Film Buff Musings

Some people lie to survive. Others lie because it’s easier than telling the truth. And then there’s Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), a tailor in Panama, fits the powerful for suits and spins tales for anyone with an ear and a need. He’s a born fabulist, which makes him the perfect mark for a down-market British spy (Pierce Brosnan) in search of intel—real or otherwise. What begins as minor embroidery quickly snowballs into geopolitical fiction. Harry’s invented rumors catch the attention of Washington, roll their way up the intelligence chain, and before long, his harmless lies are being cited in Pentagon briefings. Back home, his domestic life—wife (Jamie Lee Curtis), two kids, one of them a very pre-Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe—starts fraying under the pressure. Rush plays him beautifully: a well-meaning fabulist in too deep, flustered but never fully panicked. He’s a man who’s made a career out of bluffing and is finally out of aces. Brosnan, meanwhile, has a blast skewering his own Bond image—still sharp-suited and charming, but hollowed out and transparently seedy. He doesn’t hide his amorality; he marinates in it. The whole thing plays like Our Man in Havana by way of Graham Greene’s drunk cousin. The plot is outlandish, yes, but only just. It’s the kind of espionage story that would cause real-world headlines to disclaim, “You couldn’t make this up”—even though someone clearly did. Panama itself is shot with an eye for texture—vibrant, sometimes garish, often beautiful. The script is smart, coiled tight with cynicism, and wickedly funny in a way that creeps up on you. It’s a satire, but not a cartoon. The laughs sting. The politics matter. And the lies, as always, are just close enough to the truth to get someone killed.

Take Care of Maya opens with a medical emergency and slides—quietly, inexorably—into procedural collapse. The Kowalskis, a well-appointed Florida family navigating their daughter’s rare neurological illness, check into an ER for help. They leave without her. Maya is pulled into state custody, and from there, everything calcifies. Not through overt cruelty, but through process—unchecked, unquestioned, and moving forward on autopilot. Henry Roosevelt directs with a steady hand and a low pulse. No fireworks, no heightened music cues, no need. The film plays like a legal drama with the volume turned down—slow, clinical, and accumulating in weight. The usual players—doctors, social workers, hospital administrators—move through the frame like clock parts. There’s no mustache-twirling, no hysteria. Just paperwork, suspicion, and a vague insistence that this is all “for the best.” The Kowalskis, straight out of a suburban brochure, are gradually reframed as liabilities. The transformation is subtle, procedural. That’s the point. Roosevelt assembles it all with cold efficiency: testimony, surveillance footage, institutional language stripped of empathy and arranged with surgical clarity. There’s no editorializing because there’s no need to editorialize. The evidence damns itself. This isn’t just a story of loss, though it’s undeniably tragic. It’s a study in erosion—of autonomy, of trust, of any assumption that the system will stop to ask whether it’s wrong. People vanish inside the process, not physically, but legally, emotionally, structurally. And when the outcome finally lands, there’s no catharsis—just a lingering sense that none of it had to go this way. The documentary doesn’t push. It doesn’t need to raise its voice. Everything you need is already sitting there, in frame.

This sleek, muscular retooling of The Taking of Pelham 123 updates the 1974 Walter Matthau-led original for the broadband era, but in the process loses some of its bite. Directed by Tony Scott, the film leans into his signature excess: saturated colors, hyperactive cutting, and camera moves that twitch even when the dialogue doesn’t. What it lacks in tension, it tries to make up for in velocity. Denzel Washington plays Walter Garber, a transit official sidelined to dispatch duty while under investigation for accepting a bribe. When a subway train is hijacked by a crew of gunmen led by a manic, snarling John Travolta—going by the alias Ryder—Garber becomes the reluctant point man. Ryder demands ten million dollars and insists that only Garber speak with him, raising the eyebrows of NYPD hostage negotiator Camonetti (John Turturro), who can’t understand why a sociopath would waste so much time chatting. The plot clicks along in familiar fashion, full of double-crosses and brinkmanship, but the real draw is the verbal sparring between Washington and Travolta. Washington underplays Garber, keeping him measured and cagey, while Travolta, neck tattoo and all, goes big—rattling off threats like he’s waiting for someone to call “cut.” It’s not a great thriller, but it’s a tightly wound one. The original had grit; this one has gloss. Different times, different trains.

Elegant and unsettling in equal measure, A Tale of Two Sisters is a psychological horror film that plays fair with the audience while still pulling the rug out from under them. Directed with precision by Kim Jee-woon, it weaves a story of trauma, guilt, and familial decay that keeps its secrets until the final frames—and even then, the edges remain purposefully blurred. Su-mi (Im Soo-jung) returns home from a psychiatric facility to the family’s secluded country house, accompanied by her younger sister Su-yeon (Moon Geun-young), who clings to her like a shadow. Awaiting them is a stepmother (Yum Jung-ah) with a porcelain smile and a snappish temper, and a father (Kim Kap-soo) who seems less emotionally distant than emotionally unplugged. The girls are still mourning their mother, whose presence hasn’t entirely left the house—especially for Su-mi, who dreams of her ghost levitating just outside the parameters of her senses. What begins as a quietly discordant domestic drama slowly disintegrates into something far more fractured. Hallucinations, hauntings, bruises with no cause—reality folds in on itself. The film becomes a ghost story, a portrait of mental collapse, a metaphor for familial repression, and a study in grief, all at once. The scares are both tactile and cerebral: doors that open when they shouldn’t, silences that stretch too long, and a creeping sense that no one in this house is quite who they claim to be. Even if not every twist lands with full force, the atmosphere is so tightly calibrated you can practically hear the wallpaper breathing. It doesn’t need to shout to be disturbing. As Korean horror goes—and that’s a high bar—this one earns its place near the top. In Korean with English subtitles.

It has something unusually clear-eyed to say about love—something I don’t think I’ve quite heard from any other film, at least quite like this. Félicie spends one perfect summer with a man named Charles. They fall for each other fast, convinced it’s the real thing. But when the season ends, she gives him the wrong address—just a slip, nothing malicious—and that’s it. He disappears. No way to find her, no way to fix it. Then she finds out she’s pregnant. Five years later, the rest of her life has moved forward—but she hasn’t. She’s not stuck exactly—she has a job, a daughter, a rhythm to her life—but part of her never moved forward. Two men want to be with her: Loïc, a thoughtful librarian, and Maxence, a confident, practical hairdresser. Both are kind. Both are available. But they’re not Charles. And she can’t let go of the idea that Charles might still be out there. That something that felt that right couldn’t have ended over a simple mistake. This kind of love story usually gets smoothed into cliché, but Rohmer keeps everything slightly unfinished. His characters talk in circles, contradict themselves, try to reason things out and fail. They’re not designed for narrative payoff—they’re trying to live their way through something confusing. You’re never told whether Félicie is being romantic or irrational. The film leaves room for both. It’s the second film in Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons, and winter here isn’t just the setting—it’s how her life feels. Cold, quiet, unresolved. The cinematography reflects that: modest, unshowy, but gently observant. You get metro rides, gray skies, and conversations that wander toward meaning without ever quite landing on it. The story unfolds in moments, not messages. What it comes down to isn’t reason or passion—it’s doubt. The kind you learn to live with. The kind that doesn’t let go, even when it should.

A thriller dressed like a holiday. The Talented Mr. Ripley flirts with Hitchcock’s obsessions—duplicity, social aspiration, murder by way of manners—but does it at a glide, polishing every surface until even the danger looks expensive. It’s a film that seduces by stillness. Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) is introduced with just enough awkwardness to make you underestimate him. He plays piano at parties, says yes too quickly, and listens like it might be a trick. A shipping magnate (James Rebhorn) mistakes him for a Princeton man and offers him a job with no clear description: bring back my son. That son—Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law)—has gone maritime, wasting the family’s money in Italian villas and jazz clubs, tan from doing nothing, radiant from being wanted. Tom goes. Tom stays. Dickie lets him in and then tires of him. Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), the fiancée, senses something off but can’t decide if it’s admiration or proximity. It isn’t really either. Tom is studying, rehearsing, trying on Dickie’s voice like a new pair of shoes. When they fit, he keeps them. When they don’t, he adjusts the laces and walks anyway. The movie circles this transformation with the fascination of someone watching a scorpion build a dollhouse. It doesn’t race—it coils. Minghella lavishes the locations, trailing his camera across tiled courtyards and white shirts hung out to dry. Damon, for his part, plays it like a man who can’t decide if he’s faking politeness or discovering it. Law, practically golden, makes narcissism feel like a reasonable response to existence. And Paltrow, sharper than she looks, punctures the glamour every time she tilts her head and doesn’t smile. When violence arrives, it doesn’t shock—it confirms. Tom can’t stop impersonating people because he hasn’t figured out how to be one. He isn’t a sociopath in the usual way—he’s too aware of the effort it takes. Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Philip Baker Hall show up like slaps to the face—short appearances, no soft landings. The film is too well-behaved to be nasty and too elegant to be brutal, but it understands desire, and it knows how it warps when it doesn’t get returned.

Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant), a local firebrand with a history of speaking his mind, finds himself wrongly accused of arson and murder after a factory burns to the ground. He escapes jail and holes up in the cottage of his old friend, schoolteacher Nora Shelley (Jean Arthur), who’s trying to rent the place to a distinguished law professor (Ronald Colman, dapper and detached). The plan is for Dilg to disappear before the professor arrives—but of course, the professor shows up early, and suddenly Nora is juggling a fugitive in the attic and a tenant in the guest room. The setup teases screwball, but the tone slowly recalibrates into something more deliberate. As the professor settles in to work on a book about law and democracy, Dilg challenges him with questions not found in footnotes—what about justice when the law falls short? Is theory worth anything if it can’t hold up in the real world? The film doesn’t solve these questions, but it gives them air to circulate. Grant is loose and funny, but there’s a quiet bitterness under his quips, and Jean Arthur once again proves she’s better at selling nervous pragmatism than just about anyone. Colman plays the professor as a man whose stiff collar begins to fray the longer he stays in Nora’s orbit. What could have been a simple odd-couple triangle becomes something more: a debate between civics and humanity, dressed up in drawing-room farce. The film isn’t perfect—the ending ties things up too cleanly—but there’s something satisfying in how all three characters evolve without anyone being made the fool. It’s one of those rare comedies from the era that feels less like a gag machine and more like a moral fable with footnotes. And it still moves.

A peculiar mix of charm and missed opportunities—a comedy that brushes up against sharper ideas but never digs in. Jeff Goldblum plays Dexter King, a lanky, anxious American actor stuck playing second banana to Ron Anderson (Rowan Atkinson), a self-absorbed British comic who performs every gag like he’s auditioning for a statue of himself. The setup should work, but it doesn’t quite click. Goldblum, with his sly charisma and quick mind, doesn’t sell the part of the fumbling underdog—he seems too knowing, too in control. Atkinson, meanwhile, brings just enough vulnerability to make you wonder what this would’ve looked like if their roles were reversed. The romantic subplot, thankfully, lands better. Emma Thompson, in her first major film role, plays Kate—a brisk, no-nonsense nurse who stumbles into Dexter’s orbit and quietly steals the film. Their relationship is clipped, awkward, funny. Thompson brings a grounded sweetness that helps stabilize Goldblum’s manic energy, and together they strike a rhythm that’s messy but endearing. The film’s best moment, though, has nothing to do with plot or character. It arrives when Dexter gets cast in Elephant!, a parody of a bloated West End musical that reimagines The Elephant Man as a syrupy, overproduced spectacle. Goldblum, dead serious in a silver unitard, singing “Somewhere Up in Heaven There’s an Angel with Big Ears,” is so ridiculous and so committed that it nearly redeems everything that came before it. But as a whole, the movie doesn’t quite get there. The pacing slips, some scenes feel like they’re just passing time, and the tone never fully settles. But there’s still something likable about it. It plays like a comedy trying to find its shape in real time—and while it never quite does, the flashes of brilliance are enough to make you wish it had.

Judging comedies by how often and how hard they make you laugh is as fair a metric as any—and Talladega Nights doesn’t coast. It’s a full-throttle, sugar-fueled send-up of sports biopics and Americana machismo, built on absurdity and played with a straight face. Not every joke hits, but the hit rate is high, and when it lands, it lands hard. Will Ferrell fully commits to Ricky Bobby—a “big, hairy American winning machine” whose Southern-fried bravado feels like a NASCAR-fueled extension of his SNL George W. Bush. Ricky’s life philosophy—“If you ain’t first, you’re last”—was drilled into him by his flaky, speed-addled father (Gary Cole), and it’s served as both gospel and emotional crutch. He gets his start humbly, as a pit crew member, until one fateful race when the driver quits mid-lap to take a bathroom break. Ricky hops behind the wheel, finishes third, and becomes an overnight sensation. He rises with the help of his loyal sidekick Cal Naughton Jr. (John C. Reilly), whose patented “slingshot” maneuver helps push Ricky into first—every time. But when Cal timidly suggests maybe he could win, just once, the very idea of coming in second throws Ricky into an existential spiral. Enter Sacha Baron Cohen as Jean Girard, a French Formula One driver with a penchant for jazz, literature, and latte art. He’s meant to be the villain, but it’s the film’s weakest link—less a character than a collection of tired punchlines about prissiness and queerness, made flatter by repetition. Cohen does what he can, but the script doesn’t give him much beyond accent and affectation. The real engine here is Ferrell and Reilly, who work together like a comedy pit crew—loose, ridiculous, and weirdly in sync. And no review is complete without a shoutout to Ricky’s foul-mouthed kids, Walker and Texas Ranger (Houston Tumlin and Grayson Russell), who nearly steal the movie with their pint-sized bluster. It’s not just the swearing—it’s the commitment. Stupid, smart, and proudly both, Talladega Nights is the rare comedy that knows exactly how ridiculous it is and revs harder because of it.

A Shakespeare adaptation with teeth and sequins, The Taming of the Shrew comes at you like a Renaissance parade crashing into a marital spat—lavish, loud, and very much alive. Franco Zeffirelli directs with a decorator’s eye and a showman’s pulse, but it’s Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton who set the thing ablaze. Taylor, in full tempest mode, plays Kate—the allegedly unmarriageable eldest daughter, treated by the script like a civic nuisance in need of resolution: sharp-tongued, disinterested, and visibly allergic to flattery. Burton, as Petruchio, shows up like he’s auditioning to marry a thunderstorm. Their courtship plays like a duel with breaks for innuendo. The supporting cast stays lively, even when the plot doesn’t require it. Background actors behave like they’re owed screen time. But it’s Taylor and Burton who hold the center—not just delivering the lines, but brandishing them. The tension between their performances and their offscreen tabloid epic adds an extra layer that’s either subliminal or spectacularly on the nose, depending on your read. The film isn’t out to convert Shakespeare agnostics. But as comedies go, this one’s unusually digestible—frothy, fast, and too visually decadent to bore. It may not solve the play’s more loaded gender politics, but it knows how to dress them up and shout them into submission.

A skippable entry in a series that was already running on fumes, Tammy and the Doctor drops Sandra Dee’s backwoods heroine into a Los Angeles hospital and asks us to watch her fall for a young doctor, played by Peter Fonda in his film debut. The romance is perfunctory. The real focus is Tammy herself—a character so insistently “quirky” she becomes almost hostile. She speaks almost entirely in malapropisms and folksy detours, delivered with the grating confidence of a crotchety old woman who thinks she’s being precious. What’s meant to be disarming comes off as smug, and in the end, you don’t root for Tammy so much as endure her. It feels like I’m being cornered by a teenager doing impressions of her grandmother talking to her chickens. Fonda, meanwhile, spends most of the film trying not to flinch. He has presence, even here, but the role gives him nothing to do beyond look handsome and mildly attentive. His character barely registers outside of Tammy’s relentless monologuing. There’s a glossy emptiness to the whole thing—sterile sets, filler scenes, and a script that mistakes eccentricity for charm. Not grating enough to be fascinating, not sincere enough to care about. Just a warm bath of nothing, humming politely to itself.

Proof that when Disney actually tries, it can still dazzle. Tarzan may be a late entry in the studio’s second golden age, but it swings in with confidence—visually lush, emotionally fleet, and paced like it has somewhere urgent and exciting to be. The jungle setting is a painter’s dream: dense, vibrant, kinetic. And the story, while familiar, still works like gangbusters when given this much polish. Everyone knows the gist: orphaned baby, jaguar attack, rescue by gorilla mom. Glenn Close voices Kala, whose own loss softens her to this strange little creature with opposable thumbs. She raises him like one of her own, over the objections of troop leader Kerchak (Lance Henriksen, in full gravel). As Tarzan grows—first a wide-eyed klutz (voiced by Alex D. Linz), then a vine-surfing specimen of impossible musculature (Tony Goldwyn)—he finds his place in the tribe. Sort of. He can beat the apes to the treetops, out-blast the elephants in a splash fight, and MacGyver a sled from whatever’s lying around. But somewhere under all that joy is a whisper he can’t shake: what if I’m not just this? The film knows how to balance myth and mischief. Rosie O’Donnell voices Terk, a wisecracking gorilla who wouldn’t be out of place in a Brooklyn deli, and Wayne Knight shows up as an elephant with confidence issues. But things shift when humans arrive: Clayton (Brian Blessed), all mustache and menace; the absent-minded professor (Nigel Hawthorne), who thinks in footnotes; and Jane (Minnie Driver), who’s an actual delight. Their presence kickstarts the usual tug-of-war between worlds—jungle or civilization, instinct or intellect, ape or man. The adaptation’s surprisingly nimble, trimming the pulpier corners of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original while keeping the emotional hooks intact. And then there’s the Phil Collins of it all. Say what you will, but the man commits. His songs aren’t just background mood—they swing, with drums and sincerity and just enough syrup to coat the heart without drowning it. It’s not the most profound Disney film, but it’s one of the most satisfying. Fun without being frantic, sweet without turning sticky, and so gorgeously animated it barely needs dialogue. It doesn’t push too hard or shout to be loved—it just moves, swings, glides, and charms its way through. You don’t walk away transformed. You just walk away pleased.

Scorsese wanted the drift of a dream. He gets it. Scenes slide past like streetlight on a windshield, then snag on a face, a doorway, a thought that won’t leave. The camera glides, then prowls; time loosens; cause and effect feel negotiable. Bernard Herrmann’s final score—brassy, airless, insistently looping—doesn’t accompany the film so much as press down on it until you’re breathing with its rhythm. Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle: twenty-six, sleepless, wired by the city he claims to hate. His diary voice is calm, almost tender, the content anything but. He cruises the night for fares the other drivers avoid, collecting sights he files under “filth,” building a case against the world and, conveniently, for himself. Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) appears like a solution he can hold still. Coffee, small talk, a smile, and then the hard snap back—he takes her to a porn theater, and the possibility evaporates in the harsh light of his mistake. Then Iris (Jodie Foster), twelve and already cornered, slips into his cab and asks for escape. Sport (Harvey Keitel) yanks her out, tosses a crumpled twenty through the window, and tells him to forget it. He pockets the bill; it sits there like a fuse. Hair cut short, guns bought and hidden, speeches rehearsed into the mirror—the transformation arrives without fanfare, like a plan that writes itself while you watch. You can read the film as character study, urban trance, or a march toward a purpose that hardens into blood. The final stretch is quick and terrible, not grand, just close and loud, followed by a hush that feels wrong in precisely the right way. Resolution isn’t the point; the perspective is. Taxi Driver leaves you with the sensation of a long ride at 3 a.m.—windows streaked, city muttering, meter running—and the uneasy knowledge that you’ve been inside someone else’s head long enough to hear your own thoughts answering back.

A glossy Miramax product with a surprisingly loaded cast, Teaching Mrs. Tingle proves that star power and production sheen can’t rescue a script starved for wit, stakes, or common sense. Katie Holmes plays Leigh Ann, a high school overachiever with the valedictorian title practically engraved—until she runs afoul of Mrs. Tingle (Helen Mirren), the school’s resident tyrant, who seems to despise her purely for being competent. Tingle, a history teacher with the warmth of a paper cut, pounces when Leigh Ann is caught with a copy of the final exam—planted on her, of course, by a smirking burnout named Luke (Barry Watson). It’s all circumstantial, but no one cares. Leigh Ann’s future is suddenly in jeopardy, and in a fit of narrative desperation, she and her friends—Luke and the melodramatic Jo Lynn (Marisa Coughlan)—decide to confront Mrs. Tingle at home. The conversation goes poorly. The confrontation becomes a hostage situation. And the movie, already on shaky footing, collapses into a series of nonsensical reversals. Kevin Williamson, still surfing the Scream wave, seems to be aiming for something arch and nasty, maybe a Heathers homage. What he delivers is slack and shapeless. The suspense fizzles. The jokes misfire. The characters move not with purpose but like pawns stuck in a draft rewrite. Mirren, game as ever, tries to inject some venom into the role, but the film’s idea of edgy is just slightly more passive-aggressive than usual. Teaching Mrs. Tingle wants to be a wicked satire. It ends up a shrill whimper, all setup and no teeth.

Marionettes. Explosions. Broadway numbers about AIDS. Team America: World Police is what happens when Trey Parker and Matt Stone take global politics, Hollywood activism, American exceptionalism, and every taboo they can think of, and feed it all through the most juvenile, merciless, weirdly meticulous puppet show ever mounted. The premise is as blunt as it is brilliant: an elite paramilitary force of American “heroes” storms the globe to fight terrorism, often leaving a trail of flaming embassies and toppled monuments in their wake. The Eiffel Tower goes down in the first five minutes. The pyramids don’t last much longer. But the mission is clear: freedom isn’t free, and subtlety’s not in the budget. Their latest crisis: Kim Jong Il is arming terrorist cells with weapons of mass destruction, and Team America—complete with a psychic, a psychiatrist, a martial arts expert, and a hotheaded jock with biceps full of liberty—is the world’s last, worst hope. But the external threat is only half the problem. Back home, they face another battle: a PR war led by none other than Alec Baldwin, who fronts the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G.)—a coalition of smug celebrity activists demanding the team disband immediately. The satire here is not what you’d call subtle, but Parker and Stone have never been in the business of nuance. They’re here to offend everyone, and they do so with the gusto of teenagers who got their hands on explosives and a stage. And yet, for all its vulgarity, Team America isn’t just flailing its limbs for shock value. It’s weirdly well-crafted. The puppets are impressively designed, the sets have genuine production value, and the character types—even while deliberately clichéd—have just enough texture to make the love triangle and betrayal subplot feel like they’re part of a real movie. Sort of. There’s a straight-faced commitment to the absurdity that makes it all funnier. The longer it takes itself seriously, the more ridiculous it becomes. It also helps that the puppet limitations are played for laughs. Walks are stiff, fights are chaotic, and the infamous sex scene—long, athletic, and deeply unholy—feels like it was choreographed by hormonal 12-year-olds locked in a prop closet. The violence is cartoonish, the language filthy, and the R-rating pushed so hard it practically snaps—which is hilarious when you remember we’re talking about felt and fishing line. It’s dumb on purpose and smart when it counts. You’re laughing before you know why. And like most of Parker and Stone’s best work, it roasts every direction at once, including its own.

The novelty has worn off. Once you’ve sat through a movie about a foul-mouthed teddy bear who drinks beer and quotes Flash Gordon, the idea of a sequel mostly raises the question of how much gas is left in the stuffing. Quite a bit, as it turns out—though not quite enough to justify another go-round. Ted (voiced by Seth MacFarlane) is now “married” to Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth), and the quotes are implied. Their relationship, unsurprisingly, is falling apart. After a grocery store shouting match that feels less like a fight than a demolition derby, they decide a baby might patch things up. Biology objects. So they try to adopt—triggering a government investigation that declares Ted is property, not a person. What starts as crude sitcom material veers into courtroom drama, with arguments about civil rights, personhood, and constitutional precedent. It’s not that the material is mishandled—it’s just too sincere for a movie that also features gags about porn, pot, and Tom Brady’s bodily fluids. Mark Wahlberg returns as Ted’s best friend John, newly single after an offscreen breakup (Mila Kunis is quietly erased). The two still bounce off each other with decent timing, and MacFarlane’s comic rhythm occasionally clicks—especially during celebrity cameos or throwaway cultural riffs. Giovanni Ribisi returns as Donny, now conspiring with Hasbro to kidnap Ted and have him dissected, duplicated, and sold as a mass-market toy. The movie is intermittently funny, occasionally overwrought, and never quite sure of its tone. But when it stops making a case and just wallows in its own nonsense, it works. A lesser sequel, but not an unwelcome one.

Here’s a film with the good sense not to aim higher than its own hairline. Teen Wolf is a low-stakes high school comedy with a lycanthropic gimmick, and it gets about as much mileage out of it as you’d expect. Michael J. Fox plays Scott Howard, an ordinary teen with an extraordinary hormonal hiccup: he’s a werewolf, and not the tortured kind. The condition—triggered, appropriately enough, just after puberty—is hereditary. His dad (James Hampton), all cardigan and calm, breaks the news with a mug in hand and a face full of fur. Scott tries to keep it under wraps, but that plan dissolves spectacularly when he wolfs out during a basketball game and sinks a shot from half-court. Instead of fleeing in terror, the crowd goes wild. Turns out, the school is totally fine with supernatural transformation so long as it improves their win/loss record. Soon, Scott’s a one-man pep rally, the alpha jock, the center of attention, and finally making progress with the girl he’s been quietly yearning for (Lorie Griffin, whose entire role could be condensed into a hair toss and a prom dress). The plot never deepens so much as it loops—more games, more attention, and the eventual realization that maybe being a howling showboat isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The metaphor, if you squint, is adolescence: growing hair in strange places, sudden mood swings, the urge to dunk. But don’t expect a think piece. This isn’t Carrie with claws—it’s a sitcom with fangs. Michael J. Fox, riding the Back to the Future wave, is the film’s best asset—quick, self-effacing, and effortlessly likable. He sells the nonsense without overselling it. The movie itself isn’t particularly clever, but it has a goofy, offhand charm that’s hard to fake. Like its hero, Teen Wolf is awkward, overenthusiastic, and somehow still manages to win the crowd.

The first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film aims to split the difference between comic-book grit and toy-store appeal, and winds up landing in an odd middle zone. Drawing more from the murk and shadows of Batman (1989) than the colorful cartoon that made the turtles famous, the film presents a version of New York steeped in trash piles, petty crime, and gloomy back alleys—just cartoonish enough not to scare kids, but too heavy for much fun. The plot is basic: New York’s been hit with a wave of thefts, and TV reporter April O’Neil (Judith Hoag) finds herself pulled into the mystery—ultimately crossing paths with four six-foot turtles trained in martial arts by a talking rat. That’s not even the weird part. Their enemy is Shredder, a samurai-styled gang leader who recruits runaway teens and trains them in martial arts at a warehouse outfitted with skate ramps, neon lights, and stolen goods. The turtles, brought to life with Jim Henson-designed suits and dubbed-over voices, are technically impressive for the time. The physicality works, and the lip-syncing isn’t bad. But the personalities blur together—most of what we know about them comes from their weapons, one-liners, and what color bandanas they wear. Raphael gets a little more attention as the brooding one, but the others mostly orbit around jokes and pizza references. There’s some appeal in the rough-hewn quality of the production—it looks like it was shot in the back corners of an actual city, not on a polished soundstage—but the pacing drags, the action scenes are repetitive, and the tone wavers between goofy and grim. The film is not without moments—Elias Koteas brings a strange charisma as Casey Jones who wields a hockey stick and talks like Clint Eastwood. Splinter has a surprisingly somber presence. But the film as a whole never quite settles into a convincing rhythm. Its story plays more like connective tissue between fights and catchphrases. Call this a functional introduction for the franchise’s live-action era, but not a particularly thrilling one.

Ten sketches. Ten commandments. Zero reverence. The Ten treats the Bible like a buffet—cherry-picking rules, ignoring context, and adding just enough filth to raise eyebrows. It’s not exactly satire, but it’s not not sacrilegious. Mostly, it’s an excuse for comedians to goof off under Old Testament headings. The most memorable sketch (and easily the most deranged) involves a ventriloquist, his dummy, and Winona Ryder. Mid-performance, the dummy makes a lewd comment. Ryder leans in. Soon, she’s stolen the puppet and taken it home for a one-night stand. The corresponding commandment? “Thou shalt not steal.” Technically accurate—though she seems to break at least one more in the process. The sketch coasts on sheer audacity, but like most of the film, it has no idea how to end. It just gives up and slinks off. Other entries follow a similar arc: strong premise, weak punchline. A man survives a skydive without a parachute, lands vertically, and becomes a minor celebrity while stuck in the ground like a lawn ornament. Two neighbors spiral into a CAT scan arms race, each buying a dozen machines to outdo the other. A husband hosts nude parties while his wife’s at church, all set to the gentle strains of Roberta Flack—because nothing says spiritual crisis like smooth soul and full frontal. These are amusing in theory, but they rarely build to anything. The joke shows up early and then just… loiters. There’s a loose energy to the whole thing—shaggy, chaotic, and occasionally funny in spite of itself. The cast is game, the tone is absurdist without being smug, and the film moves quickly enough that nothing grates for long. But it’s the kind of comedy that mistakes randomness for surprise. If you’re looking for sharper, nastier sketch chaos, Movie 43 pushes things much further—and crashes harder doing it. (Though depending on your tolerance for watching Hugh Jackman with testicles dangling from his chin, this one may be just enough.)

A film so unassuming it barely qualifies as one—but it’s watchable, likable, and just self-aware enough to get by. Morgan Freeman plays a version of himself—or rather, a movie star without a name, long past his last big role, idling on the edge of relevance. He’s been asked to consider a part in a micro-budget indie and is dropped off in a small, sunbaked neighborhood to observe the setting: a rundown grocery store where the light buzzes and the patience is short. Inside, he meets Scarlet (Paz Vega), a cashier with a sharp eye and no patience for nonsense—she tracks the aisles from her monitor like it’s a security feed and calls things as she sees them. She sizes him up quickly, and not without reason. But there’s an odd comfort in their mismatch. They circle each other, trade observations, and wander through the day in search of… not much. An outfit change. A job interview. A better mood. The story barely registers as narrative. It’s more of a back-and-forth, a two-hander about people who didn’t expect company but don’t mind the distraction. They talk, they linger, they part. The movie doesn’t pretend it’s about transformation. It just lets them spend time. It’s laid-back to a fault. The stakes are microscopic, the emotions mostly implied, but it moves with ease. You wouldn’t call it memorable, but for eighty-some minutes, it’s agreeable company—quiet, offhanded, and just sharp enough to keep from drifting.

Loud, profane, and powered by its own shameless mythology, The Pick of Destiny is part rock opera, part stoner fable, and part excuse for Jack Black to scream about destiny while ripping a solo on a demon-powered guitar. He and Kyle Gass play exaggerated versions of themselves—two aspiring legends who meet by accident and form Tenacious D, the most self-serious joke band of their generation. The plot is barely restrained nonsense. Gass, cloaked in a wig and delusions of grandeur, pretends to be a rock icon. Black calls him out. They form a band anyway. Songwriting stalls, so they set their sights on a mystical guitar pick rumored to have been chipped from Satan’s tooth. The quest is launched. The volume never drops. What follows is a collision of metal fantasy, bongwater logic, and full-blown musical numbers that crash into scenes like power surges. Black, channeling frontman bravado and adolescent zeal, feels completely at home—less like he’s playing a character than tapping directly into his stage persona. The music, written by Black and Gass, straddles the line between tribute and send-up, delivered with enough conviction to sell the mythology. The supporting players show up ready to detonate. Meat Loaf, as Black’s stern and repressive father, roars his disapproval in a power-ballad tantrum. Dio erupts from a bedroom poster to offer divine guidance. Tim Robbins limps in as a one-legged drifter with a phony accent and a cryptic obsession with the Pick. Amy Poehler, in one of the film’s sharper grace notes, scowls from behind a diner counter and dares anyone to ask for coffee. Ben Stiller, uncredited, shows up just long enough to sell Black a guitar strap. The whole thing is built on a single joke, but it holds. The Pick of Destiny doesn’t broaden its appeal or sand down its edges. It’s loud, juvenile, borderline devotional—and proud of it. Somewhere between farce and fan letter, it plays the dumbest possible idea like it’s the greatest show on earth.

Roman Polanski’s The Tenant is the kind of film that art-house obsessives could spend hours decoding, trading theories like contraband and arriving at nothing definitive. I wouldn’t blame them. I’m not even convinced the film wants to be solved. It might be an elaborate prank, or maybe the ambiguity is the point. Either way, I found it deeply unsettling—and oddly entertaining. What starts as a low-key character study gradually distorts into something colder and more oppressive. Polanski plays Trelkovsky, a mild-mannered clerk who rents a shabby Paris apartment recently vacated by a woman who attempted suicide. She’s still alive—barely—when he visits her in the hospital, but soon dies, leaving behind a cracked windowpane and a sense of unfinished business. Trelkovsky can’t stop thinking about her. He starts investigating her life, rifling through her belongings, and eventually finds a human tooth tucked behind a loose bathroom tile. It only gets stranger from there. His neighbors are quick to complain—sometimes for things he’s done, sometimes not. No sound is safe. The walls seem to absorb anxiety and funnel it back. And across the courtyard, the window to the vacant bathroom stares back at him like a fixed eye. The film feeds on that sense of narrowing perspective: everyone watching, everyone judging, until the question becomes whether Trelkovsky is unraveling—or simply being absorbed. Polanski directs with a chilly, deliberate pace that makes each interaction feel faintly off. The tone shifts almost imperceptibly from mundane to paranoid, and by the final stretch, the film seems to be circling itself, like some architectural fever dream. It’s psychological horror without resolution—more about atmosphere than clarity. The Tenant doesn’t build to a conclusion so much as it loops in on itself—leaving behind a strange residue, like you’ve been living someone else’s nightmare and only just realized the door’s locked from the inside.

Christopher Nolan doesn’t make puzzle boxes so much as roller coasters engineered by theoretical physicists. Tenet is one of his most intricate contraptions yet: a time-bending espionage epic that expects its audience to keep up at a dead sprint—or not at all. John David Washington stars as an unnamed CIA operative who, after surviving a siege at a Kyiv opera house and a brutal test of loyalty, is handed a single word—Tenet—and ushered into a secret war that hasn’t happened yet. Or maybe already has. The enemy is entropy itself. Or rather, reverse entropy: objects and people that move backward through time, colliding with our forward-motion reality. A bullet returns to a gun before it’s fired. Cars uncrash. Fists are dodged seconds before they’re thrown. The mechanics aren’t explained so much as asserted—briskly, matter-of-factly, and just long enough to avoid a mutiny. Nolan’s not here to teach; he’s here to disorient. The script moves like it’s being chased, and the film dares you to blink. Plot threads spool forward and backward simultaneously. Key reveals play in reverse. Characters revisit past scenes from new angles, new directions, sometimes quite literally. What anchors it is momentum. Washington cuts a clean figure—sharp, confident, never rattled—and Robert Pattinson, as his roguish handler, adds just enough sideways energy to keep things from going sterile. Kenneth Branagh, leaning into menace, plays a Russian arms dealer with a villain’s growl and a god complex. Elizabeth Debicki, in a role that’s largely reactive, still manages to give the film its only human ache. This is first and foremost an action film, and in that sense it delivers. The sequences—fights, heists, full-blown time-inverted warfare—are staged with jaw-dropping precision. It feels like Nolan is choreographing chess at 70 mph. While this isn’t an emotional experience, it’s a physical one. Though the logic and mechanics of Tenet might not fully hold together under inspection, it never lets go of its grip. If nothing else, it’s a thrill to watch a director push his obsessions to the breaking point and still stick the landing.

The Terminal is one of those high-concept curiosities that probably sounded questionable at pitch but plays like gentle magic in practice. Tom Hanks stars as Viktor Navorski, a citizen of the fictional Krakozhia, who arrives at JFK International Airport just in time for his country’s government to collapse in a coup. His visa is now void. His passport is invalid. And no flights are headed home. Officially, he exists nowhere. Unofficially, he lives in the terminal. What makes this premise work—more than it has any right to—is how Spielberg leans into the absurdity without forcing whimsy. Viktor doesn’t speak English, doesn’t understand what’s happening, and can’t leave the building. So he adapts. He builds a life out of scraps and gestures. He fashions a bed from rows of plastic chairs. He learns the airport’s rhythms. He finds clever ways to feed himself. He befriends the custodial crew, a food service worker, a customs officer with a soft spot for romantic subplots, and eventually even manages a courtship with a flight attendant (Catherine Zeta-Jones), whose layovers become something like a relationship. Hanks disappears into Viktor so completely it’s easy to forget just how delicate this performance is—an accent that flirts with caricature but never tips, physical comedy played with restraint, and a baseline decency that somehow never curdles into sap. It’s the kind of role that demands total trust from the audience, and he earns it. Stanley Tucci plays the airport official who wants him gone—not out of malice, necessarily, but because bureaucracy doesn’t like loose ends. And Viktor, despite his paper-thin backstory and confused smile, becomes an inconvenient knot no one can untangle. The plot doesn’t escalate so much as it accumulates. New friendships. A better suit. A job in construction. It all moves lightly, with Spielberg’s usual polish, but the stakes remain modest—no ticking clocks, no world-saving reversals, just the stubborn decency of a man refusing to give in to circumstances. It’s not a great film, but it’s satisfying. The story never pushes beyond its modest setup, and that’s fine. There’s a quiet assurance in how it plays out: no big revelations, no heavy drama, just a strange situation handled with curiosity and care. It’s light, pleasant, and oddly complete.

A nightmarish, adrenaline-soaked sci-fi thriller that’s far smarter than its premise lets on, The Terminator wastes no time setting its tone: bleak, brutal, and humming with dread. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the title character, a cybernetic hitman sent from the year 2029, wrapped in synthetic flesh and dropped into 1980s Los Angeles with one mission—kill Sarah Connor. Why her? In the future, she gives birth to John Connor, a resistance leader who becomes a threat to Skynet—an artificial intelligence network that achieves self-awareness and promptly decides to eliminate the human race. No Sarah, no John, no rebellion. The machine is there to correct the timeline. Chasing behind is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a soldier sent to protect her and, if possible, explain any of this before she’s gunned down in a nightclub. The premise sounds thin, but the execution is anything but. Cameron shoots it like a survival story masquerading as a horror film. The violence is fast and loud, the pacing tight, and the action sequences have a rough, unvarnished momentum. The effects—mostly practical—may look dated now, but the atmosphere they help build hasn’t lost its bite. Linda Hamilton holds the film together. She begins uncertain and overwhelmed, but there’s a slow, believable shift as panic gives way to resolve. Biehn plays Reese like someone running on nerves and instinct, a man whose entire life has been shaped by a war that hasn’t technically happened yet. And Schwarzenegger—limited in dialogue but not in impact—feels like the perfect casting fluke: blank, silent, and horrifying. It’s a modest film, and that’s part of what makes it so effective. There’s no fat on it. Just a relentless chase across streets, alleys, and cheap hotel rooms, with the constant threat of violence not far behind. The Terminator doesn’t pause for reflection. It moves forward, always. Just like its title character.

A gorgeously lensed tragedy with a spine, Tess is one of those rare literary adaptations that feels inhabited rather than mounted. Roman Polanski directs with a painter’s eye and a dramatist’s patience, giving the film its measured, deliberate sprawl—nearly three hours—but never letting it drift. The real marvel is Natassja Kinski, playing the title role with a kind of internal glow, as if defiance were something that could radiate through lace collars and pastoral gloom. Based on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the film opens with a poor villager, John Durbeyfield (John Collin), discovering through idle conversation that he may be descended from nobility. The revelation doesn’t ennoble him so much as inflate him, and soon he sends his daughter Tess to ingratiate herself with a family bearing the d’Urberville name—a family who bought the title but not the lineage. She’s quickly met with predatory hospitality from Alec d’Urberville, who sees her as property from the moment she enters the house. The rape isn’t dramatized for shock or pity—it’s one of many violations Tess endures in a world that sees her beauty and independence as provocations. Time and again, she chooses dignity over convenience, and time and again, the world makes her pay for it. There’s a bleak nobility in her resilience, and Kinski plays it not as martyrdom, but as the only way she knows how to be. This is not a brisk film, nor is it meant to be. But its slow unfolding feels earned, even hypnotic. Geoffrey Unsworth’s cinematography (finished by Ghislain Cloquet after Unsworth’s death) captures the countryside like it’s being remembered from a lifetime later—soft, golden, and faintly haunted. The result is a work that takes its time but leaves an imprint. You don’t watch Tess to feel energized—you watch it to be quietly leveled.

A satire that thinks it’s sharper than it is, though it’s still plenty funny—mostly because Aaron Eckhart plays Nick Naylor like he was born to sell cancer with a smile. Naylor’s the silver-tongued frontman for Big Tobacco’s PR machine, a man who treats spin as both art and sport. He knows exactly how questionable his job is. He also knows he’s very, very good at it. His workday involves hopping between talk shows and policy hearings, massaging the facts until they no longer resemble themselves. He’s a master at turning “yes” into “maybe” and “no” into “let’s not rush to judgment.” Among his extracurriculars: slipping cigarettes into blockbuster movies, paying off the ailing ex–Marlboro Man (Sam Elliott) to keep quiet about the cancer, and jousting with a Vermont senator (William H. Macy) dead set on branding cigarette packs with a skull and crossbones. All this while half-raising his son Joey (Cameron Bright), whose admiration for Dad is only slightly dented by the fact that Dad’s job is to make the truth unrecognizable. The film’s problem—and maybe it’s not fair to call it one—is timing. By the mid-2000s, the idea that cigarettes kill wasn’t exactly in dispute. This might have landed harder as a mid-century period piece, back when the science was still being buried under ad copy. Or it could’ve gone truly contemporary—substitute tobacco for selling a war on phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction and watch the satire bite clean through the bone. As it stands, Thank You for Smoking is a breezy, clever comedy with a terrific performance at its core. It doesn’t scorch the earth, but it makes the grass smoke a little.

A shaggy mystery wrapped in whiskers and mid-’60s Disney whimsy, That Darn Cat! is the kind of film where the title tells you exactly what the tone will be—exasperated, amiable, and just a little too pleased with itself. The plot, which hinges on the nocturnal wanderings of a Siamese cat known as “D.C.” (short for “Darn Cat”), manages to be both convoluted and featherlight. It’s technically a kidnapping thriller, if you squint through a kaleidoscope of slapstick and canned yelps. Patti (Hayley Mills), D.C.’s teenaged owner, discovers a wristwatch clasped around his neck, bearing the scratched-in plea “Help”—a distress signal from a hostage held by a pair of not-so-menacing bank robbers. She alerts the FBI, which dispatches Zeke Kelso (Dean Jones), an agent whose job quickly becomes less about federal procedure and more about trailing a cat with unpredictable taste in alleys, attics, and snack sources. That darn premise—half Hardy Boys, half hairball—could work at a tight 85 minutes, but the film stretches past two hours, padded with gags that feel lifted from a well-worn vaudeville routine. Slipping, tripping, pratfalling—rinse and repeat. Dean Jones gamely plays the straight man to a feline who couldn’t care less, while Roddy McDowall pops up as a cat-hating neighbor whose sole function is to be publicly humiliated every ten minutes. The charm here is mild but genuine, carried mostly by Mills’ sunny confidence and the sheer novelty of watching a cat carry an entire espionage plot on its back—literally. Still, it’s a long way to go for a film that never rises above pleasant. Even D.C., as cats do, seems vaguely bored by the whole thing.

It begins in a garage in Erie, Pennsylvania in the early 1960s—four kids, one catchy tune, and a name nobody can pronounce. The Oneders (say it out loud, then guess again) are just another local band until a drummer named Guy Patterson—nicknamed “Skitch,” then rechristened “Shades” after a single performance in sunglasses—sits in for a show and kicks their tempo up a notch. That notch changes everything. The song, That Thing You Do, is bubblegum lightning. It’s supposed to be a ballad. Shades speeds it up, and suddenly it’s a hit—first on local radio, then across state lines, then nationwide. The band signs with Play-Tone Records, hits the tour circuit, and rides their single straight into the top ten. All of this happens with alarming speed, like a dream being played back slightly too fast. And that’s the point. The music is pop perfection. The success is real. The cohesion? Less so. Jimmy (Johnathon Schaech), the group’s self-serious frontman and songwriter, wants to be taken seriously—by critics, by girls, by the gods of art. Jimmy begins to lose control—not just of the band, but of Faye (Liv Tyler), his girlfriend, who finds herself drawn to Shades. He doesn’t pursue her. He doesn’t need to. There’s a quiet steadiness to him, a kindness Jimmy has stopped showing. Bit by bit, Shades starts to feel like the center of the band, even if no one says it out loud. Orbiting them all is Mr. White—the band’s manager—played by Tom Hanks with a kind of polished calm, the ease of a man who’s done this before. He wears tight suits, speaks in smooth lines, and knows exactly how long a band like this can last. He just doesn’t pretend otherwise. The film moves like the song it’s named after—brisk, bright, built for replay. It’s full of minor-key notes, though: the fleeting nature of fame, the transactional weirdness of showbiz, the way a band can be both family and liability. But it never turns bitter. Hanks keeps the tone fizzy without being frivolous, nostalgic without being sticky. He knows how to cast a spell—and when to break it. The real secret weapon is Steve Zahn as Lenny, the band’s guitar-playing jester and dispenser of perfectly dumb joy. He doesn’t get an arc, exactly—just punchlines. And they’re perfect. Every so often, Captain Geech and the Shrimp Shack Shooters pops into my head for absolutely no reason. It was the fake band they played in during a beach movie cameo. No reason to remember it. But I do. This is a film with a rhythm that stays—not through drama, but through warmth, timing, and an impossible-to-shake chorus. Fictional or not, it’s one of the best rock movies ever made.