THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

It begins with a mix-up. A rural hospital, two sets of identical twins, and a nurse running on fumes who accidentally trades a pair. No one catches it. The parents head home convinced they’ve got fraternal twins. One pair grows up wealthy in Manhattan penthouses. The other grows up on strawberry pies and fiddle music. And because one father overheard the other picking baby names and decided they’d do nicely, both sets end up with the same ones: Rose (Lily Tomlin) and Sadie (Bette Midler).

Decades later, the New York twins are busy shutting down the factory that keeps the small-town twins’ world alive. So the country pair head to Manhattan, ready for a fight—but accidentally walk straight into a family reunion forty years in the making.

It’s a setup built to ricochet. Mistaken identities, hallway collisions, two Bette Midlers shouting across a lobby. But the rhythm feels off. Gags seem to arrive with a self-satisfied grin. But they also feel lonely—like they’re waiting for laughs that never quite arrive. The film’s best scene is also its simplest. One that we’ve all seen before—most famously in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. The twins meet for the first time in a restroom. Each convinced she’s staring at her own reflection. It’s the classic mirror routine—only a watered-down, 1980s-sitcom approximation of it that’s stripped of its old vaudevillian snap and surprise. But it does land about where it aims: softly and on target.

For all the movie’s structural misfires, the performances are nearly enough to save it. Tomlin splits herself cleanly into two distinct people. One smiles like it hurts. The other tilts her brow towards the city like it’s a feral hog that needs tying up. Midler’s approach is broader—sharp and brassy. The contrast between her two Sadies isn’t sharp, exactly—one’s a ruthless corporate shark, while the other only wishes she could be. But her energy never dips.

Director Jim Abrahams, a third of the Airplane! brain trust, swaps anarchy for polish and forgets to keep the thing moving. Scenes drag when they should fly. Punchlines wheeze in late and out of breath. The finale leaves on an underwhelming note. It feels more like a meeting adjourned rather than the madcap pileup it deserves. This is a farce, but it’s forced.

Not a disaster, though. It’s likable enough. A comedy searching for a rhythm that it never quite finds. Two solid performances, one classic idea, and a director too polite—or perhaps too constrained—to let things get interesting.

One minute it’s the late ’60s. You’re draped in caps and gowns, with the confidence that everything is about to line up. But then suddenly it’s 1983, and those same protest songs are coming from a kitchen radio while you chop vegetables.

Eight friends end up back together for a weekend after years or decades apart. Not for a casual gathering, though. One member of their formerly tight-knit group has died. Killed himself. What those who remain are in for is a weekend of grief and gossip, while everyone quietly takes stock of where their lives ended up. How their vision of what an idealized life used to look like has since dissolved into careers, marriages, divorces, and the kinds of problems that come with lawyers.

Old tensions still surface among them. A quick jab here. A grudge dragged out for another pass there. But most of the time they fall back into rhythms you can’t fake. Shorthand. Private jokes. Glances across the room that still mean what they always did.

Kasdan’s dialogue can feel a little prepped, like these conversations have been waiting years to find the right audience. But when it works, it relaxes into something easy and convincing. A few scenes stall, and others spin their wheels on bland ideas. But some fall into a groove that feels so natural that you almost forget you’re watching actors at all.

The ensemble cast almost couldn’t be better. They handle all of it without strain. Almost equal to the power of the cast is the soundtrack—scattered with ’60s songs. But they’re not here just for nostalgia. They’re here for contrast. That while people change, the music always stays the same.

The Big Chill is a talky, intelligent drama. Never cloyingly sappy, sometimes smug, often entertaining. Not quite the profound reckoning it seems to chase. But there’s also real pleasure in watching people try to keep liking one another long after the glue that once held them together has started to wear thin.

Some bad movies don’t care that they’re bad and simply flop on the couch and nap. The Big Cube is more ambitious than that. It staggers around under the impression that it’s saying something important. In this case, it’s aiming in the direction of some kind of mod cautionary tale. But instead, you get a soap opera on acid. Pawing through the sofa cushions for a plot that was misplaced three drafts ago.

Lana Turner is game throughout, at least. She plays an aging, glamorous actress. She marries a wealthy man only to, almost immediately, outlive him. He dies in a boating accident. This kicks off the expected inheritance scramble. His spoiled daughter (Karin Mossberg, blank and faintly venomous) wants the money. So she and her smug drug-dealer boyfriend decide on a solution. To put a bit of LSD in her medication and go hands-off from there.

What the movie lingers on are the freak-outs. It’s the full Hollywood acid kit. Faces stretch. Lights strobe. Voices echo until nothing sounds anchored anymore. Had the movie concentrated on that, it would have been one thing. But the bulk of the film is framed around dangerous youth culture. Depicted here as little more than noise, debauchery, and danger. For ’60s rock fans, there’s at least a groove-heavy, acid-drenched soundtrack (provided by the fictional rock band The Finks, singing music by Val Johns and Howard Finkelstein). The music is far more committed than the plot ever manages.

Turner is the lone professional holding the screen together. She treats the hysteria like it belongs in a Douglas Sirk melodrama. And for stretches, she almost sells it. Everyone else exists in a precarious space somewhere between blank stares and overheated theatrics. Never quite finding a register where any of this could tip into camp or fun.

The film moves quickly enough, but beneath the swirling lights, glitter, and rock ’n’ roll posturing, there isn’t much holding it up. The Big Cube might want to scare all you drug-addled youth straight. It just forgets to entertain you along the way.

Adam Sandler spent a good stretch of the ’90s playing characters who treated refusing to grow up as a personality, not a problem. Big Daddy doesn’t argue with that posture so much as settle into it—sweatpants, junk food, and a general belief that consequences can wait. Sonny Koufax is not misunderstood. He’s exactly what everyone thinks he is. And the movie spends ninety minutes hoping you’ll find that endearing.

Sonny lives off a settlement check and whatever momentum he can fake, doing his best to avoid work or responsibility. But of course the universe is going to have different plans for him. Through a string of sitcom logic, he ends up taking responsibility for a kid left at his apartment door. But it’s not out of kindness. It’s not even curiosity. It’s mostly as a demonstration—to his girlfriend, to his friends, to the universe—that he’s not the useless lump that everyone assumes he is. The problem is that he absolutely is a useless lump, and the movie keeps asking you to go along with it as he does a completely unconvincing job trying to prove otherwise.

A few jokes do work. Sonny’s all-purpose solution to life’s problems—throw newspaper over them until they disappear—is quite funny. But too much of the comedy relies on noise and cruelty dressed up as mischief. The Central Park rollerblading bit, where Sonny and the kid toss sticks into people’s paths for fun, is treated like boys-will-be-boys hijinks. It plays closer to a mugging. The movie never seems to notice the difference.

The arc lumbers exactly where you expect it to go. Sonny starts caring about the kid for real. He softens. He learns something. Sandler does the whole character growth thing. But it never really feels convincing. It mostly feels like he’s killing time until he can start yelling again.

That said, there’s enough sweetness jammed in there to explain why this thing hit as big as it did. Big Daddy keeps trying to split the difference between crude and cuddly. Once in a while, it almost backs into something that works. Seeing it again is like stumbling on an old DVD in a shoebox. And remembering why you never pulled it out much.

At least the kid will probably be okay. Given enough time and distance. And hopefully a better guardian. If you need proof that not every nostalgic hit improves with age, Big Daddy is still right here. Permanently parked where it belongs on late-night cable—stunted and perfectly content to stay that way.

When Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) talks, the past changes shape around him. One minute he’s walking with a giant. The next he’s running away with a circus, meeting a witch who shows him how he’ll die, slipping behind enemy lines during the Korean War, swearing he fell in love the instant he sees his future wife. And if you ask him to repeat any of it, some details may have shifted. Edward believes narrative license is part of the deal.

But his days of telling stories are coming to a close. Edward is dying. His son Will (Billy Crudup), nearly estranged and back home for the end of it, wants to pin down something solid before there’s no time left. Some version of his father that isn’t filtered through performance. But what he gets instead is, of course, more stories.

Edward keeps talking, and we see it play out in flashbacks with a younger stand-in for himself (Ewan McGregor, smiling easily, ready to cooperate). The stories arrive bright and exaggerated. Beautifully filmed. Already worked over, with anything sharp or prickly taken out. Each episode comes out like a story that’s been told so many times it runs on confidence instead of memory. To the extent that truth enters the exchange, it likely doesn’t have much say in how things go.

Sandra (Jessica Lange), Edward’s wife in the present and Will’s mother, doesn’t compete with the stories. She absorbs them. (Alison Lohman plays her younger counterpart inside the stories.) She’s calm, settled, uninterested in sorting myth from fact. If there’s anything in Edward’s life that doesn’t feel revised, it’s her. Their adventures might have been embellished, the details smoothed down, but the bond is as strong as it’s always been. You can tell in how they regard each other. Like people who don’t need to prove anything anymore.

Burton stages these memories carefully, as if they’d fall apart the moment real life got near them. Everything is dressed up, brightly lit. Nothing is allowed to look accidental. Burton’s usual fixations—the macabre, the grotesque—have been put away. The control hasn’t.

Accuracy isn’t what the film is chasing. It’s more concerned with what truth is good for. Edward’s stories don’t document a life so much as move him through it, and once he’s gone, leave his son with something workable in their place. They sort what gets carried forward and what finally gets set down. Will doesn’t learn who his father really was. He learns how his father wanted to be remembered.

Big Fish isn’t interested in correcting the past. It trims it down, filing away whatever catches until what’s left goes down easier. That kind of emotional plainness isn’t where Burton usually stops. The worlds are still dressed up and carefully shaped, but he doesn’t disappear into them here. He steps back and lets the sentiment press on you.

A sort-of comedy with a sort-of point. Sort of aimed at teen girls. Laura (Hillary Wolf) is thirteen and has grown up watching her family constantly rearrange itself. Divorced parents. Step-parents. Ex-step-parents. Siblings in halves and fractions. Her biological father (Griffin Dunne) has the personality of a sock drawer and has already moved on to his next future ex-wife. He’s busy ignoring her and assembling whatever’s going to come next with his new girlfriend (Adrienne Shelly) who has a baby on the way. Laura’s life is one big mess of domestic sprawl.

And she’s finally had all she can handle. Her response isn’t dramatic or defiant. She just leaves. She hitchhikes through the backroads of California where she ends up at a remote cabin belonging to David (Dan Futterman)—the grown son of one of her father’s former wives. He tells her she can’t stay. She stays anyway. David then tips off the adults, which sends Laura back on the road again—just as the rest of her extended mega-family descends on the cabin in uneven clusters. Everyone looks uncertain. Conversations stalling out halfway through. Old resentments surfacing briefly, then retreating. No one being entirely sure what they’re meant to be fixing. Beyond, of course, getting Laura back where she’s supposed to be.

The film means well, but it never really finds its shape. The plotting wanders. And despite centering on a runaway thirteen-year-old, the film rarely behaves as if anything could truly go wrong. The film raises real subjects—estrangement, resentment, old disappointments—then quickly moves past them, as if staying put might break its tone.

Whatever charm the film has comes through with Laura’s narration as she watches the adults around her with a dry, faintly caustic intelligence. She’s alert to patterns the adults don’t notice themselves. Like who shows up late. Or who avoids eye contact. Who mistakes convenience for generosity. Her perspective is clear-eyed and keeps the movie from slipping entirely into sentiment.

But the movie as a whole is a muddle. A friendly muddle, at least. It’s fractured, fleeting, and just coherent enough to resemble closure.

Big Hero 6 moves fast and looks immaculate. A Disney film that hates resistance and spends the entire runtime making sure that you’ll never feel any. Comfort first. Complication later.

San Fransokyo is a city built out of Silicon Valley optimism and Tokyo gloss. Everything shines. Nothing shows wear. And it is where Hiro lives. Fourteen and already finished with high school. He’s brilliant, bored. Burning off excess intelligence in underground robot fights. The kind of kid pointed in the wrong direction that a movie like this is built to set right.

His breakthrough comes in the form of microbots. Tiny magnetic units that link together and become whatever he asks them to be. When Hiro shows them off, he’s watching them change shape, testing their limits. But the room around him is already thinking about who can finagle their way into profiting from it.

Then Tadashi dies. Hiro’s older brother. The one adult who treated him fairly. Took him seriously. Didn’t try to use him. What Hiro is left with is a healthcare robot named Baymax. He’s soft-bodied, literal-minded, hard to rush and looks like a giant marshmallow. Think of him like a pneumatic Totoro in scrubs who has no sense of when his presence might be excessive.

Eventually, the story opens back out when Hiro’s invention is stolen and turned toward harm. And Hiro responds by taking a page out of Tony Stark’s style guide and building color-coded super-suits with varying specialties—super strength, speed, precision cutting. He recruits several classmates to try them on, see how they fit, and join his team. Sort of like The Incredibles, except the emphasis isn’t on clashing personalities or internal strain.

From there, the film proceeds cleanly. The plot never stagnates. The villain barely needs attention. The finale is large and busy and carefully managed. Nothing strains for surprise. The animation dazzles. The action sequences are buoyant and easy to follow. But most importantly, through it all, Baymax stays put. Steady and unfazed by the noise around him. Whenever the story approaches anger, danger, or moral mess, Baymax is the force that pulls back to stability.

Big Hero 6 isn’t top-tier Disney. It’s far too careful for that. But it’s sincere about what it wants to offer. A movie that believes calm is a virtue. That relief can be heroic. And that sometimes the most radical thing a story can do is refuse to make things sharper than they already are.

You could say a lot about Big Momma’s House. Elegance wouldn’t make the list. There have been great films in the past about grown men passing themselves off as women. Tootsie, Some Like It Hot, even Mrs. Doubtfire. Those movies were so funny that you were willing to overlook how ridiculous the premises were—and for good reason, since people in real life don’t actually get away with doing things like this. Martin Lawrence is at least an efficient slapstick comedian, but the movie keeps pressing its premise until something gives. And that happens maybe ten minutes in. There’s padding everywhere. Latex padding. Story padding. Jokes packed out so much that they stop behaving like jokes.

Malcolm Turner (Martin Lawrence) is an FBI agent who is tracking an escaped convict—one he expects will eventually show up at his mother’s house to retrieve a cache of stolen bank money. That mother is Big Momma. Elderly. Southern. A loud, larger-than-life fixture of her neighborhood. With uncanny timing, Big Momma abruptly leaves town to attend a family reunion, which clears the board for Malcolm to set up shop in her house.

But Malcolm doesn’t just sit quietly in a dark corner and wait for the convict to turn up. That would almost make sense. Instead, he disappears into prosthetics and padding. Borrows pieces from Big Momma’s wardrobe and adopts her church-lady cadence. He even takes over her social life.

And amazingly, the neighborhood accepts the swap. There are a few moments where Malcolm says or does something that gives people pause. Just to ask if she’s OK. Maybe there’s a fleeting moment of doubt that something isn’t quite right. But it gets extinguished just as quickly as a minor itch after you scratch it. Even though the voice is different. The eyes are different. The posture is different. Even Big Momma’s own son can’t tell his mother apart from some goofy stranger who slathered himself deep in a fat suit.

What follows is Lawrence scrambling, scene after scene, trying to keep things moving from inside a mountain of foam that works against both his body and his timing. Truthfully, he pulls it off about as well as anyone. He’s funny enough in a vacuum. The real problem is the movie strands him. Flailing in a fat suit. No real laughs to speak of, no matter how valiantly or tirelessly Lawrence contorts his face into silly shapes.

While this isn’t exactly rock-bottom for a big studio comedy—Lawrence’s sheer dedication still earns a few grins—it’s close enough that you can smell the mildew.

Uh oh, you scrolled to this review—a movie with the reputation of being “one of the worst ever made.” But I can hardly contain my laughter when I put this on. Perhaps my fuse for handling obnoxious jackassery is higher than it should be. What can I say? When a movie makes me laugh, it makes me laugh. Whether we’re talking about bone-dry sophistication or just a couple of idiots behaving like, well, idiots.

Some movies chase wit. Bio-Dome chases its own tail. Ninety-five minutes of nothing more than Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin turning a multimillion-dollar science experiment into a frat-house prank. They mistake a gleaming new facility for a shopping mall, wander in for a sneak preview, and wind up sealed inside what is actually a year-long self-sustaining ecosystem. A handful of scientists are locked in with them, and we have our premise: serious scientists trying to conduct their business while two walking Murphy’s Law ids come around to undo everything. Any kind of disaster these two can summon, they summon. And the punchline, of course, is that with all the PhDs trapped in with them, no one can figure out how to evict them.

A film so devoted to foolishness that it practically signs a lease. The engine behind it is so simple that perhaps it could even be called elegant. That is, if dumb is funny, then dumber must be funnier. And for the most part, it is. Bio-Dome doesn’t care about coherence or behavior. It cares about how much ecological damage two morons can inflict before the scientists lose their composure. Which turns out to be quite a lot.

Shore and Baldwin attack their roles with an infectious kind of reckless abandon. Shore talks in helium-inflected squawks, flails his arms about like pool noodles, and in general conducts himself like he considers his own existence to be a punchline. Baldwin charges ahead with nothing more than a vacant grin, moving with the blind enthusiasm of a man who’s never once let a thought slow him down. Together, they work with a kind of anti-precision. Wrecking everything in sight while simultaneously looking genuinely thrilled to be there.

The movie never once pretends it could be more than a ninety-minute anthology of moronic antics. But why should it? This is a movie that certainly entertains itself. And you know what? It entertains me as well. While there aren’t really big laughs here, the small ones keep slipping through. Full of nonsense asides, stray gags, a rather misplaced Blue Velvet reference. Shower pipes become golf clubs, milk goats become caddies. At one point, a man collapses, and Shore, with an insincere kind of solemnity, declares: “I’m no doctor, but I think he’s brain dead.” The line is nothing, but his delivery gives me the giggles.

None of this movie was built to last, but momentum carries it, and for whatever reason, I’ve found myself addicted to it. It’s two idiots being as stupid as possible for as long as possible. That’s the whole show. We’re not talking about one of the greatest films ever made, but I find it infectious. Call it a magnificent trashterpiece. Infectious and silly, it makes me giggle like I’m 12 again. So pass the popcorn, and let’s watch it again.

A horror movie built on a clever truth: that what you don’t see is often more frightening than what you do see. The survivors of this particular movie apocalypse spend much of their time in blindfolds. That’s where the movie stumbles a bit. The characters see nothing, we see everything, and—for our sakes—the movie has to be consciously selective. And what we see is occasionally suspenseful, occasionally flat.

But it’s suspenseful enough, particularly in the initial scenes. When the apocalypse just begins and the world suddenly finds itself overrun with these invisible things. Where they came from is immaterial. They are creatures so malevolent that they don’t even need to touch you to kill you. All you need to do is glance at one and it’ll take over your mind—sending you straight into suicide mode. You might slit your own throat, jump in front of a bus, or fling yourself out of a high-rise. Whatever is quickest and most convenient. People who were already mentally insane somehow survive the attempts, but they roam the world trying to convince the stragglers to set themselves free. Call it biblical plague by way of urban legend.

Sandra Bullock shoulders the movie with a grim scowl. She’s become guardian of two blindfolded kids she only bothers to call Boy and Girl. The movie explains she doesn’t want to grow attached to them enough to give them names. Motherhood as drill sergeant duty.

The film splices two tracks together: the early days, where Bullock—pregnant and prickly—ends up holed up in a suburban bunker. Then five years later, when she’s rafting blindfolded down a river, dodging rapids, creatures, and lunatics—all of which are trying to get her to look, but her survival instincts and stubbornness won’t let her.

The premise is great, but the movie is weighed down by too many scenes devoted to hushed discussions of “the rules,” as if horror works best when treated like an instruction manual. The suspense is there, but the movie keeps stopping to check its own reflection. There’s a crackerjack set piece with a GPS-guided car barreling through an empty city, and then it’s back to endless hush-hush strategizing.

When it all converges to a conclusion, the ending feels like the filmmakers pulled the blindfold off and immediately worried. Better close this up tidy. Which is a shame, because when the movie pulls the screws on the premise, it can really be quite unnerving. Bird Box is ultimately a movie that hooks you with its big idea but then asks you not to stare too hard at the rest.

In Spanish.

Give it one of these labels. A spin-off, a sidequel, a franchise attempt. Whatever it is, Netflix was clearly hoping to turn Bird Box into some kind of shared, expanded universe. But instead of expanding the mythology or committing to an actual sequel, this Spanish-language installment mostly pads it. We get more information but no new insights.

The setup remains the same: there are mysterious entities that—without announcing themselves—suddenly blanket the earth. And anyone who sees them immediately takes their own life. Our main character is a Barcelonian named Sebastián (Mario Casas). He’s a rare case. A person who can look at the creatures without dying. Of course the original film was littered with such people, but they were mentally insane. The creatures turned them into deranged prophets. This guy can look at them and is still normal. For the most part.

At first, he thinks they’re here to deliver humanity to some kind of salvation. Later, he’s not so sure. He bands together with a group of survivors and feels haunted and conflicted about his role—does he try to lead these people to salvation or does he listen to them and try to lead them to freedom? Sebastián’s motives change through the film, which is sometimes a good sign that we’re dealing with a multi-dimensional character. But here, it’s done in such a clumsy way that we don’t get depth as much as a character that’s a bit difficult to follow.

Scene for scene, the film is handsomely mounted. The cinematography is moody, the effects restrained, and the creature design still wisely left to implication. But the narrative lacks urgency, and the stakes feel vague.

There are hints of a larger mythology. Something that digs at something stranger or deeper. But the film seems mostly content at merely gesturing towards it instead of genuinely exploring. Ultimately a movie that doesn’t so much deepen a franchise but decorates it.

A farce so giddy and hysterical I nearly laughed myself into respiratory failure. The Birdcage makes Meet the Parents—which would mine a similar premise four years later—look like the sitcom warm-up act. In Meet the Parents, we got a father-in-law who was cat-obsessed and ex-FBI. Here, we get Robin Williams in a silk shirt, Nathan Lane in full drag, and a South Beach nightclub throbbing with sequins and disco haze. Advantage: obvious.

Williams is Armand, the owner of a drag club called The Birdcage. His partner, both in business and in life, is Starina (Lane). Starina is not only the club’s drag queen headliner on stage, but off stage, he’s a full-time drama queen. We meet him mid-crisis—another one of his nightly fits in which he refuses to go on until … well, he relents. He always relents. Their son is Val (Dan Futterman), the product of a brief heterosexual experiment, who returns home with an announcement: he’s engaged. The problem isn’t the girl. The girl is great—wonderful, accepting, everyone loves her. The problem is her father: a conservative U.S. Senator (Gene Hackman) with ties to the “Coalition for Moral Order” (a barely disguised jab at the real-life Moral Majority). And brace yourselves: the Senator and his wife (Dianne Wiest) are coming for a visit. Soon.

To secure the Senator’s approval of Val, Val asks Armand and Starina to do the impossible: pretend to be straight-laced, heterosexual, and above all, conventional. That’s hard enough when the décor in your house looks like Liberace’s storage unit. Harder still when your partner (who decides to go full drag for the performance, assuming they won’t question his genitals) has a default setting parked at high emotion. And the icing on the cake? A housekeeper like Agador Spartacus (played by a scene-stealing Hank Azaria), a flamboyantly gay Guatemalan man-child who’s so used to going everywhere barefoot he can’t even wear shoes without falling over.

This is a movie that could’ve been relegated to a campy gag reel. But under Mike Nichols’ direction and Elaine May’s razor-sharp script, it becomes something smarter. Not only a biting satire and a hysterical farce, but also a comedy with real warmth. While the characters might be exaggerated, they’re never mean-spirited, and there’s enough chemistry to make their entire scheme (barely) plausible.

And then there’s the final note: the proverbial mic drop, one of cinema’s most glorious. A fairy tale for liberals who just want everyone to stay out of everyone’s way and live their best life—and maybe even embrace a little of it themselves. The movies, after all, are for dreaming.

A movie that pulls you in like a bad memory. It starts quietly at first, but then it comes at you with full force. And you don’t even realize how thoroughly it’s gotten under your skin until you realize you’re already stewing with it. The only place where it stumbles is in its final minute—and I mean, literally, the last minute. It plays a prank on the audience. One so out-there and abrupt that it nearly undoes all that effort the film made in developing its thick atmosphere that falls on you like a strange, haunting, and sad mist. I didn’t quite let it spoil my time, but I don’t begrudge anyone who did let it.

Birdy follows two teenagers from working-class Philadelphia. Al (Nicolas Cage) is brash and scarred. Birdy (Matthew Modine) is a quiet oddball who has an obsession with birds that borders on religious. They get sent to Vietnam. When they return, they find themselves broken in different ways. Al is bandaged and limping. Birdy is catatonic and committed to a military psych ward. Convinced he’s no longer human but rather has literally transformed into his namesake. He doesn’t speak—he squats, twitches, flicks his head. Whatever’s left of him that’s human is buried deep and unrecoverable—at least by any standard means. So they bring in Al. They hope a friendly face from the past can do what medicine can’t.

What follows is a series of flashbacks—sometimes funny, sometimes deeply sad—as it charts the unlikely friendship between a kid who talks too much and another who’d rather eschew speech altogether and build massive cages and climb rooftops in homemade wings. All throughout their friendship, Al stands by, baffled but unwaveringly loyal.

When the war comes, it doesn’t explode their world so much as seep into it. Slowly and thoroughly, like a leak you don’t notice until the carpet squishes. And while the ending breaks the spell the film has worked so carefully to cast, it’s only for a minute. The movie as a whole is haunting. Eerie, tender, and strange. A movie that might captivate you one afternoon but stay with you for the rest of the month. Fantastic performances by the two principal cast members—some of their best work in these early parts of their careers.

The past doesn’t vanish so much as it bleeds into the landscape—seeping into the walls of old buildings, lodging in the grains of dry wood that won’t shake loose. But the town of Bisbee, Arizona refuses to let its past stay buried.

They are preparing for a reenactment—an eerie, town-wide exhumation of the Bisbee Deportation of 1917. A horrific event where 1,300 striking miners were rounded up at gunpoint, shoved into cattle cars, and unceremoniously dumped in the New Mexico desert. A century later, the locals are still trying to decide what it was. A tragedy or a necessity? The film itself stays neutral, though it’s hard to shake the human rights implications of it all.

This is a documentary that moves like a ghost story, but the phantoms wear contemporary clothes. Some of the participants in the reenactment are descendants of those deported. Others are the grandchildren of the men who did the rounding up. The town itself, still visibly shaped by the event, can point to the fracture lines.

What led to it: the miners were striking for safer conditions and fair wages. But the company branded them dangerous radicals whose true aim was to sabotage the war effort. One side spoke of workers’ rights and justice. The other of law and order. You’ll still find townsfolk vehemently taking sides. But neither side quite knows what to do with the fact that history has already made its choice.

Robert Greene pushes past the usual documentary format and gives us something more theatrical, especially in the reenactment itself, which plays like a slow, communal reckoning. It’s uncanny to watch the weight of the event—buried under a hundred years of rationalization and uneasy silence—wash over their faces as they try not just to understand how it ends, but how it was supposed to end. It’s one thing to talk about the event and throw opinions behind it; it’s another thing entirely to actively participate in it. A fascinating documentary, and a must for any American history buff.