Film Buff Musings

Remaking a film as cherished as Billy Wilder’s Sabrina might sound like hubris, but this 1995 version mostly sidesteps disaster by doing the one smart thing a remake can do: it doesn’t screw around with the original’s skeleton. Sydney Pollack and company preserve the core structure—chauffeur’s daughter, glass tower magnates, mistaken affections, romantic rearrangement—and let the polish do the rest. The result isn’t inspired, exactly, but it’s handsome and functional, like a high-end reproduction of a designer lamp. Julia Ormond takes over for Audrey Hepburn and acquits herself well. She’s warm, luminous, and holds the screen without resorting to imitation. Greg Kinnear, as David, the caddish younger Larrabee, brings just enough charm to suggest why Sabrina might have once adored him, but not quite enough to make you believe she still does. That’s where things get tricky. Because then there’s Harrison Ford. And here I brace myself. He’s a pleasure to watch, as always—but as Linus Larrabee, he’s slightly miscast. Too handsome. Too cool. Too Harrison Ford. The original idea is that Sabrina falls for the wrong brother—David, the shiny object—and only later realizes the gruff, emotionally unavailable Linus is the one who’s actually worth loving. But here, David looks like a mid-tier game show host, while Linus radiates classic movie star magnetism right from the get go. The supposed romantic tension collapses under simple visual logic: who in their right mind wouldn’t choose Ford? Still, despite its softened edges and lowered stakes, Sabrina moves well and looks good. It’s paced like a proper adult romance, with sweeping locales, string-heavy scoring, and tasteful dialogue that never strains for cleverness. It doesn’t recapture the alchemy of Wilder’s version, but it doesn’t try to sabotage it either. That’s not nothing. This remake knows better than to tinker too much—it simply reframes the picture in a glossier, 1990s light.

Seven friends graduate from Georgetown and promptly faceplant into adulthood—jobs, bills, bad romances, worse decisions. Welcome to St. Elmo’s Fire, Joel Schumacher’s glossy portrait of post-collegiate drift, where the only thing thicker than the hair is the denial. The film doesn’t ask you to like these characters so much as tolerate their growing pains. They’re self-absorbed, confused, and frequently insufferable—but they’re also 22 and overeducated, which in the mid-’80s was practically a license to spiral. There’s something fitting about how tangled their lives are. Romantic triangles bleed into squares, and everyone’s in love with someone they shouldn’t be. Rob Lowe plays the sax-blowing bad boy who still thinks frat parties are a career path. Demi Moore burns through money and mascara like both are infinite. Emilio Estevez stalks a woman he once shook hands with and calls it romantic. And Andrew McCarthy broods in a trench coat, delivering wounded monologues like he’s auditioning for a more emotionally literate film. But beneath the melodrama and aspirational sweaters, there’s something oddly honest about their flailing. These are not yet fully-formed people, and the film, to its credit, doesn’t pretend they are. The script gives them just enough wit to suggest they might grow up someday, but not so much that they already have. It’s about the in-between—that purgatory between keg stands and 401(k)s—where nothing quite works yet, and everyone’s secretly terrified it never will. The film isn’t whimsical, and it certainly isn’t comforting. But it has its moments of clarity, and more than a few laughs. And while these overprivileged young adults might not earn your sympathy, there’s something universal in their stumbles. You don’t walk away believing they’ve figured anything out. But maybe, just maybe, they’re starting to.

Oscar Wilde's Salome was banned in Britain upon publication, but in Ken Russell’s hands, it’s reborn as a full-throated hallucination—gaudy, intense, and somehow absolutely entrancing. This is Russell working at near-peak clarity of chaos: theatrical to the marrow, yet calibrated with such visual bravado and tonal conviction that what should be ridiculous becomes, instead, riveting. Framed as a secret brothel performance attended by Wilde himself (Nickolas Grace), the film plunges headfirst into the play-within-the-film without a breath of restraint. The dialogue remains largely intact from Wilde’s original, but Russell stages it with such sensory overload—candles, velvet, dissonant flutes—you stop noticing it’s a play at all. It simply consumes the screen. I was glued. Salome (Imogen Millais-Scott), the teenage stepdaughter of King Herod (Stratford Johns), becomes dangerously fixated on John the Baptist—here Jokanaan—who rebukes her with a prophet’s fury. Her desire curdles into obsession. Herod, meanwhile, leers and lunges at anything that moves, male or female, as the entire cast seems to pivot on one hormonal axis. Russell renders it all with a straight face, which only heightens the surrealism. It’s lurid and theatrical, yes—but it also dares you to take it seriously. And somehow, I did. The production design is delirious: ornate, claustrophobic, and unmistakably Russell. Every surface glistens, every line is delivered like prophecy, and every frame feels purpose-built to make the moralists squirm. There’s homoeroticism, incest, hedonism, sacrilege, and not a whiff of apology. But it’s all so feverishly rendered, I found myself swept along with it—not amused or titillated so much as mesmerized. It isn’t just provocative. It’s hypnotic. Not for the cautious, Salome’s Last Dance is a dazzling sideshow that demands a willing viewer. You either meet it on its operatic wavelength or stand baffled in the lobby. But for anyone prepared to surrender to it, there’s something intoxicating here—something grotesque, beautiful, and strangely sublime.

Salvador starts like a screwball detour—two guys heading south for quick cash and adventure—and ends with their boots in the mud and bullets flying past their heads. It’s a war film, but not the kind with marching orders or swelling strings. James Woods plays Richard Boyle, a broke, burned-out photojournalist who figures civil war might make for marketable carnage. He ropes in his out-of-work DJ buddy Doctor Rock (Jim Belushi), who packs like it’s spring break and shows up like he’s still half-expecting groupies. They cross into El Salvador thinking they’re chasing a payday, and pretty quickly find themselves stepping over bodies and bribing their way out of being shot. Oliver Stone directs with no interest in smoothing the edges. The politics aren’t whispered—they’re baked into the frame, blunt and angry. The U.S. role in the conflict isn’t debated; it’s just there, looming like a smirk behind the action. But the focus stays on Boyle, a man who confuses tenacity for courage and thinks being loud counts as a plan. Woods is perfectly wired for this—nervy, relentless, always seconds from talking himself into (or out of) disaster. He plays Boyle as a survivor with press credentials, a man too proud to leave and too wired to stay still. Belushi plays backup, more comic accent than character, but the two have a junkyard rhythm that mostly works. The film doesn’t pretend there’s a right side—just a lot of guns, bad choices, and photo ops soaked in someone else’s blood. It keeps moving, because stopping would mean having to process what it’s showing. And Boyle, like the film, would rather keep going.

Call it a family affair. Two generations, two love stories, and not quite enough intrigue to carry either. Dustin Hoffman and Sissy Spacek play maybe-lovers. Their real-life children—Jake Hoffman and Schuyler Fisk—play the titular Sam and Kate. It’s not a stunt, exactly. But it is the hook. Sam returns to his small hometown to care for his father, Bill (Hoffman), whose health is declining. Kate still lives nearby, quietly tending to her mother, Tina (Spacek), who’s slipping into compulsive hoarding. He meets Kate at a bookstore and tries to flirt. She isn’t interested. But then they spot each other at church, her car’s dead, and he offers a ride. It’s a slow, tentative start—not just between Sam and Kate, but also between Bill and Tina, who share a quiet ease that reads like memory. The setup is promising. The performances are low-key, unaffected, emotionally sharp. There’s real warmth in how these characters orbit each other—some of it familial, some invented. The tone suggests depth. But the story doesn’t build—it drifts. Scenes play out like pages from a diary: quiet, personal, but never quite accumulating into something. You wait for shape; instead, you get softness. A subplot involving Tina’s hoarding is taken seriously, but not rendered convincingly. Spacek gives a believable performance—frazzled, private, gently defensive—but the house itself never quite sells it. A little clutter, a few boxes. It doesn’t look like someone who’s drowning in things, just someone who hasn’t tidied up. And then come the emotional eruptions. The cringe arrives dressed for drama. A few blowups hit with all the subtlety of a matinee meltdown—characters scolding each other for things they were clearly about to explain, or striking moral poses that make no sense given how they’ve behaved up to that point. It doesn’t unfold—it erupts, like the script set an egg timer for tension and waited for it to go off. It’s not without feeling. The warmth between them gives the film a pulse, but the plot keeps it stuck in neutral. Moments pass, then vanish. You’re left with a movie that looks at love and aging with tenderness, but not quite enough insight.

Two people who rarely have anything interesting to say—but at least they look good saying it. The Sandpiper pairs Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in a film that feels more like an extended coastal sigh than a romantic drama. The dialogue is stodgy, the script inert, and yet the thing moves, carried almost entirely by its mood and scenery. Taylor plays a free-spirited single mother. Burton is an Episcopalian minister. They meet. They clash. They fall into bed. The moral tension is supposed to simmer. Instead, it barely simmers tea. But none of that seems to matter when Taylor and Burton are onscreen—whatever the material, they radiate a kind of glamorous exhaustion that’s hard to look away from. The real star is the coastline. Sweeping shots of Big Sur come at regular intervals, as if the film knows the script won’t carry it. The color cinematography is pristine—sunlight refracting through sea mist, waves crashing against cliffs, all of it polished to a warm, cinematic sheen. You get the same effect watching a slideshow of the Pacific set to a Johnny Mandel jazz track—which, in fairness, is also pretty much this film’s vibe. It’s a very specific kind of mood piece. Not quite romantic, not especially dramatic. Just languid. You can feel it trying to say something profound about love, freedom, and restraint, but whatever it’s reaching for tends to slip through its fingers. The film isn’t unwatchable. It just never really sharpens into anything more than an expensive melancholy.

Tim Allen, still buzzing with sitcom energy, plays Scott Calvin—a divorced, short-tempered toy executive who, on Christmas Eve, accidentally kills Santa Claus. Not in a sinister way, of course; the old man slips off Calvin’s roof, leaving behind a red suit and an implied clause (fine print on a business card) that binds the wearer to the job. Calvin, urged by his wide-eyed son Charlie, puts on the coat. The reindeer know the route. The sleigh flies. And before he knows it, he’s at the North Pole being fitted for the long haul: he is the new Santa, and apparently there’s no resignation policy. The premise is both grim and oddly bureaucratic—a Christmas myth reimagined as a magical corporate takeover. What saves the movie is Allen, whose smirking skepticism slowly gives way to reluctant wonder. His transition from cynical executive to jolly old man isn’t subtle (there’s a whole montage of weight gain and beard growth), but it’s oddly satisfying. The movie treats the transformation like a body-horror comedy softened by cocoa and fairy lights. Around him, the cast plays it straight: Eric Lloyd is likable as his son, and Judge Reinhold leans into his role as the overly analytical stepdad who thinks Santa is a symptom of delusion. David Krumholtz, playing a deadpan elf administrator, is a quiet highlight. The Santa Clause might not belong in the top tier of Christmas classics, but it’s a sturdy mid-shelf entry—strange, clever, and just sentimental enough to pass inspection.

The first Santa Clause wasn’t exactly sharp, but it had a workable premise: a reluctant Tim Allen, conscripted into yuletide servitude, clashing with a North Pole he neither understands nor particularly wants. That tension gave it shape. By the sequel, Scott Calvin has gone native. He’s comfortable in the suit now, and comfort, as it turns out, is the death of comedy. This time around, the writers conjure up a new legal technicality—the “Mrs. Clause”—which demands that Santa find a wife or lose the gig. Scott heads back to the suburbs to woo a school principal (Elizabeth Mitchell), while his robotic stand-in at the North Pole misinterprets “naughty and nice” and begins running the place like a toy-based junta. There’s potential in the idea of a dictatorial Santa, but the film does nothing with it. The tone stays sweet, the jokes stay safe, and the plot chugs along with manufactured urgency. The original film had some bite, however mild. This one gums its way through a checklist. Allen, once a cynic dragged into Christmas against his will, now just plays the part with rote enthusiasm. Mitchell does what she can, but the romantic subplot is airless, and the comedic beats rarely land. The production has seasonal gloss and a surplus of holiday decor, but little else. What started as a decent high-concept lark has become a corporate obligation. It plays like background noise for wrapping presents.

The title is the joke—and the movie never gets past it. Santa Jaws presents a killer shark adorned in holiday trimmings, armed with powers acquired by eating Christmas decorations. A Santa hat flaps from its dorsal fin. Its eyes glow red. At one point, it weaponizes ornaments. It’s meant to be ridiculous, and it is—but only conceptually. Watching it is another matter entirely. The plot involves a teenage comic book artist who accidentally conjures the creature into existence. What follows should be gleeful absurdity—shark attacks spliced with tinsel, sleigh bells, and wrapping paper. Instead, the film trudges through slack scenes, wooden dialogue, and a curious lack of anything resembling momentum. There’s no escalation, no rhythm—just cut-rate carnage and filler stitched together like holiday leftovers reheated past their expiration. The cast plays it straight, which might have worked if the script had sharper timing or a single clever line. The effects are exactly what you’d expect from a Syfy original, but that’s not the issue. The real failure is in tone. It doesn’t lean into horror, comedy, or camp—it just stalls, hoping the premise will carry the weight. Santa Jaws wants a spot on the novelty shelf next to Sharknado or Jack Frost, but it never earns it. It isn’t outrageous enough to be memorable or self-aware enough to be funny. It’s a Christmas creature feature that forgets to be either festive or fun.

By day, Tony Manero stocks shelves at a Brooklyn hardware store. By night, he’s a demigod in platform shoes. Saturday Night Fever is often remembered as a disco fantasia, but it’s far more jagged than its mirror-ball reputation suggests. The soundtrack may shimmer, but the film is about disillusionment, rage, and the fleeting transcendence of the dance floor. John Travolta, in a performance he’s never quite equaled, plays Tony as a tangle of swagger and insecurity. He struts through the streets with rehearsed bravado, but at home he’s treated like an afterthought, and in conversation, he stumbles. The club is the one place where his body speaks with conviction. That duality—between who he is and who he tries to be—gives the film its soul. This isn’t a story about chasing dreams. It’s about someone barely hanging on to the illusion that he has any. His treatment of women, particularly Annette (Donna Pescow), is casually cruel. He drops her—both as a romantic partner and dance collaborator—when someone more polished (Karen Gorney) appears at a ballet studio. But even that pairing is hollow, built more on fantasy than connection. The film is vulgar, riveting, and—despite how enshrined it is in late-’70s pop culture—still hits a nerve. And yes, the Bee Gees soundtrack is impeccable.

If Friday the 13th is unlucky, Saturday the 14th is worse—or so hints The Book of Evil, an ancient tome discovered in the basement of a spooky old house just inherited by the Hyatt family. When young Billy cracks it open, he accidentally unleashes a parade of budget-conscious monsters: swamp things, mummies, bats, gill-men, and various other rubber-faced creepers that proceed to haunt the house with increasing flair. Oddly, most of this happens without the parents noticing. Despite its title, this isn’t a slasher parody. It’s a cheap, silly homage to classic creature features—less Jason and more Creature from the Black Lagoon, filtered through Saturday morning cartoon logic. The jokes are more goofy than sharp, but often land with a kind of endearing absurdity. A swamp monster appears in the bathtub. The television cuts to The Twilight Zone. An exterminator arrives to deal with the infestation, even though the real threat comes from a pair of vampires (Jeffrey Tambor and Paula Prentiss) posing as would-be buyers, trying to get their hands on the book. Meanwhile, a stuffy Van Helsing-type—played by Severn Darden—turns up to stop the madness but with mixed results. The production is rough, the effects are cheap, and the pacing sometimes fumbles—but there’s a weird, specific charm to it. Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss as the oblivious parents sell the ridiculousness with straight faces, and the film’s affection for the genre is hard to miss. It’s not a spoof for everyone, but for monster movie enthusiasts with a tolerance for nonsense, it’s a short, strange ride worth remembering.

A satire with teeth—even if it ends up gumming its way to the finish. Saved! starts strong, skewering evangelical teen culture with the kind of precision that only comes from firsthand exposure. This isn’t a broad parody—it’s a pointed, painfully accurate takedown of a subculture that turns piety into performance and repression into sport. Someone on the writing team clearly survived a purity retreat and took notes. Jena Malone plays Mary Cummings, a Christian high schooler whose boyfriend comes out to her with a splashy baptismal flourish—he’s gay, he’s crying, and she’s convinced Jesus wants her to fix it. Her fix involves sex. It doesn’t work. He’s shipped off to a gay conversion center so hands-off it practically doubles as a hookup spot. Back at school, Mary’s saintly image begins to crack. Her best friend Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore, doing weaponized cheerfulness with alarming conviction) turns on her the moment she shows signs of independent thought. Her brother (Macaulay Culkin), wheelchair-bound and atheist, watches from the sidelines while crushing on the school’s only Jewish student (Eva Amurri). A misfit alliance forms, and the satire kicks in with full denim-skirted force. The first two acts hit the spot—smart, scathing, and weirdly sweet. But by the home stretch, the bite gives way to reassurance. The satire dulls, the edges round off, and what began as a sharp comedy of moral hysteria starts reshaping itself into something softer. Less bite, more balm. It doesn’t undo what came before, but it does take the sting out. Still, Saved! hits from inside the tent—the jokes land because they’ve lived there. The details ring true, the humor cuts just enough, and the characters never feel like props for the punchlines. If you’ve lived this world, or even brushed against it, the film doesn’t just play—it resonates.

When the U.S. Army learns that three of the four Ryan brothers have been killed in action, it makes a decision: send the fourth one home. Not for strategy—for decency. No mother should have to open four telegrams and bury four sons. The order is passed down: locate Private James Ryan (Matt Damon), last seen somewhere in Normandy, and get him out before fate finishes the set. Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) is assigned the job. He doesn’t question it—at least not aloud. He assembles a team and heads into France. Eight men sent to retrieve one. Whether that arithmetic adds up is never really answered—it just hangs there, growing heavier with each mile. The Omaha Beach landing is still staggering. Noise, sand, blood—then less of each, then more again. Metal sprays. Men yell but can’t hear themselves. Helmets float, then sink. Limbs vanish before names are even mentioned. It isn’t a battle so much as a malfunction. The mission is survival, nothing grander. And when it ends, it doesn’t conclude—it runs out of momentum. The camera holds on what’s left. What’s twitching. What still knows it’s alive. What follows is a slow march through hostile terrain and moral static. The men debate the mission’s logic. Some call it a waste, others something close to noble. But none of them seem sure where duty stops and futility begins. Miller stays focused. Hanks plays him like a man carrying more than orders—upright, quiet, too composed to be unaffected. There are familiar war movie markers—last stands, letters home, whispered goodbyes—but Spielberg grounds them. The sentimentality isn’t dumped on; it’s earned. The violence isn’t stylized; it’s blunt. When people die, it’s not with grandeur—it’s with panic, mess, and sudden silence. Saving Private Ryan isn’t just about sacrifice—it’s about how strange, arbitrary, and human those sacrifices can be. The mission is simple. The toll isn’t. And what sticks with you isn’t the scale, but the unease that never quite goes quiet.

A bathroom. Two men. One corpse. That’s all Saw really needs. The setup is deceptively bare: a photographer (Leigh Whannell) wakes up in a grimy, tile-walled chamber, his ankle chained to a rusted pipe. Across the room, a doctor (Cary Elwes) is equally trapped. Between them lies a dead man, blood pooling, gun in hand, face down. A tape recorder is found. Press play. A gravel-throated voice, equal parts menace and theater, informs the doctor that he must kill the photographer by 6 p.m. or his wife and daughter will be executed. What unfolds is part locked-room mystery, part sadistic parable. The two captives—suspicious of each other, increasingly desperate—begin parsing through clues left behind by their unseen tormentor. They’re in the hands of the Jigsaw Killer, a moralist psychopath with a fondness for elaborate traps and a twisted idea of redemption through suffering. The narrative expands outward through flashbacks, including one from Amanda (Shawnee Smith), the only known survivor of Jigsaw’s handiwork—a woman who escaped a reverse bear trap by cutting into another person. The film’s true aim is to disgust, and on that front it delivers—saws through flesh, jaws ripped open, a horror show of squirm-inducing contraptions. But beyond the gore lies a faint but persistent curiosity: who is Jigsaw? Why these two men? What connects them? The answers are doled out in pieces, culminating in a reveal that’s both genuinely surprising and mechanically satisfying. Saw is grim, mean, and absolutely relentless. But in its bleak little chamber, it finds a kind of low-budget ingenuity. You don’t have to enjoy it. You just have to admit it works.

The trap has grown. No longer confined to a single grime-caked bathroom, Saw II widens its scope to a dilapidated house filled with hidden rooms, poisoned air, and enough death mechanisms to stock a torture museum. A group of strangers awakens, scattered and confused, each with a vague sense that they don’t belong—but they do. A tape recorder behind a wall, predictably hidden but helpfully intact, delivers the voice of the Jigsaw Killer once again, rasping out his terms: the key to escape lies in discovering what connects them all. Cooperation is suggested. Chaos ensues. Instead of banding together, the trapped participants bicker, split off, and fall prey—often spectacularly—to Jigsaw’s signature devices: incinerators disguised as safes, needle pits, and devices designed to punish precisely the flaw each victim can’t let go of. It’s gruesome but also grimly resourceful. Meanwhile, Detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg) believes he’s finally caught the man behind it all—Tobin Bell’s calculating, cancer-ridden philosopher of suffering. But even when strapped to a chair and surrounded by cops, Jigsaw remains oddly calm. That’s because Matthews’s son (Erik Knudsen) is one of the house’s unwilling players. The clock ticks. The game continues. As with the first film, Saw II thrives on its puzzle-box structure and mean streak, anchored this time by Jigsaw’s increasingly smug life lessons. He lectures about valuing existence, about awakening one’s primal instincts, about survival through suffering. It’s nonsense, but persuasive nonsense—especially when narrated over razor wire. The film is still filthy, morally dubious, and engineered for maximum discomfort. But it’s also a cleverly plotted sequel that doesn’t just rehash the original—it escalates it.

By its third installment, the Saw series isn’t just desensitizing its audience—it’s actively testing their threshold. The grim inventiveness remains intact, but here it veers into grotesque overload. Blood is no longer enough. So the film doubles down with decaying flesh, bone-cracking devices, and a live brain surgery sequence that feels less shocking than exhausting. It’s horror by attrition. To its credit, Saw III doesn’t simply repackage the escape-room mechanics of its predecessors. Instead, Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), now bedridden and rapidly declining from brain cancer, orchestrates a dual-layered game. One track follows Jeff (Angus Macfadyen), a grieving father given the chance to confront—and potentially save—those connected to the lenient sentencing of his son’s killer. The other follows Lynn (Bahar Soomekh), a surgeon abducted to perform impromptu surgery on Jigsaw himself, with a device strapped around her neck that will detonate if his heart stops. There’s an attempt here to thread themes of vengeance, forgiveness, and the fragility of life. But much of that is drowned in viscera. The film wants to be meditative and merciless, but the balance slips. The emotional beats never quite land, and the moral grandstanding wears thin. Jigsaw, once an enigmatic figure pulling strings from the shadows, becomes overexposed. The more we hear from him, the less compelling he becomes—like a dying guru determined to get the last word. Saw III still has structure, still has momentum, but the strain shows. The shock is intact. The intrigue isn’t.

By this point in the franchise, the Saw films had become a grim holiday tradition—each year delivering a fresh set of grotesqueries lashed to an increasingly labyrinthine mythology. But Saw IV marks the moment where the narrative thread doesn’t just fray—it snaps. The plot is not so much convoluted as it is indecipherable, tangled in flashbacks, overlapping timelines, and a tangle of grim-faced detectives whose identities and motivations blur into static. Whatever mystery might have existed is swallowed whole by the film’s one remaining currency: pain. Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), famously dead since the last installment, somehow continues orchestrating new games from beyond the grave. His legacy is explained through a convoluted series of contingency plans—essentially moralist time bombs he set before expiring, now executed by unseen proxies or preprogrammed instructions. It’s a mildly intriguing premise in theory, but dramatically inert in practice. There’s no tension in watching carnage unfold when the puppeteer has already left the stage. And the carnage is relentless. A woman’s scalp is torn from her skull. A man’s eye is gouged out. Another pair is impaled, symmetrically and slowly. Each death, as usual, comes with a monologue about moral failure and redemption, as though being filleted alive is a path to self-betterment. Whatever philosophical underpinning the series once flirted with has collapsed under the weight of its own cruelty. Saw IV isn’t frightening—it’s mechanical. A grinder set to repeat. The trap may still snap shut, but the thrill is long gone.

As Chevy Chase once deadpanned on SNL, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.” The same, unfortunately, can be said for Jigsaw. And yet the franchise insists on dragging his legacy across the screen, corpse first, with elaborate posthumous schemes that unfold like murder-themed scavenger hunts. Saw V opens with five strangers chained in a concrete dungeon while a familiar gravelly voice advises them to suppress their survival instincts. A promising setup—at least on paper—but the execution, like the victims, is DOA. What follows plays less like a horror film and more like a sadistic riff on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where each new room introduces another contraption and another disposable body. The mechanics are rote, the puzzles limp, and the deaths—however creative in design—land without impact because the characters are written with the depth of caution signs. You don’t just forget their names; you forget they were even in the movie. The central conceit—that teamwork is key, and selfishness leads to doom—is undercut by the fact that none of these people seem worth saving. The audience isn’t engaged in the puzzle so much as trapped alongside it, watching limbs sever and torsos erupt in blood with a growing sense of impatience. The film isn’t suspenseful. It’s just loud and red. Even the narrative scaffolding—attempts to deepen the mythology through flashbacks and detective work—feels like filler between kills. Saw V is gore without gravity, a sequel that functions like a place-holder: fast, ugly, and already decomposing.

Jigsaw is still dead. The franchise helpfully reminds us of this, just in case we’ve forgotten—though his legacy continues to spill blood with uncanny precision. This time, the moral spotlight lands on someone who may have actually earned the torment: William (Peter Outerbridge), a health insurance executive whose cold calculus denied Jigsaw an experimental cancer treatment. Now, William gets to experience actuarial decision-making in reverse, forced to weigh lives in real time—with human faces staring back at him. In a rare moment of clarity, Saw VI returns to what made the series tick: one man, one gauntlet, one increasingly horrific moral dilemma. Instead of just trying to escape, William must pass judgment on others—colleagues, clients, victims of the very system he helped design. Each trap becomes a twisted allegory, each decision a mirror. It’s less about survival than accountability, and that tilt gives this installment a sharper edge than its immediate predecessors. The gore, as expected, arrives in gallons. Bodies burst, limbs break, spines snap. But here the devices are at least clever again—more than just meat grinders on timers. There’s a thematic logic to the cruelty, a rhythm to the punishment. For the first time in a while, the film’s grotesqueries feel less like filler and more like storytelling. Is it brilliant? Not remotely. But it’s coherent, nasty in a focused way, and even manages a few narrative surprises. For a franchise that’s mostly run on fumes and viscera, Saw VI is surprisingly lucid—still a bloodbath, but one with a point.

A late entry in the Brat Pack era, but one of its finest—less cynical, more generous, and somehow truer. It marked Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut, and even now it feels like one of the most authentic portrayals of teenage romance to slip through the cracks of ’80s cool. No prefab attitude, no wink to the camera. Just two kids trying to figure out what to do with themselves—and each other. John Cusack plays Lloyd Dobler, a recent graduate with a trench coat, a hangdog charm, and a vague ambition to never sell, buy, or process anything as a career. He’s smart, decent, and drifting—but the one thing he’s sure of is Diane Court (Ione Skye), the class valedictorian. She’s brilliant, composed, already halfway gone—accepted to a prestigious program in England and carrying herself like she’s been grown-up longer than everyone else. When Lloyd calls to ask her out, it’s clumsy, sincere—and somehow, it works. That first date leads to more, despite a clunky party detour where Diane makes the rounds while Lloyd—dutiful, slightly adrift—winds up holding everyone’s car keys like the night’s most reluctant concierge. What follows is a romance with actual oxygen in it—funny, strange, uneven in ways that feel exactly right. It moves through familiar beats (yes, there’s a third-act rift), but the details are sharper, the tone more open. Diane’s father (John Mahoney), loving but overbearing, doesn’t disapprove of Lloyd at first—he assumes the relationship will expire on its own. When it doesn’t, his opposition hardens, and not for the reasons you expect. There’s a subplot involving embezzlement and betrayal that creeps in—not as a twist, but as a reminder that even the most polished adults might be worse at life than the kids they’re raising. The film is tender without turning soft, stylized but steady on its feet. The dialogue wanders just enough to feel real—and deliberate enough to stick. And the ending—two figures on a plane, waiting for a ding—feels tentative and perfect. You believe in them. You want them to make it. And you wonder what came next.

Sayōnara plays like a studio romance on its best behavior—elegant, reserved, and just rebellious enough to think it’s breaking rules. It’s based on a James A. Michener novel, which tells you a lot: earnest, thoughtful, maybe a little stiff. Marlon Brando stars as Major Lloyd “Ace” Gruver, an American fighter pilot stationed in Japan during the Korean War. He’s a southern gentleman with stripes on his shoulder and a fiancée waiting back home. He’s not looking for trouble. Neither is she. But connection finds them anyway. There’s a ban on these relationships, of course. Military policy. Cultural purity. The usual excuses. Love becomes a line item in a diplomatic memo. And Sayōnara, to its credit, doesn’t pretend that’s normal. It’s a film about crossing boundaries, even if it spends half its runtime bowing politely first. Brando’s great, as expected. Gruver isn’t one of his showpieces—no fireworks, no table-smashing monologues—but that’s part of the appeal. He plays it soft, measured, a man trained to follow orders who suddenly starts asking questions. The romance doesn’t ignite so much as slowly catch—quiet scenes, long pauses, looks that land like decisions. He doesn’t dominate the film—he centers it, without raising his voice. Meanwhile, the real emotional arc is happening off to the side. Joe (Red Buttons, sweet and slightly stunned) marries Katsumi (Miyoshi Umeki, luminous), and their life together—tiny home, shared rituals, soft resistance—quietly becomes the film’s emotional center. Their scenes aren’t flashy. They just hurt. Slowly at first, but then all at once. The ache sticks around. The next quiet comes in the form of kabuki—painted faces, measured steps, silence standing in for speech. Kabuki isn’t just ornament here—it’s mood, rhythm, and recognition. The performances are patient, formal, and oddly hypnotic. They also give Gruver his first real look at Hana-ogi, framed in ritual and distance. It’s not love at first sight. It’s recognition—a moment where something shifts, even if neither of them admits it. The whole thing gleams like it’s been waxed. Even when it drags—and it does—it stays handsome. The emotions don’t rise much above a simmer, but neither do the characters. Sayōnara doesn’t hammer its point. It doesn’t raise its voice. It just frames the message and lets it sit there.

Scarface is a remake in the boldest possible terms—less a reprise of the 1932 Howard Hawks film than a reengineering of the immigrant gangster myth for the Miami cocaine boom. Where the original trafficked in prohibition and machine guns, this one trades in drug wars, assault rifles, and a body count that climbs with the ambition of its central character. The arc is familiar: an outsider claws his way to the top, builds an empire, and collapses under the illusion that he’s untouchable. What’s different is the volume, the scale, and the fury. Al Pacino is Tony Montana, a Cuban refugee with nothing but attitude and appetite. His early days are spent scrubbing dishes and running petty scams, but he makes his name—and secures his future—by executing a hit that no one else has the stomach for. From there, the ladder rises fast. He takes over his boss’s territory, his clientele, and eventually his girlfriend (Michelle Pfeiffer, cutting through the decadence with bored detachment). Tony buys a mansion, fills it with surveillance cameras, and acquires a pet tiger for his lawn. Success comes easy. Self-destruction, even easier. Pacino plays him as both irresistible and repellent. Tony is charismatic, cunning, and also quite funny. He’s also volatile and increasingly incapable of knowing when enough is enough. As his paranoia escalates, so does the body count. His friends turn into enemies. Loyalty becomes a transaction. The cinematography is fluid and assertive—gliding, circling, pressing in. Even the rise-to-power montage, scored to “Push It to the Limit,” feels like a crescendo few films would dare use so early. But Scarface thrives on excess. It wants to show the full sprawl of Tony’s empire, and then tear it apart piece by piece. By the end, it’s a fortress under siege, a staircase, a mountain of cocaine, and a final stand shouted through bullets. Scarface is grim, hypnotic, and theatrical to its core—a gangster opera that doesn’t blink.

To anyone familiar with the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, this film is a notorious misfire. To everyone else, it might just scan as another foggy, oversexed period drama with high production values and no real heat. The source material is thorny and severe—so naturally, the film tries to warm it up with whispered confessions, gauzy sex scenes, and a soft-focus rewrite of the ending. Demi Moore plays Hester Prynne with a kind of sun-dappled flatness, all clenched dignity and hair product. Gary Oldman is Reverend Dimmesdale, her tortured lover, though the film never seems sure what kind of torment he’s supposed to be carrying. Robert Duvall, as Hester’s long-lost husband Chillingworth, turns up late and proceeds to drift through scenes like a wax effigy of himself—stringy-haired, vengeful, and oddly sedate. The film wants him to be menacing, but he just looks like he’s waiting for someone to explain the plot. There’s also Mituva, a character invented for the film: a servant from Africa whose role sits awkwardly between mystical sidekick and third-act afterthought. She pops in and out, barely registering as more than a studio note that never quite got developed. The story—at least what’s left of it—isn’t framed as a love triangle so much as a romance haunted by one man’s wrath. And yet very little actually builds. Characters whisper, unravel, confess, and start over, like they’re caught circling the same puddle. It’s a movie about forbidden passion and public disgrace that somehow manages to keep its collar starched. It moves like a film trying to stay busy without getting anywhere—furtive glances, heavy sighs, and no real push. Still, it’s not a complete wash. The costumes have a rich tactile quality, the sets offer their share of brooding candlelight, and John Barry’s score tries valiantly to stir a heartbeat in something half-asleep. It looks like prestige. It just doesn’t move like it.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark begins, as these things often do, with a haunted house. A group of teenagers—braver than they should be—enter a decrepit mansion on Halloween night and discover a book once owned by Sarah Bellows, a tormented shut-in whose family history is marbled with cruelty. The book doesn’t just contain horror stories. It writes them. And one by one, it begins producing new entries—with fresh ink, fresh victims, and no apparent off switch. The premise taps into the perfect kind of childhood terror: that our stories might be alive, that reading them is dangerous, and that monsters aren’t made up so much as waiting. What follows is a parade of folklore-tinged nightmares—a bloated corpse in search of her missing toe, a pale woman in a hospital hallway, a scarecrow who doesn’t like being ignored. The film isn’t out to unsettle your psyche. It wants to chase you under the covers. There’s a lightness to the horror that recalls dog-eared paperbacks passed around on school buses. Director André Øvredal stages the scares with affection and restraint, letting the creatures emerge slowly, letting the tension breathe. It’s less about gore and more about mood—shadows, fog, and the queasy anticipation of what’s behind the next door. It might not burrow deep, but that would be missing the point. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark plays like campfire tales told in anthology form by someone who remembers what it was like to be young and scared and delighted by it. And it’s just creepy enough to make you want to leave the light on.

The premise sounds like a setup for a decent chamber comedy: a married couple, mid-holiday shopping spree, begin revealing their infidelities to each other in between escalator rides. But Scenes from a Mall doesn’t play like comedy so much as protracted marital punishment—with the audience as collateral damage. Bette Midler and Woody Allen play the couple in question, and while they have a certain rhythm together, their characters are too shallow to support the emotional whiplash the film keeps demanding. Allen didn’t write the script, though the film seems desperate to imitate his style—neurotic patter, midlife crises, philosophical detours—but without any of the wit or grounding that makes that approach tolerable. What we’re left with is ninety minutes of increasingly shrill bickering, punctuated by emotional reversals that feel obligatory. There’s no real insight into marriage, just a series of agitated exchanges that only escalate in volume. The pacing is already strained, but it gets worse. Every few scenes, the film cuts—without explanation or payoff—to a mime (Bill Irwin) and a hip-hop dance crew, both roaming the mall like permanent fixtures from a local access cable channel looking to expand their fan base. These interludes aren’t funny, or clever, or even particularly surreal. They just happen. Even the title feels like a stretch. These aren’t scenes. They’re outtakes from a couple’s therapy session scheduled during a clearance sale. Unless you’re on a personal mission to watch every frame ever committed to film by Midler or Allen, skip this one. You’re not missing anything but the mime.

Spielberg had the right instinct—find one of the rare bright spots in the Holocaust and hold it up to the light until we can’t look away. Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a German industrialist, a man with cufflinks for priorities, is credited with saving 1,200 Jews. The film’s black and white isn’t just an aesthetic choice—it makes history feel close enough to smell, and lets the shadows do half the talking. Schindler’s buried on Mount Zion, the only Nazi Party member ever given that honor. That fact alone could carry a film. But this one does more. The Schindler we meet isn’t a savior. He’s a war profiteer, buttering up Nazi officers for contracts to keep his enamelware and munitions factories running. Jewish labor isn’t a rescue mission—it’s cheap overhead. He hires accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) for his black market skill set, not his humanity. Then the war grinds on. A massacre unfolds in the snow, and Schindler sees a girl in a red coat—a single flare of color—showing up later on a pile of corpses. Something breaks. Or wakes. Slowly, the factory becomes less a business than a disguise for sanctuary. Across from him is Amon Göth (Ralph Fiennes), a commandant who kills without warning, sometimes without reason. He drinks coffee on his balcony and shoots prisoners for walking too slowly. If Schindler’s arc is about a man learning what decency costs, Göth is the opposite—proof of how easily cruelty thrives when it’s given power and a rifle. Their scenes together are almost polite, and somehow that’s worse. It’s not a film you “like.” It’s not a film you revisit on a whim. But it’s a film that holds you still and doesn’t let you blink. By the end, when Schindler breaks down—fixating on his watch, his car—he’s not mourning lost possessions. He’s seeing them for what they were: lives he could have bought. It’s not tidy regret. It’s the awful realization that no matter how much good you’ve done, it will never feel like enough—and doing nothing is unthinkable.

Schizoid plays the slasher card with unexpected restraint, aiming for psychological tension but hampered by its own structure. It’s shot with care and framed like a murder mystery, which works well enough as a guessing game, but not so well as a vehicle for suspense. The pacing is deliberate—more in line with a moody character study than a film about a killer stabbing people with scissors. The premise is solid: an advice columnist (Marianna Hill) receives a series of anonymous, threatening letters while members of her therapy group begin turning up dead. The connection is tenuous at first, and the police are baffled. Everyone in her orbit is a suspect, and the script is careful to distribute suspicion evenly. But because the murders seem to occur without pattern or buildup, the film misses the mounting pressure that defines better slashers. You’re not bracing for the next kill—you’re just waiting for it. Klaus Kinski, cast as the group’s psychiatrist, has a backstory that should be more explosive than it is—he sleeps with his patients and exhibits the emotional temperature of a loaded gun. But the film tiptoes around his volatility. Fans of Kinski’s usual intensity may be surprised to find him unusually subdued here, as if the performance were capped before it could ignite. Christopher Lloyd, playing a taciturn, withdrawn repairman, brings an uncomfortable energy to every scene he’s in. He stands at the edges of conversations, eyes downcast, body tense—like someone waiting for a break that never comes. It’s the one performance that seems to understand the film’s potential for menace. Despite its missteps, Schizoid remains watchable. The premise is sound, the mystery is competent, and the mood hovers just enough to keep you engaged. Not a classic, but not a waste either.

Jon Heder, still coasting on his Napoleon Dynamite persona, stars as Roger, a pathologically timid New York City meter maid who seems to invite defeat at every turn. He’s harassed by teenagers who rob him of his dignity (and his sneakers), ignored at work, and paralyzed by his unspoken crush on his neighbor Amanda (Jacinda Barrett), whose polite friendliness he can’t bring himself to interpret as interest. Desperate for confidence, Roger enrolls in a mysterious self-help course recommended by a friend—a program designed specifically for “losers.” The course is run by Dr. P (Billy Bob Thornton), a swaggering blowhard with a God complex and a fondness for humiliation-as-therapy. The curriculum is half aggression training, half theatrical takedown—something between boot camp and social sadism. Dr. P pelts his students with insults, lectures them about alpha behavior, and delights in watching them squirm. But when Roger actually begins to improve—standing straighter, speaking up, even considering asking Amanda out—Dr. P abruptly shifts tactics. He poses as a charming doctor, setting his sights on Amanda for himself. The film sets up a promising premise—an insecure man challenging the authority of his manipulative mentor—but never pushes the rivalry far enough. Heder’s wide-eyed awkwardness and Thornton’s smirking cruelty play well together, but the script softens every punch. The pranks are too tame, the comeuppance too mild, and the resolution too neat for the stakes the story pretends to raise. School for Scoundrels wants to explore how fragile masculinity can be weaponized under the pretense of self-improvement. What it offers instead is a comic grudge match with a few laughs, a lot of missed opportunity, and a premise that deserved sharper claws.

Jack Black, equal parts flailing limbs and loud conviction, stars as Dewey Finn, a rock guitarist so terminally self-absorbed he impersonates his roommate to land a substitute teaching job at a tightly wound prep school. His first days in the classroom are a haze of nap time and avoidance—until, during music class, he hears something unexpected: real talent. That’s when the idea strikes. If these kids can handle Mozart, they can handle AC/DC. Soon he’s forming a secret band, rehearsing during school hours, and keeping the entire operation under wraps from their by-the-book principal (Joan Cusack, expertly anxious), all in hopes of entering a local battle-of-the-bands competition. The plot follows a familiar arc: imposter finds purpose, kids thrive under unconventional guidance, everyone grows a little. But the details are so vibrant, and the tone so gleefully specific, that it never feels rote. Black’s performance is the engine, and it doesn’t quit. He struts, screeches, improvises, and delivers impromptu lectures on the essential history of rock—never as a gag, always with conviction. What begins as a grift quickly becomes something closer to mentorship, driven not by delusion but a deepening connection. You believe he cares, and you believe the kids believe it too. The film’s real center lies in its affection for outsiders—for the awkward, the quiet, the self-conscious. It’s about what happens when someone shows them how to take up space, even just for a moment. School of Rock might not surprise, but it thrills. And by the final chord, you’ll likely want to rip an air guitar solo just to prove you’ve been paying attention.

Scissors is one of those psychological thrillers that doesn’t entirely make sense, but remains watchable by sheer force of atmosphere. It builds its mystery with unsettling precision, only to end in a heap of half-explained ideas and missed resolutions. Still, the trip is oddly absorbing, even when the destination disappoints. Sharon Stone plays Angela Anderson, a sexually repressed woman who restores antique dolls by day and sleeps on the couch at night—her bed rendered unusable by the sheer volume of porcelain inhabitants. She also collects red-handled scissors, which she treats with an odd reverence. That is, until one becomes a weapon: after being attacked in an elevator by a red-bearded man, she stabs him in self-defense. Later, in a session with her psychiatrist (Ronny Cox), she reveals something more disturbing—this wasn’t just a violent encounter. It was also her first sexual experience. Shortly afterward, she’s drawn into the orbit of her neighbor Alex (Steve Railsback), an artist with an unnerving interest in her. Sharing his apartment is Cole, his identical twin (also Railsback), who uses a wheelchair and quickly veers from cryptic to threatening. What follows is a sequence of disorienting events involving locked rooms, anonymous messages, and a collapsing sense of reality. The narrative threads don’t fully connect, but the mood is sustained with enough conviction to keep you guessing. The film gestures toward themes of trauma, repression, and control, but only in fragments. Characters arrive, speak in riddles, vanish. The resolution, when it comes, is mechanical at best. And yet, Scissors remains oddly compelling—messy, inconsistent, but just strange enough to hold you in its grip.

A generally buoyant and technically competent reboot of the Saturday morning staple, Scoob! isn’t trying to reinvent much—it’s just trying to keep things moving. And for the most part, it does. The pace is brisk, the tone is light, and the script is just witty enough to pass for funny without ever delivering a real laugh. There’s an origin story tucked into the opening, involving Shaggy, Scooby, and a stolen rotating gyro spit—because apparently even childhood friendship needs a backstory now. From there, the film pivots quickly into a superhero plot that gives the animators an excuse to stage zippy action scenes, which they do with some flair. But it’s hard not to wish the film had stuck closer to what actually made Scooby-Doo tick: a good mystery. Instead, we get time travel, ancient prophecies, and a subplot involving Scooby-Doo as the last living descendant of Alexander the Great’s dog—something that sounds like a joke but isn’t. There’s also a detour to a digital Athens, a Colosseum battle against Captain Caveman, and a subplot involving Dick Dastardly trying to open a portal to the underworld. Somewhere in there, Simon Cowell shows up. It’s not unenjoyable, just oddly unmoored. The more it tries to widen the scope, the more it drifts from anything distinctly Scooby-Doo. You can’t help but wonder why the brand was needed at all if the film was mostly interested in testing out other IP. Still, there’s a certain baseline likability to the whole thing. The energy is there. The animation is slick. The voice cast is fine. I just wish there were more nutrition in the Scooby Snack—less sugar, more substance. For a reboot, Scoob! is watchable enough. But it’s hard to imagine returning to it once the sugar crash hits.

Catnip for geeky Xennials and a minor cinematic revolution, in hindsight. At the time, Scott Pilgrim made a stir—maybe not loud, but pointed—for its relentlessly quirky script, visual punchlines that never stopped coming, and total disregard for genre boundaries. It wasn’t quite a comedy, or an action movie, or a romance. It was just wired to its own logic and moved too fast to explain it. The setup is a garage-band twist on romantic purgatory: Scott (Michael Cera), 22, bass player and part-time sad sack, is dating Knives (Ellen Wong), a high schooler who worships the ground he slouches on. But then Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) shows up—cooler, quieter, less forgiving of indecision—and he dumps Knives without much ceremony. Things escalate. Seven exes from Ramona’s past appear, one by one, each demanding a duel. Scott obliges. The fights look like video game boss levels reimagined as live-action cartoons, complete with Batman-era sound effects and health bars. His first foe explodes into coins, though Scott comments that it isn’t even enough to pay for bus fare. Anyone who thought this film was a one-time fluke might’ve blinked when Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture twelve years later for doing something very similar—fracturing tone, collapsing genre, chasing sincerity through slapstick. This film is certainly more idiosyncratic. The references pull from early-console DNA: Zelda, Sonic, Street Fighter. Deep cuts if you’re listening, background noise if you’re not. If you were born in the early ’80s, the whole movie plays like someone found a way to animate a mixtape you forgot you made. Cera is pitch-perfect here: a little stunned to be the lead, a little unsure whether he wants to win. Winstead gives Ramona the vibe of someone who’s been through this before and has the patience to watch it fail again. Their chemistry is half-misdirection. You’re not sure if they belong together or if they’re just both too tired to try harder. The dialogue is clipped, mumbling, weirdly precise. Think John Hughes on a dial-up connection. Jokes are tossed off like side quests—some deadpan, some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, many funnier than they need to be. And then there’s the style. Transitions snap. Sound effects burst across the screen. Quirky asides fall like confetti, perfectly timed and gone before the next scene starts. Nothing about this movie is fundamentally new—elements are just rearranged and with sharper reflexes. Its trick is momentum. Keep it fast, keep it weird, and don’t explain the rules. It works fundamentally, because it never stalls long enough to doubt itself.

The posters promised Drew Barrymore, but the movie pulls the rug fast—she’s dead before the title card’s cold. It’s a fake-out with teeth, and a smart one: Scream isn’t following the usual rules, it’s throwing them out mid-sentence. This isn’t just another teen slasher—it’s the one that’s seen them all, made a checklist, and decided to start cutting sideways. Wes Craven, resurrecting his own genre, directs like a man who knows every cheap trick and when to twist the blade. The killer is Ghostface—a low-budget phantom in a Halloween robe and a Munch mask, clumsy and fast and unsettling precisely because he won’t shut up. He stumbles, he taunts, he’s read the same script you have. And yet he still gets there first. Neve Campbell holds the center as Sidney Prescott, still living in the long shadow of her mother’s unsolved murder. She’s smart, guarded, and doesn’t buy into horror logic—until she has to. Around her orbit a cast of genre-aware teens, including Jamie Kennedy as the video store clerk who explains the “rules” of survival: never say “I’ll be right back,” never have sex, never assume the killer’s dead. The movie doesn’t just reference slasher clichés—it beats them to the punch, then uses them anyway. There’s real menace to the kills and actual suspense to the chases. A character watches Halloween on TV, shouting “look behind you!” at Jamie Lee Curtis—unaware Ghostface is creeping up behind him too. That’s the level the film operates on: self-aware but never smug, ironic but still invested. The blood sprays and the bodies drop, but so does your guard. By the time the ending rolls around, it’s genuinely surprising—not just in who the killer is, but in how thoroughly the movie managed to pull off both satire and slasher without losing its grip on either. It’s clever without being cute, brutal without being nihilistic, and still one of the best executions of horror meta-commentary to make it past the popcorn crowd.

The knives are back out, but the blade’s starting to slip. This time, the carnage heads to Hollywood, where Stab 3 is filming—and its cast keeps winding up dead. It’s a clever enough setup—the original survivors find themselves face to face with their cinematic doubles, as the lines between fiction and fact start to blur and bleed. But clever isn’t quite the same as compelling. Neve Campbell returns as Sidney, now living off the grid and haunted by more than just memories. Courteney Cox’s Gale is pulled back into the mess, this time shadowed by her own cinematic double—a magnificently manic Parker Posey, who brings the only real jolt of energy to the film. David Arquette, now an ex-deputy and a technical advisor on set, shuffles back into place as the franchise’s wobbling moral compass. The idea of actors playing actors who are playing versions of characters we’ve already met should’ve opened the door to all kinds of satirical fun. Instead, the film creaks under its own weight—too many characters, too many subplots, and a script that confuses convolution for suspense. Even the kills feel softened, caught between self-parody and studio polish. There are still flashes of style—Craven doesn’t phone it in—but the scares don’t stick, and the mystery unspools more out of obligation than momentum. What’s left is a glossy, slightly weary echo of what once felt sharp. Not quite a scream—more like a sigh.

There are trashy teen sex comedies, and then there’s this—an exercise in hormonal inertia, where every setup arrives with its pants down and no plan for getting back up. Screwballs isn’t trying to be clever, or even functional—it’s a single-joke movie stretched like expired chewing gum across 80 minutes, its premise as subtle as a nosebleed in a snowstorm. The mission: five leering faux-teens, each representing a different brand of juvenile impulse, unite in a noble quest to catch a glimpse of the virginal, implausibly named Purity Busch (Linda Shayne) in a state of undress. That’s the plot. They take turns concocting wildly implausible schemes—strip bowling, nurse’s office sabotage, absurd pranks involving janitorial closets—all in service of a goal they could’ve achieved with a magazine and a quiet afternoon. Peter Keleghan and Kent Deuters are the de facto ringleaders, delivering lines as if timing were a vague suggestion. The rest of the cast moves through the set pieces like a variety show no one auditioned for, each gag thinner than the last. Whatever energy the direction mustered seems entirely devoted to making sure the camera is positioned for maximum ogling. What’s missing isn’t just originality but timing. Even bad taste can have rhythm. Screwballs has the instincts of a raccoon in a locker room—curious, aimless, occasionally loud, never once surprising. The nudity arrives. The laughs never do.

Charles Dickens by way of tabloid television and radioactive eggnog, Scrooged is a clanging, overstuffed, occasionally berserk update of A Christmas Carol—and it works because Bill Murray, in all his sardonic splendor, refuses to let it spiral completely out of control. He plays Frank Cross, a sadistic TV executive who thinks Christmas programming is best when spiked with terror, violence, and a touch of animal cruelty. He’s forcing his staff to stage a live, nationally broadcast version of A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve—complete with exploding sets and dancers in lingerie—while simultaneously becoming the reluctant star of his own supernatural morality play. His Marley is a rotting, chain-rattling former boss (John Forsythe). His Ghost of Christmas Past is a gravel-voiced cab driver (David Johansen) who reeks of cheap cigars and bad decisions. Carol Kane’s Ghost of Christmas Present is a demented Tinkerbell with a mean right hook and zero boundaries. The Future ghost is faceless, skeletal, and ominously sleek—like a boardroom specter with a remote control. The plot careens through studio sets, childhood flashbacks, lonely apartments, and drunken boardrooms with a kind of possessed rhythm. It’s messy, loud, and crammed with sight gags and strange tonal pivots, but Murray threads it all together. He can bark insults with venom one minute, then melt into full-blown existential collapse the next. When the final act arrives—with a monologue that’s part nervous breakdown, part desperate plea—it’s ridiculous, but it works. This isn’t a tidy film. It’s a bizarro holiday cocktail of satire, slapstick, and sentimentality with shards of real feeling poking through. And for all its overproduction and overacting, Scrooged still hits something real. It’s not a perfect Christmas movie, but it’s the one I keep returning to.