Film Buff Musings

Jakarta, 1965. The air is thick with smoke and slogans. Military trucks idle at intersections. Radios hum with rumor. Into this political unrest stumbles Guy Hamilton (Mel Gibson), a green Australian journalist who’s finally been handed a foreign post—his shot, his proving ground. He arrives too late, knows no one, and can’t get a single story past the hotel bar. But luck—or something more uncanny—delivers him Billy Kwan. Billy (Linda Hunt), half-Chinese, half-European, all-seeing, a camera slung around his neck like a sixth sense. He’s got contacts in every quarter and a filing cabinet mind for political undercurrents. More than that, he’s a kind of matchmaker—for stories, for people. He sees something in Guy. Helps him. Guides him. Pushes him toward Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver), a British embassy attaché with cautious eyes and a wary posture. Something sparks, but Guy’s drawn to danger like a moth to jet fuel, and intimacy gets smothered in smoke. This is one of those films where the tension doesn’t build—it arrives early and stays, hanging in the air like heat lightning. Peter Weir doesn’t just direct scenes; he engineers pressure. There’s real narrative momentum here, despite the political complexity. You feel the ground shifting even if you don’t know the full history. And then, there’s Hunt. Playing a man—but that’s the least interesting thing about her performance. Billy is enigmatic, principled, wounded, and oddly serene. Every line she delivers lands like a secret being handed to you. It’s one of those rare performances that seems to anchor the entire film from a side angle. This isn’t just a great political thriller. It’s a portrait of a nation unraveling—and one man trying to thread a headline through it.

Somewhere between a screwball romance and a second-rate spy caper, Year of the Comet tries to bottle charm and ends up with corked bathwater. The premise isn’t the problem: a fabled 1811 Château Lafite—commissioned by Napoleon, no less—is unearthed in a crumbling Scottish castle. Margaret (Penelope Ann Miller), a wine expert with something to prove, is sent to retrieve it. Before she even gets a grip on the thing, it’s stolen—kicking off a mad dash across Europe that never quite lights up—or even tries that hard. Margaret is paired with Oliver (Timothy Daly), an American fixer who brings all the charisma of a lukewarm toddy. They bicker, they banter, they fall in love—mechanically, inevitably, joylessly. Miller plays exasperated; Daly plays like he’s hoping someone yells “cut” so he can check out early. Whatever chemistry they’re supposed to have evaporates on contact. The tone staggers from thriller to romance to limp comedy, never finding a footing. The script lobs half-hearted zingers and clunky plot twists, hoping speed will substitute for wit. It doesn’t. It flirts with style but settles for clutter. What we get is a lot of running, a lot of shouting, and a final toast to nothing in particular. The wine stays corked. So does the movie.

Yellowbeard hits pirate movies like a cannonball through a window—loud, graceless, and mostly debris. Scenes barely hold together, the pacing conks out, and most of the punchlines veer off course—but with a cast this stacked with comic legends, all crammed onto one ship, you might find yourself sticking around just to see who staggers on deck next. Graham Chapman plays the titular menace—a frothing pirate who bursts out of prison and sets his one good eye on the treasure he buried long ago. The Royal Navy’s after him, but that’s a minor detail in the grand scheme of things, as it stumbles from set piece to set piece, forgetting its own plot about as often as it remembers its own punchlines. Momentum is sacrificed for randomness, and coherence dies early. Still, there are flashes. James Mason plays a pompous ship captain who believes, by “science,” that women bring bad luck at sea—while calmly taking orders from “Mr. Prostitute,” a woman in a dollar-store mustache. Tommy Chong, as a lisping aristocrat, repeatedly urges Cheech to smash his head into hard surfaces. John Cleese wanders in, blind and belligerent, with just enough bite to remind you what this could have been. David Bowie turns up—briefly, suavely, and manages to be the coolest thing on deck, even while wearing a shark fin. The film’s energy pulls in five directions at once, but rarely toward anything funny. It wants to be Holy Grail with boats. What it delivers is half-formed sketches strung together with sea shanties and slapstick. If you’re just curious, sure—it’s a spectacle. But if you’re looking for structure, payoff, or anything resembling rhythm, best steer clear.

A self-serious but involving musical about a woman who cuts her hair, changes her name, and rewrites the rules—not to challenge them, but to study them. Barbra Streisand plays Yentl, a book-hungry girl in 1900s Poland, where women don’t read Talmud—they pour tea for the men who do. Her father (Nehemiah Persoff), a rabbi, teaches her in secret. When he dies, she keeps the books—and the silence. With her curls on the floor and a borrowed name in her mouth, she enters a yeshiva as “Anshel.” The disguise works. No one questions her scholarship—only her quiet. At school, she bonds with Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin), a fast-talking fellow student thrilled to find a sparring partner with some bite. He doesn’t know Anshel is a woman. Yentl doesn’t know what to do with her feelings for him. When Avigdor’s engagement to the dutiful Hadass (Amy Irving) is called off, Yentl is offered up as the fallback groom—and accepts. Not out of love. More like panic, loyalty, and the creeping fear that access to knowledge might be revoked. What sounds like setup for farce plays out like an operetta of restraint. Streisand turns every flicker of doubt into a ballad. Michel Legrand’s score swells beneath Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s lyrics, sung with her usual precision and operatic conviction. The songs aren’t bad—some are even lovely—but they blur together: too similar, too forceful, and too frequent. Each one is sung like a finale. The closing “Papa, watch me fly” crests so high it nearly tips into parody. The music doesn’t sink the film, but it adds drag—every emotional shift stretched into aria. Beneath the crescendos, the characters stay simple: Yentl the seeker, Avigdor the idealist, Hadass the tradition she disrupts. Still, the specificity of the setting and the tension of the masquerade keep it alive. Who’s allowed to learn? Who gets to interpret faith? What compromises hold a life together when your mind doesn’t fit the role you’re assigned? Streisand piles on the drama, but she stays in control—even as the material starts to swell beyond its frame.

An all-too-rare case of Happy Madison doing something besides filming the cast on vacation. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah is bright, funny, and—possibly because Adam Sandler handed it to his daughters—written like someone actually cared. Based on Fiona Rosenbloom’s novel, the film follows Stacy Friedman (Sunny Sandler), a seventh grader with big dreams, a bigger crush, and a bat mitzvah on the horizon. She and her best friend Lydia (Samantha Lorraine) have been planning theirs for years—matching dresses, choreographed entrances, the works. But when Lydia starts dating Stacy’s crush (Dylan Hoffman, all preteen swagger and conditioner), the friendship fractures. Swiftly. What keeps the film from turning into a middle-school soap opera is its tone—light, snappy, and just tart enough. Sunny Sandler, who could’ve coasted on the family brand, actually gives a sharp, buoyant performance. She’s expressive without overselling it, and the comic timing is locked in. The script is fast on its feet, full of small, recognizable humiliations: outfit disasters, gym-class betrayals, dads who think they’re helping. Adam Sandler shows up in dad mode—not the overgrown slacker version, but the quietly exasperated one, which suits him better. His presence is understated, as if he knows it isn’t his movie. It’s not perfect—the drama plays a little cleaner than it probably would in real life, and the ending resolves with more ease than sting—but the film earns its sweetness. There’s a specificity to it that feels rare for this genre. For once, the Happy Madison house style gets out of the way, and the result is a small, satisfying teen comedy that actually respects its audience. Mazel tov.

A car crash. Two parents gone. Their children, Sammy and Terry left behind. Years pass, but the absence never really does. Sammy (Laura Linney) stays where they grew up—bank job, small-town habits, raising her son with a steadiness that sometimes looks like camouflage. Terry (Mark Ruffalo) bolts—odd jobs, half-finished relationships, always drifting toward the next place that won’t work out. When he shows up again, it’s familiar but not easy—love laced with the memory of every fight they’ve ever had. He’s broke. She knows the drill. He crashes on her couch and, almost by accident, starts orbiting Rudy (Rory Culkin), Sammy’s son. That thread—messy, unplanned—becomes one of the film’s sharpest quiet pleasures. Meanwhile, there’s Sammy fencing with a priggish new bank manager (Matthew Broderick), Rudy quietly wondering about the father he’s never met, and Sammy herself—open one minute, closed the next, like someone guarding the door without knowing why. It’s not a story driven by plot. Lonergan builds it out of the little slippages in human behavior—hesitations, sidelong jokes, arguments that loop back on themselves because the original wound never healed. Linney plays Sammy with that tricky balance of warmth and reticence; Ruffalo’s Terry feels like someone you’ve known forever but still can’t quite predict. Lonergan doesn’t fake catharsis. Families don’t tie things off. They stumble forward, leave things unsaid, keep circling each other because gravity won’t let them drift too far. In the middle of that pull—funny, painful, unresolvable—the film finds its shape.

Frank Capra never had trouble filling a frame with eccentrics, but this may be his most luminous lineup. At the top is Grandpa Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore), a middle-class patriarch who once turned down a lucrative buyout from hard-nosed banker Anthony Kirby (Edward Arnold) and has been living entirely on his own terms ever since. In the Vanderhof household, there’s always room for another oddball—like Mr. Poppins (Donald Meek), a mild-mannered inventor of novelty gadgets who wandered in off the street and was absorbed into the family as if he’d been misplaced there decades ago. He works in the basement alongside Grandpa’s son-in-law, their recent output mostly consisting of homemade fireworks—often set off indoors, to no one’s concern. Upstairs, a young woman (Ann Miller) flits through rooms in ballet slippers, while a young man (Dub Taylor) periodically produces a xylophone and plays it for no discernible reason. Out of this circus emerges Alice (Jean Arthur), the family’s most composed member—at least on the surface. She’s fallen for Tony Kirby (James Stewart), the banker’s son, and the obstacle is obvious: Tony’s wealthy parents aren’t likely to welcome their heir marrying into a household of hobbyists and happy anarchists. The pleasure is in simply being among these people. Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin give them conversations that drift into delightful irrelevance, tasks so cheerfully pointless you almost want to join in, and a knack for mischief that arrives right on cue. The comedy is unforced, the kind that seems to happen for their own amusement while we listen in. And then, as ever with Capra, it gathers into a populist finale—this one managing to feel both preordained and entirely satisfying—a reminder that wealth without warmth isn’t worth having. One of the Golden Age’s essential comedies, and one of its most effortlessly pleasurable.

The fifth entry in the James Bond series might lag in places, but it delivers all the key ingredients audiences had come to crave by 1967: Sean Connery’s effortless cool, an elaborate villainous plot, globe-hopping glamour, and a finale built for maximum spectacle. It opens with a bang—Bond “killed” in action so he can move invisibly through his next mission. His trail leads to Japan, where astronauts are vanishing from orbit, a nefarious plot is unfolding beneath a dormant volcano, and a ninja training facility somehow becomes crucial to stopping World War III. If that sounds like a lot, it is—but it’s never boring. Connery, by now fully at ease in the role, exudes that perfect mix of charm, authority, and eye-rolling detachment. His chemistry with Japanese agent Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi) brings warmth to the film’s middle stretch, which otherwise begins to sag under too much exposition. The eventual switch to a new partner, Kissy Suzuki (Mie Hama), comes a bit too late to register as anything more than a plot device. Then there’s the unfortunate detour: Bond, in disguise as a Japanese fisherman, complete with prosthetics and a fake marriage. It’s tonally bizarre, unconvincing, and best filed away under “misguided.” Still, once the rocket launches and ninjas descend into that cavernous volcano lair, all is forgiven. Donald Pleasence appears as Blofeld—bald, scarred, and purring menace from behind a control console. His performance teeters into parody, but that’s exactly what made it iconic. It’s no From Russia with Love or Goldfinger, but You Only Live Twice still has that outsize Bond appeal: style, danger, and a villain’s lair worthy of architectural digest.

I’ve seen this film more times than I can count. I know every punchline, every muttered aside, every oddly timed reaction. And still—still—I laugh. Young Frankenstein isn’t just funny, it’s built to last. The jokes are rooted not only in wit but in craft: visual gags, musical cues, deadpan delivery, and comic timing so precise it feels like clockwork. Mel Brooks’ send-up of the old Universal Frankenstein pictures isn’t content to simply lampoon the classics. It lovingly replicates them. Shot in luminous black and white and scored like an authentic 1930s monster movie, the film actually reuses some of the original sets from Bride of Frankenstein. The fog rolls in on cue. The castle looms like it should. This isn’t parody slapped together with duct tape—it’s made with care. Gene Wilder stars as Dr. Frederick Fronkensteen, the grandson of the notorious Victor Frankenstein. He insists—loudly—that he is not like his ancestor. But once he inherits the family estate and stumbles across a dusty lab manual titled How I Did It, he reconsiders his stance. Wilder gives a performance of manic elegance: all wild hair and wilder eyes, but always deadly sincere. Marty Feldman’s Igor (pronounced “Eye-gor,” naturally) slinks around the film like a vaudeville gremlin, constantly breaking the fourth wall without ever actually saying he’s doing it. Peter Boyle plays the Monster with surprising subtlety—until he dons top hat and tails for a show-stopping rendition of “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Add in Madeline Kahn’s comic perfection, Cloris Leachman’s haunted glare, and Kenneth Mars going full lunatic as a German inspector, and you have a comedy where every scene offers a new highlight. It’s a rare kind of movie: a send-up that improves with every rewatch.

Jacques Demy’s follow-up to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg isn’t as emotionally potent, but it might be the most buoyant musical ever made about yearning. The Young Girls of Rochefort doesn’t walk—it twirls, glides, and occasionally pirouettes just to cross the street. It’s so airy and pastel-colored it seems less filmed than frosted. Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac—real-life sisters—play twin sisters Delphine and Solange, a dance instructor and a composer, who live in a candy-colored coastal town and dream of Paris and love. Their prayers are answered, sort of, by a pair of passing carnival workers (George Chakiris and Grover Dale), who rope them into a traveling show, and by Gene Kelly, playing a lovestruck composer whose main function is to elevate the screen’s MGM quotient. There’s barely a plot—just near-misses, wistful glances, and a slow swirl toward romantic alignment—but Demy isn’t telling a story so much as conducting a mood. Michel Legrand’s jazzy score carries the film forward even when the songs begin to blur. The visuals do most of the heavy lifting anyway: sherbet-pink buildings, lemon yellow dresses, dance numbers that bloom like fountains. The whole thing plays like a Technicolor dream remembered in soft focus. If there’s a flaw, it’s in how little of it sticks. The sweetness floats but doesn’t settle. Emotions skim the surface, and for all the elegance, you may leave feeling slightly underfed. Still, it’s a lovely confection—delicate, sugar-dusted, and lit like optimism itself. If Umbrellas broke your heart, Rochefort flirts with it, kisses both cheeks, and skips off smiling.

Arthur Conan Doyle purists will want to calibrate their expectations. This Holmes isn’t the pipe-smoking, razor-sharp observer of the canon—he’s a teenage boarding school student in a Victorian action serial. Nicholas Rowe plays him as bright and self-assured, but the deductions take a back seat to dodging booby traps and piloting a Da Vinci–style flying bicycle. The mystery itself involves a rash of hallucination-driven murders linked to an underground cult. At one point, Holmes and Watson spy on a ritual through the glowing eyes of a giant bull idol—pure Temple of Doom without the gore. When Sherlock says, “We must create a diversion,” Watson answers, “Why didn’t I think of that?”—a perfect “No shit, Sherlock” setup the script doesn’t touch. What it lacks in deductive intrigue, it tries to make up for in atmosphere. Fog-shrouded London streets, candlelit classrooms, and that early CGI stained-glass knight—still a marvel in its novelty—give the film a certain period-adventure gloss. Rowe’s Holmes is competent if not especially memorable; Alan Cox’s Watson feels more like a tagalong than a partner. As an ‘80s curiosity, it has its moments, but as a Holmes mystery, it’s more Young Indiana Jones and the Mysterious Boarding School than The Sign of Four.

It’s a rom-com with a long-distance clause. Your Place or Mine keeps its stars on opposite sides of the country and bets that charm can survive the time zone difference. Debbie (Reese Witherspoon) is a single mom in L.A., defined by her checklists, her frozen dinners, and her refusal to deviate from either. Peter (Ashton Kutcher) is a brand consultant in New York who drifts between hookups and half-hearted life changes, but always seems to bail before takeoff. They’ve been friends for twenty years—after a sultry one-night stand—and still keep in contact, talking like co-parents of a romance that never made it past the planning stage. When Debbie gets the chance to take a last-minute class in New York, Peter offers to watch her son, Jack (Wesley Kimmel). He moves to L.A., and she moves to New York. He’s horrified by the rules. She’s horrified by the minimalism. The rest of the movie proceeds in tidy crosscuts: Debbie fumbles her way into a fling with a handsome editor (Jesse Williams), while Peter becomes an off-brand stepdad—ordering takeout, loosening curfews, and panicking over emotional growth. This is a movie built for convenience: characters who don’t grow so much as shift around, romance that arrives not with heat but with calendar clearance. The script flirts with wit but rarely follows through. The inevitable reunion feels more like a box being checked than a spark being lit. What’s left is airbrushed nostalgia for early-2000s rom-coms, with stars who can still carry the look, if not the charge. Steve Zahn shows up, casually stealing scenes as Debbie’s barefoot gardener who pays someone else to mow his own lawn. It’s a welcome bit of comic relief for a comedy that badly needed it. Overall: not unpleasant, not memorable. Just a film that keeps its shoes on and never stays the night.

Frank (Henry Fonda) and Helen (Lucille Ball) are two widowed parents who meet cute on a military base—he’s a naval officer, she’s a nurse—and share a tentative first date. But each is harboring a surprise: Frank has ten kids. Helen has eight. Their second date is with destiny. The premise alone makes it impossible not to think of The Brady Bunch, which premiered the following year with its tidy package of six children. You can practically picture this fictional family of eighteen watching it together and laughing their asses off at that quaint little starter pack. What’s surprising is how often the film manages to be genuinely funny. The pacing is snappy, the script is full of playful lines from both kids and adults, and Lucille Ball is in fine comic form. She even gets to revive her famous Vitameatavegamin routine when Frank’s kids spike her drink, leading to a gloriously tipsy dinner scene. But the film isn’t just antics. There are grounded emotional beats that land with quiet strength—particularly a moment when Helen’s children struggle with the idea of giving up their late father’s name in favor of their soon-to-be stepfather’s. Another arrives when her eldest son prepares to ship off to Vietnam. These scenes give the film ballast, preventing it from floating off into pure fluff. Yes, it’s sentimental. And yes, the ending ties up a little too neatly. But there’s something winning in the way it embraces the sheer scale of its story—finding humor, hubris, and genuine warmth in eighteen people trying to build something resembling a family.

If this film did nothing else, it ensured that an entire generation would forever hear “You’ve got mail” in a chipper, robotic voice—a phrase once full of promise, now about as dated as dial-up. Kathleen (Meg Ryan) runs a fiercely beloved children’s bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Joe (Tom Hanks) is the executive face of a faceless corporate bookstore chain, building a megastore just down the block. They’ve never met—or so they think. Online, they’ve been anonymously corresponding under screen names and slowly falling for each other, one thoughtful email at a time. Offline, they’re sworn enemies. The story isn’t new. You’ve Got Mail is a digital-age remake of The Shop Around the Corner—a 1940 gem about two co-workers unknowingly exchanging love letters. Nora Ephron updates it with email, lattes, and corporate overreach, but the bones are the same: romantic irony with just enough bite. What makes this version click is how it lets the premise breathe. The romance simmers, the jokes land softly, and the film even sneaks in some surprisingly pointed commentary about big-box capitalism masquerading as neighborly charm. There’s a strange sweetness to watching Joe unknowingly coach Kathleen—through vague online advice—on how to fight the very store he’s helping open. Ryan plays Kathleen with a kind of endearing fluster, while Hanks, per usual, makes charm look suspiciously effortless. Their chemistry doesn’t need selling. It just settles in. It’s all a little fluffier than Sleepless in Seattle, less melancholy, more café playlist. But that’s the charm. Sometimes, a romance doesn’t need heartbreak or grand tragedy. Sometimes all it needs is two people, a blinking cursor, and a modem trying to connect.

Remember when the clocks struck midnight on January 1, 2000, and absolutely nothing happened? This movie imagines the opposite—what if the world did end, and in the dumbest, most chaotically literal way possible? Y2K is more juvenile than satirical, more messy than madcap. It’s got killer vending machines, rogue microwaves, sentient blenders—all lashing out in the first minutes of the new millennium like HAL on bath salts. Some people die in appliance-based carnage. Others just seem to die incidentally. It’s the apocalypse, apparently, but the stakes are inconsistent and the tone’s scrambled like eggs in a server crash. At the center is a shy nerd (Jaeden Martell) who everyone calls a loser for reasons never explained. He harbors a crush on the school’s resident cool girl (Rachel Zegler), who also happens to be a world-class hacker. You know the drill. Together they become reluctant heroes in a digital doomsday that never quite decides whether it wants to be WarGames or Scary Movie. The movie’s undoing is that very indecision—too soft for satire, too slack for farce. The logic behind the carnage barely holds: it hand-waves away questions of connectivity, causality, or why a TV self-assembled into a robot and suddenly needed to kill. The second act’s highlight has almost nothing to do with the plot: a surprise appearance from Fred Durst, who leads an acoustic sing-along of “Faith” with more sincerity than the rest of the movie manages to fake. Still, for all its aimless flailing, Y2K is brisk and not often boring. You won’t hate yourself for watching it. But it’ll vanish from memory faster than whatever snack you were eating while it played.