Film Buff Musings

Jack Black, in all his soft-skulled, high-octane glory, dons the spandex of Ignacio—a humble Mexican monk with culinary aspirations by day and a penchant for secret, sinful lucha libre by night. The monastery kitchen doesn’t pay much, and the orphans deserve better soup, so he slips away in a cape and stretchy pants to body-slam for pesos. The problem—according to ecclesiastical rules and possibly divine precedent—is that professional wrestling is a sin. That’s the set-up, and it’s a pretty good one: a holy fool risking damnation for dignity. As a follow-up to Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre arrives already bearing the weight of expectations. However, under that weight, it buckles. The Hesses retain their signature deadpan delivery, framing characters like paper dolls in wide, awkward compositions, but this time the tone doesn’t quite cast the same hypnotic spell. There’s a strain behind the silliness, as if the film is working harder to earn our laughter and, paradoxically, achieving slightly less of it. The gags feel more calculated, the absurdism a bit more self-conscious—less the found-object charm of Napoleon and more like something bought secondhand and spray-painted zany. Jack Black, for his part, is a walking contradiction to the film’s house style. He commits with the fervor of a man headlining an arena tour—leaping, screeching, mugging, and throwing his whole diaphragm into the role. It’s a bravely ridiculous performance, and often quite funny, but he’s a comedian built for operatic excess, not stifled awkwardness. You can feel the incongruent juxtaposition where his instinct for full-throated chaos meets the film’s preference for blank-faced eccentricity. Oddly, it’s Héctor Jiménez, as Nacho’s skeletal tag partner and spiritual foil, who hits the comic sweet spot. He moves like a string puppet cursed with awareness, delivers his lines with the wearied calm of someone who’s seen things he refuses to name, and lands nearly every moment he’s given with impeccable, oxygen-starving deadpan. He doesn’t push; he lets the weirdness rise like dough. Despite its tonal mismatches and occasional flops, Nacho Libre remains affable and weirdly warm. There’s an innocence to it, under the fart jokes and wrestling tights—a belief that ridiculousness, pursued with conviction, can carry a kind of grace. And while the laughs come in more sporadic waves than in Napoleon Dynamite, they’re still there, tucked into odd corners, peeking out of the wrestling ring ropes, or hiding in Jiménez’s magnificent stillness. You might not laugh as hard as you want to. But if you have a taste for the eccentric, you’ll probably laugh anyway.

A limp crime comedy dressed up with a Southern twang and not much urgency. Kim Basinger stars as Nadine, a well-meaning flake who talks fast, thinks slow, and winds up in over her head after trying to reclaim a batch of ill-advised nude photos from a sleazy photographer (Jerry Stiller). He’s promptly murdered, and the file she grabs in the scuffle turns out to contain secret construction plans for a new highway—though how or why this is supposed to matter isn’t entirely clear. Her estranged husband Vernon (Jeff Bridges), more opportunist than support system, sees a quick buck and runs with it, dragging both of them deeper into a plot involving Rip Torn as a sweaty, drawling land shark. The caper never builds any real tension, and the comic rhythms are slack—scenes drift from one to the next like they’re waiting for the music to kick in. Basinger and Bridges have an easy rapport, but it doesn’t lead anywhere memorable. Their characters aren’t written with much specificity beyond “quirky” and “stubborn,” and the film never decides if it wants them to be lovable rogues or just people who make poor decisions in sequence. It’s passable in the moment, then disappears. The one exception: a brief, vertigo-inducing bit involving a step ladder stretched between two second-story windows, with Bridges and Basinger inching across in a moment of suspended panic. It’s the one time the movie remembers it has a camera—and something to do with it.

If Mary Poppins had an older, considerably more grotesque cousin who arrived uninvited and wielded her magic like a last resort rather than a treat, she might resemble Nanny McPhee. Played with mischievous composure by Emma Thompson—buried under a unibrow, a wart constellation, and a snaggletooth that could open cans—McPhee materializes in the home of a widowed undertaker and his seven feral children, not so much hired as conjured by narrative necessity. The children, practiced in the art of driving away nannies (17 and counting), take one look at McPhee and reach for the usual arsenal—bugs, food fights, generalized menace. But McPhee, unlike her predecessors, doesn’t flinch. She blinks. And with each blink, reality reconfigures itself to her liking: food flies back into bowls, children freeze mid-mayhem, and chaos is repackaged into choreographed order. It’s behavioral correction via supernatural deterrent, and it works—though not without protest. Meanwhile, the children’s father, Cedric Brown (Colin Firth, reliably frazzled), finds himself cornered by a Dickensian ultimatum: marry within the month or forfeit financial support from a tyrannical great-aunt (Angela Lansbury, who enters like an ambulatory heirloom). He sets his sights on an unspeakably garish widow (Celia Imrie, having a marvelous time), whose lack of maternal instinct is evident even to the mice. The children, sensing doom, mount a campaign of resistance that McPhee, true to her role as a facilitator rather than an enforcer, quietly endorses. As order takes root and familial affection emerges from under layers of soot and tantrums, McPhee’s features begin to soften. The wart recedes. The nose reshapes. The snaggletooth retreats. This isn’t vanity—it’s pedagogy. The better the children become, the less grotesque she needs to appear. When they’ve learned enough, she’ll be gone, like any self-respecting magical figure with a timetable and a moral curriculum. There’s something vaguely Dahl-esque in the architecture of it all—naughty children, eccentric authority figures, and a tone that walks a careful line between punishment and play—but the texture is softer, the characters less prickly. If this is a “poor man’s Roald Dahl,” then it’s one who spent wisely: the film is colorful, brisk, and never insulting to the intelligence of the children (or adults) watching. Thompson’s script sprinkles just enough wit to keep things buoyant, and the supporting cast—Imelda Staunton, Derek Jacobi, and Kelly Macdonald among them—fills in the margins with a delightful sense of theater. It doesn’t rewrite the spellbook, but it recites it with flair. And in the end, that’s enough.

Released in the UK as Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang—a title wisely abandoned for U.S. audiences, lest anyone assume the magical nanny was here to lecture on cosmic inflation. Instead, she arrives to fix children. The formula’s unchanged: she shows up when she’s not wanted and disappears the moment she is—which feels like emotional sabotage disguised as moral wisdom, but maybe that’s just the going rate for British magic. Emma Thompson returns as Nanny McPhee, still sporting the nose, the unibrow, and the general air of a witch who’s read too much Rousseau. She lands on a rural farm during the WWII Blitz, where five children—three local, two imported—are tearing each other to shreds over mud, jam, and basic decency. The setup is familiar. The city cousins—privileged, brittle—are dropped at a crumbling country farm run by their aunt Isabel (Maggie Gyllenhaal, doing a respectable British accent and blinking like someone who hasn’t slept since rationing began). The youngest refers to it all as “a land of poo.” The children are brawling in the yard. And someone smashes the last jar of jam they’d been saving for their father, who’s been reported missing at the front. Cue Nanny McPhee. She doesn’t ask for order. She enforces it. With a stomp of her cane, pigs synchronize swim, boys fly through the air, and spoiled children find themselves nose-to-nose with the consequences of their tantrums. It’s still a poor man’s Mary Poppins—less elegant, less magical—but it’s funnier than expected, and maybe even a little sharper than the first Nanny McPhee. The tone strikes a careful balance: silly enough for kids, dry enough for the adults who brought them. There’s a side plot involving Isabel’s oily brother-in-law, who’s up to his eyeballs in gambling debts and pressuring her to sell the farm. His intentions are transparent; the resolution, surprisingly not. The story ties itself together with more grace than it initially lets on. It’s whimsical, but not hollow. Sentimental, but not sticky. A family film that keeps its feet, even while pigs are climbing trees—and funny in that specifically British way that suggests good behavior is best learned through fear and light humiliation.

Some comedies swing for the fences. Napoleon Dynamite seems barely aware a game is happening. A film of studied anti-energy and exquisitely awkward grace, it drops into rural Idaho like a time capsule from a decade that never quite existed—one part 1970s fringe vest, one part early AOL, and all of it bathed in the bleached tones of a thrift store hallucination. At the center of this temporal no-man’s-land is Napoleon (Jon Heder), a slack-jawed, tater tot-hoarding high schooler with a ginger perm, snow boots in July, and a speaking cadence that suggests tranquilizers laced with contempt. He lies compulsively—about fighting gangs, about hunting wolverines with his uncle in Alaska, about possessing secret ninja knowledge—but not maliciously. It’s more like an involuntary reflex, a way to give shape to a life so staggeringly mundane it barely qualifies as background noise. And yet, he is remarkable. Not because he changes or reveals hidden depths—but because he stays exactly who he is, without apology or adaptation. He befriends Pedro (Efren Ramirez), a new student whose monotone delivery and shaved head make him an oddly perfect mirror. Pedro is the friend who offers a protection amulet and runs for class president with a campaign slogan that feels more like a dare than a promise. Together, they form a duo so dry they feel sculpted from dust. Napoleon’s home life is an exercise in arrested development. His brother Kip (Aaron Ruell), a man-child glued to online chat rooms and dreamy boasts of internet girlfriends, is barely functional and completely hilarious. His eventual meetup with LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery)—a glamorous, deadpan force of nature—is as unlikely as it is weirdly touching. Then there’s Uncle Rico (Jon Gries), permanently stationed in the year 1982, scheming to recapture a high school football career that likely peaked in his own imagination. He peddles plastic Tupperware door-to-door and records himself throwing footballs at nothing, and he is, in his own way, perfect. The film’s humor is so deadpan it feels embalmed. Punchlines arise from posture, pause, and prolonged, excruciating silences. There’s an entire ecosystem of comedy growing in the dead air between lines, in characters’ weird gait or odd, hesitant eye contact. This is a film where even the triumphs are muted—when Napoleon finally dances in front of the school assembly, it’s not a climax so much as a surrender to the moment, and it’s glorious. I’ve seen Napoleon Dynamite a dozen times, and it remains one of the rare comedies that doesn’t wear out its welcome by becoming too familiar. If anything, the familiarity sharpens the effect. You know what’s coming, and you laugh harder because of it. Like a favorite pair of thrift store pants—ill-fitting but essential—it never stops being funny.

Robert Altman’s sprawling mosaic loosely tracks 24 characters across five days in the titular Tennessee city, as a political campaign and a flurry of country music events bleed into each other like one long, overheated conversation. It doesn’t so much tell a story—it tells hundreds of tiny ones that add up to a panoramic view of America on the eve of its Bicentennial. A stunning portrait, really—something to soak in rather than follow. Like life, there are moments that are quietly funny, quietly sad, quietly tragic. There’s also a loudly tragic moment at the end. But that’s followed by a rousing finale—Barbara Harris singing “It Don’t Worry Me” with such force it either feels like a triumph of American resilience or a national reflex to paper over every open wound. Depends how nihilistic you’re feeling. This might be one of cinema’s most widely analyzed films—or at least the one with the most divergent interpretations. Maybe trying to pin down its meaning is as folly-bound as trying to decode your Tuesday. Still, there are consistent threads: critiques of fame, politics as performance, and a country allergic to self-awareness. And of course, there’s music—live, plentiful, sometimes beautiful, sometimes hilariously bad. Most of the characters are country-western singers (some rising, some falling, some with no hope of either), and the cast wrote many of their own songs. Keith Carradine even won an Oscar for I’m Easy. The atmosphere is so natural it doesn’t feel filmed—it feels eavesdropped. There’s a scene where Lily Tomlin silently listens to Carradine sing, and in that silence you get everything: longing, regret, and the little fictions people carry to survive the week. Nashville doesn’t force its point. It just quietly accumulates. And by the end, you feel like you’ve lived among these people. Strange, flawed, familiar. Maybe you understand them. Or maybe you just recognize the mess. Either way, it sticks.

Home for the holidays, which sounds benign until you remember it’s the Griswolds. No cross-country death march this time, no giddy Grand Canyon detours—just one man, a snow shovel, 25,000 imported Italian twinkle lights, and the distinct whiff of psychological slippage. Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase), a human thermostat forever set to “nervous breakdown,” is hosting Christmas, and by hosting, he means reenacting Apocalypse Now in miniature—with reindeer-shaped cookie cutters and eggnog served from a moose head. The house—somewhere between suburban utopia and electric chair—is buckling under the weight of his expectations. His family arrives in waves, as if summoned by an amateur séance. In-laws, cousins, and Cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid in bathrobe and beer can) all come bearing gifts wrapped in disappointment and side-eye. No one behaves, but that’s not the point. The film isn’t building to reconciliation—it’s just piling dysfunction like snow on the roof until it gives. Chase plays Clark like a man tiptoeing across thin ice while holding a flaming fruitcake. His niceness is weaponized, stretched to the snapping point. He smiles with molars. He staples with vengeance. He’s trying to keep it together, but the wires are frayed and the bulbs keep shorting out. And the one thing holding his fantasy together—the promise of a Christmas bonus—vanishes. He’s already committed to spending it on a backyard pool, and when the envelope arrives with a subscription to the Jelly of the Month Club instead, something inside him breaks loose and doesn’t return. There’s an art to a well-timed squirrel attack. Or a fried cat. Or a grandma confusing grace with patriotic duty. And Christmas Vacation excels in precisely this medium: joke delivery with the rhythm of collapsing furniture. There’s no build, just the sudden collapse and the echo afterward. You’re laughing before you understand why. Chechik directs with a kind of looseness that works entirely in the film’s favor. The structure is there—you can feel it—but everything feels slightly askew, as if the entire movie were strung together with the same flickering lights Clark uses to blind his neighbors. It might be the funniest entry in the series—more concentrated, less episodic, and better tuned to the physical comedy of watching Clark’s optimism melt into pulp. Underneath the burnt turkey and the blinking deer and the endless moaning about sewage is a guy who just wants his family to be dazzled. He’s not a buffoon so much as a man trapped inside his own seasonal delusion, certain that if he adds just one more strand of lights, everything will finally look the way it’s supposed to.

This second entry in the Vacation series arrives with its passport stamped and its punchlines detained. Whatever engine powered the first film—the sense that each misstep added weight to the next—has been swapped out for something closer to sketch comedy, only without the economy of time or the benefit of a good editor. The Griswolds win a game show, hop across the Atlantic, and proceed to embarrass themselves in several countries that may now have stricter visa requirements as a result. Clark (Chevy Chase) is still the smiling ambassador of suburban optimism, and Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo) still grits her teeth with graceful weariness. Their children, this time played by Jason Lively and Dana Hill, seem less like kids and more like hostages. Rusty, traumatized from their last American road trip, mostly sulks. Audrey, pining for her boyfriend Jack (William Zabka). The film plods from one continental mishap to the next with the rhythm of a travel brochure falling down the stairs. In England, Clark terrorizes traffic circles, hits everything but Big Ben, and receives only cheerfully restrained nods in return. In France, the waiters insult them—swiftly and in French. The jokes are built on national caricature: the Brits are polite, the French are rude, the Germans wear lederhosen. That’s the depth. Episodic doesn’t begin to cover it. Each new country is a reset button: different rental car, different disaster, same airless attempt at farce. There’s no build, no comic pressure, just a series of misplaced zingers and clunky collisions. A hotel mix-up here, a topless mishap there. If the first film was a slow descent into cheerful madness, this one feels like a vacation slideshow narrated by someone who forgot they were supposed to be funny. The lone inspired moment—if you squint—arrives when Chase breaks into a stiff-limbed Bavarian dance in full lederhosen, kicking like a man whose knees are trying to secede from his body. It’s silly and the kind of thing that would be unbearable if stretched another minute, but it’s also the only time the film remembers spontaneity is meant to feel spontaneous. By the end, you haven’t watched a family unravel. You’ve watched a franchise pause, refill its coffee, and consult a map it can’t read. It’s not unwatchable. But it’s not especially necessary, either.

Few films have mapped the American road trip with such scenic clarity: the snack-strewn vinyl interior, the existential fatigue of Kansas, the creeping suspicion that the whole country might be a prank. Vacation isn’t just about a family crossing state lines—it’s about that peculiarly American optimism that insists something better must be just a few hundred miles further west. Chevy Chase, in what might be his finest performance outside a live studio audience, plays Clark Griswold—suburban patriarch, bad decision enthusiast, and proud driver of a station wagon that looks like it was designed by someone who hates children. His vision for summer: a cross-country pilgrimage from Illinois to Wally World, the Disneyland of fictional theme parks. His wife Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo) gently suggests flying. Clark, allergic to efficiency, insists on the full roadside experience. The kids—Rusty (Anthony Michael Hall) and Audrey (Dana Barron)—are dragged along like luggage with opinions. Their expressions shift between boredom and disbelief as the trip veers into detours, wrong exits, and motel-room tension. Gags pile up, uneven but persistent. Some are beautifully calibrated: Clark handing his son his first beer, which is promptly chugged like communion in hell. Others are shakier, especially when Clark’s ongoing flirtation with a mysterious blonde in a red Ferrari turns from teasing to regrettable in record time. Along the way, the family picks up a travel companion and endures a string of mishaps that push things to a darker place—not quite morbid, but close enough to smell it. The comedy deepens, or curdles, depending on your tolerance for gallows humor. You either laugh or flinch, and the film doesn’t pause to let you decide. Randy Quaid shows up as Cousin Eddie, a walking illustration of everything Clark is trying to pretend doesn’t exist. His household is barely functional, his kids semi-domesticated, and his smile a little too wide. He’s family, which in Griswold terms is both the problem and the contract. The trip’s destination is held up as a shining beacon—pure joy at the end of a long, gasoline-scented tunnel. But when they finally arrive, things don’t exactly go as planned. The payoff is perfectly deranged, a kind of comic rupture that’s both inevitable and still somehow unexpected. The only misstep is what comes after—an extra beat that softens the impact, as if the studio decided the film needed to go home with a smile. It didn’t. Still, Vacation gets away with it. Not every bit is gold, but the parts that work shine with the strange glow of misadventure hard-earned. It knows the highways. It knows the diners. And it knows that the worst family vacations make the best stories—just not necessarily while they’re happening.

A myth dressed up as a baseball movie—or maybe the other way around. Robert Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a promising young ballplayer whose career ends before it begins when he’s shot in the stomach by a mysterious woman (Barbara Hershey). Decades later, he resurfaces as a middle-aged rookie for the floundering New York Knights and starts hitting like someone who stepped out of a legend instead of a dugout. This isn’t a comeback story—it’s a storybook epic. Hobbs swings a bat named Wonderboy, carved from a lightning-blasted tree, and connects like he’s answering to something older than the game. The film doesn’t build tension; it anoints. Halos of light. Slow-motion heroics. A score that treats every swing like it belongs to a national archive. The symbolism is oversized, sometimes ridiculous—but the conviction behind it never wavers. Barry Levinson directs with a solemnity that’s half reverence, half bravado. Redford plays Hobbs with a stillness that makes him seem half-in-this-world, like someone already part of the folklore. Glenn Close appears in warm, glowing light; Kim Basinger moves through shadows like she knows the ending; and Wilford Brimley and Richard Farnsworth treat the dugout scenes like gospel according to spit and gravel. Robert Duvall, as a needling sportswriter, stays just far enough outside the frame to notice how stylized it’s all become. Whether you’re swept up or left cold depends on your appetite for baseball as American scripture. But even at its most self-serious, The Natural has the momentum of a tale polished by repetition—and too firmly believed to be told any other way.

A shotgun wedding between Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino was never going to result in a tasteful ceremony. Natural Born Killers doesn’t so much play as erupt—edited like a panic attack, lit like a hallucination, and performed with the subtlety of a megaphone at midnight. It is among the best films either of them has touched, and without question among the most violent. But that violence, for once, has a target: not morality, not authority, but the dead-eyed American appetite for carnage on the evening news. Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis star as Mickey and Mallory, two freshly hatched nightmares who barrel down America’s backroads in a homicidal fugue state. They don’t have reasons. They have momentum. Their victims are random, incidental—clerks, waitresses, strangers who happened to be standing in the wrong frame at the wrong time. And yet the film doesn’t treat them like villains. It doesn’t treat them like heroes, either. It treats them like symptoms. Stone shoots the entire movie as if switching channels. Super 8, sitcom lighting, black and white, rear projection, animation. At one point we’re inside a sitcom from hell with Rodney Dangerfield as Mallory’s abusive father, complete with laugh track. At another, we’re watching the desert bleed. Everything jitters, everything flashes, and if you’re not disoriented, you’re not paying attention. It’s one of the only movies where you start to feel like you’ve ingested whatever psychedelics the characters are chewing on. Robert Downey Jr. plays Wayne Gale, a TV journalist with a lizard grin and an Australian accent that may be a side effect of his ego. He wants access. He wants ratings. He wants Mickey and Mallory in his lens and on his show and preferably mid-massacre. He gets what he wants, which is the problem. The line between coverage and complicity vanishes, and Gale doesn’t notice because he’s too busy adjusting the lighting. Tom Sizemore and Tommy Lee Jones round out the chaos with performances that might have unhinged the hinges on other movies, but here they’re practically subtle. Jones, especially, turns his prison warden into a bug-eyed parody of law and order, a man who seems to be screaming before he speaks. That it’s funny—genuinely funny—is a surprise. Not clever-snide, but surreal and profane and wrong in ways that feel too sharp to be accidental. You laugh, then flinch, then laugh again—sometimes during the same frame. It’s not senseless violence. It’s sensational violence, and the film knows exactly who it’s indicting: the audience, the anchors, the producers, the people who clap for blood as long as it cuts to commercial. It’s too much, intentionally. And that’s why it works.

Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is a gently lacerating road movie that veers between funny, forlorn, and strangely majestic—all filmed in a stark, wintry black and white that looks like it was developed in a small-town photo lab. It follows David (Will Forte), a mild-mannered stereo salesman in Billings, Montana, who reluctantly agrees to drive his ailing father, Woody (Bruce Dern), to Lincoln, Nebraska. Woody is convinced he’s won a million-dollar sweepstakes, despite every indication that it’s a scam plainly spelled out in the fine print. Woody isn’t just stubborn—he’s drifting in and out of some undiagnosed fog, and this delusion becomes his last great mission. Kate (June Squibb), his wife and professional truth-teller, thinks the whole thing is idiotic and says so at full volume. Squibb nearly steals the film with her stream of barbed insults that would make a cattle prod feel subtle, but Payne doesn’t let her upstage the others. He knows how to let the quiet characters breathe, and Bruce Dern’s understated performance is the film’s thumping, bruised heart. On the way to Lincoln, they detour through Woody’s old hometown—which is really where the film finds its heart. Old grievances, possibly invented memories, and dusty hometown rivalries resurface. There’s something deeply funny and melancholic about watching relatives and former friends, now barely moving furniture, suddenly crowd around Woody with outstretched hands, believing they’re owed a cut of his imaginary millions. The film keeps its pace slow and its tone steady, but it’s anything but boring. What begins as a fool’s errand becomes a soft excavation of family history—some of it myth, some of it grief, all of it affecting. By the final scenes, Payne’s control of tone is so precise it barely feels directed at all—it’s a real slice of life. Chalk this up as a quietly beautiful film.

If the Devil came to town with a twinkle in his eye and the Home Alone soundtrack playing behind him, it might look something like this. Needful Things is Rated R, technically, though the whimsical music suggests something more in line with a mischievous Christmas caper. You keep waiting for someone to slip on marbles or be hit with a paint can. That mismatch alone gives away the game: this Stephen King adaptation might’ve worked better if it had been aimed at children. Not younger children, necessarily—more the curious twelve-year-olds haunting the horror section at the video store, looking for something they probably shouldn’t watch but could get away with. And truthfully, not much would have to be cut. Trim a few swears, dial down the occasional act of violence, and you’re left with a PG-13 Twilight Zone morality tale, complete with blunt lessons on temptation, greed, and the price of wanting too much. Max von Sydow plays Leland Gaunt, a smiling stranger who opens an antique shop in a sleepy Maine town. He sells nostalgia, desire, satisfaction—whatever it is you think you’re missing, he has it behind the counter. But he doesn’t take Visa. His currency is favors, most of them designed to needle one neighbor into war with another. Before long, the town begins to splinter. People shout. Tempers flare. Items are thrown. And yet none of it feels particularly menacing, because the film never finds the rhythm of real menace. It moves like a Sunday matinee and scores itself like a cartoon. Von Sydow is well-cast, if underused. He carries the potential for real menace in every syllable—he doesn’t need to raise his voice, just elongate it. But the film rarely lets him stretch past “creepy store owner,” by the time the third petty outburst is staged like a punchline, the devil feels less like a threat and more like a high-end prankster. Ed Harris plays the town sheriff, which mostly consists of furrowing his brow and muttering things that sound like foreshadowing. He’s the lone voice of reason in a town full of easily provoked caricatures. Bonnie Bedelia and Amanda Plummer round out the cast with some conviction, but there’s not much to hold onto beneath the hysteria. As morality plays go, this one is fine, even functional. But it never quite earns the weight of its premise. The whole thing might’ve been better served with a Goosebumps logo and a slightly shorter runtime. As it stands, it’s a horror film that forgets to horrify, and a satire that never sharpens its claws.

A domestic pressure cooker with the lid slightly askew, Neighbors is a strange, darkly funny little film about the slow dissolution of suburban comfort—or whatever passes for it. John Belushi plays Earl Keese, a mild-mannered nobody whose routine life begins to warp when new neighbors move into the dilapidated house next door. Vic (Dan Aykroyd) and Ramona (Cathy Moriarty) arrive with no backstory, no boundaries, and no apparent motive beyond mayhem. They eat his food, insult his wife, and casually dismantle his sense of control—all while smiling. The casting flips expectations: Belushi, usually the anarchic presence, is twitchy and bottled-up; Aykroyd, typically the straight man, glides through scenes like a salesman on helium. Their dynamic crackles—strange, off-balance, and just uncomfortable enough to make you wonder whether you’re watching a comedy, a horror film, or a stress dream. Moriarty, as the blonde bombshell who may or may not be trying to seduce Earl, slinks through the film with a practiced calm that borders on eerie—a smiling wildcard who speaks in riddles. Meanwhile, Earl’s wife (Kathryn Walker) seems barely conscious of the surreal unraveling happening just beyond her line of sight. The film thrives on discomfort. The tone is icy, the humor brittle, and the editing just jarring enough to keep you from settling in. It’s The ’Burbs drained of whimsy, or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? rewritten by someone who thinks the real problem with suburbia is that no one ever gets to burn it down. Where it falters is the ending. After ninety minutes of escalating tension, the resolution arrives too cleanly—as if someone decided, arbitrarily, that the story needed closure. It didn’t. A final note of ambiguity would’ve suited the mood far better. Still, what comes before is a minor gem of suburban menace—stylized, skewed, and designed to make you squirm.

Sean Connery returns to the role of James Bond one last time, not through the official Eon pipeline but in this outlier production—technically a remake of Thunderball, though you’d be forgiven for not recognizing it. Whatever plot Thunderball had is filtered here through even more noise: side quests, side characters, side distractions. The result is a film that runs longer and feels looser, with the central narrative buried somewhere beneath the clutter. The story—something about nuclear warheads, a stolen jet, and global ransom—barely registers. The emphasis is on set pieces, indulgent detours, and the novelty of seeing a grayer, thicker Connery don the tux again. And to be fair, scene for scene, the film can be plenty entertaining. There’s a surprisingly brutal hand-to-hand fight early on between Bond and a refrigerator-sized assassin built for maximum wall damage. It’s one of the better sequences—fast, physical, and strangely satisfying. Then there’s the opposite: Bond playing a bizarre video game against the villain, Maximilian Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), with stakes that are never quite clear and rules that feel made up mid-scene. It’s the kind of moment where everyone on screen seems more invested than the audience. The tone toggles between gritty and silly, rarely settling into either. Connery still has presence, even if he moves more like someone playing Bond at a dinner theater. The film treats his age as an occasional joke, but mostly just ignores it. Kim Basinger floats in and out as the requisite captive-love-interest hybrid, while Barbara Carrera turns up the volume to an absurd, watchable pitch and steals several scenes in the process. Never Say Never Again is hardly essential Bond, but it’s not without its appeal. It’s messy, overlong, occasionally exciting, and often strange—but just watchable enough to make the grade. Take the good with the baffling, and you get a Bond film that feels like it wandered in from an alternate universe and decided to stay.

Of all the fantasy epics the 1980s conjured—some puffed up with pomp, others collapsing under allegory—The NeverEnding Story is one of the few that still feels enchanted. Lush, sincere, and entirely unembarrassed by its imagination, it pulls off something deceptively difficult: it makes belief feel like participation. The story begins with Bastian (Barrett Oliver), a shy boy with a backpack full of grief and a growing disinterest in institutional learning. After ducking a group of bullies, he takes shelter in a dusty bookshop and swipes a novel warned to be “not safe” for children who only like things that go “beep beep beep.” Which apparently means most of them. He skips class, climbs into the school attic and begins to read. Inside the book is another story: a crumbling land called Fantasia, disappearing piece by piece into a void known only as the Nothing. The ruler, a frail Childlike Empress (Tami Stronach), summons a warrior named Atreyu (Noah Hathaway)—a stoic plains hunter with high boots and a face built for paperback covers—to track the source of the destruction and stop it. What follows is a winding, emotionally fraught quest involving a depressed ancient turtle, sentient sphinx statues with eyes that judge and annihilate, and a soaring, dog-faced dragon named Falkor who glides through the air like a cloud with teeth. Meanwhile, Bastian reads on. As Atreyu pauses for a meal, so does he—biting into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with such resolve you’d think he was rationing for a siege. “No, not too much,” he mutters, as if leaving the attic might break the spell. And maybe it would. Because the book isn’t just pulling him in; it’s pulling back. The more he reads, the more it seems to know he’s there. The movie’s sincerity is what sets it apart. What could have easily played as stiff or overwrought becomes strangely moving in its commitment. There’s no irony, no distance. The storybook sets, the heavy-handed dialogue, the swelling score—it’s all delivered with complete seriousness. And that seriousness becomes its own kind of magic. Even its clunkier moments feel earned. There’s a beautiful awkwardness to the way it invites you in without hedging. The ending is a literal flight of fantasy, and a great one. Bastian gets the catharsis we’ve been craving on his behalf, soaring over the city atop Falkor, restoring stolen pockets of joy, rewriting the gloom with one impossible ride. Klaus Doldinger’s synth-heavy score—augmented by Giorgio Moroder’s title track—gives the whole thing a dreamlike momentum. It might be the most memorable electronica fantasy score of its decade, and it’s certainly the only one with a theme song that sounds like a roller rink crossed with a prophecy. This is one of those films I fall into every time. As a kid, renting it from the grocery store for 99 cents, it felt huge. As an adult, it still does.

There’s something oddly noble about how little New Faces tries to disguise its origins. It’s a Broadway revue, filmed like a high school assembly, and padded with just enough backstage “drama” to qualify as a feature. No illusions, no ambition—just skits, songs, and visible set seams. The framing story involves a producer who’s out of money and a Texan backer who wants to cut the weird numbers. The compromise: let the show go on, and judge it mid-performance. It’s the kind of meta-structure that feels like a workaround for not rewriting the stage version, which, of course, it is. Eartha Kitt is the standout—smoky, feline, practically purring through “C’est Si Bon” and “Santa Baby” like the camera’s a toy she’s decided to keep. Paul Lynde delivers a spoof of Death of a Salesman—written by a young Mel Brooks—where the beleaguered patriarch is a career criminal and his son betrays him by getting good grades. It’s amusing enough, if not exactly a showcase. Brooks completists will clock it as a deep cut, early evidence of his affection for skewering American myth. The rest of the cast is energetic, if not quite ready for prime time. There’s charm in the effort, even when the material creaks. As filmed theater, it’s barely cinema. The camera mostly stays put, the sets look borrowed, and the lighting is flatter than the punchlines. But for fans of mid-century oddities—or those curious to see Kitt before she became a legend—it’s a curio worth flipping through. Just don’t expect polish, or narrative, or any real reason it needed to be a movie.

That DJ Qualls was once handed his own teen sex comedy—and that it made decent money—is one of those curious pop-cultural hiccups that could only have emerged from the early-2000s fog. The era was generous to niche types, but even within that permissive stretch, it’s hard to explain how this slipped through. Qualls, all angular awkwardness and pinched expressions, doesn’t have the comedic muscle to carry a film. He’s no Jim Carrey. Barely even a Pauly Shore. He plays Dizzy Harrison, a gangly high school senior sick of being shoved into lockers. After a series of mishaps—none of which warrant the screentime they’re given—Dizzy ends up in jail, where he meets Luther (Eddie Griffin), a self-appointed cool whisperer who teaches him how to be less pathetic. Step one: get expelled. Step two: enroll in a new school. Step three: punch the biggest guy you see. Surprisingly, this works. Dizzy reinvents himself as a bad boy and promptly draws the attention of the lead cheerleader (Eliza Dushku), despite showing all the charisma of a paper towel dispenser. From there, the film ties itself into knots. Dizzy alienates his former nerd-band friends, grows unreasonably invested in the school’s football team, and delivers a motivational locker room speech that plays like Patton by way of community theater. The message is muddled—something about being yourself, maybe?—but it’s mostly drowned out by a parade of hijinks that either fall flat or never lift off the ground in the first place. There are trace amusements. Gene Simmons pops in as a preacher pushing abstinence, and Lyle Lovett—deadpan and unfazed—makes a surprisingly good movie dad. But they’re footnotes in a film that keeps throwing energy at the screen in hopes it’ll stick. It doesn’t.

Danielle (Blu Hunt) wakes up in a hospital that looks abandoned but isn’t. She’s told she’s a mutant, her powers unknown, her memories unreliable. A tornado—or something far worse—has flattened her reservation, taken her father, and dropped her in the care of Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga), who promises treatment but radiates threat. She is not alone. Other teenagers, damaged and dangerous in their own way, are housed alongside her: Rahne (Maisie Williams), a shy shapeshifter with a crucifix-shaped trauma; Illyana (Anya Taylor-Joy), acidic and sword-wielding; Sam (Charlie Heaton), explosive in more ways than one; and Roberto (Henry Zaga), whose affliction involves heat he can’t control and shame he can’t mask. The setup is promising. Less X-Men, more One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with energy blasts and haunted corridors. There’s atmosphere here—moody lighting, a claustrophobic setting, and hints of trauma-based horror that suggest the film might want to burrow into the psychology of powers rather than the spectacle. A noble goal, especially in the superhero genre’s twilight of diminishing returns. But somewhere between premise and execution, things begin to sag. The characters, while clearly sketched, never fully animate. Their backstories are gestured at rather than explored. Their chemistry flickers but never quite catches. Dialogue is the biggest offender—it sounds like placeholder text left by a screenwriter in a rush, smoothed over just enough to make it to the final cut. There are moments. One action sequence, involving chalky, faceless creatures with wide, toothy smiles, is genuinely unnerving. But moments don’t make a movie. The rest is slow-drip exposition, half-formed arcs, and muttered angst that works better in theory than in real time. You can feel the intention—to strip down the genre, to do something more intimate and horror-tinged. But what’s left is too undercooked to haunt and too slow to thrill. Mutant or not, this one never quite finds its form.

You know a comedy’s in trouble when you start to miss Chris Tucker. He is conspicuously absent in this sequel to Friday, and this mostly unfunny film could have benefitted from a caffeinated jolt every so often. Ice Cube returns as Craig, John Witherspoon is back as his perpetually agitated father, and there’s no shortage of weed smoke—but the wiry energy, strange stillness, and underplayed humor that made the original work have mostly gone up in it. The first film was a stoner comedy, but it had an almost dry absurdity—guys sitting on a porch doing nothing while everything happened around them. This one trades that for broader gags and louder volume: Witherspoon steps in dog feces in the opening scene and then proudly refuses to clean it off, which is about as subtle as the comedy gets. This time around, Craig is hiding out in the suburbs after Deebo (Tommy “Tiny” Lister Jr.) breaks out of prison. He moves in with his uncle (Don “D.C.” Curry) and cousin Day-Day (Mike Epps), and most of the film is spent on their run-ins with a hostile Latino gang next door. What starts with loud music and territorial posturing escalates into threats, weapons, and eventual retaliation. Meanwhile, all this hiding out turns out to be for nothing—Deebo and his brother track Craig down anyway, leading to a final confrontation in the backyard. The film moves in bursts: a long buildup to a fight, a handful of neighborhood skirmishes, a few detours to Day-Day’s job as a strip mall security guard, and a backyard showdown built around slow-motion punches and exaggerated brawling, but with no real tension or payoff. Epps brings energy, but the film leans on him too hard, dragging out bits that should’ve ended a minute sooner. There are laughs, but they’re fewer and more scattered. Next Friday is a significant step down. It remembers the characters and the setups, but the tone is broader, the timing looser, and the charm noticeably thinned out.

Also known as The Karate Kid with the Girl, or The One Everyone Forgot About. Which feels about right. Hilary Swank—still a few belts shy of her Oscar phase—plays Julie, a short-fused teenager quietly spiraling after the death of her parents. She lives with her grandmother, skips school, nurses a wounded hawk in secret, and walks around like she’s allergic to help. Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita, calm in the eye of a fairly uninspired storm) notices. When Julie avoids being hit by a car by leaping directly onto it, he decides karate might offer some steadiness—or at least tire her out. The film reuses the original’s blueprint: a troubled kid, a patient mentor, a slow climb to balance. But it plays like a photocopy run through too many toner cycles. The story’s all bones, no marrow. The emotional beats are there—training, trust, catharsis—but they arrive pre-flattened, like someone remembered how they were supposed to feel without remembering why they worked. Julie and Miyagi share scenes, not a relationship. They’re in sync only because the structure demands it. There’s a hawk subplot, a monastery detour, a garden of flaming lanterns, and a climax involving a group of teenage bullies in matching varsity jackets, all apparently trained in martial arts and school-based authoritarianism. Michael Ironside looms through it all as a militarized principal who treats discipline like a contact sport. He runs a crew of uniformed teen toughs who enforce order with headlocks and intimidation, because apparently that’s how this school operates now. Swank is game—tough, agile, trying hard to sell what the script can’t. Morita, as ever, brings a calm center, even when the film doesn’t deserve one. There are glimmers—moments where it edges toward something heartfelt or weirdly graceful—but they fade fast. Mostly, it’s a movie stuck in a crane kick stance, waiting for a reason to strike.

It’s the kind of film where people talk. A lot. About books, politics, Brazil, fate, fish. The camera drifts, the bossa nova murmurs, and the conversations hover somewhere between clever and contrived. I liked it. Hope Davis plays Erin, a recently dumped nurse in her thirties whose mother (Holland Taylor) decides the solution is unsolicited matchmaking via personal ad. Erin protests, of course, but listens to the messages anyway—and embarks on a whirlwind of awkward, over-educated first dates. Much is said about destiny and free will and whether either exists, usually over coffee or white wine. Meanwhile, a man named Alan (Alan Gelfant) keeps missing her by inches. He’s a volunteer at the local aquarium, nursing quiet ambitions and a quiet grudge. In one subplot that sounds dumber than it plays, he sabotages the expansion of the aquarium by assassinating a celebrity blowfish—an act of aquatic eco-terrorism that somehow lands just shy of ridiculous. It works because the film doesn’t wink. It just lets its characters live in their little pocket of Boston, full of earnest gestures and philosophical detours. This movie rewards patience. It drifts. It loops through conversations that feel aimless until they aren’t. It’s smartly written, casually acted, and the romance, once it shows up, feels like something that might actually last. It’s for people who enjoy watching two lives circle each other while the music sighs behind them. Lucky for me, I do.