Somehow, it’s both a great movie and hard to watch.
Leaving Las Vegas is not the kind of movie you throw on because you want to relax.
It is bleak, uncomfortable, emotionally exhausting, and populated by two people whose lives are already badly damaged when they find each other.
And somehow, it is also tender.
Nicolas Cage plays Ben Sanderson, a screenwriter who has come to Las Vegas to drink himself to death (literally). There he meets Sera, played by Elisabeth Shue. Her life is a mess too, though in a different way, and the two of them form a connection that neither seems to expect.
That sounds like a rough two hours. It is.
Why it works
The movie never pretends that Ben and Sera can fix each other. Ben isn’t suddenly going to stop drinking because he met the right person, and Sera has problems that a new relationship won’t solve either.
What they can do is give each other a little comfort. That may not sound like much, but it’s what makes the movie work.
Cage won the Academy Award for this role, and absolutely deserved it. Most actors are terrible at playing drunk. Cage is brilliant at it. He can be funny and charming one moment, then make you remember exactly where Ben is headed the next.
Shue is just as good. I’m a big fan of Elisabeth Shue and, without her, this could have become two hours of watching Nicolas Cage fall apart.
Should you watch it?
Yes, if you’re up for something heavy. I wouldn’t recommend putting it on after a long day when all you want is to unwind. It’s painful to watch, and it doesn’t let you off easy.
Mystery, Alaska has almost everything you want from a sports movie.
An underdog team. A tiny town with an outsized sense of pride. Personal grudges. Family problems. A big game nobody expects them to win.
It’s all there.
Oh yeah, and hockey.
The premise is wonderfully simple: the amateur hockey players of Mystery, Alaska suddenly get the chance to play an exhibition game against the New York Rangers.
On their own ice.
It sounds ridiculous, but the movie takes the idea seriously enough that you don’t even think about it.
Pre-Gladiator Russell Crowe leads a strong ensemble cast, with Burt Reynolds, Hank Azaria and Mary McCormack giving the town enough personality that the movie feels bigger than the game itself.
The hockey matters, but Mystery, Alaska is really about a community being handed one improbable moment.
It’s funny without being a comedy, a little sentimental, and not entirely predictable.
It’s not for everyone, but if you love hockey, Russell Crowe, Burt Reynolds or sports movies in general... this one is for you.
A small Alaskan town, a hockey team with something to prove, and a surprisingly warm sports movie that deserved a much bigger audience.
Critics aren’t useless. No, seriously.
But they watch movies differently than most people do.
If you watch several movies for a living, predictable plots become irritating, sentimentality can get punished, and a movie that simply delivers two entertaining hours may not seem particularly impressive when you’ve watched three other variations of it that month.
The rest of us have a very simple, but different question:
Was it good?
More specifically: did we enjoy it, would we recommend it, and would we watch it again?
Sometimes the answers to those questions look very different from the reviews.
Here are a few movies where I think the critics missed what mattered.
Last Action Hero (1993)
I remember when this movie came out, the press savaged it. It was so pervasive, I almost believed it… until I saw it.
Genuinely one of my favorite Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
Here’s the plot: A young movie fan gets pulled into the world of his favorite fictional cop, Jack Slater, where the kid understands the rules better than the people living by them.
Of course the bad guy is hiding there. Of course that explosion didn’t kill anybody important. Has nobody in this movie seen a movie?
Schwarzenegger is a big part of why it works. He’s willing to make fun of the screen persona that made him famous while still delivering the action you came for. And Charles Dance is terrific as the villain.
Some of the jokes land better than others, and it could stand to be shorter. But there’s considerably more imagination here than in another movie where Arnold simply shoots his way through a warehouse.
Although, to be fair, I’d watch that too.
The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)
Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas hunting man-eating lions… do I need to say more?
Kilmer plays an engineer overseeing a railway bridge in East Africa when two lions begin killing the workers. Douglas arrives as the hunter brought in to help. Finishing the bridge becomes somewhat less important than surviving the night.
The movie builds a nasty sense of vulnerability. There’s tall grass everywhere, darkness is coming, and being inside something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re safe.
The setting, the cast, and the suspense make this an easy recommendation from me.
Just perhaps not the night before a camping trip.
The Guardian (2006)
I think the Tomatometer is broken. The Guardian has a 37%.
On what planet does that make sense? Kids making movies in high school can get 37%.
Thankfully, the audience gets it: 80% with more than 250,000 ratings.
Kevin Costner plays a veteran Coast Guard rescue swimmer, while Ashton Kutcher is the cocky young recruit who thinks talent is enough. You know where this is going.
Doesn’t matter.
Costner is perfect for this kind of role, Kutcher is better than I expected, and the training gives their relationship enough time to matter once the rescues start. There’s also something compelling about watching people whose job it is to jump into conditions everyone else is desperately trying to escape.
Veteran and rookie. Check. Huge waves. Check. Cocky young guy gets humbled. Check.
What more do you want?
For Love of the Game (1999)
Apparently I have two Kevin Costner movies to defend. Fine with me.
Costner plays Billy Chapel, an aging Detroit Tigers pitcher looking back on his career and his relationship with Jane, played by Kelly Preston, while pitching against the Yankees.
The baseball and the love story split the movie. If you only care about one, the other may test your patience.
But together they give Billy something more interesting to deal with than the next batter.
What does his life look like when baseball is over?
That’s a good subject for a sports movie, especially one about a guy who’s been doing this long enough to know the end is coming.
And to be fair, that 47% Tomatometer score isn’t completely crazy. I’d probably put this one in the Watch If Free category.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. I did.
I like a sports movie that understands there’s a life waiting outside the stadium.
Even if the athlete hasn’t quite figured out what to do with it.
Country Strong (2010)
Country Strong is a messy movie about people making a mess of their lives.
That's it.
Maybe critics don’t like that. That might help explain the 23% Tomatometer score.
To be fair, some of that mess belongs to the screenplay, so I’m not going to pretend every criticism is unfair.
Gwyneth Paltrow plays Kelly Canter, a country star trying to make a comeback after rehab. Tim McGraw is her husband and manager, while Garrett Hedlund and Leighton Meester play younger performers joining the tour.
There’s ambition, drinking, romance, and a collection of decisions you’d probably advise everyone involved not to make.
But the music gives you a reason to care about these people as performers, even when you’re frustrated with them as people. Hedlund is a particular draw as Beau, and his scenes with Meester give the movie some needed warmth.
Don’t expect a cheerful concert movie. It gets heavy.
Still, the songs, the performances, and the relationships all worked.
I enjoyed it, flaws included.
A bad review isn’t a veto
I’m not arguing that these five movies are flawless. But I am recommending them.
Some are Watch If Free. Others are Worth Renting. Last Action Hero probably gets pretty close to Must Watch territory.
There are fair criticisms of every one, and some will bother you more than they bother me.
Big Tomato has had its say, but I say these are worth a look.
Critics have a different job than the rest of us. Sometimes they dismiss exactly the things that make a movie fun, memorable, and worth watching again twenty years later.
I don’t generally like serial-killer movies. I just don’t usually enjoy spending two hours inside that particular kind of story.
Switchback is different. It doesn’t feel like a typical serial-killer movie.
It feels more like a thriller that happens to have a serial killer in it.
And that is a big part of why I like it.
Dennis Quaid plays Frank LaCrosse, an FBI agent whose pursuit of the killer has become deeply personal. His investigation takes him through small towns and cold, isolated stretches of the American West.
Meanwhile, Danny Glover plays Bob Goodall, a railroad worker who crosses paths with a young drifter played by Jared Leto.
Goodall is friendly, talkative, funny, and yet slightly odd. Glover plays him with exactly the kind of warmth that makes you want to trust him — while giving you just enough reason not to.
The movie spends a lot of time on highways, trains, diners, snowy landscapes, and remote towns. That setting matters.
Instead of constantly rushing from murder to clue to confrontation, the movie has room to breathe. Characters talk. Relationships develop.
You are watching these people move toward each other without always knowing exactly what is going to happen when they finally collide.
That makes Switchback feel much more human than most movies in this genre.
Danny Glover is excellent. Dennis Quaid gives the movie weight. The locations are terrific. And the suspense builds gradually instead of being manufactured every five minutes.
There are dozens of better-known serial-killer movies from the 1990s.
I usually avoid serial-killer movies. Switchback is the exception — a tense, atmospheric ’90s thriller with a great Danny Glover performance and far more personality than most movies in the genre.
Box office results and the quality of a movie are not the same thing.
Sometimes the marketing was lousy. Or maybe a bigger, more anticipated movie ate its lunch. Maybe audiences just didn’t show up.
Whatever the reason, these three deserved better:
1. Warrior (2011)
Warrior is one of those movies where the setup sounds more predictable than the movie actually feels.
Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton play estranged brothers who both end up entering the same mixed martial arts tournament. Nick Nolte plays their father, a recovering alcoholic who has done enough damage to give everybody involved a reason to be angry.
So yes, you can probably see where this is heading. It doesn’t matter.
The fighting works, but the movie is really about everything these guys have been carrying around for years. Resentment. Guilt. Family. Pride. All the stuff nobody has managed to deal with.
And Nolte is terrific.
By the time the brothers finally end up where you know they’re going to end up, the movie has earned it.
The strange part is that almost nobody showed up. Warrior made roughly what it cost to produce, which is not remotely enough once marketing and theater splits are involved.
Audiences who actually watched it loved. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 92% from viewers.
2. Gattaca (1997)
Far too many people have never seen Gattaca — or even heard of it.
That’s an issue.
Ethan Hawke plays Vincent, a man born naturally in a future where genetic engineering has created a society increasingly divided between people with desirable DNA and everyone else.
Vincent wants to go to space.
His genetics disagree.
That’s basically the movie, although there’s a lot more going on around it, including Jude Law giving one of his best performances and a murder investigation that adds just enough tension without taking over the story.
This is science fiction without constantly reminding you that it’s science fiction. No giant battles. No endless effects. Just a very good idea, a very good cast, and a story about refusing to let somebody else decide what you’re capable of.
It bombed anyway.
The audience score is now 87% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Apparently people just needed a little more time.
3. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
This one still feels almost impossible to me.
One of my favorite movies ever made — maybe my favorite — was a box-office bomb. And it’s a movie that takes place almost entirely inside a prison.
That sounds absurd, but The Shawshank Redemption has become one of the most beloved movies ever made. It has spent years near or at the top of IMDb’s rankings and routinely shows up on greatest-movies-ever lists.
I understand why.
Yes, it’s bleak. There’s brutality, corruption and years of a man’s life disappearing behind prison walls. But what people love about the movie is the friendship, the hope, and Andy’s refusal to let the place define him.
And the ending?
Best movie ending I’ve ever seen.
Audiences eventually caught up. Rotten Tomatoes now has it at an almost unheard-of 98% from viewers, with more than 250,000 ratings.
Not bad for a prison movie nobody showed up for.
There is a useful lesson here.
Opening weekend tells you how successfully a movie was sold.
It does not necessarily tell you how good the movie is.
Sometimes audiences figure that part out years later.
A bad box-office run doesn’t always mean a bad movie. Some excellent films found their audience only after theaters had already given up on them.
Michael Keaton has had one of the strangest and most interesting careers in Hollywood.
He was Batman before superhero movies became a factory. He was Beetlejuice. He disappeared for stretches, came back, and eventually reminded everyone just how good he was.
Keaton plays Bob Jones, a successful man who learns he has terminal cancer just as his wife is expecting their first child. Knowing he may never get the chance to know his son, he begins recording videos so the child can someday know who his father was.
That premise could have become manipulative very quickly.
It didn’t.
Instead, My Life works because Keaton keeps Bob incredibly human. He is scared, angry, funny, stubborn, and not always especially graceful about what is happening to him.
Bob starts looking backward at his family, his choices, the things he has avoided, and the people he has kept at a distance. The recordings begin as a practical project for his unborn son, but they become something more — an attempt to make sense of his own life while there is still time.
And when the movie finally lands emotionally, it does so because you have spent enough time with Bob to feel what he is losing.
My Life is not subtle. It wants something from you. It is designed to hurt.
But it earns that emotion.
For all the larger and more famous movies in Keaton’s career, this may be the one that shows the most of what he can do as an actor.
Michael Keaton has played Batman, Beetlejuice, and plenty of memorable oddballs. But *My Life* may be the most moving performance of his career.
💡
Somehow, it’s both a great movie and hard to watch.
Leaving Las Vegas is not the kind of movie you throw on because you want to relax.
It is bleak, uncomfortable, emotionally exhausting, and populated by two people whose lives are already badly damaged when they find each other.
And somehow, it is also tender.
Nicolas Cage plays Ben Sanderson, a screenwriter who has come to Las Vegas to drink himself to death (literally). There he meets Sera, played by Elisabeth Shue. Her life is a mess too, though in a different way, and the two of them form a connection that neither seems to expect.
That sounds like a rough two hours. It is.
Why it works
The movie never pretends that Ben and Sera can fix each other. Ben isn’t suddenly going to stop drinking because he met the right person, and Sera has problems that a new relationship won’t solve either.
What they can do is give each other a little comfort. That may not sound like much, but it’s what makes the movie work.
Cage won the Academy Award for this role, and absolutely deserved it. Most actors are terrible at playing drunk. Cage is brilliant at it. He can be funny and charming one moment, then make you remember exactly where Ben is headed the next.
Shue is just as good. I’m a big fan of Elisabeth Shue and, without her, this could have become two hours of watching Nicolas Cage fall apart.
Should you watch it?
Yes, if you’re up for something heavy. I wouldn’t recommend putting it on after a long day when all you want is to unwind. It’s painful to watch, and it doesn’t let you off easy.
A devastating, unforgettable drama anchored by one of Nicolas Cage’s best performances — and the kind of great movie you may only want to watch once.
The ’90s gave us plenty of movies everybody still talks about.
These aren’t those.
None of these are obscure exactly, but they’ve slipped far enough out of the conversation that a lot of people either haven’t seen them in years or never got around to them in the first place.
That should probably change.
1. Breakdown (1997)
Kurt Russell’s wife disappears after their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere.
That’s really all you need.
Breakdown is one of those movies that wastes almost no time getting to the problem and then spends the rest of the movie making that problem worse.
Russell plays an ordinary guy who suddenly has to figure out who took his wife, where she went, and why nobody seems particularly interested in helping him.
If you like tight thrillers that don’t need two and a half hours to make their point, this one is absolutely worth going back to.
2. The Negotiator (1998)
Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey spend much of The Negotiator trying to outthink each other.
That’s enough to make the movie work.
Jackson plays a police negotiator who is framed for a crime and takes hostages in an attempt to prove what really happened. Spacey plays the negotiator brought in to talk him out.
So now you have one professional negotiator trying to negotiate with another professional negotiator.
Good setup.
The movie gives both actors plenty of room to work, and the back-and-forth between them is much more interesting than another generic police standoff.
It’s smart, tense and very ’90s in the best way.
3. Executive Decision (1996)
There was a stretch in the ’90s when Hollywood was very good at making movies and Kurt Russell seemed to be in half of them.
He’s already shown up once on this list with Breakdown. Here he is again.
In Executive Decision, Russell leads a team trying to secretly board a hijacked passenger jet in midair before terrorists can use it as a weapon.
Yes, the premise is ridiculous.
And that’s part of the fun.
The movie takes itself seriously enough to create real tension without becoming so serious that you start asking too many questions about how any of this is actually possible.
And it has one of the better early surprises in a ’90s action movie.
If you’ve forgotten this one, it’s worth remembering.
4. October Sky (1999)
This is probably the quietest movie on the list and it may also be the easiest to recommend.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Homer Hickam, a kid growing up in a West Virginia coal town who becomes obsessed with rockets after seeing Sputnik cross the sky.
His father expects him to work in the mine. Homer has other ideas.
Homer wants to build rockets. He fails. A lot. Rockets explode. People doubt him. He keeps going.
That’s the movie.
Chris Cooper is excellent as his father, and the relationship between the two gives the movie most of its weight.
It’s sincere without becoming syrupy.
5. A River Runs Through It (1992)
A River Runs Through It is a movie about family, Montana, fly fishing and the fact that loving somebody doesn’t necessarily mean you can save them.
Brad Pitt and Craig Sheffer play brothers who grow up under a strict but loving father, played by Tom Skerritt.
One brother is steady.
The other is not.
You can probably guess which one Pitt plays.
This is a slower movie than the others on the list, but that’s exactly what it should be. The scenery is beautiful, the performances are strong, and the story has the kind of sadness that sneaks up on you instead of announcing itself.
It’s the sort of movie people remember liking but don’t necessarily think about watching again.
They should.
These five didn’t disappear.
They just got buried under thirty years of newer movies.
Neal McDonough plays Joe Wainright, a retired rodeo star who has absolutely no business climbing back onto a bull.
Which, of course, is exactly what he does.
Joe’s grandson needs help, and the quickest way to get it involves entering a high-stakes bull-riding competition years after Joe walked away from the sport. It’s not exactly a unique setup, but this is one of those movies where familiarity isn’t really a problem.
A family that still has a few things to work through.
And one very bad idea that Joe knows is a bad idea.
But family comes first.
McDonough is the reason it works. He has spent years being the guy you recognize from somewhere, usually playing someone intense, dangerous, unpleasant, or some combination of the three. Here he gets to carry the movie, and he fits the role almost suspiciously well.
Joe is old enough to know exactly what getting back on that bull could cost him.
He does it anyway.
Rotten Tomatoes has it at 69% from critics and 94% from verified audiences, which feels about right for this kind of movie. I’m much closer to the audience on this one.
Neal McDonough plays a retired rodeo star who gets back on the bull for one very good reason: family.
Bob Odenkirk (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Nobody) has somehow become one of the more convincing late-career action stars working today.
Nobody changed the equation, turning Odenkirk getting beaten half to death before methodically destroying everyone around him into a surprisingly legitimate movie genre.
Normal takes that formula and changes it just enough to keep things interesting.
Odenkirk plays Ulysses, an interim sheriff sent to the small Minnesota town of Normal after the previous sheriff dies under unusual circumstances. What initially looks like a sleepy temporary assignment gets considerably less sleepy after a botched bank robbery exposes the fact that basically nothing — and I do mean nothing — about Normal is normal.
That setup is probably all you need to know.
This is one of those movies that benefits from letting the weirdness reveal itself rather than reading a detailed synopsis beforehand. What starts as a slightly off-kilter small-town mystery eventually turns into something much louder, bloodier and more ridiculous.
It also hits the sweet spot in length at about an hour and a half. Normal doesn't try to convince you that any of this is terribly important. It establishes the town, lets you know something isn't right, and then the normal world starts to disintegrate and chaos ensues.
If you're looking for something grounded and plausible, skip Normal. This isn't that movie.
Rotten Tomatoes currently has it at 77% from critics and 76% from verified audiences — which, if nothing else, tells you the critics and the audience are unusually close on this one.
It opened in April, hit streaming in May, and has already largely disappeared from the conversation. That's a shame.
Normal isn't some undiscovered masterpiece. It's compact, violent and funny. It won't be the best movie you'll ever watch, but it'll be far, far from the worst.
Bob Odenkirk heads back into action in Normal, a bloody, funny small-town shoot-'em-up that feels familiar in all the right ways.
There are a lot of television shows where you can explain the premise in about fifteen seconds.
Pluribus is not one of them.
Apple describes the show as “the most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness,” and for once, the marketing line gets pretty close to what makes the show interesting.
Pluribus comes from Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and co-creator of Better Call Saul, and stars Rhea Seehorn as Carol Sturka, a successful romance novelist who isn’t exactly overflowing with joy even before the world changes.
And “changes” is probably underselling it.
An alien species effectively converts humanity, turning virtually everyone into happy, agreeable, cooperative drones — basically happy Borgs, for you Star Trek: The Next Generation fans out there. Everyone except Carol and a handful of others.
If you watched Better Call Saul, you already know Seehorn can carry a scene without doing very much at all. A look. A pause. She can make you feel like there’s an entire argument happening inside her head before she says a word.
That makes Carol perfect for this world, where she spends much of the show surrounded by people who are relentlessly reasonable, cheerful and accommodating while she becomes increasingly irritated by all of them.
And somehow, she’s the one you understand.
That’s where Pluribus gets interesting, because happiness is supposed to be good. People getting along is good. No fighting. No cruelty. No selfishness. Everyone working together. Sounds pretty great.
Except Pluribus keeps asking an uncomfortable question: what if getting all of that required giving up the thing that makes you you?
Now we have a television show.
If you need a major revelation every twelve minutes, Pluribus may drive you nuts. There are stretches where the show is perfectly happy letting Carol wander around, test the boundaries of what has happened and argue with people who refuse to argue back.
I can understand why that won’t work for everyone.
This is a weird show. It takes its time, doesn’t rush to explain itself, and sometimes seems more interested in the idea behind the story than moving the story forward.
But that’s also why it sticks with you.
And if you’re anything like me, it will stick with you long after the episode ends.
Rhea Seehorn stars in Vince Gilligan’s very strange new series about a world where almost everyone becomes happy, agreeable and connected. Which turns out to be much creepier than it sounds.
If you watched Longmire, you’ll recognize the face at the center of Dark Winds.
Mathias.
Yes, the Cheyenne tribal police chief who could make it pretty clear he wasn’t pleased with Walt without raising his voice. The actor behind him, Zahn McClarnon, gets the lead here. And he’s a good reason to watch.
Dark Winds isn’t a Longmire spinoff, though it’s clear there’s a natural audience overlap. It has the open country, complicated loyalties and lawmen dealing with problems that a badge doesn’t necessarily help them solve. But the mood is darker, and the story takes us back to the 1970s.
A familiar face gets his own investigation
McClarnon plays Joe Leaphorn, the head of a Navajo Tribal Police office in the American Southwest. The series opens with a double murder, but investigating the deaths means dealing with more than evidence. There are personal wounds, community ties and federal authorities whose priorities don’t always match his.
Leaphorn is watchful and measured, but you don’t mistake that for having nothing going on underneath. This is a man you believe has spent years listening to people leave out the important part.
Should you watch it?
Don’t go in expecting a fresh case neatly wrapped up every episode like early Longmire. This is a continuing mystery, with room for suspicion to build and for a conversation to become uncomfortable before anyone reaches for a gun.
If you like Western settings, patient crime stories and a lead actor who doesn’t need to shout to hold your attention, this belongs on your list.
Longmire fans have an obvious reason to give it a look. But you don’t need to know Mathias—or Walt—to get into this one.
A moody 1970s crime drama set in Navajo Nation, with great characters, terrific scenery, and a mystery-driven story that feels unlike almost anything else on TV.
Anthony Hopkins plays a New Zealand motorcycle obsessive chasing a land-speed record in Utah. It’s funny, warm, and one of the easiest movies to recommend.
The World’s Fastest Indian features Anthony Hopkins as Burt Munro, a New Zealander who has spent years modifying an old Indian motorcycle in his garage. His goal is simple: get the bike to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and see how fast it can go.
That is basically the whole movie.
Burt is not wealthy, polished, or especially concerned with what other people think. He is obsessive, stubborn, mechanically gifted, and completely convinced that the trip is worth making even when almost everything about it seems impractical.
The movie follows Burt as he travels to the United States, meets a string of strangers, solves problems as they come up, and slowly makes his way toward Bonneville. Much of the pleasure is simply watching him interact with people.
There is very little cynicism in the movie.
That is part of its charm.
The stakes are personal rather than world-changing. Burt is not trying to become famous. He wants to find out what he and his motorcycle are capable of before he runs out of time.
By the time he finally reaches the salt flats, you are completely invested.
💡
An odd little movie about an old man chasing a speed record — and it’s terrific.
Dennis Quaid plays a high-school baseball coach who gets an improbable shot at the major leagues. It’s earnest, straightforward, and exactly the kind of sports movie that works because it never tries too hard.
The Rookie is based on the kind of true story that sounds made for a movie.
Dennis Quaid plays Jim Morris, a high-school science teacher and baseball coach whose own playing career ended years earlier. When his struggling team makes him a deal — if they win the district championship, he has to try out for the major leagues — Morris agrees.
Then the team wins.
That leaves him with a promise to keep and a very unlikely second chance.
Quaid plays Morris with restraint. He is not chasing fame. He is trying to find out whether the opportunity he thought was gone forever might still exist.
The movie is slightly sentimental, but the story stays grounded in family, work, and the reality of starting over when everyone else assumes that part of your life is already finished. Morris does not need to become the best player in the world.
He only needs to prove that he still belongs.
By the end, you're convinced that he does.
💡
A very good sports movie built around an even better true story.
A son somehow talks to his dead father across 30 years through an old ham radio. It sounds gimmicky. Instead, Frequency turns into a smart, emotional thriller that works far better than it should.
Frequency has a clever premise: an old ham radio somehow allows Jim Caviezel, playing John Sullivan, to connect with his father, Frank, played by Dennis Quaid.
The problem is that Frank died 30 years earlier.
Once John realizes what is happening, he does what almost anyone would do: he tries to change the past.
That is where the movie gets interesting.
Frequency starts as a high-concept father-and-son story, but it gradually turns into a murder mystery and thriller. Every change John makes in the past has consequences in the present.
Dennis Quaid is especially good as Frank. He gives the movie warmth and credibility, which matters because the central idea is so improbable. Caviezel plays the more restrained role, but the relationship between the two is what keeps the movie grounded.
The best thing about Frequency is that it never becomes just a time-travel puzzle. I’m not really into those.
Ultimately, it’s about a son getting one impossible chance to talk to his father again.
But it’s not heavily sentimental. Instead, it’s more suspenseful, becoming increasingly tense as the story develops.
If you missed Frequency when it came out, it is exactly the kind of movie worth going back for.
💡
A smart, suspenseful thriller with an unusual premise that completely works.
Michael Caine and Robert Duvall as two eccentric old men raising a neglected kid in rural Texas sounds like it could have been unbearably sentimental. Instead, it’s funny, warm, and genuinely memorable.
Secondhand Lions is about a shy kid getting dumped for the summer with two eccentric great-uncles in rural Texas. One is played by Robert Duvall. The other is Michael Caine. There are stories about lost fortunes, foreign adventures, old enemies, and a very large lion.
That setup sounds dangerously close to something overly cute or boring.
It isn’t either.
Haley Joel Osment plays Walter, a kid who has had very little stability in his life. His two uncles are not exactly natural caregivers. They’re gruff, private, slightly crazy, and completely uninterested in behaving the way adults are supposed to.
The movie gradually reveals more about who these men were, what they believe, and why Walter starts looking up to them. The stories aren’t necessarily true, but that’s beside the point.
Robert Duvall is especially good because he gives the movie its backbone. Michael Caine brings a different kind of warmth, and Osment holds his own between two actors who could easily have overwhelmed the movie.
There’s plenty of sentiment here, but it earns it.
It’s funny, adventurous, sincere, and surprisingly easy to rewatch.
Confession: If Mark Wahlberg is in it, I’m probably going to watch it. So no, I’m not exactly unbiased here.
That said, By Any Means gave me pretty much what I wanted from it. Wahlberg is right in his comfort zone, but he also has a strong partner in Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and the movie is better because of the contrast between the two.
Wahlberg brings that familiar tough-guy energy, while Abdul-Mateen gives the story a different kind of weight. Their dynamic helps keep the movie from feeling like just another straightforward crime thriller.
The movie has a strong setup based on true events, a good sense of tension and enough going on to keep it from feeling flat. The story moves, the performances work and I was never sitting there wondering when it was going to get interesting.
Wahlberg is still a big part of why it worked for me. He has a very specific screen presence, and By Any Means leans into it instead of fighting it. There’s a familiarity to watching him in this kind of role, but for me, that’s part of the appeal.
At the same time, Abdul-Mateen keeps the movie from becoming too Wahlberg-y. The two of them give the story enough personality to carry the heavier material without making the whole thing feel overly serious.
It’s solid, entertaining and very easy to watch. Maybe I was always going to be an easy sell with Wahlberg involved, but By Any Means still gets the job done.
Inspired by true events, *By Any Means* pairs Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in an unlikely alliance shaped by racism, violence and a turbulent moment in 1960s Mississippi.
The Weight Wasn’t Worth the Wait
There’s quite a bit about The Weight that I liked.
The acting is good across the board. It’s beautifully shot at times, with some genuinely impressive scenery, and the whole production has a polished, expensive feel to it. This isn’t one of those movies where you can immediately point at something and say, “Well, there’s the problem.”
The problem is that I never really cared what happened.
And I kept waiting to.
The Weight starts with a premise that already feels a little concocted, and the movie never quite convinced me otherwise. Instead of disappearing into the story, I was always somewhat aware of the machinery underneath it.
Movies are obviously constructed. We know that.
The good ones make you forget.
The Weight never did that for me.
At times, the movie seems to lean heavily on sound design to generate tension.
And somewhere along the way I started wondering whether this is becoming a modern movie tell.
When the story isn’t creating enough tension on its own, turn up the sound engineering and let the speakers do some of the work.
That’s probably unfair as a universal rule. Plenty of great movies have aggressive sound design. But here, I became unusually aware of it, and once I noticed it, it was difficult not to notice it again.
Ultimately, all that craftsmanship never managed to pull me into the story.
Which is a shame, because The Weight certainly isn’t a bad movie.
It looks good. It’s well acted. Ethan Hawke, in particular, is superb. There’s clearly talent behind the camera and in front of it.
But when it ended, that was pretty much it.
Sometimes a movie can do almost everything competently and still never quite come alive.
*The Weight* is well acted, beautifully shot and impressively made. The problem is that all that craftsmanship never quite pulled me into the story.
Most love triangles want you to pick a side. The Sun Never Sets makes that almost impossible from the start.
Dakota Fanning plays Wendy, who finds herself caught between Jack, her older boyfriend played by Jake Johnson, and Chuck, a younger ex played by Cory Michael Smith. Set in Alaska, it sounds like the kind of setup where you can see the “right” choice coming pretty quickly.
And, at first, I thought I did.
Chuck seems like the obvious person to root for. He represents the possibility of the life Wendy wants, including having children, and there’s an easy pull toward the idea that maybe this is the path she was supposed to take all along.
Then the movie starts making things a lot less comfortable.
The more time you spend with both Jack and Chuck, the harder it becomes to feel confident about either one. My sympathies kept shifting, and that was easily the part I enjoyed most. Just when I thought I knew who I was rooting for, something would make me question it.
More importantly, I never really knew what Wendy was going to do.
That uncertainty gives the movie its tension. It doesn’t need some giant twist or overly dramatic reveal to keep things moving. The suspense comes from watching her weigh two very different futures while neither choice ever feels completely clean or obvious.
A lot of love triangles are only complicated for the character in the middle. The audience usually knows exactly who they want to win. The Sun Never Sets is more interesting because it keeps that uncertainty on both sides of the screen.
It’s well done, enjoyable, and surprisingly hard to predict. By the end, I wasn’t just wondering who Wendy would choose. I was still trying to figure out who I wanted her to choose.
A familiar love triangle gets a lot more interesting when neither choice feels obvious. The Sun Never Sets keeps shifting your loyalties right along with its main character.
Robert Taylor plays Walt Longmire, the sheriff of fictional Absaroka County, Wyoming. He is old-school, stubborn, observant, and not especially interested in talking about himself. He carries a gun, drives a beat-up truck, and solves crimes in a place where everybody seems to know everybody else.
That gives the show its basic structure, but the setting is what makes it stand out.
The Wyoming landscape, small-town politics, ranches, reservations, and long distances between people give Longmire a modern-western feel that separates it from the usual police procedural.
Walt is surrounded by a strong group of characters, especially his deputy Vic Moretti, his best friend Henry Standing Bear, and a department full of people with their own ambitions and problems. The cases generally change from episode to episode, but the relationships and larger storylines keep building.
That makes it particularly easy to binge.
You can watch an episode for the mystery, but after a while you are watching because you want to know what happens to Walt and the people around him.
The show also benefits from patience. It is not constantly trying to manufacture a cliffhanger or shock you every ten minutes. It lets the characters, setting, and conflicts develop at their own pace.
That slower rhythm is part of the appeal.
💡
Great small-town cop show set in a part of America TV usually ignores.
A Wyoming sheriff, a small town full of secrets, and crimes that rarely stay simple. Longmire is part western, part detective show, and far more addictive than its quiet pace suggests.
Tags
Space Cowboys has a premise that could have gone wrong very easily.
Four aging former Air Force test pilots get called back into action when an old Soviet satellite begins failing in orbit. The catch is that the satellite uses an obsolete guidance system that only one of them really knows.
So yes, Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner end up training to go into space.
It sounds ridiculous. But it actually works.
A big reason is that the movie never treats these guys like superheroes. They are old. They know it. NASA knows it. Everyone around them knows it.
That’s where a lot of the friction comes from — and often the joke.
Eastwood is the stubborn leader, Jones brings the gruff intensity, Sutherland gets most of the sly comedy, and Garner gives the group some warmth. Their chemistry is really the heart of the movie — part buddy comedy about four old guys refusing to admit they’re old, part legitimate space thriller that gradually sneaks up on you.
Space Cowboys is not trying to reinvent anything. It is simply an entertaining studio movie built around four actors who know exactly how to hold the screen.
💡
They’re too old for this mission. That’s half the fun.
Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner turn an absurd premise into a surprisingly entertaining mix of buddy comedy and space thriller.
3000 Miles to Graceland is not a subtle movie. Not even close.
Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner play members of a crew who dress as Elvis impersonators, walk into a Las Vegas casino during an Elvis convention, and rob the place.
That should tell you pretty quickly what kind of movie you’re dealing with.
And the robbery is really just the beginning. From there, it turns into a violent road-trip crime movie full of double-crosses, stolen money, bad decisions, and a cast that is much better than you’d expect for something this ridiculous.
Costner is especially fun because he’s playing so far against type. Forget John Dutton—this is something closer to Tony Soprano Kevin Costner. Kurt Russell is Kurt Russell, which is usually a good thing, and Courteney Cox gets dragged into the mess along the way.
Is it over the top? Absolutely.
Does every part of it work? No.
But it has personality, moves fast, and never feels like just another generic crime movie.
Sometimes ridiculous works.
3000 Miles to Graceland is proof.
💡
Messy, excessive, and much more entertaining than you would expect.
A ridiculous, violent Elvis-heist movie with Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner that absolutely should not work as well as it does.
There’s nothing particularly flashy about Murphy’s Romance. Far from it.
That’s a large part of why it works.
Sally Field plays Emma, a recently divorced mother trying to start over in a small Arizona town. James Garner is Murphy, an older local pharmacist who gradually becomes part of her life.
And gradually is the important word.
This isn’t a movie built around some giant romantic contrivance. The relationship develops through conversations, small favors, irritation, friendship and time. Garner is effortlessly likable without playing Murphy as some perfect fantasy, and Field gives Emma enough stubbornness and independence that the movie never feels like she’s simply waiting for someone to rescue her.
It’s funny, warm and remarkably comfortable with being about adults behaving more or less like adults.
If you’ve never seen Murphy’s Romance, it’s exactly the kind of older movie worth digging back up.
💡
A quiet little movie with more charm than most films twice its size.
A warm, funny, unusually grown-up romance with Sally Field and James Garner — and exactly the kind of movie that seems to have slipped out of the conversation.
