Film Buff Musings

The genius of the Coen Brothers might not be more complicated than knowing when and how to keep things interesting. O Brother, Where Art Thou? does exactly that—there’s something surprising and funny around every corner. This isn’t just one of their sharpest comedies; it’s in the top echelon of films that actually make me laugh out loud, and not just once. Loosely adapted from Homer’s Odyssey, and even more loosely inspired by Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels—where the fictional novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? was meant to be a sober reflection on the struggles of man during the Great Depression—the Coens don’t make that movie either. The classical references are less roadmap than seasoning. What they’ve actually built is a meandering, musical, dust-covered picaresque packed with talking prophets, blind DJs, Dapper Dan hair pomade, and the kind of surreal detours that feel pulled from a Southern tall tale. George Clooney stars as Ulysses Everett McGill, a fast-talking con man with a pompadour and a vocabulary to match. He escapes a Mississippi chain gang with two fellow convicts—John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson—and together they wander into a backwoods radio station where they record a folk song for ten bucks. Unbeknownst to them, the record becomes a hit, which follows them across the state as they dodge the law and trip headfirst into an ever-widening tangle of political campaigns, backwoods baptisms, and accidental fame. Somewhere along the way, one of them gets turned into a toad. The cast is stacked with faces that know how to walk a fine line between cartoon and conviction. John Goodman plays a Kentucky-fried conman with an eye-patch and a booming voice; Holly Hunter turns up as Clooney’s long-lost wife with seven daughters and zero patience. And stealing nearly every scene is the soundtrack: gospel, bluegrass, blues—music that holds the movie together even when the plot stops pretending to. It’s a lark, but it’s not light. The Coens dish up slapstick with deadpan, surrealism with structure, and heart without ever getting sentimental. O Brother may nod to epic poetry and classic cinema, but mostly it carves out its own weird, glorious path. Another Coen gem—funny, tuneful, and exactly the sort of cracked logic they make look effortless.

A glossy, well-tailored caper that doesn’t ask to be taken seriously and doesn’t mind if you forget most of it by morning. Ocean’s Eleven is Vegas slick and built to glide—a high-tech heist fantasy with just enough suave detachment to pass for wit. George Clooney plays Danny Ocean, recently paroled and already plotting his next job: robbing not one, but three Las Vegas casinos simultaneously. Because why stop at difficult when you can try impossible? To execute the plan, Ocean assembles a crew of nine supporting archetypes and one Brad Pitt, each introduced with a flourish and a quip. Pitt plays the permanently chewing right-hand man; Matt Damon, a glum pickpocket with something to prove; Don Cheadle, a demolition expert with an accent that’s more ambition than authenticity. There’s Carl Reiner and Elliott Gould as seasoned pros lured back for one last job, plus Casey Affleck and Scott Caan as wisecracking chaos twins. Julia Roberts shows up as Ocean’s ex-wife, looking appropriately dubious about everything and everyone, especially him. The film moves with the rhythm of a card shuffle—quick, clean, and just distracting enough to keep you from asking how it’s all supposed to work. Soderbergh directs with a winkless polish, layering in montages, jazzy interludes, and dialogue that clips along like it’s in a rush to make last call. The fun is in the timing, the cutaways, the satisfied grins. This is entertainment dressed in Armani, designed for evenings when depth feels like a chore. It’s undeniably clever, though maybe not quite clever enough to leave a strong impression. You may not feel compelled to revisit it, but it delivers exactly what it promises: a stylish escape hatch for ninety-odd minutes. And sometimes, that’s the jackpot.

The plot says danger, but the movie plays like a vacation itinerary with stylish detours. Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), whose casinos were cleaned out in the first film, resurfaces with spreadsheets and deadlines. He’s tracked down the original eleven and demands the return of $38 million—what’s left after everyone scraped together whatever hadn’t already been burned, buried, or spent on things with stitching. Two weeks. No delays. They regroup in Amsterdam—not in hiding, but in style. There are plans, or outlines of plans. Conversations about logistics that slide sideways into chatter about food, suits, and romantic missteps. The crew plots vaguely, executes loosely, and mostly kills time like they’re trying to miss their own getaway window. Eventually, a shape emerges: a Fabergé egg housed in a museum, a challenge from a smug French thief known as the Night Fox (Vincent Cassel), and a bet that if they can steal it before he does, he’ll cover their debt. It’s a plot, technically—but Soderbergh’s more interested in the intervals. Cassel slinks and somersaults through laser grids; Clooney and Pitt sit on balconies trading lines that sound memorized, but not necessarily understood. Julia Roberts, meanwhile, is given the kind of subplot that sounds made up even as it’s happening: her character, Tess, impersonates Julia Roberts. That it works at all is a testament to tone control and collective commitment. The film doesn’t go meta so much as let the air out gently and keep walking. The actual heist is treated like an obligation—there to anchor the scenery and give the cast something to drift around. By the time the heist comes together, the film has already decided the real prize was hanging out. Soderbergh’s direction coasts, and the cast doesn’t seem to mind.

This is, without question, a bad monster movie. The monster suit—a man in green rubber with tentacles sprouting from his back like pool noodles—wouldn’t frighten a brave toddler. The acting is wooden, the picture quality hazy, and the special effects budget appears to have been rounded down to zero. And yet… there’s something oddly likable about it. The story, such as it is, involves a scientist investigating reports of a mutated octopus that walks on land. What he doesn’t expect is another mutation, far more extreme—a half-man, half-octopus creature with a thirst for blood and a habit of dragging victims into swampy oblivion. The premise is played straight, and despite the costume’s obvious limitations, a few attack scenes build a modest amount of tension. Octaman is schlock, but it’s committed schlock. There’s an earnestness in its approach—no irony, no self-awareness, just a serious-faced tale about a rubbery sea-beast menacing researchers in the wilderness. You won’t find finesse here, but if you’re tuned to the right frequency, you might catch a scrappy B-movie doing its best with whatever scraps it could find.

Jack Lemmon, in one of his most definitive roles, plays Felix Unger—a man whose neuroses could be listed alphabetically and still spill onto a second page. When his wife finally ejects him after twelve years of marriage, Felix—ever the dramatic technician of misery—rents a hotel room and attempts suicide. The gesture is foiled not by epiphany, but by physiology: he throws out his back trying to open a window. Rarely in cinema is despair rendered with such comic precision. Felix retreats, limping and forlorn, to the Upper West Side apartment of his old friend Oscar Madison (Walter Matthau), a sportswriter whose own recent divorce has left him living amid ashtrays, stale sandwiches, and newspapers that haven’t moved since the Johnson administration. Felix, naturally, offers to clean. And cook. And sanitize. And alphabetize. A living arrangement is born—one that feels instantly doomed and endlessly watchable. What follows is the purest version of the Neil Simon formula: a character-driven comedy powered by exacting dialogue, oppositional chemistry, and just enough human truth to keep it grounded. Simon’s screenplay—arguably his tightest—is a cascade of wit, where even the throwaway lines feel like they’ve been chiseled into place. Lemmon is all clenched jaw and aggrieved dignity, while Matthau exudes a kind of relaxed exasperation that makes every reaction funnier than the line that preceded it. Their banter is legendary, and their rhythm together—already established in The Fortune Cookie—reaches its peak here. You believe these two men have known each other for years. You believe they’re driving each other slowly insane. And you’re thrilled to be stuck in the same apartment with them. Quotable? Nearly criminally so. Among many contenders, there’s this: “I hate little notes on my pillow. Like this morning. ‘We’re all out of Cornflakes. F.U.’ It took me three hours to figure out that ‘F.U.’ was Felix Unger.” The premise couldn’t be simpler, but the execution is so sharp that the film becomes a kind of masterclass. Comedy built from friction, not farce. Timing as structure, not garnish. The Odd Couple is what happens when perfect casting meets perfect material and no one tries to dress it up with anything that doesn’t belong. It’s just two men, one apartment, and a script that sings.

Three men and one bank job—standard noir arithmetic—though the tension here isn’t in the planning, it’s in the pairing. Harry Belafonte plays Ingram, a nightclub musician with a gambling problem and a coiled temper, recruited by an ex-cop (Ed Begley) with a pension for desperation and a plan to match. The third wheel is Earle Slater (Robert Ryan), a man who carries his racism like a second spine. What begins as crime plotting quickly turns into something more volatile: two men bound by a job, repelled by everything else. Wise directs like he’s playing jazz on a cold piano. The notes don’t always resolve, but they sting in the right places. The film drifts between character study and heist blueprint—conversations in shadows, motives in conflict, and everyone just a few drinks away from saying what they really think. Belafonte, stylish but worn down, stays magnetic even when cornered. Ryan, jaw set and voice like ground glass, doesn’t play for sympathy and never fakes civility. The screenplay is lean, its dialogue prickly with tension. But it’s not the robbery that gives the film its shape; it’s the waiting. The hours before the plan unfolds are as charged as the act itself—watching, worrying, unraveling. The black-and-white cinematography, rough-edged and ash-toned, treats New York like an accomplice—indifferent, grim, full of blind corners and sidelong glances. Shelley Winters, Gloria Grahame, and a few others pass through like ghost warnings, suggesting what survival might look like for those who know when to duck. It’s noir that doesn’t find comfort in cool—it stays frayed at the edges. And the ending, when it arrives, doesn’t release the tension so much as freeze it. Which, in a story about men trying to outrun themselves, feels just about right.

A romantic melodrama in a uniform, An Officer and a Gentleman follows Zach Mayo (Richard Gere), a Navy officer candidate with nowhere to go but forward. He lands in a 13-week training program in the Pacific Northwest—wet, gray, and grim—where the only thing colder than the weather is the reception from his father (Robert Loggia), a bitter, boozy Boatswain’s Mate who tells him flatly he’ll never salute his own son. On base, the boots are shined, the fists are clenched, and the drill sergeant, Emil Foley (Louis Gossett Jr., in his Oscar-winning role), barks out enough homophobic abuse to make you wonder where tough love ends and institutional ritual begins. Whether it works or just reaffirms its own brutality is never quite explored. Foley is the system, and the system breaks people because that’s how it’s designed. Off base, the local women—dismissed by the trainees as husband-hunters—have their sights on officer husbands and a way out. Mayo finds his in Paula Pokrifki (Debra Winger), a factory worker with steel in her spine and fewer illusions than she lets on. Their relationship ambles along in fits and starts—more durable than it first appears, but not especially revealing. The romance is convincing, if not deep. The drama is steady, if not piercing. What stands out most are the boot camp rituals: obstacle courses, barracks inspections, and the inevitable standoff between Mayo and Foley—a contest of will performed like a showdown, staged with the intensity of something real even when it skirts the theatrical. The film flirts with critique, but can’t resist the redemption arc. It’s an involving watch, but a slow one, and never quite as illuminating as it thinks. The uniform fits, but the movie doesn’t fully grow into it.

A low-key, disarming comedy about divine intervention in a world that’s forgotten how to listen. John Denver—sweet-faced, modest, and surprisingly good at playing confusion with conviction—stars as Jerry, a mild-mannered supermarket manager who gets a mysterious letter summoning him to the 27th floor of an office building. Only problem? The building only has 17 floors. Still, he goes. And what he finds is… nothing. Just a voice on the intercom, calmly introducing itself as God. Turns out, God wants a new messenger. Not a prophet, not a preacher—just Jerry. A regular guy who, as he protests, doesn’t even belong to a church. “Neither do I,” God replies. The Almighty, as it turns out, is weary. Mankind’s running low on kindness, common sense, and basic upkeep. God thinks maybe it’s time for a PR refresh. When God finally shows up in person—played by George Burns as a twinkle-eyed retiree with perfect comic timing—he’s not interested in fire and brimstone. He likes plain speech and dry punchlines. Jerry’s family (Teri Garr plays the doubting wife) thinks he’s losing it, his job starts slipping away, and public perception turns sour fast. But God, in his wry, unfussed way, keeps showing up when needed. Burns is the soul of the film, and he knows it. He delivers divinity without ego—just a little tired, a little bemused, and still patient enough to believe in people. Denver, better known for his guitar than his acting, proves to be a solid straight man, grounding the outlandish premise with quiet sincerity. What’s notable here is how the film walks the line: neither sermon nor satire, it’s just thoughtful enough and never self-important. For all its lightness, it sneaks in some sharp observations—about belief, doubt, and the absurd way we’ve turned religion into bureaucracy. It’s a peculiar little movie, but an appealing one—gentle, funny, and refreshingly devoid of cynicism. And in the right mood, it plays like a cosmic exhale.

The first Oh, God! was a wisp of a comedy: George Burns puffing cigars as the world’s most unflappable deity, John Denver looking perpetually out of his depth, and somehow it all floated by on charm alone. The sequel tries to clone that trick, swaps Denver for a pint-sized messenger, and hopes nobody notices how thin the air has gotten. Louanne Sirota is Tracy—bright, level-headed, and movie-cute without being a pest. She opens a fortune cookie that orders her to “Go to the lobby to meet God,” and because it’s that sort of script, she does. George Burns reappears exactly as he left: old shoes, old jokes, and the twinkle of a man who knows he can’t save the movie but won’t embarrass himself trying. This time, the Almighty wants a catchy slogan to remind everyone he hasn’t clocked out. So Tracy grabs chalk and poster board, armed with “Think God” as her mighty tagline. It’s a notion so featherweight you can see the scenes straining to pad it to feature length. Suzanne Pleshette pops in as Tracy’s mother—sane, sensible, and, naturally, given almost nothing to do except sigh and doubt. The rest drifts from therapy appointments to playground conspiracies, with just enough geniality to prevent you from outright groaning. Burns drifts in and out like a retired vaudevillian who knows exactly when to bail. There’s a stray sweetness here, but no real mischief. It plays more like a TV special stretched on a rack. You keep waiting for that sly wink the original had—the sense that the joke might be on us. Instead, it’s just an old punchline given a child’s handwriting and a politely wasted cast.

The third—and final—entry in the Oh, God! series pulls off one clever trick: casting George Burns as both God and the Devil. And frankly, he makes a better Devil. There’s something unsettling in the way his eyes glow red beneath those scrunched-up brows, cigar flickering like it was lit in hell’s own ashtray. At one point, he dances at a wedding and gleefully antagonizes every guest within reach. It’s the film’s high point—five minutes of pure, smirking mischief. The rest of the movie, unfortunately, is a slog. It follows Bobby (Ted Wass), a struggling musician with no charisma and even less songwriting talent, who slouches at his piano and mutters, “I’d sell my soul to the Devil to make it in this business.” The Devil, watching via an old-school TV console while cruising in a Cadillac airlifted from a Florida country club, pounces. Soon Bobby is transformed into a bland rock sensation with a new face, a new manager, and absolutely nothing interesting about him. He’s basically Rick Springfield with the personality sanded off. The Faustian premise is tired, and this version doesn’t do much to revive it. The satire is toothless, the stakes are limp, and the music doesn’t help—lukewarm pop anthems that make eternal damnation seem like a mercy. Burns, to his credit, seems to be having fun, and whenever he’s onscreen the movie briefly stirs awake. But otherwise, You Devil just coasts on fumes from a once-clever concept. Divine intervention not included.

The Chevy Chase–Benji crossover you didn’t ask for, didn’t remember, and probably still won’t believe exists even after sitting through all 104 minutes. It’s a murder mystery wrapped inside a reincarnation comedy wrapped inside a shaggy dog movie. And somehow, all of it manages to feel like less than the sum of its parts. Chase plays Browning, an American PI in London who accepts a job from a man with the kind of mustache that practically guarantees foul play (Omar Sharif, adding gravitas to the nonsense), only to be promptly murdered. Upon reaching heaven, Browning is told he may return to Earth to solve his own murder—but there is one minor catch: no human bodies are available. So he’s sent back in the body of a small dog. Not just any dog—Benji. What follows is a series of loosely connected scenes involving canine sleuthing, clumsy puns, and the occasional chase (Chase?) sequence that reminds you this really is a dog inhabited by Chevy Chase’s spirit. The jokes are frequent but mostly limp, though Chase does what he can with a script that thinks “fetching justice” is cleverer than it is. Jane Seymour plays the romantic interest, for those keeping track of how grounded this is in reality. There’s a certain novelty in watching Benji outmaneuver bad guys and sniff his way toward justice, but the film never commits to farce or sincerity—wobbling between both like a half-remembered sitcom pitch. A few scattered laughs can be salvaged, mostly from Chase’s voiceover muttering smart-aleck asides, but not enough to justify the film’s insistence on being more than a curiosity. For completists only. Or possibly dogs.

An intriguing Twilight Zone conceit that slowly gives way to a stretch of cinematic dreariness. For a while, though, it works well enough. A group of vacationers at a luxurious island resort are whisked away to a secluded beach, touted as a hidden gem. But the setting proves more trap than treasure: a corpse washes ashore, and time itself appears to accelerate. The adults wrinkle incrementally; the children become teenagers by lunchtime. The premise invites fascination, and Shyamalan handles the early suspense with a light but effective touch. The cast, including Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps, gamely tries to keep pace as the script throws them into increasingly bizarre developments. Yet the characters’ reactions often feel mismatched to the situation—they speak with a studied calm that doesn’t always ring true. You’d expect more panic, more fury. What you get, instead, is a series of mildly shocked faces and conveniently timed epiphanies. There are moments of genuine tension, even horror—though they compete with others that elicit chuckles more than gasps. Shyamalan, as always, flirts with the ridiculous while hoping to keep the tone in check. Whether or not he succeeds will depend on your tolerance for movies that take themselves seriously while plotting like pulp fiction. Still, it’s popcorn-friendly sci-fi horror with an eerie concept and just enough bite to keep you from checking your watch—at least until the ending starts explaining everything. Which, naturally, is when it stops being interesting.

There’s a kernel of greatness buried in *Old Gringo*, a romantic Western with the texture of a fevered memory and the narrative focus of a tossed journal. The ingredients are promising: Gregory Peck, stately and sorrowful, plays Ambrose Bierce—yes, the Ambrose Bierce—who, disillusioned with the shape of his legacy, slips across the border into revolutionary Mexico to vanish into myth. Peck wears the role like a sun-weathered coat—stoic, watchful, resigned. Then there’s Jane Fonda as Harriet Winslow, a buttoned-up schoolteacher on the verge of withering into irrelevance, who arrives in Mexico expecting to tutor the children of an aristocratic family and instead finds herself swept into the currents of upheaval. She drifts into the orbit of General Arroyo (Jimmy Smits), a magnetic revolutionary with equal parts swagger and volatility, and the two embark on a romance that feels more metaphorical than physical—an idea of liberation, not quite a lived one. The film is handsomely mounted—Gabriel Figueroa’s cinematography bathes every frame in sepia dust and tragic grandeur, and the battle sequences snap with impressive clarity. But the story drifts. It introduces profound ideas—about aging, disillusionment, historical erasure—only to wander off before exploring them. The script never quite figures out whose story it wants to tell, and in its dithering, it loses dramatic traction. There are moments that work beautifully in isolation—Peck manning a railway switch as an act of moral defiance is one—but the film lacks the cohesion to make them sing in unison. *Old Gringo* is wistful, well-acted, and occasionally moving. But it’s also unfocused, occasionally inert, and ultimately easier to admire than to embrace.

Charlize Theron stars as Andy, the brooding leader of a centuries-old squad of immortal mercenaries who dispatch enemies with the ease of people who’ve done this before—many, many times. Wounds close, bullets pop out, and the mission continues. That is, until one day, the healing slows down. Mortality, once a rumor, begins to show its face. And yet, the group still fights like they’ve got infinite lives, which drains the tension and makes the action feel oddly weightless. There’s a video-game quality to the whole thing—impeccably choreographed shootouts, punches that land like choreography, and cutscenes of vague backstory. But watching it is like watching someone else play a first-person shooter with god mode enabled. You never get to hold the controller, and it’s hard to care what happens to the characters when they barely seem concerned themselves. The villain, a sniveling Big Pharma executive played by Harry Melling, comes across less as a threat and more as a petulant intern who got hold of a biotech lab. He’s supposedly after the secret to eternal life, but the film is never quite interested in the logistics of that, or much else. The immortality premise, rich with potential, ends up a bullet point on a pitch deck. The film flirts with deeper themes—loneliness, loss, the weight of memory—but doesn’t stay long enough to explore them meaningfully. Highlander covered this territory with more imagination and flair (not to mention Queen on the soundtrack). This isn’t an incompetent movie—it’s sleek, well-cast, and occasionally stumbles on a good idea. But those ideas flicker and fade like its heroes’ wounds. You’re left with a film that talks like it’s epic and acts like it’s disposable.

Some sequels pick up where the story left off. The Old Guard 2 picks up where the confusion left off—and doubles down. It opens mid-firefight, Charlize Theron mowing down anonymous henchmen—the kind bred in bulk for the sole purpose of being shot by Charlize Theron. Then come the flashbacks: ancient battlefields, haunted faces, cryptic stares. Back in the present, the same faces reappear with the same weapons, now solemnly whispering about the curse of immortality like it’s a chronic condition. The plot blinks in and out of coherence. People reunite. Others die. Some might come back. Nobody seems quite sure, least of all the movie. There’s a villain this time—played by Uma Thurman—who wants something from the immortals, maybe revenge, maybe science. Hard to tell. Her motivation shifts depending on the scene. Characters transport across Rome, Split, and South Tangerang, as if trying to outrun narrative gravity. New immortals appear. Old ones reappear. At one point there’s a prison break that plays out with the urgency of a dinner-theater production. The movie stops cold every so often so characters can trade cryptic laments about the burden of eternal life—how isolating it is, how it hollows you out—but the film itself feels hollow for different reasons. Nobody has a personality. Everyone broods. Everyone monologues in whispers. Then it’s back to flinging knives and swan-diving off rooftops. The first Old Guard flirted with genre ambition before dissolving into monochrome sentiment and generic action. This one skips the teases and dives straight into static blur. Save your popcorn. The movie won’t notice either way.

Three thirty-somethings, exhausted by the burdens of maturity, decide to start their own fraternity. Their recruits range from recent grads to guys who look like they should be refereeing youth soccer, not pledging allegiance to a keg. The film provides a more elaborate setup than that, but it hardly matters. This is all about the gags, and I giggle just enough to emerge with that light, pleasant sense of post-laughter euphoria. Which, let’s face it, is the only real metric that matters in a comedy. On paper, I’m not sure I could justify why Will Ferrell sprinting naked down a suburban sidewalk is funny. It just is. He thinks a group is streaking with him; turns out, no one followed. So he runs alone, bare as can be, just in time for his wife to drive by and ask what he’s doing. “Everybody’s doing it!” he hollers, the lonely streaker anthem. Vince Vaughn’s motor-mouthed sarcasm is also used to full effect here, especially when he orders his kid to put on “earmuffs” before unleashing a profanity-laced tirade. The kid hears everything. But again—it’s all in the delivery. Luke Wilson, the straight man by default, holds the whole thing together as the mildly responsible center of the group. The humor is often crude and politically incorrect, but there’s a goofy buoyancy to it that keeps things from turning sour. The movie doesn’t care about anything except being funny, and with this cast, that’s more than enough.

A lavish musical about poverty, crime, and child exploitation—though you’d hardly know it from the choreography. Oliver! doesn’t flinch at the darker edges of Dickens, but it dresses them up with elaborate set pieces and rousing numbers, letting the misery go down like lemon sherbet. It’s beautifully made, impeccably staged, and occasionally horrifying—if you stop to think about what any of these people are actually singing about. Mark Lester plays Oliver Twist as a mop-haired wisp with big eyes and a high tolerance for trauma. After daring to ask for seconds at the workhouse, he’s sold like surplus furniture and bolts, only to land in the soft grip of Fagin (Ron Moody), a theatrical old scavenger running a pickpocket apprenticeship program out of what looks like an abandoned factory. Jack Wild’s Artful Dodger struts in as the company’s top earner, welcoming Oliver with the kind of upbeat musical number you don’t usually associate with urban child poverty—“Consider Yourself,” complete with a conga line of street urchins weaving through markets and rooftops. The songs are densely packed: ensemble anthems, criminal tutorials, aching solos. “Food, Glorious Food” is sung by starving children in soup lines, harmonizing over the prospect of gruel. “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two” turns larceny into curriculum, with Fagin gliding around his cavernous den doling out scarves and slogans in equal measure. There’s barely a scene that doesn’t bleed into music, and the transitions are seamless enough that reality starts to feel like the digression. Fagin, for all his twitchy opportunism, is made approachable by Moody’s vaudeville-inflected performance—more limber con man than predator. You can see how a kid might mistake him for safety. Then Bill Sykes shows up and crushes that illusion flat. Oliver Reed gives him the demeanor of a man who’s never blinked in his life—hulking, dead-eyed, and practically carved from stovepipe smoke. He barely sings, doesn’t crack jokes, and stalks through the film like a reminder that the world outside Fagin’s den has no patience for whimsy. His presence throws a shadow over Nancy (Shani Wallis) that only gets longer as the story moves. She tries to protect Oliver while pretending not to be afraid for her own life—a performance inside a performance. Her ballad, “As Long As He Needs Me,” teeters between devotion and despair, and Wallis doesn’t blink. She sings it like someone who’s already made peace with the cost. When she finally stands up to Sykes, the moment hits fast and without mercy—cutting straight through the film’s polished surface. Carol Reed directs like a man who knows spectacle and sorrow can share the same frame. The screen is always in motion—chimneys coughing smoke, extras bustling like they’ve been choreographed, cobblestones gleaming as if Dickens himself had company coming—and still, the shadows slip in. The pacing is hypnotic, almost gentle, like the movie’s guiding you by the wrist… until it walks you straight into a wall. The rooftop chase might be the official climax, but what lingers is the thump of Nancy’s off-screen murder, the look on Oliver’s face when Sykes grabs him, the creeping sense that some of these songs were always lying. The ending offers a rescue, but not a real release. The music keeps playing, but the mood doesn’t quite lift. I love this movie, of course. It was one of my staples growing up—maybe for better, maybe for worse—and it still takes my heart, soul, and brain for an unstoppable ride. It’s a strange, exquisite, gorgeously designed contradiction of a film—and one of the rare musicals that can sing its way through misery and still leave you humming.

A Dickens adaptation mostly in outline, Oliver & Company takes Oliver Twist, drops it into late-’80s Manhattan, and trades the soot and grime of Victorian London for steam vents and traffic jams. Oliver is no longer a waif but a wide-eyed orange tabby, abandoned in a cardboard box as the city blares past. He’s the last of his litter, forgotten before the first chorus. Then comes Dodger—sunglasses, street smarts, voice by Billy Joel—who teaches him how to hustle for hot dogs, steer clear of collars, and glide through the city like he owns it. The animation is a step up from The Great Mouse Detective—smoother, looser—but still a little rough around the edges, which fits. This isn’t fairy-tale New York. It’s noise and neon—manholes hissing, sirens bleeding into saxophones. The soundtrack matches the pulse: glossy pop, touches of new jack swing, radio hooks built for roller rinks. Billy Joel sings from the sidewalk. Bette Midler belts from a penthouse. The whole thing feels pinned to its moment in time—in a good way. There’s charm to spare. A gang of misfit dogs pulling petty capers. A broke lowlife named Fagin, doing his best to stay out of real trouble. And Sykes, the villain, who doesn’t monologue or sing—he just shows up, scowls, and lets his Dobermans do the talking. The plot sketches out some danger, enough to keep the stakes honest, then doubles back for a warm finish. It’s sweet. It’s familiar. It ends how you think it will. Still, for Disney, this was a left turn. A city story. A scrappy, street-level detour before the ’90s resurgence kicked in. It doesn’t try for grandeur, but it’s got flavor. Sometimes a story about a kitten, a con man, and a dog in Ray-Bans is all you need.

The Bible Code was a fringe theory that briefly made the rounds in evangelical circles—especially among the youth group set—claiming that if you arranged the Hebrew text into a grid and played a game of divine Word Search, you’d find secret predictions of future events. The Omega Code takes that already dubious premise and builds a thriller around it. Or tries to. The supposed villain of the piece is media mogul Stone Alexander (Michael York), who earns global adoration by… solving world hunger. As far as ominous origin stories go, that one’s oddly philanthropic. But no matter—he’s the Anti-Christ. Or at least he will be, once an earthquake hits the Dome of the Rock, setting the stage for his most nefarious act yet: proposing to rebuild the mosque and a Jewish temple right beside it. For the film’s theology, this qualifies as a surefire sign of the apocalypse. But despite all that prophecy and prelude, the movie mostly stalls. Alexander doesn’t hiss or sneer or summon plagues—he just stands around looking vaguely concerned and delivering exposition in a boardroom tone. The film teases world-ending stakes but delivers hotel lobby lighting and a script that seems more focused on clunky setup than actual menace. The whole thing feels less like a battle for humanity and more like a really intense meeting that never gets to the point. Casper Van Dien plays the nominal protagonist, tasked with watching Stone do vaguely sinister things and furrowing his brow in disapproval. He’s a reporter, or maybe a scholar, or just a concerned citizen—it’s never quite clear. What is clear is that his main job is to point at Alexander and say things like, “That’s pretty Anti-Christ-y,” without anyone around him being especially alarmed. For a film that builds itself around prophecy, the end result is strangely prophecy-free. The Code itself—this supposed blueprint for disaster—is barely even used. Instead, the film wanders through signs and symbols without ever committing to a tone. It’s not scary, not exciting, and not even enjoyably bonkers. A movie about the end of the world shouldn’t feel like it’s waiting for a meeting to start.

Fred is dead on the side of the road. His niece Shula (Susan Chardy)—en route to a costume party, no less—discovers him. You’d expect this to register as a tragedy. It barely does. The loss of her uncle isn’t what’s strange. It’s the silence that follows it. Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a very dark comedy set in Zambia, tracing the emotional fallout as Fred’s large, scattered family tries to process—or avoid processing—what his death actually means. Fred wasn’t beloved. He wasn’t even decent. As the days pass and the rituals unfold, it becomes clear he left behind a long, ugly trail: abuse passed down through generations, covered with propriety and reinforced by silence. Shula remembers. So do her cousins. Not everyone wants to talk, and some would rather they didn’t. The family splits between protectors and witnesses, myth and memory. The film moves between them with a steady rhythm, letting the discomfort build. It’s not played for laughs exactly, but the humor is there—in the awkward toasts, the barbed condolences, the kind of laughter that works like a shield. The title comes from the guinea fowl—a bird that can’t do much on its own, but when threatened, calls out with others. Loud enough to drive predators off. These women didn’t cry out in time. But now, too late for Fred, they start to make noise. Shot in English and Bemba, the film threads generational pain through family ritual without sentimentalizing either. It doesn’t offer closure or catharsis. It just says what needs saying—and refuses to smooth it over.

The Grim Reaper is usually imagined as a cloaked skeleton wielding a scythe. In this film, he’s an English gentleman named Mr. Brink (Cedric Hardwicke), waiting patiently by the roadside for an unfortunate couple to die in a car crash. They are the parents of eight-year-old Pud (Bobs Watson), whose closest companion is his wheelchair-bound grandfather, known affectionately as Gramps (Lionel Barrymore). After the funeral, Gramps and Pud are granted a wish. Offhandedly, they decide they’re tired of neighborhood kids sneaking into their yard and stealing apples, and wish that anyone who climbs their apple tree be stuck up there until Gramps says otherwise. And wouldn’t you know—it works. The real joy of the film is in watching Barrymore and Watson together. Barrymore’s crusty, foul-mouthed old man is both hilarious and formidable, while Watson plays a real kid—unforced and genuine. Their best scenes involve ganging up on the venomous Aunt Demetria (Eily Malyon), whom Pud memorably dubs a “squid-faced old bird stuffer.” She only becomes interested in adopting Pud once she catches wind of the inheritance. When Mr. Brink comes knocking to collect Gramps, he’s tricked into climbing that now-enchanted apple tree—effectively trapping Death itself until further notice. The ending hits harder than you might expect. For all the film’s whimsy and verbal slapstick, it walks directly into its emotional wallop without blinking. The fantasy might be gentle, but the feelings are real and left me blubbering more than I would have expected from a film about the Grim Reaper and a magic tree.

In small-town Indiana, circa 1910, Marjorie Winfield (Doris Day) prefers a baseball bat to a beau—until her family relocates to the nicer part of town, and fate throws romance through a barn door. Literally. While clad in her baseball uniform, she catches her mischief-loving little brother Wesley playing with an old gun. She wrestles it from him, but it accidentally discharges, knocking a door off its hinges and nearly killing the college boy on the other side. Said college boy, Bill (Gordon MacRae), storms over and, mistaking Marjorie for a boy, tosses her over his knee and spanks her. The moment he sees her smiling face, though, it’s clear what this movie has just done: it’s called its shot. Love, instantaneous and in Technicolor. Bill is more than just a dreamboat in a vest; he’s a social critic with opinions about the decay of civilization—caused, he claims, by men wasting their time on football, baseball, and song. The irony is rich, since he’s saying all this while he’s in a musical. His vague distaste for banks also puts him at odds with Marjorie’s father, a no-nonsense pillar of the financial establishment. So the romantic tension has the added benefit of being cross-generational and economically inconvenient. None of that really matters, of course, because this is a film built on charm, not subtext. Doris Day is effervescent and luminous, and Gordon MacRae is so likeable you forgive the pseudo-intellectual brooding. The screenplay is light but dotted with clever lines, and while some of the romantic moments melt into goo, there’s an underlying sweetness that carries them through. With an upbeat tone, breezy musical numbers, and a warm glow of nostalgic Americana, On Moonlight Bay floats along just fine.