Fool for Love (Robert Altman, 1985). In the bare particulars of visual storytelling, Robert Altman does an admirable job of directing this adaptation of Sam Shepard’s twisty stage work, with a screenplay and lead performance by the playwright himself. Altman can’t quite get the tone right, though, so the vicious-punch emotions of the piece instead start to feel like weird abstractions. There are fleeting moments of hardscrabble intensity as Eddie (Shepard) confronts his former lover May (Kim Basinger) at the destitute desert motel where she’s holed up. More often, this version of Fool for Love feels like a rusty, rickety merry-go-round, spinning on a wobble and always on the verge of collapsing into the dirt. The performances range all over the place, sometimes laconically precise and sometimes florid to the point of absurdity. Until the emotional mayhem of the closing scenes, Harry Dean Stanton, playing a character who initially seems like a inconsequential hanger-on at the motel, spends most of his time onscreen morose, observant, prone to careful bits of physical business, and largely silent, like the Buster Keaton of the barflies.

Rabid (David Cronenberg, 1977). God bless David Cronenberg and the murderous yonic wounds he puts on screen. Rabid opens with a nasty motorcycle crash that sends Hart (Frank Moore) and his girlfriend, Rose (Marilyn Chambers), to the hospital. Hart is roughed up plenty, but it’s Rose who suffers such severe burns that she needs to undergo an experimental procedure involving skin grafts. Rose looks great when it’s all done. The side effects are a doozy. Rose has a fervent thirst for human blood that she consumes through a stinger that protrudes from a wound in her armpit. So, it’s normal Cronenberg stuff. The carnivorous craving gets passed along to victims, and Cronenberg has some fun satirizing societal panic and collapse when an epidemic takes hold. There’s an exciting energy to the film, probably attributable to everyone involved fully embracing the lurid, gruesome story. The amateurish performances scattered throughout only add to the film’s charm. Chambers is genuinely terrific in the leading role, playing every odd beat of the character’s tumultuous journey with offhand authenticity and an endearing slyness.

The Naked Gun (Akiva Schaffer, 2025). This revival of the film series created by Airplane! revolutionaries Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker — with an assist by Pat Proft — strains mightily for the joyful absurdity, anarchic spirit, and wicked wordplay of the original Naked Gun outings starring Leslie Nielsen. In this instance, The Naked Gun is occasionally clever and rarely funny. In a film packed with jokes, only three or four really landed for me. Part of the issue is that director Akiva Schaffer can’t quite settle on an approach. Sometimes the comedy is purely deadpan and sometimes the characters are reacting accordingly to the madness around them. This indecision is emblematic of the muddled comedy all around. Everyone involved is certainly game, especially Liam Neeson, who seems relieved to be genially booping the nose of his late-career tough-guy image rather than living with it for another lumbering action movie. Pamela Anderson is sweet and charming, proving herself fully worthy of the unexpected revival of her professional prospects.