Katie Holmes plays a graduate student bent under academic pressure, whose mind answers by coughing up visions of Embry (Charlie Hunnam)—a smug, golden boy who vanished years ago without a trace. Now, he starts turning up again. Not fully. More like a bad splice in her day—there, then not there. A police detective (Benjamin Bratt) shows up to investigate this student’s dubious claims. While the hook is there, the squeeze isn’t. The film preens in every frame, but it feels hollow underneath. Like a designer showroom—plenty to look at, nothing to take home.

The smartest move about dropping Abbott and Costello into a Universal horror picture is letting the genres stare each other down. Abbott and Costello keep their routines. They stall, bicker, talk past each other. Dracula and company stay lethal and humorless. The joke never reaches them. The plot’s simple: two shipping clerks are hauling crates to a wax museum full of full-size monster “replicas.” Only the figures aren’t wax. They’re real. Some routines in their film either miss or seem too familiar. The well-outmoded vaudevillian flavor also won’t translate as easily for everyone as gothic horror elements usually do. But if you tune yourself into its frequency, this proves to be a lively blend. A comedy and horror mash-up that pulls off the rare trick of honoring both its elements.

You don’t need to press play to know what you’re getting here. Just look at the cover art. The sitcom-extracted parents, the blank-slate kids, the badly airbrushed sheepdog. You don’t go into this expecting quality, exactly. The plot is pretty bare-bones. A brainy kid stumbles onto a secret chemical. He messes with it, and—whammo!—his dog Abner goes invisible. The pooch can also communicate telepathically. But then you wish it wouldn’t, because it pumps out some of the most groan-inducing one-liners I’ve heard in recent memory. Before long, those same clowns who let that chemical slip out of their grasp are trying to retrieve it. They take spills. They let out loud, juicy farts. Even—at one point—they literally slip on a banana peel. There are plenty of ways for you to waste an afternoon. But this one might make you want to reconsider the idea of watching television altogether.

Will Freeman (Hugh Grant) has perfected a whole lifestyle out of dodging consequences. Marcus Brewer (Nicholas Hoult) is a kid who’s already taken too many hits from them. When these two polar opposites find their way into each other’s lives, you can sense where this movie is going—and you’ll be correct. But the journey stays smart and wryly funny. When it slips into quietly affecting territory, it does it casually. As if it didn’t really mean to get warm. Grant plays Will like a man sealed up tight. But then he lets the seal break, just a little, at just the right times, until real warmth comes in. Hoult plays Marcus as awkward and exposed—a kid whose face gives him away. Too odd to disappear into the crowd, too sincere to bluff. An arrangement forms. Will borrows Marcus as a pretend son to impress a romantic prospect (Rachel Weisz). Marcus, meanwhile, is shopping for stability. After his mother’s (Toni Collette) suicide attempt, he needs an adult who doesn’t fold. A friendship forged on dubious pretenses that keeps rewriting itself into something real. The movie often gets close to sweetness, but then steps back to allow room for a dry joke or a sharp turn. And when it’s all over, and you might even just find you miss them.

Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) is newly retired—after 40 years in the insurance game. But he has a hard time telling whether he’s been freed or erased. His home life offers little. His wife (June Squibb) can’t stop talking. His daughter (Hope Davis) keeps him at arm’s length. The days flatten. Beige and airless. A TV ad catches him at the right (or wrong) moment, and suddenly he’s sponsoring a child in Africa. They tell him to write. He does. Pages of regret, complaints, and half-memories, addressed to a six-year-old who probably can’t read them and wouldn’t understand it if he could. Then, suddenly, his wife dies. The camper they just recently bought, that he didn’t want, becomes his escape plan. He gets in and starts driving—toward his daughter’s wedding he disapproves of. Her fiancé (Dermot Mulroney, spectacularly repellent) sells waterbeds and sports a mullet. The humor throughout the film runs dry and offbeat—even a little surreal at times, but never soft. Nothing gets glossed over, including the jokes which tend to crack open their scenes instead of numbing them. Payne, writing and directing, has a feel for this particular dead zone—where life keeps going, but the center of it has already gone sour. The film is also notable for its abrupt ending. One that’s left up to some interpretation, but it takes the wind out of you.

The title promises a pulp carnival. Abraham Lincoln, saving the Union by day. Chopping up monsters by night. It sounds like it should be a blast. But it’s far from it, adamantly refusing to have fun with its own idea. Abe’s a kid when it happens: his mother dies in front of him. Poisoned, he’s told, by something with fangs. Years pass, and Abe gets taller. And meaner. Vengeance has fermented. The action’s clean and the images are glossy. It refuses to crack a smile. Lincoln with an axe should be insane. Here it feels routine. I expected goofy scenes—Lincoln pausing mid–Gettysburg Address to leap off the podium and split a vampire in two. Or John Wilkes Booth unmasked as a vampire at Ford’s Theatre, and Lincoln getting one clean swing to turn the tide on his own assassination. But none of this happens. Instead the film just trudges forward—grim and self-important. And all I could think to do was check out.

A carnival of a movie. Loud, crowded, and at one point featuring David Bowie singing and dancing atop a giant typewriter. Saying it’s stylish is an understatement. The sets are dazzling. There’s color everywhere. This is a 1950s dream blown up to billboard size and so overstuffed that it feels like you’re being force-fed the décor. Eddie O’Connell is a young, idealistic photographer who means to be an artist—until glamour, money, and a mercurial muse (Patsy Kensit). The story isn’t especially unique. The romance doesn’t convince for a second. You can ignore it without losing anything. The real draw is the rock-star trio waiting off to the side: Bowie, Ray Davies, and Sade. Not there to make a ceremonial cameo. They step in and run their scenes. They even supply original songs in their own styles. All folded into a larger soundtrack that keeps zigzagging with variety, featuring songs by such artists (some original, some not) as The Style Council, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Eighth Wonder (Kensit’s band), among others. For my jukebox dime, though, the highlight is Bowie’s title track—such a joyous, wonderfully bent anthem that you come out of it riding that buzz. This is a movie so overstuffed that plenty of viewers will find it exhausting. But it’s also so delectably offbeat that I can’t resist its lure.

The ghost of Alfred Hitchcock can be felt in this film’s opening ten minutes. There’s such palpable tension there that you start to think the film’s got something dangerous tucked away for later. But it doesn’t, really. The tension goes slack. Not a meteoric drop—just enough give that you notice. Eastwood still holds it together just by being there, with that familiar, hard, weathered, carved-from-oak stillness. An added bonus is that he gets to aim that scorn at one of his favorite real-life targets: the Oval Office. He plays Luther Whitney, a high-tech cat burglar who picks the wrong house on the wrong night. He stumbles on a secret—one involving the President of the United States (Gene Hackman), staggering into the room Luther happens to be robbing, drunk and hanging off a much younger, married woman (Melora Hardin). Their giddy flirtation quickly turns rough. Then worse. Before Luther can even process what he’s seeing, the Secret Service bursts in and shoots her. She dies. Thus, the cat burglar becomes the mouse—chased by federal agents eager to frame him. The film’s tension dips now and then (particularly due to a subplot with him trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter, Kate, played by Laura Linney), but there’s still enough charge left to make it a worthwhile pick—especially if you like movies about one crusty lone wolf positioned to drag the misdeeds of very powerful people into the light.

Amiable enough, but pretty slight as far as these things go—though it could feel cathartic if you’ve ever been steamrolled by the whole college-admissions circus. Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) doesn’t get into a single college. Facing his parents with his failure isn’t an option, so he invents one: the South Harmon Institute of Technology. He secures a crumbling old mental hospital and turns it into a makeshift campus. He talks his friend Sherman (Jonah Hill) into building a website. Sherman does a little too good a job, and hundreds of kids show up on the first day. With a premise like this, the film could have gone sharper—maybe even aimed a barb at the admissions process itself. Instead, it opts for loose gags and cheap laughs. The result underachieves, just as Bartleby does. At least Long’s laid-back charm keeps him buoyant enough to root for. Hill, still warming up for bigger things, gets some of the film’s genuine laughs. And Lewis Black storms through as the fake college’s dean with his trademark volcanic rants. Nothing especially unique or infectious—but it goes down easy.

Jackie Chan movies have never been especially concerned with plot, and The Accidental Spy doesn’t suddenly revise the arrangement. The story works best when Chan stays in motion—running here, vaulting there, smacking into whatever’s nearby. He plays Buck, an exercise-equipment salesman who wanders into espionage without the skills or instincts for it. But he knows kung fu, and he has incredible luck. So there’s that. The film hops continents with cheerful indifference—Hong Kong to Istanbul to South Korea. Drug lords, henchmen, the usual machinery. What still works is Chan’s physical intelligence, even if by 2001 the stunts have grown noticeably safer. His timing remains precise. The fights still feel improvised. A highlight finds Buck stranded naked in Istanbul, forced to outrun attackers while preserving his modesty with whatever’s at hand. Classic prop comedy, played with immaculate rhythm. It never reaches the inventiveness of Chan’s best work, but as long as he stays alert onscreen, so do we.

Jim Carrey is the human embodiment of a noise complaint. He plays Ace Ventura, a Miami pet detective—a profession treated as if it were tax law or dentistry. Plot-wise, it’s simple: someone nabs Snowflake, the Miami Dolphins’ mascot. Ace goes hunting with the delicate logic of a toddler on sugar. There’s a faint whiff of cotton-candy noir in its bones—pink facades and blue skies in place of shadows. It might have tipped into wacky parody, but the film prefers to orbit Carrey’s contortions, mugging, and vocal tics. The schtick is occasionally funny in isolation. Over ninety minutes, it wears thin. The supporting cast mostly stands aside, stranded, waiting for him to flame out. The ending leans into an extended trans panic gag that already felt mean-spirited in 1994 and fares worse now. To the extent that Ace Ventura: Pet Detective survives, it’s on Carrey’s effort alone—energy, invention, and total disregard for dignity.

The pink, plasticky doldrums of South Florida give way to the African jungle, but not much else changes. The supporting cast exists largely to stand aside while Jim Carrey detonates another scene. It opens with a Cliffhanger parody—Ace bungling a rescue and dropping a raccoon off a mountain. A misjudged gag, since the punchline depends on a dead animal. Still, there are moments that hit harder than the first film. Chief among them: the mechanical rhinoceros sequence. Ace becomes trapped inside the metallic beast and must claw his way out through its narrow “birth canal,” writhing and shrieking while a family of tourists mistakes the spectacle for a live rhino birth. It’s deranged. It’s committed. It’s funny. Unfortunately, one inspired sequence can’t carry the rest. This one’s for fans of Carrey’s boundless elasticity. Everyone else may feel the strain.

It opens in Norman Rockwell territory—sunny, decent, reassuring—but that evaporates quickly. A spinal injury leaves a man (Rourke) quadriplegic and stranded in a hospital room with no visible path forward. So he asks his brother (Howard) to sneak in a gun and end it. A nihilistic movie that isn’t arguing a case for euthanasia and doesn’t show much curiosity about what life after catastrophe might look like. It’s flat, bleak, and incurious. Almost impossible to believe it was once broadcast into living rooms.

About as good as could be reasonably expected from a film spun out of a 1960s sitcom—possibly better. You could mute the volume and still absorb its chief pleasure: the sets. A lavish Gothic playground of trapdoors and cobwebs, creaky floorboards and velvet gloom. The plot involves an imposter Uncle Fester, but plot is secondary. You come for the deadpan morbidity and inspired casting. Raul Julia plays Gomez as a debonair madman. Anjelica Huston glides through as Morticia, scented with haunted perfume. Christopher Lloyd makes Fester—imposter or not—a bundle of loose joints and poor judgment. But Christina Ricci steals it. Her Wednesday speaks with the precision of a guillotine. A steady trip to a wayward mansion where electrocution counts as foreplay and homicide feels like a hobby—yet you still feel strangely at home.

Cleaner and meaner this time. Addams Family Values taps into what the first film did best—deadpan cruelty delivered with elegance. A new baby named Pubert joins the clan—rosy-cheeked, mustached, cursed-looking. Wednesday and Pugsley respond with homicidal intent, earning themselves exile at a relentlessly cheerful summer camp run by WASP caricatures. The film peaks at a Thanksgiving pageant where Wednesday goes scorched-earth, dismantling colonial myth with serene contempt. Back at the mansion, Joan Cusack arrives as Debbie, a nanny with one objective (Fester’s money) and one method (murder). None of which the Addamses take personally. A sharp sequel with steadier aim and darker nerve.

A black comedy about stalking that freezes before the tone should turn ugly or satirical, settling for cute instead. Meg Ryan ends up stranded in the middle. Cast in a role that demands venom, she brings sweetness instead—like a daisy growing in a poison ivy patch. She’s paired with Matthew Broderick as a likable neurotic, an astronomer whose life collapses after his high school sweetheart (Kelly Preston) leaves him for a chef. Ryan plays the equally jilted other half. A movie that goes to show: If you’re looking for love by spying through windows, true love might just be the person spying next to you.

A platonic breakup movie disguised as a buddy comedy. Katie Corwin and Delaney Buffett wrote it and star in it, with Buffett directing too. They’re playing versions of themselves—best friends near thirty, not remotely on the same page about what adulthood is supposed to look like. Katie’s newly engaged. Delaney seems perfectly content to stay parked in arrested development. Katie can’t quite bring herself to break the engagement news. She drags Delaney back to their hometown for a girls’ weekend. Partly out of nostalgia. But mostly as a stall tactic. She’s hoping the subject of her engagement might come up on its own, naturally. Expect a lot of loose, wandering conversation that starts with jokes (some genuinely laugh-out-loud). But then hard truths start slipping in. And they accumulate until there’s no way to keep ducking them. The acting can feel a bit green, but nothing ever feels put-on. A movie that understands what growing older does to friendships. How you (whether subconsciously or not) decide who to keep and who to leave behind. And how sometimes the hard part isn’t the falling-out. It’s the stretch beforehand. When you’re still trying to pretend that you’re all in.

Chris (Shue) begins the evening babysitting, which turns into a drive into downtown Chicago. A friend needs a favor, and she brings the kids with her, thinking it won’t take long. But she’s wrong. Her car gives out, and they become stranded as well. At first, the danger makes sense: suburban kids who don’t belong, moving carefully through a city that doesn’t soften things for them. Eventually, the danger stops behaving like danger, and the film enters a confused, surreal territory. For instance, they land on a blues-club stage, right in the middle of a set—pressed into performing a song with the band. At another point, they cling to the outside of a speeding tow truck, and one of them even scales a skyscraper, body pressed up against a window, while their parents just happen to be on the other side. Overall, the film is watchable thanks to some funny moments, but it’s uneven—due in no small part to Shue’s cool, casual presence.

A noir-tinged comic-book oddity that acts as though you missed the first reel and leaves you to piece together what you can make of a story already in motion. Buckaroo Banzai (Weller) is introduced by accumulation. He’s a neurosurgeon, rock star, physicist, polymath—hero by fiat. He drives a jet-powered pickup through the side of a mountain and punctures a hole in the 8th Dimension, causing aliens to spill into New Jersey. They’re intent on freeing their leader, Lord John Whorfin—a beast who has been trapped on Earth for a number of years, hiding out in the body of Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow), a physicist committed to a psychiatric ward for acting, well, bizarre. Lithgow is the real marvel here, playing the character with such ferocious scenery-chewing and a vaguely Italian accent that it’s shocking—even by his own standards. The movie might be difficult to follow and feel overblown, but it’s also so overstimulated and bonkers that it’s difficult to resist. One of the ultimate cult films of the 1980s.

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood is a daydream of a hero—sly, swaggering, impossibly handsome. Extravagantly masculine as well, even while garbed in green tights and feathered drag. His story starts with no real warm-up—gathering his Merry Men at a clip. Each new addition greets him in a light collision of bravado and play. Little John meets him on a log for a sparring contest. He sweet-talks Friar Tuck into carrying him across the water. Will Scarlett starts out shilling for the bad guys until Robin’s sheer nerve convinces him to defect. The crew moves like a ragtag unit, loose and confident. The kind you instinctively want to fall in with. The villains are drawn in heavy strokes and sharper edges. Claude Rains’ Prince John sweats authority from the moment he enters. Rathbone keeps Sir Guy stiff, sharp, and unyielding. Marian (Olivia de Havilland) is the mild disappointment, coming off less as a romantic force than something the film feels obligated to include. Their romance is staid. Likely borrowing chivalrous patterns from the original tales, as opposed to modern Hollywood sensibilities. That might have been a mistake. But everything else here is exhilarating—running on speed and muscle with nothing ever sitting still long enough to stiffen.

Jay Ward’s early ’60s cartoon inflated to feature length. Rocky and Bullwinkle—now awkwardly rendered in early-’00s CGI and dropped into live action—amble through the expected puns, pratfalls, and reheated bits from the old show. The plot finds the series’ favorite Cold War relics Boris and Natasha (gamely played by Jason Alexander and Rene Russo) attempting to hypnotize America by bad television. They don’t exactly have their work set out for them. This adaptation is not particularly sharp or necessary, but it does successfully shepherd us on a puff of candy-scented air all the way to the end-credits before the sugar wears off.

An avant-garde cartoon refitted into mid-2000s prestige sci-fi. Theron is Æon, an assassin dispatched to eliminate the ruler of a spotless, oppressive utopia. A CGI world that’s designed for sheen and where everything moves smoothly and nothing quite grips. Theron does what she can to compensate with physical commitment, but the imbalance remains obvious. Plenty of motion and glossy surfaces to gaze at, but very little narrative substance to absorb it. The film plays far more ornamental than dramatic, such that it feels like Æon is only pitting herself against bodies with empty personalities.

The atmosphere is right, and Rita Hayworth is magnetic, but this noir ultimately doesn’t accumulate much pressure. Hayworth plays a nightclub singer who finds herself tangled in an espionage plot when her husband turns up dead. The official story is suicide, but the victim’s brother (Ford) knows better. What should tighten instead unravels, and it’s hard to care who did what or why. A disappointment considering this marks a reunion for Ford and Hayworth whose near-masterpiece noir Gilda (1946) is widely considered a landmark of the genre.

Bogart is a scruffy riverboat captain. Hepburn is a rigid missionary. War wedges them together on a battered riverboat called The African Queen, chugging down the Ulanga through heat, gunfire, and bad temper. They nurse a plan so reckless that it barely qualifies as a plan at all—one that involves improvised torpedoes, a covert strike, and a German gunboat (Königin Luise) waiting out on Lake Tanganyika. The mechanics of their plan are far-fetched but believable. So is the mutual attraction that develops between them. They start as mutual irritation, like oil and vinegar. Bickering and bantering. He is gin, grit, and instinct; she is starch, resolve, and moral force. They don’t just warm to each other. They fall in love. And, believe it or not, Bogart and Hepburn make it believable. The conclusion marks a stark departure from the E.M. Forster novel, but it works so well here that it’s its own contained argument in favor of the Hollywood ending.

Griffin Dunne plays Paul, a data analyst whose night goes wrong the moment he steps outside. He goes out for coffee. Rosanna Arquette is there. She takes him back to her loft. Inside is Linda Fiorentino, quietly sculpting a paper-mâché figure locked in an ugly contortion. It takes Paul a while to see it, but the figure looks an awful lot like him. From there, all Paul wants is to leave the neighborhood. It never works. Each attempt only tightens the trap. The film moves by dream logic rather than sense. Don’t bother trying to wrestle with it. Just watch to see where it takes you. One of Scorsese’s loosest films. Also one of the few that seems to enjoy the damage it does.

Forbidden passion is set against the lush, suffocating opulence of 1870s New York in this adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Newland Archer, a man shaped by high society and engaged to the era’s ideal of a model lady (Winona Ryder). She’s sweet, orderly, protected by old money. Innocence carefully maintained. But Newland’s gilded existence is undone when his desire turns toward his fiancée’s worldly, scandal-marked cousin (Michelle Pfeiffer). The consequences arrive slowly. Martin Scorsese does something remarkable here. He loosens what—by all rights—should have been a stiff period piece. The characters are utterly vivid, moving through this labyrinthine comedy of manners, their missteps turning funny, then faintly brutal, once it demonstrates how little room they’re allowed to move. And how carefully they’re forced to pretend otherwise. PG, USA, 139 mins. Warner Bros.

A sun-drenched coming-of-age reverie where summers exist to sort out the vague ailments of slightly wayward teenage boys. This one follows a Midwestern transplant in Southern California who calls himself Minnesota and winds up in a junior lifeguard program. He quickly befriends the only kid even scrawnier than he is. Then, just as quickly, they’re no longer friends. He disappears for the rest of the movie. Minnesota then turns his attention to an older girl named Summer—a big, hopeless crush that nonetheless leads to a vaguely statutory first kiss. The film stays pleasantly warm and is populated by a zoo of eccentrics—though more than a few are needlessly over the top. Its real trouble lies in the story. It wanders far too much, then calls in a narrator to sort things out in just about the most obtuse way imaginable. The intentions are good. The nostalgic notes hit right. But it just doesn’t hold together.

Not so much a whodunit as a tightening vise. Agnes of God is a psychological mystery that pits church authority against scientific inquiry, with neither side especially inclined to yield. Fonda is sent to a secluded convent to evaluate a disturbed young nun (Tilly) who insists she conceived immaculately. The pregnancy ends in miscarriage—or maybe it was something worse. For most of its run, the film survives on doubt. Eventually, it gives in to clarification—and the answers just aren’t satisfying, and the spell breaks. The performances, at least, survive the damage—especially Tilly’s eerie fragility and Anne Bancroft’s formidable authority as the mother superior.

Developed by Spielberg from a Stanley Kubrick conception he wasn’t able to film before he passed away, A.I. is a sci-fi fairy tale about a robot child named David (Osment) who was built to love. But then he gets abandoned in the woods by the human woman who he understands to be his mother. (This scene is emotionally brutal, and Osment plays it without insulation.) From there, David starts roaming. Through junkyards, theme parks, half-built futures. He’s fueled on one desperate hope: to find the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio and ask her to make him a real boy. Only then, he reasons, will his mother accept him. That’s an ache that permeates through the film—even as it often gets choked by excess with its overbuilt worlds, stretched runtime, and the occasional character who feels superfluous. (Jude Law as a glittered, discarded sex robot is more distraction than tragedy.) The film’s final twenty minutes will play differently for different viewers, but I think anyone can agree it’s a distinctly clinical form of a dream coming true. Yet, I bawled through it. This is an imperfect but often powerful film about the hunger for affection, and what it costs to keep chasing it.

A Vietnam-era action buddy comedy built around an actual ordeal in which the CIA was caught trafficking drugs. This is certainly an environment ripe for satire—or at least a moral reckoning—but the film prefers to wave all that aside in favor of rote banter and unimpressive aerial antics. Gibson and Downey Jr. show up here ready and raring to go, but their presence is ultimately squandered.

By the fourth entry, the question isn’t why a dog can play a bunch of different sports. It’s which ones are left. Baseball gets the nod here. A dog playing America’s favorite pastime starts getting into a certain territory where Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s “Dogs Playing Poker” paintings start to feel less surreal by comparison. In this sequel, Buddy tracks fly balls, runs bases, and swings a bat with his mouth. There are also some lightly sketched emotional beats involving a girl who feels a little downbeat after her older brother decides to hightail it off to college. There’s also a half-hearted heist plot, but it’s best we don’t mention that. This is a movie that knows why it exists. We watch Buddy perform, and we smile, because Buddy is a very good boy.

Volleyball should have been the easy sell—a sport a dog could feasibly play against humans. At least more plausible than the flagship film’s basketball. But the pooch can barely even be seen playing the sport here. That’s all shoved aside in favor of a slack crime subplot. This marks the last entry in the Air Bud franchise. Unless your toddler wants to watch any of the Air Buddies movies. And of course they will.

She isn’t supposed to move, let alone think. But she does. Bae Doona plays a blow-up sex doll. She suddenly becomes self-aware and steps out into the city, while her owner is gone. She looks at things quietly, without knowing what she’s supposed to ignore. Pavement. Food. Other people. It’s the first time she’s seeing the world. She assimilates—quickly enough to land a job at a video rental store, where she grows romantically curious about one of the employees. But the nights reset things. Back home. Back to the arrangement. Back to being used. Hirokazu Kore-eda films this with restraint and quiet grace—but the idea doesn’t completely open up. It’s a sad, gentle movie about loneliness, but it never quite presses into what that loneliness costs.

The kind of innocent family fare Disney used to churn out of the factory in the 1990s—prefab redemption arc and all. But this one comes with a secret weapon: Kevin Bacon. He’s Jimmy Dolan. A disgraced basketball coach grasping for one last way back. He heads to a remote Kenyan village convinced there’s talent waiting to be mined. But what Africa ultimately offers him isn’t really a player. It’s self-improvement, with Bacon playing the shift with plenty of sincerity. Just as fine is the Kenyan location work and the pan-African soundtrack, which bring plenty of texture otherwise absent from the script. The Air Up There is not the kind of movie that’ll move you much, but it’s a decent pick for kids. Especially the basketball-inclined.

Three would-be metal gods—Fraser, Buscemi, Sandler—are tired of being small-times and having to beg for airtime. So they take a radio station hostage and force them to spin their music. Steve Buscemi has the right kind of energy for this. He’s wired, sneering, his hair looks ready to pick a fight. But the movie doesn’t know what to do with him besides prop-gun mugging. Fraser plays it sweet. Earnest, almost apologetic. It could’ve worked—if the script gave him anything to play beyond that. Meanwhile, Sandler is just sort of there. He wasn’t quite a frat-cinema darling yet. The film’s one moment of clarity happens courtesy of Beavis and Butt-Head. They call into the station to deliver the movie’s lone truthful moment—“You suck.”

Airplane! keeps the disaster movie’s posture intact and removes its brain. Robert Hays plays Ted Striker. He used to fly. Then the war happened, and he hasn’t really been right about it since. Flying terrifies him now, but he boards a commercial jet anyway—chasing his ex-girlfriend (Julie Hagerty). Then disaster strikes. Food poisoning takes out the whole cockpit—one by one—leaving Striker the last person on board able to land the plane safely. The story is lifted almost whole from the 1957 melodrama Zero Hour!, which keeps the film fundamentally coherent. The jokes come from what’s added to the script—like a little girl finishing a rote exchange by announcing she’ll take her coffee black, “like my men.” Gags like that arrive constantly. Spoken lines. Background nonsense. Visual interruptions. Everything is played straight, with the same faith in procedure disaster movies always pretend to have. Nothing comes out unscathed—Hollywood melodrama, television advertising, disco, masculine competence fantasies. Leslie Nielsen plays the doctor like a man who has never been funny in his life, which works so well here that it rerouted his career from dramatic roles to comedy. Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, and Robert Stack—also actors trained to sell authority—treat nonsense like doctrine. Even the walk-ons are lethal. Barbara Billingsley drifts in as a cheerful jive translator. America’s chirpy mom, suddenly weaponized, delivers one of the film’s sharpest jolts. Call this the mother of all spoofs.

The ZAZ team had nothing to do with this sequel, and many of the jokes shamelessly recycle themselves from the first film. But the cast commits hard enough to keep the rhythm intact. The action moves into outer space, allowing the spoof to expand into sci-fi—including a memorable turn from William Shatner, dryly skewering his own Captain Kirk authority. This sequel is unnecessary, clearly, but it’s put together with enough precision—and still contains enough laughs—to forgive the smudges.

A star-stuffed melodrama set inside a snowbound airport. Stalled runways. Failing marriages. A ticking bomb. The film moves through a series of connected vignettes. Each one adds another strain to the system. The film doesn’t rush—it moves back and forth between people falling apart and machines doing the same. Disaster treated as an extension of soap opera rather than spectacle, but it stays engaging. The most white knuckle the film gets is a suicide bomber subplot, but much of the joy comes from the little things: Lancaster barking orders, Martin pretending he has a conscience, Kennedy growling his way through another near-impossible task. Veteran actress Helen Hayes also has some scene stealing moments as a wily elderly stowaway. Her charm is so disarming that you almost root for her to keep sneaking aboard planes.