THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

New York City of the mid-1980s is about to get a new addition to its service economy that it doesn’t even know it needs, and it’s coming courtesy of three disgraced academics armed with proton packs and no business plan. They are the Ghostbusters, of course—three parapsychologists: Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), who recently lost their funding at Columbia University. Instead of fading into the twilight of academic obscurity, they decide to pull themselves up by their proverbial pocket protectors and go into business, protecting denizens from these supernatural, see-through ghouls.

They aren’t con artists, by the way. Ghosts are not only real, but their activity has been increasing lately. One of the first entities they encounter is a haunted librarian whose only annoyance at being dead, it seems, is having to shush all the screams from unsuspecting researchers and readers as they flee. That includes the Ghostbusters themselves. They don’t actually capture their first ghost until they encounter Slimer in an old hotel—a green, gluttonous blob that stuffs food down its gullet, but it passes straight through him. The Ghostbusters develop their own (unregulated) equipment, but that’s really the easy part. The hard part is becoming proficient at using it.

It turns out that this sudden influx of spectral activity isn’t random. It’s all a byproduct of a demonic force that’s gathering power. Its chosen vessel happens to be Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver), a cellist. And suddenly the Ghostbusters—who had been winging it the entire time—are now expected to save the world.

This is a comedy that treats the supernatural with an intoxicating mixture of spectacle and irreverence. It works as well as it does because of the sharp writing, but what makes it unforgettable are the actors. Bill Murray slouches through the film like a con artist who got his PhD by mistake. Aykroyd is the overgrown Boy Scout of the paranormal. Ramis is quietly hilarious with a deadpan delivery as the film’s backbone. Ernie Hudson arrives later as Winston, the only one who treats ghostbusting like a regular job, finding himself more exasperated than awe-inspired when he learns he’s riding shotgun for the apocalypse. And last but not least, Rick Moranis as an overcaffeinated, nebbish accountant whose every twitch makes me giggle—for example, the way his voice cracks after realizing he was locked out of his own apartment during a party he’s hosting.

And it all culminates in a satisfying conclusion, with a demon named Gozer (looking like a punked-up demigod of VHS aerobic workout videos) and a behemoth—the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, 50 feet of pure, doughy menace who stomps through Manhattan like an overgrown parade balloon gone rogue.

This is a film that not only believes in itself but knows how to smirk at itself, too. The ghosts exist to be caught. The Ghostbusters exist to be funny. And Ghostbusters is still massively popular with audiences precisely because this concoction has never stopped working.

After saving New York City from certain destruction—not to mention the entire world—the Ghostbusters find themselves washed up and out of work. Reduced to birthday party gigs where they perform tricks and general clownery. They stumble their way back to business, though, when a subterranean river of pink sludge is found oozing through the sewers—apparently feeding off human hostility. Which in New York is never in short supply. And along with this goo comes a new flurry of spectral activity.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. Proton packs are back in vogue. But the four Ghostbusters (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, all reprising their roles) can’t just trudge about the city trapping ghosts like they own the place. Somewhere, a much more powerful being lurks—a medieval warlord trapped inside a painting. It’s been whispering world-domination schemes to a sniveling museum curator (Peter MacNicol). What it wants is an infant—so that he can reincarnate himself. And I’m going to assume we don’t want to know what’ll happen if he succeeds in doing that.

While this film successfully recombines the ingredients—the state-of-the-art effects with a sly sense of humor—there’s something missing. The first Ghostbusters was a miracle of timing and tone. This one is less miraculous. It feels more mechanical. Like a greatest-hits tour that keeps the band together but doesn’t find a new song. The jokes land here and there, but the rhythm feels off. I don’t laugh as much. The only real flicker of inspiration as far as the ghosts go is the haunted babysitter sequence. Gareth from Labyrinth had his work cut out for him if he was going to find a more creative way to supernaturally kidnap kids than that.

Bill Murray, once the slouching prince of ironic detachment, spends much of the movie looking half-interested in his own scenes. Sigourney Weaver’s Dana is back, this time with a baby to imperil. The villain, Vigo the Carpathian, mostly glowers from the confines of his portrait. He wants an infant to reincarnate himself but never bothers to be specific about what’s supposed to be especially terrifying about it. Rick Moranis and Annie Potts, playing love-struck oddballs, do manage to steal a few scenes. And I’ll have to give a shout-out to Peter MacNicol, working a bizarre accent and a near-fanatical devotion to overacting, who injects the film with something close to energy.

As a whole, the magic is thinner this time. The film feels like it’s amusing itself, but it only amuses us occasionally. The Ghostbusters piloting the Statue of Liberty through the streets of Manhattan like a patriotic float with a vendetta tries to replicate the goofy grandeur of Stay Puft, but it lacks the same weird brilliance. The movie seemed to know, almost, that it couldn’t go wrong as far as box-office returns go, and it’s entertaining enough to meet our most basic expectations. It’s even good enough to rewatch. But unfortunately, good enough is all it is.

A nostalgia-laced resurrection. Set decades after the original team saved New York, Afterlife assumes that if one generation was raised on Ghostbusters, the next must want to inherit it. Here, the past isn’t just revisited—it’s dusted off and repackaged, handed down like a family heirloom. Presumably a whole new branch of the franchise is going to follow. The big shake-up this time is that the action is uprooted from New York’s skyline to an Oklahoma dust bowl. The ghosts have apparently been waiting there, politely, for their next curtain call.

Phoebe (McKenna Grace) is a sharp, socially awkward science prodigy with no idea her late grandfather Egon was a Ghostbuster. In fact, she doesn’t even know what a Ghostbuster is. But she’s about to find out. Her broke, embittered mother (Carrie Coon) drags the family to Egon’s abandoned farmhouse, where Phoebe discovers the remnants of his life’s work: ghost traps, proton packs, an Ecto-1 with decades of grime baked onto its hood. Paul Rudd drops in as a summer school teacher, serving effectively as the pop culture Rosetta Stone for all characters under 40. In this universe, the Ghostbusters were popular, but not the sort of thing people told their children about.

Jason Reitman takes the director’s chair from his father Ivan and handles the franchise like sacred text. That’s as opposed to the 2016 reboot (which nobody, I suppose, is ever going to acknowledge again). That one was a slick, high-energy rehash that tried to stand on its own. Fans, I suppose, didn’t appreciate that it didn’t properly acknowledge the old films. But this one presses back into service the familiar iconography. There are miniature Stay Puft Marshmallow Men, a Terror Dog or two—everything even seems to have that familiar spectral glow. The ghosts look great, and much of the special effects work feels tactile. That retro flavor might be the most important callback to the original films of them all. The action trudges along, but it feels perfunctory at best. The kids dive into their roles with the kind of enthusiasm you wish the movie itself had.

The problem, though, is movies can’t run on reverence alone. There’s a distinct lack of energy. Chuckles come here and there, but the awe the children are supposed to feel when they learn ghosts are real—and that they have the power to expel them—feels forced. As much as I came out of this movie satisfied that it recalls the old films and works well enough to be counted as entertaining, I never found it stirring. I certainly never found it surprising. Even the generous callbacks seem merely obligatory (the surviving original Ghostbusters stage their encore for another final hurrah). Afterlife is a movie that knows how to bow to the past. Where it seems to have difficulty is translating that into anything fresh.

A sun-bleached teen comedy and a cultural sparkplug. Gidget is credited with kicking off the surf craze that would wash its way through early ’60s pop culture. Maybe this movie is even indirectly responsible for launching one of my favorite rock bands (The Beach Boys, in case you needed that spelled out). Sandra Dee plays 17-year-old tomboy Francine, who wanders into the sport almost by accident. She’s at the beach with her girly-girl friends, too busy chasing dates to notice that she’s drifted into the orbit of a group of local surfers. Undesirables, as far as polite company is concerned. She’s instantly fascinated—the camaraderie, the slang, the independence. Maybe one of them, a handsome plank who calls himself Moondoggie (James Darren), might even be datable material someday. But not today.

The group quickly dubs the tiny-in-stature Francine “Gidget”—short for girl midget—but what she lacks in size she makes up for in stubbornness. She keeps paddling out, wiping out, and coming back to carve out her place on the waves. Her befuddled parents are even more helpless, trying to veer her toward things they consider more appropriate for a teenage girl. She talks them into buying her a surfboard.

This could never be a proper teen movie without romance. Moondoggie is a college boy with the good looks and vague ambitions of a paperback hero. Their flirtation is light and frothy. Thankfully, it isn’t really the focus of the film, but it’s pleasant enough. You hang onto it mainly because of how infectious the character Gidget herself is. The script treats her as more than just a swimsuit on a surfboard. She has quirks, agency, a sense of humor. And Dee’s performance sells it: bright, bubbly, magnetic, and never saccharine.

Around the edges, there’s Cliff Robertson as “The Big Kahuna,” a weathered surfer who follows the sun year-round, drifting between beaches as though allergic to winter. He’s the film’s most intriguing figure—half mentor, half cautionary tale. The pop group The Four Preps show up, too, as guitar-toting surfers. They dutifully perform their song “Cinderella” right there on the sand, and lend their voices to the title theme that bookends the film.

Gidget isn’t a movie built for depth, but it’s a pop culture high-water mark. It catches its wave and rides it: buoyant, breezy, and still charming decades later. And if it’s still fun after all this time, who’s to say it won’t last decades longer?

A sugar-dusted musical with a curious aftertaste. Gigi transports us to turn-of-the-century Paris, where we get inundated with glamour by the yard. Painted salons, Paris in soft light, pastel-colored flowers, the Eiffel Tower in backdrops during a time when people first saw it as romantic. And there are songs by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner that play so precise and winsome they almost distract you from the premise.

The film opens with Maurice Chevalier cheerfully serenading a park full of little girls about their future eligibility: “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” It’s a song that once played as charming but now hovers somewhere between ironic and alarming. Well, times change. Movies don’t.

Gigi (Leslie Caron) is a schoolgirl of about 15 or 16. Bright, curious, and just unruly enough to concern her elders. She’s earmarked to become a courtesan—a mistress trained in elegance and social graces (basically, a very high-class prostitute). Her great-aunt (Isabel Jeans) oversees the curriculum. Hard lessons posture, etiquette, and how to catch a man without seeming to, while her grandmother (Hermione Gingold) looks on—fond and complicit.

But Gigi resists. At first quietly, and then not so quietly. Not because she objects to the profession exactly, but because it forces her to act polite. Simply put, not everyone deserves such treatment. Maybe hardly anyone does. Enter Gaston (Louis Jourdan), a Parisian aristocrat with too much money and too little to do. He finds himself drawn to Gigi, especially her refusal to flatter. They’ve known each other for years, but thanks to her sudden pubescent blossoming (no doubt sprung into existence by Maurice Chevalier’s own breath), he no longer sees her as a child or a friend. He sees her as something he might acquire. Gigi considers whether she’ll let him.

This meandering story is tricky, and it’s made trickier by how extravagantly it’s dressed. But Minnelli directs this with such visual confidence that the contradictions—anything modern audiences might find queasy—can slide on by in pearls and gloves. It helps that the characters rarely question their world. And the fact that Gigi does question it—that she resists the role tailored for her—makes her easy to relate to. We don’t watch this movie holding on to see whether Gaston will commit. We watch it to see whether Gigi will accept the costume that’s being fastened on her.

Caron plays Gigi like a kitten among show dogs. She’s clever and increasingly unwilling to sit still. Jourdan lets his discomfort seep through his charm, and Chevalier keeps things airy. This is a movie that begins as a powdered confection and ends with a peculiar kick. In the end, it’s a gloriously mounted musical that soothes, distracts, and quietly complicates its own fantasy.

A perfectly serviceable entry in the second-string screwball canon. Lively, likable, and just eccentric enough to pass the time—though not quite sharp enough to graduate to the big leagues. You haven’t heard of it. People at the time probably hadn’t either. In theaters, it was probably double-billed with something else. But what this movie might lack in bite, it makes up for in bounce.

The real reason for modern audiences to seek this out is that it’s a starring vehicle for Lucille Ball. She’s still pre-legend, but already working the angles. She plays Dot, a working-class secretary with a quick temper and a sturdy handbag. She finds herself and her family seated at a prestige theater, somehow scoring box seats.

But those seats ended up in their possession only because of her brother Pigeon (Lloyd Corrigan), a cheerful dope. He had claimed to have purchased them, but it comes out later that he had only “found” them. Turns out the box really belongs to the Herricks, a moneyed clan with haughty attitude to match. They attempt to reclaim their seats, and Dot responds the only way a proper screwball heroine would—she smacks one of them with her purse. The unlucky recipient of that harshly swinging pendulum is Stephen (Edmond O’Brien), who—she finds out the next day—is her new boss.

She walks into this assignment, sees him behind the desk, and starts mentally packing. But when she explains the mix-up, he softens. And then a professional relationship begins. Or maybe it’s not that professional. Don’t forget this is a screwball comedy. Wherever things look like they might settle, personal complications aren’t going to be far behind. Both Dot and Stephen are technically spoken for, which in this genre means the clock is ticking until at least one of them gets cold feet and the other starts falling in love. The titular “gob” is Dot’s fiancé, a Navy man played by George Murphy with just the right mix of cornball charm and cartoonish bravado. He comes with a party trick—able to contort himself into four extra inches of height. That makes about as much sense as the romance plot, but it’s arguably more entertaining.

Scene for scene, this film is easygoing and agreeable. I can’t say there are too many big laughs here, but there are plenty of small ones. Chuckles, smirks, a few fond head-shakes. The energy is quick, the misunderstandings mild, the stakes featherweight. I wouldn’t call this vintage film a discovery. It’s more a curio. Worth seeking out if you want a good, early glimpse of Ball’s comedic timing. You don’t always get to see that so well in her early film appearances. All in all, count this as a brisk, pleasant farce.