Film Buff Musings

Michael Keaton has always had a talent for looking relaxed while suggesting—just faintly—that something’s off. In Pacific Heights, he plays Carter Hayes, a tenant who shows up in a blazer, offers six months’ rent upfront, and proceeds to dismantle a young couple’s life with unnerving calm. The couple, played by Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine, have just sunk every dollar they have into a sprawling San Francisco Victorian that looks like it should come with its own séance. They’re counting on rental income from the downstairs units to cover the mortgage. When Hayes appears—smooth, polite, promising to wire the funds—they hand over the keys. But the money never arrives. Then come the new locks, the buzzing machinery, and the creeping suspicion that nothing in the lease covers any of this. Hayes never raises his voice or makes direct threats. He just stays. And he knows exactly how to exploit the legal system to his advantage. Every attempt to remove him kicks off a slow-motion cascade of bureaucracy: restraining orders, eviction notices, dead ends. It’s not a war of escalation—it’s a war of attrition. The pacing is clipped and procedural: a problem, a phone call, a knock at the door. Griffith and Modine spend most of the runtime trying to hold onto their sanity while their finances and living space unravel one legal technicality at a time. Pacific Heights stays small, sharp, and efficient—and leaves you thinking twice about ever handing over your keys.

The Pacifier is the kind of children’s film that seems built entirely out of secondhand ideas. The premise—tough guy saddled with unruly kids—has worked before. Kindergarten Cop wasn’t exactly my cup of juice, but it had its moments. This one mostly has filler. Vin Diesel plays Navy SEAL Shane Wolfe, a man whose emotional range hovers somewhere between surveillance footage and a loading screen. After a mission goes sideways, he’s reassigned to protect a dead scientist’s five children and recover something called the GHOST program—an all-purpose MacGuffin with no real bearing on anything. Early on, the children’s father (Tate Donovan) shows Wolfe a family photo and says, “You’d like them. They’re great.” Wolfe replies, “I doubt it.” It’s meant as tough-guy deadpan but doubles as among the curtest plot summations in film history. Diesel’s transformation from militarized statue to surrogate father is mostly handled through montage and mild sarcasm. The kids function more as marketing quadrants than characters. Any emotional development either happens offscreen or arrives without warning. Then there’s Brad Garrett as a vice principal with what seems to be a personal vendetta against children—a strange trait for someone in education. His arc ends with a wrestling match against Diesel, which the film presents as resolution. The Pacifier gestures toward action, comedy, and heart, but mostly just cycles through required story beats. It isn’t aggressively bad—just sluggish, flatly directed, and inexplicably self-satisfied. A movie in the technical sense—credits, runtime, cast—but not much else.

There’s a long, somewhat tragic tradition in Hollywood of bolting together prestige musicals with actors who possess neither the pipes nor the pliability for song. Paint Your Wagon, for all its sweeping production and solid gold pedigree (Lerner & Loewe, no less), joins the ranks with a kind of brawny, tuneless defiance. The melodies are still lovely, the orchestration lush, but then Lee Marvin opens his mouth, and out comes a growl that sounds like it’s been filtered through whiskey and gravel. Clint Eastwood fares marginally better—he’s clearly done his homework with the vocal coach—but his effort has the slightly tentative quality of a man reciting poetry with a toothache. And yet, despite the off-key warbling and excessive length (a punishing 154 minutes), there’s something mildly hypnotic about the whole affair. The story begins with a runaway wagon, a dead man, a wounded Eastwood, and a surprise gold strike unearthed from beneath the grave. Marvin’s Rumson—equal parts rascal, squatter, and opportunist—stakes his claim without missing a beat and promptly christens the stranger “Pardner,” as if names are luxuries best left to more civilized corners of the world. Together, the two men strike up a partnership—business first, friendship eventually—and build a mining camp that slowly morphs into a mud-caked town populated by gamblers, loners, and the occasional woman. Jean Seberg shows up as a Mormon wife sold into polyandry like it’s a land deal, and from there the film’s moral compass spins with the same abandon as its tone. There’s an alternate version of Paint Your Wagon—leaner, unsung, perhaps a shaggy buddy western with satirical bite—that could have worked beautifully. But what we have is more of an oddity: an operatic fever dream of frontier capitalism, where songs burst from the saloon fog and nobody seems entirely sure why. Still, when the music stops and the characters return to muttering, scheming, and drinking, the film hits its modest stride. Marvin, revisiting the hangdog inebriation that won him an Oscar in Cat Ballou, is the most comfortable of the bunch—funny without trying to be, and weirdly watchable even when he’s slurring through a solo that should’ve been gently retired before opening night. So no, it doesn’t work—not really. But it lumbers along with a certain conviction, and if you squint past the miscasting and close your ears when necessary, you may just find yourself, against your better judgment, enjoying it.

A union dispute has never sounded so cheerful. The Pajama Game is a mid-century musical set in a pajama factory, where the machines keep time, the workers sing in sync, and labor disputes come with choreography. The plot’s nothing fancy, but it sticks—mostly thanks to Doris Day, bright-eyed and charging through the numbers with enough force to make you forget how little she’s been given to work with. She plays Babe Williams, head of the grievance committee and the sort of romantic lead who could run a negotiation and belt a solo without pausing to catch her breath. The new superintendent, Sid Sorokin (John Raitt), shows up with a square jaw and management’s agenda, and every seamstress on the floor clocks him like it’s part of their shift. A flirtation sparks, predictably. The love story falls into the usual push-pull: worker meets boss, boss kisses worker, labor dispute complicates things. The songs are the real argument for the film’s longevity. “Hey There,” “Hernando’s Hideaway,” and “Steam Heat” have outlasted the source material and then some—especially the latter, with its proto-Fosse choreography: hats, angles, and sharp little shocks of movement that suggest the musical is trying to sneak in some style before the plot catches on. (Fosse choreographed the Broadway version and came along for the ride here, already showing signs of the precision and kink that would define his later work.) The musical numbers have a strange endurance—peppy but pointed, occasionally surreal, and more formally inventive than the romantic storyline they orbit. It’s lively, a little brittle, and painted in broad gestures: labor tension as backdrop, love song as distraction, dance break as release valve. The union plot is more frame than engine—it sets things in motion, then politely steps aside. This isn’t propaganda, and it isn’t satire. It’s workplace conflict reimagined as a high-kick fantasy, where problems—romantic, economic, interpersonal—can be sorted out by the time the final number hits its last note. A must for musical completists, Doris Day devotees, and anyone curious to see labor relations staged like a tap routine.

Morose and inert—like someone tried to build a gothic thriller out of damp firewood. If it weren’t for Christian Bale, it might’ve collapsed entirely. He gives Augustus Landor, a world-weary detective summoned to West Point in 1830, more than the role deserves—gravel in the voice, something guarded in the eyes, the air of a man who’s already solved too many crimes to be impressed by another. Why he pours this much focus into such a threadbare character says something about his work ethic, or maybe his inability to coast. The case is grisly enough: a cadet found hanging from a tree, his heart removed with surgical precision. Suicide ruled out, whispers of ritual creep in. To navigate West Point’s codes and corridors, Landor recruits an eager, theatrically morbid young cadet named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling). On paper, it’s a pairing that could’ve had bite—Bale’s blunt gravity set against Poe’s florid eccentricity—but the script sands off the edges. Melling plays him with a birdlike intensity, less wooden cipher than bright ornament in a dim room, yet the character still feels airless. The investigation drifts between interrogations, secret societies, and whispers of occult practice—never fully supernatural, but never entirely rational either. The film aims for slow-burn mystery and mistakes inertia for suspense. Cooper gives us frostbitten landscapes and candlelit interiors—gorgeous, to be fair, the sort of Victorian tableaux you could frame and hang. But the beauty never seeps into the storytelling. Twists arrive, including one that finally sharpens the focus, but they register more as quiet turns than true shocks—discussed afterward, perhaps, more than felt in the moment. What’s left is a prestige package—handsome sets, expensive fog, an overqualified lead—wrapped around a hollow core. Bale keeps pushing, as if he can will the film into life. The rest of it just sits there, embalmed.

A riff on The Graduate with less bite, more awkwardness, and a funeral. The comparisons write themselves—a directionless young man, an older woman, a crush from his youth—but The Pallbearer swaps existential angst for Gen X malaise, and the result is uneven, if occasionally compelling. David Schwimmer, still riding the Friends wave, plays Tom Thompson, a soft-spoken 20-something who lives at home with his mother (Carol Kane, wonderfully kooky as always) and spends most of his time trying to appear more together than he is. One day, he gets a phone call from Ruth Abernathy (Barbara Hershey), who informs him that her son Bill has died by suicide—and, stranger still, that Bill considered Tom his best friend. Tom doesn’t even remember him. They went to the same high school, apparently. He thinks. Maybe. Out of a mixture of politeness and pity, Tom agrees to give the eulogy. He fumbles through it, of course. But his awkward good deed does come with unexpected perks: a chance reconnection with high school crush Julie (Gwyneth Paltrow), and a series of increasingly confusing visits with Ruth, who turns out to be lonely, forward, and quite interested in Tom. A kiss becomes a sleepover. A sleepover becomes an affair. The emotional geometry grows more convoluted by the day. The film flirts with insight, and sometimes lands it. There are scenes of genuine discomfort that manage to evoke the particular confusion of being young, stuck, and suddenly expected to have thoughts on mortality. The dialogue is sharp without being smug, and Schwimmer, despite his limited range, sells the hangdog sincerity of a man in free fall. And yet, the whole thing never quite gels. The emotional stakes feel penciled in, the characters drawn with just enough detail to pass, but not enough to resonate. You can see the structure—Graduate, but with a coffin—but the poignancy never finds its footing. Still, for a directorial debut from Matt Reeves, it’s watchable. The pacing is tight, the supporting cast uniformly good (Toni Collette and Michael Rapaport make the most of small roles), and the tone—while wobbly—never fully collapses into farce or melodrama. It’s a passable curio: occasionally funny, vaguely sad, and mostly kept afloat by the sheer oddity of its premise.

Call it second-tier Sturges if you want—just don’t pretend it isn’t fun. Claudette Colbert plays Gerry Jeffers, married to Joel McCrea’s Tom—a sweet but penniless inventor who’s just about to be evicted, blueprint in hand. Faced with financial ruin, they flirt with the idea of a split. Not a dramatic one, just strategic: Gerry will go off, find a wealthy man, marry him, and funnel the money back to fund Tom’s dreams. Divorce as investment strategy. It sounds insane, but the film doesn’t blink. Gerry, with suitcase in hand, promptly runs into the Wienie King (Robert Dudley), a cheerfully deaf old man who’s rich, generous, and entirely unconcerned with optics. He hands her $700, which she uses to settle the rent, buy a new dress, and pack for Palm Beach. Tom, of course, misreads the whole exchange—he sees a kiss on the cheek and assumes the worst. Gerry leaves before she’s forced to explain herself again. On the train, the screwball machinery kicks in. Gerry finds herself caught between a trigger-happy group of hunters and the eternally polite John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), a walking trust fund in spats who’s taken with her immediately. He courts her with the kind of sincerity that can only come from extreme wealth and lifelong celibacy. She doesn’t discourage it. Meanwhile, Tom tracks her down and poses as her brother, which naturally sets off the affections of Hackensacker’s sister—the serially remarried Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor), who’s always shopping for a new last name. The setup is pure Sturges: scandal without sin, innuendo without follow-through. There’s the usual dance around sexual impropriety, mistaken identity, and a possible bigamy plot—though everything stays just this side of acceptable. Sturges was a master at sneaking the risqué past the Hays Code, and The Palm Beach Story gets away with more than you’d think. The finale, while not quite satisfying, ties it up in a way that dodges both punishment and sentiment. No one suffers, no one repents, and everyone walks off with exactly what they were chasing—more or less. It might not be top-tier Sturges, but it moves with such speed and glib assurance that you barely notice. Even the crackpot logic feels plausible while you’re watching. You only start asking questions once the credits roll—and by then, you’ve already laughed.

I was lucky. I went in blind. I didn’t know the premise, hadn’t seen a trailer, hadn’t read a logline. This wasn’t a strategic act of media avoidance—it just happened that way. But what a gift. Watching the fantastical conceit of Palm Springs unspool in real time is a genuine delight. That said, if you already know the hook, don’t worry. The film’s pleasures aren’t rooted solely in surprise. They’re baked into the dialogue—remarkably sharp, sometimes blisteringly funny—and in the performances, particularly the two leads, who generate a chemistry so immediate and natural you’d swear they’d been riffing off each other for years. Andy Samberg plays Nyles, a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing wedding guest who doesn’t seem to belong to anyone. He’s a plus-one to his girlfriend, who’s only loosely connected to the bride. The day unfolds like a typical Samberg scenario: half irony, half beer. At the reception, when the bride’s sister Sarah (Cristin Milioti) is roped into giving a speech while visibly hammered, Nyles swoops in with the timing of a man who’s done this before. His impromptu toast starts off pompous, skewers the couple for looking like siblings (they do), and somehow lands with everyone raising a glass. He, of course, pops open a beer. That moment—offbeat, disruptive, weirdly sincere—sets the tone for everything that follows. Nyles and Sarah gravitate toward one another with the urgency of people who suspect time might not be working quite right. She’s cynical, he’s resigned, and both of them have clearly been through enough to cut past the small talk. Their connection is instantaneous but never forced, and their banter—clever without ever feeling scripted—becomes the film’s most durable asset. It’s tempting to talk about plot here, but that would spoil half the fun. Suffice to say, things get strange. The laws of time and consequence unravel. So do the characters, a bit. But the film never forgets that its core is emotional, not just conceptual. Samberg, usually cast as a goofball in overdrive, leans into something more existential here—still funny, still sharp, but with an edge of weary nihilism. And Milioti matches him step for step, grounding the film with a sense of emotional realism that makes all the absurdity feel oddly human. Palm Springs is a romantic comedy, a sci-fi loop-de-loop, and a low-key meditation on what it means to be stuck—with time, with someone else, with yourself. It doesn’t reconfigure the genre, but it refreshes it, and sometimes that’s even more difficult.

For years, Pamela Anderson wasn’t a person so much as a composite—Playboy ink, slow-motion cleavage, and the setup to every late-night monologue for a decade. She existed on covers, in calendars, and in the national subconscious, but never quite in her own story. Pamela, A Love Story tries to change that. Not with scandal, not with spin—just by letting her speak. Anderson appears here unfiltered and largely unadorned—no makeup, no retakes, and very little distance. She’s warm, funny, sometimes scattered, and never evasive. The film lets her talk through the whole messy arc: the small-town childhood, the leap to Playboy, the whirlwind marriage to Tommy Lee, the stolen sex tape that turned her into property, and the long, uneven slide that followed. There are familiar beats, yes, but they’re delivered on her terms. Even her journals—long sealed off—are handed over as raw material. And when she addresses the Pam & Tommy miniseries, it feels like a gut punch: another glossy production made without her consent, feeding on pain it didn’t bother to ask about. (And yes, I watched the miniseries.) The film itself is plainspoken. No re-creations, no talking heads, no attempts to dramatize what already stings. Just Anderson, now in her fifties, flipping through memories and trying to make sense of the noise. The story winds, doubles back, leaves a few things unsaid. But it feels like hers—for once. And that’s the whole point.

This is less a movie than a mood. Or a poem. Or maybe it’s just narratively thin enough that you have to pretend it’s all a dream to make sense of it. The plot is technically there—Pandora (Ava Gardner), a luminous enigma drifting through a Spanish coastal town, finds herself drawn to a melancholy stranger (James Mason), who turns out to be the cursed, immortal Dutchman of legend. He’s doomed to sail forever unless he finds a woman willing to die for him. Pandora might be that woman. Or maybe she just wants something to feel real. But the story barely matters. What you’re really watching is tone: golden-hour Technicolor, whispered fatalism, gowns that ripple in the sea breeze. Conversations unfold like riddles. People stare into the middle distance and say things like “time is a circle” without batting an eye. You could call it slow, and you wouldn’t be wrong—but it’s the kind of slow that sometimes feels like hypnosis. There’s a bullfight in a mostly empty arena—snorts and hoofbeats echoing like distant thunder. There’s talk of fate, destiny, eternal love—but the dialogue drifts past like fog. You don’t watch this movie for the story, you let it seep in. Some scenes mesmerize, others drag like wet velvet. It’s a salt bath for the eyes—but one that eventually cools. Fellini would later show how to do this kind of reverie with more madness and bite. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman gets halfway there, then drifts. It’s lovely, hushed, adrift in gold. But by the end, it’s not a peaceful dream—it’s the kind where want to wake up.

A raw nerve of a film—unvarnished, grim, and almost documentary in how it drags you into the cold daylight of New York’s street-level drug scene. Needle Park—really Sherman and Verdi Square, rebranded by the local addicts—was where junkies drifted, scored, and slowly hollowed themselves out while the city hummed indifferently around them. In his first lead role, Pacino makes Bobby feel raw and unpredictable—a street-corner operator, all puppy-dog grin one minute and jittery small-time shark the next, flickering between half-sincere sweetness and whatever hustle keeps him high. Bobby’s orbit pulls in Helen (Kitty Winn, painfully good), a drifting young woman recovering from a back-alley abortion. She moves in with him, and what starts as rescue slowly curdles into complicity—Helen sliding into using not through force, but through small, believable choices she makes for herself. There’s no melodrama here, no moralizing trumpet blast about the wages of sin. Schatzberg and screenwriters Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne sketch these lives with a harsh, offhand honesty: messy apartments, whispered deals, Needle Park—a patch of concrete that’s both a refuge and a cage. Even Helen’s slightly safer background doesn’t shield her for long. Her slide feels quiet, incremental—one compromise at a time, until the next fix is all that’s left to want. Pacino hints at the star he’d become, but there’s no showboating—just a bruised charisma that makes Bobby sympathetic even when you know he’s no hero. And Winn matches him, anchoring the story with a performance that never begs for pity. The Panic in Needle Park isn’t neat or polite. It’s a snapshot of addiction as routine and ruin, a love story eroding from the inside. Unflinching, unsentimental, and still one of the most hauntingly real films about people who can’t live without the needle—and can’t quite live with it either.

Proof that a limited cast and a single location are no impediment to suspense—especially when David Fincher’s at the helm. Panic Room is a taut, elegantly brutal thriller that turns confinement into a pressure cooker and never lets the steam out. The setup is simplicity itself, but the execution is anything but. Meg (Jodie Foster), recently divorced and still exhaling from the move, relocates with her 11-year-old daughter Sarah (a young Kristen Stewart, already radiating steely resolve) into a Manhattan brownstone that comes equipped with a very specific luxury: a panic room. Steel-reinforced, concrete-lined, and wired to the teeth with surveillance monitors and an intercom system, it’s the kind of feature you might scoff at during a real estate tour—equal parts overkill and rich-person paranoia. And then, of course, you find yourself using it on night one. A trio of burglars breaks in, expecting the house to be empty. They’re after something stashed away by the previous owner, but what they don’t expect is a mother and daughter barricaded inside the very room that makes their job infinitely harder. Forest Whitaker plays the most human of the intruders—calculating but conflicted—while Jared Leto, in cornrows and bad decisions, bounces off Dwight Yoakam’s icier presence with erratic menace. Most of the film plays out in the breathless, claustrophobic tension between rooms—one fortified, the others penetrable—and the camera roves with Fincher’s usual precision, gliding through walls and banisters like an omniscient specter. The tricks never feel showy. They heighten the mood, keep us off-balance. Foster is the engine. Calm, decisive, increasingly ferocious, she grounds the high-concept premise in real grit. The mother-daughter dynamic has genuine warmth and becomes essential as Sarah’s quick thinking—despite managing a health condition—becomes just as critical as her mother’s resolve. Panic Room might not reach the thematic depths of Fincher’s more existential work, but as a stripped-down survival thriller, it’s remarkably efficient. If it doesn’t quite get you to the edge of your seat, it at least has you gripping the armrests.

Paparazzi is a terrible film, but the premise has a certain base-level appeal: a rising movie star, his family nearly killed by a pack of tabloid ghouls, decides to pick them off one by one. It could’ve been trashy fun—a glossy Death Wish knockoff with cameras instead of crowbars—but instead, it opts for a weirdly sanitized revenge narrative, wrapped in moral seriousness it never earns. Bo Laramie (Cole Hauser, so stiff he seems stapled into frame) plays the newly famous action hero whose wife and son are injured in a car crash caused by predatory photographers. He takes justice into his own hands, not with legal threats or a security detail, but through a series of conveniently choreographed homicides. You can see the bones of a pulpy thriller underneath, something wild and unrepentant, but the movie refuses to lean into its own nastiness. The tone is self-important, the violence cautious, and everything is framed with the kind of polish that blunts what little edge the story might have had. A little theatricality, a wink, even a trace of absurdity could’ve gone a long way. But the film seems determined to play it straight, and the result is just inert. And then there are the cameos. The film occasionally pauses to pan across a familiar face—Mel Gibson shows up, among others—like it’s scanning a crowd to see who else might be famous. These appearances aren’t the worst thing here, just another odd detour in a film already wandering off course. There’s a version of this movie that might have worked—faster, meaner, less concerned with looking respectable. What we get instead is a revenge film that’s afraid of getting its hands messy, starring a lead who never looks convinced he should be in it.

A strikingly buoyant comedy, especially given how it begins—with a funeral and no tears. In Depression-era Kansas, nine-year-old Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal) stands beside her mother’s grave wearing an expression so composed it feels surgical. Not grief-stricken, not bewildered—just calmly calculating. It’s a look she maintains for most of the film, and it becomes her armor. Enter Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal), a two-bit Bible hustler with a beat-up car and a grin half a shade too wide. He claims no formal relation to Addie, though locals suspect otherwise. When he gets roped into driving her to her aunt’s place in Missouri, he accepts with all the enthusiasm of a man who plans to ditch her at the nearest train depot. But first, he pays a visit to the brother of the man who caused Addie’s mother’s death, managing to extract $200 in the name of “doing right by the girl.” Addie, ever observant, catches on quickly. When Moses tries to leave her behind, she makes a scene and demands her share. Turns out, he’s already spent most of it. To keep her quiet, he promises to earn it back the only way he knows how: by conning widows out of deluxe, gold-embossed Bibles they never ordered but can’t quite dispute. (They travel with an engraver in the back seat—it’s that kind of operation.) Moses insists Addie stay out of sight during the cons, but her usefulness becomes undeniable after she helps smooth over a close call with a local sheriff. She’s better at the game than he is. She reads people faster. Her poker face is lethal. And she knows when Moses’ judgment goes soft—especially when he picks up a traveling showgirl (Madeline Kahn, brilliant and parasitic) who promptly begins draining their earnings and cluttering the car with baggage both literal and emotional. The relationship between Moses and Addie never settles into anything clean. Maybe they’re father and daughter. Probably. But what forms between them is something richer: an unlikely partnership shaped by mutual stubbornness, sharpened instincts, and a profound—if rarely spoken—understanding of how lonely people find each other. Shot in crisp, high-contrast black-and-white, the film doesn’t just evoke the 1930s—it feels like it could’ve been made then, if not for how modern the character work is. The performances are remarkable across the board, but Tatum O’Neal, just nine years old at the time, carries the film with a kind of stoic brilliance that should be far beyond her years. She’s not precocious. She’s resilient. And in moments when she lets the armor drop—when she’s mistaken for a boy, or when she quietly navigates the pangs of girlhood with no one to explain it to—she’s devastating. Paper Moon is sharp, funny, and weirdly tender. It’s about survival and performance and improvised families that don’t always fit but sometimes function. The script is razor-clean, the characters unforgettable, and the world so absorbing you never want the story to wrap. Which is why, when it does, it feels like someone just drove off with your favorite people.

Very minor Hitchcock—so minor even completists might be forgiven for skipping it. The premise promises more than the film delivers: a glamorous woman is accused of poisoning her blind husband, and her defense attorney (Gregory Peck) finds himself spiraling into obsession while trying to prove her innocence. It has all the hallmarks of a classic Hitchcock setup—murder, ambiguity, erotic undercurrents—but what should simmer never quite warms up. Part of the blame lies with producer-screenwriter David O. Selznick, whose script trudges along with all the urgency of a formal apology. The dialogue is strangely lifeless, flattening a cast that includes Charles Laughton, Ann Todd, and Alida Valli into furniture with billing. Only in scattered moments does Hitchcock’s style peek through—a few tight zooms, some clever blocking, and a whiff of the psychological tension he’d later refine to brilliance. Peck’s performance flirts with something darker, especially in the way his infatuation edges toward self-immolation, but even that feels like a draft of Vertigo, still waiting to be rewritten. The courtroom scenes add a bit of spark, if only by contrast, but the momentum doesn’t hold. The ending arrives without urgency or consequence—less a conclusion than a final page that happens to be numbered. There’s a film buried in here somewhere: one about self-delusion, desire, and the futility of projecting fantasies onto strangers. Hitchcock would eventually make that film. Just not here.

If Paradise is meant to be an uplifting coming-of-age story, it misses the mark by several miles—and possibly a state line. Elijah Wood plays Willard, a quiet, sensitive 10-year-old who’s being bullied at school and then, as consolation, shipped off to the country to stay with family friends so his parents can welcome their new baby in peace. It’s a flimsy pretext, but never mind. He’s dropped into the care of Lily (Melanie Griffith) and her husband Ben (Don Johnson), who are too absorbed in mourning the loss of their own infant to notice they’ve just taken on another child. The logic is baffling. Why send your son away to miss the birth of a sibling, only to place him squarely in the path of someone else’s unresolved trauma? The marriage he’s been parachuted into is barely functional. Lily mourns in near-permanence. Ben sulks and snaps, with Willard often on the receiving end. He’s expected to bear witness to all of this and somehow emerge better for it. Of course, this is a film with a weeping, swelling string section, so Ben and Willard gradually begin to bond—through shared chores, a model airplane, and the kind of forced proximity movies mistake for intimacy. Meanwhile, Willard finds some actual joy in the company of Billie (Thora Birch), a spunky nine-year-old with just enough feral energy to slice through the gloom. Her scenes are the only ones with real life in them. Everything else is hushed trauma in soft focus. But the problem isn’t just tone—it’s perspective. The film wants to be about grief, healing, and chosen family, but it turns Willard into the emotional go-between. He isn’t growing; he’s absorbing. These adults are stuck in their own wreckage, and the script treats him less like a child than a sponge for their runoff. It keeps handing weight that should belong to adults to a ten-year-old and calls it tender. Melanie Griffith at least fares better than the material, playing Lily with a kind of glassy-eyed ache that almost convinces. Don Johnson, meanwhile, emphasizes the script’s stiffness with every line reading—grimacing his way through grief like someone trying to pass a kidney stone in slow motion. In theory, Paradise is about a boy who teaches two broken adults to treasure what they still have. But that only works if you believe it was ever the boy’s responsibility to begin with. If he took it on voluntarily, fine. But it’s thrust on him, and all I can think about is the years of therapy he’s going to need just to name what happened. Let the kid be a kid. Don’t hand him your mess and call it wisdom. And for the love of God, let him be there when his sibling is born.

Visually exquisite, narratively sluggish. The costumes deserve archival preservation, the sets feel engineered more for mood than movement, and the script, for all its structure, never quite takes hold of what it’s reaching for. Paradise Hills wants to be a fairy tale with teeth, but settles for looking expensive while saying very little. Paradise Hills is the name of a re-education center with floral arrangements. Young women—too independent, too famous, too resistant, too round—are sent to this pastel island retreat to be softened, reshaped, and sent home gleaming. The program, politely fascist, offers tea service between indoctrinations. Emma Roberts plays Uma, dispatched for rejecting a marriage that would’ve secured her mother’s social ambitions. She wakes in a bedroom scented like pressed orchids and immediately clocks that this place, while smiling, is not a resort. She’s told she’ll be “adjusted.” Her roommates come with their own violations: a pop singer under brand surveillance, a business heir who refuses to trade freedom for spreadsheets, and a teenager enrolled by parents who want her thinner. They’re not delinquents. They’re misaligned investments. The island operates with spa-day serenity, all mirrors and maze gardens, monitored by women in ice-cream-colored uniforms who speak like they’re apologizing for your behavior. The Director (Milla Jovovich, lacquered into a pageant of menace) glides through with the practiced stillness of someone who’s memorized her own silhouette. The therapy includes drone ballet and posture correction. There’s a mystery in the background—one involving replacements, disappearances, doubles—and the girls, slowly, start to piece it together. It’s a puzzle with obvious edges, but the script takes the long way around, favoring atmosphere over tempo. Everything is styled within an inch of its budget. Gardens look painted. Corsets have geometries. Even the shadows wear makeup. And while that’s the appeal—designer dystopia in powdered pinks—it becomes the problem. You’re meant to feel tension. You end up flipping through the visual catalog, looking for a chaise you saw earlier. Roberts frowns with purpose. Awkwafina paces around like she’s trying to wake the film up. Danielle Macdonald underplays, wisely. But the dialogue is too vacuum-sealed to breathe. Not a mess, just a mood piece too infatuated with its own surface. A ruffled nightmare that forgot to be scary.

A taut, well-appointed thriller with just enough menace to keep your pulse up, though not quite enough identity to lodge in the memory. Warren Beatty, mid-glow and perfectly shaggy, plays Joseph Frady, a journalist with a chip on his shoulder and a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His ex-girlfriend (Paula Prentiss, in a brief but rattled turn) insists she’s being hunted. She dies—supposedly a drug overdose—and Frady, sensing more than just bad luck, starts connecting dots. Turns out, she was one of several witnesses to a political assassination atop the Seattle Space Needle—a sequence staged with such unnerving detachment it feels less like a murder than a civic procedure. From there, the plot thickens in all the usual places: mysterious organizations, secret dossiers, a recruitment exam that feels like a Cold War acid trip. Frady’s investigation slides him into the murky orbit of the Parallax Corporation, an outfit so shadowy they practically bill in negative space. Attempts on his life follow, naturally, but he remains dogged—half detective, half walking target. As political thrillers go, this film satisfies the baseline: tight, deliberate, occasionally electrifying. The machinery moves smoothly, and a few sequences hit hard enough to leave a mark. But it never quite breaks free from its own framework. The paranoia is textbook, the plot cleanly constructed but oddly impersonal. What elevates it is the camera. Gordon Willis’s cinematography is a feast of right angles and open skies, framing men as tiny figures dwarfed by buildings, staircases, and systems they don’t understand. The visuals say more than the dialogue, and they stick longer, too. Not a classic, but a handsome relic from the era of slow-burn conspiracies and reporters in perpetual trench coats.

A found-footage horror film with the visual texture of security footage and the décor of a starter home that hasn’t quite decided how to look lived in. The lighting is flat, the camera is fixed, and the tension crawls in slowly, like it’s testing whether you’re paying attention. No score, no stylization—just grainy digital video and the slow dread of the ordinary turning against you. Set in suburban San Diego, the story follows Katie and Micah (Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, credited as themselves), a young couple who begin noticing strange disturbances at night. Katie suspects a presence that’s followed her since childhood. Micah, armed with gear and ego, turns their home into a paranormal lab and himself into the least helpful documentarian imaginable. The film’s strength lies in its refusal to decorate. The camera doesn’t chase horror—it waits for it. Most of the film takes place at night, the couple asleep in bed while doors move, lights click on, and an unseen force auditions its way into the narrative. The effect is cumulative. You don’t get big jumps—you get erosion. Featherston gives the stronger performance, carrying unease with her into every scene. Sloat, for his part, plays smugness with the accuracy of a man who would absolutely read a demon its own Better Business Bureau reviews. Their believability mostly works, though there are moments when their reactions feel too composed, too casual, like they’ve half-accepted being haunted as a mildly inconvenient roommate situation. Still, this thing works. The restraint, the artificial naturalism, the way it lets silence curdle—Paranormal Activity knows that sometimes, the most terrifying thing is a camera that never moves and a hallway that never quite stays empty.

Paranormal Activity 2 rewinds the clock a few weeks to reveal that the haunting didn’t start with Katie and Micah—it started down the road with her sister, Kristi. After what looks like a break-in (nothing stolen, everything trashed), Kristi’s husband installs a full array of security cameras throughout their suburban home. From then on, the house watches itself—fixed angles, wide shots, and enough dead air to make you suspicious of your own refrigerator. Kristi (Sprague Grayden) and her husband (Brian Boland) share the home with a teenage daughter, a nanny with spiritual instincts, and a baby boy whose crib becomes ground zero for some of the film’s most unsettling moments. The presence of a child raises the tension considerably—there’s no ambiguity about what’s at stake. Where the first film thrived on minimalism and restraint, this one builds on that foundation with better pacing and, crucially, more credible human behavior. The characters respond the way you might if a cabinet flew open by itself: confused, scared, in denial, then increasingly desperate. Their reactions feel lived, not scripted. The surveillance format still works. Every frame carries a low-level unease—not because of what’s moving, but because of what stays just still enough to be wrong. It’s less about what you see than what you think you did. That psychological pull keeps the tension taut without overplaying its hand. It’s not groundbreaking, but it refines what the first film established and plays it well. Less like a sequel and more like a smart expansion of the universe, Paranormal Activity 2 earns its scares without shouting for them.

By the third entry, the Paranormal Activity formula is starting to show its seams—but 3 at least tries to patch them with novelty. It rewinds all the way to 1988, where sisters Katie and Kristi, still in grade school, begin to encounter the kind of invisible presence that flickers lights, rattles cabinets, and escalates from ominous to aggressive without ever announcing itself. The footage is presented as grainy VHS home video, which allows for some clever period texture—scrunchies, nightgowns, and one deeply cursed Teddy Ruxpin—and a few neat visual tricks. The standout is a camera duct-taped to an oscillating fan base, slowly panning left and right between kitchen and living room. The movement is hypnotic, the suspense engineered by what enters the frame a second too late. The cast is mostly new and mostly functional. Lauren Bittner and Chris Smith play the girls’ mother and her videographer boyfriend, whose curiosity predictably turns into obsession. The child performances—particularly Jessica Tyler Brown as Kristi—are better than expected, which helps ground the supernatural escalation in something that at least looks like a family dynamic. But the freshness wears thin. The jump scares feel programmed. The rules are fuzzier than ever. There’s a strange mix of ambition and laziness in the writing, as if it wants to deepen the mythology while simultaneously copy-pasting its best tricks from earlier films. There are moments that work. The ending takes a hard swerve into occult territory, which may not make a lick of sense but at least jolts the thing out of autopilot. And the fan-cam sequence deserves a place in the found-footage horror canon, even if the rest of the film doesn’t. It’s competent, intermittently creepy, and occasionally inventive—but by now, the haunting feels more contractual than cosmic.

A social satire, a home invasion thriller, a class parable with a mean streak—Parasite is all of it, and something stranger. It doesn’t lean on style. It moves with precision, tightening its grip as it goes. That it became the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture says less about the Academy’s taste than about how hard this one is to ignore. It would’ve been great with or without the statue. The Kims live half underground, in a cramped apartment that floods when it rains and reeks of resignation even when it doesn’t. Ki-taek and Chung-sook live half underground, jobless and restless, with their two adult children—Ki-woo and Ki-jung—both bright, bored, and itching for a way out. When Ki-woo cons his way into a tutoring job for the rich Park family, the rest fall in line like it’s choreography. One fake credential at a time, they move in. Fake credentials, strategic firings, forged alliances. They don’t just get jobs. They embed. The house is a modernist fortress: sunlight, clean angles, no clutter. The Parks, who live there, are wealthy, trusting, and a little too proud of their own niceness. For a while, the con plays like a farce—funny, fast, and frictionless. Then the old housekeeper rings the bell. From that point on, the movie twists. Genre, tone, expectation—none of it holds. Bong Joon-ho doesn’t just shift gears; he throws the whole engine off a cliff and makes you watch it tumble. What started as satire curdles into suspense, then into something closer to horror. The rich stay untouched. The poor absorb the consequences. A rainstorm washes away the facade. For the Parks, it’s an inconvenience. For the Kims, it’s a disaster—one they’re expected to endure with a smile. They do. They have to. That’s the point. There’s no speech to wrap it up, no courtroom or moral. Just a long drop, a quiet thud, and a closing note that feels like the breath you didn’t realize you were holding. Parasite is about class, yes—but more than that, it’s about structure. What it takes to climb, what it costs to fall, and how deep the foundation really goes.

Paris Can Wait is a slow, scenic slide show with a movie attached, Paris Can Wait stars Diane Lane as Anne—the sidelined wife of a high-powered film producer (Alec Baldwin). They’re meant to be vacationing after Cannes, but he gets pulled to Budapest for a work emergency, leaving Anne with a suitcase and an open itinerary. Enter Jacques (Arnaud Viard), a smooth-talking French associate of her husband’s, who offers to drive her to Paris. He does—eventually. The route meanders, with stops for gourmet meals, boutique hotels, and drawn-out conversation. There’s a flicker of romantic tension, but it stays firmly PG—more Pinot than passion. Lane and Viard are attractive in a glossy, travel-catalog way, but their characters are blanks. She’s vaguely dissatisfied. He’s vaguely flirty. Together, they discuss French and American cultural differences like they’re prepping for a very long Rick Steves segment. Nothing they say is new, and most of it sounds cribbed from a guidebook last updated in 1997. To be generous, you might pick up a few scraps of trivia—a use for a nylon stocking in car repair, some light Sudoku encouragement—but the real appeal is visual. Cobblestone streets, open-air markets, foie gras plated like jewelry. If you’ve ever fantasized about someone else footing the bill for a weeklong detour through France, this might qualify as vacation porn. It’s not awful. Just mild, glossy, and slow in that specific way movies get when no one seems in much of a hurry. Still, it’s rare to see a romantic comedy this clean—a gentle flirtation with the idea of infidelity that stays safely on the polite side of the Ten Commandments.

Eighteen directors. One city. No time to get comfortable. Paris, Je T’aime is the cinematic equivalent of a heart-shaped chocolate sampler—bite-sized, varied, occasionally surprising, and not every piece is filled with something you like. But the cumulative effect is oddly satisfying. This anthology strings together tones and textures, most of them orbiting around love, grief, or confusion, all in some quadrant of Paris. Some are sweet. Some are strange. Some evaporate on impact. But when they work, they really work. The Coen Brothers’ segment, set in a Metro station, is aggressively ridiculous—to glorious effect. Steve Buscemi plays a lonely American tourist who glances at the wrong couple and is instantly dragged into a silent, cartoonish meltdown. It has no moral, no resolution, just escalating nonsense and Buscemi’s perfect confusion. Another standout is the vampire story starring Elijah Wood, which plays like a Giallo comic strip: pale lighting, lush shadows, and blood that looks like someone squeezed a tube of acrylic straight onto the film stock. Elsewhere, a child calmly narrates how his mime parents met in jail. It’s told without irony, and somehow that makes it funnier. Of course, not everything lands. A few segments slip by without leaving a smudge. Some trade emotion for concept. But that’s expected when twenty-odd voices are all talking at once, each with a different definition of intimacy. As an experiment, this film is unruly but worthwhile. Taken as a whole, the film is a tender, fractured valentine to the city—a place where everyone seems to be falling in or out of something.

A gaunt man in a weathered suit and red baseball cap emerges from the scorched nowhere of the Texas desert, walking with the vacant determination of someone who’s been on foot for days, maybe weeks. His name is Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), though we don’t know that right away. He doesn’t speak. He just keeps moving until his legs give out inside a convenience store, where he collapses and is taken to a modest medical clinic in a nowhere town. From there, word reaches his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell), who—like most people—assumed Travis was long dead. Walt shows up, bewildered and quietly hopeful, prepared for some overdue answers. Travis, however, remains silent. This is how Paris, Texas begins: not with explanation, but with a void. The film unfolds from there like a memory dragged out of a fog—an image slowly coming into focus. The more time we spend with Travis, the more we understand the damage behind his stare. And by the time we reach the final stretch, we know exactly where he’s been—even if he still isn’t sure why. It’s a film about estrangement and reconciliation, but not the neat kind. Travis reunites with his young son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), who doesn’t remember him. Their early scenes together are laced with hesitance and mild absurdity, but gradually give way to something warm and haltingly affectionate. There’s humor in their fumbling interactions, but it’s the fragile kind—earned, not inserted. Stanton’s performance is quietly monumental. He plays a man reduced to the essentials—bone, regret, and a slow crawl back to language. When he finally does speak, what comes out isn’t redemption—it’s the kind of soul-scouring confession that stops time. His late-film monologue, delivered behind glass like a man trying to touch something he knows he can’t have back, is one of the most haunting things I’ve ever heard. I read it again after the film ended. I had to. Wenders and cinematographer Robby Müller treat the Texas landscape as an emotional map—wide, lonely, indifferent. Ry Cooder’s steel guitar score matches that desolation note for note, always hovering, never intruding. Paris, Texas doesn’t explain itself. It invites you to sit with the emptiness, to listen, to wait for meaning to rise from beneath the silence. When it does, it’s devastating. And oddly gentle.

Party Girl isn’t quite a musical, not quite a noir, not quite anything in particular, but it’s dressed like a star and carries itself like one. The color is practically powdered on. Nicholas Ray shoots it like he’s trying to revive something that never fully existed—a gangster melodrama with MGM gloss and a conscience muddled just enough to sell tickets. Cyd Charisse is the title’s namesake, though the film’s real relationship is with her legs. She dances twice—briefly, pointedly, and with the kind of perfection that reminds you dialogue is a concession, not a requirement. The script gives her a showgirl past and a moral compass polished just enough to pass inspection. She’s paired with Robert Taylor—their romance built from secondhand cigarettes and studio lighting. He accuses her of being bought; she replies that he sells his integrity wholesale to the same men who hand her envelopes. The argument works better as plot device than revelation, but it’s delivered with a self-importance that pretends not to notice. And then, Lee J. Cobb. Playing a mob boss like he’s waiting to be tried for it. There’s nothing reserved about his performance—he storms through scenes as if the film might try to end without his permission. Every syllable is a controlled demolition. If anyone gives Party Girl its weight, it’s Cobb, and maybe the wardrobe department, tied for second. The film doesn’t know quite where to land emotionally, but it knows where to look. There’s a dance of morality in here—greased by money, rationalized by necessity—and Ray treats it with a flicker of respect, like a preacher giving a benediction to a poker game. The romance is negligible. The dialogue behaves like it’s allergic to subtlety. But the picture moves, and in its overdesigned, underfelt way, it charms the eye while trying to brush past your brain. A lesser Ray, but even here, his instincts for visual texture and ethical discomfort tap out a rhythm worth noticing.

Set on the sunny Greek island of Nisi during the last wheeze of the Ottoman Empire, Pascali’s Island is a film that seems content to exist just to be looked at—its plot more pretext than engine, its pleasures mostly atmospheric. Ben Kingsley plays Basil Pascali, a resident informant whose loyalty to the Empire is so quiet it may be imaginary. For years, he’s been sending spy reports to Constantinople, with no sign anyone’s ever read them. Still, he keeps at it—long, paranoid dispatches to an empire that may have stopped listening years ago. Into this fragile balance strolls a British archaeologist (Charles Dance), all good manners and ulterior motives. Pascali is instructed to befriend him, which he does with the strained eagerness of someone who can’t quite remember what friendship is supposed to look like. The Brit claims to be interested in antiquities. Pascali suspects something more transactional. What follows isn’t quite suspense—more a slow drift of unease, measured out in cautious glances and polite conversations that seem to mean something else. The pacing is deliberate. Not hypnotic, exactly—just slow enough that your attention starts to drift toward the film’s more cooperative features: the sun-struck courtyards, the crumbling ruins, the way Kingsley’s eyes seem to carry their own sepia tone. The story moves in gentle, educated circles: minor deceptions, diplomatic friction, the vague whiff of betrayal. It’s not poorly told, just so subdued that watching it can feel like reading footnotes in a textbook on imperial decline. You understand why it exists. You just wish it had a little more blood in it. Pascali’s Island isn’t a bad film—just one that feels like it’s being watched from a respectful distance. It wants your intellect, not your pulse.

Jesus Christ in a snuff film. Had Ken Russell made this in the 1970s, it would’ve been labeled sacrilege. But context is everything. Mel Gibson, a devout Catholic with an Old Testament sense of spectacle, frames the gore not as provocation but as reverence. The brutality isn’t sensational—it’s devotional. This is what He endured, the film says. Now sit with it. Gibson’s boldest formal decision wasn’t the violence, but the language. No English, only Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic—the tongues of the time, spoken with solemnity and subtitled for the modern flock. Not that the subtitles are essential. The story’s familiar—Easter Sunday bulletin familiar: betrayal, trial, crucifixion, death. Caviezel plays Jesus with the flat calm of someone who knows fighting back won’t change the ending. He’s tempted by Satan in Gethsemane, betrayed by Judas (Luca Lionello), passed through the hands of Pontius Pilate (Hristo Shopov), and whipped into hamburger meat on the road to Golgotha. Flashbacks interrupt the bloodbath long enough to remind us what kind of man he was, before we’re returned to the spectacle of his undoing. The filmmaking itself is strong—richly composed, tightly staged, and guided by conviction. But for all its immersion in flesh and suffering, the film rarely reaches inward. The passion here is physical, and nearly nothing else. The real agony, the doubt and dread, the metaphysical weight of being human and divine at once—Gibson doesn’t touch it. Martin Scorsese did, with The Last Temptation of Christ, a film that dares to ask not just how Jesus died, but what it cost him to live. Gibson plays it straight, and perhaps a little too safe. He took risks with language, with violence, with religious tone—but not with casting. Historically, Jesus wouldn’t have looked like a Renaissance painting—or Jim Caviezel. He’d have been dark-skinned, Semitic, unmistakably Middle Eastern. But that image doesn’t travel as well, and Gibson doesn’t touch it. Familiarity, of course, wins out. Still, The Passion of the Christ delivers what it came to deliver: a devout, unblinking portrait of a body pushed past its limits. If the scope feels narrow, it’s by design. The suffering is skin-deep—because that’s where the focus stays. And yet, the most profound detail may be the one left unstated: this death wasn’t unique. Crucifixion was routine. The difference is, this man could have stopped it.

A big, soggy valentine to the notion that laughter can heal—except here, it’s less medicine than sugary cough syrup you wish you’d spit out sooner. Patch Adams tries so hard to swaddle you in giggles and sniffles that the effort feels less like comfort and more like a full-body spritz of corn syrup you can’t rinse off fast enough. Robin Williams does what only he could: flicks sparks of mischief through a script so squishy he might as well be juggling rubber chickens in quicksand—he keeps it afloat, but barely. He’s been a one-man rescue squad before (Good Morning, Vietnam comes to mind), but here he’s shackled to canned epiphanies and soft-focus sermons too starchy for even him to jazz up for long. The premise, at least in theory, is sturdy enough: a man who believes clown noses belong in hospital corridors, convinced patients need giggles as much as scalpels. If only the film trusted this idea to breathe. Instead, director Tom Shadyac slathers on inspirational speeches, syrupy violins, and slow-motion shots of orphans and the elderly until sincerity buckles under its own weight. And then there’s the so-called romance—by far the drippiest element on offer. Williams’s Patch woos Monica Potter’s Carin with a relentless persistence that the script insists is heartwarming, though it mostly registers as mild stalking. She withdraws, he reappears with a grin and a monologue, as if raw grief and personal boundaries were just speed bumps for his “healing” gospel. The glaring age gap—north of twenty years—doesn’t help. What’s meant to be sweet is mostly just uneasy. You can feel the well-meaning heartbeat under all the hokum, and if you’re inclined to forgive a film for trying too hard to be kind, maybe there’s something to sniffle over. But more often than not, Patch Adams confuses syrup for soul and treats a clown nose like a substitute for depth. Williams keeps it watchable—barely—but even he can’t doctor this into something you’d prescribe twice.

Some of it made me laugh until I lost control of my posture, which is not the sort of thing I can say about many films, let alone one that spends a good portion of its runtime daring me to walk away. The Patsy is Jerry Lewis in full Lewis mode—rubber-faced, noise-making, body-flailing—and while that often grates, sometimes it hits a pitch of lunacy that’s hard to resist. The premise is pure contrivance: a wildly successful comedian dies in a plane crash, and his opportunistic management team—sensing a golden goose can be rebuilt from spare parts—set out to manufacture a new star. Their recruitment method is as scientific as a coin flip; they select the first hotel bellhop they see. Unfortunately for them (and us), that bellhop is Jerry Lewis, playing a human calamity named Stanley with a gift for mangling every sentence, situation, and doorway he encounters. What follows is less a narrative than a stitched-up sequence of comic bits. Some feel like they wandered in from another film. Others are so precisely timed they achieve a kind of cartoon transcendence. The structure barely pretends to hold together—this is more comedy lab experiment than screenplay—but when the gags work, they work. It’s a Jerry Lewis vehicle, which means your tolerance for his vocal contortions and compulsive flailing will determine how much of this you survive. But to its credit, it includes some inspired nonsense—one scene involving a malfunctioning record player made me laugh in spite of myself. Peter Lorre and John Carradine show up, somehow, alongside Keenan Wynn and Everett Sloane, giving the supporting cast a surreal sheen—as if half the Warner Bros. contract roster had been accidentally swept onto the set. It’s a flimsy film, stitched together with spit and mugging, but parts of it are so wildly funny I can’t bring myself to hold that against it.

It looks like a Kung Fu Panda knockoff, but underneath the martial arts gloss and talking animals, it’s something odder: a children’s remake of Blazing Saddles—just with fewer slurs and more fur. The film even admits it. Mel Brooks lends his voice, the outline is intact, and the species-swapping is complete: a dog in a town full of cats, trying to earn their respect. Race becomes species, racism becomes generic hostility, and subversion becomes a few winks and a punchline about tolerance. The jokes lean meta—characters comment on the script, the structure, the clichés—but they rarely land anywhere. Satire gets swapped for self-awareness, and even that’s pretty tame. What’s left is a kind of synthetic watchability, the way background TV can feel tolerable when you’re folding laundry and a child is vaguely entertained nearby. It moves fast, and there’s enough color and noise to pass the time, but what’s remarkable is how thoroughly it declaws its source. One of the sharpest comedies of the 20th century gets flattened into something so cautious it barely registers. Less a spoof than a vague recollection of one.

A film with a workable premise and the emotional restraint of a Hallmark card left out in the rain. Pay It Forward wants to inspire, but it overreaches—collapsing into one of the most egregiously manipulative endings ever passed off as profound. Still, the cast does what it can. Haley Joel Osment, fresh off The Sixth Sense, gives the film something it wouldn’t have found on its own—a steady gaze and no false moves. He plays Trevor, a seventh grader with a high-functioning moral compass and a home life unraveling in slow, sour increments: an absent father, a mother who drinks too much, and a quiet sense that he’s the only one keeping the roof from buckling. His mother, Arlene (Helen Hunt), lies about her drinking, and his father (Jon Bon Jovi, casting that somehow makes sense) merely floats in and out of their lives, a sporadic presence defined mostly by menace. But Trevor’s sharp, and he listens in school—especially when his scarred, soft-spoken social studies teacher Mr. Simonet (Kevin Spacey) challenges the class to “think of an idea that could change the world.” Trevor’s idea: do three big favors for three different people, then ask each of them to do the same for three others. A pay-it-forward pyramid scheme, but in earnest. His first act of goodwill is letting a homeless man (Jim Caviezel) camp out in the garage—a gesture that predictably backfires when Arlene finds out. His second: matchmaking. Simonet and Arlene, both damaged in their own ways, become his pet project. Not entirely selfless—he clearly wants his favorite teacher to double as a father figure—but the effort’s sincere. The film functions best in the quiet moments: Trevor trying to make sense of adult behavior, Simonet struggling to accept affection, Arlene attempting accountability in fits and starts. But it loses patience with itself. The final stretch throws subtlety off a rooftop, insists on catharsis, and leaves you with an ending so cloying it feels punitive. There are decent pieces here. They just don’t add up to anything you’d want to pass along.