A sleek, mean horror story about the notion that money can vaporize consequences. Frida (Naomi Ackie) is a nail artist and cocktail waitress. She spends her days around other people’s glamour and knows luxury when she sees it. She wants in. When she’s invited to the private island of tech mogul Slater King (Channing Tatum), she jumps at the chance. Her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) needs a little convincing, but she tags along too. What they find is the sort of place that’ll dazzle you into dropping all suspicion. There’s sculpted food. Endless cocktails. Soft clothes. Expensive smiles. Parties that stretch past dawn. But the longer Frida and Jess stay there, the more they sense something is off. It’s not obvious at first—just little distortions. Staff members who seem to hang around too long. People you’ve never met before who seem to know you. Whole hours of the day that seem to vanish. You wake up in rooms you don’t remember entering. Around that point, the movie’s ambitions come into focus. It’s reaching for a Peele-style social nightmare. Where everything on the surface gleams but something rotten sits underneath. Something that isn’t only in the evil act itself. But in the entitled belief that someone like Frida exists to be used and forgotten. The conclusion doesn’t exactly shock you, but it still feels potent enough to sting you numb.

Charles Condomine thinks a séance will be good for his writing. That’s his first mistake. He figures it’s all a bunch of table-rattling hokum until the ghost of his deceased first wife, Elvira (Kay Hammond), appears—coy, mischievous, and visible only to him. Charles, who always takes life’s problems with a stiff drink in his hand, isn’t even afraid to talk directly to Elvira in front of his current wife, Ruth (Constance Cummings). She assumes—at first, anyway—that her husband is staging some kind of deeply sick joke. Either that or he has gone peculiar. The pleasure of Blithe Spirit is in the dialogue, which comes at you in quick verbal jabs. And the cast—many of whom played these roles on stage—handles every line with a practiced sharpness you wouldn’t get from almost any other cast. Margaret Rutherford, in particular, nearly steals the film outright as the medium, blundering through the spirit world with such cheerfully owlish conviction that she seems less a mystic than a municipal nuisance from beyond. Plenty of films have cribbed the idea of a man caught between the living and the dead. But very few have comic rhythm quite like this infectious little treat.

The 1945 Blithe Spirit was such a firecracker that you’d think a remake could just coast on the same framework and do fine. But you’d think wrong. What should play like featherweight farce instead drops to the floor—dead on impact. Dan Stevens plays Charles Condomine, a novelist stalled out on his latest book. In search of a spark, he brings the clairvoyant Madame Arcati (Judi Dench) into the house. Instead, she coughs up the ghost of his first wife, Elvira (Leslie Mann). She has unfinished business with Charles and a keen interest in Ruth (Isla Fisher), the woman currently occupying her former place as his wife. The machinery—Noël Coward’s script, which also powered the brilliant 1945 version—is more or less unchanged. The trouble here is that nobody’s able to get it moving. Screwball always depended on precision. Timing, pressure, lines snapping back and forth. Stevens, to his credit, does seem to try to stir things to life, but dead air wins. Fisher plays Ruth in only one register: irritated. Mann just seems to bounce between seductive and sitcom-loud haphazardly. Usually this cast is capable, but they seem lead footed. Like people showed up with all the right parts, but nobody could figure out where the laughs should go.

For a direct-to-DVD slugfest, this goes down easy. Comfort cinema here means watching a man built like a brick wall end fights quickly—usually with a single roundhouse kick. Isaiah Bone (Michael Jai White) is a quiet, no-nonsense ex-con who doesn’t so much enter the underground fight circuit as lower his competitors’ life expectancy. He dismantles men so efficiently you almost feel bad for them. Dante Basco—better known professionally as “Rufio from Hook”—plays the kingpin running the matches, usually in graffiti-stained lots and counting his cash in small, dirty stacks. Then comes Bone. Not fighting for glory, but to raise money for the widow of a slain friend. It’s a thin motive, but a workable one. The movie gets itself into trouble when it wanders off to dwell on her addiction and her volatile boyfriend. There’s also the occasional downtime, when the movie stops to appreciate its star: slow-motion tai chi against city skylines, flexing and holding poses just long enough to show off the architecture of his body. Which does almost nothing except remind the rest of us why we’re all shaped like couch cushions. But the fight scenes keep pulling it back. Clean, brutal, efficient. Every elbow, knee, and roundhouse kick dispatching enemies onto the pavement with a painful-sounding thud. That’s the movie’s language, and it speaks it well.

A morally indignant thriller with a message that isn’t subtle: that sparkle on your wedding ring might have cost someone a hand, a family, or an entire generation. But in addition to your outrage, it also wants your applause. Atrocity on one side. DiCaprio charging through the jungle in a tank top on the other. Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) is stuck in a rebel diamond camp, shoveling for other people’s profit. Then the dirt throws up a surprise: a pink diamond. He buries it again, hoping to come back for it later. Maybe it’ll change his luck. Then DiCaprio slithers in as Danny Archer—a smuggler and scavenger with a Rhodesian accent that comes and goes. He smells a payday in Solomon’s secret rock and talks him into one suicidal return trip into the war zone. The film’s trouble is that nothing ever sneaks up on you. You can see every turn coming—mercenaries, betrayals, automatic weapons. Then the predictable, tidy moral lessons waiting for their turn on the soapbox. There are well-constructed action scenes that flare up every now and then, but they never last for long.

Hardly seems fair, this being the Coens’ debut. Most filmmakers spend their first feature looking for a tone and misplacing it. Dan Hedaya plays a Texas bar owner brooding himself into a sweat over his wife (Frances McDormand) and his bartender (John Getz). He thinks they’re carrying on behind his back. Marty pays a private detective (M. Emmet Walsh) to snoop around and try to prove it. That’s a bad idea, it turns out. Because the detective is a ghoul who immediately starts scheming for a bigger payday. Violence, injury, death—just collateral damage. From there, the film turns mean and dark. People get hurt. Often in ways nobody planned. Frances McDormand gets stuck with the fallout, quickly learning that survival becomes a matter of trying to stay one step ahead of somebody else’s bad information. Cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld shoots the whole town like it’s been sweating for days. Beer bottles glinting in neon. Sweat dribbling off foreheads. You can feel the Coen Brothers’ instincts already locking into place. Their mean sense of irony, shaky control, and characters forever trying to outthink the hole they’re still busy digging themselves into.

A monster movie paced with such swampy reluctance you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s about algae. Martin Kove (pre–Karate Kid villainy) kicks off the story when he arrives on a remote Greek island with his wife (Mary Louise Weller). They say they’re looking for his missing sister (Deborah Shelton), but mostly what they end up doing is roaming the island in a state of durable confusion. Every now and then the water spits up a body, steeped in what looks like tomato broth. Some of the casting feels excessive. James Earl Jones, in particular, gets top billing as a chain-smoking treasure hunter named Frye, growling his way through most of his scenes. Veteran actor José Ferrer also shows up. Just long enough to deliver an ancient prophecy with the energy of a sedated stage actor. No wonder it takes so long for the monster to finally surface—all these retellings of the prophecy probably keep putting him to sleep. And when we do finally see it, it’s only brief, and it looks weirdly like one of those bleached skeleton Koopas from the Super Mario games. The island itself is the movie’s lone strong suit. Wind-beaten churches, goat paths, crumbling ruins. All of this beauty wasted on a movie in no hurry to get anywhere. At least with a travel brochure, you get an idea of where you can go for drinks.

It opens with a chase. McCaleb (Clint Eastwood), an aging FBI agent, comes within reach of a serial killer and then drops from a heart attack. A transplant saves his life, but his career is finished. He retires to a houseboat, where he presumably expects to ride out the sunset. But then comes Graciela Rivers (Wanda De Jesus), armed with a case she wants McCaleb to help solve: her sister’s murder. She’s dead, but her heart isn’t. It’s still beating. Inside McCaleb’s chest. Now he feels obligated to take on the case. The movie eventually locks into a classic, old-library whodunit. Some colorful characters hover around his periphery: Jeff Daniels as the loose-limbed houseboat neighbor, Anjelica Huston as a cardiologist with no interest in sugarcoating, Paul Rodriguez as a cop whose help always arrives with reluctance. The mystery is serviceable, but it never cuts very deep. What makes this all work, ultimately, is Eastwood himself. His old-mule presence. That expression like he’s already heard your excuse and rejected it.

Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth) used to belong more fully to the water. She was talented, maybe more than that. Then came one catastrophic wipeout, one that took away her confidence to the point that she doesn’t dare go back out anymore. Now her life is split three ways: hotel work, her younger sister (Mika Boorem), and two active surfer friends (Michelle Rodriguez and Sanoe Lake). You can already guess that circumstances will eventually call Anne Marie back to the waves. Throw in a love interest for good measure—here supplied by a visiting quarterback (Matthew Davis). It comes alive in the physical stuff: wax soft under your feet, sun on skin, that strange thinning of sound when the water takes you under. It’s all filmed close enough to feel unstable. The dry-land stuff follows the standard playbook. But it plays it well, and the film never drags. The friendships feel easy, the dialogue sharper than expected. It’s a movie that doesn’t set out to challenge the sports-movie template but runs it cleanly, with some tremendous surfing footage to boot.

There’s no redemption waiting in Blue Jasmine. This is a long, slow portrait of a woman unraveling. Until recently, Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) lived inside serious money. Now the marriage is gone, the fortune gone with it. She washes up in San Francisco with a suitcase, a pill habit, and one available couch: her sister Ginger’s. Ginger (Sally Hawkins) lives the sort of blue-collar life Jasmine once kept at a lofty remove. She’s closer to it now than she ever wanted to be, but her contempt hasn’t improved. Something Ginger and her live-in boyfriend (Andrew Dice Clay) find wearisome fast. There’s certainly a trace of A Streetcar Named Desire in this, but it lacks the big theatrical flourish. The process here is much slower and meaner—grinding rather than exploding. But it still hits you hard. Blanchett is superb in this—ridiculous, raw, brittle. Still faintly regal, even with everything collapsing around her. Flashbacks give us glimpses of her gilded life: parties, money in such abundance no one has to think about it, her fraudster husband (Alec Baldwin) smoothing everything over until there’s nothing left to smooth. Jasmine has spent years driving people away, wearing them out, talking past them. You feel like she deserves her plight. Yet the final image still stings like tragedy: Jasmine, alone on a park bench with no one left to listen to her talk to herself.

There isn’t much dramatic voltage in Blue Miracle, but it has sun on the water. Jimmy Gonzales plays Omar Venegas, the head of a struggling orphanage in Cabo San Lucas. A hurricane strikes—hard enough to threaten the place with closure for good. But Omar has one long-shot idea: enter Bisbee’s Black & Blue marlin fishing tournament. The prize money might be enough to keep the doors open. One problem, though: they don’t have a captain. Or a boat. That’s where Wade Malloy (Dennis Quaid) comes in, a onetime champ gone cranky, with little appetite for company—especially pint-sized company. But he needs the kids because they qualify for a reduced entry fee. From there, the picture moves through familiar patterns: a gruff adult, skeptical, world-weary kids, resistance, then friction, then the thaw you can see coming from well offshore. The movie doesn’t hurry any of it or press too hard, and it doesn’t sermonize. The best material comes in the fishing scenes—the movie’s strongest sense of effort. They’re tight to the action, cleanly edited, and attentive to the work of bringing the fish in. The movie ultimately never amounts to much, but it goes down easily.

Martin Lawrence comes in hot and stays there. He plays Miles Logan, a thief cornered by the police. Just before they close in, Miles stuffs a stolen diamond into an unfinished building. Two years later he comes back to collect it. Only to find the place has become a police station. With the diamond still inside the walls, he figures there’s one obvious move left: bluff his way onto the force. The film gets a fair amount of mileage out of that one joke. But then it slips into buddy-cop comedy when Luke Wilson turns up as the assigned partner. Lawrence gets something solid to push against—especially Wilson’s stonewall but bemused face that says this cannot possibly be procedure. But then it all gets strange when Miles’ methods prove effective. So effective that his fellow cops (sans the flummoxed Wilson—at first anyway) start treating him like a prodigy. Dave Chappelle, playing the actual partner Miles left behind in the criminal world, drops in now and then to remind him what a ridiculous fraud he is. While the film isn’t especially sharp or surprising, I laughed. More than I expected to. Call Blue Streak an action comedy that does the basic job. It moves quickly, stays loose, and works with Lawrence’s instincts as a wily goofball.

The movie begins like a political ad having a nervous breakdown. We see postcard-perfect suburbia. White fences, red roses, a man watering his lawn. Then the camera takes a nosedive into the grass. Into the dirt, where insects are at work—chewing, writhing, crawling. Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) has come back home to this suburban duality to help tend to his ill father. Out walking one day, he finds a severed ear lying in a field. It’s already starting to rot—ants crawling all over it. He takes it to the police, which should have been the end of his part in things. But it isn’t. Sandy (Laura Dern), the detective’s daughter, lets details slip. A smile here, a clue there. How could that ear have ended up there? He keeps poking. Pushing. Into things that should never concern him. And there he discovers a dirtier world. It’s been there beside him the whole time. He just never noticed. That trail ends at Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Dorothy is a nightclub singer caught in a sexual nightmare. Her boyfriend Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) is the reason. A howling, infantile man—sexually deranged, terrifying, and constantly sucking down nitrous oxide. Hopper is tremendous, but he alone isn’t what gives the film its force. It’s in the way David Lynch folds violence and perversity into something seductive. Romance into threat. Sex with terror. Nostalgia, but it’s crawling with bugs. The film ends with the image of a mechanical robin—chirping in a bed of roses, a worm wriggling in its beak. Jeffrey is back living a Norman Rockwell life. The place he should have stayed all along.

The SNL origins are basically a fuse. Once it’s lit, this thing turns into a crusade on bald tires. The stakes are clear. $5,000, or the orphanage that raised them goes under. Jake and Elwood mean to raise it. Method: get the band back together, win a blues competition. They call this a mission from God. Along the way they not only accumulate their disparate band members but an even larger horde of enemies. The police, a country-western outfit, Illinois Nazis, Carrie Fisher so heavily armed like she’s going to square off with the Pentagon after she settles the score with Jake. The plot is mostly an excuse to keep the thing moving, but this film’s real fuel is the music. James Brown in a church, Aretha Franklin in a diner, Ray Charles running a music shop with a sawed-off shotgun—all here and they sing. The comedy runs on two tracks at once. Tightly controlled and completely unhinged. One minute they’re onstage at a country bar. Realizing too late that when a bartender tells them they play “both kinds of music: country and western” isn’t a joke. Then it’s a police chase—sirens everywhere, cars pancaking into scrap. Sense is mostly absent here, but the movie has plenty of verve and faith in the music to keep the whole lunatic machine upright. Call this a bundle of reckless joy.

Tim Robbins directs and stars as Bob Roberts. A folk-singing, right-wing Senate candidate peddling nostalgia, grievance, and free-market faith. His songs—with titles like “Retake America,” “This Land Was Made for Me,” and “Times Are Changin’ Back”—are pure reactionary politics spun into singalong populism. There are clips from one of his music videos where he’s cribbing the cue-card gimmick from Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. Only now, the cards are pushing things like discipline, morality, and the virtues of laissez-faire economics. The rest of the campaign continues the pageant. Scapegoat the press while also baiting them. Stoke white, middle-class resentment. Wrap the whole thing in homespun noise. Bob Roberts is phony from every angle. You see it more blatantly the longer the film goes on. And yet people continue to line up. Jack Black, here in his screen debut, is especially good as one of Roberts’ young believers. He’s drawn in completely by the aura, but ask him to explain an actual policy and he’ll come back with nothing. Though you can’t necessarily blame him for that. Roberts doesn’t really have policy. He’s more like a sales pitch. There are laughs here, real ones. But the mockumentary angle feels less playful now than it did in 1992. Back then, it was a smirking send-up. These days, it hits so close to the bone that it almost isn’t funny anymore. Even so, chalk this film up as a bold, nasty, and unusually prescient slice of political satire.

Rami Malek builds Freddie Mercury from the outside in. Teeth first, then the strut, then the voice. But the person inside is fogged over. Mercury is allowed to be dazzling and troubled, but never too difficult, too opaque, or too fully human. The fights inside the band, the grime of success, the possibility that brilliance like this might carry some wreckage—all polished into nothing. This movie behaves like an insightful biopic, but it prefers to coast on nostalgia. Roll the hit. Restage the myth. Let the audience’s preloaded goodwill do the rest. Sometimes, though, the rote recreation works. The Live Aid sequence in particular is recreated with uncanny precision. Other stretches—like the material centered on the creation of their seminal album A Night at the Opera, particularly the birth of “Bohemian Rhapsody”—are fun but feel staged in a museum sense. More polished walkthrough than real glimpse of how the work got made. Skim the Wikipedia page, put on Greatest Hits, and you’ll come away with roughly the same effect. Two surviving members of Queen were heavily involved with the production, which is disappointing. It still feels like you’re being kept outside the rope. Queen should feel electric. Dangerous. Hungry. Subversive. True, they’re “dad-rock” icons now, but that still doesn’t erase the fact that they were pretty cutting-edge in their day. Bohemian Rhapsody is well-staged but frustrating. Less a biopic than rote mimicry.

Bolt is a white shepherd under the impression that he can stop traffic with his body and vaporize bad guys with a bark. Nobody has corrected him. Odd belief for a dog, but Bolt has spent his life inside a tightly controlled TV studio, where he stars in his own show without knowing it. He thinks the adventures are real. The Truman Show by way of Disney. Then he gets loose, lands far from the set, and discovers that actual life has no interest in studio physics. He runs into Mittens—an alley cat with street sense and no interest in indulging anybody’s fantasy life. There’s also Rhino, a plastic-ball hamster who knows Bolt from television and worships him accordingly. The trio provides an odd but fun dynamic, and the humor is well-tuned with snappy voice work and a tone that’s relatively restrained. Solid middleweight Disney. Clever enough to stay interesting. Disciplined enough not to turn into a sugar riot.

Young hustlers buy a decayed mansion and plan to turn it into a nightclub. They don’t get very far before they find themselves haunted by the spirit of Jimmy Bones (Snoop Dogg)—a murdered neighborhood kingpin turned urban legend, now manifesting as a demonic black dog with glowing red eyes. Feed the dog and Jimmy Bones starts to return, piece by piece. There’s a decent, grimy, pulpy idea in there—ghost-pimp revenge, but make it camp—but the cast seems locked in a straight-faced gear. As if no one told them they were making a movie about a flesh-eating dog. The film keeps everything smooth when there should be guts, gore, and other nasty things splattering across the screen. Snoop Dogg has presence, certainly, but he mainly just looms in the dark and looks ominous. Pam Grier plays the woman Bones loved, seen mostly in flashbacks, but nothing much is ever built out of it. There’s some toying with full gore-house surrealism at the end—walls crawling with maggots—when the film’s pulse has already gone too weak for it to really matter. Bones has some decent ideas in it—combining gothic horror with blaxploitation-adjacent street swagger. It just doesn’t go far enough.

Bonnie and Clyde was the bad boy American cinema brought home for dinner. People couldn’t keep their eyes off it. It’s often regarded as the film that made it clear the Hays Code was finally out of breath. Now violence could hurt. Ruthless criminals could be protagonists. Glamour came streaked with blood and engine smoke. Beatty and Dunaway play them as half-grown romantics. Robbing banks, stealing cars, acting like immortality is just another thing they might get away with. They’re beautiful, reckless, and magnetic. So likable that their crime spree doesn’t feel depraved. It feels like lift-off. Cutting themselves loose from the rules. The boredom, the whole suffocating arrangement that’s been sitting on them since birth. The film fills out with one memorable character after another. Michael J. Pollard as their wheelman—blinking like part of his mind is floating around in the space behind him. Gene Hackman as Clyde’s older brother—smart enough to read the room, too slow to realize it’s on fire. And Estelle Parsons as Blanche—Clyde’s shrieking, god-fearing sister-in-law, wound so tight that she’s vibrating at a frequency only dogs can hear. The film’s violence felt new, certainly. But the stranger thing—what really changed the temperature—was the feeling underneath it. It made the fall toward oblivion feel exhilarating.

Mildred (Nell Fisher) is eleven, but she has much bigger things in mind than home life. Namely, tracking a legendary black panther through the New Zealand wilderness. Her mother’s sudden accident creates an opening, and Mildred takes it. But then in walks her father, Strawn (Elijah Wood)—a washed-up magician she barely knows—just in time to spoil those plans. So they strike a bargain. She gets the expedition, as long as he tags along and plays father. From there, the film turns into a prickly little wilderness odyssey, their dynamic being the movie’s main attraction. Watch what happens when Strawn tries to impress his daughter with card tricks. He barely gets the patter started before she calls the gimmick and takes the whole thing apart. That’s more or less the movie’s rhythm too—light on its feet, a little odd around the edges, dry without going cold. An easy, refreshing watch.

Marcus Graham (Eddie Murphy) is vain. So vain that he never met a mirror he didn’t outrank. He’s a hotshot ad executive with a satin voice and a polished smile. He goes on dates like most people flip through racks of designer clothing. Take it out, inspect it, put it back over a minor flaw. A toe. A shade of lipstick. A mood. Then along comes his new boss, Jacqueline Broyer (Robin Givens). A shark in silk. Marcus finds her alluring enough to pursue, but it’s not so easy this time. She doesn’t swoon. And all of a sudden it’s Marcus getting screened, delayed, and brushed aside. For a stretch, Boomerang revels in watching its playboy hero flounder under his first real rejection. But then the movie loses its nerve and Angela (Halle Berry) enters the frame. She’s warm, lovely—the kind of woman any man would be lucky to be within 10 feet of. But Marcus pairing off with her doesn’t really work here. Too much of a karmic imbalance. Marcus already has everything—looks, wealth, a career greased with success. That he also gets a free ticket to waltz into enlightenment with Halle Berry in his arms doesn’t feel like growth. It feels like the final perk of being Marcus Graham. Still, the movie has side pleasures. David Alan Grier and Martin Lawrence keep tossing in giggle-inducing commentary from the peanut gallery. And then there’s Grace Jones, showing up for a bizarre ad shoot: a perfume commercial where she rather graphically goes into labor and gives birth to a fragrance bottle. Outrageously weird. For this movie, too weird, but I’m not going to complain. Otherwise, it’s a fairly unremarkable Eddie Murphy vehicle. A stylish, self-satisfied glide through the rom-com formula.

You’d think an erotic drama called Bora Bora might at least deliver the scenery—or failing that, something resembling heat. What we end up with is more like a marital breakdown in a humid terrarium. Our lurid plot involves one dead-eyed couple from Italy—Roberto (Corrado Pani) and Marita (Haydée Politoff)—who are already halfway divorced. She comes to French Polynesia to achieve some kind of sexual liberation by bunking up with a native. He’s there to repossess her, but ends up sleeping around himself. The women look zombified. The men look furious. Nobody looks remotely pleased to be here. The nudity looks like a spa accident. There’s a healthy smattering of domestic abuse. More slapping than you’d expect anywhere outside a Three Stooges sketch. The dialogue is dubbed from Italian into a flat, drifting murmur. Like everyone’s reading from cue cards they don’t understand. The camera seems to resent the assignment, barely using the Bora Bora beaches, water, and sky. You’d think the scenery operated on commission. I made it through this film on a hope and a prayer and some dim archaeological impulse. I got no prize, except for a tangle of glistening torsos and palm trees on grainy 35mm.

Documentary by way of kamikaze stunt. Sacha Baron Cohen drops Borat into the American bloodstream like an undetected virus, playing a Kazakh journalist with the social grace of an overmedicated goat. He wanders through America’s small towns and city streets to absorb every bit of lunacy people are willing to offer him. It turns out there’s a lot. Cohen sells Borat as an innocent bigot. The joke begins by treating his racism, homophobia, and misogyny as foreign contamination. But then the film stands back as Americans hear him out and just nod along. Sure, the film doesn’t play fair. Sometimes it’s cruel. But that’s also the fun of it. Borat barrels through a Confederate-themed antique store with the obliviousness of a punch-drunk toddler. He stands in the middle of a rodeo crowd praising George W. Bush’s foreign policy to thunderous applause—only to watch it sour when the praise starts slipping into painful truths. And then there’s what must be in the running for the most outrageous scene ever put to celluloid. A fully nude wrestling brawl that starts in a hotel room but spirals into a ballroom filled with tuxedos and gowns. In 2006, this movie played like a rude awakening—to liberal America, anyway. Watch it twenty years later, and—sadly—it all feels quaint. But even politics aside, Borat is a marvel of commitment. A vastly entertaining act of comic terrorism that invites America to smile for the camera and then keep talking.

For long stretches, this sci-fi video-game adaptation feels like a toy box that somebody kept shaking until the lid came off. Maybe these characters’ brains were rattling somewhere in there as well, because everyone seems to have some screws loose. Cate Blanchett plays Lilith. A mercenary working her way across Pandora—a junk planet made out of rust and odd little details. Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), a corporate slime merchant, hires her to bring back his daughter Tina (Ariana Greenblatt). She’s a teenage explosives addict with oversized bunny ears and the energy of a small natural disaster. When Lilith learns that Tina is the key to Atlas opening “the Vault,” she switches sides. The big problem now is that Atlas knows their location, and he sends forces to pursue them both. Along the way, they pick up Roland (Kevin Hart), an anti-Atlas resistance soldier, and Claptrap (Jack Black), an aggressively chirpy robot. They also run into Tina’s stepmother (Jamie Lee Curtis) for a little curt commentary. The humor throughout the film runs hot and dumb—some of it a little too pleased with itself. But there’s a nice cracked rhythm to it. Blanchett’s cool detachment is the grounding force as everything around her vibrates at eleven. The third act runs a bit low on juice. But by then I was already on the movie’s wavelength. And I must have an odd wavelength, since I’m in a small minority in enjoying it. (A measly ten percent on Rotten Tomatoes.) Maybe I’m just a sucker for trash planets and grenade-laced plush toys.

A live-action Rocky and Bullwinkle spinoff without Rocky and Bullwinkle is like an ice cream sundae without the ice cream. But here we are anyway. Boris and Natasha, front and center. The moose and squirrel’s Slavic-accented Cold War enemies—apparently unaware the Cold War has ended. Though in Pottsylvania, the paperwork must be so slow that they must’ve only recently opened the letter telling them that Stalin was no longer running things. Fearless Leader still calls the shots where his star agents, Boris and Natasha (Dave Thomas, Sally Kellerman), are concerned. Their assignment is simple enough: defect to America, then steal a microchip. The defection goes smoothly, but then they get distracted. Natasha winds up a supermodel, her pageboy haircut abruptly treated like the next big thing. Boris mostly trails behind waiting for the movie to remember he’s in it. The real problem with this movie is none of this has any comic force. The frantic voice-overs try to bottle the old Rocky and Bullwinkle nuttiness, but they bring back the racket, not the laughs. Thomas and Kellerman are funny people, but that counts for very little here. Not once did I laugh. Not even a smirk. Just a growing awareness of the runtime, which is mercifully kept under 90 minutes.

A one-joke movie stretched to 85 minutes, but an occasionally funny one—especially if Cheech Marin’s easygoing, stoner-adjacent shrug-and-smirk routine already amuses you. Marin plays Rudy Robles, an East L.A. auto mechanic who couldn’t sound more local if he came with freeway noise in the background. But he gets caught without ID in an immigration raid and shipped off to Mexico anyway. For all appearances to the contrary, he doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish. Then it’s one Tijuana misadventure after another—part broad satire, part easy sitcom business. Rudy links up with a cut-rate coyote (Daniel Stern). Hustles through odd jobs. Ducks corrupt cops. Puts the moves on a local woman (Kamala Lopez). Nothing out to surprise you. Still, it’s not sour—the movie shambles along on friendly terms. And Marin dependably carries Rudy’s mounting irritation without dropping that baggy slacker appeal.

A remake that prefers gleaming polish to bite, but the engine is unchanged. Teach the “dumb blonde” too much and she might go from ornament to obstacle. Melanie Griffith knows better than to chase Judy Holliday’s timing. Her Billie is softer and warmer. But the intelligence is already there, glinting under the lacquer. Billie Dawn is a former Vegas showgirl turned deluxe accessory for Harry Brock (John Goodman)—a loud, bullying sugar beast. He’s also a newly rich industrialist who is heading to Washington, D.C., where Harry is after political influence and a seat in rooms money likes to force its way into. Billie’s happy enough with the arrangement. Until Harry starts showing her off at social functions and realizes her crude, Vegas-honed manners don’t quite clear the velvet ropes in the rooms he wants to own. So he hires a reporter (Don Johnson) to educate her. Fatal error. It’s a gentler animal than the 1950 version. Sleeker, softer, much less likely to bite. But it’s enjoyable. Mostly because it keeps its eye on Billie, where it should, and knows the real pleasure is watching her wake up under her own steam and start ruining the arrangement.

A daffy premise, but in appealing proportions. A baby shows up at a suburban doorstep not to nap or teethe, but to run things. He wears a suit. He carries a briefcase. He’s Boss Baby (voiced by Alec Baldwin). Here on business. Something involving corporate turf wars between babies and the rising threat of puppies. His parents are oblivious. To them, he’s just a babbling, drooling, bottle-sucking invalid armored in diapers. But to his seven-year-old brother Tim (voiced by Miles Bakshi), who until now had been enjoying life as an only child with an active imagination, there’s something suspicious about this new kid on the block. Whether the events of the film are actually happening or are the byproduct of Tim’s inner life is left open to interpretation. It’s like Calvin and Hobbes—less about what’s real than what feels real to the kid at the center of it. Baldwin voices the title character with clipped authority, and the contrast between that boardroom bark and the character’s pudgy frame is funny enough as it is, and the film wisely doesn’t overplay it. It just uses it well. Visually, the film stays inventive. There’s a flashback styled like a pop-up storybook. A snappy musical interlude with a perfectly timed fart gag. One of the funniest moments has Tim’s dad walking in on the two brothers staring each other down while furiously sucking on pacifiers. I laughed at this more than I thought I would. It plays to kids, but not only to kids. There’s enough dry wit in the corporate satire and recognition in the sibling material to keep the adults engaged. Beneath all that, there’s a genuinely sweet story about learning to share space, love, and attention.

A caper for people who like the idea of crime more than the practice of it. Wes Anderson’s first feature is scruffier than the immaculate constructions that followed, but the peculiar comic wiring is already visible. Owen Wilson plays Dignan. A psychiatric patient who—bug-eyed, full of conviction—stages a jailbreak from a mental hospital he checked into voluntarily. “Escape” just sounded tougher. From there, he starts mapping out a criminal future he has no real capacity to manage. Other than roping in some accomplices. Anthony (Luke Wilson), his best friend, gets pulled in first—still glassy from some vague personal collapse. Bob (Robert Musgrave) follows, his main qualification being that he has a car. Together they pull off their first job. A bookstore robbery. It’s a success, if you want to call it that. The clerks barely look up from the register as they snatch what little cash there is. Then their fantasy starts to run into something real. Namely, James Caan—an actual criminal operator with expectations, and the sort who gets impatient when they fail to appear. That’s about when Anthony starts peeling away from Dignan’s little crime opera. He’s got eyes now for Inez (Lumi Cavazos), the hotel maid at their hideout. What grows between them is so quiet that it almost feels accidental. But then it quietly takes over the film. This is before Anderson developed the dollhouse style, but his signature tone is already in place: dry, a bit off to one side, and undeniably fond of these boys and their pint-sized outlaw fantasies.

Also known as Don’t Tell Her It’s Me, this is a romance that wants to be tender and swoony, but the plot turns and scripting are so awkward that it plays closer to accidental comedy. Steve Guttenberg is Gus—a cartoonist on the other side of Hodgkin’s disease. Though he’s not exactly back on his feet—the illness has left him bald, heavier, and with whatever confidence he had looking well wrung out. He’s wearing a prosthetic scalp and fat suit that look so awkward it’s like he’s a wax figure left too close to a radiator. His sister Lizzie (Dyan Cannon), a human brass band with a rescue complex, takes one look at him and prescribes one thing: romance. Enter Emily (Jami Gertz), a local journalist who makes the mistake of telling Lizzie she doesn’t think looks matter in a man. So she sets them up on a date, but Gus completely blows it. So he decides another approach is needed. He gets back into shape and reinvents himself as “Lobo”—a denim-wrapped Australian with a Michael Bolton wig and an accent that fluctuates across continents. What follows is meant to be gentle wish fulfillment, but it plays more like sketch comedy. Except with the actors looking befuddled over why the audience seems to be laughing in the wrong spots. Guttenberg does what he can, though he’s also the source of most of the unintended laughs. If this movie gives you any pleasure at all, it’s in seeing how far downhill it’s willing to roll. Quite far, as it turns out.

Even in 1970, the Bradys were square. By 1995, they might as well have been beamed in from a completely different planet. This movie drops them into 1995 untouched, speaking fluent sitcom. Sunny, square, full of groovy lingo. Fully convinced that their way is the normal one. Even if the world is returning looks ranging from bafflement to thinly concealed irritation. That premise almost could have survived without a central story, but the movie plugs one in anyway. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty generic one, involving a greedy developer (Michael McKean) who wants the Brady house bulldozed so that he can put up a mall. The neighbors are ready to cash out, but the Bradys refuse. They’re just far too attached to their mid-century split-level wonderland, with the sunken living room and avocado-green interior. There’s also a subplot involving Jan—the neglected middle child—who looks at Marcia (Christine Taylor) as though she’s a migraine in human form. In certain scenes, their sibling rivalry starts to turn into something resembling psychological horror. This is a movie that is consistently funny—but it does suffer from one limitation. It doesn’t do much to deepen the joke. It just keeps returning to that basic fish-out-of-water setup, and the pattern starts to show. Still, as pop-culture taxidermy, it’s irresistible. A sitcom yanked from its own oxygen supply and yet still able to breathe.

Gibson attacks the story of the late 13th-century Scottish rebel William Wallace head-on—both as director and star. He trudges into the mud and blood, with blaring bagpipes treated like a combat stimulant. He plays Wallace as a man driven wild by loss. Charging into battle with grief, rage, and myth already fused together. His first shove comes early, when his father and brother are killed under English rule. Then his wife (Catherine McCormack) is brutally executed. You can still see a little Martin Riggs in him here—his character from Lethal Weapon. That wild-eyed look, with martyrdom and self-destruction fighting for space on his face. But here, it’s pointed toward something bigger. More spiritual. Certainly more consequential. The gigantic battle scenes, for instance, are filthy and loud. Swings feel like they’ve connected with bone. No holds barred anywhere. Faces get pulped. Horses crash into the dirt. Men charge at each other like they’ve run out of other uses for their bodies. The film doesn’t go slack between battles. The sweeping Scottish vistas are gorgeously photographed and provide a kind of mournful grandeur. Political scheming, bits of reflection—none of it gets swallowed by the spectacle. Gibson the director knows how to pace a three-hour epic without it slouching into monotony. Braveheart is more myth than history, but it’s myth delivered like a thunderclap. An old-school Hollywood epic that swings for the broadsword and makes contact.