Ryan Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man opens with an act of violence so theatrically impossible that the film doesn’t even bother hiding it from you. Someone has been stabbed during a Good Friday service in a locked church, and the movie tells you, with its whole chest, that what just happened could not have happened. Then it stands there, arms crossed, daring you to argue.

This is the third Benoit Blanc mystery, and it’s the first one that doesn’t feel like it’s having any fun at all.

That’s not a complaint—it’s an observation about ambition. Where Knives Out skewered generational wealth with a scalpel and Glass Onion took a sledgehammer to tech-bro narcissism, Wake Up Dead Man trades spectacle for something grittier, heavier, and far more unsettling. The locked room isn’t a billionaire’s island or a grand estate. It’s a rural church in the American Northeast, where faith and certainty have been weaponized in equal measure, and where the only thing more dangerous than a knife is the conviction that you’re absolutely right.

Johnson has always been interested in certainty as a narrative device—characters who believe they know exactly what happened, exactly who’s to blame, exactly how the world works. But here, that interest becomes the entire engine of the film. Every character in Wake Up Dead Man is sure of something. Sure of their faith, sure of their inheritance, sure of their righteousness. And Johnson, with the patience of a man who’s built two of these contraptions already, watches them all collide.

I recently covered this film on The Film Board, and what struck me most in that conversation—and what lingers now—is how deliberately Johnson has shifted the register. This isn’t a mystery that delights in its own cleverness the way Glass Onion did. It doesn’t revel in the baroque pleasures of the genre. Instead, it takes the locked-room mystery—one of the most inherently playful structures in all of detective fiction—and uses it to examine something deeply uncomfortable: the way we perform certainty in the face of doubt.

The mechanics of the mystery are deceptively straightforward. A man is killed during a church service. The doors are locked. Everyone inside has an alibi that seems airtight. Benoit Blanc arrives, not with a flourish, but with a quiet, weary curiosity. And then the film spends the next two hours methodically dismantling every assumption you’ve made.

What makes it work—what makes it more than a well-constructed puzzle—is that Johnson refuses to let the mystery exist in a vacuum. The locked church is a pressure cooker for ideology. The Wicks family, with their tangled history of wealth, betrayal, and religious fervor, become avatars for the ways we weaponize belief to justify our worst impulses. And the treasure everyone’s chasing—the inheritance that was promised but never delivered—becomes a metaphor for the American social contract itself: something we’re all told exists, something we’ve built our lives around, something that may never have been real in the first place.

The film’s visual language reinforces this shift in tone. Johnson and cinematographer Steve Yedlin trade the sun-drenched opulence of Glass Onion for something far more austere. The church is beautiful, yes, but it’s a hard beauty—all dark wood and stained glass that filters light into something cold and judgmental. The color palette is muted, almost oppressive. This is a film that looks like it was shot in the exact moment before a storm breaks, and it never quite lets you exhale.

The ensemble cast rises to meet that challenge. Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc evolves here into something quieter, more observational—a listener who understands that the real mystery is why everyone is so desperate to believe their version of events. The rest of the cast—an astonishing collection of largely British actors delivering pitch-perfect regional American accents—populate the church with people who feel lived-in, damaged, and terrifyingly certain of themselves.

There’s a moment midway through the film where Cy Draven, played with ugly precision by Daryl McCormack, delivers what might be the thesis statement of the entire piece. He’s talking about politics, about the machinery of modern American discourse, and he says something to the effect of: Show people something they hate. Tell them it’s going to take away something they love. It’s a line that could easily feel too on-the-nose, too didactic. But in context, surrounded by people who have spent their entire lives doing exactly that to each other, it lands with the weight of inevitability.

This is what Johnson is doing with the locked-room mystery. He’s showing us a structure we love—the intricate puzzle, the impossible crime, the brilliant detective who sees what no one else can—and then using it to interrogate the very certainty that makes such stories satisfying. We want Blanc to tell us what happened. We want the mystery solved. We want the moral universe of the story to snap back into place. But Wake Up Dead Man keeps asking: what if certainty itself is the real crime?

Does it work? Mostly, yes. The film’s willingness to sit in discomfort, to let scenes breathe and characters contradict themselves, is one of its greatest strengths. But it’s also, at times, a liability. The final act—particularly the last twenty minutes—feels like Johnson struggling to land a plane he’s been flying at cruising altitude for too long. The revelations keep coming, each one peeling back another layer, and while the mystery itself resolves satisfyingly, the film doesn’t quite know when to stop talking.

This is the risk of making a mystery that’s more interested in commentary than catharsis. Johnson has built a machine that runs on ambiguity, on the tension between what we believe and what we can prove. But the genre demands resolution. And so the film gives it to us—but not in the way you’d expect. Blanc, in a remarkable choice, refuses to solve it himself. He hands the story to Martha to tell, recognizing that she must own this revelation. The pieces fall into place, but the lingering discomfort doesn’t dissipate. The certainty the film critiques doesn’t evaporate just because the mystery is solved.

In a strange way, that’s what makes Wake Up Dead Man the most interesting entry in the series so far. It’s a film that understands the locked-room mystery as a fundamentally conservative form—a puzzle that exists to be solved, a chaos that exists to be ordered—and then uses that form to examine a moment in American life where order feels increasingly out of reach.

There’s a scene where Jud sits down to write a letter, and Blanc sits, drinking bourbon by the fire as he does. His narration overlays time we’ve already experienced, and Johnson—in a typically elegant touch—has the act of writing take exactly one hour of screen time, matching the hour of storytelling we’ve just watched. It’s the kind of structural playfulness that reminds you Johnson is still having fun with form, even as the subject matter grows heavier.

But what makes this moment more than clever is what it reveals about the film’s deeper project. Johnson has always been fascinated by the gap between what people say and what they do, between the stories we tell ourselves and the truths we can’t face. Wake Up Dead Man takes that fascination and builds an entire mystery around it. It’s a film that refuses to let anyone—not the characters, not the audience, not even Benoit Blanc himself—rest easy in their assumptions.

Is it the most audacious Knives Out mystery yet? Perhaps. It’s certainly the one most willing to risk alienating its audience in service of its argument. But it’s also the one that feels most urgent, most necessary. In a cultural moment defined by performative certainty and weaponized belief, Johnson has made a mystery that asks us to sit with our doubt. That’s a harder trick to pull off than any locked-room puzzle, and the fact that he mostly succeeds is a testament to his skill as both a storyteller and a diagnostician of our current ailments.

I walked away from Wake Up Dead Man convinced of two things: first, that Ryan Johnson is one of the most vital filmmakers working today, and second, that I want more of these. Not because they’re easy or comforting—this one is decidedly neither—but because they’re necessary. They remind us that the hardest mysteries to solve aren’t the ones with impossible alibis and hidden clues. They’re the ones where everyone is absolutely certain they’re right, and no one can prove it.

Nearly a century on, The Phantom of the Opera feels both monumental and deeply uneven at the same time. It’s the kind of early studio spectacle that makes me marvel at how far the medium had come by 1925—and also wince at the parts that hadn’t caught up yet. You don’t watch it the way you watch Dracula or Frankenstein, where the formula finally snaps into place; you watch Phantom knowing that the formula is still being invented, that the brand book is still just a sketch, and honestly, that may be the best lens for appreciating what the film actually is rather than what we’ve retroactively wished it to be.

Let’s get my biggest gripe out of the way: the pacing. I struggle with the first half. The film spends ages roaming through opera-house politics, watching bits of Faust, and checking in on comic-relief characters who seem to have wandered in from another movie. We’re supposed to be winding up for one of cinema’s great horror legends, but instead we’re sitting through management memos and rehearsal notes, all delivered in a kind of vaudeville shuffle. And from a 2025 vantage point, it feels glacial.

Of course, that slow, sprawling first act was the point. This was prestige filmmaking in 1925—big sets, big crowds, big culture. The opera wasn’t background; it was the original IP draw. So yes, the dramatic momentum sputters, but it sputters because the film is carrying the weight of an entire studio’s ambitions.

What rescues it—what still makes the film worth returning to—is Lon Chaney. The moment he enters, the movie finds its pulse. Chaney is doing something here that no one else in Hollywood could match at the time: a performance that’s simultaneously grotesque, theatrical, and psychologically sharp. And he does it in a silent medium, under several pounds of self-applied makeup, while half-directing his own scenes because he’d stopped speaking to the credited director. The man is a one-person film school in how to act without words. When the camera moves with him through the rafters or across the underground lake, the movie suddenly remembers what cinema can do.

Those moments—the unmasking, the chandelier crash, the Red Death on the staircase—are electric. They justify the legend for me.

The tonal inconsistency that frustrates so many viewers, including yours truly, is also baked into the film’s DNA. This thing was sliced apart, previewed, reshot, recut, and partially remade for a reissue. If the finished film feels like it was directed by three different people, that’s because it essentially was. But instead of seeing that as a flaw, it’s useful to see it as an early demonstration of how Hollywood machinery often overpowers any single artistic voice. The pastiche quality becomes a record of the studio system figuring itself out on the day.

The love triangle, on the other hand—Christine, Raoul, and Erik—falls into that familiar silent melodrama pattern: compelling concept, thin follow-through. Christine is less a character than a symbolic prize for the men to negotiate over, and Raoul has all the charisma of the decorative molding in Box Five. But again, that’s the melodramatic architecture of the era, not a unique failure here.

The wrap-up is tough. The final mob chase is thrilling in motion, but emotionally it lands with the suddenness of a dropped curtain. That isn’t narrative design so much as preview cards dictating commercial necessity. The tragedy of Erik’s character deserves a smarter resolution, but Universal wasn’t in the business of letting tragedies breathe.

Despite all of this, despite my own impatience with the film’s indulgent first hour—Phantom earns its place in the canon. It’s not the clean, efficient monster movie Universal would later deliver. It’s the messy prototype, the blueprint, the film that shows the studio discovering that horror could be elegant, operatic, and even beautiful. If it’s uneven, it’s uneven in historically revealing ways. If it’s slow, it’s slow in a way that reflects the tastes and priorities of the silent era. And if Chaney’s Phantom feels like a fully formed monster dropped into a half-formed movie, that’s part of what makes the whole experience so strange and fascinating. It’s a masterpiece of parts more than a masterpiece as a whole.

If I’m honest, this one feels like watching a magic act from the lobby.

You can hear the applause, you can see the lights, but you’re missing the part where the trick actually lands. It’s chaotic, not in the fizzy, high-wire way the first film managed, but in the “too many moving parts and none of them locking into place” way.

It doesn’t help that the story feels smaller at the exact moment the cast feels bigger. Ruben Fleischer takes over the franchise and tries to tighten its focus after the maximalist sprawl of NYSM2, but the result here is oddly constrained—like a movie trying to whisper its way through a magic show. The premise has all the ingredients for a big, exuberant heist, yet the film seems uncertain about what it wants to be. Is this a generational handoff story, with the new trio stepping forward as heirs to the Eye? Or is it meant to be a reunion tour, the original Horsemen returning to reclaim the stage? The film never decides, and so we drift between those registers without the satisfaction of either.

The returning cast highlights this problem. Eisenberg and Harrelson seem game, but strangely disconnected from the emotional center—like they’ve been edited in from a neighboring movie. Isla Fisher’s return should feel triumphant, but she’s sidelined in favor of myth-building exposition. Lizzy Caplan once again steals the entire thing for me, injecting some desperately needed spark, but even she can’t disguise how thinly everyone is spread.

And the big issue remains the same from scene one to the final reveal: the story is a damned mess. You can feel the fingerprints of the four-plus screenwriters who cycled through this script. Everyone in the cast has the charisma to carry the glossy magic-heist material; the movie just never trusts them enough to slow down and let charm replace plot gymnastics.

What I miss most—and what the first film, even with all its silliness, understood—is the texture of real sleight of hand. There was a time when we could all pretend these actors had learned enough magic that what we saw on screen lived just close enough to reality to feel possible. I like watching Dave Franco throw cards. I like when a magic movie invites me to lean forward, not back.

But this third entry blows past all that. The illusions are mostly CG costume swaps and impossible maneuvers that sever any sense of physical plausibility. Even the “reveal” moments—like the diamond swap—play like digital storyboards. The movie proudly pulls back the curtain only to show you more curtain, more edits, more impossible architecture that no human team could manipulate in public. It’s spectacle without substance, and that makes it hard to stay connected to anything happening on screen.

And I want to stay connected. I’m an easy mark for these films. I love the idea of the Horsemen as a justice-minded magic troupe taking down corrupt institutions—this time a diamond empire with Nazi roots, which on paper should be delicious pulp. The Eye mythology is still goofy, but I’m willing to indulge it if the ride is fun.

But Fleischer’s direction and Stacey Schroeder’s editing never find the rhythm that made the first film a surprise hit. The glossy, neon palette from cinematographer George Richmond is nice to look at, but it can’t paper over the narrative confusion. Brian Tyler’s score tries its best to pump energy into the set-pieces, but even that familiar Horsemen motif feels like it’s searching for a movie that isn’t quite there. As a result, this is pretty handily the worst of the three—less exuberant than the original, less shamelessly silly than the second, but somehow more forgettable than both. And yet…and yet…I’m still putting a heart on it. Because I know I’ll watch it again. Because some part of me is always going to love a high-concept magic caper, even when the trick fizzles. Because guilty pleasures aren’t about quality—they’re about affection.

Two stars, heart on. My rational brain checked out early, but the part of me that loves card-throwing justice magicians just can’t quit this ridiculous franchise.

Instructions Not Included sneaks up on you. Not quietly. More like it tiptoes toward you in flip-flops, trips over a chair, knocks over a lamp, and then bursts into tears while insisting it’s fine, absolutely fine. And before you know it, you’re comforting the movie instead of it comforting you.

It’s chaotic. Not bad-chaotic — just… it’s a lot. Eugenio Derbez is directing his first feature here, and you can feel him reaching for something big and heartfelt and cross-cultural and occasionally too ambitious for its own frame. I respect the attempt. It’s messy, but it’s a human mess.

Derbez plays Valentín with this bumbling, exhausted tenderness that actually got to me. You can see him trying to hold together the plot, his daughter’s life, his stunt career, and whatever’s happening with his childhood trauma — which is a lot for someone who cannot successfully operate a toaster.

Loreto Peralta is Maggie, the daughter, who is just… stunningly good. Not “good for a kid.” Good, full stop. She has that alchemical ability to make the emotional beats feel real even when the movie is flinging tonal curveballs all over the field. Any time the film threatens to buckle under its own sentimentality, she just looks at her dad with those massive, honest eyes, and suddenly I’m forgiving everything.

So yeah, the movie is all over the place. The jokes linger longer than they should, and the dramatic turns feel like someone changed the channel without warning. And that ending — I mean, look, no spoilers, and you’ll probably see it coming miles out, but it hit me like someone threw a bowling ball at my chest while screaming, “THIS IS FOR YOUR PERSONAL GROWTH.”

Did the movie earn that moment? I don’t know. Again, it calls its shots something fierce, this movie. But, I’ll be thinking about it for a while, which is something.

And still — I liked it. I found myself rooting for it, because there’s an earnestness here that plays. It’s a film that genuinely feels things, even when it doesn’t quite know how to express them cleanly. Its heart is enormous, its technique is wobbly, and the combination ends up being charming. So yes, it’s manipulative. And uneven. And occasionally baffling. But it’s also sweet, and deeply human, and surprisingly tender.

King Vidor’s The Big Parade is one of those silent-era epics whose reputation has outlived its contemporaries—not because it’s loud or patriotic or triumphalist, but because it’s patient, humane, and unexpectedly honest about what war does to the ordinary human body. 

And what it does is profoundly unkind. 

Released in 1925, less than a decade after the armistice, it comes from a moment when the world was still suturing its wounds and the cultural mythology of World War I was not yet fixed. You can feel the urgency of remembrance, the unease, the unspoken anger, the unsettled sense that no one had yet figured out how to talk about what had just happened.

Historically, the U.S. had been late to the war and deeply reluctant to join it. The first “big parade”—the one that swept young men like Jim Apperson off their porches and into the Army—was fueled more by social pressure and propaganda than by national necessity. The film captures that flush of naïve enthusiasm remarkably well: a nation swept up in drums and bunting, sending boys who had never seen Europe into trenches already slick with years of bloodshed. I get the sense that Vidor (and MGM) knew this was the cultural memory they were speaking to, an audience still reckoning with the fact that America’s great crusade had ended not in glory but in a generation of maimed veterans and fractured families.

For all its historical weight, the film’s first hour and a quarter is… well, it’s a lot of French countryside. And washing troughs. And chewing gum flirtation. And soldierly horseplay. Andy disagrees with me on this on the show, but I have to say that this is where the movie nearly loses me. There is genuine charm in the courtship between John Gilbert’s Jim and Renée Adorée’s Melisande, and important groundwork is laid here… the boredom of green troops waiting for orders, the way routine becomes a refuge before the storm. But the pacing feels indulgent, the rustic bliss stretched far beyond what the film needs. Vidor believed in letting scenes breathe—to the point that they drift. I appreciate the intent. I’m still checking my watch.

But then the second half arrives, and suddenly The Big Paradebecomes the film its reputation promises.

When Jim’s unit finally moves to the front, the tone shifts with precision and severity. The extended march into Belleau Wood—done in slow, inexorable rhythm, each step a beat in some unseen metronome—is one of the greatest sequences in silent cinema. Combat had rarely been filmed with this kind of dread before: no triumphant charges, no patriotic crescendos, just men plodding forward into a mechanical killing field. One by one, characters we’ve come to know fall out of the frame, and Vidor refuses dramatic punctuation. There are no heroic deaths here—only the brutal, indifferent logic of freshly-industrialized warfare.

The Big Parade isn’t interpreting the war through myth; it’s still too close for that. It’s a movie made by a studio full of veterans and bereaved families, directed by a man who considered this his own attempt at national catharsis. The realism was radical for its time—no surprise that later anti-war films, from All Quiet on the Western Front to Paths of Glory, draw directly from its DNA.

The emotional climax arrives in intimacy: Jim wounded, trapped with a dying enemy soldier, confronting the shared humanity of someone he has been ordered to hate. In a film that began with drums and cheering, this quiet encounter feels like the truth finally breaking through the pageantry.

By the time Jim returns home, amputated and hollowed out, The Big Parade has fully transformed from a patriotic adventure to a meditation on trauma—a story about what happens to a naïve young man when a nation’s rhetoric collides with the body’s reality. The final scenes, where he struggles to reconnect with civilian life and ultimately returns to France to seek Melisande, acknowledge that healing after a war this devastating must happen slowly, and often far from home.

If the film were as lean in its first hour as it is devastating in its second, it would be a masterpiece without qualifications. But even with the exhausted French pastoral stretch, The Big Parade remains one of the essential war films—a movie that helped invent the grammar of battlefield realism and still carries the weight of a world trying to understand what it has done.

I’m watching this thing and about twenty minutes in I’m thinking, “Wait, this is supposed to be the greatest Indian film ever made?” Because honestly? It starts like every spaghetti Western you’ve ever seen. Two guys on horses. Dusty landscape. Ominous music that sounds like Ennio Morricone had an affair with a sitar.

The western influences surprised me—not because they were there, but because they worked so damn well. You’ve got this revenge story that could have been lifted straight from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, except suddenly Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan are riding a motorcycle singing about friendship and I’m sitting there thinking, “This should be terrible. This should absolutely not work.”

Except it does work. Spectacularly.

Look, I need to talk about the musical numbers because they’re driving me insane. In a good way, I think? The adventure, the spiritual ties to the Seven Samurai cultural history, the friendship between these two men and their dance between crime and their better angels—all felt very relevant. But those songs! If I’d walked into this expecting a straight Western, I would have lost my mind when everyone suddenly breaks into “Yeh Dosti.”

Three hours into what’s essentially a meditation on justice and vengeance, and we get a four-minute motorcycle anthem about male bonding. In any other universe, this kills the movie stone dead. Here? It somehow becomes the emotional center of the entire film.

I keep thinking about genre expectations and whether they’re helping or hurting my experience. Because honestly, I went in knowing this was Bollywood, knowing there would be songs, knowing the rules were different. So when Basanti starts dancing to save Veeru’s life, part of me is like, “Of course she is, this is what happens in these movies.” But if I didn’t have that baggage—if I was some hypothetical viewer expecting Once Upon a Time in the West—would that sequence feel like genius or like the movie having a complete nervous breakdown?

And Gabbar Singh. Jesus. Amjad Khan creates this bureaucrat of evil, this guy who kills people like he’s filing paperwork, and somehow he’s more terrifying than any villain I’ve seen in a Western. Maybe it’s because he exists in a world where people burst into song about friendship, where joy is the default setting, and he’s this black hole of systematic brutality cutting through all that celebration of life.

“Kitne aadmi the?” has to be one of the greatest villain introductions ever filmed. It’s just a simple question—“How many men were there?”—but Khan delivers it like he’s already bored by whatever answer he’s going to get. Like violence is just another Tuesday afternoon for him.

The whole thing runs nearly three and a half hours and I barely noticed. Which is insane because I check my watch during most two-hour movies. But Ramesh Sippy somehow makes this sprawling, ridiculous, genre-blending mess feel necessary. Every song, every shootout, every moment of comic relief that should feel interminable somehow fits.

R.D. Burman’s score deserves its own paragraph because what the hell was he thinking? The opening sequence starts with pure Western guitar work—you could drop it into A Fistful of Dollars and nobody would blink. Then suddenly there’s tabla and shehnai and it should sound like a car crash but instead it sounds like… well, like Sholay. Like this specific world where anything might happen next and somehow it all makes sense.

The cinematography helps. Dwarka Divecha shoots this thing like it’s Lawrence of Arabia crossed with a John Ford Western crossed with… I don’t know, a particularly elaborate music video? Those landscape shots of Karnataka looking like Monument Valley, but with this distinctly Indian sensibility that I can’t quite put my finger on.

It felt timeless in that way great Westerns do—you know how The Searchers or Unforgiven feel like they’re speaking to something fundamental about human nature? Sholay has that quality, but it arrives there through this completely different route that involves motorcycle songs and dance numbers and three hours of emotional manipulation that somehow never feels manipulative.

I keep coming back to this question: what if I didn’t know the rules going in? What if Sholay was my introduction to Indian cinema, my first encounter with the idea that movies can stop for songs, that heroes can be criminals with hearts of gold, that villains can be both campy and genuinely terrifying?

I think it would have blown my mind completely. Maybe that’s what happened to Indian audiences in 1975—they thought they were getting one thing and instead got this genre-defying monster that rewrote what movies could be.

The friendship between Jai and Veeru becomes this template for every buddy movie that followed, but watching it now, it feels fresh because these guys actually seem to love each other. Not in a “we’re tough guys who secretly care” way, but genuinely, openly, without irony. When Bachchan dies—sorry, spoilers, but the movie’s fifty years old—you feel like you’ve lost a friend too.

Which brings me to something that really bugs me about how this movie gets discussed. People always focus on the box office records, the cultural impact, the dialogue that entered the language. Fair enough. But what strikes me watching it now is how emotionally honest it is despite all the melodrama. Or maybe because of it?

Look, Sholay shouldn’t work. It’s too long, too weird, too willing to completely change tones every twenty minutes. It combines genres that have no business being in the same movie, let alone the same scene. But somehow Sippy and his team pulled off this miraculous balancing act where everything that should feel ridiculous instead feels essential.

Maybe that’s what great art does—it makes you forget your preconceptions about what’s possible, what’s allowed, what fits together. Sholay grabbed every rule about storytelling and genre and threw them out the window, then built something entirely new from the pieces.

Fifty years later, it still feels like nothing else. Still feels like this impossible thing that exists in its own universe, playing by its own rules, somehow managing to be both completely of its time and absolutely timeless.

I’m not sure I’d change a single frame.

Some movies hit you first through your ears. Jesus Christ Superstar was one of those movies for me. Before I ever saw Norman Jewison’s wild, sun-bleached film version of the 1970 rock opera, I grew up with the record spinning on the turntable, over and over, courtesy of my mom. She was a huge fan. It was part of the background noise of my childhood—the good kind. So there’s no way I can talk about this movie without acknowledging the strong scent of nostalgia hanging over it like incense in a high school auditorium production of Godspell.

Here’s the thing: I’m not religious. Never have been. But this soundtrack—this utterly bananas, wonderfully indulgent ‘70s rock spectacle—somehow drilled straight into my brain and planted roots. The guitars, the orchestrations, the barely-contained madness of it all. It was always less about Jesus and more about the vibe.

Jewison’s film adaptation gets that. It leans hard into that vibe. And I love it for that. Filmed in the Israeli desert, using ancient ruins as a stage and framing it all like some post-hippie, anti-pageant theater camp road trip, this is a film that feels less like a religious experience and more like an acid trip someone decided to stage for an audience of disaffected theology majors. That’s a compliment.

The conceit is brilliant in its weirdness: a busload of actors arrives at an old fortress, disembark, and begin performing the musical as the camera rolls. There’s no attempt to hide the seams—modern clothes, microphones, machine guns, tanks. If there were any fourth walls, they’ve long since crumbled. It’s that self-awareness—combined with the film’s utter commitment to its tone—that makes Superstar work better than it should.

And what a tone it is.

Carl Anderson’s Judas is the heart of the thing. Charismatic, anguished, furious—he dances, he broods, he belts “Heaven on Their Minds” like he’s trying to warn the audience and himself. Ted Neeley’s Jesus is… well, ethereal. Sometimes vacant. But when he opens up in “Gethsemane,” it’s raw and unfiltered, one of the most effective rock ballads of spiritual burnout ever captured on film. Yvonne Elliman’s Mary Magdalene is lovely, if underused—her “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” has aged better than most love songs from that era.

There’s also something oddly delightful about watching professional dancers leap around on ancient stone walls while wearing tie-dye and platform sandals. The choreography is peak 1970s—equal parts earnest and awkward. I love it. I genuinely love the parade of talent on the rocks, spinning and singing in what must’ve been blistering heat, all in the name of this lo-fi passion play with a Marshall stack.

But here’s the thing I can’t get past—and it’s not really a problem with the film so much as with the musical itself: Act II is a structural disaster.

The first half of Jesus Christ Superstar moves. It builds tension. It crackles with energy and conflict. Judas’s arc, Jesus’s rising notoriety, the uneasy swell of rebellion—it’s there. But after Herod’s Song (which is a glitter-drenched fever dream and arguably the highlight of the entire movie), the wheels come off. The pacing crumbles. The emotional momentum gets weirdly slack. There are songs, yes, but they’re more like prolonged sighs than dramatic turns. It’s like Webber and Rice just ran out of steam but didn’t know how to end things gracefully.

So we get the crucifixion, of course. And it’s fine. But the juice is gone. Judas’s return in the title number is a jolt of energy, sure, but it’s too little, too late. That second act just doesn’t earn the pathos it thinks it does.

Still, even with its structural problems, the film manages to land as something unique and oddly timeless. It’s hard to imagine a major studio signing off on something this odd today—certainly not something that opens with a group of actors unloading a bus in the desert and ends with the camera lingering on a crucifix silhouetted against a sunset.

And maybe that’s the point. This isn’t a literal telling of the Gospel. It’s a cultural relic, filtered through the haze of 1970s counterculture, rock and roll, and performative protest. It’s not about belief. It’s about expression. It’s about wrestling with faith in a language that sounds like an electric guitar melting down in the middle of a sermon.

I love it. Warts and all. It’s flawed, messy, and totally unhinged—but it’s also one of the most honest pieces of musical cinema from its era. A time capsule. A fever dream. A nostalgia hit with a killer soundtrack.

And honestly? That’s more than enough.

Much like its protagonist, The Last Man on Earth finds itself alone in cinematic history: too ahead of its time to be appreciated in its day, too primitive to fully satisfy modern audiences. It’s the awkward middle child of horror cinema, if that middle child also happened to invent an entire genre while no one was paying attention.

Vincent Price delivers what might be his most un-Vincent Price performance as Dr. Robert Morgan, the titular last man standing after a pandemic turns humanity into a community of bloodthirsty not-zombies (but let’s be honest, they’re zombies). Gone is the theatrical arch-villain we know and love, replaced by a man whose daily routine involves coffee, vampire staking, and existential despair – not necessarily in that order. It’s like watching Martha Stewart’s dystopian morning routine: “First, sharpen your stakes using a tidy lathe… it’s a good thing.”

Price’s restraint here is pretty impressive. Rather than chewing scenery, he meticulously assembles garlic wreaths and disposes of corpses with the emotional detachment of a guy sorting recycling. His monotone voiceover doesn’t convey horror so much as bone-weariness – less “The horror! The horror!” and more “Ugh, more vampires on the lawn. Did I pay the cable?” For the record, I hate the voice over. The movie would be better without it. Voice over… good grief, what a terrible instinct it is.

The Italian-American hybrid production creates an uncanny-valley version of America, as empty Roman streets stand in for a nameless U.S. city. It’s eerie, not because it’s trying to be, but because it fails to fully translate — and in doing so, it becomes the perfect metaphor. These people aren’t quite American. These creatures aren’t quite human. The film isn’t quite horror, sci-fi, or art-house. But it’s trying.

Where The Last Man on Earth stumbles is in narrative economy and philosophical depth. At a brisk 86 minutes, the film feels like it’s rushing through what should be a slow-burning character study. We’re dropped into a world already stripped bare, with Morgan already a fully formed scientist. In the source novel (I Am Legend), Morgan was just a guy — an average Joe who had to teach himself biology, virology, and survival. That slow, desperate learning curve made him us. Here, he’s already Dr. Morgan, scientific savior, ready to defend himself with microscopes and monologues. The film sacrifices a richer emotional and intellectual arc for efficiency.

The third act especially feels like the filmmakers suddenly remembered they had a plane to catch. What should be a devastating realization — that Morgan is the monster now — lands with the impact of a vampire tripping over a garlic clove. “I am legend,” he proclaims, but the story doesn’t give him the interior life or dramatic runway to make that moment land. And yet, there’s enough thematic residue for that line to linger. That’s not saying much.

Still, I think the film deserves its cult status. It’s the patient zero of the zombie apocalypse genre. Before Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, before 28 Days Later, before The Walking Dead, before The Last of Us, there was this: one man, one lathe, and a world full of creatures banging at the windows and breaking mirrors. The black-and-white cinematography creates moments of haunting stillness — especially the wide, desolate city shots. The image of Price’s solitary figure in a world that no longer has room for him is an early prototype of the modern post-apocalyptic image vocabulary.

And the ending — clumsy as it may be — contains the film’s most enduring philosophical idea: that survival is not the same as humanity, and adaptation, not resistance, is the key to evolution. Morgan’s downfall isn’t that he failed to kill enough monsters. It’s that he failed to recognize the people they were becoming. His science, like Betamax, may have been superior. But the world moved on to VHS.

There’s a fascinating moral sleight of hand here: the hero is the villain. The last man is the boogeyman. In the ruins of civilization, righteousness and monstrosity are often the same shape — just viewed from opposite ends of the microscope.

For Vincent Price completists, pandemic-fiction enthusiasts, and students of horror evolution, this is essential viewing. For everyone else, it’s a historically rich footnote worth a watch — if not quite worth a spot on the top shelf. Even the last man on earth deserves company — specifically the company of better pacing and a third act that doesn’t feel like it’s being chased by creditors.

I watched The Big Doll House not long after Women in Cages, and I don’t recommend that sequence unless you’re up for some healthy cinematic whiplash. Women in Cages is the kind of film that seems determined to grind you down alongside its characters—humorless, joyless, and shot through with a cruelty that leaves me not a little numb. The Big Doll House, somehow, doesn’t feel like that at all. It’s still got the sweat, the steel bars, and the sadism—but it moves with a sort of looseness, almost a wink. It knows what it is, and it isn’t sorry.

That clarity comes from Jack Hill. He’s not fighting the genre. He knows exactly what Corman needs him to deliver (bare skin, brutal guards, a big finish), and he delivers it. But he also finds space between the tropes to inject something more kinetic and aware. The camera is no-frills, stripped to the bone. You can practically hear someone off-screen telling them they have ten minutes before losing the light. There’s no indulgence here. Just quick setups, fast reversals, and compositions that are clean enough to do the job and rough enough to remind you they didn’t have the budget to care.

And yet—it works. The speed adds energy. The rawness adds grit. You get the sense the crew made this thing with sweat and tape and a slightly panicked sense of how fast this shoot had to go. That urgency bleeds into the movie in the best way.

Sid Haig plays Harry, a fruit vendor with a permanently sticky shirt and a face full of confusion, dragging his buddy Fred (Jerry Franks) into trouble they never fully understand. In a film about women resisting confinement, these two schlubby dudes are a perfect inversion: passive, aimless, and easily outmaneuvered. Haig, always a little feral around the edges, leans into the comic low status. It’s not just that they’re supporting characters—it’s that they’re at the mercy of the story in a way women in this genre rarely get to be. That reversal is subtle, but it registers. The prisoners have the power here, even if it’s temporary and hard-won.

This isn’t a Pam Grier movie, not yet, but you can feel the shift coming. She radiates control. Even in a secondary role, she’s magnetic—casual, confident, and entirely capable of stealing a scene without overselling it. But The Big Doll House isn’t built just around her. In fact, it’s not really built around anyone. It opens like a solo vehicle for Judy Brown’s Collier, the standard new fish in a sea of locked-up trouble. But that center doesn’t hold. Quickly, quietly, the film reveals itself as an ensemble story. These women—tough, ridiculous, bruised, defiant—start off clashing, then gradually align around a shared escape. They’re not heroes, exactly. But they’re in it together. That shift from individual arcs to collective action.

The plan works, mostly. The guards are overthrown, the truck rolls out, the sun’s up, and freedom is—well, not quite. Collier gets casually scooped up by a cop and tossed back toward her cell, muttering a punchline that lands like the last beat of a sitcom. It’s ridiculous. Maybe too ridiculous. But I laughed. And then I realized I didn’t feel cheated by it. I felt like the movie had pulled off a magic trick: getting me to care just enough, but not too much. It maintains the genre’s tension while releasing you with a grin. That takes control.

The Big Doll House doesn’t reinvent anything. It just does what it does better than a few others. It’s fast, cheap, dirty—and smart enough to know when to hit the gas and when to lean back.

In the world of cinematic prequels, there’s a fragile détente—an uneasy truce—between the impulse to explain and the wisdom to leave well enough alone. Hannibal Rising (2007), directed by Peter Webber, doesn’t just upset that truce—it storms the borders, topples the regime, and rewrites the entire constitution of what made Hannibal Lecter terrifying in the first place.

The film insists on explaining the psychology of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the cultured, cannibalistic antihero who once chilled us precisely because we didn’t know what made him tick. We didn’t need to. That was the point. Here, in an excruciatingly literal journey into his tragic childhood in war-torn Lithuania, we are shown—laboriously, dutifully—how the monster was made. Trauma. Revenge. A dead sister. A lot of brooding. By the time Lecter starts slicing people open, it’s less terrifying and more, well… inevitable. Tragic. Predictable. Boring.

Because when you explain a mystery, you kill it.

What once made Lecter so compelling was the sense that he existed outside the usual moral and psychological frameworks. He was unknowable. Alien. A man who could quote Marcus Aurelius while disemboweling you with perfect table manners. Hannibal Rising drags him back down to earth and says, “Actually, it’s all because of childhood trauma!” And just like that, the character loses his power.

Oh, and hey! Remember Lecter’s muzzle? It’s back and giving full Samurai!

What better way to convey deep psychological trauma than with a random samurai mask burdened with all the weight of a Halloween prop? It’s introduced with the kind of reverence usually reserved for religious relics, but it’s mostly shoehorned into the story to remind you that this is a Hannibal Lecter movie, in case the brooding and butchery weren’t enough. It doesn’t symbolize anything. It doesn’t mean anything. It is fetishized, lingered on, treated as if it holds some deep, poetic meaning.

It’s a prop with a god complex.

In all fairness, Thomas Harris wrote both the novel and screenplay for this film. But even that comes with a caveat. It’s been widely reported that Harris was pressured into writing the backstory after producer Dino De Laurentiis threatened to move forward without him. And it shows. The film reads like something written with a contractual sigh.

Gaspard Ulliel, playing young Hannibal, gives a performance that feels like a slow-motion impersonation of Anthony Hopkins: cold, calculated, occasionally smirking—but none of the charisma or terrifying unpredictability. The supporting cast, including Gong Li and Rhys Ifans, do what they can with what little they’re given, but they’re orbiting a black hole of purpose. The film lurches from one revenge killing to the next, each more violent than the last, as if gore will somehow fill the psychological void.

But gore is not depth. And trauma is not destiny. Not every villain needs a childhood. Hannibal Rising has a maddening conviction that if we just see enough flashbacks, we’ll understand evil. We won’t. That’s why the doctor scared us in the first place.

In the end, Hannibal Rising is a cautionary tale—though not in the way it intends. In the coursework of Hannibal Lecter, it’s a guest lecture on how to ruin a great character by explaining away too much. It’s a checklist of overused origin tropes… a story that demystifies a cultural icon in the name of faux psychological insight… and most of all, it’s just not very good.