Film Buff Musings

A mutant hybrid of Toho spectacle and Times Square grime, Q – The Winged Serpent plays like a love letter to the giant monster genre, scribbled in ketchup and filmed with whatever was left in the budget drawer. There’s a winged Aztec god circling Manhattan, snatching rooftop sunbathers and construction workers like hors d’oeuvres, but the real spectacle is Michael Moriarty as Jimmy Quinn—a jumpy, motor-mouthed petty crook who accidentally discovers the beast’s nest in the spire of the Chrysler Building and treats it like a bargaining chip. The monster is claymation, naturally—herky-jerky and charmingly unconvincing—but the gore is not. Victims are flayed to the bone, sometimes mid-flight, and one poor soul is found with only a charm bracelet left to identify her. The effects are crude but weirdly effective, like a child’s nightmare filtered through a late-night cable haze. Jimmy, for his part, isn’t trying to save anyone. He’s trying to leverage a citywide emergency into immunity from prosecution and a recording contract. Moriarty makes him fascinatingly erratic—less a character than a self-sabotaging jazz solo with delusions of grandeur. Opposite him, David Carradine plays a detective tasked with keeping a straight face, and Candy Clark turns up as Jimmy’s girlfriend, who’s spent years perfecting the expression of someone trying to pack a bag slowly enough not to set him off. Director Larry Cohen shoots it fast and loose, tossing out genre convention like it was slowing him down. It’s not “good” in the conventional sense, but that’s not the metric. It’s unpolished, unhinged, and too odd to dismiss. Genre fans—and anyone who’s ever wanted to see a clay pterodactyl terrorize Manhattan—will likely walk away satisfied.

When Diana died in 1997, it wasn’t just a tragedy—it was a rupture. Not just a crash, but a reckoning. She’d been cast out of the Royal Family, but no one seemed to care. In the public eye, she was still theirs—glamorous, wounded, impossible to manage. The monarchy ran on protocol. Diana ran on feeling. And when she was gone, the whole system looked colder than ever. And when the Queen chose silence, the people noticed. Helen Mirren, uncannily composed as Elizabeth II, plays the monarch as a woman who has spent her life in uniform—trained to uphold duty above all else, and now watching that doctrine collapse under the weight of floral tributes and tabloid fury. Her instinct is restraint. Her country wants tears. The longer she holds out, the more brittle she becomes. The pressure to respond comes from an unlikely corner: Tony Blair (Michael Sheen, deft and alert), newly elected and privately skeptical of the monarchy, but wise enough to see that the crowd doesn’t care about political nuance. He calls her “the people’s princess.” She stiffens. He pivots. What follows isn’t quite a reckoning, but something more curious—a pas de deux between tradition and public sentiment, managed like damage control and staged like theater. The script, by Peter Morgan, is both sly and respectful—quick to find the tension, but hesitant to cut too deep. It’s often very funny in its own tight-lipped way, and Mirren anchors it without ever overreaching. The film gestures toward critique but ultimately plays safe, content to stay within the bounds of royalist empathy. It understands the Queen, maybe even admires her, but rarely risks stepping far enough away to see the full shape of the system she represents.

A pudding-soft comedy that aspires to be Mean Girls for the Medicare set, but it pulls every punch like it’s afraid of causing a fracture. Ellen Burstyn plays Helen, a widow who still bristles at the word “retirement” and treats her daughter’s suggestion of assisted living like it’s elder abuse. Then she sets her kitchen on fire and winds up in a facility so pleasant it might as well be sponsored by Werther’s Originals. She agrees to stay “just until the house is fixed”—a timeframe the script treats as both elastic and beside the point. Inside, she meets the ruling caste: three women with good hair, sharp cards, and selective warmth. Jane Curtin presides like a PTA president redistricted into Florida—tight-lipped, territorial, and allergic to nonsense. Loretta Devine, all sweetness and subtext, plays her role like a diplomatic accomplice—likable, but strategically so. Anne-Margret doesn’t so much flirt as emanate flirtation: breezy, glowing, perched on a chaise only she can see. Then comes James Caan, slower now but still carrying himself like a man who once broke a thumb over gambling debts. He’s the love interest, though the courtship plays more like détente—two grown-ups tiptoeing toward intimacy without disturbing the furniture. Burstyn gives the thaw a lovely rhythm, but the film’s idea of emotional climax is a gentle squeeze of the hand and maybe a shared scone. Christopher Lloyd shows up long enough to be confused, briefly tender, and ultimately unnecessary. His arc is memory loss rebranded as atmosphere—tucked in for texture, then quietly ghosted. Everything glides. Conflict is airbrushed. Resolutions arrive pre-softened. You watch it for the actors, not the story—and the film knows it. It keeps them moving, smiling, occasionally crying, but never far from comfort. You’re glad they got the work. You just wish it had a little more bite.

Like Naked Lunch before it, Queer takes a William S. Burroughs text that resists traditional storytelling and drapes it in dread, sweat, and fixation. The result isn’t a narrative so much as a compulsion. Daniel Craig plays William Lee, a fictionalized Burroughs avatar drifting through 1950s Mexico, sliding between bars and beds in search of young men and the next fix. He becomes obsessed with Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a handsome, aloof GI who gives just enough to keep him circling. There’s sex, but not much intimacy. Lee’s desire drifts into desperation, his addiction deepens, and soon he’s plunging into the South American jungle in search of yagé—a psychoactive vine rumored to grant telepathy or, failing that, obliterate what’s left of his perspective. The final act is one long hallucination, vivid and slippery, like watching a fever sweat itself out. Craig is quietly terrific—shambling, needled, a man trying to talk himself out of needing other people. Guadagnino bathes the film in heat and rot: cracked ceilings, jungle mist, bodies filmed like oil paintings left too long in the sun. It’s beautifully made, even as it becomes difficult to look at. Whether Queer works depends on your appetite for films that feel more like symptoms than stories. It’s not funny, not especially pleasant, and never interested in charming its audience. But it’s committed to its own vision. And for viewers who tune into its wavelength—who find something meaningful in its parade of self-destruction and unreciprocated desire—it won’t be a one-time watch. There’s artistry here, and a kind of grim poetry, but it’s a film to be admired more than embraced. It reaches your brain without quite knowing what to do once it’s there.

Watching Querelle is like slipping into a homoerotic dream you didn’t know you were having—stylized, theatrical, and deeply ambivalent about its own seductions. It was Fassbinder’s final film, and possibly his most unguarded: a swirling, golden fever of sex, power, and Catholic guilt, where the men dress like sailors, stand like statues, and speak in riddles about their own undoing. Brad Davis plays Georges Querelle, a Belgian sailor who docks in Brest and descends into a baroque underworld of betrayal, ritual, and sex without warmth. At the center is a brothel run by Madame Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau), whose lover—played by Hanno Pöschl—is also Querelle’s brother. They spend much of their time punching each other in the stomach, slowly, like men locked in a ritual they no longer understand. Querelle himself moves through the space like a man testing the temperature of a fire he knows will burn him. He allows himself to be sodomized by Nono (Günther Kaufmann), the brothel’s owner, after losing a rigged dice game—a sequence staged less for eroticism than for surrender. Querelle doesn’t protest, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even seem curious. He’s not searching for identity so much as reenacting a fall. Franco Nero plays Lieutenant Seblon, Querelle’s commanding officer and silent devotee. Seblon is protective, watchful, writing down thoughts he never says aloud. His desire is clear, but restrained—offered without violence, which makes it all the more alien in a film where intimacy usually comes at knifepoint. Querelle, for his part, doesn’t respond. He doesn’t need to. The imbalance is the point. Visually, the film is sealed in amber—sets that look half-built and overlit, corridors that seem to extend into myth, and lighting that turns every scene into a fevered icon. The dialogue floats above the action like it’s been dubbed in from another dream entirely, while the soundtrack drones beneath it: long, monastic tones that bleed into each other and eventually disappear. It’s effective, but also numbing. The film isn’t trying to seduce—it’s staging something much colder. This isn’t Ken Russell exploitation. It doesn’t leer. Querelle is cold, sculptural, art-house through and through. It’s hard to say whether Fassbinder wanted you to be moved or alienated. Maybe both. The film keeps circling emotion but never quite touches it. It fixates, stylizes, retreats. It’s brave, uncompromising, occasionally ridiculous—but never disingenuous. It might go without saying that very few people will find a way into this film. It’s probably not even be meant for enjoyment. But it’s original. And, in its own way, honest.

A solid prehistoric fantasy that at least makes an effort to resemble anthropology—unlike earlier entries in the genre where perfectly shaved humans in designer loincloths grapple with Harryhausen’s dinosaurs. Quest for Fire trades the reptiles for woolly mammoths and tries to imagine what it might have actually looked and felt like to survive in a world that hadn’t yet discovered the convenience of a flint spark. The premise is strikingly simple: in an era when early humans knew how to preserve fire but not how to create it, the loss of a flame could mean the end of a tribe. After a skirmish with a more primitive, ape-like group leaves their fire extinguished, three Neanderthal-esque men are sent off to retrieve a replacement. Their mission, more or less, is to wander through untamed wilderness, observe other hominid species, and steal a glowing ember whenever the opportunity presents itself. The film, largely wordless and performed entirely in constructed proto-languages, avoids narration and subtitles in favor of pure visual storytelling. That it remains entirely watchable—and at times even gripping—is a feat unto itself. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud stages action scenes with a sense of raw, elemental urgency, and the world he conjures feels coherent, even if the science behind it is speculative at best. However, that rawness comes at a cost. There are scenes of sexual violence and cannibalism that are certainly not for the faint of heart. Still, the film never feels exploitative—just uncomfortably committed. You may not walk away with any firm anthropological insights, but you’ll have spent 100 minutes in a world that behaves according to its own internal rules. And for a film about a matchstick’s worth of progress, it burns bright.

The Quiet Man is Hollywood capturing myth and pretending it’s only a love story. A big, brawny romance powered by two stars who never seem more alive than when they’re shouting at each other. John Wayne plays Sean Thornton, an Irish-born American with a past he won’t discuss, who returns to his birthplace—a windswept farming village called Inisfree—and quietly decides to stay. He buys the old family cottage, ruffles the local land baron, and falls hard for the most temperamental redhead in five counties. That’s Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara), a sharp-tongued beauty with no shortage of pride and even less patience. Her brother Red (Victor McLaglen), a puffed-up brute with property ambitions and a low boiling point, is furious on both counts: first at losing the land, then at the idea that someone like Thornton might think he’s worthy of his sister. But Thornton isn’t looking for a fight—he’s looking for peace. What he gets is something closer to war, in and out of the bedroom. Wayne and O’Hara are combustible together. You don’t root for them to fall in love—you expect it, like thunder following lightning. Their courtship veers between swooning and slapstick, often within the same breath. He’s stubborn, wounded, slow to raise his fists. She’s furious that he won’t. They bicker through rituals, dance around old customs, and stage their arguments like they’re auditioning for folklore. The real fun isn’t in the kisses—it’s in the collisions. And then there’s the tone, which swings between barroom brawl and pastoral fantasy. It’s funny, sometimes startlingly so. The village is full of knowing glances, running bets, and matchmaking conspirators. Barry Fitzgerald, practically airborne with mischief, serves as both chorus and accomplice. The whole town seems in on the plot, nudging the couple toward resolution whether they want it or not. That said, there are moments that sit differently now. Forced kisses, thrown punches, and the infamous line—“Here’s a good stick to beat the lovely lady”—are part of the film’s era, and its fantasy. Gender roles are strict. The courtship plays rough. But within the world the film builds, it’s less about cruelty than ritual—two headstrong people locking horns because neither will yield without a spectacle. John Ford shoots it with clarity and precision—saturated greens, fog spilling over the hills, firelight that brushes across faces like something remembered more than lit. The visuals feel shaped by memory, but the direction stays firm. The story is simple. The world around it isn’t. The Quiet Man may raise its voice and throw its elbows, but it’s not just noise. There’s structure in the bluster—a story about pride, resistance, and two people trying to find their way without losing ground.

Quigley Down Under is a straightforward but unexpectedly elegant western, dressed in outback dust instead of prairie grit. Tom Selleck plays Matthew Quigley, an American sharpshooter hired to eliminate wild dogs—dingoes, specifically—on an Australian cattle station. Shortly after arriving, he discovers the real job: long-range extermination of Aboriginal people. Quigley reacts—first with disbelief, then with force—and is promptly knocked unconscious, bound, and left to die in the desert. He wakes beside Crazy Cora (Laura San Giacomo), a talkative, half-fractured woman who’s latched onto him for reasons that may not be entirely rational. They survive, which becomes inconvenient for everyone who left them there. Quigley resurfaces with a vendetta and a working rifle, and starts thinning the ranks of men who assumed they’d handled the problem. What follows is familiar, but cleanly executed: scattered ambushes, long silences, and a steady narrowing of the cast list until one man is left standing. Selleck keeps everything slow and upright—deliberate, maybe even too deliberate—but with the self-assurance of someone who’s already won the argument. San Giacomo, seemingly freed from whatever tone memo the rest of the film received, supplies personality on an unpredictable faucet. Rickman plays Marston with a clipped civility, as if cruelty is just another tool in the gentleman’s kit—somewhere between a cufflink and a rifle.