THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

A quiet, airless, semi-autobiographical drama that drifts in like smoke so thin you only notice it once you see what it’s been corroding. Writer-director Joanna Hogg brings us this film that has no interest in tidiness or obvious payoffs. It asks for patience. And the reward is a film that feels tender and precise. But it also feels merciless in its depiction of a poisonous romance.

Honor Swinton Byrne plays Julie, a shy student who has money and a Knightsbridge flat. Her artistic temperament is still in its early phases. She has ambition but doesn’t yet know what she wants to say. Her somewhat aimless existence seems to find some kind of meaning when an older man named Anthony (Tom Burke) falls into her orbit. There’s a cultivated detachment about him that can pass for sophistication. By profession, he works for the Foreign Office—or at least claims to. He speaks with a grim intellectual gravity and is able to guide her through museums as if culture itself were his possession. He’s charming, even though he quietly telegraphs “bad idea” to everyone. That is, except of course for Julie, who is too stricken to see any of it. They find a mutual fascination studying The Souvenir by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, a painting that becomes their private metaphor for a love neither of them can define.

But where there is a rise, there is the inevitable fall—even in art-house cinema. The cracks start to widen. Anthony asks to borrow money. He will occasionally disappear into bathrooms for long stretches. His once-polished ability to explain his erratic behavior begins to unravel. He grows manipulative. And then Julie starts to realize that this man isn’t enigmatic at all. He’s addicted to heroin. Has been all this time, but he’s become less effective at hiding it. And by this time, it’s already too late. Her life has bent toward his, and there’s no neat way of undoing it.

Hogg resists melodrama, instead letting the film accumulate through small, spare scenes that feel like diary entries. Swinton Byrne’s gentle bewilderment and Burke’s slippery evasions carry it, backed by a script that’s exact, almost forensic in its emotional calibration.

By the end, this isn’t so much a romance as it is an autopsy of one—where intelligence is mistaken for depth and love drifts into submission before you even notice the shift. And by the time you do, the cost has already been collected.

It all started with Air Bud, the dog who played basketball. Then he played soccer. Then football. Then volleyball. And through a steady erosion of narrative restraint, we arrive at the Air Buddies spin-off. This entry features five golden retriever puppies clad in miniature space suits, stowing away on a rocket, and landing somewhere on the moon. The premise is pretty much SpaceCamp, except repackaged for the chew-toy demographic. Just swap out the teenagers, lower the stakes, and everything else falls into place.

The Buddies embark on their lunar journey while on a school field trip at a private space company named Vision Enterprises, with security protocols seemingly modeled after a Chuck E. Cheese. They sneak into the launch bay and board the shuttle before they’re launched into orbit without so much as an alarm. Along the way, they meet Spudnick, a Russian cosmodog still orbiting from a Cold War–era mission. They also receive help from ground control via a ferret known as Gravity. All of this is played completely straight, which was the right instinct, but unfortunately the film is so slight and—er—stupid that it can’t even make me grin on an ironic basis. Even by Air Buddies standards, this movie isn’t very good—it’s nothing more than a slow-motion parade of teamwork slogans and off-brand Looney Tunes gags. At one point, one of the pups farts inside his suit, causing it to inflate. Another pup observes that he suddenly resembles the Goodyear Blimp. Sad to say, I just described the highlight of the whole movie.

The Buddies themselves are, of course, pristine and camera-ready. They blink on cue and move their mouths in loosely synchronized loops. It’s all done well enough to look functional, even if it’s thoroughly unimpressive. Whatever chance the film had of being decent is undone by dialogue that sounds like it was written in a single afternoon and a story that does nothing but float idly from one obstacle to the next until the runtime expires.

The tone is too safe, the pacing is flat, and the gags tire out well before they have a chance to land. I’d call this entry disappointing, but disappointment assumes some kind of expectation. An entry from this franchise doesn’t exactly invite that. But I’ll give it credit where credit is due: this film delivers exactly what it promises. That is, puppies in space, a dopey joke or two, and a safe return home. If you stick with it, your only reward will be the rolling credits. Then your toddler might eat a crayon. Life, as it always does, goes on.

A movie that delivers exactly what it promises and little else. It’s about four geezers—Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner—and they go to space. This marks the first time they ever escaped Earth’s gravitational pull, having been test pilots back in 1958. They were about ready for liftoff when their NASA boss (James Cromwell) decided to unceremoniously replace them with a chimp.

More than forty years later, the dream of space has faded into a memory, but unexpectedly they get another shot. A Soviet satellite is threatening to fall out of orbit in the most dramatic way possible, and it has one highly specific engineering flaw that only Frank Corvin (Eastwood) can fix. Too obsolete for new engineers, too complicated to teach anyone in time. Frank agrees to help, but only on one condition—that he gets the band back together. That is, Hawk (Jones), the hothead; Tank (Garner), the voice of reason; and Jerry (Sutherland), the technical whiz and resident flirt (thankfully there are no space babes to encourage it while he’s on the job).

Of course, they can’t just pack their bags and go. First they have to pass the physical, which takes up a generous stretch of the film and supplies most of its laughs. Think a frothier version of the endurance tests in The Right Stuff. Frank and Hawk are still holding a grudge from decades back, which bubbles up through playful (and sometimes not especially playful) arguments. At one point they even wager on who will black out first in the centrifuge. Where the film falters is in the story, which is hopelessly predictable, and a final act that tips too far into sentiment and contrivance. But it’s hard to mind too much when the cast is this good.

Eastwood directs with his usual dependability—disciplined, unshowy, and entirely aware of what kind of movie he’s making. He keeps it moving. The plot, of course, is nonsense—NASA would never sign off on any of this—and the runtime is longer than it needs to be, but it drifts along easily enough. A film that’s never hard to sit through, carried by the simple novelty of seeing these veterans go orbital.

I grew up on Looney Tunes, those seven-minute blasts of mayhem, cleverness, and comic timing that felt so astute you’d think it all flowed out of them naturally. I still revisit the cartoons. They were already decades old when I saw them as a kid, and they’re even decades older today, but they still work. I can only assume they’ll keep reverberating through the decades.

But Space Jam taps into none of that inspired whimsy. The sharp timing and anarchic spirit are reduced here to little more than a jittery, flattened facsimile. I came out of this movie not entertained so much as scrambled. The Tunes do little more here than run around spouting ’90s slang, like they’d been scripted by a focus group and then handed 25 cups of espresso. The animation is slick and the pacing is loud, but it all seems to struggle.

Michael Jordan, meanwhile, makes his acting debut. He’s willing, perhaps even eager, but he also seems stuck here, like he’s never entirely sure where he is, waiting for stage direction that never comes. It’s just as well he never pursued acting further. He’s simply not very good at it. And the story doesn’t do him many favors, either—an awkward concoction that exists only to mash Jordan together with the Looney Tunes, and it doesn’t do that particularly well.

The story goes something like this: Jordan is recruited to help the Looney Tunes fend off a gang of tiny alien henchmen who call themselves Nerdlucks. They challenge them to a contest. If the Tunes lose, Bugs and Co. will become theme park attractions for life. But that’s no problem. They sense a loophole and pick the game to be basketball. It seems like an easy win—the Nerdlucks are so tiny and meager that they could be squashed by bugs. What they don’t expect, however, is for the aliens to bulk up into creatures known as Monstars, after they siphon away talent from actual NBA stars. Luckily for the Tunes, though, Michael Jordan, who is the greatest of them all, isn’t on their radar. He’s off playing minor-league baseball. That is how he becomes their last hope.

Cue the training montages, cartoon pratfalls, and a barrage of digital noise meant to do little more than prevent kids from looking away. The movie isn’t a total loss, though. It has its flickers of fun. Bill Murray drops in with his trademark sardonic drawl, and Wayne Knight can mug the camera like a pro. But overall, there’s just not enough to redeem the sluggish plotting or the dizzyingly manic tone. Chalk this up as deeply underwhelming. The Tunes deserved better than this. Jordan did too.