Film Buff Musings

V for Vendetta speaks in declarations, not dialogue. It pounds the table, throws open the curtains, and delivers every line like it’s been waiting years for an audience. The film is adapted from the Alan Moore comic, which borrowed heavily from 1984, and makes no attempt to downplay that influence. What it adds is theatricality—slow turns, flickering torchlight, and masked pronouncements about freedom, control, and the cleansing power of explosions. Hugo Weaving plays V like a revolutionary stage actor who never left the wings. The mask never changes, but he still manages to raise eyebrows. He saves Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman) from a pair of jackbooted thugs and pulls her into his underground theater of resistance. She’s not sure what she’s agreed to, and neither is he. Eventually they land on the only solution this version of Britain will accept: demolish Parliament and let the pieces settle where they may. The fascist regime isn’t hiding behind suits and slogans—it’s already fully formed, with surveillance in every room and torture baked into the operating manual. Subtlety has been cleared out to make room for symbolism. There’s a rhythm to it. The film doesn’t escalate—it declares itself, and then burns steadily to the end. Visually, it’s sharp. Composed. Every set looks like it was designed to echo. Portman finds her footing, even when the script gives her little. Weaving owns every line, even the overwritten ones. Stephen Fry brings warmth. John Hurt goes full broadcast tyrant. The cast understands the assignment, and plays it like a fable with fire behind it. There’s plenty here to roll your eyes at—labored speeches, overlit metaphors, ideas repeated once too often. But the commitment is total. V for Vendetta doesn’t care if you think it’s too much. It thinks it’s exactly enough.

Even during the Great Depression, romantic comedies rarely wandered far from their preordained destinations. Vagabond Lady doesn’t either, but it strolls there with enough personality to keep the path from feeling worn. Josephine (Evelyn Venable) grew up alongside two brothers—John (Reginald Denny), a stiff-lipped executive with cultural ambitions, and Tony (Robert Young), a globe-trotting charmer who treats formality like a seasonal allergy. Josephine is engaged to John, but he worries she’s not refined enough for his tastes. So he recruits Tony to steer her toward the finer things. That plan lasts about ten minutes. What actually happens is more satisfying: Josephine and Tony bond over their shared disinterest in all things elite. Opera bores them. The circus, on the other hand, makes perfect sense. Their chemistry clicks not because the plot demands it, but because they seem genuinely relieved to find someone else who’d rather skip the symphony. It moves quickly—just over an hour—and leans heavily on its cast to keep things aloft. Some performances spike unexpectedly into melodrama, with actors delivering lines like they’re gunning for a different genre entirely. It doesn’t derail the film so much as jolt it into a stranger, livelier register. There’s nothing surprising here, but there’s charm in how loosely it all plays. Vagabond Lady hits its marks, keeps things light, and remembers not to linger. It’s a modest film with a few odd corners and a slightly crooked smile.

Some films tell stories. This one casts a spell and leaves you to sort through the ashes. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, part of the Czechoslovak New Wave, unfolds entirely in allegory, though the central thread is surprisingly direct: a 13-year-old girl steps into womanhood, and the world—predators, rituals, symbols—comes rushing in. Early on, we learn Valerie has had her first menstruation. After that, everything blurs. Red liquid splashes over daisies. A pair of magical earrings appears and reappears whenever danger circles too closely. There are vampires. There are leering priests. At one point, she’s tied to a stake for witchcraft; in the next scene, she’s untouched and wandering freely again, as if plot continuity is beside the point. The film resists logic by design. You don’t follow it—you experience it. It’s a dream masquerading as a folktale, or maybe the other way around. The imagery drifts between the surreal and the unsettling, shot through with soft pastoral light and scored with music that sounds like it was recorded in a haunted chapel during spring. Jaroslava Schallerová, as Valerie, moves through the film with wide-eyed calm, observing more than reacting. No matter what’s happening—being chased, dressed up, burned, kissed—Valerie wears the same expression. Detached, composed, maybe faintly curious. Like she knows she’s in a story but hasn’t been told what kind. Nothing really connects in a literal sense, and that feels deliberate. Scenes wash over you, full of symbols that don’t explain themselves. You’re left to piece it together later—if at all. Loss of innocence, sexual awakening, the mutating power dynamics of girlhood—it’s all in there, refracted through the lens of myth and dream logic. A beautiful puzzle. A reverie laced with menace. You don’t watch Valerie and Her Week of Wonders to follow a plot—you watch it to get lost.

It’s Romeo and Juliet with mall parking, bad lighting, and a synth beat. Nicolas Cage plays Randy, a Hollywood dropout with a face full of attitude and enough raw need to convince you he’s feeling something. Deborah Foreman is Julie, the clean-cut Valley girl with frosted lip gloss and friends who speak in italics. They meet at a party, fall into each other’s arms, and then spend the rest of the movie trying to justify it. That’s the film. A forbidden romance, filtered through leg warmers and junior prom politics. Julie ditches her ex. Her friends panic like she’s joined a cult. Randy sulks. There’s a breakup, a makeup, and a climactic dash through a fast-food restaurant. The film nails the details—jukeboxes, mall escalators, Plimsouls gigs with too much hairspray—but never figures out what it wants to say. Dialogue leans on Valley slang for personality, but most scenes evaporate before they find a shape. The supporting cast is all gesture: ditzy friends, horny classmates, dazed parents. No one matters unless they’re standing next to Cage. And Cage, to his credit, does the work. He gives Randy a bruised sincerity that slices through the lacquer. Foreman keeps pace, though the script mostly casts her as a weather vane. The soundtrack is the only part that doesn’t feel tentative—Modern English, Sparks, The Psychedelic Furs. The Plimsouls appear in person. The music moves even when the movie doesn’t. Valley Girl gets the texture of infatuation, but not the feeling. It looks right, sounds right, but leaves no mark. A time capsule with the air sucked out.

For anyone even vaguely sympathetic to the cult of Nicolas Cage, this is essential viewing. Not because it’s a great movie (it isn’t), but because it gives Cage an open floor to spiral into one of the most berserk, committed, and deeply unwell performances ever committed to film. Without him, it’s an oddball black comedy. With him, it’s a panic attack in Armani. Cage plays Peter Loew, a preening literary agent with a nasty streak and a faltering grip on reality. He picks up a woman at a nightclub (Jennifer Beals), takes her home, and is promptly bitten—possibly by a vampire, possibly by his own delusions. Either way, he’s convinced he’s transforming. He starts wearing plastic fangs, eating cockroaches, and tormenting his secretary (Maria Conchita Alonso) with the fervor of a man who thinks HR departments are a myth. The film toys with whether or not the vampirism is real, but it hardly matters. The internal logic dissolves the further Cage goes off the rails, and somehow, the movie is better for it. It’s mean, erratic, and often vile—but so hypnotically deranged that it doubles as a horror-comedy and an unintentional character study in ego collapse. It’s Cage in full meltdown mode: the manic line readings, the bug-eyed stares, the alphabet recitation that sounds like a Gregorian exorcism. You could argue he overacts. You’d be right. But Vampire’s Kiss isn’t trying to keep a straight face—it’s trying to weaponize madness.

Hugh Jackman, draped in leather and mystery, plays the Vatican’s answer to a Swiss Army knife—monster hunter, action hero, occasional brooder. His assignment: vanquish every horror icon within reach. Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, werewolves, even Mr. Hyde show up for a turn in the spotlight. It’s not a story so much as a Universal Monsters reunion special run through a blender and sprayed across the screen at 120 decibels. Kate Beckinsale joins the chaos in corseted battle gear, brandishing stakes and dropkicks with equal flair. Her character has a backstory, technically, but it mostly serves to get her from one CG-heavy showdown to the next. The script gives her just enough dialogue to justify the fight choreography. The plot—what little of it holds together—involves Van Helsing working under the Vatican to expunge evil and, in doing so, redeem his soul. It’s a noble idea, tossed in almost as an afterthought between flaming carriages and winged vampires dive-bombing castles. The film isn’t interested in theology, or mood, or even atmosphere. It wants movement. Sound. Blur. Everything that goes boom. And for a while, that works. There’s a momentum to it, an energy that tries to pass for style. But after the third or fourth high-speed monster brawl, the novelty dulls. The action never stops, but it also never shifts gears. It’s all climax, no buildup. Eventually the noise settles into white static. Van Helsing is a carnival ride with fangs, stitched together from cooler ideas and louder movies. It’s not unwatchable. It’s not even boring. But it’s empty. Thrills without tension. Lore without meaning. And by the end, the only thing left to stake is your attention span.

Cameron Crowe, once the maestro of mixtape emotion and theatrical sincerity—Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous—steers into a cinematic cul-de-sac with Vanilla Sky, a lacquered remake of Alejandro Amenábar’s Open Your Eyes that feels less like a vision than a screensaver with existential footnotes. It isn’t a fiasco, exactly—it plays—but it’s the sort of movie that leaves you squinting at your own reaction, tracing the outlines of meaning through glassy surfaces and wondering whether the film forgot to exhale or just prefers vapor. Tom Cruise plays David Ames, a smug publishing heir with a portfolio full of distractions and a conscience on layaway. His sense of reality is already porous when the film begins, which makes the moment it ruptures—following a car crash orchestrated by a bitter ex (Cameron Diaz, switching between clingy and clinically unstable with unnerving ease)—more like a push off the edge than a break. The new woman in David’s life, Sofia (Penélope Cruz, reprising her role from the original film), is luminous in that almost metaphorical way—so disarmingly perfect she might not be real. Which is fitting. Reality, here, is a membrane that stretches, tears, and forgets to reseal. This isn’t one of Crowe’s sharper scripts—his signature emotional clarity, so potent in earlier films, slips away under layers of sci-fi abstraction and dream logic. You keep waiting for the emotional throughline to emerge, but it stays buried under the film’s need to disorient. And while the twisty structure offers pleasures of the puzzle-box variety, it never quite lands with the philosophical weight it seems to be chasing. Cruise, to his credit, commits to the unraveling, but his performance feels somewhat miscalibrated—less vulnerable than disjointed. There’s a version of David that invites empathy; this one mostly inspires curiosity. Still, the film looks great. There’s a painterly sheen to the dream sequences, and the soundtrack—Crowe’s old ace—is predictably impeccable. It’s a film that fakes depth well, and that may be enough for some. Vanilla Sky is engrossing while it plays and evaporative once it’s over. A beautiful mirage, if not quite a meaningful one.

The twist made me angry—not because it fooled me, but because it thought that was enough. It’s the kind of ending built for gasps and double-takes, but what it earned was a long sigh and a sudden urge to throw the remote at the TV. Up to that point, The Vanished floats by as a serviceable missing-child thriller. A young girl disappears from a lakeside campground. Her parents (Thomas Jane and Anne Heche) unravel in real time—grief curdles into suspicion, suspicion into paranoia. They confront strangers, wave guns around, and take over the investigation like they’ve seen one too many procedurals and know the only way to swift justice is to take matters in their own hands. Jason Patric plays the sheriff, mostly by standing in rooms and looking like he regrets answering the phone. It could’ve worked. The setup is solid, the cast is game, and there’s enough atmosphere to suggest something might build. But the film plays it too safe. Scenes stall out. Dialogue leans on shouting. Even the performances feel held in place, like they’re waiting for a better version of the script to show up. And then comes the ending—a late-game swerve that doesn’t deepen anything, just unravels what little tension had been built. Instead of reframing the story, it wipes it out. It’s not clever. It’s deflating. The Vanished looks like a thriller and moves like a thriller, but never commits to one. It relies on a final trick to make the movie—and when that fails, there’s nothing left to hold it up.

Thackeray’s polite little minefield gets the deluxe treatment—velvet upholstery, chandeliers on standby, and more powdered smugness than anyone strictly needs. Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, born with nothing and determined to never stay that way for long. She starts off under the Sedley family’s roof as a governess, minding her manners while sizing up her exit strategy. The real maneuvering begins when she lands in Sir Pitt Crawley’s household, which comes conveniently stocked with relatives, inheritances, and enough simmering grudges to keep a quick thinker like Becky occupied. Mira Nair shoots it all like a painted parade—saturated colors, crowded parlors, just enough hidden barbs to stop it from feeling embalmed. The dialogue bites where it can, though here and there the story settles back into the polite stiffness that follows period costumes like a shadow. Witherspoon holds the center without blinking. Her Becky is clever but never icy, soft-spoken until she’s not, and always two steps ahead of whoever’s underestimating her that day. Jonathan Rhys Meyers drifts through as George Osborne, too self-satisfied to notice much of anything outside his own reflection. Bob Hoskins’s Sir Pitt is a shabby patriarch Becky bends to her liking, and Jim Broadbent’s Mr. Osborne lurks on the periphery, a reminder that respectability is just money in a different suit. The plot zigs through weddings, scandals, debts, and a well-timed heartbreak or two—tidy enough to keep the thing moving even when the narrative tablecloth starts to bunch. The real point is Becky: watching her read the room, smile sweetly, and edge the furniture into her pocket before the host remembers to look. Not the cutthroat take on Thackeray’s story it could have been, and that’s to its detriment, but it stays lively, dresses itself well, and refuses to pity Becky for wanting more than she was given. She never learns her lesson—and the film is better for it.

A priest walks into a patch of trees labeled “China,” steps on a glowing relic, and returns with the ability to turn into a Velociraptor. The VelociPastor should spiral into inspired lunacy from there. Instead, it parks in place, recycling the same lo-fi gags until even the rubber suit looks exhausted. Gregory James Cohan plays Doug, the dino-priest, with a kind of wounded conviction that almost holds it together. He partners with Carol, a pragmatic sex worker, and they embark on a moral crusade involving street crime, ninjas, and foam-limbed justice. Along the way, there’s a Vietnam flashback where a woman steps on a landmine and erupts like a Kool-Aid fountain, and a memory of Doug’s parents smiling serenely from inside their parked car moments before it explodes. These scenes aim for absurdity but rarely go beyond the punchline’s first beat. Some bad movies try too hard. This one barely tries at all. The acting wobbles between deadpan and accidental. The editing stumbles. The music feels like a royalty-free loop left running in the background. What should be a late-night cult riot plays like a half-rehearsed sketch everyone gave up on halfway through. There’s potential in the premise. But The VelociPastor nails the title and forgets the rest.

I enjoyed Vengeance more than I didn’t, though that might sound like fainter praise than it is. It’s a smart, self-aware black comedy with plenty on its mind, but the satire could’ve used a finer point and the dialogue a bit more sting. Some of it plays like a first draft waiting for someone to punch it up. B.J. Novak stars as Ben Manalowitz, a smug New York writer whose idea of connection is knowing someone’s Wi-Fi password. When he gets a call from rural Texas informing him that a woman he barely remembers—an occasional hookup—has died, he’s roped into attending the funeral. Her family, it turns out, believed the relationship was much more serious. They also believe she was murdered. Ben doesn’t, but he smells a story, so he sticks around and decides to turn their grief into a podcast. It’s a fish-out-of-water setup, but one handled with more restraint than usual. The jokes about culture clash are there, but they don’t hit you over the head. There’s genuine curiosity in the way the film moves through West Texas—small towns, broken phones, drug overdoses, Whataburger philosophy. The family, especially Boyd Holbrook as the brother, is drawn with warmth rather than condescension. Novak doesn’t mock the locals so much as try to figure out what makes them tick, and sometimes, what makes him not. The film stumbles hardest in the final stretch. One character suddenly decides to summarize the entire thematic arc aloud, as if a professor wandered in mid-lecture. It’s not wrong, but it’s unnecessary, and it flattens everything that came before. The ending, meant to be a gut punch, lands with a shrug. Still, Vengeance is often clever and occasionally sharp. It’s well-acted, well-paced, and Novak proves he has a good eye for tone—even if he doesn’t always trust it. The film doesn’t quite deliver on its full potential, but it gets close enough to be worth hearing out.

One of the great trial films—not because it’s flashy, but because it’s relentless. David Mamet’s script has the snap you’d expect, and Paul Newman delivers a performance so lived-in you can practically smell the whiskey on his breath. He plays Frank Galvin, an alcoholic ambulance chaser working out of habit more than conviction. Then his old partner Mickey (Jack Warden) hands him what looks like a gift: a Catholic hospital botched an anesthesia procedure, the patient choked, and she’s been brain-dead ever since. The diocese wants to settle for $210,000—quick, clean, no fuss. Frank’s supposed to take the money. Instead, he looks at the case and sees something the rest of them stopped seeing a long time ago: the system failed, and everyone’s content to pretend it didn’t. “We’ve been paid to turn the other way,” he says—and refuses the offer. No client approval, no safety net, just the decision that this one won’t be swept aside. From there, the trial’s less a climb than a siege. He’s up against the church’s airtight defense team, led by James Mason with the calm menace of a man who’s never lost. The judge (Milo O’Shea) tilts the scales before the jury even sits down. Expert witnesses vanish. His own clients threaten to have him disbarred. And then there’s the bottle—always within reach, always an option. Lumet shoots it with his usual precision: no grandstanding speeches until they’ve been earned, no wasted cuts, no sentimentality that isn’t immediately undercut by reality. The courtroom scenes play like chess matches, each move tightening the trap. By the time Frank finds his closing argument, it’s not about winning so much as dragging the truth into the light before the door slams shut again. The Verdict is an underdog story stripped of the feel-good gloss—it’s about a man so far gone he’s almost out the other side, fighting a case because it’s the only thing keeping him upright. What a terrific film.

Given that the first Brady Bunch Movie was built on a single gag—the squeaky-clean ’70s family dropped into a cynical ’90s world—it’s a surprise the sequel doesn’t just reheat the same joke and serve it lukewarm. Instead, it takes a left turn: the Bradys are still oddballs, but the novelty of their obliviousness is dialed back. This time, the joke is on the outsider. Enter Tim Matheson as a tan, smirking con artist posing as Carol Brady’s long-lost husband. He’s taller than she remembers. He looks nothing like the man she married. He’s also clearly up to something. Carol accepts his story anyway, which is funny in exactly the way sitcom logic often is—just pushed far enough to get a reaction. Matheson spends the film trying, and failing, to blend into the Brady universe like a cynical virus in a relentlessly wholesome host. His actual goal is to steal an antique stone horse that’s been sitting in the Brady living room for years, unnoticed and unremarkable—until it’s revealed to be a $20 million artifact. The family, of course, remains cheerfully oblivious, too busy with potato sack races and dinner table wisdom to ask why a man in aviators keeps making long-distance calls from their rotary phone. The film is sharper than it pretends to be. It sticks to the rules of sitcom logic and rides them straight into farce. There are cameos, callbacks, and plenty of jokes that work by sheer commitment. Shelley Long and Gary Cole continue to play it straight, and that remains the key to making any of this function. The Brady Bunch Movie was a sketch padded to feature length. A Very Brady Sequel feels more like a real comedy—more confident, more specific, and far more watchable.

The original Crocodile Dundee remains one of my go-to comfort watches—light, quotable, and charming in that offhand way Paul Hogan perfected. This unofficial epilogue, if that’s what we’re calling it, finds Hogan playing a version of himself, accepting a knighthood from the Queen but hitting a minefield of tabloid scandals and public embarrassments before he can get anywhere near the ceremony. It’s less a movie than ninety minutes of amiable loitering with Hogan, who seems perfectly content to let the jokes pile up at his expense. That easygoing self-mockery is the film’s strongest asset—and it works, for a while. You’re not here for narrative discipline; you’re here to spend time with a laid-back legend who still squints the same way he did in 1986. The laughs are mild, but the easy tone keeps it moving. No big laughs, just a steady, easy drift. Then it strays into sitcom turf—a broad paparazzo, a gag about trending headlines that overstays, celebrity cameos more polite than pointed. A leaner, more self-aware cut—something with bite—might have hit harder. Instead, there’s a car chase. Still, a few moments work. Chevy Chase and John Cleese turn up for some surprisingly funny, unflattering cameos, and Hogan has enough quiet ease to keep it from becoming pure brand maintenance. It runs out of gas by the end—once the tabloid plotline thins, there’s not much left—but I didn’t mind the time spent. If Crocodile Dundee means anything to you, there’s enough here to warrant a look. Just don’t expect another knife.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet follows Amélie with something darker, broader, and spiked with the same peculiar flourishes—quirky in the margins, shadow at the center. The visual world is meticulous: sets crowded with detail, frames you could hang. Even in the mud and fog of World War I, the lens finds something painterly. Mathilde (Audrey Tautou) comes from a modest farming family, but resignation isn’t in her build. Her fiancé and childhood sweetheart, Manech (Gaspard Ulliel), has vanished—no body, no certainty, just the military’s bland “missing in action.” She decides that’s not an answer. A limp from polio slows her walk, not her hunt. She questions witnesses, chases half-whispered rumors, tracks Manech’s trail to his last battlefield, and—through guile, charm, or both—slips into rooms of locked military files. The structure is investigative, but the tone shifts—romantic devotion one moment, absurdist war satire the next, then straight into tragedy. Digressions—odd meetings, stray recollections—don’t stall the search; they deepen it. Tautou makes Mathilde bright without naivety, wry without cynicism, stubborn enough to make the improbable feel reachable. It’s a wartime love story that refuses misty sentiment. Every tenderness comes edged with danger; every smile courts loss. By the end, Jeunet has something rare: playful without being slight, melancholy without calcifying. You start for the beauty, stay for the ache.

V/H/S kicks off like someone dropped a camera down a flight of stairs and decided to call it a movie. The frame story—petty crooks breaking into a house, stumbling across a corpse and a stack of tapes—doesn’t build tension so much as clatter around looking for it. It’s loud, leering, and pleased with its own grime. Each segment pretends not to be staged, and most of them play like ideas someone dared to film before bothering to write. There’s static, blood, the usual handheld spasms. And once or twice, the right kind of chill. But mostly, it’s horror by attrition—if the tape doesn’t scare you, maybe the tracking issues will. Most segments fade on arrival—too disjointed, too indulgent, or too reliant on pixelated mayhem to deliver any lasting scare. But a few have teeth. One standout begins like a frat boy conquest video: booze, leering, bad intentions. Then the girl with the wide, inhuman eyes begins to repeat “I like you” into the lens, and suddenly the predator-prey dynamic flips. It builds into something genuinely thrilling—sharp, unexpected, and shot through with menace. Another solid entry involves a group of friends in the woods stalked by a glitching creature that barely registers on camera—grainy and hard to place, which somehow makes it worse. But whatever energy the film builds gets bled dry by the final acts. By then, the format has worn itself out, the framing device has devolved into noise, and the transgressive edge curdles into gross-out monotony. There’s a line between discomfort and exploitation, and V/H/S steps over it far too often—particularly in its excessive use of sexual violence as a scare tactic. As an experiment in low-budget horror, it’s occasionally inventive. But the ratio of dread to drivel is rough. For every effective moment, there’s a barrage of half-coherent shrieking and a camera tumbling into drywall. Like a tape that’s been copied one too many times, it degrades before it even gets started.

Vice Versa began life in 1882 as a novel about a father and son who swap bodies—a premise recycled so often you half expect Hollywood to issue a punch card. Disney’s Freaky Friday had its turn in the ’70s. This one trades the teapot for a magic skull from Thailand, tucked in a crate like it’s waiting for Indiana Jones to misplace it. Marshall Seymour (Judge Reinhold) is a hotshot toy executive who treats deadlines like weapons and employees like clay to be molded under stress. His son Charlie (Fred Savage) is eleven, decent on the drums, mediocre in class, and just old enough to suspect his dad has no idea what being a kid feels like anymore. An argument about who’s got it easier escalates, the skull gets passed between them, and—without ceremony—the rules of biology are suspended. From there, the film doesn’t coast on the novelty. Reinhold throws himself into Charlie’s gangly, motor-mouthed worldview, tripping over corporate jargon one minute and treating a business meeting like recess the next. Savage is the real ringer: small frame, big authority, stomping through middle school with the authority of a man who’s had three cups of black coffee and a bad commute. The way he barks orders at adults is so precise it almost feels like you’ve met this eleven-year-old before, probably in a nightmare. The plot moves in predictable grooves—school humiliations for Dad, boardroom pratfalls for Son—but the gags are sharper than they need to be. A trip to the department store spirals into an impromptu toy demo. A music recital plays out like a boardroom coup. The film has the sense to let these moments settle quietly without nudging the audience in the ribs. Body-swap fatigue is real, but Vice Versa sidesteps it by actually caring about the rhythm between its leads. Reinhold loosens, Savage tightens, and the script gives them room to bounce off each other without drowning in sentiment. It’s still happy fluff, but happy fluff with a pulse—worth another go around.

It should’ve been a neon scream. A scrappy all-girl glam rock band lands the gig of a lifetime—on another planet. Their shady manager scores them a spaceship. It crashes. The band wanders through fog, fake walls, and empty noise, trying to reach the venue or maybe just the credits. Plot barely applies. The girls are indistinguishable: same hair, same attitude, same tin-eared dialogue delivered like it’s someone else’s cue. The film wants to be a punk-rock space opera—Jem and the Holograms by way of Galaxy of Terror—but gets lost in the echo chamber. Monsters lurch in and out like broken animatronics. There’s a dream sequence, or maybe a rewrite, involving a sleep pod and what might be psychic distress. The music should be a lifeline; instead, it’s warped synth sludge buried under reverb and bad ADR. Even the visual style—backlit fog, pink gels, slow zooms—feels like someone trying to will meaning into nonsense. And yet, every so often, it catches a flash of what it might’ve been. A close-up here. A lyric there. A moment where the camera lingers just long enough to pretend it believes in any of this. But it never adds up. Vicious Lips flirts with cult potential, then stalls on the runway. It has the platform boots, the eyeliner, the attitude. What it doesn’t have is a pulse.

Vicky and Her Mystery is a sincere, low-key film about a grieving girl, a distant father, and the wild animal that draws them back into each other’s orbit. After her mother dies, eight-year-old Vicky (Shanna Keil) moves with her father (Vincent Elbaz) to a quiet village in the French mountains. He’s checked out. She’s alone. One afternoon she finds a stray, names him Mystery, and insists on keeping him. He isn’t a dog. He’s a wolf. The reveal doesn’t come with wonder or awe—just rising tension. Livestock is disappearing, and the locals are quick to connect the dots. When word gets out that Vicky is secretly raising a wolf, the reaction is swift—and not especially forgiving. It’s the kind of premise that might have invited whimsy or softened into feel-good rebellion, but the film stays grounded. The tone is muted, sometimes quite heavy, favoring realism even when the premise might stretch it. This is also clearly a second-tier production. The dialogue veers into soapiness, and the direction feels like it’s working off a very safe playbook. But Keil is strong, and the film at least knows what it’s trying to do. It doesn’t oversell. Visually, it’s got its moments. The film captures the French highlands with clarity and restraint—sweeping without being showy, and atmospheric without trying to impress. The girl-wolf bond is handled plainly. No magical shorthand, no swelling music. Just a kid holding her ground. The arc is predictable, but it plays cleanly. It’s not a standout, and it’s not trying to be. But it’s thoughtful, grounded, and better than its packaging suggests.

Disturbing, hypnotic, and essential. Videodrome isn’t just one of Cronenberg’s best films—it’s one of the sharpest, strangest dissections of media addiction ever put to screen. James Woods stars as Max Renn, a sleazy TV executive on the hunt for something new to broadcast—something raw. He finds it in a mysterious broadcast called Videodrome, a pirate signal transmitting nothing but torture and murder with no explanation, no origin, and no clear intent. That’s what draws him in. What follows is a descent, not a plot. As Max digs deeper, reality fractures. His body betrays him. Screens pulse. Flesh opens. Television doesn’t just influence his mind—it rewires it. He begins hallucinating, or thinks he is. By the time he’s lost track of what’s real, so have we. The film is cold to the touch, but that’s part of the design. It plays like a nightmare without theatrics—cold, steady, and unshakable. The imagery veers into the grotesque, the tone stays detached, and the editing cuts in ways that feel almost accidental. But it all moves with a strange internal logic you can’t look away from. This is horror rendered through signal interference, where ideology spreads like a virus and technology becomes flesh. Woods is phenomenal—wired, cynical, gradually hollowed out. Deborah Harry plays a masochistic radio host with the calm of someone who’s already surrendered. The supporting cast is uniformly strange, which helps. It was prescient in 1983. It feels diagnostic now. Videodrome knew where we were going before we did. The technology has changed. The transmission hasn’t. Long live the new flesh.

The title promises carnage, and the movie delivers—just not much more. Violent Night drops a boozed-up, hammer-happy Santa (David Harbour) into a Christmas Eve hostage standoff and lets the mayhem jingle all the way. What follows is a blood-slicked sprint through half-remembered ’80s action beats—repackaged in tinsel, wired to tree lights, and swung like a stocking full of bricks. One guy gets stabbed in the eye with an ornament. Another meets his end when Santa jams a tree-topper into his skull and plugs it in. Merry Christmas. There’s some fun in the kills, and the script tosses out a few solid one-liners—Harbour plays it straight-faced and heavy-lidded, like a mall Santa who took one too many shifts and snapped. He’s well cast, but underused. Mostly he grumbles, swears, and bleeds his way through rooms full of generic bad guys, while a precocious little girl cheers him on over walkie-talkie like a sugar-addled sidekick. It’s not without charm. A few sequences land, and the premise has B-movie potential. But where something like Die Hard or Gremlins finds rhythm in the madness, this one feels padded out and oddly mechanical. The satire doesn’t bite, the action doesn’t escalate, and even the gore feels strangely obligatory—like the movie’s checking off a naughty list of genre expectations without ever really enjoying itself. A decent stocking stuffer for the blood-and-eggnog crowd, but nothing you would need to unwrap early.

A team of scientists, flush with grant money and short on foresight, invent a way to bring virtual reality characters into the physical world. Their first experiments? A pair of sex program avatars and a brooding digital gladiator named Dante. Naturally, Dante escapes and begins deleting people from the real world, one body at a time. Don “The Dragon” Wilson plays David Quarry, a futuristic border agent whose job is to stop the glitch before it spreads. He kicks things. He types. He stares at monitors like they’re trying to hypnotize him. Every scene is padded with clunky jargon, stiff exposition, and fight choreography that looks one rehearsal short of competent. The movie gestures toward ideas—identity, simulation, digital consciousness—but treats them like decorative code. Nothing resonates. Nothing evolves. The design is pure discount convention center. The virtual sets are beige. The real-world sets are also beige. Dialogue lands with the thud of a dropped hard drive. Characters explain the stakes repeatedly, but the stakes never change. Even the action scenes feel like placeholders, as if the movie were hoping someone else might come along and finish directing them. Wilson does his best—stoic, focused, trying to will the movie into motion—but Virtual Combat stays stuck in low gear. It promises cyber mayhem and delivers late-night cable drift. There’s a concept buried in here somewhere, beneath the fog and screen savers. But like everything else, it stays virtual.

A screwball romantic comedy pitched at a gentle simmer: young botanist Peter (James Stewart) takes one look at nightclub singer Francey (Ginger Rogers), marries her before the ink’s dry on the drinks bill, and only then remembers he still has to introduce her to the most tight-laced father in the state (Charles Coburn). There’s also the small matter of Helen (Frances Mercer), the polished fiancée everyone at home still assumes he’ll marry—except she’s now been quietly replaced by a woman who sings torch songs and lights up every drawing room like a pack of smuggled fireworks. Getting this news past the front door proves harder than Peter’s doctoral thesis. Stewart and Rogers slip into this contrivance like they’ve rehearsed it for years: he’s the bashful scholar with a spine made of warm caramel; she’s the spirited outsider determined not to combust on cue. James Ellison adds to the general fluster as Peter’s cousin Keith, a would-be playboy who manages to turn every discreet errand into another petty scandal. The real tension comes not from the obstacles—there’s never much doubt who’s ending up with whom—but from how many polite rooms they can turn upside down before the last shred of propriety packs its bags. If it doesn’t crackle as sharply as screwball’s top shelf, it floats along nicely on charm and mischief, and the cast knows exactly how to stretch a simple farce into a breezy hour and a half. It’s a mild delight: no great revelations, just a pair of pros selling that love at first sight might be the least ridiculous part of this story.

A young couple, Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg), set out to find a new home and wind up trapped in a suburban development that looks like it was designed by a machine with no memory of human life. Their guide is Martin, a chipper realtor who speaks like an alien imitating a man imitating a sitcom. He shows them a house, then vanishes. They try to leave. Every road loops them right back where they started. Then a box shows up with a baby inside and a note: “Raise the child and be released.” The child grows at an unnatural speed and speaks with a voice that sounds like feedback from a broken intercom. He parrots their every word, screams without warning, and watches everything. They care for him not out of love or duty, but because there’s nothing else to do. It’s not parenting—it’s maintenance. Vivarium is part existential trap, part domestic horror. It’s funny in that dry, miserable way that creeps in when people start to unravel quietly. It’s funny in the way true despair sometimes is—repetitive, awkward, grim. The humor isn’t in the punchlines; it’s in the slow decay of will. Eisenberg plays Tom with a kind of deadpan urgency, digging holes in the yard like he’s searching for the bottom of the situation. Poots, more reactive, gives the film its frayed emotional edge. It does lose steam around the halfway mark. Once the rules are established, there aren’t many variations. The repetition becomes more than thematic—it starts to feel like pacing trouble. But it never derails completely. The film knows how to stick the landing, and its final stretch regains a kind of hypnotic momentum. The opening sequence—a cuckoo bird laying its egg in another bird’s nest, set to eerie music—feels almost academic at first. Later, it clicks. You’re not watching a metaphor. You’re inside one. Vivarium is a beautifully made trap. Spare, stylized, and faintly poisonous. A suburban nightmare played out like a behavioral experiment with no exit.

Also released as My Life to Live, this quietly mesmerizing entry from French New Wave architect Jean-Luc Godard tracks the slow dissolution of a young woman’s agency with style so deliberate it feels like fate. Anna Karina plays Nana, a 22-year-old Parisian with a Louise Brooks bob, a softly angular face, and ambitions that never quite match her options. She works in a record shop. She dreams of making it in the movies. She once had a walk-on role with Eddie Constantine, she says—though the film, like her career, has long since slipped out of circulation. When her luck doesn’t change, she opts for a different kind of transaction. What follows isn’t a cautionary tale or a moral fable—it’s a series of quiet defeats, rendered in twelve episodic chapters, each one shot with the cold clarity of a streetlight on wet pavement. The film is deeply stylized but never ornamental. Godard keeps the camera at a distance, sometimes letting Nana speak with her back to us, sometimes holding a scene long past its breaking point. There’s no psychological unpacking, no overt emotional cues—just space, silence, and a creeping inevitability. Karina doesn’t so much emote as radiate self-containment. Her performance is opaque but magnetic, her face often impassive yet always readable, like a silent film star willed into modernity. You never quite know what Nana is thinking—but you’re certain she’s thinking something. The dialogue, when it comes, is thoughtful, philosophical, and often startling in its detours. Even in the film’s most mundane moments, the camera moves like it’s writing a sentence. Vivre sa vie isn’t loud or angry or sentimental. It just sits with you—elegant, austere, and gently shattering by the time it’s over. One of Godard’s finest and most haunting works. In French with English subtitles.

A volcano opens up beneath Los Angeles, and somehow, almost nothing actually burns. Lava creeps through downtown like it’s waiting for traffic to clear. Concrete dividers stop it cold. Firefighters stand by with hoses, but no urgency, no plan, and apparently no water. At one point, it feels like someone’s about to roll out a grill and start roasting hot dogs. Buildings stay upright. The body count stays low. A handful of civilians burst into flames. A subway car gets singed. A firetruck goes down in a blaze of lava-assisted glory. But for a city-leveling disaster, it’s oddly polite—more like an emergency drill with pyrotechnics than a full-blown crisis. Tommy Lee Jones, grim as ever, plays the head of L.A.’s Office of Emergency Management. He spends most of the film barking evacuation orders at magma. Anne Heche is there to explain the science, when the film remembers it cares about science. Don Cheadle monitors some blinking lights and offers the occasional update. Together, they reroute lava flows with heavy machinery, dramatic speeches, and perfect municipal efficiency. The movie tries to scale up, but never lets go. Everything unfolds in neat stages—problem, plan, resolution—without the chaos, panic, or destruction the genre demands. You wait for it to spiral. It never does. Volcano wants to be seismic, but it’s weirdly cautious. The spectacle is measured. The danger, sanitized. By the end, the city looks shaken, not scorched. It’s not a disaster movie—it’s urban planning with fire effects.

On December 9, 2019, a tour group stepped onto the volcanic island of Whakaari—an active crater treated like a scenic detour. There was no warning. One moment, tourists were snapping photos. The next, superheated gas and ash tore through the air, peeling skin and swallowing sound. Twenty-two people died. Most of the others barely made it back. Rory Kennedy’s documentary doesn’t dramatize the disaster—it lets the survivors do it. Their voices carry the weight: plain, exact, impossible to forget. They describe the heat, the silence, the feeling of being boiled alive. The film pairs their words with raw footage—shaky phone videos, rising plumes, and sudden whiteout. Some of it is blurred for mercy. Some of it is not. But the story doesn’t end with the eruption. The film shifts its focus to the people who weren’t hit—but rushed in anyway. Boat captains, nearby tourists, strangers onshore—they didn’t wait for orders. They turned their boats around. They pulled bodies from the ash. They improvised tourniquets and carried the wounded through steam and fire. The Volcano is restrained but exacting. No voiceover. No swelling score. Just the wreckage, the memories, and the silence that followed. It doesn’t frame tragedy as spectacle. It doesn’t moralize. It simply shows you what happened, then lets you sit with it.

Somewhere between a midnight movie and a hallucination taped over a karaoke demo reel, Voyage of the Rock Aliens stars Pia Zadora as a small-town singer who dreams of stardom and ends up fronting a band with extraterrestrials in matching jumpsuits and Devo haircuts. The aliens arrive via guitar-shaped spaceship, park near a lake, and immediately get to work on a synth-heavy music career. The plot involves jealous boyfriends, chainsaws, high school turf wars, and several loosely connected music videos strung together with just enough dialogue to count as narrative. The tone drifts between parody and sincere goofiness—cheesy, yes, but so committed it becomes oddly likable. I laughed, a lot. Sometimes with it. Sometimes at it. Zadora isn’t a strong singer or actor, but she’s relentlessly watchable—partly because she seems to understand how ridiculous this all is, and plays it straight anyway. In one of the film’s strangest gags, a chainsaw-wielding maniac (Michael Berryman) pauses his murder spree to accept power tool maintenance tips from a potential victim. That sort of thing happens more than once. The songs are catchy in the way commercial jingles get stuck in your head. The production design looks like it was sponsored by a roller rink. And the whole thing has the energy of something that shouldn’t work, but sort of does. Bad taste? Absolutely. But proudly. I had a great time.