THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino) bursts into a Brooklyn bank like he’s in a heist movie. But he quickly finds out he’s in a comedy of errors that turns tragic. His first accomplice bolts before the job even starts. This leaves him stuck with Sal (John Cazale), a man who looks like he’d rather evaporate than hold a rifle. The police arrive almost instantly and the hostages prove harder to wrangle than the cash. Then insult to injury, the vault turns out to be nearly empty. Outside, the crowd swells into a circus. And suddenly Sonny becomes some kind of anti-establishment mascot.

Frank Pierson’s script, drawn from a real 1972 Life magazine account, hews surprisingly close to fact. But what makes the film extraordinary is the way it leaves the mechanics of the robbery behind and turns this story into a study of desperation. That is, how people behave when they are cornered. Sonny feeds off the attention, playing for the crowd as though applause might make him too larger than life to face consequences. Sal continues to turn inward, becoming more fragile with every hour.

Charles Durning is pitch perfect as the cantankerous but steady and self-controlled negotiator. Chris Sarandon, as Sonny’s “wife,” walks in for a single scene rife with tremulous sensitivity and nearly steals the movie. Even the hostages feel as though they’re drawn from life. Some are resigned, others defiant. Some are even quietly cheering Sonny on.

The brilliance of Dog Day Afternoon is that there are no cartoon villains. These are people rattling around inside the pressure cooker of 1970s New York. It’s volatile and intimate, and maybe most importantly incredibly entertaining. Easily one of the high-water marks of New Hollywood. Not so much built on spectacle but on sweat and nerves. This is a rare movie that recognizes that real-life crime stories aren’t simply about the crime.

Here is the Karate Kid–style dog-training homage that nobody asked for. Barely anyone knows it exists, and those who do and actually watched it probably wish they hadn’t. This marks the final gasp in the Dog Who Saved series. This time, it drags a handful of ’80s holdovers into its leash-yanking slapstick.

Martin Kove, best remembered as the muscle-head barking orders in The Karate Kid, does roughly the same thing here. Except instead of impressionable teens, these are far less impressionable beasts with leashes. William Zabka—Johnny Lawrence himself—shows up briefly as a local cop. Not one of Kove’s pupils, which feels like an obvious missed opportunity for some meta humor. Couldn’t Johnny Lawrence have a froufrou poodle that makes poochified dismissive gestures when it fails to follow this drill sergeant’s orders?

The movie kicks off when a smug terrier knocks a birthday cake off the table. Through a kind of Rube Goldberg chain of events, it leads to an entire stack of presents sliding off and splashing in the swimming pool. Zeus—the Labrador Retriever and star of the series, still voiced by Mario Lopez—is blamed and then shipped off to a place called camp where he must undergo some intense obedience training.

He’s introduced as a former police dog. Though he is relentlessly heckled by his doggy classmates with insults even an eight-year-old would be embarrassed to blurt out. “What kind of cop were you, anyway—meter maid?” one mutt sneers. Come to think of it, is that even an insult at all? Dogs are usually trained to sniff out things, but a dog trained to write parking tickets? Now that’d be impressive.

As you’d suspect, the comedy is tired, the pacing practically nonexistent, and the ending resolves in the usual ways. There’s a chance this will keep some kids entertained, especially those prone to oohing over furry, four-legged best friends. But most adults are going to want their evening back.

An uncomplicated and satisfying thriller with John Travolta as Frank Morrison—a small-town boat builder—who is reeling from a divorce. His ex, Susan (Teri Polo), has not only moved on but remarried the sleek and pedigreed Rick Barnes (Vince Vaughn). But what Susan doesn’t know is that Rick has a sordid second life—he’s a gangster and a murderer.

Frank and Susan share a son, Danny (Matt O’Leary). He’s smart but drifting—taking the fallout of his parents especially hard—and he is prone to spinning lies, especially when it comes to his new stepfather. They are so egregious that when Danny witnesses Rick commit a murder, people think he’s sunk to a new low of brazenness rather than believe him. That is, except for Frank. He senses something genuine in his son’s voice that he can’t quite shake.

From there, the film shifts—from psychological thriller to action-based. Nothing we haven’t seen before, and seen done better, but it has a quick, snappy pace and gets a lift from sharp performances. Travolta reins it in: quiet, reactive, resolute. But Vaughn’s the big surprise here, ditching his usual wiseass treadmill to play a man who could smile, shake your hand, and convince you to lie to the FBI for him.

Nothing spectacular, but this is, all in all, a solid little thriller. Not one that warrants many rewatches, but also not one I got the urge to turn off halfway through.

In French.

A fairy tale musical glazed in meringue and moonlight. If you could smell this movie, it would smell like potpourri and theater dust. Logic is turbid, the costumes shimmer like spells, and the props and sets look like they were purchased from a vintage boutique shop that also dabbles in sorcery. Donkey Skin takes the 17th Century story of the same name by Charles Perrault and filters it through a prism of 1970s French whimsy. The result isn’t quite a children’s film, a satire, or a tragedy—but it tastes like an intoxicating mixture of all three.

The movie starts with a death. The queen is gone. The king (Jean Marais) is blinded by grief and swears that he’ll only remarry if he finds someone as beautiful as his late wife. The trouble is, there’s only one such beauty left in the kingdom. His own daughter (Catherine Deneuve). She hears the whispers that her father had come to this conclusion and gets out the proverbial Kingdom of Dodge. But not before her fairy godmother (Delphine Seyrig, who is draped in lilac chiffon) disguises her in a donkey’s skin. Not just any donkey. A royal donkey that, when it was alive, pooped gold and jewels like a medieval slot machine. (Hey, you can question the weirdness of old fairy tales. The chances of you getting answers that make more sense than the question are probably something like nil.)

Deneuve moves through the film like she’s made of powdered sugar and porcelain. She is a pure figure who remains untouched by the madness that surrounds her. Director Jacques Demy, who also wrote the screenplay—and who’d previously worked with Deneuve in the pastel dreams of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort—isn’t chasing plot. He’s chasing texture and trance. The colors pulse. There are animal statues situated everywhere that feel drawn from paganism. The castle interiors feel like they were built from frosting and tarot cards. The forest is a soundstage hallucination.

Michel Legrand composed the score and the songs, which drift in like scented lullabies. Harpsichords, soft-pop swoon, and melodies that you might forget but they seduce you. Eventually—of course—there’s a prince. And there’s also the requisite fairy tale ending.

I’m a sucker for fairy tale adaptations, especially the strange ones, and this one hits all those peculiar notes. Maybe there’s a sour or dead note here and there, but the overall effect of watching this felt like I had something floating somewhere behind my eyes.

Psychological horror. A suburban time loop. A teenage meltdown. The experience of watching Donnie Darko is much like tuning into a static-ridden radio station with three signals bleeding over each other. Sometimes it flickers into a teen drama, other times a sci-fi thriller. But mostly it plays like a shadowy art-house hallucination: fevered, magnetic, and impossible to shake.

The disaster arrives early. A jet engine falls out of the night sky and tears into Donnie’s bedroom. He should’ve been there, asleep. Instead, he’s on a golf course, lured there by a giant rabbit named Frank. He didn’t save Donnie out of the goodness of his heart, however. This isn’t the genial bunny from Harvey. Rather, this is a nightmare figure with a metallic skull, antenna-like ears, and a ventriloquized voice rasping out of a vent.

Frank gives assignments like he’s some kind of demonic mentor. And they’re not simple assignments. They’re crimes. Flood the school. Burn down the mansion of a sleazy self-help guru (Patrick Swayze). Each act, Frank insists, is part of something bigger. What exactly, he won’t say. Only that it has something to do with the end of the world—an event he even knows the exact time of: 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds.

The closer that clock ticks toward zero, the more Donnie unravels. This once ace student is suddenly spitting prophecies at the dinner table. Freaking out classmates. Even the way he walks changes—increasingly like he’s being tugged by wires.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance is remarkable, as he flickers between menace and vulnerability—much like a light bulb on the verge of burning out. The more Donnie’s psyche unravels, the more the world around him seems to warp accordingly. Hallways stretch into dream corridors. Basements close in like traps. Walking through the quiet sidewalks of suburbia feels less like living in the present and more like half-remembered memories. While the film might often feel overcrowded and messy, it still flows with an alluring kind of coherence, even as it braids fairly complex and disparate themes like time travel, mental illness, grief, and fate. It’s all quite surprisingly gripping and unnerving.

If the movie has one major weakness, it’s that ending. Frankly, it’s nonsense. Something that feels profound but is really sophomoric. If you were expecting grand revelation (and there’s no reason you shouldn’t have been), all you get is grand sophomoric silliness. But I also strangely found that ending quite stirring. And while the movie isn’t answering questions so much as replacing them with new ones, I found those questions sticking with me in the weeks following my viewing of the film. My mind was spinning like pinwheels over what it all could have meant. Was it destiny? Or maybe it’s about letting go. Or maybe just this: that everyone has a clock—you don’t see the hands, but they’re counting down to something.

Sci-fi B-movie fare that begins the way these things often do. With a remote lab, a devoted wife, and a scientist (not quite mad but mad adjacent) feverishly trying to mess with the natural order.

Lew Ayres stars as Dr. Patrick Cory, working in his mountainside laboratory alongside his wife-slash-assistant Janice (Nancy Davis). His obsession is the human brain. He’s only just figured out how to keep a monkey brain alive in an electrically charged vat of milk-colored goo. Cory insists that his goal is noble. That he’s curing diseases of the mind, such as those tormenting his brilliant but hopelessly alcoholic colleague, Dr. Schratt (Gene Evans). But monkey brains will only take him so far. He needs a human one to experiment on.

But then fate suddenly obliges. A private plane crashes nearby and claims a victim: ruthless millionaire Warren Donovan. He survives just long enough for Cory to be able to preserve his brain. And what happens is beyond even Cory’s wildest imagination. The brain doesn’t only survive, it responds. It learns. It’s wonderful, until things start going sideways. That is, when the brain starts to psychically control people.

What follows is pulp and paranoia. The science is nonsense, but in the world of vintage sci-fi, it all reads just credible enough to work. Ayres and Davis keep the grounded, playing things just straight enough to at least convince me they believe their science. The effects are modest—it’s bubbles, wires, and flashes of static. But the mood is heavy, building a slow and steady unease as Donovan’s brain begins to assert control.

By all rights this is a B-movie that should’ve been relegated to camp. But it ends up something as something stranger. Psychological horror by way of mid-century lab drama. Dated, ridiculous, but effective. A movie sustained by its own taut conviction and a twitchy little nerve.