Film Buff Musings

Zama is a minor colonial official, stationed in late 18th-century Argentina, stranded at the ragged edge of the Spanish Empire and slowly coming apart at the seams. When we first meet him, he’s crouched in the reeds, spying on Black women bathing in a muddy river. One sees him and charges. He slaps her—less out of fear than reflexive entitlement. That’s Zama in a single gesture: exposed, absurd, and still clinging to a hierarchy that has long since stopped caring about him. His sole ambition is a transfer to the city of Lerma. It’s all he talks about. He files petitions, flatters his superiors, makes himself small. He waits. Then waits more. Nothing happens. That’s the narrative, but calling it a plot feels generous. What Martel gives us instead is a slow-motion collapse—personal, political, spiritual. The film unfolds like a fever in dry heat. Wigs slip, uniforms sag, insects buzz in rooms where nothing moves. Power still exists, but only in gestures—empty rituals performed by men too proud to notice they’ve become scenery. This isn’t colonialism as conquest. It’s colonialism as inertia. The grandeur is gone. All that’s left is formality and heatstroke. Martel’s direction is precise and surreal in equal measure. She composes each frame like a portrait warped by humidity. Landscapes stretch into nothing. Interiors suffocate. There’s a quiet absurdity to it all—sunlight falling on faces that seem startled just to still be alive. Zama serves the Crown, but the Crown is spectral, its logic mutable, its favors elusive. The ladder he’s climbing doesn’t just lead nowhere—it was never anchored to anything. Daniel Giménez Cacho plays him with the perfect erosion of dignity: a man who believes, stubbornly, that loyalty still earns dividends. That systems, however cracked, will eventually reward patience. They won’t. And by the time he realizes it, the architecture around him has dissolved into hallucination. Zama doesn’t progress. It festers. And that’s its brilliance. Dryly comic, hypnotically strange, and quietly damning. You don’t follow it—you surrender to it. In Spanish with English subtitles.

Barney Springboro (Scott Baio) is a lab-coated high schooler who accidentally brews up telekinetic powers in science class. What follows is less Frankenstein and more Porky’s by way of ESP. He doesn’t move mountains. He levitates skirts. The power corrupts immediately—and predictably. The film runs on hormonal impulse and VHS-era shamelessness, with Barney and his horndog best friend Peyton (Willie Aames) turning psychic ability into a low-stakes sex crime spree. Plot is an afterthought. Women are mostly treated as test subjects, wardrobe malfunctions waiting to happen. And yet, buried somewhere beneath the leering, there’s a pulse of something stranger. Barney’s zealot mother (Mews Small) delivers a parody of The Exorcist with full fire-and-brimstone hysteria, convinced her son has invited Satan into the house through chemistry. And the finale—an anything-goes prom sequence—is Carrie without the carnage, just a series of clothing ejections set to disco. Zapped! is proudly, almost defiantly dumb. But it’s not boring. If nothing else, it commits to its junk-food logic with the kind of sincerity you only get from early-’80s teen comedies made by adults who should know better. You won’t feel smarter after watching it. But you might feel nostalgic. Or at least mildly stunned.

Zardoz opens with a disembodied head floating through blackness, eyes painted on, mustache scribbled in magic marker, reciting some cosmic haiku about death and the divine. Then comes the stone god itself—Zardoz—descending from the clouds like a pagan blimp, preaching that “the gun is good” and “the penis is evil,” before vomiting rifles onto its worshippers. The tone is reverent. The effect is not. Among those kneeling in the dust is Zed, played by a ponytailed Sean Connery, wearing nothing but a red loincloth, bullet-suspenders, and boots that creep up his thighs. A walking contradiction: primal fury in drag revue costuming. Zed infiltrates the head, kills its pilot, and crash-lands in the Vortex, a cloistered society of immortal intellectuals so advanced they’ve forgotten how to move their limbs. Thought has replaced action. Death is obsolete. Sex, mostly theorized. John Boorman directs it like a sci-fi séance. The imagery is formal, painterly, vaguely ceremonial. Interiors glow with synthetic mist. Landscapes stretch out like faded tapestries. The film whispers of philosophy—mortality, entropy, class, repression—but each idea arrives lacquered in cryptic voiceover and slow-motion interpretive writhing. You don’t decode it so much as wade through it. Connery seems game, even as the film strands him in tableau after tableau of psychic interrogation and metaphysical finger-pointing. Charlotte Rampling stares at him like she’s seeing both a god and a punchline. And when the film finally unveils the true origin of the name “Zardoz,” it’s not an epiphany—it’s a punch pulled so hard it turns into self-parody. This isn’t so much a movie as a relic from a cinematic dimension where plot is optional and symbolism wears thigh-highs. Zardoz plays it straight, but the effect is warped. Ambitious, absurd, and strangely mesmerizing. You won’t forget it. You might not forgive it either.

Think Jumanji, but cold and airless. Two brothers—one sulky, one clingy—discover an old tin board game in their basement, give it a spin, and promptly launch their house into outer space. The game is called Zathura. The rules are vague. The consequences are immediate. Meteor showers tear through the living room. Their sister (Kristen Stewart) gets frozen solid in the bathroom. An astronaut (Dax Shepard) drops in, uninvited, and a swarm of space-lizard Zorgons circles the property like cosmic vultures. All of this, naturally, unfolds before their dad (Tim Robbins) gets home from work. The setup is familiar, and so is the tone: high-stakes fantasy with a sibling rivalry subplot stitched into the fabric. Director Jon Favreau keeps the pacing tight and the effects mostly practical, giving the film a tactile quality missing from a lot of early-2000s CGI orgies. The production design leans into retro pulp—steel corridors, blinking consoles, the kind of gameboard that looks like it might electrocute you. Josh Hutcherson plays the older brother as a pint-sized tyrant, but it’s Jonah Bobo who grounds the film—wide-eyed, worried, and just earnest enough to make the chaos matter. The script builds its tension through escalation rather than noise, and even the cartoony moments land with weight because the stakes feel rooted in childhood logic: what if you broke reality, and there were no adults left to fix it? It doesn’t have Jumanji’s mythic pull or Robin Williams’ gravity, but it’s got energy, invention, and a surprisingly sweet arc about brothers learning not to annihilate each other. Which, in kid terms, counts as emotional growth.

Not for the faint of heart, mind, or appetite. And certainly not for anyone hoping to “relate” to the characters. But if you have even a passing tolerance for grotesque art-house provocation—and God help me, I do—A Zed & Two Noughts offers a singular experience: clinical, perverse, hypnotic. Twin zoologists (Brian and Eric Deacon) lose their wives in a swan-related car crash outside a zoo. In the aftermath, they descend—calmly, methodically—into obsession. They begin filming time-lapse footage of decomposing animals in their lab. They ruminate on symmetry, biology, the meaning of rot. They also fall, together and without apology, for the driver of the car that killed their wives: a woman who lost one leg in the crash and is now considering amputating the other—purely for balance. The film is composed like a painting and edited like a riddle. Every frame is deliberate. Every movement is part of some unspoken geometry. Greenaway has no interest in plot mechanics or catharsis. What he delivers instead is a meditation on decay—corporeal, emotional, spiritual—shot through with wit so dry it might qualify as desiccated. This is grief rendered as formal experiment. No one cries. No one screams. People drift, catalogue, stare. And somehow, beneath the morbidity, there’s a kind of cracked sincerity—a confrontation with mortality so literal it becomes surreal. You might recoil. You might laugh. You might sit slack-jawed as a zebra bloats in time-lapse. But you won’t soon forget it.

A backstage, black-and-white melodrama built for display, Ziegfeld Girl moves like a dream in heels—graceful, towering, and a little unsteady when it stops to explain itself. The plot is studio-standard rise-and-fall, but the spectacle—Busby Berkeley in full visual command—is what earns its place. When the camera floats through chandeliers or climbs a staircase of chorus girls, the movie doesn’t walk, it ascends. Judy Garland pulls the eye like a magnet. She plays Susan, a plucky vaudevillian pulled from a father-daughter act and offered a shot at something grander. She sings with the ease of someone whose instincts are faster than her thoughts—it just happens, and you believe it. Hedy Lamarr plays Sandra, a cool, distant figure with a classical violinist husband who treats the spotlight like an insult. Lana Turner, playing Sheila, goes the opposite way—an elevator operator turned showgirl who can’t quite stop performing, even offstage. She’s in love with a truck driver (James Stewart), who watches her transformation like someone clocking a stranger in familiar clothes. The plot moves through ambition, ego, compromise, and fallout—some of it effective, some of it stretched. At 132 minutes, it wears its running time, especially for a musical with its most striking sequences clustered near the middle. But the surface never dulls. The gowns, the sets, the way the camera sways and pans—none of it is meant to be natural. It’s built to dazzle, and it does. Ziegfeld Girl might not deepen much as it goes, but it plays the fantasy with conviction: satin, spotlight, and a whisper of sadness behind the eyes. An MGM showpiece through and through—polished, overlong, and touching.

Zombie High is one of those titles that oversells the product. There are no zombies. No gore. No mayhem. Just a creeping sense that everyone involved knew they were making a dud and chose to finish it anyway. It plays like a term paper copy-pasted from The Stepford Wives—only drained of wit, irony, or anything resembling a pulse. Virginia Madsen stars as one of the first girls admitted to a once-all-boys boarding school where something isn’t quite right. The students are polite to the point of brainwashed. The faculty stares too long. No one raises their voice. It’s less horror than hallway hypnosis. Madsen, admirably alert considering the script, drifts from room to room trying to make sense of it all. But the mystery never deepens—it just stalls. There are no scares, no surprises, just a lot of hushed conversations lit like a deodorant commercial. Sherilyn Fenn appears briefly, like a flare from a better movie. Paul Feig shows up too, long before he traded acting for comedy that actually lands. The film doesn’t misfire—it never fires at all. It loads up on atmosphere and premise, then slinks off into nothing, as if afraid of its own potential.

What if a squad of WWII grunts behind enemy lines ran headfirst into a crashed UFO—and handled it like just another day on the job? This proudly low-budget mashup is a little daft, a lot sincere, and more entertaining than most B-sci-fi send-ups with ten times the budget. The setup is as neat as it is silly: an American unit, stranded deep in Nazi territory, stumbles across a battered alien craft and its lone insectoid occupant hiding nearby. The Nazis, never ones to pass up extraterrestrial leverage, want it for themselves. Most of the platoon gets wiped out early, leaving four stubborn survivors to protect the alien, dodge stormtroopers, and swap gee-whiz one-liners between gunfights. The dialogue has a warm community theater flavor—half stiff heroics, half sly cracks—and the cast leans into it without flinching. Art LaFleur, chewing scenery like it owes him rent, even gets to plant one right on Hitler’s jaw, which is reason enough to watch. For something shot on a shoestring, the sets and effects hold up nicely. The alien suit is surprisingly well-crafted, more lost pet than death machine—gentle-eyed, helpful, and sympathetic. The spaceship interior runs on dry ice and plywood illusions, but it’s sold with enough gusto that you accept it at face value. It’s a patchwork of pulp nonsense, sure, but it commits. No smug parody, no eye-rolling—just a brisk ninety minutes that knows exactly which matinee clichés it wants to salute. Not a lost classic, but if the idea of Nazis, aliens, and grunts sharing a foxhole makes you smile, you’ll get exactly what you came for.

Zoolander isn’t a laugh riot, but it coasts on enough absurdity and self-awareness to be watchable. It’s broad, dumb, and occasionally inspired—like a parody dreamt up in a Calvin Klein ad and delivered in slow motion with hair blowing. Ben Stiller plays Derek Zoolander, a world-famous male model with the IQ of a sponge and the emotional depth of a hairspray can. After a few too many turns on the runway, his fame starts to fade, only to be resurrected—unwittingly—as a pawn in an international assassination plot. The target: the Prime Minister of Malaysia. The method: brainwashing via day spa. The whole thing plays like The Manchurian Candidate filtered through Total Request Live, with heavy MTV-era cuts, color-saturated closeups, and camera moves that scream 2001 in all caps. Owen Wilson enters as Hansel, Zoolander’s rival-slash-mirror image, a flaxen-haired mystic whose vibe is somewhere between surfer, cult leader, and idiot savant. Their mutual contempt leads to a “walk-off” judged by none other than David Bowie, whose cameo gives the film its single moment of divinity. I keep watching this film for that scene alone. Then, unfortunately, it keeps going. Will Ferrell’s Mugatu—deranged, high-strung, and dressed like a fever dream—feels pulled from a lost SNL sketch and somehow elevated into myth. Milla Jovovich glowers in the margins, while Christine Taylor tries to anchor the chaos with a human performance that mostly gets swallowed by the glitter. Some gags still land: a 2001: A Space Odyssey spoof with a Mac computer, the gasoline fight that ends in fireball, David Duchovny explaining fashion-world corruption through a tracheotomy tube. The plot is thin, it’s not especially funny, but the commitment is airtight.

Zootopia is a zippy, genre-hopping fable about the soft power of stereotypes and the harder work of undoing them. It’s a detective story in disguise, a buddy comedy with teeth, and a kid-friendly take on systemic bias that somehow manages to juggle message and momentum without dropping either. Judy Hopps is a bunny with ambition. In a world where predator and prey have long since signed their social contract, she dreams of joining the police force—an institution typically staffed by species with tusks, claws, or at the very least, visible muscle tone. Rabbits, by all logic and precedent, don’t make the cut. But Judy does. Barely. She graduates, gets the badge, and is immediately assigned to parking duty—her dreams deferred by bureaucracy and polite condescension. Then comes the case: a missing otter, part of a quiet epidemic involving predators mysteriously reverting to their feral roots. Judy seizes the opportunity, recruiting a reluctant con artist fox named Nick Wilde as her partner. Rabbits aren’t supposed to trust foxes. Foxes aren’t supposed to play nice with law enforcement. Together, they plunge into a mystery that cuts across class, species, and geography—through tundras, rainforests, rodent-sized metropolises, and, famously, a DMV run by sloths. The metaphor isn’t perfect—after all, human prejudice doesn’t come with sharp teeth or evolutionary wiring—but the film handles it with more thought than most adult dramas. It’s not a morality play so much as a behavioral mirror, asking its audience to consider how fear calcifies into policy, and how assumptions can shape entire lives. Ginnifer Goodwin gives Judy a mix of pep and grit that sidesteps cutesiness, while Jason Bateman’s Nick delivers his lines with a weary charm that deepens into something more moving by the end. The voice cast is stacked, the jokes come quick, and the world-building is as layered as it is lovingly ridiculous. It’s rare for a kids’ movie to be this sharp, this thematically loaded, and still this fun. Zootopia pulls it off with polish, wit, and just enough bite to matter.