Film Buff Musings

A frontier love story trimmed to studio scale, Rachel and the Stranger plays like a fireside folktale with just enough grit to hold attention. William Holden is David Harvey, a recently widowed settler who purchases the indenture of Rachel (Loretta Young), a soft-spoken woman working off her father’s debts. He marries her, technically—more arrangement than affection—so it won’t seem improper to house her under the same roof. She cooks, cleans, teaches his son, and lives in the same cabin, though never quite as a wife. Rachel, for her part, plays it straight. No coquetry, no protest. She does the job. Enter Jim Fairways (Robert Mitchum), a scruffy, itinerant hunter who blows through like wind through a smokehouse. He sizes up Rachel, flashes a grin, and makes himself very comfortable. David, predictably, stiffens. A triangle forms—hesitant, unspoken, and unmistakable. And just beyond it, the threat of the Shawnee hangs in the air like dense moisture—present, pressing, and hard to ignore. (Whether you can stomach the stock Hollywood depiction of Native Americans is another matter.) It’s not a grand film, but it moves well and resolves with a satisfying snap. The budget’s modest, but the cast makes it work—Holden all flinty reserve, Mitchum in full backwoods flirt, and Young with a patience that plays stronger than it looks. It was the studio’s biggest hit that year—unexpected, maybe, but not undeserved.

Woody Allen’s Radio Days is less a story than a broadcast—tuned to a frequency somewhere between memory and myth. It’s a film about how ordinary people lived in the orbit of radio’s golden age, back when every voice on the air sounded like it came from a better world. And looking back, it all blends together anyway—the music, the war, the gossip, the comedy, the heartbreak. Allen stays offscreen but narrates, circling back through his childhood in Rockaway Beach. The stand-in is Joe (Seth Green), a red-haired Jewish kid with a front-row seat to a household that never quiets down. In that house, the radio isn’t background—it’s the thing that keeps everything else from flying off the table. The film doesn’t build—it skips. One fragment, then another. Some Joe remembers. Some he only heard. Some were probably never true to begin with. He once claims to have seen a German U-boat off the coast but kept quiet, assuming no one would believe him. In another, a group of burglars answers a phone mid-robbery, ends up winning a radio quiz show. No explanation, no follow-through. It just plays and moves on. Some of the best stories stay indoors among Joe’s family, who is loud, opinionated, always at the table, and rarely in agreement. Dianne Wiest plays Aunt Bea, forever looking for a husband, but having rotten luck. One man leaves her in the middle of a date, and she walks six miles home. It just so happens that was the day Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds was raging on the radio. Other stories float out toward the bigger world. Mia Farrow plays a squeaky-voiced cigarette girl who is tangled up with a married broadcaster—until they get stranded on a rooftop where his wife is closing in on them like the weather. The whole film plays like someone flipping through a scrapbook too fast—warm, funny, and just sad enough to feel like remembering. Not mourning. Just that quiet ache when the picture’s familiar but the details won’t line up. Allen moves through it without pushing. There’s no plot, just tone. Loose, affectionate, touched by loss. It’s a memory piece that doesn’t pretend memory works. Things don’t connect the way stories do—they overlap, fade, contradict, return. What sticks is the atmosphere: radio as presence, as pulse, as furniture and phantom. Allen isn’t selling nostalgia—he’s sorting through it. The result is one of his most purely enjoyable films, free of big gestures, full of small signals. The rumble of war, the fizz of comedy, the voice drifting in from another room.

Raging Bull is a film with no patience for triumph. It opens with a man in a ring and ends with a man in a mirror—everything between is a slow, methodical demolition of ego disguised as autobiography. Jake LaMotta’s jealousy curdles into psychosis. His young wife (Cathy Moriarty, remarkable in her debut) is accused, battered, pushed away, and accused again. His brother and manager (Joe Pesci, in a breakout role) stands by him longer than anyone should, only to be consumed by the same paranoia that poisons everything Jake touches. The violence isn’t limited to the ring—it seeps into kitchens, hallways, and arguments that snap into fights before anyone has time to breathe. Scorsese shoots it in crisp black and white, giving the film a hard, cold clarity. Michael Chapman’s cinematography gives the boxing matches a brutal elegance, while Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing turns each hit into something you feel in your gut. The dialogue—much of it improvised—has a raw immediacy, as if the characters can’t stop themselves from saying something they’ll regret. Every exchange teeters on the edge of eruption. De Niro plays LaMotta as a man who can’t articulate his feelings, so he weaponizes the one thing he can control: his body. The older he gets, the softer and sloppier he becomes—not just physically, but ethically—slurring through crass nightclub routines that reek of bitterness. Still, he remains compelling. Monstrous but never empty. Scorsese doesn’t seek sympathy. He builds a cage and lets his subject pace. The result is claustrophobic, disquieting, and impossible to look away from. A masterpiece, no question.

In Ran, Akira Kurosawa adapts King Lear into something both intimate and operatic—a collapse of power rendered in fire and fog. The aging warlord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai), sensing the weight of time, decides to divide his kingdom among his three sons and retreat into a ceremonial retirement. But what he imagines as a slow fade into reverence quickly unravels into betrayal, bloodshed, and ruin. His sons, each with their own ambitions, turn inheritance into a battlefield. The narrative echoes Shakespeare, but Kurosawa strips it down to essentials—greed, pride, vengeance—and paints in grand, brutal strokes. The political maneuvering has the tight coil of a tragedy already in motion, with each character sliding toward their end not by surprise but by nature. No one here is merely misguided; they are fated. But Ran isn’t great because it adapts Lear. It’s great because it transcends it. The script may carry the bones of the play, but the flesh is cinematic: long, windswept silences; color-coded armies colliding on scorched plains; moments of devastation staged like rituals. The battle scenes, choreographed with an almost cruel elegance, are as painterly as they are savage—red and yellow banners cutting through smoke, riders vanishing into dust. Kurosawa, in the final stretch of his career, directs like a man with nothing to prove and everything to say. He stages grief on the scale of empires, and madness as a quiet, methodical descent. Tatsuya Nakadai, his face etched like a ruin, plays Hidetora as a man undone by the very order he spent a lifetime imposing. The score by Tōru Takemitsu doesn’t underscore the action—it hovers above it like a distant lament, rising and receding like wind through stone. And the camerawork, composed with painterly precision, lets scenes breathe until the frame feels haunted. This isn’t just Kurosawa’s take on Shakespeare. It’s a farewell elegy in widescreen. Brutal, hypnotic, and ravishing.

Not quite a revisionist Western, but too crooked and bitter to be called traditional, Rancho Notorious plays like an outlaw ballad with a streak of vengeance and a cigarette burn around the edges. Fritz Lang opens not with a shootout but a reckoning—a rape and murder, told in voiceover like a bullet-pointed ballad. No romance, no reprieve. Just a body in the dirt and a man left behind. This is Lang’s West: grief outweighs law, and the frontier doesn’t promise freedom—it promises consequence. Arthur Kennedy plays Vern, the fiancé, running on vengeance and little else. His trail leads to Chuck-a-Luck, an outlaw hideout people only talk about if they’re drunk or cornered. It’s somewhere near the Mexican border, a place where fugitives pay for protection and silence isn’t optional. Getting there isn’t just a matter of directions—it takes pressure, bluffing, and knowing when to pull the gun before someone else does. Along the way, he hears of a woman named Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich), a saloon singer with a voice like poured liquor and a reputation that travels faster than any posse. She runs the place, more or less, with the help of an outlaw named Frenchy (Mel Ferrer), whom Vern befriends by getting himself thrown in jail and staging a convenient escape. Lang shoots the West like a noir—tight, expressionistic, loaded with shadows. There’s gunplay, sure, but most of the tension coils around suspicion and loyalty. Who’s lying? Who’s stalling? Who already knows? Dietrich, sharp-eyed and statuesque, isn’t there to soften the film—she gives it its edge. Her Altar is no romantic lead, just a woman who’s survived long enough to stop apologizing for it. The pacing drifts now and then, and it’s not a film that gallops—it prowls. But what it loses in momentum it gains in mood. You feel the dust, the danger, the proximity of betrayal. There’s no white-hat morality here, no clean shootout to tie it up. Just a man, a woman, a grudge, and a place that stays open for reasons nobody says out loud. It’s a strange, tightly coiled Western that doesn’t bother earning your trust—it just expects you to keep up.

This homage to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World trades in the same brand of manic spectacle, swapping palm trees for slot machines and handing the baton to a who’s-who of early-2000s comic talent. A billionaire casino mogul (John Cleese, all teeth and mischief) pits a group of strangers against each other in a race from Las Vegas to Silver City, New Mexico, where two million dollars sits in a locker, waiting. It’s an excuse for cartoon logic and high-speed detours, and the results bounce between inspired and exhausted. The cast is game—Whoopi Goldberg, Seth Green, Jon Lovitz, Amy Smart, and others crash through a barrage of loosely connected mini-sitcoms—but only Rowan Atkinson leaves a significant impression. He plays Enrico Pollini, a narcoleptic “Italian” tourist who’s essentially Mr. Bean with an accent and a passport, and he delivers the film’s few genuine surprises. Cuba Gooding Jr. gets an honorable mention for enduring a bus full of shrieking Lucy Ricardo impersonators like it’s some karmic debt being repaid in full. The rest is scattershot. One gag involves a transplant heart falling out of a moving van and getting stolen by a dog. Another involves a cow suspended from a runaway balloon, only to be clipped by a passing car. Zucker, of Airplane! fame, tries to recapture the tempo of his earlier work, but the pacing lurches and the tone skids from gleeful to grating. Still, there’s something oddly appealing about its refusal to stop for breath. Rat Race isn’t built to be watched closely—it’s built to keep moving. The jokes come at you like luggage on a carousel: some worth grabbing, others best left spinning. It’s not a great movie, but it barrels forward with such dumb confidence that resisting it takes more effort than giving in.

A bleak, beautifully harsh debut from Lynne Ramsay—part kitchen-sink realism, part dream-state misery. The setting is Glasgow, early 1970s, during a garbage strike that leaves the city festering: rats in the alleys, trash in the canals, nowhere to go but out of your head. James (William Eadie) is twelve, quiet, and watching it all from a half-detached slouch. His family lives in the kind of state housing that’s waiting to be bulldozed—part of a nationwide rehoming campaign that promises something better but delivers mostly limbo. The film opens with a death. A friend. A canal. No funeral, no mourning—just the unspoken weight of it trailing James like smell. His father (Tommy Flanagan) drinks. His mother snaps. His sister tattles. There’s no refuge, no moment of comfort. He meets Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), older, bullied, just as lonely. The boys torment her, humiliate her, grope her. No one intervenes. That’s the world here—grim, indifferent, real. Ramsay shoots it all with a cold poetry that never softens the blow. There are flashes of fantasy, escape, but nothing feels sentimental. Just small, strange jolts of interior life breaking through the rot. A mouse gets tied to a balloon. A vacant new housing estate glows like science fiction. These moments don’t lift the film out of its ugliness—they deepen it, suggesting a world where even hope feels accidental. The cast barely seems to be acting. These aren’t performances, they’re presences. You don’t doubt them for a second. Ratcatcher is a hard film to recommend but a harder one to shake. It’s one of the most authentically miserable movies ever made—hypnotic, tender in its own way, and painfully, stubbornly true. The ending hurts. But it also floats. Somehow both.

The Raven isn’t so much a literary adaptation as it is a giddy genre send-up—and it’s all the better for it. Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff headline this sorcerer’s romp with theatrical gusto that might’ve capsized a lesser film. That it holds together at all is thanks to Roger Corman’s instinct for draping B-movie bones in velvet robes and knowing just where to aim the camera. Price plays Dr. Erasmus Craven, a widowed magician still brooding over the loss of his wife when he’s visited by a raven—who turns out to be Dr. Bedlo (Lorre), transformed by a botched duel with the sinister Dr. Scarabus (Karloff). The spell reversal requires a bubbling potion, brewed with shaking hands, passive-aggressive grumbling, and the kind of slapdash energy that makes you worry for the furniture. Once restored to human form, Bedlo convinces Craven to storm Scarabus’s castle, where they’re joined by Craven’s daughter and Bedlo’s well-meaning but dense son (Jack Nicholson, stiff as a board but plainly soaking in the masters at work). The film builds to a gloriously ridiculous wizard’s duel: fireballs, smoke rings, levitating chairs, and flying beasts—including a conjured vampire bat that gets turned into a cooling fan. It’s clever, silly, and visually inventive. The castle interiors drip with theatrical opulence, and the saturated color palette gives everything the look of a haunted pop-up book. No, it’s not frightening. But it doesn’t want to be. This is Corman at his most playful, giving three horror titans a chance to jab, preen, and cackle through a tale that’s equal parts spooky nonsense and lovingly staged high camp. A delight.

It’s not hard to see why filmmakers keep turning to musicians for biopic material—meltdowns, mistresses, addiction, redemption, and a built-in soundtrack. But Ray doesn’t just check the boxes. It breathes. It dips into the myth without getting lost in it. And it has Jamie Foxx, who doesn’t play Ray Charles so much as disappear inside him. The walk, the laugh, the off-kilter genius—it’s all there, but never as mimicry. There’s a stillness behind the performance, like the real man’s still in the room, watching. The film skips the jukebox format and digs into the contradictions. Charles’ artistic brilliance wasn’t separate from his personal wreckage—it fed it. His marriage to Della (Kerry Washington), already strained, buckles under the weight of his heroin habit and his revolving door of road flings. And then there’s Georgia. The moment he refuses to play a segregated venue, and the state blacklists him. A ban that lasts over a decade. It’s one of the rare scenes where the film goes quiet and lets its subject stand up without fanfare—just resolve. The flashbacks hit differently. A boyhood marked by loss: his younger brother’s drowning, his sight fading, the urgency in his fingers as they first find a piano. The film doesn’t frame these as simple origin points but as emotional echoes—still vibrating years later in the man he becomes. What Ray gets right—aside from the music, which is as essential and electric as you’d expect—is the complexity. There’s no saint-making here. Just a sharp, engrossing portrait of a man who lived large, sinned often, and still left something transcendent behind.

Real Genius stood out as one of the few Reagan-era tech comedies that actually felt smart. Not just clever—with its barrage of laser beams, liquid nitrogen pranks, and cafeteria subversion—but emotionally tuned, with a sweetness that sneaks up on you. Gabriel Jarret plays Mitch, a fifteen-year-old prodigy whisked from high school obscurity into a prestigious tech university, where he’s immediately folded into a high-level laser research project. The boy wonder is out of his depth until he meets his roommate, Chris Knight (Val Kilmer), a puckish senior with Einstein’s IQ and Groucho’s delivery. Chris used to be the golden boy, but now spends his days dodging deadlines, pulling practical jokes, and savoring the intellectual equivalent of senioritis. Yet underneath the sarcasm and bathrobes, he’s still a genius—and, more importantly, a good mentor. Kilmer’s performance, glinting with irreverence, more or less launched his career. Unbeknownst to them, their esteemed professor Hathaway (William Atherton, on-brand as a smug villain) is secretly funneling their research into a military project designed to vaporize targets from orbit. Once the students discover they’ve been duped, they stage a climactic act of retaliation so over-the-top it somehow feels earned, aided by lasers, popcorn, and an astonishing disregard for real-world physics. Sure, the characters lean heavily into their assigned types—the brooding introvert, the zany slacker, the dorm ghost who lives in the closet—but the film finds a rhythm between its one-liners and its conscience. It’s as much about resisting institutional rot as it is about blowing things up with science. The movie doesn’t entirely transcend the teen comedy formula, but it elevates it—with intelligence, kinetic energy, and the rare conviction that brilliance doesn’t have to come at the cost of joy.

Starts as a swaggering buddy comedy, swerves into UFO nonsense, and finishes with James Belushi strapped into discount bondage gear that’s more awkward than funny. Belushi plays Nick — a bargain-bin womanizer collecting an FBI paycheck. John Ritter is Bob: a mild insurance agent who just happens to look exactly like Pillbox, a dead agent tasked with delivering Earth’s survival payment — a single glass of water for visiting aliens willing to mop up humanity’s accidental ocean poisoning. Naturally, Nick drags Bob into the mess, promising to toughen him up while dodging Russians and rattling off bad advice about manhood. It might have worked as breezy nonsense, but it never finds the right groove. The jokes stumble, the fights limp along, and any flicker of screwball momentum gets buried in editing that always seems a step behind. Ritter tries to squeeze out a laugh wherever he can — there’s a bit where Belushi convinces him to use finger guns and shout “bang” at real attackers, which should be ridiculous fun but fizzles before it hits. The rest leans on Belushi barking about “real men” while Ritter plays the perpetual deer in headlights. By the time the UFOs appear and the restraints get wheeled in, whatever punchline this was chasing has already left the room. Earth gets saved, technically. The audience’s patience, less fortunate.

A coming-of-age story wrapped in intergenerational warfare, Real Women Have Curves is about knowing who you are and deciding whether that’s enough—especially when the people closest to you keep suggesting otherwise. America Ferrera, in her first film role, plays Ana Garcia, a sharp, college-bound teenager and first-generation Mexican-American navigating the tightrope between personal ambition and family obligation. Her mother (Lupe Ontiveros) runs the house like a one-woman bureaucracy and applies guilt the way others apply sunscreen—early, often, and in thick coats. Ana’s been offered a full scholarship to Columbia, but her mother would prefer she stay in East L.A. and help in the family-run garment factory. The tension doesn’t just come from class expectations or cultural differences, though there’s plenty of that. It’s also in the small cruelties—comments about Ana’s weight, jabs that sting harder because they come from someone who’s supposed to know better. That the film treats this conflict with empathy rather than melodrama is part of what makes it work. The dialogue is sharp without being scripted, and the characters feel rooted in real conversations, not just themes. Ana’s journey isn’t framed as a rebellion so much as an assertion. She isn’t running away; she’s stepping forward. The title isn’t just a nod to body positivity—it’s a quiet manifesto. And by the end, you understand why she had to claim it for herself.

Reality Bites wants to be the voice of a generation. What it ends up with is a mixtape: curated, well-cast, and emotionally sincere—but only occasionally profound. It flirts with disaffection and stares longingly at disillusionment, but mostly glides on the surface tension of its era. Winona Ryder plays Lelaina, a newly minted valedictorian launched into the real world with a gas card, a hand-me-down BMW, and no functioning roadmap. Her dream is to become a vérité-style documentarian, the kind who captures truth with shaky cameras and borrowed mics. Instead, she’s stuck producing for a condescending morning show host (John Mahoney), whose corporate cheerfulness makes her want to scream into the nearest camcorder. She gets fired, of course—fate doing what Lelaina is too polite to. Then there’s Michael (Ben Stiller), a clean-cut TV executive who crashes—literally—into her car and her life. He sees potential in her raw footage, a handheld chronicle of drifting Gen X roommates who chain-smoke indoors and argue about ethics while avoiding rent. He wants to help, maybe even commodify it, but Lelaina isn’t sure if that’s romantic or predatory. Hovering just offscreen, then suddenly in the frame, is Troy (Ethan Hawke), her sullen best friend and emotional saboteur—a Kurt Cobain with fewer guitars and more aphorisms. He’s a philosophy major who scoffs at ambition and plays in a band that seems allergic to actual gigs. Hawke gives him just enough bruised arrogance to make the character irritating and magnetic in equal measure. The film has moments—sharp exchanges, well-observed tensions, an undercurrent of quiet panic. Ryder, all twitchy nerves and half-finished thoughts, makes Lelaina feel like someone you knew once and maybe still follow on Instagram. But for all its cultural reach, Reality Bites doesn’t quite earn the generational banner it waves. It gestures at Big Ideas—late capitalism, identity, the end of certainty—but rarely gets its hands dirty. The angst is mostly aesthetic. Still, as a time capsule, it’s pristine: flannel shirts, nicotine-stained banter, coffee-shop nihilism. A film about people who want meaning but will settle for mood. And in that regard, it may have captured its moment better than it knew.

This remake wouldn’t exist without Christopher Reeve. Hitchcock’s Rear Window didn’t need an update, but as one of the most famous single-room thrillers ever made with a protagonist confined to a wheelchair, it gave Reeve a natural spotlight, as he’d been paralyzed in a horseback accident three years earlier. Thus, this wasn’t so much a reinterpretation of Hitchcock as it was a way to reframe Reeve. It starts with a near-infomercial tone, walking us through the aftermath of a fictional car crash and the grueling adaptation that follows. Reeve plays Jason Kemp, an architect adjusting to life as a quadriplegic, and for a while, the plot stays in that space—part recovery narrative, part medical brochure. Eventually, the story settles into more familiar territory. Kemp is alone, stuck in his apartment, and watching his neighbors. He suspects one of them is a murderer. The structure holds, more or less. The dialogue is trimmed down, the setting updated with late-’90s tech, and the sense of menace reduced to its most manageable pieces. But the chills don’t register. Where the original made paranoia feel like oxygen—so natural you didn’t notice until it was gone—this one delivers tension like a product: clear, labeled, and pre-digested. Still, Reeve gives it something the original never had. His performance is quietly forceful, never tipping into self-pity. He plays Kemp with gravity and a kind of watchful defiance. Even as the script softens the edges, he doesn’t. He stays sharp. And then comes the ending—that moment where the line between actor and character disappears. Kemp looks out his window, face lit by the glow of an early voice-command device, and talks about future breakthroughs in medical technology. It’s meant to inspire. But in context, it aches.

Wes Craven trades slashing for scheming in this tight, high-concept thriller that unfolds almost entirely at cruising altitude. Rachel McAdams plays Lisa Reisert, a sharp but weary hotel manager on a red-eye flight to Miami, heading home for her grandmother’s funeral. The man seated beside her—Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy, with icy charm and dead eyes)—seems like a polite flirt, maybe even a travel fling waiting to happen. They banter. They clink drinks. Then the seatbelt sign turns off, and the real turbulence starts. Jackson isn’t interested in small talk. He’s part of an assassination plot, and Lisa’s role—willing or not—is to change the room assignment of a government official staying at her hotel. Do it, or her father dies. That’s the deal, delivered with chilling calm over gin and tonic. The setup is simple, but Craven knows what he’s doing. He turns that cramped cabin into a pressure cooker, and McAdams carries the film with a mix of calculation and real panic. She’s not a scream queen; she’s a woman pushed to the edge who starts thinking three moves ahead. Murphy, meanwhile, weaponizes his bone structure—suave one moment, monstrous the next. Once the plane lands, the final stretch leans into genre mayhem, with chases, stabbings, and improvised weaponry in domestic spaces. It’s a bit of a tonal pivot—almost home-invasion by way of Hitchcock—but it mostly holds. The whole film runs lean, never overstays its welcome, and reminds you how much tension you can wring out of a two-seat conversation and a locked lavatory door. Not a game-changer, but a high-functioning thriller with smarts, stakes, and two leads who know exactly how to keep an audience locked in.

Reds is a sweeping, cerebral epic about John Reed—the American journalist who embedded himself in the Bolshevik Revolution and then tried, futilely, to export the spirit of it back home. It’s a rare biopic that refuses to sand down its subject: Reed is neither sainted nor dismantled, just studied—in all his brilliance and blinkered devotion. Beatty plays him with headlong intensity, the kind of charisma that stirs a crowd but often misses the people standing right beside him. Diane Keaton, as Louise Bryant, gives the film its emotional undercurrent. Sharp and restless, her performance resists the trap of playing second fiddle; she’s too busy asserting herself, professionally and personally. Their relationship, a long and tetchy entanglement of ideals and ego, becomes the film’s throughline—though it occasionally elbows aside the politics in ways that stretch the runtime more than deepen the themes. The supporting cast reads like a prestige roll call: Jack Nicholson’s Eugene O’Neill says more in silence than others do in monologue, while Maureen Stapleton’s Emma Goldman hurls each line like she’s etching it into stone. Intercut throughout are real-life interviews with aged contemporaries of Reed and Bryant—gravel-voiced, contradictory, and often bracingly candid. They don’t just lend historical weight—they fracture the mythos in just the right places. Reds doesn’t rush. At over three hours, it lingers—sometimes too long—but the ambition and intelligence never waver. It’s not the definitive word on Reed or revolution, but it gives space for contradiction, doubt, and reflection. For a film about radicalism, it’s surprisingly contemplative, less interested in raising fists than in understanding what made them clench.

Some road movies are really just walks—modest, meditative, done on foot. Redwood Highway is one of those. A quiet American walkabout, not particularly profound but well-observed, with just enough terrain—emotional and literal—to earn its miles. Shirley Knight plays Marie, a woman nudged into retirement-community purgatory by her well-meaning son (James LeGros) and quietly stewing about it. She doesn’t think she belongs there. She doesn’t think much of her granddaughter’s fiancé either—a rock drummer she openly deems a poor choice. After a particularly harsh voicemail from said granddaughter (Zena Gray), Marie decides to walk it off. Sixty miles, from southern Oregon to the coast, on foot, with a backpack and no real plan—except to show up at the wedding she was uninvited to, and maybe see the ocean for the first time in nearly half a century. It’s a redemptive arc in outline—a kind of belated coming-of-age—but the film doesn’t push too hard on the transformation. There’s no great epiphany, no speech at the end to tie it up with ribbon. Instead, the story ambles. Marie blisters, gets sunburned, takes detours. She meets a kindly widower named Pete (Tom Skerritt), who offers hiking tips and gentle companionship, but mostly she’s on her own. The film lets her be prickly, tired, uncertain. That feels honest. Visually, it’s unshowy. The Pacific Northwest isn’t dressed up with lens flares or moody filters—it’s just there: piney, misty, a little damp. The camera doesn’t romanticize the journey, and the script resists turning it into metaphor soup. It’s more like a diary entry than a parable. That might make it underwhelming for some, but it also spares the movie from condescension. It treats Marie with respect, and that’s more than you can say for a lot of films about older people rediscovering life. It’s not The Straight Story. It lacks the gravity, the ache. But it tries for something similar: the slow build of small choices, the dignity of motion, the stubborn belief that even a short journey is worth taking if it brings you a little closer to clarity.

This is the kind of movie that makes you want to invent a time machine just to go back and swat it out of someone’s hand before it got greenlit. Or better yet, become a fly on the wall during the first table read, to study how a room full of capable actors agreed to participate without staging a mass walkout. The catering must’ve been extraordinary. Relative Strangers was written and directed by Greg Glienna, the original mind behind Meet the Parents—not the glossy studio version, but the scrappier 1992 black comedy it was based on. This plays like a reversed, off-brand version of that premise. Instead of a man meeting his fiancée’s parents, here we have Richard (Ron Livingston), a 34-year-old psychiatrist who finds out he was adopted and decides to track down his biological parents just in time for his wedding. He finds them—and regrets it immediately. They turn out to be two aggressively obnoxious carnival types played by Danny DeVito and Kathy Bates, who attack every social setting like they’re trying to get banned from it. They’re not characters so much as noise generators, and there’s no real counterbalance to their presence. Richard looks exasperated and cornered in every scene, while his adoptive family and friends mostly stand around in silent mortification. There’s a dinner party charades sequence where they repeatedly shout Mother, Jugs & Speed at full volume. Later, the whole mess culminates with a trip to a Jerry Springer-style talk show, where Richard finally tries to throttle them on air. The film’s biggest problem is tone. It wants to be brash and heartfelt at the same time, and manages neither. A small, low-budget release with virtually no distribution—and for good reason. Unless you collect unwatchable curiosities, steer clear.

A must for Disney completists. For anyone else, the interest level drops sharply after the novelty wears off. The hook isn’t the title short—that’s just the closer—but the tour that gets us there. Robert Benchley, playing himself with faintly baffled good humor, arrives at Walt Disney Studios on orders from his wife to pitch a film adaptation of *The Reluctant Dragon*. Instead of heading straight to Walt, he drifts from department to department: music, writing, animation. The real value is voyeuristic—peeking behind the curtain to watch the factory at work. Edison’s old line about genius being one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration never feels more literal. The labor is constant, the headcount massive, the process oddly hypnotic. Benchley’s wanderings are padded with set pieces, some stranger than others. Clarence Nash (Donald Duck) and Florence Gill (Clara Cluck) perform a duet in full human form, looking both ridiculous and fascinating, like costumed animals stripped of their costumes but not their voices. In another corner, animators work on *Dumbo*, complete with a live elephant lumbering through the studio as reference material. These are the moments worth seeing—odd collisions of craft and absurdity that you don’t get from the finished cartoons. When we finally arrive at the namesake short, it’s pleasant but hardly top-shelf Disney. The gag is that the dragon would rather drink tea and eat cakes than do anything fierce, while the designated dragon-slayer turns out to be a Don Quixote type who couldn’t slay a sneeze. It’s whimsical enough, but after the behind-the-scenes curiosity of the tour, it plays like an intermission sketch.

A strange concoction: part apple-pie Americana, part eyebrow-raising social farce. The tone is pure Cheaper by the Dozen—wholesome, well-scrubbed, and coated in 1950s Technicolor syrup. But the plot, somehow, is about an unrepentant bigamist. Clifton Webb plays Horace Pennypacker, a well-to-do businessman at the turn of the 20th century with not one, but two full families—one nestled in Harrisburg, the other in Philadelphia. Neither knows the other exists. That’s the setup. The film opens with a parade of his nineteen children introducing themselves like they’re starring in a community operetta, and from there it only gets odder. Pennypacker’s double life hinges on his job’s convenient two-office arrangement, allowing him to shuttle between households under the guise of being perpetually engaged in serious matters. It unravels when he breaks protocol to attend his eldest daughter’s engagement party, only to be ambushed by the arrival of a son from his “other” family. Cue the kind of polite pandemonium only a 1950s studio comedy could manufacture. What’s most peculiar is how little judgment the film seems to pass. You keep waiting for a wink, a nudge—some sign that it’s in on its own outrageous premise—but it plays with the straight-faced tone of a wholesome crowd-pleaser. The source material, based on a successful stage play, likely had a sharper bite. Onscreen, it’s as if Springtime for Hitler were staged like a Sunday matinee for the PTA. The most radical thing about it is how breezily it treats bigamy—particularly considering that, in 1959, interracial marriage was still illegal in parts of the U.S. Even when the film falters under its own tonal confusion, it’s hard to look away. Not because it works, but because it so confidently assumes it does. A moral curio masquerading as family fluff—strange, off-putting, and anthropologically fascinating.

Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn (Charles Laughton) begins the film in mid-eulogy, rhapsodizing over his late wife with such reverence it feels liturgical. Minutes later, he learns of her sudden death. It’s emotional whiplash of the stylized kind—melancholic, theatrical, and unashamed of its sentiment. Laughton, never one to underplay, gives a performance that pulses with defiance and sorrow, capturing an artist sliding toward solitude without ever begging sympathy. Rembrandt’s career unravels after his brutally honest painting The Night Watch draws mockery instead of praise. Disillusioned, he retreats into poverty and deeper artistic conviction, stubbornly pursuing realism over flattery. His romance with Hendrickje (Elsa Lanchester) offers fleeting warmth, but the film is more interested in isolation than passion. Laughton speaks the florid dialogue like its scripture—sincere, grave, sometimes sly—and anchors scenes that might otherwise drift into decorative inertia. Visually, the film often strives for painterly elegance. Many of its strongest scenes are lit and composed to evoke the texture and intimacy of Dutch portraiture, particularly in moments of solitude or artistic focus. The 17th-century sets are handsomely mounted, and Laughton’s stillness gives certain shots the weight of a live tableau. But the visual ambition isn’t uniform—some stretches revert to standard studio formality, more decorative than expressive.

Integration doesn’t come easy in Remember the Titans, though the movie makes sure it arrives right on schedule. It’s 1971 in Alexandria, Virginia, and the local high school football team—previously all white—is suddenly a test case in court-mandated desegregation. The friction is immediate. Black and white players square off like oil and vinegar, and tempers don’t so much flare as smolder on contact. What turns tension into wildfire is the school board’s move to bench the town’s cherished coach, Bill Yoast (Will Patton), and install Herman Boone (Denzel Washington)—a hard-edged tactician who knows the job isn’t just about football, it’s about holding the whole thing together without catching flame. The bones are familiar—feel-good sports uplift with underdog pacing and a playbook full of teachable moments—but the racial undercurrent cuts deeper. Boone’s not just calling plays; he’s being watched, second-guessed, weighed against every prejudice still gripping the stands. Yoast stays on as assistant, walking a line between wounded pride and moral clarity. The players resist. Then they run drills. And somewhere between forced proximity and actual sweat, a team starts to form—grudgingly at first, then fiercely. Long before the town’s ready to see it, these kids have already decided what kind of teammates they’re going to be. It’s all told with the smooth inevitability of Disney dramatics—arcs that complete, speeches that swell, and games that turn on last-second plays. But the emotions hit more than they miss, the football looks convincing, and the point lands: racism didn’t just pollute politics or policy—it infected pep rallies, halftime chants, and the pecking order of a locker room. Washington, for his part, delivers exactly the kind of performance the role demands—tough, controlled, and just raw enough to carry the weight of the film on his back, one yard at a time.

Nicolas Cage as Dracula sounds like a casting prank too perfect to pass up. But Renfield, rather than going full-throttle into camp excess, plays things straighter than you’d expect—mildly deranged when it could’ve been gloriously unhinged. Cage delivers a self-aware, half-parodic take on the Count, drawing more from his own gallery of eccentric roles than from Lugosi. The fault isn’t his alone. The script gives him little to chew on, so he glides through the film with theatrical shrugs and just enough bite to remind you he’s trying. Nicholas Hoult anchors the story as Renfield, Dracula’s loyal insect-munching familiar, who’s recently begun questioning his place in a relationship that’s clearly toxic—even if one party sleeps in a coffin. His journey into self-actualization includes attending support groups, rediscovering moral purpose, and falling for a brash traffic cop played by Awkwafina, who drops into the plot like a taser. The action sequences are gory and breezy, peppered with cartoonish violence and punchlines that mostly land. But for a movie built on a killer premise, Renfield plays it safer than it should. There are flashes of energy—Awkwafina gets off some good lines, and Hoult sells the melancholy underneath the madness—but the movie seems unsure whether to double down on absurdity or stay palatable. It’s never dull, just frustratingly restrained. Entertaining, yes—but there’s a bolder version of this concept hiding in plain sight.

Pro football players go on strike. The team owners, led by a snarling Jack Warden, refuse to cave. Enter the misfits: a band of replacement players, drafted from obscurity and dumped onto a field under the direction of crusty legend Jimmy McGinty (Gene Hackman), who delivers his coaching philosophy like it’s scripture handed down from Vince Lombardi’s barstool. At the center is Shane Falco (Keanu Reeves), a washed-up college quarterback with barnacle scars and haunted eyes. He’s got the arm, the heart, and just enough damage to make him rootable. What follows is an ultra-predictable underdog tale, soundtracked wall-to-wall by jukebox hits like the studio feared silence more than fumbles. Every trope is dusted off: the slow-building camaraderie, the halftime speech, the clumsy love story between Falco and the team’s head cheerleader (Brooke Langton, fine but forgettable). None of it’s fresh—but it’s delivered with a wink, not a smirk. The film’s best assets are its supporting players: Orlando Jones, Rhys Ifans, Jon Favreau, and Faizon Love chew the scenery like they’ve got nothing to lose and know it. Reeves keeps it centered with that earnest cool only he can sell. Is it good? Not really. Is it watchable? Entirely. It’s not about surprise—it’s about comfort, timing, and the crowd-pleasing thrill of a Hail Mary that lands.

One of the few Disney features from its post-Walt, pre-Renaissance slump to carve out a particularly unique identity—mostly thanks to two mice with impeccable taste. The plot is functional: a kidnapped orphan named Penny slips a message into a bottle, which floats its way to the Rescue Aid Society, an international network of mice operating out of the United Nations. Enter Bernard and Miss Bianca, voiced by Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor, whose chemistry is so effortlessly urbane they could be mistaken for regulars at Sardi’s. Without them, this might have dissolved into the background like most of Disney’s ’70s catalogue. The rescue mission itself meanders more than it escalates—it’s a series of scenic detours disguised as a ticking clock—but the stops along the way are at least vivid. Penny’s captor, Madame Medusa, feels like Cruella de Vil’s backwoods cousin: crazy, feral eyes, prominent chin, and a convertible that corners like a weapon. Her henchmen include Mr. Snoops, who dresses like he got lost on his way to a resort buffet, and a pair of grinning crocodiles who handle the actual terrorizing. He bumbles; they bite. Her lair is a decaying riverboat blanketed in bayou fog and feels like it aspired to glamour before the mildew set in. Visually, it’s a study in contradictions. The scratchy Xerox-line animation, typical of the era, walks a fine line between stylized restraint and outright carelessness. Characters slide in and out of focus; some characters are smoothly drawn, others look scribbled. The film doesn’t sing so much as drift. Shelby Flint’s ballads enter like breath on glass—soft, halting, almost embarrassed to be heard. They play over long, slow montages: Penny alone in the swamp, the mice gliding through tunnels, the world moving just a bit too slowly. Nothing in the film hurries. The mood turns hushed and inward, like it’s been wrapped in cotton and set aside. It plays like a childhood memory you’re surprised to recognize—damp, detailed, a little eerie—but unmistakably yours.

A debut that detonated. Reservoir Dogs marked Quentin Tarantino’s arrival like a pipe bomb through the front door—loud, confident, and soaked in blood. The setup is simple: a jewel heist gone sideways, eight criminals hiding out in a warehouse, none of them using their real names. Mr. White. Mr. Pink. Mr. Blonde. Everyone’s got a code name, a bad temper, and a gun that’s probably going to go off. It’s a film that runs on tension and talk—sharp, profane, frequently hilarious talk. Tarantino’s script zigzags through time, dropping details like landmines, and the violence—when it comes—is abrupt and sickening. The infamous ear-cutting scene, set to “Stuck in the Middle With You,” is still one of the most unnerving things ever put on film, precisely because of how casual it is. Michael Madsen, all smirks and menace, turns sadism into choreography. Harvey Keitel brings a kind of grizzled empathy to Mr. White, and Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink is pure nervous energy. Lawrence Tierney, as the crew’s crusty boss, growls through every scene like a man made entirely of scabs. Even Tarantino, in a mid-sized role, feels like he’s auditioning for himself—jumpy, funny, and entirely in command. But as much as I admire it, I don’t love it. It’s too stripped-down, too grimy, too self-contained. What it lacks is the electric, referential absurdity that Tarantino would lean into later—the junk-drawer madness of Pulp Fiction, the cinematic vaudeville of Kill Bill. Still, this is where it all began, and there’s no mistaking its influence. Reservoir Dogs didn’t just launch a career—it built a template.

Empty-headed, sure—but Resident Evil has a pulse, and if you’re on its wavelength, it’ll raise yours too. It’s a guilty pleasure with a glossy finish, a video game adaptation that doesn’t just lift the premise—it replicates the sensation. The film moves like you’re playing it: doors open with menace, every corridor promises a boss fight, and the pacing kicks in right around the time your breath does. The setup is thin but efficient. In a sprawling underground lab operated by the Umbrella Corporation, a viral outbreak turns a facility full of researchers into flesh-hungry zombies. The facility’s AI—the Red Queen—seals everything off and neutralizes the staff to prevent contamination. A military clean-up crew is sent in, joined by Alice (Milla Jovovich), who wakes up with no memory and no clue that her day is about to involve monsters, machine guns, and mutant Dobermans. Visually, the film is polished like a steel countertop. Cold lighting, mirrored corridors, antiseptic white labs drenched in emergency red—it all looks less like a horror film and more like a haunted server farm. The cinematography has a synthetic beauty to it, and when things get bloody, they do so in perfect alignment with the production design. It’s not just stylish—it’s controlled, architectural. Every shot feels like it was placed there with a grid. There’s not much to the dialogue, and the characters are mostly uniforms with cheekbones, but the film’s momentum and mood carry it. What matters is the feeling it gives you: that itchy, edge-of-your-seat alertness you get when you’re playing a game on a level you don’t quite know how to survive. Resident Evil doesn’t aim high, but it strikes clean. Call it cinematic cardio: it doesn’t ask much—just that you keep up.

A parody that charges at the superhero genre like a knight with a cardboard lance—too self-aware to miss, too silly to matter, The Return of Captain Invincible is an Australian cult curio with Alan Arkin as a washed-up caped crusader and Christopher Lee as his old nemesis, now back with a “hypo-ray” and vague plans for world domination. Invincible, once a wartime hero who socked Nazis and waved at ticker-tape parades, is undone not by a supervillain, but by postwar paranoia: hounded into obscurity for wearing red, flying without a license, and committing crimes against modesty via external underwear. When we catch up with him, he’s decaying quietly in Sydney, nursing a drinking problem and dodging relevance. He’s yanked from his stupor when the government comes calling. What follows is a lurching mix of satire, slapstick, and original songs—some crooned, some shouted, few of them memorable. Arkin carries a tune in the way someone might carry a shopping bag with a hole in it. Lee, on the other hand, seems to enjoy every baritone syllable, singing like he’s reading a cursed libretto from a vampire opera. The production design is ragged but resourceful—half mad-scientist lab, half repurposed game show set. The songs don’t quite work as music, but as theatrical set pieces, they have a strange, loopy confidence. You’re never sure what genre you’re in, but the film doesn’t seem to mind. Arkin plays it like a man who misplaced the script but decided to keep going. He mutters, winces, blinks through plot points like they’re light drizzle. Lee, meanwhile, plants each line like he’s burying a sacred object. They’re not in the same movie, exactly, but they’re at least in compatible hallucinations. The film moves in a sideways shuffle—scenes looping, tone swerving, punchlines drifting off-course—but it keeps going with a kind of theatrical stubbornness. It remembers the spoof it’s making, even if it forgets the route. Like a parade that lost its map but kept marching anyway. It’s not graceful, and it’s rarely sharp, but for anyone drawn to scrappy cult comedies that hurl whatever they’ve got and don’t care what sticks, Captain Invincible makes an oddly satisfying mess.

Not the unbroken delight of A Shot in the Dark, but The Return of the Pink Panther still earns its laughs the old-fashioned way: pratfalls, double-takes, and an accent so deranged it’s practically a second performance. Peter Sellers slips back into Inspector Clouseau like he never left—still incompetent, still confident, still infuriating every man in a ten-foot radius. The plot is recycled wholesale from the 1963 original: the famous Pink Panther diamond has gone missing, and the bumbling inspector is once again summoned to solve a case he’s more likely to detonate. Sir Charles Litton is again the prime suspect, this time played by Christopher Plummer with a champagne smile and just enough detachment to sell the part without touching it. The heist itself plays like a cousin to Topkapi—acrobatic, sleek, with just enough high-wire nonsense to justify the franchise’s title jewel. But the setup isn’t the draw. It’s a clothesline for gags. Sellers mispronounces, disguises, pratfalls, interrogates potted plants, and single-handedly shortens Chief Inspector Dreyfuss’s lifespan (Herbert Lom, never better, unspooling one aneurysm at a time). The slapstick gets more room to breathe than in earlier entries, and Blake Edwards stretches every routine just past its limit—long enough that the repetition starts to fray, then lands anyway. It doesn’t have the elegance or slow-burn sophistication of the original Pink Panther. The style’s a little coarser, the gags more relentless, the setup less mysterious. But it’s a full-throttle return to form for the Sellers/Edwards partnership, and whatever finesse it trades, it more than repays in momentum. The running jokes may be overused—but they’re good ones. And when they hit, they hit hard. You laugh, often harder than you expect. Not quite a peak, but close enough to remind you how high this series can climb when Sellers is in the room, wrecking the furniture.

Among the glut of Reagan-era sex comedies, Revenge of the Nerds remains one of the most recognizable—probably because it doubles as a victory lap for anyone who’s ever been shoved into a locker. Lewis (Robert Carradine) and Gilbert (Anthony Edwards), two socially tone-deaf but sweet-natured friends, arrive at college with high hopes and functioning calculators, only to be evicted from their freshman dorms when the football team burns down their own frat house and commandeers the building. The popular kids scatter to cushier digs, while the dweebs are left to fend for themselves. With nowhere to go, the outcasts form their own fraternity—a legal loophole that eventually secures them housing and a seat at the Greek Council’s increasingly stacked table. It’s not a subtle film. The jocks are dumb, the nerds are clever, and the comedy operates somewhere between Animal House and a Saturday morning cartoon. Still, it’s funny. The characters are distinct, the gags consistent, and it builds to a genuinely rousing climax that plays like wish fulfillment for anyone who’s ever been mocked for knowing what a motherboard does. While this is firmly a lowbrow affair, it’s hard to deny the steady stream of gags and the appeal of its cast of underdog oddballs. But there’s a catch. One sequence involving hidden cameras in a sorority house and a later act of sexual deception is played for laughs. But viewed now, it’s unmistakably grotesque. The film brushes it off as harmless mischief; time hasn’t. Even so, the film’s appeal is easy to see: it’s scrappy, silly, and built on the enduring fantasy that one day, the smart guys will get the girl, win the house, and take down the bullies. For better or worse, Nerds helped write the rulebook for a whole genre of underdog comedies.

A sour sequel to what had been a fitfully decent comedy. This time, the Tri-Lambs head to Fort Lauderdale for a national fraternity conference, only to be met with familiar hostility, contrived hijinks, and reheated plot points from the first film. Whatever scrappy charm the original had is stripped down here to a hollow routine of sand, sun, and sexist gags. The script is photocopied and blurry at the edges, leaning on cheap laughs without even the vague underdog sincerity that gave the first film its following. Robert Carradine mugs his way through the lead as though trying to summon enthusiasm from muscle memory, while Anthony Edwards, wisely, bows out early. The misogyny remains intact, only now it’s paired with jokes that don’t work and characters that feel drained of personality. Barry Sobel’s cartoonish addition to the group grates more than he amuses, and even Curtis Armstrong’s reliably oddball Booger seems marooned by material too thin to riff on. The jokes—when they arrive—feel mailed in, and the pacing has the start-stop rhythm of a hangover. There are bikinis, bad synth music, and palm trees, but no real reason for any of it. The film coasts on inertia, hoping nostalgia or ambient goodwill will carry it past the finish line. It doesn’t. What began as a rowdy revenge fantasy has curdled into something that resembles punishment.

Revenge of the Pink Panther isn’t the worst of the franchise—that distinction belongs to the necromantic sequels that reanimated outtakes after Sellers’ death—but it’s the first one that feels like everyone involved was starting to eye the exits. This time, the emphasis shifts from Clouseau’s talent for physical destruction to a catalogue of half-baked disguises. Sellers commits, as always, but the gag structure is lazier than usual, and the rhythm has a noticeable limp. When the pratfalls do arrive, they tend to land with the energy of someone tossing a couch cushion. The plot sends Clouseau into hiding after an attempted hit, gives Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) another excuse to twitch and seethe, and throws in a few chase scenes across Hong Kong for variety’s sake. Cato turns up, does his usual pounce, and vanishes again like a wind-up toy with a weak spring. The story drifts from one half-formed setup to the next, like it’s waiting for something funnier to happen. Clouseau fakes his death and goes undercover, though “undercover” mostly involves bad accents and ill-fitting wigs. Plot points are introduced, forgotten, and occasionally tripped over again later. It’s less a mystery than a loosely organized excuse to dress Peter Sellers as a mafioso, a pirate, and what might have been a sofa. Herbert Lom’s Dreyfus shows up for another round of escalating lunacy, but even that routine feels subdued. The slapstick, when it does arrive, is sparse and oddly restrained—as if choreographed for a different movie. A few gags connect, mostly by inertia. But the overall effect is of a film unsure how much longer it can keep spinning the plate. The film isn’t unwatchable, just unusually quiet for something built on noise. It coasts where it should collide, drifts where it should detonate. Sellers, still game, moves through the proceedings like a man slipping on banana peels out of obligation. The result feels less like a comedy than a contract being honored—competently, halfheartedly, and with the lingering sense that everyone involved already missed the joke.

The American space program gets the mythmaking treatment in The Right Stuff, a sprawling, three-hour-plus tribute to test pilots, astronauts, and the fine line between courage and national theater. It begins in the desert, with Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) quietly preparing to do what no one has done before: break the sound barrier in an experimental aircraft that looks like it was built under extreme time pressure and questionable funding. Yeager doesn’t say much, but that’s part of the point—he’s a man who cracks the sky in a jet held together by rivets and gumption, then strolls away like he just got back from a coffee run. His scenes, grounded in the high-risk world of supersonic flight, give the film a low-boil intensity that eventually gives way to something flashier: the birth of the astronaut. As America begins to pivot from fast planes to orbital bragging rights, Yeager is gradually pushed out of the spotlight. In his place come the Mercury Seven, a collection of grinning overachievers selected as much for their public image as their technical aptitude. Ed Harris plays John Glenn as the polished golden boy. Dennis Quaid, Scott Glenn, Fred Ward, Lance Henriksen, Scott Paulin, and Charles Frank round out the rest of the roster, each given just enough screen time to sketch out a personality. If Yeager and his peers are stoic cowboys, these men are government-sponsored action figures—prepped, groomed, and paraded in front of a hungry press corps that seems more interested in wholesome anecdotes than orbital mechanics. Philip Kaufman doesn’t go out of his way to make the film historically precise—by all accounts, the real Mercury astronauts weren’t fans and nicknamed it Animal House in Space—but accuracy isn’t the point. It’s about mood, scale, and the steady transformation of flesh-and-blood pilots into Cold War mascots. The set design is painstaking, the flight sequences are adrenalized, and the film knows how to take its time without feeling bloated. Shepard is the quiet center of gravity, while the rest orbit around him in increasingly theatrical arcs. At three hours and change, it’s not a casual sit. But The Right Stuff earns its sprawl. It doesn’t just celebrate an era—it sketches the performance of heroism with enough clarity to let you see the wires.

You could count the number of effective PG-13 horror films on one hand—and you’d still have fingers to spare—but The Ring earns its place with icy precision. It’s not just the jolts that stay with you (and there are plenty), but the persistent unease, the chill that creeps in under your skin and settles there long after the screen has faded to black. Gore Verbinski’s remake of the 1998 Japanese film Ringu trades in both startling visuals and a brooding, fog-soaked atmosphere that makes the Pacific Northwest feel like the edge of the underworld. Naomi Watts plays Rachel Keller, a Seattle journalist whose teenage niece dies under grotesque and unexplainable circumstances. Her investigation leads to a grainy VHS tape—part arthouse freakout, part cursed object—that kills whoever watches it exactly seven days later. How polite of the supernatural to observe calendar norms. Once the tape finishes, a phone rings. A voice whispers: “Seven days.” That’s it. No receipts. No return policy. Just a ticking clock and your imagination left to marinate in dread. Rachel, being professionally inquisitive and just reckless enough, enlists her ex-boyfriend (Martin Henderson) to help decode the tape’s strange imagery—burning trees, falling ladders, a faceless girl in a mirror—each clue pointing toward a deeper horror buried in rural Washington. The investigation plays out like a noir-laced scavenger hunt with Rachel experiencing increasingly surreal visions, most involving a pallid girl with a mop of wet black hair covering her face. Her name is Samara. You won’t forget her. Watts delivers a strong, emotionally calibrated performance that grounds the film even when it flirts with excess. The mystery pulls us in, the terror yanks us back. If there’s a weakness, it’s in the ending: eager to tie things up while somehow leaving too many threads dangling. Still, that’s forgivable in a horror film this elegantly crafted—one that trades gore for mood and earns nearly every shiver.

Yes, it’s offensive. That part’s not in dispute. But The Ringer is also far more good-natured than you’d expect for a movie built on such a toxic premise. I laughed a few times—loudly, even. Just not often enough to justify the whole endeavor. Johnny Knoxville stars as a down-on-his-luck office worker who fakes a developmental disability in order to rig the Special Olympics. That’s the setup. The punchline, supposedly, is that he learns a lesson. Knoxville, to his credit, commits to the role with a kind of reckless sincerity—you could almost say he was born for it, given that his entire screen persona has always teetered between shameless and vaguely unwell. The humor runs a wide spectrum—from cheap gags to moments that land almost in spite of themselves. Some scenes are genuinely funny. Others are built on the kind of groan-worthy logic that only makes sense if you’re 14 and watching it on cable at 1 a.m. The film seems unsure whether it wants to be a subversive satire, a slapstick romp, or a redemption story, and instead settles for brushing up against all three without sticking to any. It’s also relentlessly predictable. Every beat in the story arrives exactly when you expect it. The redemption arc is pre-loaded. The friendships form on cue. By the third act, even the jokes feel like they’re showing up out of obligation. Still, it’s not cruel. That’s probably its most surprising trait. Despite the premise, the supporting characters—many of whom are played by actual Special Olympics athletes—are treated with more respect than you might fear. The film doesn’t punch down so much as misfire in every direction. The Ringer isn’t sharp enough to be satire, funny enough for farce, or dark enough to be subversive. But it’s also not as mean as it sounds. It aims for something vaguely redemptive and, depending on your tolerance for bad taste and soft punchlines, it occasionally gets there.

Once banned in multiple countries and hailed as gritty in its day, Riot in Cell Block 11 now plays more like a sobering procedural than a powder keg. But if its shocks have dulled, its urgency hasn’t. Shot on location at Folsom Prison with real inmates as extras, the film is both a lean, tense thriller and a rare example of 1950s cinema giving voice—if not sympathy—to the incarcerated. The plot is simple but effective: a group of hardened prisoners seize control of a cell block and take guards hostage in an effort to demand better treatment. They don’t want out—they want dignity. More rehabilitative programs, less brutality, actual parole hearings. It’s a bold idea for a post-war B-movie, and Don Siegel doesn’t flinch. The film’s moral center is the warden (Emile Meyer), a man who actually listens. He understands the inmates’ grievances—agrees with them, even—but he’s caught in the gears of a state system that favors punishment over progress. “I only run the place,” he says grimly, when the governor’s office sends in the cavalry. There’s a statistic casually dropped—65% of inmates return to prison after release—and it hits harder than any of the film’s bursts of violence. It’s not a throwaway fact; it’s an indictment. “Then I’m not doing my job,” the warden says, more quietly than he needs to. That might be the film’s most honest line. Neville Brand, a real-life ex-con turned actor, delivers a performance that feels stripped of theatricality—authentic, direct, even dangerous. And Siegel, years before Dirty Harry, directs with crisp efficiency, never letting sentimentality or sermonizing get in the way of the story’s steady boil. It’s a prison film that asks you to look through the bars—then keeps your eyes there, long after the final shot.

Tom Cruise explodes through the front door in socks and Ray-Bans, here in his star making turn. He plays Joel Goodson, a college-bound teen from a pristine Chicago suburb, left alone for a week while his upwardly mobile parents take a vacation—though not before reminding him, with menacing cheer, how much they “trust” him. It’s less encouragement than a threat. What starts as mild suburban rebellion—joyriding in his father’s Porsche, lip-syncing Bob Seger in his underwear—tilts into outright disaster after Joel, nudged by his gleefully unbothered friend Miles (Curtis Armstrong), calls an escort. Lana (Rebecca De Mornay) appears—calm, alluring, and unreadable—and Joel’s carefully engineered future unravels by the hour. The Porsche takes a swim in Lake Michigan. The house turns into a pleasure palace. His Princeton recruiter arrives to find a bordello in full swing. It’s a teenage fable of Reagan-era values disguised as a farce: fast cars, fast money, and no permanent consequences, as long as you learn the right lesson by morning. What makes it tick isn’t just Brickman’s cool, precise direction or the moody synth waves of Tangerine Dream—it’s Cruise, channeling the sweaty anxiety of a kid who knows the deck is stacked but tries to win anyway. His performance is less icon-making than oddly vulnerable. Risky Business doesn’t pretend to be wholesome, but it’s smart enough to sell transgression with polish. And when Joel finally shatters the crystal egg, it’s not just an accident—it’s a business opportunity waiting to be monetized.

A drab little thriller that wants to feel exotic and grim but mostly feels like an undercooked episode of Miami Vice that someone left to bloat into a feature. Cole Hauser is Detective Boyd, a glum cop with a personal tragedy stapled to him for dramatic weight—though the film keeps forgetting why we’re supposed to care. He broods through therapy, snaps at partners, and stalks crime scenes with all the charisma of a half-charged flashlight. The hook is a string of ritual murders in Clinton, Mississippi—each victim dispatched according to the gruesome dictates of an obscure African tribe’s sacrificial rite. To decode this, Boyd enlists an anthropology professor (Morgan Freeman, doing dignified exposition duty and nothing more) who lectures about ancient customs, frowns at local law enforcement’s cluelessness, and retreats before the next dismemberment drops. It could have been nasty fun, but the menace keeps dissolving in a swamp of boilerplate cop gloom. The murders are ugly, sure, but the script undercuts any tension by dragging us back to Boyd’s soggy domestic grief. Instead of tension, you get repetition: a victim, a lecture, a cop meltdown—repeat until the credits, which arrive less like a payoff than a mercy. Plenty of bad thrillers flame out with style—The Ritual Killer doesn’t even try. It drifts from setup to shrug, politely asking you to confuse portentous mumbling with depth.

Perfectly fine as far as disposable wilderness thrillers go, though anyone hoping for the sweaty tension of the 1994 version—Kevin Bacon menacing strangers while Meryl Streep navigates vicious rapids in sensible clothes—might want to dial down expectations. This installment is part remake, part off-brand spin-off, mostly an excuse to watch people panic on rafts for ninety minutes. Five friends head into the Idaho backcountry for a whitewater adventure, ostensibly to catch up and shake off old grudges. Naturally, it turns out one of them is wanted for murder—because nothing says “memorable reunion” like drifting down a river with someone who might kill you for asking too many questions. Once the truth bubbles up, the trust evaporates, the rapids get nastier, and everyone spends a lot more time underwater than planned. The story is pure pulp, but played straight enough to stop short of real camp. It checks every box: betrayals at inconvenient bends in the river, alliances breaking with every jolt of the current, and enough shrieking to make you glad you’re not sharing the raft. What keeps it watchable are the river scenes themselves—snappy, well-edited bursts of foam and boulders that make the human villain look tame by comparison. The cast does what it can, though nobody here has quite the fangs to match Bacon’s old-school smirk. It won’t stick with you for long, but as a breezy survival ride with solid stunt work and enough backstabbing to fill the dead spots, it gets the job done. If nothing else, it should renew your appreciation for dry land and for catching up with old friends somewhere that doesn’t require a life vest.