THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

Some films beg to be remade. Sabrina wasn’t one of them. But Sydney Pollack takes Billy Wilder’s fairy tale of class and longing and plays it again in a glossier key. The bones are still the same—a chauffeur’s daughter, two Larrabee brothers, a tangle of misplaced affections. You know the story. Only now it gleams a little too neatly. This not Wilder’s alchemy. The movie wouldn’t have been able to recreate that even if it tried. This is something softer, slower, and dressed for the ’90s.

Julia Ormond steps into Audrey Hepburn’s shadow and doesn’t flinch. Her Sabrina is warm, poised, luminous—but not borrowed. She skips the porcelain fragility, the fluttering sweetness. What she lacks is that peculiar Hepburn shimmer—that mix of worldliness and weightlessness that made the original glow from the inside. Ormond’s light is steadier, more human. She’s not a daydream. She’s flesh, thought, and presence. You believe her.

Greg Kinnear is David Larrabee—a man who thinks good hair and a lazy grin can solve most of his problems. It usually does. He flirts the way some people breathe. Out of nature, not hunger. You can see why Sabrina fell for him once. It’s just as clear why that version of her couldn’t last.

Harrison Ford, as Linus, is a different story. He’s measured and deliberate. Allergic to spontaneity. The businessman brother who treats feelings like contract negotiations. Ford strikes me as a bit of a strange choice of casting. He has too much charisma, too much gravity. In the original, Humphrey Bogart made Linus the unlikely choice for Sabrina. Here, it isn’t much of a contest. Most women, given the choice, would pick Ford over Kinnear without a second thought. Even so, he finds something sly in the restraint. You can see him thinking through every line, and somehow that becomes the point. Linus isn’t supposed to sweep Sabrina off her feet. He surprises her by being human. By being worth spending time with. The way, I suppose, all romance is supposed to be.

Pollack directs it all with an easy hand. Nothing rushed, nothing forced. The Paris scenes glow like handbag ads. The Long Island estates look quietly airless, as they should. The film never reaches for Wilder’s sparkle. It prefers polish. But this is quiet surprise, really. A remake that remembers the shape of the original dream. Then it glosses it up into something worth watching. The rare serious romantic film for adults.

You wouldn’t call Sahara smart, exactly. But you can call it confident. An adventure fueled not by logic but by cast charisma and sand-blasted spectacle. It’s based on a Clive Cussler novel, where realism checks out somewhere after the dedication page. The film opens with a bizarre rumor. That an American Civil War ironclad is buried somewhere in the West African desert. How did it get there? Why so far from home? Don’t know. But seems a peculiar enough hook to care. American adventurer Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey) is convinced that this is more than a rumor, and he comes with evidence.

Pitt’s the kind of man who could charm his way out of a sandstorm. He’s tan, confident, and has his own rebranding of the word “recklessness.” Something he calls “instinct.” Steve Zahn tags along as Al. A friend, a sidekick, a comic ballast. He also talks so little that it’s like he thinks words cost money. Together they crash through explosions, chase sequences, and heat mirages. At one point they commandeer a yacht and steer it through gunfire. Later they turn a wrecked plane into a desert skiff. MacGyver with heatstroke.

Penélope Cruz turns up as Eva Rojas, a WHO doctor tracing a strange illness up the Niger River. She’s here to play the adult in the room. The medic. The voice of reason. The one trying to keep the boys from dying of their own enthusiasm. But she also brings something lighter. Something the script didn’t necessarily prescribe. A kind of childlike flicker in her eyes that shows she’s decided to abandon her inhibitions and play along with these lunatics. Maybe she enjoys the company too. Not that she’d ever admit it.

The movie feels the same way—too restless to pause, too pleased with itself to care that it’s mostly sand and swagger. The action is clean and streamlined. Maybe too much so. The physics, of course, is debatable. The desert looks spectacular—almost like it’s unreal. The tension feels a bit slack, but there’s still plenty of motion here. Overall, chalk this up as an entertaining pulpy adventure. Best enjoyed by adventure seekers who know better than to ask their movies to make sense. For people who just want to watch it sweat.

Seven friends graduate from Georgetown and go tumbling into adulthood. A time when the party’s over. Now there are jobs to get, rent to pay, hearts to break, real hangovers to nurse. But the problem is this: the party might be over, but no one flipped the off switch. You don’t suddenly become an adult—it’s more like you drift into being one. And even those experienced at it for a while (let me tell you a secret, young ’uns) are still pretending. But you’re less good at pretending when you’re in your mid-20s and still haven’t found the bearings college promised to give you. St. Elmo’s Fire is Joel Schumacher’s glossy ode to that kind of denial.

Rob Lowe plays the sax-blowing bad boy who thinks charisma counts as a career path. Demi Moore floats through hangovers and heartbreak, burning through money and mascara like both are infinite. Emilio Estevez thinks obsession is love. Andrew McCarthy calls detachment depth. Judd Nelson keeps mistaking ambition for maturity. Only Ally Sheedy and Mare Winningham seem remotely self-aware. Which, in this group, might as well count as sainthood.

The movie doesn’t ask you to like them. It just wants you to recognize the type. They still think life’s a continuation of college: do the work, get the result, move up. But things are messier now—especially the overlapping romantic triangles that get so complex they start to look like an unsolvable geometry problem.

Visually, the movie looks great. It’s bathed in that soft-light glow and nostalgic haze that defines peak Brat Pack cinema. The sweaters are perfect. The angst practically framed. It’s also offensive in spots—though in the same way some people you might actually know are offensive. What matters is that beneath all the gloss, the feelings ring true: the confusion, the competitiveness, the desperate need to seem OK. They feel familiar, even to my own memories of those post-collegiate years.

You can laugh at their privilege, their hair, their sax solos. But it’s harder to dismiss that ache—the desperate wish for everything to make sense. Especially in a film like this, which captures it so clearly. Other aspects don’t hold up as well. The dialogue can come off as stiff. There could have been more humor and warmth. But St. Elmo’s Fire still lands where it counts—in that first real collision between youthful certainty and adult compromise. The moment you realize no one’s grading on a curve anymore. And there are no office hours left to negotiate your future.

Oscar Wilde’s play Salome was banned in Britain when it was originally published. In director Ken Russell’s hands, nearly a century later, it’s reborn as a full-throated hallucination. Russell is working here at near-peak clarity. Salome’s Last Dance has theatricality deep in its marrow, but it’s shot with such visual bravado and tonal conviction that what should feel ridiculous instead feels riveting.

This isn’t a straightforward adaptation of Salome, though. There’s a framing device: the play is being put on in a brothel, with Oscar Wilde himself (Nikolas Grace) in attendance. The Madame (Glenda Jackson) presides over the staging, pulling strings while Wilde looks on. From there, the film dives straight into the play, performed with such bizarre gaudiness and intensity that “restraint” must have been a dirty word in Russell’s vocabulary. Candles, velvet, dissonant flutes. It’s a confetti cannon of sensory overload—so intoxicating that I eventually realized I’d stopped noticing the words altogether.

But naturally, there’s a story, and it’s an often riveting one. Salome (Imogen Millais-Scott) is the teenage stepdaughter of King Herod (Stratford Johns). She enters like a shadow, poised like a statue, her gaze extending halfway across the room. She has a dangerous fixation on John the Baptist (Douglas Hodge)—here known as Jokanaan. His response is to lash back at her with the fury of a prophet, scorching her and anything else within range. Herod, meanwhile, leers and lunges at anything that breathes—man, woman, it makes no difference—as if the entire cast is wired to his personal hormonal circuit.

The play-within-the-film is fearless as it brushes against homoeroticism, incest, hedonism, and sacrilege. And it does that so feverishly that I felt completely swept along by its hedonistic scripture. Call this sideshow without safety net. You’ll either tune into the manic opera, or you’ll be left standing outside in the lobby, not sure if you’re supposed to be baffled or offended. And anyone who claims to fall somewhere in between that polarity must be a rare breed indeed.