Film Buff Musings

U-571 is one of those war thrillers that’s best approached as fiction with a military haircut. It’s brisk, well-mounted, and moderately gripping, but it plays faster with history than with torpedo triggers. The film takes inspiration from a real 1941 British naval operation—disabling a German U-boat, boarding it via a disguised rescue vessel, and retrieving an Enigma machine—but hands the credit to American sailors, which, to put it gently, didn’t sit well with historians on either side of the Atlantic. Matthew McConaughey plays Lt. Andrew Tyler, a junior officer with a clean jawline and limited command experience, selected for a covert mission mainly because he speaks fluent German. His arc is standard-issue: early doubt, moral conflict, eventual steeliness. At first, he struggles to assert authority, but there’s never much doubt he’ll grow into the uniform by reel three. His commanding officer (Bill Paxton) sets the tone with starchy resolve, and Harvey Keitel lends his usual no-nonsense gravitas as the grizzled chief. The mission itself unfolds with underwater cat-and-mouse tension—depth charges, flooding compartments, suspicious sonar echoes. The espionage element gives the film a layer of intrigue, though it’s often steamrolled by more conventional action beats: countdowns, explosions, terse shouting in narrow hallways. Submarine films almost always flirt with claustrophobia, and Mostow gets the atmosphere right—tight quarters, sweat, desperation—but never quite pushes it into psychological territory. For history buffs, the film’s narrative sleight-of-hand is more than a minor irritation. But as genre entertainment, it holds together. There’s enough technical detail to give the illusion of accuracy, and enough suspense to keep things moving at a steady clip. It’s not Das Boot, but it’s not a misfire either. U-571 might fumble the facts, but it delivers the tension. Just don’t mistake it for a history lesson unless you’re prepared to annotate.

The Ugly Dachshund is a movie so deeply committed to its own cuddliness, it practically sheds fur. This is vintage Disney in full G-rated mode: bright colors, spotless sets, and not a trace of cynicism in sight. It’s engineered for maximum Awww, and if you’re even mildly susceptible to dog antics, resistance is futile. Dean Jones and Suzanne Pleshette play Mark and Fran, a practically airbrushed couple living in a mid-century dream house, complete with indoor easels and flowerboxes. She adores dachshunds—owns one, wants more. He, on the other hand, has always pictured himself with something a little more regal: a great dane. Destiny intervenes at the vet’s office. Their dachshund has just had three pups. A nearby great dane has been rejected by its mother. The vet suggests a little cross-species nursing, and voilà—Brutus the dane is adopted into a household of dachshunds. What follows is pure slapstick fluff. The dachshund pups are pint-sized agents of chaos, engineering elaborate household destruction and leaving Brutus to take the blame. He, towering and good-natured, spends most of the film bewildered, framed, or both. The film delights in this injustice. And for all its sugar, it’s surprisingly watchable—if only for the joy of seeing an oversized, gangly puppy try to navigate a world built for sausages on legs. Less delightful: the outdated gags involving a pair of Japanese dinner guests who insist Brutus is a “rion.” Even by 1966 standards, it’s a sour note in an otherwise gentle film. Still, this is one of Disney’s more polished live-action efforts from the period—brightly lit, briskly paced, and buoyed by its cast, particularly Charlie Ruggles as the vet with a twinkle and a scheme. It’s dopey. It’s predictable. But it’s also kind, unhurried, and shamelessly devoted to its dogged premise.

UHF is pure Weird Al: proudly juvenile, delightfully chaotic, and almost aggressively stupid in all the right ways. It’s also his only feature film, which feels appropriate—this sort of manic energy is difficult to sustain, and nearly impossible to repeat. Yankovic plays George Newman, a daydreaming burnout who gets fired from yet another fast-food job, only to stumble into the unlikely role of station manager at a failing UHF television channel. What follows isn’t so much a narrative as a loose framework to hang as many gags, parodies, and genre send-ups as can fit in 93 minutes. Gandhi II, Wheel of Fish, Raul’s Wild Kingdom (in which a deranged animal handler attempts to teach poodles how to fly)—all of it ridiculous, some of it brilliant. The channel’s accidental salvation comes via Stanley, the janitor (Michael Richards, pre-Kramer), who’s roped into hosting a children’s show and becomes an overnight sensation. Yankovic and co-writer/director Jay Levey seem less interested in building a story than in setting up a comedic buffet. Some bits work, some don’t, and the ratio will depend entirely on your tolerance for non sequiturs and rubber-faced overacting. For me, enough jokes land to make the whole thing worthwhile. One of the best gags comes from the station’s deadpan news program, hosted by the receptionist (Fran Drescher) and shot by their 3’9” cameraman Noodles (Billy Barty). It may be the only newscast in America where the anchor is literally looking down at the audience. There’s an attempt at romantic subplot, with Victoria Jackson as George’s long-suffering girlfriend, but it barely registers. George is so manic and scatterbrained that the idea of someone waiting around for him to become emotionally available feels like one of the film’s more unrealistic gags. Still, UHF wears its stupidity like a badge of honor—an intentionally slapdash comedy for anyone who ever wondered what television might look like if handed over to a parody-obsessed manchild. It’s not pretty, but it’s funny. And that’s the whole point.

On the bright side, Ultraviolet is exceptionally bright. Not just lit to the rafters—polished, saturated, scrubbed to a futuristic shine. You could hunt for the green-screen seams, but the candy-colored gloss keeps your eyes elsewhere. At the center, Milla Jovovich moves through the frame in color-shifting outfits like her own special effect—slashing, spinning, firing, never breaking stride. The rest is standard future-shock: a government-engineered virus creates vampiric super-soldiers; the infected turn on their makers; the state answers with layers of biometric security. Trouble is, checkpoints don’t mean much when the people you’re screening can dodge gunfire, carve through crowds, and pull off mid-air contortions that leave physics winded. It’s a setup that could go anywhere, but here it dissolves into fragments. A few good ideas surface, then vanish into a plot that barely holds together—especially toward the end, when it feels less like a story than a stack of comic-book panels shuffled into place. The dialogue is a mixed bag: simple to the point of parody, yet clipped into a rhythm that’s strangely easy to take. And while no amount of neon sheen can turn this into a good movie, I keep wanting to defend it. Maybe it’s the way the visuals keep trying to spin my brain into pinwheels.

A heartbreak wrapped in ribbons, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of the most beautiful films ever made about the quiet betrayal of time. Every line of dialogue is sung—an operatic experiment that sounds risky but plays out with such grace it barely registers as one. Michel Legrand’s score is lush, cyclical, and emotionally overwhelming, returning to the same few melodic themes until they start to feel like memory more than music. The most famous of these—“Je ne pourrai jamais vivre sans toi” (“I could never live without you”)—might be the saddest love song ever written for the screen. It plays like a vow, but it also sounds like something already lost. And while the repetition can wear thin, the film dwells in that precise, unending rhythm that makes love ache. The story is deceptively simple. Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve), a shopgirl in a pastel-drenched umbrella boutique, falls for Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), a young mechanic with oil-streaked hands and quiet, unwavering devotion. Their love is immediate, rapturous, and—inevitably—doomed. When Guy is drafted into the Algerian War, the separation begins to dissolve what the songs promised would be eternal. She waits. He writes. But the ache between them grows, and life—in its dull, forward shuffle—refuses to pause. By the time Geneviève discovers she’s pregnant with Guy’s child, their letters have grown sparse and uncertain. Everything in Cherbourg is deliberately stylized—the candy-colored sets, the flawless blocking, the way people move like they’re being guided by invisible sheet music. But none of it masks the sadness. The pastel palette doesn’t brighten the mood so much as soften it, like a gauze wrap on an old bruise. Demy isn’t telling a story of loss so much as capturing the quiet process of growing apart. No arguments. No betrayals. Just the slow reordering of a life when love is no longer the central fact. It’s a remarkable film. It doesn’t break your heart. It just hands it back to you a little quieter, and slightly out of tune.

Umma wants to be a horror movie about intergenerational trauma, but it keeps getting distracted by its own mood lighting. The premise—an off-the-grid mother haunted by her actual mother—is intriguing, and Sandra Oh gives it more weight than the script earns. For a while, the film simmers: strange noises, ghostly glimpses, bees buzzing like they’ve read the script. Then it plateaus. Amanda (Oh) lives on a rural farm with her teenage daughter Chrissy (Fivel Stewart), a set-up that seems suspiciously curated for a future haunting. Amanda’s mother has recently died—possibly years too late, judging by Amanda’s reaction—and an uncle shows up lugging a box of cremains and bad memories. Soon, Amanda’s unspoken resentments start wandering the house in traditional garb, asking questions no one wants to answer. The film hints at deeper material: cultural inheritance, parental violence, the slow erosion of identity in exile. Amanda, who rejects electricity and avoids anything that smells of her Korean roots, could have been a fascinating subject. But the ideas drift in and out like smoke—acknowledged, framed nicely, and then pushed gently offscreen. There’s some pleasure in the staging: long corridors, flickering lanterns, things moving in corners. A few jump scares are timed just well enough to make you forgive the fact that very little else moves. The performances, at least, commit. Oh manages to project internal panic without ever breaking her surface calm, and Stewart is convincing even when the dialogue insists she shouldn’t be. The film, however, folds in on itself before it’s had the decency to open. Emotional payoffs are murmured rather than earned, and the climax arrives as if summoned by obligation. Whatever spell was cast early on has dissipated by the time the final shot arrives. Umma starts with something—the setting, the setup, the slow throb of something unresolved—and finishes with nothing you haven’t already seen in a dozen better films. Quiet, tasteful, and almost politely afraid to get weird.

Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage, recently retired and haunted by the version of himself that won’t shut up. He talks to it, drinks with it, argues about legacy while staring at his own face in younger form. Then he gets a $1 million offer to appear at the birthday party of a Spanish billionaire—an invitation he accepts with the dazed resignation of someone who once turned down The Lord of the Rings. The fan is Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal), part mogul, part sweetheart, who has written a script just for him—action, emotion, explosions, everything Cage used to do without irony. And so begins a Mediterranean bromance fueled by movie quotes, mutual admiration, and enough CIA suspicion to give the plot something to trip over. The agency thinks Javi’s connected to arms dealers. Cage is drafted as an informant. He’s not great at it. The meta-winks pile up, but the movie doesn’t coast on premise alone. There’s a giddy affection in how it frames Cage—not just as an actor, but as a genre, a mood, a one-man subculture. The real surprise is how sincere it becomes. Cage and Pascal have the kind of crackling chemistry that makes you want them to star in everything together, forever—buddy comedies, road trips, culinary dramas. Anything. The film loses a bit of nerve in the final act—it doubles down on gunplay when it might’ve done more with self-referential madness. But by then, it’s already done its job. Cage is both the joke and the punchline, and also the guy you’re suddenly rooting for. Not out of nostalgia, exactly—but because watching him play himself better than anyone else could is its own strange reward.

A superhero movie played in a whisper. The concept’s terrific—real-world powers handled as if they might actually happen—and Shyamalan turns it in his hand like a rare coin, letting the light hit every surface. Bruce Willis plays David Dunn, the only survivor of a train wreck that should have killed everyone on board. He walks away without a bruise, taking it in with the calm of someone who’s been sidestepping catastrophe for years. Then there’s Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), bones like porcelain, mind like a collector’s catalog. He dresses as though he expects an inked border to appear around him at any second. To him, Dunn isn’t lucky—he’s proof of a theory, the real thing in street clothes, too slow to realize what he is. Elijah prods, lectures, theorizes. Dunn resists, until the questions start to stick. How much can he lift? How far can he push himself? How has he never—this part’s played with straight-faced seriousness—had a cold? The script presents this like a revelatory clue, though it plays more like a note you’d have pinned to the fridge by age twelve. Shyamalan handles it with the gravity of myth—that’s part of the appeal and part of the problem. The humor’s nearly absent, but the craft’s undeniable: camera moves paced like a stalker who knows you’ll turn around eventually, framing that can make an empty hallway feel like a cross-examination. The logic seeps a little, yet the mood stays fixed—measured, hypnotic, slightly askew. What you’re left with is a strange hybrid: origin story, procedural, mood piece—still clutching its own self-importance, yet hard to look away from while you’re in it. Later you can pick it apart; in the moment, it’s a theory you almost believe.

Uncle Buck is a film at war with itself—part tender family comedy, part loud, lurching cartoon. It’s built on a promising premise, powered by John Candy’s sheer likability, and then repeatedly undercuts itself with tone-deaf slapstick that makes you wonder if two different scripts got shuffled together in the edit. Candy plays Buck as a man who’s never quite gotten his act together—he drinks, he gambles, he lives off hot dogs and charm—but he means well. When he’s asked, out of desperation, to watch his brother’s three kids for a few days, he agrees with the kind of half-hearted reluctance that turns out to be exactly what the situation needs. Buck doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he’s trying—and Candy plays that tension beautifully. His scenes with the younger kids, Macaulay Culkin and Gaby Hoffmann, have an offhanded sweetness that sneaks up on you. There’s a real connection forming, even if it’s built on pancakes the size of tabletops. But just as the film starts to find a rhythm, it crashes into itself. Every quiet moment is followed by a loud one, every bit of emotional traction derailed by a scene that feels like it wandered in from a different movie. The worst offender: Buck stuffing his teenage niece’s sleazy boyfriend into the trunk of his car. It’s played for laughs but lands like a leftover from a vigilante comedy. Jean Louisa Kelly does what she can as the sulky niece, but the character isn’t so much written as sketched—your standard-issue teenage hostility that eventually softens into gratitude, because that’s how these arcs are supposed to go. There’s no real tension in the shift, just a box getting checked. Still, Candy keeps pulling things back from the edge. His performance is grounded, gentle, and quietly funny in ways the script only hints at. Even when the film loses its footing, he holds the center. A tighter rewrite might have turned Uncle Buck into the classic everyone seems to remember it being—one that trusted Candy’s instincts and let the relationships breathe without turning them into setups for gags. As it stands, the film has its moments. It just never quite figures out what kind of movie it wants to be.

A cheapie horror film with a poster that sells the whole thing in one image. It’s a riff on the classic “Uncle Sam Wants You” recruitment ad—except this time, Sam has rotting flesh, jaundiced eyes, and the word “Dead” slapped after “I Want You.” It’s clever enough that you barely need a trailer. If that image works on you, the movie probably will too. The setup goes full camp. Jodie (Christopher Ogden) is a star-spangled tween who idolizes his Uncle Sam—a Desert Storm vet just returned home in a body bag after a friendly fire accident. Jodie sees him as a hero. Others, not so much. Turns out Uncle Sam wasn’t just a soldier—he was abusive, vengeful, and now, undead. Before long, he’s upright and stalking the town, killing the insufficiently patriotic. Slackers, bullies, corrupt officials—Sam doesn’t discriminate, as long as they’re asking for it. There’s also the not-so-small matter of those he blames for his demise, many of whom just so happen to be in town for the Fourth of July celebrations. The kills are cheap, the dialogue cheaper, and the acting comes in two speeds: flat or shrill. Blood flies in unlikely directions. Limbs bend the wrong way. It’s all ridiculous—but intentionally so. The tone stays trashy but straight-faced, the premise never gets lost, and the film knows better than to overreach. As a slasher, it’s basic. As political satire, it barely gestures. But as a midnight movie with a killer mascot and a 4th of July body count, it delivers just enough. You either see the poster and press play—or you don’t. The movie knows that. It’s fine with it.

Adam Sandler, wild-eyed and diamond-toothed, plays Howard Ratner like a man trying to sprint his way out of a collapsing building. He’s a jeweler, a schemer, a gambler, and possibly the last person in Manhattan who believes he’s only one bet away from salvation. The film is a two-hour panic attack disguised as a character study, and Sandler rides the edge of it with such unshakable conviction you wonder if he’ll survive the shoot. Howard has recently acquired an uncut opal smuggled out of Ethiopia—his golden ticket, if he can keep it in his pocket long enough. But everything in his life is already mortgaged: his business, his marriage, his relationships, even the gem itself, which he can’t stop handing over to celebrities and creditors like it’s a party favor. His brother-in-law (Eric Bogosian), who’s both the family enforcer and the debt collector, stalks through the film with the quiet resolve of someone who’s waited long enough. Meanwhile, Howard pinballs between his seething wife (Idina Menzel) and his clingy mistress (Julia Fox), neither of whom is quite done with him. The Safdie Brothers shoot the film like they’re eavesdropping—voices overlapping, deals being made mid-conversation, momentum piling up before you’ve figured out where it’s going. The camera rarely sits still, and neither does Howard. He talks too fast, bets too big, lies too badly, and thinks it’ll all work out, because it has to. That’s the tragedy of it: he’s still convinced there’s a system to beat. The result is a loud, frantic, and perversely exhilarating experience, with Sandler delivering the kind of performance that feels like a self-detonation. He doesn’t soften Howard—he wears him like a rash. Every gamble, every sprint down 47th Street, every locked door and yelling match, pulls the screws tighter. Uncut Gems barrels forward with the single-minded force of its protagonist. You either grab hold or get flattened.

A surprisingly tolerable adaptation of the 1960s superhero cartoon, even if it barely resembles the original beyond the title. The cape remains, as does the rhyming catchphrase, but the self-aware parody has been swapped for a more straightforward origin story—and the cartoon’s upright, talking dog has been reimagined as an actual beagle. This version of Underdog begins his story on the police bomb squad, where a false alarm—prompted by a misidentified ham—gets him unceremoniously fired. He’s taken in by a retired cop (Jim Belushi) and his teenage son (Alex Neuberger), who dub him Shoeshine. Cue the shady science subplot: Shoeshine is kidnapped by a pair of villains in a lab, including Peter Dinklage as a rapidly unraveling mad scientist and Patrick Warburton as his perpetually confused henchman. One experimental mishap later, Shoeshine gains the power of flight, speech, and crimefighting. The plot is thin but serviceable, aimed squarely at the under-10 demographic. Shoeshine spends most of the film evading capture, bonding with his human, and pursuing a cocker spaniel voiced by Amy Adams. The villain wants him back; the dog just wants to do good. There are no big laughs, but the tone is light and watchable. I found myself mildly amused—Dinklage’s wardrobe becomes increasingly chaotic, and Warburton delivers every line like he’s never once questioned the material. It’s the kind of film you can half-watch while doing something else and not feel like you’ve missed much. Underdog isn’t reaching for greatness, and it doesn’t embarrass itself trying. It’s modest, mildly funny, and built to entertain without causing offense. For parents looking to kill an hour and a half, it gets the job done with minimal resistance.

The hair’s the same, but the body’s gone brittle. Snoop Dogg, sinewy and smirking, plays Jaycen “Two Js” Jennings—a former gridiron god now drifting on the fumes of old swagger. He still walks like he expects the world to move around him, but the cheers are long gone, replaced by TMZ clips and a mandatory court appearance. After a joyride ends with a car wrapped around a guardrail, the judge hands down community service: a whistle, a clipboard, and a sideline gig coaching a peewee team patched together from neighborhood runoff. The kids are sketches. One’s got rage issues. One can’t count. One just sort of vibrates. Snoop surveys them through sunglasses so dark they might as well be prescription apathy. He calls them “little assholes.” Not once or twice—dozens of times, like it’s been worked into the clock. It starts funny. Then it starts sounding like a reflex. There’s a story here, but you’ve seen it in warm-ups: the broken man who couldn’t care less until he does, the nobodies who become somebodies, the big game that rearranges priorities. The film checks each box like it’s auditing a sports-comedy starter kit—tantrums, pep talks, skill montages, redemptive high-fives. It’s not a plot—it’s an itinerary. Snoop, all limbs and drawl, floats through the movie like he negotiated filming around his nap schedule. He doesn’t perform so much as observe, but the movie leans into that. Give him some R-rated riffing, a few moments of half-hearted growth, and let him roast the kids like he’s holding court at a barbecue, and he mostly gets by on vibe. Every scene is a rerun. The structure’s familiar enough to recite: grumpy coach, misfit team, one halftime speech, one game-time miracle, one nod to emotional maturity. If you’ve seen even one of these a year—and you have—you’re already ahead of the story. But if expectations are low, the room is right, and your tolerance for recycled profanity is high, it’s watchable. It doesn’t trip. It just jogs the full game in a straight line and heads for the locker room without looking back.

This remake of the 1948 Preston Sturges classic stumbles out of the gate. Dudley Moore plays Claude Eastman, a temperamental symphony conductor who, within the first five minutes, swears to kill his wife. Daniella (Nastassja Kinski) is young, glamorous, and suspected—by Claude, anyway—of having an affair. The bulk of the film rewinds from that declaration, dragging us through the fits and spirals of Claude’s jealousy as he tries to cobble together evidence that barely qualifies as circumstantial. Moore, always more appealing when flustered by the world rather than tormented by it, is miscast. The role wants menace wrapped in mirth, but Moore’s specialty was always the hapless innocent, not the plotting paranoiac. Claude spends the film obsessively deducing an affair using fragments so flimsy they might as well be fortune cookie scraps. It doesn’t take long to realize we’re on a collision course with a big, syrupy misunderstanding. Most of the film’s comedy hangs on Moore’s suspicion tightening into obsession, but the pacing’s slack and the farce never really ignites. The one sequence that catches fire comes near the end, when Claude conducts an orchestral piece while playing out an elaborate fantasy of murdering Daniella—clean, bloodless, practically choreographed. And then, when he tries to carry it out, everything goes gloriously off the rails. It’s in that stretch—the physical chaos, the beautifully timed unraveling—that Moore finally feels at home. For ten minutes, the movie remembers how to be funny.

Yes, Donald Trump has narcissistic personality disorder. No, this isn’t breaking news. The premise of Unfit is that psychologists—bound by an ethical duty to warn—can and should diagnose public figures if their behavior presents a threat. The so-called “Goldwater Rule,” which discourages psychiatric assessments without personal examination, is dismissed here as outdated nonsense. After all, Trump is less a private citizen than a walking broadcast—if anything, there’s too much material to sift through. But once the film establishes this point, it doesn’t build on it. Instead, it loops: Trump is volatile, cruel, impulsive, vindictive, easily flattered, openly authoritarian—traits any sentient observer has clocked since he descended that escalator in 2015. The psychological commentary is thoughtful, but the analysis feels less revelatory than repetitive. Worse is the inclusion of figures like Bill Kristol, who helped midwife the Palin era and now wants to scold the very populist current he once cheered. The film’s attempt to reach across the aisle by propping up “reasonable” conservatives feels disingenuous, especially when those same voices helped pave the road they now claim to be shocked by. A few mea culpas don’t erase the trail of gas and matches. By the time the film circles back to its thesis—that Trump’s pathology makes him uniquely unfit for leadership—it’s just restating the obvious in increasingly grave tones. It preaches to the choir, then hands out hymnals. If you somehow missed the last five years and need a crash course in why Donald Trump’s presidency felt like watching a man play hot potato with democracy, this’ll do. For everyone else, it’s a somber recap that arrives long after the horse left the stable, kicked over the barn, and sued the farmer.

Clint Eastwood plays Will Munny, a former killer turned widowed pig farmer, trying—and failing—to raise his children without slipping back into old habits. His late wife, now sainted in memory, had civilized him once, but morality proves harder to maintain when the trough runs dry. Enter the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), a nearsighted loudmouth with a bounty proposition: two cowboys disfigured a prostitute, and there’s $1,000 on their heads. Munny resists, predictably, then doesn’t. He needs the money. Or maybe he just needs the excuse. Before heading out, Munny recruits his old partner Ned (Morgan Freeman), and together with the Kid, they make for an awkward trio—one half-crippled by age, the other by inexperience, and Munny somewhere in between. He’s not who he was, but the gun’s still familiar in his hand—and that familiarity slowly takes over. The film doesn’t rush. It knows the genre, knows what we’ve come to expect from it, and then quietly resists. There’s no operatic gunplay, no glowing sunsets. Even the violence is drained of glamor. Gene Hackman plays Little Bill Daggett, a sheriff who smiles like a schoolteacher and tortures like a bureaucrat. He runs the town like it’s his personal fiefdom and responds to the bounty with a campaign of beatings and casual humiliation. Hackman’s performance is the film’s sharpest tool—controlled, cruel, and impossible to reason with. As westerns go, this one’s tidy. Too tidy, maybe. The film seems strangely uninterested in dirt. It’s not that it looks pretty—it doesn’t—but there’s a studied restraint to the grit. Even the prostitute’s injuries, which supposedly set the plot in motion, are surprisingly cosmetic. A few superficial slashes and some artfully applied shading. The ugliness is intellectualized, never really felt. It’s a handsome film with a slight case of revisionist polish. Still, there’s no denying its grip. The characters breathe, the tension creeps, and when Munny finally uncoils, it’s with the certainty of a man who’s tried decency and found it overrated. Unforgiven doesn’t reinvent the western so much as it writes its final chapter in lowercase—quiet, deliberate, and unwavering.

Unicorn Store has Brie Larson directing and starring as Kit, a glitter-obsessed former art student who flunks out of school and moves back in with her well-meaning, overly cheerful parents (Joan Cusack and Bradley Whitford). Urged to get serious, she lands a temp job at a PR firm—an office where adult life is defined by passive-aggressive emails and marketing jargon. She plays along, but not convincingly. Then she receives an invitation to something called “The Store,” where a pink-suited Samuel L. Jackson promises to give her a unicorn—if she proves she’s ready. That includes building a stable, which she does with help from Virgil (Mamoudou Athie), a quietly bemused hardware clerk. The catch is the film never fully commits to whether this is a metaphor or just something quirky to hang the story on. Larson is engaging in the lead and keeps things moving, but the tone wobbles. The characters are exaggerated, the humor is often soft, and scenes drift without much build. Jackson’s role, while amusing, feels vague—more costume than character. There are better ideas poking through. A late-night camp-out scene, where Kit admits she doesn’t really understand adult life either, comes close to something real. But instead of exploring that, the film quickly returns to unicorn prep. Unicorn Store wants to say something about holding onto imagination without completely retreating from reality, but it doesn’t seem to know how. It’s watchable—bright, colorful, occasionally funny—but it never settles into anything deeper than a pastel mood board. Still, for those who enjoy their whimsy without too many questions asked, it mostly delivers.

Shot in a jittery, near-documentary style and told in real time, United 93 drops us into the raw confusion of 9/11 with a sense of precision that feels anything but cinematic. Paul Greengrass directs with restraint and urgency, building a film less concerned with dramatization than with reconstruction. There are no movie stars here. No speeches, no soaring scores. Just the accumulating dread of a day when nobody quite knew what was happening—until they did. The focus, as the title suggests, is on United Airlines Flight 93, the Boeing 757 hijacked and likely headed for Washington, D.C., before crashing in a Pennsylvania field. What exactly occurred on board remains a matter of partial record and inferred truth—assembled here through air traffic control logs, cockpit transmissions, and the final phone calls made by passengers. Where gaps existed, Greengrass fills them with plausible urgency rather than dramatic license. The decision to avoid visual rehashings of the more iconic images—like the Twin Towers themselves—is not only tasteful but thematically right. One early shot catches just the tips of the buildings from the airplane window as it lifts off from Newark, and the effect is quietly devastating. The film doesn’t dwell. It knows that we will. The hijacking itself is sudden and terrifying, executed by four men with box cutters, nerves, and a bomb strapped to one of their waists. A delayed takeoff buys the passengers just enough time to hear about the other attacks. What follows isn’t a speech, or a rallying cry, but a group of strangers murmuring plans, passing glances, quietly forming the decision to act. United 93 isn’t entertainment. It’s a controlled reenactment, built from restraint and respect. And it might be the most harrowing film of its decade.

This should be a perfect bad-movie night: killer cat, shady yacht, George Kennedy. But even with friends and alcohol, Uninvited mostly coughs up fur. The concept is admittedly promising: a fluffy orange tabby, cute enough to star in a calendar, moonlights as a genetic horror experiment that occasionally vomits out a smaller, angrier cat that mauls people to death. That’s the movie. That’s the hook. The rest takes place on a yacht headed to the Cayman Islands with a grab bag of human placeholders—sleazy yacht types, bikini bait, and George Kennedy, who performs like a man deeply aware he should’ve fired his agent two tax seasons ago. They’re all trying to outrun something—charges, extradition, boredom—but end up stuck on a floating death trap with a killer puppet in cat form. When the mutant doesn’t claw or bite its victims to death, it poisons their blood and causes them to bubble and burst like microwaved meat. It’s not the worst premise in the world, but the follow-through is so slack it’s practically inert. The transitions between the real cat and the foam-rubber stand-in are laughable, though not in the ways you’d hope. Most of the attack scenes look like someone squeezing ketchup over a stuffed animal while shaking it slightly. The acting hovers somewhere between narcotized and nonexistent. Even the camp potential is smothered by sheer, unrelenting dullness. It builds toward something—unclear what—and then stops. The premise keeps hinting at fun, but the execution just stares back blankly. Nobody seems particularly alarmed by the killer cat or interested in reacting to much of anything. Scenes trail off. Deaths happen, sort of. By the end, you’re not sure what’s worse: the fact that it’s bad, or that it’s so thoroughly uninterested in being anything else.

A gleaming, icy mystery-thriller with a whiff of gothic rot underneath, The Uninvited is exactly the kind of mid-budget pulp that keeps you watching, even after you suspect you’ve figured it out. It’s handsomely made, atmospherically staged, and just trashy enough to be fun. Emily Browning stars as Anna, recently discharged from a psychiatric hospital after a ten-month stay triggered by the death of her terminally ill mother in a fire—an event she witnessed but can’t fully piece together. Her return home is anything but stabilizing. Her father (David Strathairn), emotionally inert, is already living with Rachel (Elizabeth Banks), the unnervingly chipper nurse who once cared for his wife. The move feels abrupt. Calculated, even. Anna’s sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel), brimming with contempt, doesn’t buy the domestic act either. The girls unite, Nancy Drew-style, to expose Rachel’s secrets—convinced the angel of mercy has blood on her hands. The film plays heavily with Anna’s fractured perception, alternating between waking unease and surreal nightmares that bleed into daylight. It’s not subtle, but it works—especially given the film’s moody, seaside isolation and shadow-heavy interiors. Browning is a solid anchor: vacant when she needs to be, reactive when it counts. Banks, meanwhile, dances between Stepford-perfect and death-stare malevolence with impressive calibration. What follows is a tightly controlled build-up that walks the familiar path of unreliable memory and possibly murderous caregivers, only to veer, at the last minute, into something sharper. The final twist—equal parts outrageous and well-seeded—won’t stump every viewer, but it lands with a satisfying jolt. Slick, unpretentious, and unsettling in just the right register, The Uninvited plays its cards with enough conviction to make the whole thing worth the ride—even if you peeked at the ending early.

Andra Day gives a raw, nervy performance as Billie Holiday, but the film doesn’t know what to do with her. It opens with a promising thesis: that Holiday wasn’t pursued by federal agents simply because of drugs, but because she wouldn’t stop singing “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching that embarrassed the government. That idea alone could support an entire film. Instead, it gets lost in the clutter. What we get is a shapeless biopic that circles Holiday’s pain without ever locating the person. Scenes bleed into one another without rhythm or clarity. Addiction, jail time, betrayal, loss—every crisis is stacked atop the last with no real sense of progression. The timeline jumps, the tone swerves, and we’re left squinting through fog to find the through-line. Day brings Holiday’s contradictions to the surface—fragile one minute, furious the next—but she’s stuck in a film that reduces its subject to an endless series of bruises. The supporting cast is fine, though barely sketched. Trevante Rhodes, as the conflicted federal informant, has potential but isn’t given much beyond furrowed brows and the occasional apology. The other agents are even thinner, essentially suits with grudges. Visually, the film strains for significance—stylized transitions, bursts of archival footage, hazy lighting—but none of it adds up to insight. Even the music, supposedly central, is treated as punctuation rather than substance. There’s a sharp, timely movie buried somewhere in here, one that traces the political implications of Holiday’s defiance and the systemic cruelty that tried to silence her. But the film isn’t interested in that. It prefers the collapse.

It’s a bold proposition: a newly identified human ancestor—Homo naledi—might have been burying its dead 250,000 years ago. The bones are real; the claim is still under peer review. If it holds, it would mean a small-brained species with limited tools beat Homo sapiens to one of our most meaningful rituals. The documentary follows paleoanthropologist Lee Berger and his team into the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, where the fossils were unearthed—often by scientists navigating spaces barely wide enough to exhale in. Artist renderings give shape to what Homo naledi may have looked like: upright, expressive, vaguely Muppety. The reconstructions are speculative, but they do the job—adding a bit of eerie humanity to the fossils. The film is persuasive in tone, but singular in perspective. Berger mentions academic pushback, but the naysayers don’t get any screen time. So the hypothesis—that these hominins intentionally buried their dead—is presented less as a scientific debate than as a closing argument. You don’t need a panel of experts to see where this is heading. There’s also a lot of talk about how difficult it was to access the cave. Which is fair—the footage makes it look like a crawlspace designed by an escape room sadist. But after the third or fourth reminder, you might wish the film spent less time on bruised elbows and more on the actual stakes. Still, the idea at the heart of it all is hard to shake: could a species with one-third our brain size have understood death—and ritual? Unknown: Cave of Bones doesn’t settle the issue, but it knows how to make a mystery feel newly strange.

Unsane is a rare kind of horror film—one where the scariest thing isn’t a creature or a curse, but the quiet possibility that it could actually happen to you. Claire Foy plays Sawyer, a tightly wound professional who’s just relocated to escape a stalker. However, she’s still rattled—barely sleeping, second-guessing shadows, brushing off her panic with professional detachment. Looking for help, she visits a therapist, signs what looks like routine intake paperwork, and finds herself committed to a psychiatric facility for a 24-hour observation. Except it doesn’t end there. That setup is more than enough to build tension, and for a while, the film rides a strong current of ambiguity. Is Sawyer really in danger? Is the stalker real, or is her trauma reshaping her perception? The movie’s most effective scenes lean into that uncertainty, making you question whether you’re watching a paranoid spiral or a Kafkaesque nightmare. Unfortunately, a major twist is dropped too early, and the unease shifts into something more predictable. But even after that miscalculation, the film remains gripping. Shot entirely on an iPhone, the visual texture is claustrophobic and slightly off—blown-out lighting, distorted angles, everything just a little too close. It works in the film’s favor. So does Foy, whose performance walks the edge between panic and composure with startling precision. Her American accent wobbles here and there, but it hardly matters—she sells the escalating disorientation better than most could. The ending trades subtlety for catharsis, but it’s well earned. While I wouldn’t call Unsane perfect, it’s good—tense, nervy, and laced with a kind of horror that feels real.

There’s a sincerity to Untamed Heart that’s hard to swat away. It means well. It tries to break your heart. And for a while, it almost gets there. But there’s a baseline dopiness humming underneath that it never fully outruns. By the time it hits the final act—where tragedy is meant to bloom on cue—the cynical part of me had taken over. I saw it coming from three blocks away, and when it landed right on schedule, I didn’t cry. I laughed. Not proudly. The movie certainly didn’t laugh. The premise is earnest enough to avoid total parody, though not by much. Marisa Tomei, at her most adorably frazzled, plays Caroline—a Minneapolis waitress with a bad track record in men and a shift at a diner where the jukebox gets more affection than the staff. One night, after closing, she’s attacked. Enter Adam (Christian Slater), the quiet, wide-eyed busboy who shows up out of nowhere to save her. He doesn’t say much, but when he does, he explains—with full sincerity—that a nun once told him his failing heart had been replaced with a baboon’s. This is not allegory. He believes it. Naturally, they fall into a romance. Or something like one. Adam admits he’s been following her home every night to make sure she’s safe. Caroline’s reaction lands somewhere between unnerved and flattered. Later, she finds a shrine of her belongings in his apartment. Still fine. This is a movie where boundary violations are just love notes written in weird ink. And yet, the performances almost carry it. Tomei sells every scene, even the ones that barely justify her presence. Slater plays Adam like a wounded stray—mildly haunted, maybe part feral. Rosie Perez shows up just to remind the movie what a pulse sounds like. For a while, I was with it. The weirdness kept me curious. But the story doesn’t deepen—it merely softens. The romance stays symbolic, never quite tangible or believable. They’re both lonely, they’re both available, and the film calls that fate. Untamed Heart isn’t insincere. It’s just clumsy. A movie that wants to break you but hands you a tissue before it even starts. It’s sweet. It’s sad. It’s a little embarrassing. All heart, sure—but perhaps not the kind that knows how to beat.

Another day, another group of twenty-somethings who don’t know how to leave a haunted house. Until Dawn doesn’t do anything new, but it’s slick enough to pass for effort—and the premise does hook you. A missing sister, the same cursed night on repeat, thirteen chances to die before you’re out of reruns. It’s a smart twist on the horror-loop formula, and for a while, you want to see where it’s going. But the flavor fades fast. The scares flicker like faulty wiring, the atmosphere clings without sinking in, and the whole thing drags itself along with grim determination. The house shifts with each loop—new killers, new threats, new subgenres—but the variety feels cosmetic. One night it’s a masked slasher in the basement, the next it’s a half-seen witch muttering prophecy through a respirator. Later, it’s Wendigos—gaunt, half-seen, and always hungry. The threats change, the faces rotate, but the rhythm never does: run, hide, scream, reset. Beneath it all, Dr. Hill is running a psychological experiment—each loop, each death, a data point in some study of fear and memory. But it’s all premise, no payoff. The kills are gruesome, the effects competent, but nothing hits. It all spins in place. The characters don’t help. They bicker, panic, regroup—then circle back again. The cast plays it straight, but the script doesn’t give them room to evolve. By mid-film, they’re pawns in a haunted escape room, not survivors in something real. Bits of humor show up—enough to stop tension from sagging, but not enough to bite. The hourglass motif is visually strong at first—glowing sand counting down their chances—but it never matters: just glows, ticks, and gets ignored. Scene after scene resets, but momentum never accrues. There’s style, there’s effort, but there’s nothing underneath. Until Dawn gestures toward something bigger, then circles it for ninety minutes. It’s horror with form, but no follow-through.

Brian De Palma has always had a knack for wringing poetry out of pulp, and this might be his most operatic example. On paper, it’s a David Mamet script about Prohibition-era lawmen—a premise that could easily dry out under the weight of its own period detail. On screen, it’s pure spectacle: De Palma’s camera prowling like it’s casing the joint, tilting from shadowy alleys to marble staircases, holding a beat too long on a face while Ennio Morricone’s score swells beneath. You could strip the dialogue and still get the story—maybe even a better one. The tale follows Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), clean-cut enough to double as a recruiting poster, assembling a crew immune to bribes, intimidation, and the easy rot that comes with chasing gangsters. His ace in the hole is Jim Malone (Sean Connery), a beat cop well past his sell-by date and twice as dangerous for it. Connery plays him like a man who could win a fistfight with a cathedral bell, and the Oscar he took home feels less like a surprise than a receipt. Across the board is Al Capone (Robert De Niro), part tailor’s dummy, part coiled spring—able to summon headlines or hitmen with equal ease. He’s got half the city in his pocket, maybe more, but not the law, and that’s where Ness decides to hit him. The battles come in bursts: some blunt and vicious, others staged like grand opera. The Union Station sequence—pram, slow motion, stairwell gunfire—is De Palma at his most shameless and his most irresistible. It’s a period gangster piece that plays like a crowd-pleaser and a crime epic at once, elegant enough to admire, bloody enough to make you look away. De Palma doesn’t waste a frame, but he doesn’t mind staining one.

Cheech & Chong’s first feature film plays exactly like you’d expect a Cheech & Chong film to play—loose, improvised, and intermittently hilarious. The first 15 minutes are a blast: two burnouts trading drug-fueled nonsense, chasing a high, and barely registering the world around them. The setup is so simple it’s almost elegant—they’re looking for good weed. That’s it. And for a while, that’s enough. Then the movie remembers it’s supposed to have a plot. The duo ends up smuggling a van made entirely out of marijuana across the Mexican border, pursued by law enforcement so inept they seem to be operating in an entirely separate movie. It’s a good gag, and the film rides it for as long as it can. But once the story starts slipping into chaotic stage shows and a last-act punk concert—complete with Cheech jumping around in a tutu and shouting into a mic—it’s pretty clear the film has run out of gas. Still, there’s something oddly endearing about how little it cares. The pacing is slapdash, the dialogue often sounds improvised (because it probably was), and the ending makes almost no sense, but it’s all done with such genial dopiness that it’s hard to hold a grudge. Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong have an effortless chemistry, and even when the laughs dry up, they’re fun to watch. Up in Smoke more or less invented the stoner comedy template, for better or worse. It’s dopey, meandering, and uneven, but also oddly influential. As time capsules go, it’s a hazy one—but still worth cracking open, provided you know what you’re inhaling.

A proudly dumb slacker comedy in the Animal House mold—a rung below that, a rung above Porky’s, and content to drift right in the middle. Four academic washouts from Lepetomane University—better known as Lobotomy U—are blackmailed into entering a whitewater rafting race against preppy sadists, military-school hardcases, and local threats in sleeveless shirts. The reward is a diploma. The tone is barely supervised. The comedy is crude but purposeful—pratfalls, beer fights, topless detours, and the occasional one-liner that sneaks through. An outhouse explodes. A guard dog changes allegiances mid-attack. A fake rescue nearly becomes a manslaughter charge. The raft moves forward, mostly by accident and alcohol vapor. Tim Matheson glides through the role he’s been playing since 1978—the half-engaged operator who wakes up just in time to take credit. Dan Monahan, twitching like someone who hasn’t slept since Porky’s, delivers the anxious energy. Stephen Furst wears the face of a man who stopped tracking reality and started following the snacks. Sandy Helberg rounds out the team as the self-declared genius—over-verbal, under-useful, and always pitching the worst possible plan with complete confidence. The rivals are cartoonish and disposable. The river is the real obstacle, and the whitewater scenes are surprisingly well filmed—tight, fast, and shot with more spatial clarity than most action comedies ever manage. The rest of the movie moves on slapstick, cleavage, and momentum. Up the Creek doesn’t bother pretending it’s about anything. It just barrels downstream—no map, no brakes, no apology. For a movie built on leftover archetypes and floating trash, it moves better than it should.

Terry (Joan Allen) is bitter, boozy, and newly abandoned—her husband, she believes, has taken off with his secretary, leaving her to stew in suburban martyrdom and lash out at whoever’s nearby, most often her four adult daughters. Each is trying, in her own halting way, to establish a life outside the gravitational pull of their mother’s wrath. They’re played with quiet complexity by Erika Christensen, Keri Russell, Alicia Witt, and Evan Rachel Wood—each one shouldering her own plotline, whether it’s ballet, a questionable romance, or general household navigation. Kevin Costner plays Denny, a retired baseball player turned radio host who lives next door and nurses his own alcoholism with less theatricality. At first, he and Terry circle each other warily, bonded mostly by liquor and disappointment. But a reluctant friendship forms, eventually shading into something warmer—if not entirely functional. The film lives or dies by its conversations, and fortunately, the dialogue is good. It’s a serious drama about serious people, but it doesn’t wallow. The tone is often conversational, even wry. Everyone here is wounded, but no one’s given a violin. The film gives just enough room for each character to register without turning it into a therapy session. If there’s a misstep, it’s the twist ending—less a twist than a shrug dressed up as a reveal. It doesn’t invalidate what came before, but it does feel like the screenplay trying to tack on significance where none was needed. Still, the draw here is performance. Joan Allen doesn’t chew scenery—she corrals it. Every glance, line delivery, and half-suppressed insult is calibrated. She makes Terry maddening, funny, sympathetic, and believable, sometimes all in the same breath. And she generously leaves room for the supporting cast, all of whom are just as good.

Brittany Murphy has quicksilver ease, and eight-year-old Dakota Fanning can match her beat for beat—but the script gives them a stage that’s barely built. It needed cleaner lines, sharper edges, and a clue about what to do with its two best assets once they were in the same frame. Murphy’s Molly Gunn is the daughter of a late rock icon, a 22-year-old who’s managed to make “aimless” into a full-time occupation. Then her trust fund vanishes—absconded with by a crooked financial manager—and she’s left blinking in the light of the working world. Every job’s a mismatch until she stumbles into one she can half-manage: nannying Ray (Fanning), the brittle, hypochondriac daughter of a self-involved music executive (Heather Locklear). Molly floats through life in glitter and giggles; Ray runs hers like a military campaign. The movie wants that contrast to be the engine, but it’s not tuned right—Murphy is playing loose jazz while Fanning is locked in metronome time. The beats are predictable: the wild spirit teaches the disciplined child how to play, the child teaches the wild spirit how to stand still. There’s nothing wrong with that arc, but the film skims it so lightly you barely feel the shift. The rapport between Murphy and Fanning works in flashes—unguarded, funny, almost accidental. But Fanning, usually the definition of composure, comes off here as stiff in a way that feels more like directorial mishandling than a choice. The whole thing is amiable, uncynical, and easy enough to watch. It’s also the sort of movie you forget about while you’re still in the parking lot.

Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby make a curious pair—one measured and elegant, the other all elbows—and watching them volley dialogue is at least half the appeal. Or it would be, if time hadn’t turned parts of the film into a slow-motion wince. One early scene—Cosby making leering faces at women in a nightclub—is so blatantly skeezy that (even if modern audiences weren’t going to wonder if there was anything in their drinks) that there is nothing to do but groan. Released at the height of the blaxploitation cycle, Uptown Saturday Night tries to offer an antidote—a mild-mannered caper that swaps firepower for banter and aims to entertain without raising its voice. The instinct is admirable. The result is less certain. The setup has promise. Poitier and Cosby, playing factory workers on the hunt for their stolen prize, drift through a string of dead ends and eccentric side characters, with the occasional detour into mild peril. But the pacing is slack, and the script seems more interested in wandering than in building anything. The jokes skim the surface. The plot forgets to escalate. Their chemistry is easy, but not electric. Poitier underplays, Cosby mugs, and somewhere in between is a friendship that never quite turns into a comic engine. The film’s lone jolt of energy comes courtesy of Flip Wilson as a high-volume preacher in full rhinestone mode—he gives the movie five good minutes of what it needed the whole time. Uptown Saturday Night means well. It just never figures out how to mean something else too—like funny, or lively, or sharp. A noble swing at a genre rethink, stuck somewhere between cool and sleepy.

Used People opens with a sense of rhythm—family members filing into a post-funeral gathering and immediately resuming decades-old arguments like they’d only paused for coffee. The lines come quick, half insults dressed as conversation, half affection shouted over soup. For a while, the film has the timing of a family that’s been bickering for decades and sees no reason to stop now. Then it starts to drag. The shift is gradual but steady, as the story tightens around a romance that never quite stirs. Shirley MacLaine plays Pearl, recently widowed, approached by a soft-spoken suitor named Joe (Marcello Mastroianni), who arrives bearing memories, patience, and a string of measured declarations. Their scenes drift by with polite determination, never building toward anything sharper than mutual tolerance. Around them, the family simmers. Marcia Gay Harden plays Norma, Pearl’s daughter, who copes with grief and divorce by slipping into the identities of cultural icons—Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe—like she’s picking out costumes for her psyche. Her son, Mark, decides death can’t touch him and begins testing that theory on a small scale. Kathy Bates appears as Pearl’s other daughter, Jessica Tandy as her mother, and Sylvia Sidney as a family friend—each bringing a slightly different temperature to the table, all just loud enough to make sure they’re heard over one another. But each return to the central romance slows things back down. The movie trades in quick retorts for quiet speeches, lets grief taper off into soft-focus lessons, and eventually settles into a kind of pleasant inertia. There’s some warmth in the overlapping voices, and a few scenes that play with real wit, but the initial spark is gone by the time the film starts repeating itself.

A rare and warmly observed window into an Orthodox community rarely seen on screen—Ushpizin unfolds during Sukkot, the seven-day Jewish pilgrimage festival that involves prayer, hospitality, and a temporary hut in which meals (and sometimes sleep) take place. But for Moshe and Malli Bellanga (Shuli Rand and Michal Bat-Sheva Rand), a devout but destitute couple in Jerusalem’s Breslov Hasidic community, even the basics of celebration are out of reach. They’re broke, childless, and behind on bills. The citron—a ritual fruit required for the holiday—costs a hundred bucks for a perfect one. Moshe can’t even swing bus fare. Then one morning, a miracle slips under his door: a thousand dollars in cash, no note, no explanation—just there. Debts vanish. Prayers are answered. The citron is bought. But not all blessings are obvious at first. Soon after, two men from Moshe’s not-so-devout past show up—escaped convicts with a taste for disruption and nowhere else to go. He invites them in. They become his ushpizin—the honored guests. And what follows is a strange, stirring blend of comedy, spiritual test, and cultural insight. Shuli Rand, who also wrote the script, gives Moshe a mixture of warmth, conviction, and barely-contained panic. His real-life wife Michal Bat-Sheva, a non-actress cast due to religious modesty restrictions, holds her own beautifully—watchful, earthy, and every bit her husband’s equal in faith and temper. Their bond holds steady, even as the walls start to shake. Ushpizin keeps its scale small but its spirit wide—anchored in faith, frustration, and the daily grind of trying to be good. If the customs feel unfamiliar, that’s part of the gift. The film doesn’t explain so much as invite. Pull up a chair.

The Usual Suspects has often been pegged as a secondhand Tarantino knockoff—and not without reason—but it still works. The dialogue is sharp, the plot is tangled in all the right ways, and the cast of character actors seem to be enjoying themselves just enough without tipping into smugness. It kicks off with five low-rent criminals—Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Pollak, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro, and Kevin Spacey—rounded up for a hijacking they all claim they had nothing to do with. While killing time in the holding tank, they come up with a plan to commit a real crime. What follows is a layered, increasingly convoluted web of cons, shootouts, shifting allegiances, and unreliable narration—all recounted by a nervous, limping Spacey to a skeptical federal agent (Chazz Palminteri), who senses there’s more going on than he’s being told. That twist ending—famous to the point of parody—will either floor you or feel like a cheat. Personally, I didn’t mind the trick so much as the timing. It’s less of a payoff and more of a clever curtain pull. Still, the construction is neat, and the film earns a rewatch if only to track the sleight of hand. What keeps the film engaging, even when the plot starts curling in on itself, is the rhythm. The script has snap, the pacing never drags, and the cast leans into their roles with just the right mix of menace and mischief—especially Del Toro, who garbles his dialogue into something halfway between a threat and a joke and walks off with every scene like he knows no one’s going to stop him. It’s not deep, but it’s a good time. And if you’re in the mood for something twisty, slick, and stylishly overthought, it scratches the itch.