THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

An existential thriller. A genre that by all reason shouldn’t even exist, but here it is. And maybe it's even the cleanest, purest screen representation of existentialism that was ever put to film. If that matters to you. If you were like me in high school and struggled to understand the concept. But if none of that matters to you, then that's fine as well. No question, this is among the most nerve-shattering thrillers you’ll ever see on your TV screen.

The setup takes its time. It takes place in a sweltering, dust-choked town somewhere in South America. A purgatorial company outpost where the flies buzz as part of the décor, and poverty wears through the seams of every shirt of the people sitting around in the bars and cafés, rotting in their own boredom, waiting for some excuse to be put to use. These people—mostly men, though a few women—are broken expatriates: French, Spanish, Italian. Whoever is willing to let the oil company use them for cheap.

Then there's an explosion at a distant oil field. The only way to put out the resulting fire is a bigger explosion. Enter four expendable men, two trucks, and enough nitroglycerin to wipe out the jungle. The money—$2,000 each—is almost insulting for a job no one is expected to survive. But it entices them. Some are thinking more about the payday than what it takes to earn it. Maybe some are thinking there might also be some kind of reward in a catastrophic failure. And the roads look designed to kill them. Hit a rock too hard and you're just a memory. Drive too slowly on corrugated ridges and the vibrations will cook you. There's one mountain pass so narrow that it feels like someone’s idea of a sick joke. And all this before you ever factor in suspicion, fear, the creeping sense that dignity and self-preservation rarely travel in tandem.

Mario (Yves Montand, confidence slowly hollowing out as his journey continues) teams with Jo (Charles Vanel), older, blustery, and with failing strength. Their odd-couple dynamic is almost as volatile as the cargo. One is driven by greed, the other oddly composed.

Once the drive begins, there's no music. All you get is engines, breath, and the sound of men realizing there's hardly room for any kind of error. Maybe no room even when doing everything correctly. Every scene feels like a test. And director Henri-Georges Clouzot offers no kind of relief. It starts as a simple job but becomes a slow, blistering unraveling of nerve and resolve—so relentless that even the prospect of success starts to feel like punishment. This is a film so tense that at times I caught myself forgetting how to breathe. And that's not because the suspense builds. It's because the suspense never lets go.

Some thrillers make you jump. This one makes you listen. Wait Until Dark keeps its world small. A basement apartment. A few strangers. And Audrey Hepburn, surviving on instinct alone. She’s Susy—recently blinded in a car accident, now tracing her life through touch and sound. Her world has shrunk, committed to memory: a mental map she moves through carefully and deliberately. She counts steps. Feels the edges of furniture. Each motion must be preplanned. Every sound or shift of air demands a recalibration.

The trouble starts with a favor. Her husband (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) agrees to carry a doll through customs for a stranger. He doesn’t check what’s inside—why would he? But if he had, he’d have found it packed with heroin. He brings it home, drops it somewhere, and heads out for the day. Susy is alone when three criminals come sniffing around for it. Two of them (Richard Crenna and Jack Weston) manage to charm their way in. The third, played by Alan Arkin, is so cold and calculating it’s hard to believe he’s even human. Susy’s ready to hand over the doll when something catches her ear. Their stories don’t match. Details slip. And suddenly she realizes—these aren’t collectors. They’re predators. She doesn’t know the game, only that handing over the doll might mean she doesn’t live long enough to see how it ends.

Hepburn plays Susy with an intelligence that keeps tightening, minute by minute. You can see the gears turning, the fear giving way to calculation. It’s one of her most remarkable performances—stripped down, stripped bare, and utterly alive to every vibration that the movie throws at her.

Wait Until Dark is a near-perfect chamber piece—a movie about raw nerve, or at least as raw as mainstream Hollywood dared to get in ’67. The movie has only one weakness—and it’s a small one. It’s that we always feel one step ahead of the plot. Unlike Susy, we can see the traps closing in. We know who’s lying. We can even sense exactly where the story’s headed.

But the movie’s wound tight, and Hepburn’s not-so-helpless fight keeps it alive. A movie not about what’s hiding in the dark but about what happens when the dark starts moving.

Word to the wise: don’t drink anything sticky while you watch Waiting for Guffman. This isn’t your typical setup-to-punchline comedy. It lulls you into an innocuous sip and then—wham! One of the characters drop a line so quietly deranged that you end up spewing whatever was in your mouth clearly across the room. (I’m speaking this from experience.) This is the first of Christopher Guest’s improv mock-docs, borrowing the same template that he helped forge with Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap twelve years earlier.

Guest plays Corky St. Clair, self-anointed theater king of Blaine, Missouri. He’s staging a musical for the town’s 150th. A man of vision. Tap shoes. And a closet door that might as well have a neon sign that says “gay” flashing over it. But the joke isn’t about “outing” him. The joke is how completely the town loves him exactly as he is.

The auditions reel in an oddball chorus. Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara—travel agents with Broadway dreams. Parker Posey—frosts cakes by day, sings like she’s aiming at Sondheim. Eugene Levy—braces and earnestness clearly on the same payment plan. None of them seem to be in the same show. That’s okay, because Corky might as well be directing a different one entirely.

We barely see the play until the finale. By then, we’re primed for anything. What we get is part civic valentine, part acid-trip hallucination. And it’s performed for an audience that reacts like they’ve just witnessed Les Misérables crack open the heavens.

The cast improvise like sharpshooters. Every crooked note they fling into this movie’s ether somehow lands exactly where it should. This is a satire about eccentrics that actually appreciates eccentricity. A movie so funny it stings. But then—somewhere between the laughter—you start to notice it’s tender, too. Waiting for Guffman might not reach Spinal Tap’s height, but it catches the same wind, skimming the same clouds.

Proudly, relentlessly goofy, and honestly a joy. Adam Sandler adopts a full-throttle Bayou accent (or an attempt at one, at least) that sounds like it was forged somewhere between a catfish boil and a dental emergency. Of course, if that’s going to irritate you, and you’re already predisposed against Sandler’s brand of lazy, frat-boy comedy, steer yourself far, far clear from this specimen. But to those of us who can stomach it, maybe even enjoy it, Sandler is strangely endearing here as Bobby Boucher—an emotionally stunted, painfully awkward man in his 30s who is obsessively devoted to the science of hydration.

He’s gainfully employed with the University of Louisiana Cougars football team, and when he finds that his water is at ideal temperature and peak purity, he’ll utter his catchphrase: “Now that’s what I call high-quality H2O.” But things aren’t all that cheery in his world. He is relentlessly bullied and mocked, and the team also finds his devotion to water pretty weird. So he is fired. (Call me crazy, but why would you run out a guy who just wants to give you a perfect drink of water when all you do is run around chasing some ovular thing made of leather under the open, sweltering Louisiana sun and humidity so thick that you could drink it?)

But Bobby doesn’t stay unemployed for long. He is picked up by a flailing rival team, this one coached by the perpetually overwhelmed Coach Klein (Henry Winkler). Klein, and the team’s more misfit brand of players, are the first people to treat Bobby like he might actually be capable of something. And, as it would turn out, he is capable of things that extend even well beyond water hydromancy. All of the bullying and repression that’s been simmering within his psyche for years is suddenly allowed to unleash itself on the gridiron, and Bobby suddenly becomes a one-man wrecking crew. He joins the team, enrolls in classes, and his life is suddenly transformed. But he has to keep this part of his life secret.

Because he has a mother (Kathy Bates, chewing the scenery with the utmost glee), who is fervently convinced that education, football, and girls—especially girls—are works of the devil. And she means it, too. Naturally, of course, Bobby is going to find himself attracted to a young woman who even the most grounded mother might describe as at least satanic-adjacent. She’s Vicki (the chronically underestimated actress Fairuza Balk), a parolee who drives a motorcycle and looks like she might key your car just for fun.

This puts the elements all in place for enough conflict to make a fun comedy that’s not sharp exactly and certainly not sophisticated, but it’s otherwise packed with plenty of strange side characters, bizarre line readings, and weirdly memorable throwaway jokes. Sandler’s irritating to some sensibilities, but he plays with genuine heart. Bates goes big and makes it sing. Winkler is so committed to his nebbish coach persona that he’s strangely endearing. Even if you’re just slightly on board with Sandler’s brand of comedy, this is a gem. Funny in a gut-busting way, strange and intoxicating, and sweet in a way that might catch you off guard.

You can feel the movie negotiating with itself. We Have a Ghost wants to scare you, hug you, and go viral—all at the same time. But it doesn’t end up doing any of those particularly well.

The ghost in question is Ernest (played by a mostly silent David Harbour). For a ghost, he’s surprisingly dull. He has a combover, bowling shirt, blank stare. He isn’t a ghost as much as he’s a man haunting his own nap. Like someone who fell asleep during Columbo reruns and then forgot to wake up. He isn’t sure why his spirit is still hanging around his old house. He can’t even remember how he died.

The Presleys are the new owners of the house. They bought it cheap. Too cheap. A fixer-upper they thought had lots charm and a little bit of rot. The realtor forgot to mention, though, that the property also came with a ghost. Realtors somehow always leave that little detail out. The youngest and cleverest of the family is Kevin (Jahi Di’Allo Winston). He doesn’t scream at the sight of Ernest. He studies him. He even sees capturing Ernest on video as a shot at YouTube fame. But once he gets to know him, the viral idea fades. He even ends up liking the guy. Ernest can’t speak. He doesn’t even remember how he died. Cue the buddy mystery plot.

There are stabs at satire, but the film keeps polishing them flat. There are occasional gestures toward weirdness, but then it blinks. One minute the film is skewering influencer culture. The next, it’s handing out Hallmark wisdom about grief and redemption. There’s horror. Family drama. Dry comedy. Conspiracy chase. The movie wants to be everything. All it ends up with is nothing.

Harbour and Winston fight to keep some chemistry going, and their oddball chemistry occasionally flickers through the softness like static—brief and fuzzy. But the film itself is too saccharine, too manufactured. You’ll start rolling your eyes long before you buy into any of this.

By the end, this is a movie that turned its own premise into a sideshow. Ghost stories can survive nonsense, but not the lack of narrative focus. This one likes to keep reshaping itself—horror, comedy, or mystery—and the mix feels flat. This is the cinematic equivalent of trying to mix together too many colors of Play-Doh. Maybe it feels inventive at the time, but all you wind up with in the end is a gray lump.