Film Buff Musings

The premise arrives with promise: high schoolers scrounging for alcohol stumble upon a lonely woman with a stash and a basement. From this chance encounter, a fragile arrangement is born. She’s Sue Ann—though soon enough they start calling her Ma, because that’s what horror loves: a name that disarms before the knife comes out. She invites them to drink, to dance, to shriek themselves stupid in the safety of her cellar. At first, she’s an icon of permissive cool. Then she lingers too long. Then the texts get weird—photos with her face awkwardly pasted into their group shots, messages that swing from clingy to menacing. Octavia Spencer, relieved of her usual moral gravitas, tears into the role with gusto. She plays Sue Ann as someone twitching with unspent adolescence, weaponizing maternal warmth with the precision of a scalpel. You get the sense the film wants to let her spiral—really spiral—into something wicked and unhinged. She’s ready. The script, alas, is not. The tonal calibration is off—chronically. The pacing limps when it should pounce. Suspense dissolves into repetition, and the film’s “slow reveal” of Sue Ann’s trauma plays less like descent than stalling. We’re told she was humiliated in high school. Now she wants the popular kids’ kids to pay. But the moment where Ma tips from wounded to monstrous never quite lands. Instead, we’re handed actions: stalking, drugging, cutting, branding. Startling, yes. But not rooted in anything that deepens our dread. Taylor’s direction sets up scenes like it’s working from a checklist: teen rivalry, check. Hidden photos, check. Basement dungeon, check. But the connective tissue—the character logic, the moral spiral—is slack. Even Ma’s twisted “care” for her daughter, suggestive of Munchausen by Proxy, gets treated with the same cursory glance as her party-planning. Nothing coheres. Threads dangle. Spencer still manages to find something sharper—something sadder—in the margins. You can almost see the movie that might’ve been: a grotesque fable about buried trauma, adolescent cruelty, and what happens when the discarded refuse to stay forgotten. But what we get can’t decide whether it wants to be a campy cautionary tale, a social revenge thriller, or Misery in a beer koozie. The result is a horror film without atmosphere, built around a character with too much potential and nowhere to go.

A satirical bruising of 1980s action ego, MacGruber introduces its namesake as a decorated American hero with the tactical finesse of a busted blender. He’s dragged out of retirement to stop Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer) after a stolen nuclear warhead surfaces, along with vague threats of large-scale destruction. MacGruber, played by Will Forte with deranged sincerity, assembles a team of elite commandos—then promptly blows them up with homemade C4 before the mission even begins. He’s left with what’s available: Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig), soft-spoken and unexpectedly capable, and Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe), a by-the-book soldier who reacts like he’s been reassigned to a different movie. What the film offers isn’t development, but escalation. Throat rips are passed off as technique, sex scenes stretch into performance art, and stealth tactics involve decoys fashioned from celery. MacGruber doesn’t think—he lurches, flatters, seduces, insults, and occasionally urinates. Forte commits to every misfire like it’s the plan. I laughed throughout, more than I expected, sometimes just from the unshakable confidence behind the stupidity. Jorma Taccone directs with loud conviction, keeping the film barrelling forward even when logic gives out. Kilmer plays his villain with the resignation of someone who’s learned not to interrupt. Wiig gives Vicki a kind of tentative poise, always supportive, occasionally mortified. Phillippe keeps a straight face longer than anyone should, but even he eventually starts playing along. MacGruber isn’t clever in the usual ways—it’s profane, relentless, and totally convinced of itself. A comedy about a man wholly unfit for leadership, carried to the finish line by the sheer force of his own misunderstanding. It works because no one on screen ever doubts that it might.

The world hasn’t ended yet, but it’s on its way. In Mad Max, society still technically exists—there are police stations, paperwork, a vague sense of jurisdiction—but none of it holds. The highways belong to whoever drives fastest and hits hardest, and the uniformed officers left patrolling the roads are barely keeping pace. Mel Gibson, early in his career and already radiating quiet menace, plays Max Rockatansky, a highway cop trying to keep his grip on sanity while the country around him slides into violent decay. He takes down a gang member known as Nightrider—an unhinged, speed-fueled cultist on wheels—and earns the wrath of his crew, led by the theatrical and sadistic Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who doesn’t so much lead as float through scenes like an acid-drenched ghost. The story is little more than a clothesline for stunts, but that’s part of the design. It’s a chase film, not a character study. Vehicles tear through rural highways, the camera dips and swerves like it’s barely holding on, and the editing feels patched together with adrenaline and instinct. The stunt work is raw, unfaked, and often looks like it barely cleared insurance. Still, one of the film’s most unnerving moments happens off the road entirely. Max’s wife (Joanne Samuel), having stepped away from their car to buy ice cream, rounds a corner and finds herself face-to-face with Toecutter and his gang. There’s no dialogue, no sudden lurch into violence—just a long, quiet stare as she grips the cones and holds her ground. Toecutter steps forward slowly, smiling without warmth, eyes fixed on her like he’s deciding which part to intimidate first. It’s not a confrontation. It’s a demonstration. And she meets it longer than most would. The film doesn’t waste time on exposition. It trusts the landscape—scorched roads, scavenged armor, improvised order—to tell you everything. The heroes are trying to keep some version of civilization upright. The villains just want the pieces. As George Miller’s debut feature, Mad Max is lean, feral, and utterly brilliant filmmaking.

Madagascar is exactly what you’d expect from DreamWorks in the mid-2000s: shrieking energy, pop-culture gags hurled at the wall like spaghetti, and just enough bright colors to hypnotize a roomful of toddlers into silence. For the grown-ups in the back row—less enchantment, more eye-rolling. It kicks off in the well-scrubbed confines of the Central Park Zoo, where Alex the Lion (Ben Stiller) lives out his days as a pampered showman with a fan club. His best friend, Marty the Zebra (Chris Rock, doing maximum Chris Rock), suddenly decides captivity isn’t cutting it. Freedom calls—vaguely, confusingly—and soon enough Marty, Alex, a neurotic giraffe (David Schwimmer), and a sass-laden hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith) are running amok through Manhattan before getting themselves crated and accidentally shipped off to the wilderness they thought they wanted. The plot, if you bother to keep your footing on it, is basically fish-out-of-water by way of Saturday morning cartoon—animals bred for crowds, suddenly forced to remember they’re supposed to be wild. It’s not a bad hook, but the movie can’t stop pelting it with ADD tangents. Pop culture nods appear not because they fit, but because they’re lying around: one minute, dolphins dance to Hawaii Five-0; the next, characters slow-mo sprint to Chariots of Fire. It’s like flipping channels inside a sugar-fueled toddler’s brain. To its credit, it’s never boring. Kids love the penguins (of course they got spin-offs), and the animation has that plasticky zing that holds up better than some of DreamWorks’ other experiments from the era. But under all the winking and screeching, there’s not much of a movie—just a frantic distraction that does exactly what it promises and not a flicker more.

Zippy, colorful, and relentlessly busy, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa makes a stronger effort at narrative than its predecessor. The pop culture references are dialed down, though not eliminated—a line borrowed from Planet of the Apes (“You’re so darn ugly”) is slipped in for the benefit of cinema-savvy parents who might be half-watching. The animals crash in the African savannah. For Alex the lion (Ben Stiller), this means a reunion with his long-lost parents, voiced by Bernie Mac and Sherri Shepherd. They lost him to poachers years earlier. He tells them he’s “the king of New York,” which his father takes to mean he can handle himself in a fight. It turns out Alex is more comfortable dancing in front of a crowd than defending territory. Marty the zebra (Chris Rock) meets a herd of near-identical zebras, all voiced by Rock, all delivering the same lines. He blends in a little too well. Attempts at individuality don’t get far. The film keeps adding characters, set pieces, and detours—some of them amusing, others less so. There’s a cobbled-together aircraft powered by chimpanzees, a subplot involving zebra identity, and various animal councils weighing in on leadership succession. Most of it passes by without much consequence. It’s entertaining enough in the moment. The pace is fast, the animation polished, and the voice cast engaged. But there’s not much to take from it beyond the noise. It fulfills the basic assignment of keeping kids occupied, but that’s about it.

By now, the Madagascar series has found its groove as DreamWorks’ gummy bear garnish—loud, shiny, and determined to win you over by sheer force of color. The first film scattered its energy across half a dozen pop culture detours and called it narrative. The second reined that in just enough to function. This third outing doesn’t suffer the same reference-whiplash, but it’s still running on a sugar high—skittering from one set piece to the next with the subtlety of a confetti cannon. This time, the zoo crew—Alex the lion (voiced once again by Ben Stiller), Marty, Gloria, and Melman—have made it from Africa to Europe, where they promptly latch onto a rundown circus as both disguise and mission. The goal, loosely, is to get back to New York. But first, they must reinvent the circus, dodge the world’s most unrelenting animal control officer (voiced with icicle precision by Frances McDormand), and help a trio of emotionally spent performers remember why they ever cared in the first place. The centerpiece of this redemption arc is Vitaly, a scowling Siberian tiger who once flew through rings of fire and now mostly sulks near the hay. Burned—literally and existentially—he’s nudged back toward mid-air somersaults and showbiz self-respect by Alex, while Bryan Cranston gives Vitaly a growling fatalism that softens just enough when the music swells. To its credit, the film doesn’t look lazy. The European backdrops are rich, the circus sequences are kaleidoscopic, and the animation is operating at a very high polish. But there’s a hollowness at the center, despite the whisper of something deeper—a story about animals longing for home, or identity, or just a little relevance. The movie hears the thought and waves it away, juggling flaming batons, rubber chickens, and whatever joke popped into the screenwriters’ heads. Kids will be happy. Adults might feel like they’re stuck inside a Ferris wheel that’s talking to them. Still, there’s a manic professionalism to the whole thing. Nobody’s phoning it in. They’re just speaking in circus. Watchable, even dazzling—just overstimulated.

It’s not a capital-C Classic, but it pulls off something better: it makes domestic drama feel like an ambush. James Stewart marries Carole Lombard before the ink’s dry on the meet-cute, and the film treats this life decision like a scheduling error. One moment he’s boarding a plane, the next he’s hauling a wife back to his boss—the same boss who expected him to marry his daughter and treat the promotion like a wedding gift. The boss does not approve. The promotion evaporates. The rent stretches. A baby arrives. Nothing explodes, but everything erodes. The Great Depression isn’t named—it just seeps in around the edges. The bills tighten, the dinners get quieter, and the marriage starts to creak in places neither of them wants to look too closely. Then comes the turn—sudden, unmistakably soap. What had been simmering domestic tension boils over without preamble. The volume spikes. The pace kicks. And the film, without changing shape, starts to tremble. Don’t worry—it resolves in exactly the palatable fashion the average viewer comes to expect, but it had me on the proverbial edge of my seat regardless. Stewart plays decency like a man trying to outwalk his own impatience. Lombard, stripped of her usual screwball sheen, plays every scene like she’s listening harder than anyone else in the room. They don’t unravel. They just keep going, hoping that momentum counts for something. Made for Each Other doesn’t reach for more than it can carry. It builds its case slowly, carefully, and by the end, you’re right there with it—worn down, caught up, and quietly moved.

The Madness of King George finds something rare in historical drama: mischief. It’s a film with powdered wigs, parliamentary scheming, and ceremonial protocol—but it’s also brisk, sly, and surprisingly funny. Nigel Hawthorne, reprising his stage role, gives a towering performance as George III, a man whose grip on power begins to loosen just as his mind does the same. The line between ruler and patient turns out to be thinner than anyone expected. George’s unraveling walks a tightrope between comedy and crisis. One moment he’s tossing out insults with perfect timing; the next, he’s slack-jawed, muttering nonsense, and being watched like a threat to himself and others. His outbursts grow sharper, the logic looser, and the people around him start inching back. Parliament circles. His son—the Prince of Wales, played by Rupert Everett with a look of perpetual offense—sees the power vacuum before it fully opens and begins rehearsing for the throne. Enter Dr. Francis Willis (Ian Holm), a clergyman-turned-physician with unconventional ideas about mental illness. Where others see a man possessed, Willis sees something closer to broken circuitry—something that might be repaired. The scenes between Hawthorne and Holm are some of the film’s most electric, laced with dry barbs, psychological probing, and the uneasy rapport between a king and the only man allowed to boss him around. The political backdrop—filled with rivalries, power grabs, and constitutional maneuvering—is deftly drawn, but it never overwhelms the human story. This is George’s film, and he’s often maddening, but never monstrous. Hawthorne gives him pride, panic, vulnerability, and—at his best—great comic timing. If there’s a fault, it’s in the final stretch, when George begins to stabilize. The wildness subsides, and so does the energy. It’s inevitable, maybe, but you do miss the spark. Still, the film closes with a kind of clarity that suits its subject. Lavishly produced but never stuffy, The Madness of King George moves with a clarity most period pieces would envy. The court may be dressed in brocade and powdered wigs, but the tension underneath—between power and fragility, sanity and spectacle—keeps it alive. Hawthorne doesn’t play a footnote in history. He plays a man trying not to vanish.

A satire of capitalism, class, and human absurdity—at least nominally—The Magic Christian plays like a sketchbook of deranged ideas taped together by a filmmaker with a grudge and no sense of pacing. And yet, despite the incoherence, the chaos, and the tendency to abandon any given scene the moment it threatens to make a point, I had a fairly great time. Peter Sellers stars as Sir Guy Grand, an erratic billionaire who floats through society like a half-sedated trickster god, disrupting institutions with nothing but his checkbook and a smirk. One day, for reasons never explained and probably not worth asking about, he strolls through a park and decides to adopt a homeless man named Youngman (Ringo Starr). The film doesn’t treat this as a humanitarian gesture so much as the start of a prank war against the British upper class. What follows is a chain of anarchic episodes stitched together with nonsequiturs, nonsense dialogue, and a deep distrust of anything resembling structure. A performance of Hamlet turns into a striptease. A cruise full of aristocrats dissolves into class warfare and projectile vomiting. A pile of cash is tossed into a vat of raw sewage just to see who’ll climb in. The answer: everyone. John Cleese and Graham Chapman contributed to an early draft and both appear onscreen—Cleese as a gallery auctioneer whose restraint evaporates mid-sale. The final product is more scattershot than Pythonic, but there’s enough proto-Monty anarchy bubbling under the surface to feel like a missing link. Just don’t go in expecting laugh-a-minute. The comedy here is more conceptual than comedic, more bewildered chuckle than belly laugh. As satire, it’s too unfocused to land cleanly, and as a narrative, it barely holds together. But as a cultural artifact—a meeting point for Sellers, Starr, Cleese, and late-’60s nonsense—it’s weirdly irresistible. And yes, if nothing else, stick it out for the Yul Brynner cameo. You will not see it coming.

A beautifully constructed film about coincidence, consequence, and people who can’t quite outrun their own damage. Magnolia follows a sprawl of loosely connected characters across a narrow window of time in Los Angeles, each one tangled up in guilt, loss, or delusion. It’s long, ambitious, and occasionally on the verge of unraveling—but it holds. The ensemble is exceptional. Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy—every performance strikes with bruised clarity. Tom Cruise is the exception. His performance is loud and seems forced in a way that clashes with the rest of the film. His nomination for an Oscar for this performance is among the more perplexing decisions by the institution. The camerawork is fluid and purposeful. Tracking shots drift down hallways, catch fragments of conversation, and switch focus mid-scene without calling attention to themselves. It’s the kind of directing that makes choreography look effortless. Narratively, the film walks a tightrope. It could easily buckle under its own weight, but Anderson holds it together through tone. Even when the characters never meet, they feel like they’re caught in the same emotional current—stuck in variations of the same feedback loop. Everyone’s either unraveling or just past the point of doing so. It’s a heavy film. Not tragic—just persistently sad. Emotional paralysis settles over everything. At one point, mid-crisis, each character pauses to lip-sync Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up.” On paper it sounds like a gimmick. On screen, it works. Not because it’s profound, but because it captures something the script doesn’t need to say out loud—that these people are all coming apart in compatible ways. Mann’s music runs through the film like connective tissue. It’s not commentary so much as a shared frequency. And then, near the end, it starts raining frogs. There’s no setup, no explanation. It just happens. A Biblical verse even flashes briefly on screen—Exodus 8:2—inviting viewers to make of it what they will. You can read it as divine intervention or pure absurdity. The point isn’t what it means, but how the characters respond. Some freeze. Some keep going. Some treat it like the final thing they were waiting for. It’s strange, sure, but by that point the film has already stretched past realism into something more like modern folklore. And if nothing else, it clears the air. Magnolia moves like a mood piece masquerading as a character drama—and it works. Not because it ties anything up, but because it doesn’t pretend to. Things fray. People stall. And sometimes, they move on anyway.

Almost unwatchable—unless you’re compiling a case study in how not to write a romantic comedy. The Maid wants to be one of those Parisian confections where a harried American loses his cynicism somewhere between a baguette and a balcony. Instead, it’s ninety minutes of Martin Sheen skulk­ing through alleyways like a second-rate peeping Tom, trailing Jacqueline Bisset with the sort of behavior that ought to end with a restraining order, not a love scene. Sheen is Anthony, a Wall Street hotshot plopped in Paris with a fat promotion and nothing better to do than hunt for a fling. He zeroes in on Nicole (Bisset), a single mother overwhelmed by a diva of a daughter and a carousel of unreliable maids. Through sheer narrative laziness, Anthony gets her address under the pretense of helping—only to show up on her doorstep posing as the new nanny when she’s desperate enough not to ask too many questions. What’s supposed to be playful screwball hijinks is mostly him botching childcare and leering at his unwilling host. They bicker like they’re in a lesser Neil Simon outtake, until, with no logic or buildup, Nicole flips from suspicious to besotted—because the script needs her to. To top it off, she turns out to be the very exec Anthony was brought in to replace, because the gods of lazy coincidence never sleep. Sheen and Bisset try, but charisma only goes so far when your romantic premise is borderline stalking dressed up as “meet-cute.” There’s a half-decent farce hiding in here if anyone had bothered to write it. A wasted cast, a plot that ties itself in knots it can’t untangle, and not a single moment that feels genuinely earned. Watch literally anything else set in Paris instead.

The fairy tale’s intact in outline but filed down to something glossy and bureaucratic. Maid in Manhattan borrows the bones of Cinderella and installs them in a high-rise suite with room service and neutral carpeting. Jennifer Lopez plays Marisa, a hotel maid with managerial ambitions and the posture of someone long overdue for a promotion. One afternoon, a guest’s designer coat beckons from the closet, and Marisa—just for a moment—tries it on. Enter Chris (Ralph Fiennes), a politician with diplomatic vowels and the emotional temperature of a marble countertop. He mistakes her for wealth-adjacent, and before anyone can clarify, they’re in Central Park with her precocious son rattling off Nixon trivia. The script gestures at class tension, then quickly backs away, settling into easy platitudes about self-improvement and looking the part. Everything moves with a cautious, polished rhythm, terrified of scratching the surface. Lopez, always more watchable than the roles she’s given, sells sincerity with very little help. Fiennes stands opposite her like a mannequin with a résumé. And then there’s the supporting cast—strangely vivid, mostly wasted, occasionally magnetic. Bob Hoskins brings quiet decency to a role written in shorthand. Natasha Richardson, polished and precise, makes her lines sound sharper than they are. Amy Sedaris, sly and spiky, injects just enough bite to make you wish the whole movie had her pulse. The movie doesn’t offend. It doesn’t surprise either. A romantic comedy with no romance in the pulse and no comedy in the reflexes, just enough gloss to pass inspection. Easy to watch. Easier to forget.

The Majestic doesn’t just want to be a Frank Capra movie—it practically shows up in a fedora and offers to fix your screen door. It’s sentimental, flag-waving, and completely convinced that decency and piano solos will save the republic. Whether that works on you depends on your tolerance for speeches delivered with trembling chins. Jim Carrey plays a 1950s screenwriter who gets blacklisted, crashes his car, and washes up in a small California town with no memory and a strong resemblance to a local war hero who went missing overseas. That the missing soldier also happened to be a virtuoso pianist is one of several plot conveniences the film doesn’t bother to iron out. Everyone assumes he’s their long-lost son, and no one seems especially curious about how he forgot them all. The film isn’t interested in doubt—only affirmation. Carrey suppresses every one of his usual instincts. There are no funny voices, no facial acrobatics. It’s a straight performance, and a surprisingly grounded one. If The Truman Show was testing the waters, this is full commitment. He blends into the role almost too well—competent, likable, and just blank enough to carry the fantasy. Martin Landau gives the film its most grounded moments as the soldier’s father, who’s more than willing to believe the lie if it brings his son home for good. There’s one shot of him just watching Carrey with a look that manages to combine joy, grief, and quiet doubt. It’s subtle, and probably too good for this movie. The town, determined to show its gratitude, decides to resurrect its shuttered movie palace—the Majestic—once run by the missing soldier and his father. The scenes involving its restoration are the closest the film comes to feeling lived-in. There’s something pleasant about watching people repaint an old marquee and argue about popcorn machines. It’s one of the few places where the film drops the big speech and settles for something resembling behavior. Eventually, the courtroom drama arrives, and the gears start grinding. The film decides it has something to say about patriotism and the Constitution, and proceeds to underline it in permanent marker. Characters declare their values in full paragraphs. It’s not subtle, and it’s not short. The Majestic isn’t terrible. Carrey is solid. The production looks expensive. But the film keeps borrowing someone else’s tone, someone else’s pacing, and someone else’s playbook. It’s a heartfelt imitation—handsome, heavy-handed, and so preoccupied with being uplifting that it forgets to be alive.

A brisk, tart little adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s moral chess match—staged in Salvation Army halls and laced with just enough wit to pass as a comedy—if your idea of comedy involves arms dealers debating salvation over tea. Wendy Hiller plays Barbara, a true believer in soul-saving, unshaken even when the soul in question belongs to Bill Walker (Robert Newton), a snarling brute who storms into the shelter furious that his girlfriend has found God and stopped returning his threats. He throws a punch and gets met with a look. Barbara doesn’t flinch—and somehow that lands harder than a counterblow. Looming in the background is her estranged father, Andrew Undershaft (Robert Morley, all affable menace), a munitions tycoon who talks about war like it’s an especially lucrative side hustle. Barbara sees his money as bloodstained, irredeemable. But when that “tainted” cash starts keeping the electricity on and food in the pantry—and the Army accepts it—her moral high ground starts to erode under her feet. That same erosion reaches Adolphus Cusins (Rex Harrison), a cool academic who treats idealism like a personal hobby until it drags him, reluctantly, into the family business. He starts off as the film’s resident skeptic and ends up inheriting a weapons empire—not out of greed or conviction, but because opting out starts to look suspiciously like cowardice. Their courtship, such as it is, stays dry and largely theoretical, which for Shaw might as well be foreplay. The film trims the play’s wordiness, but not its spine. Shaw’s voice stays sharp: amused, cynical, and fully prepared to ruin everyone’s illusions. It might not be his most rousing work, but it might be his most quietly destabilizing. You don’t leave feeling moved—you leave wondering how long your principles would last in a room with a checkbook.

There’s something oddly beautiful about watching Damon Wayans terrorize children. In Major Payne, he plays a career marine unceremoniously discharged for lack of wars—left twitchy, unemployed, and visibly insulted by peacetime. The role requires a man who can deliver death threats in a squeaky Southern drawl without blinking, and Wayans doesn’t blink. His Major Payne squints at the world like it owes him pain. When offered a post at a boys’ military academy, he accepts with the grim resolve of someone preparing to dismantle a toaster using live ammunition. The setup writes itself: an emotionally stunted killing machine tasked with shaping discipline out of a pack of preteens. What saves the film from the usual workshop of redemption arcs and marching montages is Wayans’ performance—so committed, so deeply weird, it becomes its own justification. His put-downs arrive with creative cruelty—half drill-sergeant insult, half cartoon monologue—targeting everything from weight and posture to facial expressions that don’t meet his standards. They’re barked with the deranged precision of someone who’s memorized every insult from every war movie and rerouted them through recess threats and lunchroom grievances. And then—somehow—he softens. A tiny cadet confesses he’s scared of a monster in the closet, and instead of a life lesson, Payne unloads a rifle into the darkness. “If he’s still in there,” he mutters, “he ain’t happy.” That’s the pivot point. Not subtle. Not trying to be. But unexpectedly sweet, like a hug given with brass knuckles still on. The main story—a showdown with a rival academy—barely registers. You’ve seen it before, and probably better. But as a vehicle for Wayans at his most hilariously unhinged, Major Payne marches well ahead of expectations. Not deep. Not dull. Just loud, quotable, and weirdly endearing.

The first in Andy Sidaris’s “Triple B” series—bullets, bombs, and boobs, more or less—Malibu Express is also the limpest entry, and not just because it’s barely a movie. Sidaris would go on to refine his particular blend of softcore espionage fluff, but here the formula is missing its dumbest, most essential ingredient: women with firearms. You can feel the audience shifting in their seats, waiting for the Playboy models to stop lounging and start loading. Instead, they just take their tops off. That’s the whole show. There’s a perfunctory lesbian shower scene, some vaguely smirking nudity, and a lot of walking around in heels taller than the script is deep. No shootouts, no hot tub double-crosses, no purring assassins with beach-bag Uzis. Just cleavage and conversation—neither used well. Darby Hinton plays Cody Abilene, a rich-boy private investigator who appears to have wandered into the plot by accident. He narrates the film with the affect of a sleep-deprived rodeo clown and acts with the dramatic range of a loaf of white bread. There’s some kind of arms deal afoot, and he’s supposed to be investigating it, but you’d be forgiven for thinking the real crime is how often his bare backside ends up onscreen. If that’s your priority, you’re covered. The film’s only real value is historical: the origin point for a franchise that would later understand exactly what kind of idiocy it was selling. Malibu Express shoots blanks. And not even stylish ones.

Mallrats, Kevin Smith’s second film, doesn’t so much follow Clerks as trip over its own feet trying to level up. It begins with two breakups and ends in a pile of flailing subplots, but somewhere in the middle is a loud, lopsided comedy that made me laugh enough to forgive its more desperate lunges. A mess, yes—but a glorious one. T.S. (Jeremy London) is the more romantic of our two leads, and also the duller. He’s just been dumped by his girlfriend Brandi (Clare Forlani) after she agrees to fill in last-minute on a dating game show produced by her sweaty, alpha-male father (Michael Rooker). Meanwhile, his best friend Brodie (Jason Lee, the real engine here) is also freshly dumped—his girlfriend (Shannen Doherty) finally loses patience with his smug, comic-book-hoarding immaturity. So the boys head to the mall, as one does, to loiter, conspire, and heckle. It’s their turf. It’s also where the game show is being taped. Collisions ensue. Smith’s dialogue is juvenile, circuitous, and occasionally brilliant—packed with geek-speak, deadpan insults, and misdirected philosophy. I giggled often. But the film gets bogged down by a subplot involving Silent Bob (Smith himself), who’s suddenly transformed into a knockoff Batman, performing slapstick stunts to sabotage the show. It’s not just unfunny—it drains momentum every time it shows up. Still, there are gems. A standout scene involves Brodie meeting Stan Lee, who doles out life advice with charming sincerity. It’s oddly touching and unexpectedly well-played. Mallrats doesn’t hold together, but it has a junk-drawer energy that keeps it from collapsing. Too silly to dismiss. Too uneven to ignore.

The Maltese Falcon is everything film noir would later turn into cliché, but here it still feels original: hard-boiled, coiled tight, and cut like it knows how easily things fall apart. Huston keeps everything precise and wound like a pocket watch. Humphrey Bogart plays Sam Spade, a private detective built on cigarettes, suspicion, and thinly veiled contempt. His partner is gunned down hours into a case brought in by a nervous, overly polished client (Mary Astor) who doesn’t even try to make her story sound plausible. From there, the plot narrows like an alley. Everyone wants the bird—the Maltese Falcon, a jewel-encrusted relic that may or may not exist—and they all expect Spade to play errand boy. He plays something else entirely. The mystery carries weight, but the real puzzle is Spade. What drives him? Greed? Spite? A tendency to press his luck just to see who folds? Bogart holds the line with a performance that never begs for sympathy. Huston lets the ambiguity stand. The supporting cast—Peter Lorre’s slippery hanger-on, Sydney Greenstreet’s corpulent charmer, Elisha Cook Jr.’s doomed underling—round out a world where everyone’s bluffing and no one folds cleanly. The dialogue is pure percussion. Every line arrives with bite, every pause says more than it should. Huston corrals it all without grandstanding. The Maltese Falcon didn’t invent the genre, but it gave it its rhythm. Cold, fast, and cut to the bone. A noir that never loosens its grip.

Lucille Ball took on Mame with the hopes of resuscitating a flagging film career. Instead, it wrote her off the marquee. Long tagged as one of the great musical misfires, the film has its defenders, but even they tend to sound apologetic. Angela Lansbury originated the role on Broadway and gave it legs; she was reportedly considered for the movie but dismissed for not being bankable enough. So Ball, then in her sixties and well past her comedic zenith, stepped in. Her voice, worn thin from years of cigarettes and sitcom patter, couldn’t quite handle Jerry Herman’s melodies. Her dancing stumbles, her timing drags. And yet—she’s watchable. That’s more than can be said for the production around her, which often plays like a nostalgia trap disguised as spectacle. It’s all theatrical sheen and musical inertia. The sets are gaudy in a way that borders on hypnotic, and some of Herman’s songs do stick, particularly the banjo-driven title number. But the choreography accompanying them is flat, as though no one in the editing room could find a pulse to cut to. The energy that should explode from a number like “That’s How Young I Feel” barely flickers. Robert Preston provides a pattering of elegance as Mame’s Southern suitor, and Bea Arthur, reprising her Broadway role as Vera Charles, brings a welcome growl. Their scenes give the film momentary lift. But the rest feels embalmed in good intentions and gilded production design. I wouldn’t say Ball was miscast—twenty years earlier, she might have killed it. But at this late stage in her career, she’s coasting. The film doesn’t implode, exactly. It simply stalls as it waits for a spark that never comes.

A Belgian art-house provocation filmed in harsh black and white, Man Bites Dog poses as a mockumentary and escalates into something closer to a confession. The concept is simple and perverse: a documentary crew follows Ben (Benoît Poelvoorde), an affable sociopath who talks like a philosophy major on speed and kills like it’s an errand. He chats about race, architecture, music—and in between, he strangles a postman, shoots strangers, startles an old woman into cardiac arrest, drowns a child offscreen, and debates the physics of body disposal. The crew follows, records, laughs. Eventually, they join in. There’s a point here, sharpened like a shiv: media desensitization, voyeurism, the complicity of watching. But the satire isn’t shaped—it’s hurled. Scenes arrive in sequence, not arc. It feels less like storytelling than escalation. And while the ugliness is the argument, it makes for an experience that’s less scathing than numbing. It’s not without precedent—A Clockwork Orange toyed with ultraviolence as theater, and Natural Born Killers would soon remix it as tabloid opera. But this feels more primal, more amateur by design. Shot by co-directors who also play the crew, it mimics cinéma vérité so effectively it starts to feel like evidence. No score. No framing. Just horror, direct to camera. And yet, it sticks. Not because it’s meaningful—though it insists it is—but because it gets under the skin by sheer abrasion. It’s a provocation without a wink. No safe distance. No relief. You don’t forget it. But remembering feels less like reflection than damage. In French with English subtitles.

Sammy Davis Jr. plays a jazz legend on the verge of combustion, and for the first fifteen minutes, you might believe you’re watching a powder keg in a tailored suit. He plays Adam Johnson, a trumpet player with an audience, a temper, and a habit of bottling his grief in something that doesn’t stay bottled. The premise—troubled genius loses his footing—arrives pre-scuffed. It doesn’t deepen; it loops. But what a cast. Louis Armstrong appears and doesn’t have to act—he just plays, and the film swells around him like it’s catching its breath. Mel Tormé shows up like a nightclub spirit guide. Frank Sinatra Jr. tries his best not to get swallowed. Cicely Tyson, incandescent even in early-career fragments, walks through one scene with such emotional precision it leaves the movie coughing behind her. The structure is scaffolding: bottle, rage, guilt, repeat. The film gestures at racism, guilt, and legacy but mostly cycles through hotel rooms and hollow reconciliations. Davis, when singing, is undeniable—confident, intimate, dangerous in the right way. When he’s asked to carry the dramatics, he flattens into gesture. The script gives him feelings but no spine to push against. Some moments work so well they feel misfiled. A conversation turns sharp, a song fills the space between regrets, and for a flicker, it feels assembled. But then we’re back to fussing with clichés and waiting for the film to decide what it wants from its own sorrow. A Man Called Adam isn’t a failure—just a talented ensemble dragging their feet through a rehearsal where no one brought new pages. But when the music starts, you remember why they showed up.

This is about as good as the costume drama ever got—restrained, literate, and built around the kind of performance that doesn’t announce itself so much as quietly take over the frame. Paul Scofield plays Sir Thomas More as a man so anchored in conscience that it becomes both his armor and his undoing. He won’t endorse Henry VIII’s annulment. He won’t acknowledge the King’s new church. He won’t bend, even slightly. And that silence becomes the loudest thing in the film. Robert Shaw, meanwhile, arrives like a thunderclap. His Henry VIII is all appetite and volatility—warm one moment, lethal the next. The dynamic between the two men—one bluffing, coaxing, demanding; the other holding firm without raising his voice—gives the film its core tension. Every scene they share tightens the grip. Visually, it’s a feast: lush exteriors, rich interiors, carefully staged but never fussy. The dialogue, adapted by Robert Bolt from his own play, is some of the sharpest ever written for screen—measured, eloquent, and unfailingly precise. Even the quietest conversations feel like they’ve been carved in stone. Yes, the pacing dips now and then. This is a long game, not a sprint. But it moves with a kind of moral gravity that keeps it from ever feeling inert. The drama here is in the refusal—in what’s withheld, in what isn’t said. This isn’t a film that chases easy catharsis or tidy resolutions. It’s about conviction under pressure, and what that costs. The tragedy isn’t that More dies. It’s that he’s the only one who doesn’t flinch.

There’s a fine line between energy and flailing, and The Man from Toronto doesn’t so much cross it as dig a trench on the wrong side. Kevin Hart, doing what he can with almost nothing, sweats his way through yet another mismatched-identity caper, this time paired with Woody Harrelson, who plays the actual Man from Toronto—a legendary assassin with a taste for violence and a wardrobe that screams tactical couture. His character plays like three rewrites stitched into a single role—ruthless in one scene, sardonic in the next, and weirdly sentimental by the third. Hart plays Teddy, a would-be entrepreneur whose latest scheme is “no-contact boxing,” a fitness concept that doesn’t make sense even in theory. A botched Airbnb reservation leads to him being mistaken for Harrelson’s character. When the real killer shows up, instead of eliminating the mix-up, he decides—for reasons the film never convincingly explains—to drag Teddy along and use the confusion to his advantage. Harrelson is meant to be the cold, methodical type, but the film keeps steering him off-course, unsure whether he’s the threat or the sidekick. His character keeps softening into comic relief, which leaves Hart’s manic energy with nothing to push against. The central joke is tired by minute ten, and by minute thirty, you can see Hart start to circle the same punchlines like a magician returning to a vanishing coin that never worked the first time. The humor sinks into secondhand bodily-function gags, the plot forgets itself, and whatever potential the premise once had disappears into static. The Man from Toronto plays like something brainstormed to fill a release window—not watched so much as slotted.

It’s 1950s Louisiana: blistered porches, wide silences, and feelings no one’s been taught how to name. The heat doesn’t lift. Conversations don’t land—they circle, stall, and retreat. Robert Mulligan directs The Man in the Moon like a man filing evidence he never plans to explain—quiet, orderly, and lethal once it sinks in. Reese Witherspoon, fourteen and all edges, makes her debut as Dani—barefoot, sun-scabbed, and allergic to quiet. She’s not so much playing a part as announcing herself, elbows first. Her world tilts when Court Foster (Jason London) moves in next door: older, loose-limbed, kind in the vague, untrained way that gets misread. Dani reads it, hard. He calls her “kid,” which says everything and nothing. Then his eyes slide toward Maureen—Dani’s older sister, practiced in the kind of prettiness that doesn’t ask, just receives. And that’s the shift. Not a betrayal—just the cruelty of timing, of biology, of being fifteen and certain the universe should be fair. Sam Waterston plays their father like a man who never figured out how to improvise—rigid, dutiful, exact until he isn’t. He hits Dani once. It happens fast, without flourish. No monologue, no swelling score. Just impact and shame, like a match struck in a quiet room. Tess Harper, as their mother, registers every crack in the family without commenting on any of them. Her love is unadorned. She keeps the house running, the lies polite, and the grief in check. Mulligan shoots the film like he’s watching it through memory—sun-drunk, bleached at the edges. Freddie Francis’s cinematography leans into stillness: porches, dirt roads, the frame holding just a second too long. Nothing is rushed. The cicadas talk more than the characters. And then it breaks. Not with spectacle, but with a mistake. One bad second, no rewind. The crush, the triangle, the yearning—pushed aside by something louder. The grief isn’t cinematic. It’s dumb, fast, impossible to negotiate. The film doesn’t resolve it. It just ends, leaving everyone—Dani, the viewer—stuck with what can’t be fixed.

A musical about impossible dreams, undone by entirely avoidable missteps. Man of La Mancha, the beloved Broadway show about madness, nobility, and the blurred lines between performance and delusion, arrives on screen already weighed down—and then sinks. On paper, it sounds like a sure thing: Peter O’Toole as Miguel de Cervantes, performing his Quixotic tale from the confines of a dungeon; Sophia Loren as Aldonza, the battered kitchen maid he envisions as the saintly Dulcinea. But neither of them can sing. Not passably. Not even close. These are magnetic actors, yes, but the score—sweeping, strange, demanding—requires more than presence. It needs voices. And what we get instead are strained approximations that might pass in a forgiving community theater production, but collapse under the scrutiny of the camera. James Coco, as Sancho Panza, emerges as the film’s sole bright spot. He can sing, for one, and his warmth softens the film’s stiffer passages. When paired with O’Toole in spoken scenes, the dynamic finally clicks. But the musical numbers—the film’s beating heart—never quite come alive. And then there’s the makeup. O’Toole’s transformation into Quixote, meant to mark the shift from playwright to mad knight, is laid on with such heavy hand it borders on kabuki. He looks less like a dreamer than a wax figure in search of a ventilator. The prison framing device—so effective on stage as a metatheatrical conceit—feels bloated here, dragging the pace and pulling us back into a setting the story keeps trying to escape. There are moments where you can glimpse the bones of what this could’ve been—tragic, stirring, defiant in its theatricality. But the execution is off at nearly every level. The dream remains unreachable, and the film never even gets close.

There’s some inherent comedy baked into the premise: Tommy Lee Jones, in full squinting, stone-faced form, plays a Texas Ranger assigned to protect a gaggle of cheerleaders who’ve witnessed a murder. That setup practically begs for a sharp genre fusion—part fish-out-of-water comedy, part procedural parody. But once the credits roll, it becomes clear that the concept is doing most of the work. Jones, ever the professional, doesn’t phone it in. He brings that bone-dry wit and military stiffness we’ve come to expect, treating every glittery offense against order with slow-burning dismay. Watching him attempt to enforce curfews and tactical awareness among a crew of hyperactive co-eds has its moments—mostly smirks rather than laughs—but the film doesn’t seem interested in pushing the absurdity far enough. The cheerleaders, meanwhile, are less characters than tropes in tank tops. They sneak out, flirt, obsess over lip gloss, and talk in bumper-sticker catchphrases. The writing can’t decide whether it wants them endearing or insufferable, so it settles for one-note caricature. A few mild laughs slip through—Jones bellowing at their choreography like it’s a combat drill, or watching their pep rub off on him in spite of himself—but the comedic rhythm never finds its beat. The plot, such as it is, involves the murder they’ve witnessed. But it feels like a placeholder—an excuse for chase scenes and the occasional shootout, none of which rise above cable-TV filler. The action is perfunctory. The suspense is nonexistent. Man of the House should’ve been breezy and self-aware. Instead, it meanders through stock gags and paint-by-numbers hijinks, never quite committing to its own silliness. Jones holds the line, but he’s playing against a script that offers him little beyond punchlines and pratfalls. He deserves better. So do we.

Man on Fire is a vengeance thriller dressed in grief, anchored by Denzel Washington in full slow-burn mode. He plays John Creasy, a former CIA operative with nothing left but a bottle and a death wish, sleepwalking through a life he’s already quit. When he’s inexplicably hired to protect a young girl in Mexico City—a wide-eyed, too-articulate-for-reality Dakota Fanning—he accepts out of necessity, not conviction. At first, Creasy can barely muster a word. He’s all scowl and silence, swaddled in guilt, treating the child like an inconvenience with a pulse. But Pita, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist (Marc Anthony, playing it solemn), chips away at his defenses with questions, affection, and relentless presence. Eventually, something shifts. Their connection becomes the film’s emotional hinge—unexpected, then deeply felt. And then she’s gone. The kidnapping, when it comes, feels less like a plot device than an open wound, and Creasy’s descent into retribution is brutal, methodical, and deeply personal. Tony Scott stages the fallout with signature excess: jagged edits, visual flares, oversaturated yellows, and a camera that can’t sit still. It’s stylish to the point of distraction, but the rawness underneath holds it together. The plot hits familiar revenge beats—dirty cops, double-crosses, bodies stacking—but Washington elevates every scene with simmering intensity. His Creasy is not just a man with a mission; he’s a man finally awake again, even if only to burn everything down. What saves the film from genre routine is the bond between Creasy and Pita. Washington and Fanning have a rare onscreen rhythm—wary, tender, and earned. It’s that connection, not the carnage, that gives Man on Fire its staying power.

A western about memory, myth, and the uneasy passage of time—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance finds John Ford dismantling the genre he helped build. It’s a film about who gets credit, who takes the blame, and how stories become history. There’s still gunfire, but the real tension is political: courtroom speeches, newspaper print, backroom deals—the slow bureaucratization of the American West. James Stewart plays Ransom Stoddard, a lawyer from the East who shows up in the dusty town of Shinbone carrying a law book and a firm belief in due process. It doesn’t take long for that idealism to get him beaten bloody by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), a whip-wielding thug with no patience for courts, rules, or anything that doesn’t end in violence. Stoddard wants justice through the system. The system is still under construction. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) already knows how this ends. A local rancher and veteran of rougher times, he represents the older way—quieter, quicker, more final. He doesn’t exactly welcome Stoddard, but he doesn’t let him die either. With a sheriff too bumbling to intervene (Andy Devine), Doniphon becomes the town’s only real defense against Valance—though he won’t be the one remembered for it. The showdown is tense, but it’s the aftermath that matters. Marvin makes Valance dangerous not just for his cruelty, but for how casually he wields it. Stewart brings wounded civility, Wayne brings a kind of grave resignation, and Ford directs like he’s disassembling a monument plank by plank. The final reveal doesn’t shock—it cools everything that came before. The legend was cleaner than the truth, so the legend stuck. That’s not irony. That’s how history gets written.

Not even peak-era Tom Hanks can rescue this limp farce from its own misplaced faith in quirk over coherence. A remake of the well-regarded 1972 French comedy The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe, this American version swaps out black for red—because, apparently, brighter means funnier. It doesn’t. Hanks plays Richard Drew, an absent-minded classical violinist who, by sheer chance, is chosen as a decoy in an internal CIA turf war. The agency’s top brass needs a patsy to throw a rival off the trail of a real investigation, so they point to the first oddball they spot at the airport—a man with mismatched shoes, courtesy of a prank by his bandmates. Richard, naturally, has no clue he’s become the center of a half-baked spy sting. He blithely fiddles through rehearsals, drifts into a fling with a seductive operative (Lori Singer), and never quite notices that a pack of bumbling agents is bugging his toothbrush and tearing apart his laundry. The joke—what little there is—is that his cluelessness reads as world-class espionage to people too incompetent to check twice. On paper, it should be featherweight screwball fun: mistaken identity, pratfalls, secret agents too busy backstabbing each other to notice they’re chasing a nobody. On screen, it sinks faster than it bounces. Hanks is effortlessly likable, but the script relies so much on that charm that it forgets to pack any real jokes worth the effort. A few stray chuckles survive—mostly because Hanks can’t help himself—but nothing sharp enough to pass for a proper spy spoof, or silly enough to work as decent slapstick. Some ideas deserve a second shot. After this one, maybe a third wouldn’t hurt.