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.

Women in Cages is a movie that dares to ask the question: What if we took all the worst parts of human suffering and made them aggressively boring?

This 1971 women-in-prison flick is part of the glorious cesspool of exploitation films that Roger Corman churned out on his mission to screw with the censors. It was filmed in the Philippines—because nothing says “authentic storytelling” like making a movie about American women suffering in a Spanish-speaking prison system they don’t understand, while also making sure the real exploitation happens behind the camera. And yet, somehow, despite all the jungle chases, torture chambers, and lesbian sadist wardens, the most painful part of this movie is watching it.

The story follows Carol “Jeff” Jeffries, a woman so naïve that she makes a Disney princess look like a hardened criminal. She’s dating Rudy, a man whose entire personality screams “I am definitely a drug dealer,” and yet she’s utterly shocked when he frames her for drug trafficking. Cue the immediate sentencing—because in this universe, the judicial system moves at Marvel Cinematic Universe speed—and Jeff is shipped off to Carcel del Infierno, which, in case you don’t speak Spanish, literally translates to Hell Prison. Subtle.

Inside, she meets her new cellmates: Stoke, a heroin addict whose character arc is just… more heroin; Sandy, a woman who killed her abusive husband, and yet somehow has less personality than the prison walls; and Theresa, Alabama’s girlfriend, because of course the sadistic warden has a girlfriend played by an actress they were too cheap to credit. And speaking of the warden—enter Pam Grier as Alabama, a whip-wielding, torture-happy prison matron with a real talent for making every scene both deeply uncomfortable and mildly hilarious. Naturally, there’s escape planning, because of course there is. It goes about as well as you’d expect from a group of people who can’t figure out how to avoid getting stabbed in their sleep.

Let’s be clear: nobody was winning an Oscar for this. Jennifer Gan as Jeff is a main character with the screen presence of paint that is deeply confused about why it’s drying. Roberta Collins as Stoke is the only one who seems to be having any fun. Pam Grier, on the other hand, is the only person who understood the assignment. She plays an absolute monster of a warden, delivering every sadistic line with the kind of energy that says, “I know this movie is trash, but I am here to collect a paycheck and steal every goddamned scene.”

If you really squint, Women in Cages wants to have themes. It flirts with the idea that women are trapped not just physically, but emotionally, societally, and, most importantly, in this movie. It toys with the notion of power and corruption, showing a prison where the guards are cruel, the system is broken, and yet somehow the most unrealistic part is that Jeff thought her drug dealer boyfriend wasn’t a criminal. And of course, it dabbles in sexual exploitation, trying so hard to be edgy but mostly feeling like it was written by a 13-year-old boy who just discovered what the word lesbian means. At the end of the day, this movie isn’t making much of a statement.

Behind the scenes, things aren’t much better. The film was shot in the Philippines because cheap labor and questionable ethics! It was produced by Roger Corman, a man who has never met an exploitation film he didn’t want to bankroll. It was directed by Gerardo de Leon, who, according to reports, didn’t much care for working on this movie. Perhaps most tellingly, Quentin Tarantino has praised the film. Which might be telling, but Quentin Tarantino has made this sort of movie better than this movie actually is.

SPOILER: Does anyone escape? Nope! Instead, we get what Tarantino called a final shot of “devastating despair.” And sure, I see. But also? The real devastating despair is realizing you just sat through this entire movie and will never get that time back.

One star. It’s for Pam Grier, and also for the fact that the movie ended. Women in Cages is a film that proves you can have torture, betrayal, and jungle warfare, and still somehow be largely unwatchable.

Mank is a dazzlingly meticulous deep dive into the origins of Citizen Kane. It is something of a monument to the creative process. In fact, there’s a moment in which our protagonist, Herman Mankiewicz, is told that he is simply “a writer.” The line is meant as a toss-off, a reminder of his inconsequential place in Hollywood’s grand hierarchy. And yet, what Mank suggests—what it insists upon—is that the writer is everything.

David Fincher’s film is a story about authorship: who tells the stories, who controls the narrative, and, most importantly, who gets the credit. Told in a dazzling black-and-white palette that evokes the era of old Hollywood, Mank follows the bedridden, alcoholic, and razor-sharp Mankiewicz (played with staggering depth by Gary Oldman) as he races to complete the first draft of Citizen Kane for Orson Welles. Flashbacks transport us to 1930s Hollywood, where Mank’s drunken wit makes him both indispensable and disposable in the studio system. His friendships—with media mogul William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), and the various power players of the industry—became the raw material from which he shapes what would become one of the highest-regarded films of all time. (I haven’t actually written my review of Citizen Kane as it’s been quite a while since I last watched it. But I think I might be one of those rare breed who prefers Mank. Controversial, I’m aware.)

Fincher, working from a script written by his late father, Jack Fincher, presents Mank as not just a story of artistic creation but of political and personal reckoning. The film weaves Mankiewicz’s disillusionment with Hearst and the Hollywood machine into the broader political landscape of the time, particularly the 1934 California gubernatorial race, in which socialist author Upton Sinclair ran against Republican incumbent Frank Merriam. The film suggests that Mank’s disgust at the film industry’s role in manufacturing propaganda to destroy Sinclair’s campaign was the true catalyst for his damning portrayal of Hearst in Citizen Kane.

This is where Mank takes creative liberties. Historians have pointed out that there is little evidence to suggest that Mankiewicz was deeply invested in Sinclair’s campaign or that he had any hand in the infamous fake newsreels designed to sabotage Sinclair’s candidacy. The character of Shelly Metcalf, the guilt-ridden director who kills himself over his role in making the propaganda films, is fictional. But Fincher is not interested in strict historical accuracy; he is interested in myth-making, in the ways people justify their own creative choices, and in how the wounds of history shape the stories we tell today.

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, Mank is a marvel. Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt crafts a world that feels pulled straight from a nitrate print, complete with reel-change markers, deep-focus compositions, and sound design that mimics the acoustics of 1940s Hollywood films. The film is shot in luscious black-and-white, using RED digital cameras with a custom monochrome sensor to achieve a period-appropriate look. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, eschewing their usual electronic soundscapes, is a hauntingly beautiful homage to orchestral compositions of the time.

The performances are uniformly excellent. Oldman, as Mank, is a whirlwind—charming, self-destructive, brilliant, and infuriating in equal measure. Amanda Seyfried’s Marion Davies is delightful, imbuing the character with warmth, intelligence, and a tragic awareness of her place in Hearst’s world. Charles Dance’s Hearst is a quiet, looming presence… and a dick.

Mank also reignites one of Hollywood’s longest-running debates: Who really wrote Citizen Kane? The film takes a stance that aligns with Pauline Kael’s 1971 essay Raising Kane, which argued that Mankiewicz was the true author of the screenplay and that Orson Welles merely put his name on it. This argument has been widely discredited, with scholars confirming that Welles played a significant role in shaping the final script. Yet Mank portrays Welles (Tom Burke) as a distant auteur and an opportunist who swoops in at the last moment to claim credit.

It is tempting to read Mank as Fincher’s own statement on the nature of authorship. After all, this was a project written by his father, a passion project that Fincher had been waiting decades to make. The film’s final act, in which Mankiewicz battles to have his name on the script, feels like a plea for recognition—not just for Mank, but for all the unsung writers who have shaped Hollywood’s greatest works without the glory.

Mank is dense, layered, and insider-y. It assumes a level of familiarity with old Hollywood, with Citizen Kane, with the history of the studio system. But it is, at the same time, a rich, intoxicating, and deeply rewarding watch. Fincher has made a film about the power of storytelling—who owns a story, who gets to tell it, and who history remembers. In doing so, he has crafted a film worthy of its subject: a sharp, complex, and exquisitely crafted meditation on genius, power, and the cost of speaking truth to both.

There’s tension at the heart of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pete writes, obviously. It’s a machine built on spectacle, on interconnected narratives, on the promise of something bigger always on the horizon. But what happens when that machine starts to feel… well, a little too efficient? A little too predictable? “Captain America: Brave New World,” the latest installment, sits squarely within this tension.

Let’s get this out of the way: I enjoyed it. There’s an epic satisfaction in seeing the threads of the Hulk universe woven back into the larger tapestry of the MCU. And Anthony Mackie? He embodies Sam Wilson with a strength and a humanity that makes you root for him, even when the plot contortions are strained. I genuinely hope this Captain America gets the runway he deserves, that he’s given the space to become a substantial figure in the new Avengers lineup. He has the potential to bring a much-needed dose of heart and perspective to a team often defined by raw power.

“Brave New World” wasn’t quite the Captain America film I expected. Instead, it felt like a Harrison Ford movie that happened to have Captain America in it. Ford brings a gravitas, a world-weariness, to Thaddeus Ross that elevates the character beyond a simple antagonist. It’s a performance that hints at the complexities and compromises inherent in leadership, even – perhaps especially – at the highest levels. The film, as a result, is something of a political thriller, even if it falls far from the previous highs in the franchise.

That’s where the film stumbles. We’ve seen the heights this franchise can reach. The Winter Soldier redefined the superhero genre with its sharp, paranoid energy. Civil War wrestled with complex moral questions and delivered action sequences that were both thrilling and character-driven. Brave New World, while aspirational, doesn’t quite punch in the same class. The filmmaking feels… clumsier. Disjointed. Disorganized. The pieces are all there, but the glue just isn’t quite strong enough to hold it all together. The action, while competent, lacks the innovative spark that made previous Captain America films so memorable. This film is a fine entry into the MCU, but it simply doesn’t connect emotionally in the way its predecessors did.

One of the more compelling aspects of the film is the subtle, yet persistent, tension surrounding Sam Wilson’s choice not to take the super-soldier serum. It’s a question that hangs in the air as an undercurrent to the main narrative. Is he enough? Can a man without enhanced strength and speed stand shoulder-to-shoulder with gods and monsters? The film doesn’t offer easy answers, and that’s precisely what makes it interesting. It forces us to confront the idea that heroism isn’t just about physical prowess, but about the strength of one’s convictions, the unwavering commitment to doing what’s right, even when it’s difficult. Sam’s humanity, his vulnerability, becomes his superpower.

The film also boasts a strong villainous presence in Tim Blake Nelson’s return as The Leader. It was fantastic to see him back, finally given the chance to explore the character’s potential after all these years. However, I couldn’t help but feel he was ultimately underutilized. The same could be said, even more emphatically, for Giancarlo Esposito. Here’s an actor with immense screen presence, reduced to what amounts to a utility character. His presence felt symbolic of how much Brave New World is trying to cram into a single film, juggling too many plot threads and character arcs without giving any of them the space they need to truly breathe.

And speaking of characters… Shira Haas as Ruth Bat-Seraph. I find her a bit of a curiosity. The film asks us to believe that this woman, with her slight frame, can credibly embody the ruggedness and ruthlessness of a former Black Widow. I wasn’t entirely sold. It feels like a gamble, a bet that the MCU is making on Haas’s ability to grow into the role, to convince us that she’s more than a cipher. Whether that bet will pay off remains to be seen, but for now, her presence felt more like a question mark than a fully realized character.

So, yeah. Brave New World tries to do too much. It’s a sequel to The Incredible Hulk, a continuation of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a political thriller, and a setup for future Avengers films – all rolled into one 118-minute package. It’s a testament to the talent involved that the film doesn’t completely collapse under its own weight even as you can feel it creak and moan along the way.

The post-credits scene, meant to tantalize and tease what’s to come, was a disappointing retread. A vague warning about threats from other worlds? It’s a trope the MCU has leaned on far too heavily, and here, it felt like a perfunctory nod to the larger narrative, rather than a genuinely exciting glimpse into the future. It left me with more skepticism than anticipation, a feeling that the machine is churning out promises it will not be able to keep.

Ultimately, Captain America: Brave New World is a worthwhile addition to the MCU, but it’s not a game-changer. It’s a solid step forward for Sam Wilson, and a fascinating showcase for Harrison Ford. But it’s also a reminder that even the most successful formulas can start to feel formulaic. The challenge for Marvel, as it moves forward, is to prove that it can still surprise us, that it hasn’t become entirely beholden to its own formula, and that it can still deliver stories that are more than just elaborate advertisements for the next widget on the assembly line. I am ever the optimist.

Sometimes, the most unsettling stories aren’t those that simply scare us, but those that make us interrogate the very nature of what we’re watching. Bigas Luna’s 1987 film, Anguish, does that, burrowing its way into your psyche with a meta-horror narrative that’s as bold as it is bonkers. It’s a commentary on how cinema itself can be a form of hypnosis, a shared delusion we participate in willingly. Dummies.

Anguish presents a film-within-a-film, The Mommy, where a mother (Zelda Rubinstein) uses hypnosis to control her myopic son, John (Michael Lerner), compelling him to commit gruesome murders and collect eyeballs. Up to this point I wondered if I could start watching the movie on 2x. But just as we settle into this thing, Luna jukes. We’re not watching The Mommy; we’re watching an audience watching The Mommy. And within that audience, a man begins to mirror the on-screen violence, turning the theater into a terrifying reflection of the film itself.

Now, I’ll admit, Zelda Rubinstein’s performance didn’t resonate with me, but I understood her casting. She certainly has a unique appeal that adds to the film’s unsettling atmosphere. However, Michael Lerner truly shines as John, capturing a disturbing mix of vulnerability and menace. It’s a testament to his skill that he can elicit both sympathy and revulsion, and still go on to do Barton Fink.

Once the film reveals its layers, I was completely invested. Luna is dissecting the act of watching a horror movie. And he’s doing it in a way I’ve never seen. The film taps into primal fears, not just of violence, but of losing control, of being manipulated, of becoming voyeurs in our own lives. The eyes, so central to the plot, become a symbol of our own gaze, implicating us in the spectacle.

Some of the pacing is uneven, and at times, it feels like Luna is juggling too many ideas at once. But its ambition and originality are undeniable. It’s a film that dares to ask: what happens when the line between reality and fiction blurs? What happens when the monsters on the screen step out of the frame and into our world?

There is a moment in Thunderball—a flash, really—where you can see the franchise slipping just beyond its own grasp. It happens underwater, of course, because everything in Thunderball happens underwater. Sean Connery’s Bond, the embodiment of effortless cool, is flailing slightly, engaged in one of those extended, balletic combat sequences that seem to stretch beyond time itself. The choreography is mesmerizing, but it’s also sluggish, overlong. The pace, the tension, the momentum—all things Goldfinger had done more adeptly a year earlier—are somehow lost in the murky blue.

This is the paradox of Thunderball: a film that is both quintessential Bond and, in some ways, a mark of the franchise’s slow drift into self-parody.

By 1965, Bond was no longer just a film series; it was a phenomenon. Goldfinger had turned 007 into a cultural juggernaut, and Thunderball arrived with the weight of expectation. The budget was massive—larger than the first three films combined. The action was grander, the gadgets more elaborate, the stakes higher. Even the title seemed to promise something explosive, something immense.

And yet, watching it now, Thunderball feels strangely bloated. The plot—SPECTRE’s theft of two nuclear warheads and Bond’s race to recover them—has all the makings of a classic spy thriller. But the film is obsessed with its own spectacle, stretching sequences past their breaking point. The underwater battles, objectively cool—and revolutionary in their day—now feel like beautifully shot exercises in patience.

Connery, to his credit, is still magnetic. This is his fourth outing as Bond, and he wears the role as comfortably as a tailored tuxedo. But there are signs of fatigue. The charm is there, sharp as ever, but the enthusiasm is waning. The film’s indulgences—its languid pacing, its fixation on style over substance—seem to weigh on him.

And then there’s the treatment of women, which even by Bond standards, feels particularly egregious here. The “seduction” of a physiotherapist at a health clinic is not played for romance, or even for the usual winking charm—it’s coercion, full stop. The film is full of these moments, relics of an era that has not aged well.

This is where my personal relationship with Bond films complicates things. I don’t love them. I like them well enough, and I have fond memories of watching them in the theater with my dad, but they haven’t aged well in just about any regard. And in the struggle with this script, I have to admit: I think I prefer the off-brand Bond, Never Say Never Again, to Thunderball.

This is not to say Thunderball is without its joys. It is, after all, a Bond film. There are high points: the thrilling opening sequence, featuring the now-iconic jetpack; the introduction of Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi), a rare Bond villainess who doesn’t fall under 007’s spell; the sheer, lush spectacle of the Bahamas setting.

But it is also a film that is too in love with itself. The underwater battles, so innovative at the time, drag on for so long that they become an endurance test. The final sequence aboard Largo’s yacht, Disco Volante, is chaos, with sped-up film and awkward cuts that feel rushed, mismatched with the deliberate pacing of everything that came before.

If Goldfinger was the moment Bond became Bond, Thunderball was when the formula began calcifying. It is the first Bond film that feels overproduced, overlong, overindulgent. It is, in many ways, a victim of its own success.

And yet, something is fascinating about it. It is a film that sits at the precipice of two eras: the lean, sharp thrillers of early Bond, and the bloated extravaganzas that would define the Roger Moore years. It is Bond at his peak, and Bond just beginning to lose his way.

Would I recommend Thunderball? Of course. It is still a Bond film, still a piece of cinematic history, still a spectacle worth experiencing. But if I had to choose between this and its unofficial remake, Never Say Never Again, I might just opt for the latter. Sometimes, the off-brand version understands the assignment even better than the original.

In 1964, Joan Crawford picked up an axe.

Not metaphorically—though one could argue that every great Hollywood reinvention is its own kind of execution—but literally. There she was, an Academy Award-winning actress, a legend of Old Hollywood glamour, standing in front of William Castle’s B-movie lens, ready to swing.

The result was Strait-Jacket, a film that, at first glance, seems like just another lurid horror flick. A woman with a violent past is released from a psychiatric institution. Murders begin anew. Suspicion swirls. The whole thing has the structure of a classic pulp thriller, the kind of thing you might expect from Robert Bloch, the man who wrote Psycho. But beneath the surface, Strait-Jacket is doing something else—something more subversive, more unsettling. It’s a film about identity, about reinvention, and about whether we can ever truly escape the roles that society—and history—assign to us.

To understand Strait-Jacket, you have to understand Crawford. By 1964, she was no longer the ingenue of Grand Hotel or the wronged housewife of Mildred Pierce. She was something else entirely: an actress who had outlived her own era, a woman who had survived Hollywood’s cruel cycle of discarding its leading ladies. And in Strait-Jacket, she weaponized that history.

Her character, Lucy Harbin, is a woman trying to outrun her past. Twenty years earlier, she murdered her husband and his lover in a fit of rage. Now, she’s released from a psychiatric institution, attempting to reconnect with her daughter, Carol (Diane Baker). But the past doesn’t let go so easily. Carol encourages her mother to reclaim the glamorous image she had at the time of the murders—curling her hair into tight black ringlets, applying the same youthful makeup. It’s an eerie echo of Hollywood’s obsession with forcing women to remain frozen in time.

And then, of course, the killings begin again.

The brilliance of Strait-Jacket isn’t just in its jump scares or its Grand Guignol excess (though the flying prosthetic heads certainly add to the experience). It’s in the way it plays with perception. At first, it seems obvious: Lucy, fragile and unstable, must be the one responsible for the new wave of murders. But the film slowly reveals a darker truth—Carol, the devoted daughter, has been orchestrating everything.

This is where Strait-Jacket becomes a study in psychological manipulation. Carol makes her doubt her own sanity. She isolates her, plants evidence, subtly reinforces the idea that Lucy is losing her grip on reality. Today, we’d call this gaslighting. In 1964, it was simply an exercise in power.

Watching Strait-Jacket now, in an era where plot twists are expected, the film’s final revelation still holds up. Maybe it’s because the groundwork is laid so carefully—Carol’s control over her mother is there from the beginning, but we don’t want to see it. Maybe it’s because of Crawford’s performance, which walks the tightrope between melodrama and genuine vulnerability. Or maybe it’s because the film taps into the fear that the people we love might not be who they claim to be.

Strait-Jacket is not a perfect movie. It leans into its B-movie roots, reveling in its campy excesses. That’s part of its charm. It understands the spectacle of horror, the way fear is as much about performance as it is about violence. At its center is Crawford, an actress who knew better than anyone that reinvention is both a necessity and a curse.