reimagined as a gun-wielding Secret Service agent, arrives as if slipped in from a different script entirely, and nobody corrects the mix-up. The plot—something about an arms race and a masked villain with a voice like gravel in a blender—feels preoccupied with motion rather than consequence. The visuals aspire to grandeur but settle for curio. There’s opulence in the design, if not in the purpose, and a few wide shots might’ve made exquisite wallpaper. The effects age unevenly—like milk, not wine—but they’re not the real issue. The problem is an action film stuffed with literary icons that doesn’t seem particularly interested in story, action, or literature. It flickers with potential, then trips over its own cape. There’s nothing extraordinary about it. Not even the gentlemen.

A vibrant account of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League—an overlooked chapter in both sports history and wartime propaganda. The league was founded in 1943 to keep baseball alive while the men were overseas, and A League of Their Own dramatizes it with a fizzy mix of nostalgia, screwball comedy, and soft-focus feminism. Geena Davis plays Dottie, a stoic farm girl with a pitcher’s frame and a catcher’s aim, scouted into the Rockford Peaches alongside her younger sister Kit (Lori Petty), whose love of the game burns a little too hot for her own good. Kit’s all emotion; Dottie’s all instinct. It’s a classic sibling rivalry setup—one that simmers, flares, and predictably comes to a head on the field. The Peaches are stocked with misfits, eccentrics, and scene-stealers—Rosie O’Donnell, Madonna, Megan Cavanagh, Anne Ramsey—but none more entertaining than their coach: Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), a washed-up slugger turned drunk-turned-reluctant mentor. He starts off treating the job like a court-mandated sentence, then slowly becomes the film’s beating heart. Hanks plays him with perfect comedic timing and just enough jaggedness to undercut the sentimentality. This is a film that’s warm without being syrupy, funny without trying too hard, and almost compulsively rewatchable. The baseball scenes are snappy. The ensemble is strong. And if the “There’s no crying in baseball” line has become a bit of a punchline, it still works in context. This isn’t just one of the best sports movies of the ’90s—it’s one of the most durable.

There’s nothing subtle about Lean on Me, and that’s half the fun. It announces itself like its lead character does—loudly, confidently, and with no intention of seeking permission. Morgan Freeman plays Joe Clark, the real-life principal turned disciplinary folk hero, who marches into Eastside High wielding a bullhorn, a baseball bat, and a belief that failure is a choice—his to correct. The school is a mess, we’re told: drugs, weapons, apathy, the usual shorthand. Clark doesn’t ask what caused the rot. He identifies it, yells at it, and throws it out by the handful. Within days, he’s banned hoodlums, bolted the doors, stripped the cafeteria of its steel cages, and staged impromptu purges of the student body with the flair of a demagogue and the energy of a man auditioning for a different century. He’s not interested in slow reform. He’s staging a hostile takeover. It’s undeniably watchable, often thrilling in its blunt-force confidence. Freeman is the embodiment of coiled authority and righteous fire as he gives the kind of performance that turns speeches into applause lines. Even when the script essentially hands him the same scene three times—lecture, rebellion, begrudging respect—he finds a new way to make them bite. But there’s little interest here in contradiction or complexity. Clark’s more volatile choices—public humiliation, zero tolerance, locking children inside a building—are framed as necessary discomforts—bold steps toward salvation. No room for moral weather. The ends justify the hallway tirades. Any dissent, whether from teachers, parents, or superiors, is flattened into obstruction. The movie works best when it’s being what it wants to be: a punchy, satisfying education fable, built for crowd response. It lacks shading, but it doesn’t lack conviction. And Freeman, charismatic to the bone, is the one who makes sure you don’t look away.

Steve Martin plays Jonas Nightengale, a fraudulent revival preacher who turns roadside breakdowns into pop-up tent revivals, rolling into Rustwater, Kansas, just as the town hits peak despair. The crops are dead, the rain’s gone missing, and the economy’s running on fumes. Perfect conditions for a spiritual extraction. With a tech crew in tow and Debra Winger feeding him personal intel through an earpiece, Nightengale calls out “miracles” with just enough razzle-dazzle to keep the donations flowing. He’s a carnival act with a crucifix, hitting marks between gospel numbers and promising divine intervention in exchange for whatever cash the congregation can dig out of their glove compartments. Martin is magnetic onstage—his sermons dance, his smile disarms, and he sells every line like it was blessed in the womb. But the casting cuts against the grain. As a huckster, he’s too playful, too ingratiating. There’s no chill in him, no sense that this character has worked the con long enough to start believing his own sales pitch. You need a little moral rot to sell the hypocrisy; Martin keeps letting the sunshine in. The plot follows a familiar rhythm: Nightengale arrives, dazzles the townsfolk, tangles with the local sheriff (Liam Neeson), flirts with a single mother (Lolita Davidovich), and begins—through some mix of small-town decency and flickering conscience—to wonder if he’s due for a change. A young disabled boy (Lukas Haas) provides the final moral nudge. It’s an old structure, borrowed loosely from Elmer Gantry, though that film kept its claws. Gantry let its cynicism breathe—allowing its title character to be both magnetic and corrosive without rushing to redeem him. Leap of Faith offers the same setup but trades moral ambiguity for uplift, softening its critique until it feels more like reassurance. By the end, the show is over, the tent comes down, and the con artist is handed a redemption arc in a to-go cup. Martin gives it everything he has, but the role needs someone colder at the center—someone you might actually believe was in it for the money. Without that, it’s not a crisis of faith. It’s a career change.

It wasn’t just a first—it was Gordon Parks, start to finish. The first Black director to helm a major Hollywood studio film, and he did it on his terms: his novel, his score, his eye behind the camera. The Learning Tree plays like a memory passed down carefully—shaped, sharpened, and still soft in the right places. The story splits between two Black teenagers—Newt (Kyle Johnson), steady, quiet, with a moral compass like a straight line, and Marcus (Alex Clarke), angrier, sharper, already aware of how crooked the world can be. Newt minds his mother, works odd jobs, falls for a girl who won’t stop smiling. Marcus watches his father, Booker Savage, get humiliated by a white neighbor and decides that decency won’t cut it. One boy stays in the system. The other starts looking for the exits. But being good doesn’t make Newt invisible. Trouble still finds him. He’s there when a white man is killed—and he knows who did it. The sheriff arrests a white suspect. Newt waits, then tells the court the truth: it was Booker. The jury, all white and all still, lets it pass. No questions. No charges. Just a quiet rearranging of the air. Days later, the sheriff and his deputies catch Newt stealing apples and march him through town in handcuffs. But it wasn’t about the fruit. Not really. It was about the testimony—about breaking ranks, speaking the name the town had silently ruled out. Easier to let everyone go than to tug at the story they’d already settled on. There are moments that feel rehearsed, like the dialogue’s been buffed down past believability. Characters slip into speeches when no one’s asking for one. But the emotions underneath don’t blink. The film keeps its footing—and when it connects, it does it clean. Parks doesn’t oversell—he just lines it up and lets it speak. A boy trying to live straight in a place where the rules won’t stay still. There’s beauty in this film, but it runs beside the disappointments—the silences that build up, the watchfulness that hardens into habit, the sense that growing up mostly means learning what not to say.

A film built on silence, not spectacle—Leave No Trace follows a father and daughter hiding in plain sight, threading their lives through the seams of a society that never asked to be part of theirs. Will (Ben Foster), an army veteran scarred by whatever the war took, lives off the grid in a public park outside Portland. His daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) is more than along for the ride—she flourishes in their minimalist woodland cocoon, trained in survival with near-military precision, but cared for with a quiet, unmistakable tenderness. The story is spare, mostly composed of small decisions and smaller reckonings. When they’re discovered and forced back into the system—houses, schools, appointments—the question isn’t whether they’ll run again, but whether Tom still wants to. Her father may be constitutionally unable to rejoin the world. But she’s young, curious, and aware that there might be more out there than pine trees and routine. Granik directs with a patient, observational eye. The cinematography doesn’t chase beauty; it finds it by staying still. Faces are weathered, voices soft, gestures deliberate. Even the supporting characters—a community of trailer dwellers and homesteaders—feel like people you’d meet if you simply wandered far enough from the interstate. Nothing in the film feels staged. It plays like it was discovered rather than written. McKenzie is a revelation, carrying emotional weight with the kind of grace that doesn’t draw attention to itself. Foster, as always, simmers without boiling. Together, they form one of the most quietly affecting screen pairings in recent memory. Not a “message” film, but a human one. Nothing here is imposed—just lived, with honesty and ache.