Film Buff Musings

An existential thriller—less a contradiction than an unholy alliance, and in this case, a terrifyingly effective one. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear might be the clearest visual translation of existentialism ever put to film, if that sort of thing matters to you. If it doesn’t, it’s still one of the most nerve-destroying thrillers ever made. The setup takes its time. We’re in a sweltering, dust-choked town somewhere in South America—a purgatorial company outpost where poverty wears through the seams of every shirt and flies are part of the décor. A cluster of broke expatriates—French, Spanish, Italian, whoever the oil company can get their hands on—sit around rotting in their own boredom. Chief among them is Mario (Yves Montand, radiating confidence that starts to look increasingly hollow), who loafs around like a man too proud to admit he’s stranded. The first act lingers, almost daring you to get bored, but it’s all necessary groundwork. The town isn’t just background—it’s the glue trap that makes the offer impossible to resist. There’s been an explosion at a remote oil field, and the only way to extinguish the fire is with another, bigger explosion. Enter four expendable men and two trucks carrying enough nitroglycerin to level the jungle. The money—$2,000 apiece—is insultingly high for a job no one is expected to survive. The roads are practically designed to kill them. Hit a rock too hard and you’re a memory. Drive too slow on corrugated ridges and the vibrations will cook you. One mountain pass is so narrow, it looks like someone’s idea of a sick joke. It’s not just the terrain that wears them down—it’s the suspicion, the fear, the creeping realization that dignity and self-preservation rarely travel in the same direction. Mario is paired with Jo (Charles Vanel), an older man with a blustery past and a rapidly failing constitution. The film doesn’t spell it out, but it’s clear—he’s playing tough long after the role stopped fitting. And it’s killing him. There’s no music once the drive begins. Just engines, breathing, and the sound of men realizing they’re not the ones in control. Every scene is a test, and Clouzot refuses to offer relief. What begins as a job becomes a slow, blistering unraveling of nerve and resolve, until even success feels like a kind of punishment. It’s one of the most exciting films I’ve ever seen—so tense and unrelenting I caught myself forgetting to breathe. Not because the suspense builds, but because it never lets go.

A tightly wound thriller with a killer premise and even sharper execution, Wait Until Dark proves that sometimes all you need for suspense is a single apartment, a few locked doors, and Audrey Hepburn. She plays Susy, a recently blinded woman still adjusting to life in the dark, and it’s easily one of her most compelling performances—stripped of glamour, full of nerve. If we’re counting icons, this might make her an honorary Scream Queen, and one of the classiest to boot. The setup is pure mid-century tension. Susy’s husband Sam (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) makes the critical error of accepting a package from a stranger at the airport—a doll, supposedly harmless, but stuffed with heroin. He brings it home and promptly misplaces it. Unfortunately, a trio of criminals is already closing in. Two of them (Richard Crenna and Jack Weston) try to finesse the situation with conman charm. The third, played by Alan Arkin in full sociopath mode, is less interested in finesse. Together, they decide to manipulate Susy into giving up the doll—banking on her blindness to tilt the game in their favor. What they don’t count on is that Susy’s no pushover. Hepburn plays her with a quiet resolve that tightens as the film progresses. You watch her shift from uncertainty to razor focus—listening, sensing, adapting. The final act is a masterclass in escalation: lights out, knives drawn, and nothing but silhouettes and sound cues to go on. It’s not just a thriller; it’s a blueprint for how to build tension with limited space and even fewer tricks. If there’s a flaw, it’s that the audience is always one step ahead—we know the setup, the stakes, the villains. The mystery isn’t what’s happening, but how long it’ll take Susy to catch up. Still, the execution is so crisp, and the finale so breathless, that it hardly matters. Wait Until Dark is the kind of film that gets under your skin precisely because it never overplays its hand. It trusts the space, the performers, and the primal fear of what might be lurking just beyond sight. Hepburn carries it beautifully. Arkin chills. And the walls seem to close in, one creaky floorboard at a time.

Word to the wise: don’t drink anything sticky while watching Waiting for Guffman. This is the sort of comedy that doesn’t chase you—it waits. Lets you take a sip. Then drops something so quietly deranged you end up spraying it across the room. Christopher Guest is Corky St. Clair, the self-anointed theater king of Blaine, Missouri, staging a musical for the town’s 150th anniversary. He’s a man of vision, tap shoes, and a closet door that might as well have a neon sign on it. The joke’s not in outing him—the joke’s in how much the town loves him exactly as he is. The auditions pull in an oddball chorus: Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara as travel agents with Broadway ambitions; Parker Posey, who frosts cakes by day but sings like she’s aiming for Sondheim; Eugene Levy, wearing braces and sincerity like they’re part of the same orthodontic plan. None of them seem to be in the same production. That’s fine. Corky isn’t either. Guest withholds the show until the end, and by then you’ve been primed for anything. What you get is part tribute, part hallucination, performed in front of an audience that reacts as if they’ve just been to the mountaintop. The numbers are ridiculous, yes, but the faces watching them are pure poetry. The cast riffs almost entirely on improv, and you can feel it—lines arriving crooked, then sticking. It’s the first of several Guest mockumentaries with this crew, and the template’s already baked in: eccentrics taken seriously enough to make you care, affection running under the satire like an underground spring. It’s not Spinal Tap, but then Blaine isn’t London.

An animated drift through other people’s philosophies—half lucid dream, half coffeehouse debate you can’t quite walk away from. The dreamer (Wiley Wiggins) wanders from one talker to the next, collecting fragments on consciousness, memory, God, free will—sometimes inspired, sometimes maddening, sometimes both in the same breath. The dream keeps shifting under him. After a while, it’s less about what he’s hearing than whether he’ll ever wake up. Linklater shoots on video, then rotoscopes the footage until nothing is stable. Faces melt at the edges, walls breathe, the air shivers—it’s reality on a surface that refuses to hold still. There’s no plot, only momentum. The film can be tedious, but in the way a great lecture can be: your attention drifts, a line catches you off guard, and suddenly you’ve been turning it over in your head for days. The encounters are the film’s bloodstream. A stranger at a bar might drift into talk about quantum physics; an old friend might casually dismantle your ideas about fate; a philosopher might start connecting dots you didn’t know were on the same page. Linklater even drops in a sly nod to his own dreamers: Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in bed, as if they’ve wandered in from Before Sunrise and decided the conversation was too good to leave. It’s curious, indulgent, intermittently brilliant. You watch it, and at some point you stop wondering if the dreamer will wake up—you’re wondering if you will. And then the credits roll, and you’re left blinking in the light, half-suspecting the next person you meet will start talking about the nature of time.

Ian Bannen stars as Jackie O’Shea, a pensioner in the sleepy Irish village of Tullymore who hears a rumor that someone local has hit the national lottery. Knowing full well it isn’t him—and not trusting a soul to confess outright—he ropes in his best friend Michael (David Kelly, twitchy and perpetually scandalized) to do a bit of neighborly snooping. If buttering up half the village over cups of tea and loaded small talk is what it takes, so be it. After a few rounds of flattery and gossip, they whittle it down to one suspect: Ned Devine (Jimmy Keogh), a loner nobody’s seen in days. One visit later, they find the poor man dead in his chair, likely struck down by the shock of seeing those winning numbers. Where most would call the authorities and move on, Jackie cooks up the sort of plan that only works in films this gentle: have Michael pose as the dearly departed Ned, claim the prize, and discreetly spread the windfall among every soul in Tullymore—except, naturally, the one neighbor no one can stand. From there, the plot drifts exactly where you expect: a harmless scramble to fool the lotto inspector, a few near misses, a token threat from the local busybody who wants her cut or else, all buffered by fiddle music and postcard shots of rolling green hills. The pleasure is in watching these conspirators fumble through their gentle crime with straight faces and plenty of pints. Bannen’s Jackie has the innocence of a man convinced that defrauding the government is basically a civic duty, and Kelly’s Michael looks like he’d faint if someone asked him to fib about his age, never mind his entire identity. Fionnula Flanagan and Susan Lynch round out the village’s moral backbone—though in Tullymore, principles bend gracefully when money’s at stake. This is the cinematic equivalent of a comfortable sweater: soft, slightly frayed at the cuffs, but just right if you want to believe that somewhere out there, a village like Tullymore exists—where neighbors scheme sweetly and a dead man’s lottery ticket can buy everyone a little more warmth.

Few films try so hard to look like a Thomas Kinkade painting and actually succeed. A Walk in the Clouds does—so thoroughly it forgets it needs anything else. Every shot is dipped in soft gold, like a greeting card that wandered into a wine commercial and stayed too long. It should be irresistible: a winery just after World War II, rows of vines heavy enough to distract from how thin the story runs. Keanu Reeves, good-natured as always but about as steamy as a damp sponge, plays Paul Sutton—a chocolate salesman and freshly returned soldier whose wife (Debra Messing) welcomes him home with the warmth of a tax notice. Hurt but not devastated, Paul boards a bus for Sacramento and stumbles, in the gentlest, Lifetime Original way possible, into Victoria (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), a luminous young woman with a family estate in the hills and a secret swelling under her beltline. Victoria is pregnant. Her old-world father would sooner salt the fields than bless an unwed daughter. So Paul, whose sense of chivalry apparently outpaces his sense of personal consequence, volunteers to pose as her hastily-acquired husband. They arrive at the vineyard, do the necessary charade work—bed-leaping, whispered explanations, frantic exits—and before long, the ruse thickens into the real thing, because in a film like this, what else could possibly happen? The plot barely notices itself. Reeves drifts through it like a polite cartoon lamb misplaced in a soap opera. The “deception” is mild, the stakes are paper-thin, and the big romantic payoff doesn’t make much of a dent. But good luck holding a grudge. The sunsets always hit on time, the vines look edible, and for ninety minutes you get to pretend you’re standing somewhere better lit than your own life. Not much of a movie, but pleasant enough to look at once.

There’s a sultry promise baked into the title, but Walk on the Wild Side never strays far enough from the sidewalk. It’s smartly written, occasionally compelling, and anchored by a strong cast—particularly a sharp-edged Jane Fonda in one of her earliest roles, playing a scrappy drifter with more wit than money and nowhere in particular to go. She crosses paths with Dove Linkhorn (Laurence Harvey), a man bound for a seedy corner of the Gulf Coast in search of his lost love, Hallie (Capucine), who now works in a high-end bordello managed with iron poise by Jo (Barbara Stanwyck). The setup promises grit—romantic disillusionment, spiritual corrosion, moral compromise—but the execution never cuts deep. What Nelson Algren’s novel explored with raw nerve, the film reconfigures into something safer, dulled by censorship and 1960s studio conservatism. Characters once steeped in moral rot are cleaned up for the screen: Hallie is softened into a tragic romantic figure, and Jo’s predatory possessiveness—unambiguously coded in the book—is rendered vague and deniable. Even the setting, which in the novel was unmistakably New Orleans, becomes a geographically anonymous stretch of Southern decay. Capucine, elegant but emotionally remote, never quite sells Hallie’s inner life. You understand why Dove might go looking for her—what she represents—but once he finds her, the connection feels hollow. Harvey brings intensity but not much personality, and Dove ends up a narrative hinge more than a character. Fonda injects some needed volatility, and Stanwyck’s Jo hints at a richer, more complex film happening just out of frame. Anne Baxter, as the aloof property owner, plays her role with a kind of regal detachment, always slightly removed from the drama she technically oversees. There’s some interest here—as a portrait of what “adult” material looked like when filtered through studio restraint—but it rarely finds a pulse. What’s left is moody, well-cast, and curiously tame. A walk, yes. But not exactly on the wild side.

Another entry in Hollywood’s hall of fame reenactments—this time The Man in Black, Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix). Polished, well-cast, and satisfying in the moment, even if the road it walks is already worn smooth. Cash, born J.R., grows up in rural Arkansas with tragedy seated at the table. His older brother dies in a sawmill accident; his father (Robert Patrick) calls it divine error—“The devil took the wrong son”—and keeps the line on repeat. Marriage to Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin) follows, along with bills, kids, and the kind of pressure that makes applause look irresponsible. He keeps chasing music anyway. An audition at Sun Records becomes the pivot. Sam Phillips doesn’t want gospel—he wants something that sounds like it means it. Cash plays “Folsom Prison Blues,” crooked at the edges, and gets signed. Tours follow. So does June Carter (Reese Witherspoon): sharp, self-possessed, allergic to being anybody’s rehab plan. The pull is immediate, the timing never clean. There’s booze, pills, wrecked shows. The romance keeps surfacing between the wrecks until it becomes the whole reason to keep watching. Phoenix and Witherspoon skip impersonation for something rougher, less varnished. She won an Oscar; he should’ve been closer to one. The music scenes work because they’re performed live—grit intact, breath audible. The rest follows the biopic blueprint: rise, fall, redemption, applause. It gets the events right but leaves the man mostly sketched in. You leave knowing where he went, who he loved, and what he sang—just not what was running under the surface.

A father (John Meillon) drives his kids into the Outback. His teenage daughter (Jenny Agutter) lays out lunch. Then, without a word, he pulls a gun and starts shooting at them. It’s an attempted murder-suicide. The boy (Luc Roeg, the director’s son) thinks it’s a game. The girl doesn’t. She grabs his hand and runs. Behind them, the car is already on fire. Then a final shot. He’s gone. What follows isn’t spectacle—it’s survival by erosion. Two children, blistered and barefoot, wandering through a stretch of desert with no plan beyond escape. The Outback looms like a cathedral built by wind and time—red earth, white sky, stone spires jutting from the dust. John Barry’s score hovers between grandeur and dread. One moment it swells like revelation; the next, it collapses into something more primal. Then, grace—brief and brittle. A still pool. A tree heavy with fruit. Shade deep enough to breathe under. They eat, drink, sleep. When they wake, it’s gone. The pool: dry. The fruit: stripped clean by birds. Eden revoked. Then he arrives. A teenage Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil), silent, assured, almost mythic. He doesn’t speak English, but his presence is fluent. He leads them to water, to food, to a way of moving that doesn’t need explanation. He doesn’t rescue them. He just shows them how to keep going. What forms between them isn’t quite friendship, but something steadier: rhythm, hunger, motion. A kind of trust. Roeg’s direction is elliptical, sensual, disorienting. The cuts jolt and blur. One moment you’re watching lizards scurry across hot stone; the next, a carcass decomposes. The world is stripped down to its elements—heat, thirst, instinct, desire. Civilization begins to feel like a distraction. Or worse: a fiction. It ends like a myth remembered through fog—not about being lost, but about shedding the need to be found. For a handful of days, they lived outside language, closer to death, and closer still to something intact and unspoken. And once you’ve touched that—really touched it—the routines of daily life feel like theater. You go home. You nod along. But part of you is still out there, barefoot in the dust, watching the rest from a distance. The film flashes once—just once—on the three of them in a watering hole, naked and laughing. Idyllic, fleeting. Already gone.

Walker is a film that exists somewhere between political satire, art house provocation, and historical hallucination. Whether it’s brilliant or a beautiful mess probably depends on how much you enjoy being disoriented on purpose. I did. But let’s be clear—this one is strictly for the subset of cinephiles who get excited when a movie aggressively forgets how movies are supposed to work. It’s “based on a true story,” which is almost entirely untrue. Ed Harris plays William Walker, a 19th-century American mercenary who invades Nicaragua with a handful of followers and declares himself president. He’s doing this, ostensibly, for railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle), who has visions of a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific. So far, so imperialist. But as Walker descends into madness—drunk on power, deluded by destiny—the film starts to unravel right alongside him. The surrealism creeps in slowly. A Coke bottle on the table. A jeep idling outside a colonial fort. By the time helicopters show up and machine guns start rattling across the 1800s, the anachronisms aren’t accidents—they’re signals. Cox uses them to draw a blunt, angry line from the 1850s to Reagan-era foreign policy. It’s not subtle. But then, it’s not trying to be. Harris is ferociously committed, playing Walker as a man too righteous to know he’s a monster. The supporting cast—Richard Masur, Sy Richardson, Xander Berkeley, even Marlee Matlin—plays straight through the madness without blinking. And Joe Strummer, who scored the film, also shows up onscreen, as if stepping in was inevitable. It’s not a clean film. It lurches. Some of it plays like satire, some like a hallucination, some like a high school history pageant interrupted by a punk band. But it sticks with you. Walker doesn’t just rewrite history—it firebombs the idea that historical films have to behave.

Wall Street is the story of a young man who confuses ambition with purpose and discovers—too late—that the two don’t necessarily align. Charlie Sheen plays Bud Fox, a hungry stockbroker clawing his way up the financial food chain in 1980s Manhattan. He gets his foot in the door with Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), a corporate predator who wears Armani like armor and speaks in clipped aphorisms. Bud brings cigars, insider tips, and just enough naïveté to be useful. Gekko provides the rest: access, momentum, and a worldview built entirely on acquisition. Bud’s golden ticket is a stock tip about Bluestar Airlines, a struggling company where his father (Martin Sheen) has worked for over two decades. The information is confidential, and he knows it. Gekko doesn’t care. Once there’s money on the table, morality becomes a rounding error. The film is less a financial thriller than a morality play with expensive suits. Oliver Stone takes the abstract churn of stock markets—mergers, trades, leveraged buyouts—and turns it into something personal, even operatic. Deals happen in boardrooms, but the consequences trickle down to union workers, mechanics, and secretaries. Bud doesn’t see the full cost of those deals until it affects someone close enough to matter. Douglas, who won an Oscar for the role, plays Gekko like a smiling serpent—seductive, logical, impossible to trust. He makes capitalism sound like scripture. Charlie Sheen, meanwhile, moves with the intensity of someone trying to outrun his own self-doubt, never fully clocking that the man he idolizes is quietly devouring him. Their scenes together have the tension of a handshake with a string attached. Stone never pretends to be neutral—he sketches the system with clarity, lets it sell itself, then quietly indicts it. The script is sharp, the pacing clean, the message unimpeachable: in the pursuit of more, there’s always someone willing to trade conscience for a commission. The only question is when you notice you’re working for them.

Every bit as delightful and giggle-inducing as the three BBC stop-motion shorts that came before it—which is saying plenty. It’s technically a children’s film, but it works on me like one too; I can’t watch it without feeling about eight. The humor is very British—daft without being smug—and the characters are so absurdly lovable that “cherish” doesn’t feel like an overstatement. Nick Park’s designs alone are a reason to watch. The way his clay seems to hold fingerprints. The way the mouths snap wide on a vowel. And those fields of bunnies—sniffing, twitching, hopping in gentle waves—I could watch them for hours. But there’s a story to get to. Wallace is an absent-minded inventor with a dangerous love of cheese. Gromit is his silent, long-suffering beagle with a head full of practical wisdom. Together, they run “Anti-Pesto,” a humane pest-control service dedicated to saving the town’s prize vegetables from rabbit appetites. The captured rabbits live in the basement, where Gromit feeds them like well-behaved inmates. When space runs out, Wallace tries to solve the problem with invention: a brain-altering contraption that scrambles a rabbit’s taste buds until vegetables seem vile. Only the experiment misfires, and out hops something else entirely—a nocturnal, carrot-consuming behemoth that leaves no garden untouched. Cue moonlit stakeouts, vegetable-based weaponry, and those sight gags that escalate that Aardman does better than anyone else. The film is clever without straining for cleverness, silly without turning limp. The jokes work in miniature—the flick of Gromit’s eyebrow—and in scale: chase scenes choreographed like ballet, except the props are zucchinis. It’s such an incredible amount of fun that “fun” feels like the wrong word—too small, too casual for something this perfectly built to make you grin.

Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is loud, grim, and built for spectacle—a disaster movie dressed like a prestige sci-fi thriller. Flawed, but when the big moments hit, they hit hard. Aliens aren’t here to explore. They’re here to erase us. The tripods have been buried for centuries, sleeping under our feet. Then the lightning starts—bolts hammering the same spots, drilling something down from the sky. Not machines. Pilots. When the tripods wake, they don’t climb—they erupt. Heat-rays slice. Steel limbs whip through the air. People turn to dust mid-stride. Clothes drift to the ground. A burning train barrels through a station. A passenger jet lies broken across a neighborhood block. Spielberg stages destruction with precision, not just scale. Ray (Tom Cruise) is our way in—a deadbeat dad suddenly responsible for two kids in a collapsing world. Not heroic, just moving forward because there’s nowhere else to go. Dakota Fanning, as his daughter Rachel, owns every scene she’s in—terrified, grounded, never written like a miniature adult. Not everything works. Ray’s relationship with his teenage son (Justin Chatwin) is sketched thin, and the Tim Robbins basement sequence feels like a claustrophobic detour. But the film doesn’t stay there long. When it moves again, it’s relentless. This is survival, not resistance—panic feeding motion, motion feeding the hope you’ll see another day. The aliens don’t negotiate, the government has nothing, and the only goal is to stay alive long enough for the next disaster to find you. Bleak, spectacular, and steeped in dread. You watch War of the Worlds for the moment the sky opens—and the world turns to smoke.

It’s fun, it’s fast, and if you stop to think about it, it’s terrifying. One of the rare big-studio “computer movies” that doesn’t look like it was written by someone who still types with two fingers. Matthew Broderick plays David Lightman, a high school underachiever whose brain is running on a different operating system than the rest of the class. He can hack the school computer and turn an F in biology into a passing grade before the teacher’s had coffee. He can also rope in Jennifer (Ally Sheedy), who thinks she’s here for a little after-school adventure and ends up halfway to DEFCON 1. David’s latest stunt starts with a magazine ad for an unreleased video game. He goes looking for the company’s server, poking through back doors and default passwords, and stumbles into something else entirely: NORAD’s nuclear command. Specifically, a dormant artificial intelligence with a taste for simulations and no real grasp of the difference between “play” and “launch.” Its creator is out of the picture. David’s just told it to start a game. From there, the tension ramps up like a countdown clock—missile launches blinking on the wall, generals barking orders, the AI running scenarios faster than anyone can shut them down. The trick is, the movie never tips over into pure panic. It keeps its grin, even as the stakes tilt toward mushroom clouds. I’ve been coming back to this film for decades, and it’s still as exciting as it’s ever been—a tech fantasy, a Cold War nightmare, a reminder that curiosity and catastrophe live closer together than they should. A kid almost starts World War III. Then he stops it. What’s scary is how easy it is to believe.

The Waterboy is proudly, relentlessly goofy—and honestly, kind of a joy. That is, if you can tolerate Adam Sandler’s full-throttle Bayou accent, which sounds like it was forged somewhere between a catfish boil and a dental emergency. But he commits to it, and the character—sweet, painfully awkward, and obsessively devoted to the science of hydration—is strangely endearing. Bobby Boucher is in his 30s, emotionally stunted, and serves as the waterboy for a college football team that openly mocks him. He’s fired for being too weird about water and picked up by a flailing rival team, this one coached by the perpetually overwhelmed Coach Klein (Henry Winkler), who’s the first person to treat Bobby like he might actually be capable of something. Turns out he is. All the bullying and repression have been simmering for years, and once unleashed on the field, Bobby transforms into a one-man wrecking crew. He joins the team, enrolls in classes, and begins living a double life—all behind the back of his mother (Kathy Bates, chewing scenery with glee), who has convinced him that football, girls, and especially education are works of the Devil. “Everything is the Devil,” she declares at one point, and she means it. Especially Vicki (Fairuza Balk), Bobby’s parolee love interest who drives a motorcycle and looks like she’d key your car for fun. It’s not sophisticated, but it’s unexpectedly sharp in the margins. The script is packed with strange little side characters, bizarre line readings, and throwaway jokes that are weirdly memorable. Sandler plays it with genuine heart, Bates goes big and somehow makes it sing, and Winkler is so committed to his loser-coach persona it becomes quietly touching. For anyone allergic to Sandler’s early-era brand, this won’t change your mind. But if you’re even slightly on board, The Waterboy is one of the better surprises—funnier, sweeter, and stranger than it had any business being.

Yes, it’s schmaltzy. Yes, the theme song practically bathes in its own nostalgia. But I was surprised—almost sheepish—by how much I bought into it. The Way We Were isn’t one of those romances glued together from prefab parts. It earns its stripes by slipping just slightly off the expected rhythm, and letting things get awkward where most films would smooth them out. It starts in college: she’s the political firebrand handing out leaflets and corrections; he’s the golden boy whose talent arrives pre-packaged with good looks and easy charm. Years later, they reconnect in postwar New York. She’s working in radio and still clinging tightly to her ideals. He’s trying to write but already has one foot angled toward Hollywood. Despite their misalignment—or maybe because of it—they fall into something real. They marry. They have a child. They give it an honest try. The oft-cited lack of chemistry between Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford isn’t a flaw. It’s the hook. They don’t glide—they bump. It’s not a soulmate story; it’s a case study in friction. She’s intense, principled, impossible to detour. He’s breezy, reluctant to engage too deeply with anything that might force a decision. She wants novels with weight. He wants to write something that sells and maybe buy a beach house with the check. Streisand is exceptional—emotional, exacting, unwilling to flatten any part of Katie to make her easier to digest. Redford’s Hubbell works as a counterpoint: elegant, evasive, and quietly allergic to conflict. The early scenes—when it’s just attraction, compromise, and early hope—feel alive in the right ways. Then comes the fade. As their lives move west and the Hollywood machine kicks in, the political tension creeps in too—not as the driving force, but as a wedge. Katie wants to fight the system. Hubbell wants to stay on the payroll. That’s not what breaks them, but it certainly helps the cracks spread. The Way We Were isn’t about the drama of collapse—it’s about the slow realization that love, even when sincere, isn’t always enough. It’s about timing, temperament, and the thousand quiet ways people miss each other. It doesn’t pretend to have a solution. It just lets you sit with the wreckage. And that honesty, cloaked in romantic melodrama, is what makes it last.

One of the great goofball comedies of the ’90s, and possibly the gold standard for breaking the fourth wall without breaking stride. Mike Myers and Dana Carvey take their Saturday Night Live sketch and stretch it into a feature without losing its bounce—or its willingness to turn directly to the camera and let you in on the joke. Wayne (Myers) and Garth (Carvey) run a public-access talk show out of Aurora, Illinois—famous enough to be recognized at the donut shop, broke enough to still be living with their parents. Enter Benjamin (Rob Lowe), a slick television producer who buys their show for $5,000 (a bargain he somehow convinces them is a windfall) and sells it to the owner of a local video arcade. Benjamin also sets his sights on Cassandra (Tia Carrere), Wayne’s bass-playing girlfriend, dangling record deals and stardom if she lets him steer her career. The plot’s a serviceable clothesline; the jokes are the laundry worth hanging out. Wayne and Cassandra holding a conversation in Cantonese while the subtitles spiral into commentary on their relationship; Wayne’s unhinged ex (Lara Flynn Boyle) presenting him with a wrapped gift and getting the deadpan, “If it’s a severed head, I’m going to be very upset”; Alice Cooper launching into a history lecture on Milwaukee like he’s moonlighting as a tour guide. It’s absurd, often inspired, and just self-aware enough to keep the momentum without tipping into smugness. Spheeris keeps the pace loose but never lazy, letting the film detour into non sequiturs and absurd cutaways while still circling back to the love story and the inevitable showdown with Benjamin. And when the film finally offers you not one ending but three—tragic, Scooby-Doo, and “mega-happy”—it’s less a gimmick than a perfectly in-character refusal to settle for one punchline when three will do.

Coming back to Aurora is like crashing the same party twice—the music’s still playing, but the beer’s warmer and the jokes have started explaining themselves. Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth (Dana Carvey) have moved their public access show into an abandoned factory, which sounds like a rebellious upgrade but might as well be a blank wall for how little they use it. Wayne is still with Cassandra (Tia Carrere), but her new record producer (Christopher Walken) is circling with that Walken mix of charm and slow-burn menace, inviting her to New York with him as the plus-one. Garth, meanwhile, is almost seduced to doom by Honey Hornee (Kim Basinger), a pulp-fantasy dream girl who looks like she took a wrong turn out of a late-night cable thriller. In the middle of all this, Wayne starts having visions—first a half-naked Native American, then a desert, then Jim Morrison himself, calmly instructing him to throw a giant music festival. Sure—why not. The setups aren’t inherently funny, but they lead to moments that are—like a dead-on recreation of The Graduate’s wedding scene, a kung-fu showdown with Cassandra’s dad (James Hong) complete with bad overdubs, and Charlton Heston wandering in to upgrade a bit part. The festival plays more like a loose pile of callbacks than a real climax, but the film still squeezes out a few last laughs on the way out. It never recaptures the accidental alchemy of the first Wayne’s World, yet there’s enough in the way of throwaway gags, random cameos, and meta detours to make it worth crashing for the weekend.

A second-shelf Steinbeck adaptation, The Wayward Bus is part road movie, part chamber drama, part studio experiment in making lightning strike twice. Fox had Bus Stop on the brain and tried to replicate it wholesale—another bus, another bombshell, this time Jayne Mansfield instead of Monroe. She plays Camille, a weary showgirl headed north, less glamorous than advertised, more lonely than she lets on. The bus belongs to Johnny (Rick Jason), a quiet operator with a sideline in specialty routes across rural California. He picks up passengers at a remote diner run by his wife Alice (Joan Collins), who spends most of her screen time nursing a bottle and seething with old resentment. She isn’t just bitter—she’s drunk, and in a film like this, that qualifies as dimension. Collins leans into it with clipped fury, and the movie perks up whenever she walks in. The ride gets rockier—literally—once the bus runs into a landslide and Johnny is forced to detour. One path leads to a rickety bridge that creaks as a river rages underneath, and it’s a wonder how it didn’t take out the bridge last. The suspense is played straight, but the drama stays internal: relationships, resentments, fragile reputations shifting as the terrain does. It’s a small ensemble, but each role feels sketched in with care. Even the minor characters—wandering salesmen, runaway wives, passengers trying to outrun themselves—get lines that sting. The film doesn’t quite resolve. Or maybe it does, just faintly. There’s no big payoff—just a few sharp turns, some literal, some not. The dialogue cuts clean, the performances stay alert, and the tension never loosens its grip completely. It might be second-tier noir, but consider this a detour worth taking.

They cut their hair short, shout about nuclear power, and decide—without instruments or training—that they’re starting a punk band. It’s 1982 Stockholm, and We Are the Best! follows Bobo and Klara, thirteen, opinionated, allergic to conformity, and not entirely sure what rebellion is supposed to look like. They just know they’re already in it. The film doesn’t follow a traditional arc. What it captures is more immediate: the half-formed brilliance of adolescent certainty, and the way it flickers when someone else enters the room. That someone is Hedvig, a lonely Christian girl with long hair, good posture, and actual guitar skills. She’s recruited almost on a dare, but the band clicks—not musically (they’re still terrible), but as a unit. The joy is in the mismatch: one quiet, one theatrical, one trying not to be either. And the chemistry holds. What unfolds isn’t quite a coming-of-age story—there’s no grand moment, no clean transformation. It’s looser than that. Three girls figuring things out. Learning what they can’t say, what they’re allowed to want, what counts as betrayal when friendship feels like survival. There are awkward crushes, shifting allegiances, and a falling out between them that doesn’t stick—because the outside world is too indifferent to lose each other over something small. The performances are disarmingly natural. No one pushes. The dialogue sounds like it was lifted from a middle school hallway, except funnier. Even the adults are drawn with a kind of bemused detail—present, occasionally helpful, mostly useless. The film knows the revolution will be out of tune, under-attended, and deeply personal. And still, when they scream, “We are the best!”—off-key, half-joking, and completely serious—it hits. Not as proof. As declaration. Like all real punk, it’s not about being good. It’s about daring to say it anyway.

Benjamin Mee—former adventure journalist, recently widowed, and out of good ideas—responds to personal catastrophe by quitting his job, uprooting his children, and buying an 18-acre property that comes with a bankrupt zoo. The animals are still there. So is the underpaid staff, hanging on out of stubbornness or inertia, led by head zookeeper Kelly Foster (Scarlett Johansson), who is visibly exasperated by the fact that her new boss doesn’t know a meerkat from a hedge trimmer. Matt Damon plays Mee as a man trying to outrun sorrow by sheer logistical overload. The enclosures are collapsing, the USDA inspector threatens closure with the dry resolve of someone who’s shut down worse and isn’t bluffing, and the finances are stitched together with vague optimism and the hope that grief qualifies as a business plan. There’s an escaped bear. A few close calls. But nothing bites too hard. Even the threats come with soft edges. What We Bought a Zoo offers isn’t realism, but a brushed-clean fantasy where the worst decisions become the most transformative. Financial collapse is briefly threatened, then quietly sidestepped by a conveniently timed posthumous deposit. The animals stay. The permits get approved. The setbacks arrive on schedule—rain in Act II, catharsis in Act III. Even the brooding son, Dylan (Colin Ford), is handed a romantic arc with near-mechanical efficiency: Elle Fanning appears, radiant and uncomplicated, like she came bundled with the acreage. Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones), his younger sister, serves as the emotional barometer—small, sincere, and impossible to disagree with. And she’s right. Everything does turn out fine. Cameron Crowe directs like he’s wrapping a gift he’s already peeked inside—gentle, symmetrical, nothing too heavy. You don’t believe a minute of it. But there’s real pleasure in watching capable actors sell the idea that grief, properly managed, can be fixed with property values, payroll spreadsheets, and a tiger enclosure that just needs a little work.

Two university professors—Jack (Mark Ruffalo) and Hank (Peter Krause)—and their wives, Terry (Laura Dern) and Edith (Naomi Watts), form a social circle that’s a little too interconnected. Jack is sleeping with Edith. Hank is sleeping with Terry. No one’s particularly secretive about it, and everyone’s too clever to play the victim without editorializing. They behave less like friends than academic wolves—stalking one another in loops of debate, rationalization, and weaponized self-pity. The cigarettes are always lit, the wine never far, and every minor argument plays like a graduate seminar on guilt and emotional leverage. The performances do most of the lifting. Ruffalo is low-boil and plausibly spineless. Dern sharpens every line like it’s been sitting in her throat for years. Krause plays indifference with a curious sort of precision, and Watts gives Edith a sadness that never quite feels separate from calculation. The screenplay, drawn from two Andre Dubus stories, is intelligent but doesn’t always know where to channel its intelligence. By the halfway mark, it stops being drama and starts resembling academic purgatory: everyone grading each other’s personal failures with escalating fatigue. You watch from the far end of the room, admire the construction, and quietly hope no one’s reading your diary.

A horror comedy with commitment issues, We Have a Ghost kicks off like a goofball sitcom, pivots into a paranormal mystery, and wraps itself in third-act sap like a couch throw no one asked for. The ghost in question—Ernest, played by a mostly silent David Harbour—looks less like a tormented soul and more like someone who fell asleep during Columbo reruns and never woke up. Combover, bowling shirt, blank stare. Boo. The Presley family scores a suspiciously cheap fixer-upper, only to find it comes with a basement poltergeist and a clear shot at YouTube fame. Kevin (Jahi Di’Allo Winston), the youngest and most perceptive, isn’t scared—he’s intrigued. Ernest can’t speak, doesn’t remember how he died, and mostly lumbers around like a spectral sad sack. But the kid likes him. Cue the buddy plot. There are stabs at satire—viral stardom, paranormal investigators, covert government weirdos—but the film keeps pulling its punches. Every time it starts to get weird, it backs off with a pout. One minute it’s spoofing TikTok culture, the next it’s holding your hand through a Hallmark subplot about trauma and healing. It wants to be sharp and sweet. Instead, it’s caught in the middle like a mood ring nobody wears. Harbour commits to the pathos with impressive restraint, and Winston does his best to keep things grounded, but the script feels like it’s channel-surfing through itself. Ghost stories don’t need logic, but they need energy—and this one spends too much time tiptoeing through its own tone shifts. Some of it lands. Some of it drifts. Most of it feels like a séance where everyone keeps checking their phones.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is slow and strange in the right proportions—gothic, off-kilter, and just tense enough to keep you watching. It’s not horror, exactly. But it knows how to make the air feel heavy. The Blackwood sisters live alone in a decaying mansion at the edge of town. Years ago, their parents were poisoned during dinner. The oldest daughter, Constance (Alexandra Daddario), stood trial for the murders and was acquitted, but the locals never let her forget it. She’s now a shut-in—smiling, cooking, hosting no one. Her younger sister, Merricat (Taissa Farmiga), does the protecting. She buries charms in the yard, practices makeshift magic, and glares at anything that moves. Their uncle Julian (Crispin Glover) survived the poisoning but not in one piece. He spends his days half-lucid, retelling the events like he’s still trapped in them. Then cousin Charles (Sebastian Stan) shows up, supposedly concerned, though it’s obvious he wants access to whatever’s left of the family fortune. Constance, starved for connection, welcomes him. Merricat, who sees through him immediately, starts pushing back. That’s where the tension starts. The film doesn’t explode—it curdles. It’s more mood than plot. The camera lingers on teacups and rotting wallpaper. The dialogue is hushed, half-coded. Even the sisters speak like they’re in a pact no one else could understand. It’s fascinating to watch them dig in—to the house, to their rituals, to each other. They could leave. They don’t. They won’t. It doesn’t quite build to a payoff. You wait for it to go somewhere bigger, darker—but the film prefers to stay inside the walls it’s built. Still, there’s something magnetic about how fully it commits to this odd, sealed world. The performances are dialed in just right: Daddario plays warmth like a trance, Farmiga keeps Merricat’s instincts just feral enough, and Glover drifts around like a ghost who forgot he’s alive. It might not be gripping, but it stays with you. A quiet little tragedy wrapped in ritual and wallpaper glue. Not much happens, but what does feels like it couldn’t happen anywhere else.

We Need to Talk About Kevin isn’t horror by classification, but it plays like one anyway. Not with monsters or creaking doors—just the slow, unblinking realization that something is fundamentally broken and getting worse. A psychological autopsy told in fragments, dread thickening with every cut. Eva (Tilda Swinton), once a restless, intellectually curious traveler, never quite adjusted to the idea of motherhood. Maybe she tried. Maybe she didn’t. But what she got in return was Kevin—a baby who wouldn’t stop screaming, a child who seemed to understand spite before speech. From the beginning, something about him is wrong. Not off. Wrong. The film opens after everything has already collapsed. Kevin is in prison. The front of Eva’s house has been slathered in red paint, and she spends long stretches of the film trying to scrub it clean—an obvious image, but effective all the same. The story unfolds in scattered memory: early signs, ignored warnings, years of small cruelties brushed aside. Her husband (John C. Reilly) refuses to see the problem, defaulting to clueless optimism. Kevin wears diapers until six, destroys Eva’s workspace with casual malice, and poisons the air between every character. When their daughter is born—gentler, trusting, more like her father—Kevin blinds her in one eye. He says it was an accident. No one believes him. Swinton carries the film on a razor-thin line between grief and guilt. Eva is not a likable mother. She’s cold, resentful, and often seems less horrified by Kevin than confirmed by him. As if he’s the worst-case version of her own suppressed instincts, made flesh and sharpened. There’s a sense that Kevin didn’t just come out wrong—he came out correctly, based on everything she feared about herself. Lynne Ramsay structures the film like a waking nightmare—hazy timelines, emotional static, silences that feel like punishment. It’s hypnotic, but it can also be grueling. The pacing often mirrors Eva’s depression: stalled, heavy, reflexively self-blaming. Even as Kevin’s final act looms in the distance, the film doesn’t race toward it. It sits with every ugly moment until you feel complicit. This isn’t an easy film to recommend. But there’s something chilling in how precisely it stares down a question most films won’t ask: What if your child was not only a stranger to you—but your punishment?

We Summon the Darkness opens in 1988 with three girls in leather and hairspray barreling toward a heavy metal concert, trailing cigarette smoke and mall perfume. A van full of grungy boys lobs a milkshake at their windshield. Naturally, they flirt about it later. This is not a film interested in subtlety. They meet again at the gig—pyro, beer, denim vests—and what starts as post-show flirting turns into an invitation back to a secluded mansion owned by one of the girls’ televangelist fathers (Johnny Knoxville, because who else?). What follows is a bloody, ironic morality tale with knives, poison, and at least one sledgehammer. Think April Fool’s Day by way of a youth group gone off-script. The cast is game. Alexandra Daddario and Maddie Hasson throw themselves into the chaos with such unbothered commitment you almost don’t mind how thin the characterizations are. The violence is creative but never overdone, and the ‘80s window dressing—cassette decks, satanic panic, Aqua Net—adds a layer of soft-focus nostalgia that works better than it should. But while the setup promises a genre shake-up, the execution mostly walks a familiar path. The twists are visible from space. The characters behave like they’ve never encountered basic story structure. You’ll guess where it’s going long before it gets there, and spend the rest watching them catch up. Still, there’s enjoyment in the way it leans into its own ridiculousness. It may not be clever, but it moves quickly, looks good, and knows exactly which audience it’s serving. Not essential, but it’ll do if you’re in the mood for satanic cosplay, bad decisions, and a well-timed fire poker.

The best part of Wedding Crashers happens before the plot kicks in. Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, parked at opposite ends of a conference table, volleying improvised nonsense back and forth like two golden retrievers chasing the same joke. It’s quick, stupidly charming, and funnier than most of the movie that follows. They play John and Jeremy, divorce mediators by day, serial wedding crashers by… also day. Their hobby is sneaking into high-end weddings, delivering rousing toasts to people they’ve never met, scarfing down free prime rib, and seducing emotionally available bridesmaids. This isn’t casual mischief—it’s a lifestyle, governed by a sacred scroll of arcane rules. Vaughn recites them like he’s been preparing for this since Cub Scouts. Then John (Wilson) catches actual feelings for Claire (Rachel McAdams), a politician’s daughter with a smile straight out of a Nancy Meyers movie and a boyfriend already auditioning for a restraining order. Jeremy, meanwhile, gets more than he bargained for with Claire’s sister Gloria (Isla Fisher), a cartoonish whirlwind of codependency and kink who attaches herself to him like a human clamp. The film works better as a buddy comedy than as a romantic one. The emotional beats are by-the-numbers and land with the precision of a dart thrown left-handed. What keeps it upright is chemistry—the Vaughn/Wilson rhythm, Fisher’s deranged enthusiasm, and a Will Ferrell cameo that’s equal parts gross and glorious. Christopher Walken delivers his lines with that hypnotic cadence that makes even throwaway dialogue sound mythic. Not everything sticks. Bradley Cooper’s villain performance is pitched somewhere between frat pledge and rabid sea lion, and Jane Seymour’s cougar routine feels less outrageous than confused. The third act gets stuck in the rom-com blender, and nobody seems sure how fast to spin it. Still, there’s a looseness here that works. You can feel where the script stopped and the actors kept going. Wedding Crashers isn’t breaking new ground—but it drinks the champagne, makes an inappropriate toast, and finds a few real laughs before stumbling into the cake.

There’s a workable rom-com buried somewhere in The Wedding Date—you can almost see the shape of it under the clichés and wasted potential—but it’s let down by flat writing and characters who feel like they were forever stuck in the rough draft phase. Debra Messing plays Kat, an upper-middle-class singleton still reeling from being dumped by her ex (Jeremy Sheffield) like a dress returned past season. Her sister’s wedding is fast approaching, it’s in London, and of course the ex is the best man. Rather than show up alone, Kat hires a high-end male escort named Nick (Dermot Mulroney) to pose as her boyfriend. Six thousand dollars buys her a few days of romantic camouflage—and, theoretically, a psychological upper hand. It’s not a bad setup. But the execution flattens everything. Nick doesn’t behave like a seasoned professional or even a particularly curious stranger—he carries himself like a management consultant with an unusually good skincare regimen. His brand of wisdom is the soft-focus, fortune-cookie kind, full of declarations about confidence and self-worth, all spoken in a tone that suggests he’s gently coaching someone through a Pilates class. Kat calls him the “Yoda of escorts.” That might be the film’s only good line. Messing does her best, and there are flickers of something watchable whenever she’s allowed to spark. But she’s stuck opposite a character who’s been polished into such an inoffensive non-entity that the dynamic stalls out almost immediately. The romantic arc has no real arc—just a flat line with some musical montages draped over it. A third-act reveal involving a family member attempts to stir things up, but it’s dropped before it can complicate anything. This is wish-fulfillment cinema for viewers who want a glossy surface and just enough conflict to keep the dresses changing. But even on autopilot, romantic comedies need rhythm. The Wedding Date doesn’t move—it drifts, with a smile plastered on its face and nothing much behind the eyes.

Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey are as attractive as advertised, which helps—because the characters they’re playing spend most of the film behaving like people in a mild fugue state. Information is withheld not for tension or surprise, but because nobody seems capable of basic conversation. He forgets to mention he’s engaged. She fumbles through a non-explanation about a man claiming to be her fiancé, who speaks mostly in vowels and refuses to leave. The premise is built on the thinnest layer of irony: Lopez plays Mary, a high-end wedding planner who can orchestrate anyone’s perfect day except her own. She just hasn’t met the right guy. Her father (Alex Rocco) tries to help by introducing her to a heavily accented Italian caricature who insists, at length, that they’re engaged. This is treated as a romantic complication. It plays more like a psychiatric concern. There are attempts at comedy—a Greek wedding where the guests start smashing priceless museum plates, a runaway dumpster on wheels, the usual—but little of it connects. The performances don’t help. Lopez coasts on charm, just barely. Every emotion feels like a light dimmed to medium. She grins when she’s supposed to seethe, furrows her brow when flattered, floats through scenes like she’s watching them happen to someone else. McConaughey gives it a little more—some selective squinting, a reliable sweater rotation—but never looks surprised to be in the movie. The film has just enough surface charm to pass a casual glance. There’s chemistry, sort of. Enough for the undemanding to nod along. But it runs on contrivance, recycles punchlines, and can’t withstand even a casual attempt at logic. People don’t act like people here—they behave like sketches of characters nobody finished writing. A misfire, but a glossy one.

The jokes come fast, come cheap, and don’t always stick—but there’s enough eccentric energy and ‘80s glitter thrown into The Wedding Singer to keep things moving with a grin. Adam Sandler plays Robbie Hart, a small-time musician who once chased pop stardom but now makes a living belting out covers at weddings. He’s good at it, in a shaggy-dog, open-collared kind of way, until his girlfriend ditches him for not being the rock god she thought she signed up for. Robbie unravels in brief, glorious spurts—drunken toasts, public meltdowns, maudlin ballads delivered to horrified reception guests. It’s Sandler in his element: just unhinged enough to be funny, but not so far gone you can’t root for him. Enter Julia (Drew Barrymore), a sweet-tempered waitress engaged to a finance bro so cartoonishly awful he might as well be wearing a name tag that says “Narrative Obstacle.” The romance that blooms between Robbie and Julia is textbook stuff, but it works—largely because Sandler and Barrymore click. There’s something disarmingly earnest about the way they play off each other, like they’re both in on the same joke and still kind of believe in it. Of course, the film’s real headliner is nostalgia. This is the kind of movie that doesn’t just nod at the 1980s—it raids the closet, plugs in the synthesizer, and blasts Spandau Ballet like it’s a public service. From the teased hair to the popped collars to a perfectly timed cameo from Billy Idol (as himself, naturally), it leans into the kitsch with wide-eyed affection. Even Alexis Arquette, cast as a George Michael tribute act, gets a few oddly sincere moments between punchlines. It’s not subtle, and the structure’s as predictable as a DJ’s third slow dance set. But The Wedding Singer earns its goodwill with charm, a handful of solid jokes, and a romance that actually feels like something worth rooting for—even if you can already see the bouquet toss coming from across the room.

Gary (Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell‑Smith) are social zeroes with too much imagination and not enough dignity. So they do what any mid‑‘80s teen nerd would: they scan supermodel photos into a computer, recite Monk‑like incantations, and literally wear bras on their heads. Out of this surreal alchemy steps Lisa (Kelly LeBrock), a statuesque goddess and social upgrade. Their first move is to shower with her—jeans still on—because even in their wildest fantasies, they’re terrified of actual nudity. Lisa upgrades their status like it’s a system setting—waltzing them into bars, parties, and impossible popularity. She brushes off bullies (including a baby-faced Robert Downey Jr.) like they’re barely worth the breath. She’s not just a fantasy made flesh—she’s a fairy godmother in a crop top, part pin-up, part drill sergeant, and entirely unbothered by teenage panic. Her mission is to shock these two out of their adolescent stupor, whether they’re ready or hyperventilating. The plot is threadbare. The logic, lobotomized. The tone plays like a blender stuck between parody, puberty, and pop-art fever dream. But that’s exactly why it works. John Hughes isn’t aiming for realism—he’s making a geek wish-fulfillment fable dressed in neon, sweat, and adolescent panic. It’s a sex comedy where the sex never really happens, and the emotional growth sneaks in under cover of a missile launching out of a bedroom and a biker gang crashing a house party. Not everything holds up. The gender dynamics are muddled, and Lisa’s dual role as sex object and surrogate mom is queasy if you think about it for more than a second. But the movie isn’t built for scrutiny—it’s built for midnight cable and teenage daydreams. And when it leans into its dream logic—Oingo Boingo blasting, hair standing on end—it’s genuinely, thrillingly weird. Not essential Hughes, but far from disposable. It’s messy, juvenile, and maybe even a little confused—but in its best moments, it feels like the purest expression of adolescent delirium Hollywood ever got away with.

A black comedy wired like a horror film—because what happens to Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo), seventh grader, is the kind of sustained cruelty that makes you brace for a jump scare. Not stylized cruelty. Real cruelty. The kind you remember. Solondz nails it with unnerving precision: the mid-’90s American middle school as a self-contained ecosystem. I happened to go to middle school in this exact era, and what I see here is unnervingly familiar. Same prefab walls, same crumbling tile, same fluorescent hum. The way kids speak to each other would make most adults gasp; for us, it was just Tuesday. And if you told an adult? You were the one in trouble. Dawn is prime prey. Socially tone-deaf. Academically middle. Craving approval from teachers and classmates who treat her like scenery. When a bully (Brendan Sexton III) calls to announce he’ll rape her tomorrow, she doesn’t react—not because she’s brave, but because she knows it’s useless. She develops a crush on a popular high schooler in her brother’s (Matthew Faber) class, a boy basically grown. She approaches him in a onesie. She doesn’t see the joke. Her one foothold in the power structure is her younger sister Missy (Daria Kalinina)—a tutu-wearing cherub twirling through the house like she’s the one paying the mortgage. Missy is untouchable, the family jewel. Dawn gets the rest. The humiliations stack, each one absurd and exact. Irony drips from every corner, but never in a way that lets you detach. Matarazzo holds the center—awkward, stubborn, heartbreakingly oblivious. Solondz builds something jagged and merciless: tragic, funny, ugly, and so precise it stings. It’s not just a cult classic. It’s one of the truest films ever made about what it feels like to be thirteen and at the bottom of the food chain.

Just crazy enough to be fun, and wacky enough that you can’t quite look away, Welcome to Woop Woop has a strong hook and a loopy energy that almost sustains it. “Woop Woop” is Australian slang for the boondocks—the kind of place so remote and hostile the law either gave up or never heard of it, leaving locals with blunderbusses and unchecked authority. Into this wanders Teddy (Johnathon Schaech), an American con artist who deals in exotic animals. He comes to Australia looking to restock his supply and crosses paths with Angie (Susie Porter), a fast-talking local with a van, a libido, and a right hook. One impulsive hookup later, he wakes up bruised, declared married to Angie, and marooned in a dust-choked village that might as well be the moon. The town is less a functioning society than a penal colony held together with kangaroo meat and musical theater. Run by Angie’s father, Daddy-O (Rod Taylor, going full cult leader), the residents operate a shady meat-packing outfit turning kangaroo into black market dog food. There’s also “Dog Day,” a local holiday where everyone gets to shoot at dogs, and a baffling community-wide obsession with Rodgers and Hammerstein. Teddy is effectively a prisoner, surrounded by twitchy eccentrics who shift from violence to show tunes without blinking. For a while, the film runs on its own derangement. The visuals are vivid, the characters have enough grit and grease to feel invented by heatstroke, and the overall vibe is so proudly off-kilter it almost works on nerve alone. But the randomness, which starts out invigorating, gradually flattens into noise. The plot stumbles like a drunk kangaroo, and whatever emotional spine it had—Teddy clawing his way out of this sunburned musical purgatory—gets buried under tonal ricochets and tossed-off digressions. By the time he’s sprinting toward freedom to the swelling strains of Climb Every Mountain, the irony isn’t registering as much as it’s wheezing. Still, if your tolerance for junkyard surrealism is high—and you’re curious what Stephan Elliott did after The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert—this is a gloriously weird effort. Not good, exactly, but committed. You could call it a mess, but it’s a mess that knows all the lyrics to Oklahoma! and isn’t afraid to scream them in your face.

There’s a potentially sharp premise buried in We’re No Angels: two escaped convicts hide out in a monastery by posing as priests. You could build a decent farce out of that. Instead, we get a long, slack parade of scenes in which Robert De Niro and Sean Penn fumble their way through sermons, collars, and confessionals, all while the movie forgets to develop anything resembling momentum. The setup is perfunctory. They escape from a prison near the Canadian border, wander into town, and are mistaken for a pair of expected clergymen. And that’s about where the story parks. The film banks everything on the mistaken-identity routine, but the script gives the actors little to work with beyond vague confusion and the occasional pratfall. There’s no escalation, no rhythm—just two crooks trying not to get caught, and not much else going on around them. Penn, to his credit, at least gives the impression he knows he’s in a comedy. He plays his character like a pocket-sized Edward G. Robinson, all high-pitched gangland bravado delivered through a halo. De Niro, meanwhile, gives a performance that feels eerily like a parody of himself—raised eyebrows, sharp line readings, and a sense of deep internal confusion, though maybe not the kind the script intended. Demi Moore floats through the film as the obligatory woman with a past, but even she looks unsure of what she’s doing here. The supporting cast—Bruno Kirby, Wallace Shawn, a young John C. Reilly—adds texture, but not much spark. It’s one of those comedies where every character looks like they’re waiting for someone else to make it funny. Neil Jordan would go on to do better work. So would everyone else involved. But We’re No Angels plays like a one-joke sketch stretched to 106 minutes, and the punchline never lands.

Remaking a film as beloved—and as bulletproof—as West Side Story is either a fool’s errand or an act of hubris. But if anyone could pull it off, it was going to be Steven Spielberg. What makes this version work is how rarely it overreaches. He doesn’t reinvent the wheel—he polishes it, tightens the spokes, and corrects a few of the wobbles the original either missed or ignored. The biggest shift is in the casting, and it’s a smart one. Rachel Zegler, an actual Latinx performer, takes on Maria and utterly mesmerizes. She sings for herself—something Natalie Wood famously didn’t—and brings a radiant vulnerability to the role. Rita Moreno returns, this time as Valentina, a reimagined version of Doc, and is given the film’s emotional apex with “Somewhere.” It’s a graceful passing of the torch, and one of the film’s most affecting moments. Spielberg doesn’t mess much with the structure—he knows better—but he and screenwriter Tony Kushner subtly recalibrate the world. The city looks like it’s on the verge of collapse, not just socially but physically: tenements crumbling, shadows stretching, corners that seem ready to give way. The cinematography is sharp, the staging electric. Jerome Robbins’ choreography is still felt in the bones of the dance numbers, but it’s been given just enough edge and variation to keep even longtime fans on their toes. The tragic arc—still echoing Romeo and Juliet—holds up just as fiercely in 2021 as it did in 1961, maybe more so. The Jets and Sharks aren’t just gangs anymore; they’re systems in collision, histories too stubborn to unlearn. And the music, of course, is indelible. You don’t just remember these songs—you hum them for weeks. I went in knowing the beats, the lyrics, the heartbreaks. And still, I found myself pulled in all over again. West Side Story didn’t need a remake, but it got a damn good one. Spielberg plays it mostly straight—but he plays it beautifully.

Equal parts homage and demolition job, Wet Hot American Summer is a spoof of early-’80s sex comedies that gleefully drowns itself in the absurd. It’s set on the final day of summer, 1981, at the deeply dysfunctional Camp Firewood, where the counselors are in a mad dash to fall in love, settle scores, and stage the most overrehearsed talent show in the history of fictional camp theater. The humor is so aggressively off-center that it stops even pretending to be satire and just becomes its own strange species. At one point, a haunted Vietnam vet turned cook (Christopher Meloni) consults a talking can of vegetables for advice. That’s not a punchline—it’s a scene. You’re either onboard or you’re not. The film plays like a sketch troupe let loose with no brakes and a VHS copy of Meatballs as their only compass. But there’s method to the madness. David Wain and Michael Showalter—alumni of The State—lean hard into the artifice, cranking every character archetype into parody and letting them melt under the August sun. What makes it age well—surprisingly—is the cast. At the time, most of them were on the cusp: Paul Rudd, Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks, Ken Marino, Joe Lo Truglio. They treat every ridiculous line with complete conviction, which only makes it funnier. Garofalo and David Hyde Pierce hold down the adult end of the nonsense, but even they can’t keep a straight face for long. It’s not for everyone. The film doesn’t build toward anything so much as it unravels gleefully. But if you have any affection for camp movie clichés, and you’re willing to watch them torched by a group of comedy anarchists, this is exactly your brand of stupid. High-concept, low-sanity, and weirdly enduring. Followed, hilariously, 20 years later by a prequel TV series—with most of the same cast returning.