THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

I like Seabiscuit because it’s warm and earnest. It’s about damaged men who forge a path through this mortal coil by connecting with one another, and with one animal in particular: a horse named Seabiscuit. He was a Depression-era misfit, and by any rational measure, he should have been nothing. Small, knock-kneed, gait all wrong. Yet in an age of breadlines and thin hope, he managed to win races, pushing himself into the public imagination and becoming a symbol of grit in a country short on it.

Almost as unlikely as the horse itself was the rider, Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire), a man who seemed battered even before his life began. Too tall for a jockey. Too volatile to trust. Too broke to quit. He claws at whatever he can to keep himself close to the track. Cleaning stalls. Boxing for cash. Riding with broken bones. Catching trains to the next gig. This is survival, not progress. But fate sometimes rewards the persistent, and this jockey considered too large for the track is matched with a horse considered too small. It’s stubbornness answering stubbornness. Grit binding grit. Man and beast dragging something better out of each other.

Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) is the third piece of this puzzle, a car magnate who became a hollowed-out widower. He loses his son in an automobile accident and drifts into horse racing as a means of passing time and needling his way back into the world of the living. Bridges plays him with a quiet ache—his attempt at a new lease on life pressing at the edges, though never spoken. He takes the gamble of hiring Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), a trainer with a reputation for coaxing sparks out of misfits. Unpopular, unpolished, borderline feral—Smith sizes up Seabiscuit and doesn’t see defects; he sees possibilities. No one else would have taken him seriously. Howard does, because sincerity has a way of bulldozing skepticism.

This is a movie that stacks underdogs on underdogs. Red too broken, Tom too odd, Charles too lost, and the horse nobody sane would’ve staked a dollar on. Sepia-hazed Americana is the packaging: slow-motion finishes, golden fields, orchestral swells ready to announce every uplift. Corny? Sure. Rousing? Also yes.

Its one real flaw is that it pours on sentiment like especially thick corn syrup, especially the narration, which plays like a vintage newsreel announcer roped into bedtime-story duty. Cornball to the point of distraction. And at two-and-a-half hours, the film sometimes drifts toward its own indulgence. But still, as history reworked into comfort food, it’s sweet and earnest enough to survive the hokeyness. This is a sports movie brushed with legend that carries just enough grit in its sincerity to feel more than an inspirational poster.

A Reagan-era fairytale about bootstraps, bluffs and the magic of looking the part. The premise is lifted directly from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but the satire is filed down in favor of something breezier, safer, and—depending on your tolerance for movies about corporate wish fulfillment—fairly charming.

Michael J. Fox stars as Brantley Foster, a bright-eyed Kansas college graduate who arrives in Manhattan armed with nothing more than optimism and that freshly printed degree. But unfortunately, New York seems to have no interest in either. Every job he applies to demands experience, and no company seems to be offering it. The classic bureaucratic ouroboros—the corporate mouth duct-taped to its own tail that leaves neophyte workers scratching their heads over how to get a foot in.

In Brantley’s case, nepotism is that key. His uncle Howard (Richard Jordan) happens to be a CEO of the Pemrose corporation, an outfit that makes an undefined product. But Howard has little patience for family loyalty and only begrudgingly installs him in the mailroom.

But he now has a foothold in the corporation, and from there, he engineers a second identity—Carlton Whitfield, a junior executive who slips between cubicles, adopts an abandoned office, and starts making critical decisions under a borrowed letterhead. Corporate improv that, for a while, works.

Meanwhile, he strikes up a romance with Christy (Helen Slater), an executive sharp enough to sense that something’s off, but her character is too underwritten for her to do much about it. Their chemistry is light but underfed—it goes down easily enough, but it feels too much like the script put them together out of obligation, as though all these movies require a romantic element. It plays like a subplot still waiting for a second draft.

More problematic is this movie’s tone-deaf detour in which Brantley’s Aunt Vera (Margaret Whitton) tries to seduce him—a scene that means to echo The Graduate but mostly feels uncomfortable and stranded. Fox, to his credit, never wavers, even in these scenes. He has a quick wit and an open-faced likability that keeps the film from collapsing under its own flimsiness. He fits the premise’s comedy-of-errors framework like a glove.

But he’s stuck in a script that pulls its punches—it’s a movie that hints at ambition and ingenuity, but defaults into convenience. There’s fun to be had, but the satire vanishes and the romance fizzles. For a movie about upward mobility, The Secret of My Success never quite climbs past the confines of its own premise. But if the movie doesn’t live up to its title, it at least embodies the spirit—success without really trying.

There is something spellbindingly grave about The Secret of NIMH in the thick, unspoken sadness that seems baked into its soil. The illustrations are lush, but they’re accompanied by a hushed overarching tone that seems almost monastic, as though they were drawn by someone who never really outgrew fear. Even more harrowing is the story, which feels like it was written by someone who no longer believes in happy endings, yet remains open to being proven wrong.

The film follows a recently widowed field mouse, Mrs. Brisby (voiced by Elizabeth Hartman), doing her best to keep her young children alive in a cinder block on the outskirts of a farmyard. Her youngest son is desperately sick, and the tractors are coming—threatening to wipe out their home. Mrs. Brisby embarks on what’s initially a simple quest for medicine, but it eventually evolves into something far stranger. She ventures into the world of NIMH, a place where genetically modified rats live underneath a rose bush, who have sharpened minds and an aversion to daylight. She seeks help from one rat in particular, an aged mystic-in-residence named Nicodemus. He agrees to help—but not before he reveals the strange attributes about the rodents that live in their little pocket of the world—including even Mrs. Brisby herself.

This was writer/director Don Bluth’s first feature since leaving Disney, and he proved right away a formidable rival to his former company. Not only is the animation done so well that it outmatches much of Disney’s peak output in the 1940s and 1950s, but the story is rich and immersive—particularly brilliant with its slow and deliberate unraveling, while also avoiding the traps of rushing towards sentiment. There’s a whirlwind of emotion here, but that also includes pain and anxiety. That, of course, just makes the triumphs, even when they are qualified like they are here, even greater.

The adventure is mesmerizing, more folklore than fantasy, even when it’s occasionally mired down by its own sense of gravity. Some transitions also feel more poetic than purposeful, but that all just adds to the texture. Gluing it all together amazingly is Mrs. Brisby, who is not a standard-issue protagonist. She is nervous, oftentimes outmatched, and she is visibly exhausted. But the film doesn’t condescend to her. She succeeds not because she’s brave, but because she keeps going.

The Secret of NIMH isn’t so much a children’s movie but a solemn little epic about intelligence, survival, and the price of persistence. There are a few moments that feel more murky than mythic, but that’s just part of the risk when a film this earnest tries to shoot just slightly beyond its range. This is one of the most phenomenally engrossing films, animated or otherwise, you’ll find out there.

For about an hour, Secret Window is a thriller that coils nicely. It’s a mystery with some teeth and has me feeling like I’m on the edge of my seat, like it has something clever waiting in the wings. But ultimately, it cashes out with an ending that feels like the writer got bored with it all.

Johnny Depp stars as Mort Rainey, a once-famous author living in bathrobe-exile in an upstate New York cabin, trying to outrun his writer’s block—not to mention a recent divorce that circles his mind like a hurricane that refuses to dissipate. He naps, dreaming about this betrayal. He mutters about it in his waking hours. He keeps replaying the same arguments in his mind like a scratched record that he can’t stop spinning.

Then comes the knock. It’s a stranger garbed in a wide-brimmed hat, speaking in a thick Southern accent, and clutching a manuscript tightly in his hand. He introduces himself as John Shooter (John Turturro). His story, “Sowing Season,” was published years ago in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine—and it looks a little too much like Mort’s latest novel. Shooter wants some kind of retribution. Justice, revenge, or both. Mort insists that he didn’t steal it. The proof Shooter claims to have of the theft doesn’t seem to hold up, either. Mort tries to wave him off. But the more he dismisses him, the worse things seem to get. A dog turns up dead. Cryptic threats follow. And soon, all of this starts to feel less about plagiarism and more like something darker.

This film does a fine job maintaining a foggy and uneasy atmosphere. The setup is intriguing, and the pacing is deliberate. The performances are also top-notch with Depp giving the kind of detached, faintly amused performance that he was coasting on at the time. Turturro, meanwhile, speaks menace in every syllable, and carries himself like a Southern gothic specter. But it’s that ending that betrays me. It’s a twist that’s straining for shock value, but instead it lands like a flat tire.

While there’s real craft and mood here, and the two leads are compelling, mystery without payoff is foreplay without follow-through. Secret Window walks in like a thriller, but it stumbles out like a damp towel.

By 1996, director Mike Leigh had already built a reputation for his raw portraits of British life. He’d satirized suburbia in Abigail’s Party (1977) and captured the bleakness of unemployment in Meantime (1983). He drew a searing portrait of urban despair in Naked (1993). Secrets & Lies, which would be honored with the Palme d’Or, follows his signature approach to filmmaking: long improvisations, characters absorbed in ordinary routines, and drama that seems to rise out of the way people stumble over words that they can’t quite say.

The film’s title hints at confrontation, but Leigh offers something much smaller. This is about the quiet corrosion of family—about how lives warp around what isn’t said just as much as what is said. And what happens when someone finally does speak.

The film is centered around Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a Black optometrist characterized by her steady calm. She’d always known she was adopted but hadn’t been serious about tracing her origins. That is, until her adoptive mother dies and she suddenly gets the urge to follow that paper path. And the name she finds at the end of it is Cynthia Purley (Brenda Blethyn). Working class, wound tight, and white. What follows from there isn’t staged exactly as a drama about race—even if that aspect of the story flickers about at the edges. This is more of a story about people who struggle to reconcile their present with secrets that have been long buried in their past.

Cynthia lives with her daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), who works sanitation. She resents every minute of her life—including even the minutes she spends at home. Cynthia’s brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) is a weary photographer who plays mediator with his family from across town. He braces himself before their reunions, because they rarely stay civil.

When Hortense appears, it seems to be out of nowhere. The resulting tension doesn’t explode as much as it seeps in. The air around them thickens and they start fumbling in their speech. There seems to be a certain expectation that someone’s about to say something that no one’s ready to hear.

What makes this film extraordinary is that it feels like what might actually happen if ordinary people were thrown into this situation. Leigh doesn’t impose drama so much as he sets the camera down and lets people fumble. Blethyn starts the film fluttery and overeager, but by the end she’s raw and cracked open. Jean-Baptiste’s performance is nuanced in the way that she barely moves—watching and listening. It’s that stillness that seems to make the others around her unravel faster.

The film doesn’t end with healing, but with the volume turned down. There seems to be a little less static in their lives, and a few knots that have been loosened. Sure, there are still lies woven into their tapestry, but at least now they seem more out in the open.