THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

In Spanish with English subtitles.

When we first meet Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho)—a middle-aged, minor Spanish colonial official stationed in Argentina’s interior in the late 18th century—he’s crouched in the reeds, spying on Black women bathing in a muddy river. One spots him and charges. His response is to slap her relentlessly, again and again. Not to injure her, just to exert what little power he has over her. He got caught doing something juvenile, and maybe he’s embarrassed by it, maybe angry. But she’s the one who committed the worse of the crimes: insolence.

Next we learn that Zama has one ambition, one that he pursues relentlessly: to be transferred to the city of Lerma. Lerma promises centrality and power. What he has instead is stagnation. He files petitions and flatters superiors. He makes himself small. He waits for official word of his transfer to come in. Then waits longer. Nothing. Zama serves the Crown, but the Crown is spectral. He’s trying to climb a ladder, but it doesn’t just lead nowhere—it was never anchored to anything to begin with.

There is still a colonial power structure here, but it exists only in gestures—formal greetings and bows. Empty rituals performed by men who are too proud to notice that nobody beyond their little environment notices them. Zama’s only duty is to sign paperwork, and he does that with a kind of practiced pomp. These are empty rituals performed by men who are too proud to notice that nobody notices them. They might have thought they were getting into colonialism as conquest, but all they got was colonialism as inertia. There’s no grandeur. Only formality and heatstroke.

What gives the film its incredible sense of texture is its setting. If this isn’t one of the most authentic-looking films about colonial South America, then I don’t know what is. Each frame is a portrait warped by humidity. You can feel the heat and humidity pressing in. The interiors feel suffocating. Colonial uniforms wilt on bodies that never belonged in this climate. Wigs slip. Uniforms sag. Insects buzz in rooms where nothing else moves, especially the people. Landscapes stretch into nothing. Sunlight falls on faces that seem startled just to be alive. This is a movie that feels surreal and precise in equal measure.

It would be an understatement to say Zama is not an exciting movie. It’s an uncomfortable one. But it’s also immersive and brilliant. Dryly comic, hypnotically strange, quietly damning. This is not a movie you follow so much as one you surrender to.

Porky’s by way of ESP. Barney Springboro (Scott Baio) is a lab-coated, sexually frustrated high schooler who accidentally brews up telekinetic powers in science class. He doesn’t use it for science. Nor does he use it to become a superhero. He uses it to levitate skirts—a power depraved from its very first thought and corrupts immediately and spectacularly.

This is a film that runs on hormonal impulse and VHS-era shamelessness, with Barney and his horndog friend Peyton (Willie Aames) turning psychic ability into a low-stakes sex crime spree. There is plot here, but why bother pretending it matters? We watch this movie to watch women treated as test subjects. Wardrobe malfunctions waiting to happen. This isn’t a comedy so much as the manifestation of a teenage fantasy—albeit a virulent one.

But when you look beyond the slobbering surface, you start to notice the film has a satirical streak. You start to see Zapped! as a movie perched in the rafters, taking potshots at Carrie. And I wouldn’t exactly call it sharp as much as I would call it giddy—and surprisingly funny. Barney’s mother (Mews Small) is a religious zealot who responds to her son’s sudden abilities with full fire-and-brimstone hysteria—convinced he invited Satan into the house through chemistry. Best of all, though, is the finale: a prom sequence gone insane not through fire and carnage, but through clothing ejections and disco.

Zapped! is a sophomoric sex comedy with junk-food logic, and Scott Baio’s acting can be—at best—described as a black hole of charisma. This is clearly intended to appeal to our worst, prurient instincts. But I’d also be lying if the movie didn’t have moments didn’t amuse me to death. I can’t in good conscience recommend this movie to anyone, apart from aficionados of pop culture curios. It’s not a good movie, but maybe it’ll surprise you.

A teen sex comedy made with a kind of sincerity that you only get from early-’80s comedies made by adults who should know better. You certainly won’t feel smarter after watching it. But you might feel nostalgic. Or at least mildly stunned.

Zardoz opens with a man’s disembodied head floating through blackness. His eyes are painted on, he has a mustache scribbled in magic marker, and he’s reciting some kind of cosmic haiku about death and the divine. Then it cuts to an exterior shot, and the stone god itself—Zardoz—descends before a crowd of kneeling worshippers from the clouds like a pagan blimp. It comes preaching that “the gun is good” and “the penis is evil.” Then it vomits rifles.

Among those who catch the rifles is Zed—played by Sean Connery. He is a walking contradiction: primal fury wrapped in costuming best described as drag revue—red loincloth, bullet-suspenders, boots that creep up his thighs, hair done up in a ponytail. But Zed isn’t really a worshipper of Zardoz. He is a rebel. He infiltrates the head, kills its pilot, and then crash-lands in the Vortex—a cloistered society of immortal intellectuals so advanced that they’ve forgotten how to move their limbs. Thought has replaced action. Death is obsolete. Sex is mostly theorized.

This movie is a total, unrecoverable mess. What I described isn’t even the extent of its weirdness, and your guess is as good as mine as to what it’s all about. There are whispers of philosophy—mortality, entropy, class, repression—but each idea arrives lacquered in critic voiceover and slow-motion interpretive writhing. But at least there’s a kind of conviction in its psychedelic hand-waving. This is arthouse cinema as a sci-fi séance with imagery so striking and painterly, even in its ridiculousness, that it has a kind of hypnotic pull. Its interior shots glow with a synthetic mist. Landscapes stretch out like faded tapestries.

Connery is game—perhaps too eager to shed himself of Bond typecasting—and that carries its own kind of gravitas. Even when the film strands him in endless tableaus of psychic interrogation and metaphysical finger-pointing, he never winks at the camera. Who are we to look for reasons not to believe his conviction? Charlotte Rampling, as one of the “Eternals,” stares at Zed like she sees him both as a god and a punchline. And when the film finally unveils the true origin of the name “Zardoz,” it’s not an epiphany—it makes every atrocious twist ending ever dreamed up by M. Night Shyamalan look like a masterstroke of genius.

Zardoz isn’t so much a movie as it is a relic from a strange time in cinematic history when plot could get away with being optional and symbolism could strut around in thigh-highs. There’s no conceivable way I could ever consider this movie “good,” but I also admire it. It’s ambitious and absurd. It’s mesmerizing in how it plays it straight, even if the effect is warped. For all its flaws, this is a movie you won’t forget. You won’t forgive it, either.

Think Jumanji, except cold and airless. Two brothers—one sulky (Josh Hutcherson), one clingy (Jonah Bobo)—discover an old tin board game in their basement. They decide to give it a spin. And the next thing they know, their house is in outer space.

The game is called Zathura. The rules are vague, but the consequences are immediate. Meteors come tearing through the living room. Their sister (Kristen Stewart) gets frozen solid in the bathroom. A sarcastic astronaut (Dax Shepard) drops in—uninvited, of course. Their property is suddenly inundated with a race of warlike space lizards who circle like cosmic vultures. All of this plays out (and must conclude) before their dad (Tim Robbins) gets home from work. Because breaking a window with a baseball is one thing, but misplacing their entire house? Something else entirely.

The Jumanji connection isn’t incidental, by the way. This was adapted from a children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg, the same author who wrote Jumanji. Perhaps the setup and story arc feel too familiar and a bit like self-plagiarism. But to its credit, this is a formula that works: high-stakes fantasy, old-fashioned child endangerment, and a surprisingly sweet arc about two brothers who experience emotional growth by learning not to annihilate each other.

Visually, this movie is excellent. The effects are mostly practical, lending the film a retro-pulp flavor and a tactile quality that’s often missing from early-2000s CGI orgies. There are cold steel corridors you can feel, consoles outfitted with glowing, blinking glass lights, and an electronic gameboard that looks like it might develop a short and zap you.

This is a sharply made and briskly paced film that might even be more technically polished than the more fondly remembered Jumanji. But what it lacks is that film’s mythic pull, and the gravity of Robin Williams. What we do get is no small consolation: Josh Hutcherson playing the older brother as a pint-sized tyrant, convincing enough that you believe him, and the wide, worried eyes of Jonah Bobo. Bobo is so earnest that he grounds the film, and he’s the one through whom we experience it all.

This is a movie where even the cartoony moments have stakes, because they feel as though they’re rooted in childhood logic. While this doesn’t quite carry the heart of Jumanji, it’s certainly a worthy (and far too under-celebrated!) entry in the franchise.