A pre-1970 release holding up is rare.

Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain. Films of such high quality they seemingly detach from time.

B in the P can’t boast such sophistication, but there’s still much to enjoy.

The pitter patter

The dialogue feels fresh (within its historical context), if a bit bloated. All exchanges between the two leads break convention with regularity.

She zags. He zigs.

Jane Fonda and Robert Redford are two names you hear a lot, but of whose work you’re mostly unaware. Barefoot is their second of five total films together, and the chemistry is palpable.

Fonda is terrific — delivering a large performance. Sexy little shimmies and shakes. Taking chances. Energetic and flirtatious. Numerous scenes find her partially clothed, but these are performed with grace. Yes, some of Barefoot’s appeal is driven by the Fonda eye candy, but it’s dignified. And her braziered dialogue was probably progressive for the time.

Jane ranks amongst the Hepburns and Elizabeth Taylors, your Margot Robbies and my Nicole Kidmans — the hardworking and stunning leading lady type. Fonda’s winsome and easy to devour onscreen.

The bigger star nowadays, Robert Redford, displays the signs of an earnest and inspired young actor really stretching for a clean performance. Each word is spoken with clarity. Measured, relatable. Engaging.

Long after color came in vogue, the art direction makes deliberate use of it.

Experienced efficiency

The production design and photography direction carefully balance tones. The gray backdrop walls of the new apartment provide the canvas with which to make the pops of color stand out — Jane’s yellow headband, Bob’s brown coat. The visual is meticulously crafted.

By that same token, the audio is near perfect too, as it should be — being almost entirely shot on a soundstage, the apartment set.

There is a shot in the park for the opening credits with no sound, and it doesn’t always seem like the lead actors riding in the carriage to the Plaza Hotel. So there’s minimal on-location filming for the principal actors. There are genuine stoop scenes, but who isn’t tired of those? There are lots of staircase antics — way too many clunkers about the five flights of stairs that are almost never funny. Characters heaving in breath, calling to each other from one floor to another.

But the progression of movement is stable: carriage to Plaza Hotel to new apartment, with stops in a park, an Albanian restaurant, a neighbor’s apartment. And that’s it. Pretty basic.

In the mid to late ’70s, the filmmaking process became less locked down. This did much for viewer immersion.

Hints of mysticism

When the couple spends the entirety of their honeymoon locked in their room, or when learning the supposed plumbing mechanics of their apartment building. Installing an inverted flush lever or a backwards radiator knob — these are believable occurrences. But an entire apartment building fitted by the same (inept) Reverse Plumber? The knobs… maybe. The levers? Not a chance.

Likely holdovers of the stageplay. Still acceptable amidst progressive film craft.

The camera follows Jane and another character chasing each other up a flight of stairs. The camera’s fixed in a single unbroken shot that seems to rise through the floor as the action moves up a level.

An early telephone scene — a horribly common (and lazy) trope nowadays — actually elevates itself above its contemporary counterparts by using the phone as a narrative device within the scene.

Slippered inside

The metaphor centers around clothing. The opulence of our armaments. It explores how, in some instances, social position equates to wealth, and how social wealth fails to purchase physical warmth. Additionally, it highlights how social elites must seek alternative sources of consistent warmth.

No matter how high we climb the social ladder. Be we big city wives or carcoated lawyers. All who waltz among skyscrapers; we’re no more than barefoot in a manicured park. That’s the film’s metaphor at work.

A nice message.

Romance. 1967. Stageplay adaptation. Early color. In-studio filming.

If these sound ungood, then Barefoot in the Park is not for you.

Otherwise it offers more than enough to keep the viewer invested.

★★★ ★★★

Briefer takes at IMDb & Letterboxd.

Is there a better film available to stream for free?

This is not the live-action franchise — the animated feature plays the premise straight and treats its audience with respect.

Much like Transformers: One (2024) — the best the brand has seen since this film — it has a sense of earnest world-building. The difference is One is a complete reimagining.

The Transformers: The Movie continues the story directly after season 2 of the original TV series. The writer, Ron Friedman, passed recently but can be proud of his legacy.

Narrative Integrity

The story takes center stage — and it delivers.

The film opens in space with Unicron, a planet-eating entity (and Orson Welles’ final performance, voicing what is essentially a sentient Death Star). The Decepticons now control Cybertron and mount a final assault on Autobot City. The Autobots’ odds have never been worse, especially with Unicron looming.

What follows is a progression of sci-fi settings and battles that feel weighty. A Megatron blast means death. The action is staged with consequence, and the events flow with organic logic — as organic as giant robots with cannons and helicopter-blade sabers can get.

The movie explores transformation mechanics — self-repair, field repair — grounding the spectacle. And the roster is stacked: Dinobots, Constructicons (who merge into Devastator), Sharkticons, Junkions and Quintessons, each serving the narrative purposefully.

Most impressive is the humanization of these robots. There’s romantic tension, heartbreaking death and actual stakes. The humans, by contrast, are minimized — a benefit compared to the bloated live-action movies. Hot Rod (not Bumblebee) is the boy’s companion, and their conversations feel like those of equals. Equipping the humans with Autobot-built armor is a smart touch that keeps the story plausible.

Humor is present but sparing — mostly in Megatron’s petulant exchanges with Starscream and his obstinacy toward Unicron. The tone never undercuts the stakes.

“I hold this entire court in contempt!”

This line from Kup, shouted in defiance at the Quintesson judges, is one of the movie’s defining moments. The Sharkticon court is ruled by the tentacled Quintessons, whose criteria for innocence is laughably strict — and whose punishment is absolute.

A forgettable Weird Al tune plays over the ensuing chaos, turning a grim setting into a surreal pop-culture moment. The absurdity of the song perfectly contrasts the threat, creating a tonal swing that makes the sequence unforgettable.

This scene encapsulates what the movie does best:

It establishes a familiar human structure (a courtroom) in the most alien of settings. It builds tension with lethal stakes, then releases it in a way that’s both gripping and darkly funny. It’s a perfect mix of drama, danger and humor — a microcosm of why this film endures.

Carriages in combat

Nearly forty years later, The Transformers: The Movie remains the gold standard for the franchise. It’s bold enough to kill beloved characters, confident enough to minimize human involvement and imaginative enough to create worlds that still feel fresh. The film respects its audience, telling a serious story with genuine stakes — and that’s why it holds up as one of the great animated sci-fi epics.

Watch this to understand why the brand’s beloved.

★★★ ★★★ ★★★

Briefer takes at IMDb & Letterboxd. Superior to another free-to-stream, Windy City Heat.

A series of vignettes bound together by a metaphysical thruline. A time-travel romance that never thrills.

Big? Occasionally. Bold? No.

What works are the lead performances. Farrell and Robbie are magnetic whenever they’re onscreen together. Premier thespians — their presence alone is enough to elevate even the weakest sequences.

The problem is everything that happens around them: an uneven supporting cast, flabby surrealism and a screenplay that leans on shortcuts.

Colin & Margot

The film’s highlight. Farrell plays muted hesitation better than just about anyone, and Robbie knows how to weaponize both charm and vulnerability. When they’re sharing screen space — in memory-landscapes, in cars, in the rain — you can almost forget how patchy the film is. Their chemistry is never forced.

They’re easy to watch, easy to believe, easy to root for. Without them this thing collapses.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Love seeing her pop up in a supporting role, but the performance is uneven. Her scenes lean on comedic timing, yet the writing leaves her stranded. Punchlines fall flat, not because she can’t deliver them, but because the dialogue doesn’t have teeth.

A recurring GPS gag saddles her with dialogue that’s more nagging than witty. The “in case your phone craps out” bit works only because Farrell’s delivery sells it — the line itself is limp, unfunny and doesn’t improve on revisiting.

Filming on the cheap

Too many scenes rely on cinematic shortcuts — phone calls, intercom chatter, the GPS voice. These are conversation stand-ins, easy ways to script dialogue without the work of staging real interaction. They read as artificial. Cinema should bring bodies into collision, but here it keeps disembodying them.

The worst offender is the introduction of the car rental agency itself — a Sharpie flyer taped to a brick wall. That’s the prop. A film aiming for cosmic mythos and timeless romance should not be grounding its central conceit in something that looks like an undergrad theater project.

At minimum, give me enameled signage. Or a location with weight. Instead it plays thin, unconvincing, cheap.

Falling water

The rain is where the film shows glimmers of life.

The opening wedding scene — Robbie asking Farrell to marry her in a downpour — is the film at its best. Elemental, physical, alive. Hair plastered, clothes soaked, emotion surging. The question of whether this is his memory, hers or a shared dream remains unclear, but the texture is undeniable. And the rain returns intermittently, sometimes scripted with umbrellas at the ready, sometimes uncontrolled enough that it must have been shot live.

These bursts give the film atmosphere, mark transitions and hint at what could’ve been if the director trusted nature’s unpredictability more than canned surrealism.

Trekking across the subconscious

The strongest stretches are the memory revisits. Here the film abandons its gimmicks and actually dramatizes emotion. The landscapes have weight; the conversations carry charge. Every time Farrell and Robbie walk through a past moment, the romance feels epic.

The love story takes shape not in GPS chatter or surreal signage but in these collisions of memory and regret. This is what the film should’ve centered.

Talent-a-whirl

Midway through we get a full car-accident sequence, complete with the now-fashionable rollover rig. Farrell and Robbie strapped in, flipping, cameras locked close. A long piece of footage of bodies tumbling in simulated peril.

Once this kind of shot felt daring, now it feels like self-aware spectacle. In a film already laced with surreal gags, it comes across as meta-comical — less about danger, more about showing off the actors gamely spinning for real. It doesn’t advance story or deepen character. It’s just production flex.

Boredom in your ears

The film’s rhythm is torpedoed by its soundtrack. A soft, plucky, muted, melancholic score that dullifies everything. Scene after scene is sanded into sameness by that perpetual wistful indie-sound. Nothing swells. Nothing punctuates.

The pacing suffers as a result — a big bold journey becomes a slow, occasionally soporific trudge.

Ending in the present

No surprises here. Straightforward, predictable, expected. After wandering through dreamscapes and gimmicks, the finale lands with no twist, no shock, no grand revelation. It’s serviceable, but underwhelming.

My Small Pretty Slog

Does the film earn its title? Not really. It’s big only in ambition, bold only in patches and beautiful only when Farrell and Robbie are fully locked in. Still, there’s a kernel of truth — the journey is there, it just isn’t consistent.

Can’t Recommend

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is half of a good film. The rain wedding, the memory revisits, the sheer talent of Farrell and Robbie — these moments almost redeem it. But then come the shortcuts, the dull score, the phony signage, the car rollover, the GPS chatter, the intercom jokes. All thinning out the magic.

What’s left is a disappointed middle. A romance that flirts with greatness but too often sells itself short.

★★★

Briefer takes at IMDb & Letterboxd. Check The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby for proper romance.

A curious anomaly in the canon of animated features. On the surface it’s a children’s movie about a surfing penguin — yet what Sony Pictures Animation actually made is a mockumentary that blurs lines in tone, style and world-building more than any other mainstream cartoon of its era. It’s the kind of film that sneaks up on you — equal parts parody, sincerity and eccentric invention.

The conceit is simple but immediately clever: we are watching a sports documentary, complete with handheld camerawork, cutaway interviews, blurred-out indecencies and a perpetually off-screen crew whose presence is as real as any character in the film. That conceit is played straight. There’s no wink or half-commitment. Every frame is treated like it was captured by a documentary unit camped out with penguins in Shiverpool, Antarctica. It’s a choice that sets Surf’s Up apart not just from its contemporaries (Cars, Happy Feet, Shrek 3), but from nearly any animated film period.

The documentary crew itself becomes an invisible but vital character. We hear their off-camera questions, see water splatter across the lens, even watch the operator drop when hit with a tranquilizer dart. More than once! The joke lands precisely because we subconsciously assume the crew is human. Penguins darting other penguins is nothing new — but darting a guy holding a boom mic? That’s funny. Likewise, when Reggie the otter absentmindedly exposes himself and the editors blur his crotch, it only makes sense if you imagine a real human broadcast crew following FCC guidelines. Those flourishes don’t just get laughs — they reinforce the conceit that this film really is “found footage” from a crew of documentarians in a penguin world.

That penguin world

Incidentally, is narrower than you might expect. Most animated animal features (from Madagascar to Finding Nemo) expand into a full ecosystem. Surf’s Up resists that. This is a penguin society first and foremost, with a few deliberate outsiders peppered in for comic effect. Chicken Joe is the goofy landbird in over his head, an affable Midwestern dope whose outsider energy makes him butt of half the jokes. Reggie the otter is the slick Hollywood promoter archetype, paired with Mikey the sea urchin as his sycophantic sidekick. A flamboyant shorebird talent scout appears for a one-off gag. Whales show up as taxis and ferries. Orcas only appear in scrapbook photos. And then there are sharks, present as raw hazard rather than part of the community. That’s basically it.

Outside those roles, other creatures are either food or props. Cody’s mother chops up fish in Shiverpool. Lani cradles a small squid in her arms like it’s a puppy, the only real nod to “pets” in this world. The taxonomy is uneven, but the narrowness is part of the point: Surf’s Up isn’t trying to be a bird world, or an animal kingdom, or a broad undersea comedy. It’s about penguins. The mockumentary lens lets the filmmakers treat penguins as a self-contained culture, while the other species exist as satirical cameos or ecological background.

The story itself

Follows Cody Maverick (Shia LaBeouf), an ambitious Rockhopper penguin who leaves the frozen wasteland of Shiverpool to chase surfing glory. The bones of the plot are rote — wide-eyed kid with dreams, arrogant rival, washed-up legend in hiding, girl with a good heart. But the presentation and the performances give it unexpected vitality. Jeff Bridges voices Big Z (a.k.a. Geek) with a slacker warmth that feels lived-in. Zooey Deschanel plays Lani as nurturing and understated. And Shia LaBeouf, still in his ascendant period, gives Cody an energy that’s awkward, insecure and occasionally unbalanced in a way that feels surprisingly human.

The campfire scene between Cody, Lani and Z is the high point of this approach. It doesn’t sound like stitched-together booth reads. It sounds like three actors in the same space, overlapping, breaking, playing off one another — because that’s exactly what it is. Bridges even brought his guitar to the session, strumming it while riffing lines. The audio bleeds into the animation, giving the moment a warmth that’s rare in studio cartoons. Likewise, the interviews with penguin children feel improvised, full of the odd half-phrases and tangents that only real kids produce. These moments of looseness stand out because they feel captured rather than constructed.

Contrast this with

Disney and Pixar’s typical precision. Their actors record alone, their editors simulate overlap in post, and the dialogue emerges polished, rhythmic and safe. Surf’s Up is rougher, looser, more human. It isn’t ensemble all the way through — most confessionals and gags are recorded solo, like any other film. But those key stretches of ensemble recording give the movie a texture unlike its peers. It’s why the mockumentary premise doesn’t collapse under its own weight. You believe the crew is really there because the voices behave like they are.

Visually, the film is a mixed bag. The surf sequences themselves are staged with surprising dynamism — Sony’s water effects were ahead of their time, and the camerawork sells the intensity of competition. But much of the character animation, particularly in the smaller penguins, has that mid-2000s plasticky stiffness. It doesn’t kill the illusion, but it keeps Surf’s Up from feeling timeless.

Tone

What rescues it. The film is funny without leaning on DreamWorks-style pop-culture reference gags. It is character-driven without lapsing into the syrupy sincerity of a Disney musical. And it has just enough adult-oriented winks (the otter blur, the darted cameraman) to keep parents amused without derailing the PG rating.

Surf’s Up is a great film. Sure, the core story arc follows a familiar underdog trajectory, and some gags are pitched at kids, but none of that undercuts its achievement. As an experiment in style, it’s boldly original, and as a piece of animated filmmaking, it transcends expectations.

Looking back nearly twenty years later, what lingers isn’t the plot. It’s the oddities: the invisible crew, the dart gag, the blurred otter groin, the child interviews, the campfire improv, the squid clutched like a lapdog. These details are what make Surf’s Up more than a curiosity. They make it an animated film with a lived-in texture — rough edges, awkward pauses, things that feel caught rather than manufactured.

Ensemble Dialogue Recording

In the end, Surf’s Up belongs in the rare category of animated works that took risks with form and benefited from them. Alongside Batman: The Animated Series — another project that embraced ensemble recording to heighten its reality — it shows how much more alive animated dialogue can feel when actors share the room. Disney never tried it. Pixar flirted with it. Sony, improbably, committed just enough to give us a film that still stands apart.

That’s why Surf’s Up endures: not as a masterpiece, not as a franchise builder (let’s not mention the direct-to-video WWE sequel), but as a quirky, inspired experiment that dares to bend the rules of animation.

★★★ ★★★ ★★★

Briefer takes at IMDb & Letterboxd.

The F-word is spoken once. That’s right — 1F.
This isn’t ironic title play, though it’s as happy an accident as they come. The single F-bomb is more a function of the film’s intended structure, staying just within PG-13 constraints. Utter it once and you’re PG-13. Cluck twice and you earn an R.

Speaking of words, I say “movie” less these days. I was ridiculed for this recently, but it’s not pretension — it’s accuracy. A film is a crafted piece with precise direction. Movies are built for the public at large: heartwarming, Hollywoodized, loaded with stars and budget. F1 feels more like a “movie.”

A Thrilling First Half

The story is surface-level; the beats are basic and occasionally melodramatic. Characters keep critiquing Sonny Hayes’ age, but these jibes don’t land on the glorious Brad Pitt. Predictability sets in early and only worsens — the pacing slows considerably in the second half until events unfold in a 100% telegraphed manner.

At 155 minutes, it’s far too long. The later half is almost devoid of the small, unconventional turns that keep viewers engaged. Some moments break from formula in the first half, but they’re rare after that.

Adequate Production

Big budget and bloated with technical work, F1 showcases a vast range of camera angles and multilayered sound design. The play-by-play announcers narrate throughout, explaining each race as if viewers can’t follow on their own. An audience sees something happen and then immediately hears it described — too polished, distractingly so.

To the film’s credit, the announcers are eventually shown on screen toward the end, putting faces to the voices. It’s a smart touch, but it arrives during the section of the film where pacing is already sagging.

I made the mistake of skipping IMAX, despite friends insisting it was the way to see it. Turns out they were right — this is a movie that dulls exponentially as the screen size shrinks.

Topsy-Turvy Acting

Only a handful of performances work. Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Kerry Condon, and Joseph Balderama deliver. The rest feel amateurish or fractured.

Tobias Menzies is a glaring problem — his “evil money man” role is so flat and obvious that his every scene distracts from the main narrative. From the moment he tempts Hayes to “join the dark side,” you can see every beat coming. His arc is so painfully telegraphed it drags the movie down from potentially great to merely decent.

JP’s mom is similarly unnecessary. Most of her scenes could be cut, particularly a hospital moment where she chews out Hayes over a misunderstanding the audience already sees through. It’s not strong writing — just a device to justify her presence. The racial casting here feels blatant, and I wonder when audiences will tire of this trend.

On the positive side, Javier Bardem is as good as ever — likable, engaging, and central to the emotional pull. He doesn’t want his friend to die, and we’re right there with him. Pitt remains magnetic, always a delight to watch. Kerry Condon is terrific too, delivering a seamless performance even when saddled with difficult material (see: the porch scene).

Existentially Unchallenging

F1 isn’t a bad film — it’s a decent movie. Learning about the sport is fun enough to merit a casual watch, but the story’s predictability, bloated runtime and uneven cast keep it from greatness. If you’re going to see it, see it in IMAX. Otherwise, your life won’t change.

★★★ ★★★

Briefer thoughts at IMDb & Letterboxd.

Check out The Fantastic Four: First Steps for a more engaging blockbuster.