The story The Grandfather reads The Boy drops us into the fictional Florin, where Buttercup (Robin Wright) is a farm girl with the misfortune of being the most beautiful (and thus sought-after) person in the world, and the fortune of falling for a dashing farmhand, Westley (Cary Elwes), whose entire personality is, initially, mindless devotion. Their courtship is a bit of a gag in making the hunk the blank slab of romance that a princess normally would be. She orders, he answers “As you wish” every time; and then the rhythm becomes romantic. It’s the kind of miniature and effortless invention movies usually have to earn with a lot more screen time, but the writing and tone of this opening is so clean that it feels like it’s always been part of the folklore.

Then the movie kicks into its real narrative mode: nonstop momentum bordering on shagginess. Goldman’s script is genius in balancing mayhem with just enough structure. Buttercup gets kidnapped for a politically convenient wedding to Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), and the chase that follows is a string of set pieces that all feel like their own brilliant short stories. We visit Cliffs of Insanity, where the heroic Man in Black shows up like a storybook Zorro; the sword fight with Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), staged and performed with such crispness that it’s a proper Douglas Fairbanks tribute; the brute-force brawl with Fezzik (André the Giant) as the world’s gentlest mountain; and funniest of all, the battle of wits with Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), a walking bundle of smug paranoia who somehow makes “inconceivable” sound like a religious mantra.

The charm of these sequences in the film’s first half is that they’re funny in a way that never undercuts the stakes — the movie playful remixing of tropes is utterly joyful and committed rather than mocking, preventing this from ever feeling like a pre-Shrek bit of irreverence. The iocaine powder scene with Vizzini is maybe the best example: it’s a battle of wits performed like an effervescent vaudeville or Abbot/Costello routine, and the punchline lands so hard because the movie has meticulously set up the rules of the bit.

Even when the plot pivots and slows down a bit (and the second half not quite reaching the height of the first is why I have it a hair short of a Masterpiece) — when Humperdinck catches up, Westley is dragged into the Pit of Despair, and the band splits up — The Princess Bride keeps its tonal balance on a tightrope. Count Rugen (Christopher Guest) is genuinely nasty, and the torture device is a fairy-tale abstraction of suffering that still manages to feel upsetting. Then the movie swerves into Miracle Max (Billy Crystal) and Valerie (Carol Kane), who show up like they wandered in from a different comedy universe but somehow make the whole thing richer, not messier. The second half is not quite so transcendently delightful as the first half, but it hardly holds the movie back. The rhythm and storytelling is so confident from start to finish: romance, danger, joke, sincerity, joke again, etc.

It helps that the film is gorgeous in an old-school, tactile way. Reiner (RIP to a great one) does not assert his own voice but rather keeps the film steady and free of distracting breaks in immersion: Everything is shot in real locations, filled with storybook production design, costumes that look lived-in, not freshly unboxed. It’s not a “look at our budget” kind of spectacle; it’s a “look at our love of filmmaking” kind of spectacle. And because the cast is so perfectly tuned to their characters, the archetypes and slight variations they’re playing, the movie can do big, bold character work in shorthand: Patinkin’s vengeance quest is melodrama played mostly straight, which is why it has become so iconic. (The Princess Bride makes great use of repetition — “as you wish” and “prepare to die.”) Sarandon’s prince isn’t complicated; he’s a coward in a crown, delivered with spot-on smarm.

The ending lands exactly where it should. We get the kiss. We get the catharsis. We get the kid, now fully invested, asking for the story again. It’s beautifully touching. And the final “As you wish” doesn’t just tie a bow on the romance but becomes a thesis statement: These kinds of stories get passed down and become timeless because, when they’re told well, they make cynicism feel briefly unnecessary, even in a modern world. The heart’s longing for adventure in the great wide somewhere soars; and the right adventure fulfills that wish. They remind you that adventure can be thrilling, love can be clean, and comedy can sit alongside both without turning either into a joke.

Three years after their previous size-shifting adventure, Wayne Szalinski (Rick Moranis) is now tinkering at a corporate lab while Diane (Marcia Strassman) holds the fort. A not-quite-explained growth beam zaps their toddler before long. At first nothing happens, but grows a little whenever the baby encounters electricity (or, given that electricity is literally everywhere in the modern world, whenever the story needs the baby to grow). Soon the kid is door-frame tall, then neighborhood tall, and inevitably skyscraper tall. Meanwhile, the now-teenaged Nick (Robert Oliveri) develops a bashful crush on babysitter Mandy (Keri Russell). The movie’s middle stretch is the film’s sweet spot, the promise of the premise: Wayne and Nick scrambling to corral a seven-foot wobble-monster around the house, the floorboards rumbling to “The Locomotion” as the baby bounces in rhythm.

Formally, this one swaps out the first film’s huge-prop, kitchen-sink spectacle for lots of compositing, forced perspective, and kaiju-scale gags. That’s a real shift in texture: the original’s tactile, backyard jungle craftsmanship gives way to a totally different mode of camera tricks and clever editing, so unrecognizable it’s barely an obvious sequel. (And indeed, the script did not originate as a Shrunk sequel; a “giant baby” idea had been bouncing around the company for years. Disney faced multiple lawsuits stemming from its failure to properly credit writers in the wake of its release.) Some of the shift in tone is surely because of the switch in directors — Joe Johnston’s thrill-ride instincts are out, and Randal Kleiser’s more whimsical attitude is in. But the film still shares the spirit of a suburban genre adventure with modest thrills of its predecessor, and it too offers some innovative staging and effects. Plus, with Wayne as its face, this still tastes like Honey.

The sequel’s fundamental problem, though, is stakes. In Shrunk, the danger is relentless creatures and overpowering elements; here, the threat is a big baby. They need to shrink the baby, and they spend the second half of the film with a shrink ray they don’t use. We haven’t hit 90 minutes yet, I guess. The film tries to wave off that logic issue with some artificial danger (don’t want to, you know, “blow up” the baby in the other sense), but the sense of “what are we waiting for?” really grows in the third act. Shrunk kept showcasing new hazards to the very end; Blew Up is content to wait out its runtime with a few nifty visual ideas but lots of treading water.

Honey, I Blew Up the Kid has a much more genial screenplay than its predecessor. The integration of the theme of parenting and the way having a kid interrupts a carefully planned life feels natural and earned. Diane, a mama bear, gets super-sized in the climax to soothe her out-of-control toddler. Wayne has been slightly rewritten as a deeply loyal and humble dad and husband. It’s a breezy script, and its sweetness caught me off guard after the snottiness of the first had bugged me.

The Szalinskis all return from the previous film. Moranis is still the franchise’s key presence, his inviting neurosis the series hallmark, and the writing is tooled around him more this time than in the original, which actually spent more time on the teens. Nick and Mandy’s romance in this works for me more than the high school fling in the original, mostly because Russell is a winning presence. Oliveri has toned down his geekiness, but the groundwork he laid in the first film deepens his teen portrait, both imitating and diverging from his father.

I suppose the biggest new cast members (get it?) are the duo of twin toddlers Daniel and Joshua Shalikar playing the baby, Adam. The film’s Wikipedia page is filled with funny anecdotes about the casting and filming of the young’ns. The toddler chaos apparently contributed to the story’s shapelessness, as the filmmakers had trouble with all the on-set wrangling and filming limitations getting the footage they wanted.

Honey, I Blew Up the Kid is ultimately charming but slight, not as memorable or exciting as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids but giving off better vibes as a portrait of a family. It proves out that “suburban dad mad scientist” is a sturdy template; it makes sense that Disney spun off a TV show with the brand. If only the movie had a narrative as big as the baby at its center.

Revisit the film as an adult, and it reveals itself as something strange, but not bad. It’s more ambitious, scarier, and weirder than you likely recall. It’s a fascinating portrait of a suburban family culture starting to shift from the open range, “be home by dinner” parenting of baby boomers to the more involved parenting adopted by Gen X and millennials — in fact, that topic is pretty much the film’s theme, how strange and scary it is for family members to be invisible and distant from each other despite sharing a roof. On the other hand, this isn’t really a movie about its themes so much as it is a neat production playground for its “what if” visual ideas.

The premise, if this somehow never crossed your path as a child and the title somehow didn’t tip you off, is that bumbling inventor Wayne Szalinski (Rick Moranis) accidentally shrinks his teenage daughter and son, along with the neighbor’s kids, down to a quarter inch tall due to a misfire of his shrinking ray device. The kids end up tossed into the backyard, which is suddenly a treacherous expanse of dewy blades of grass, lawn sprinklers turned monsoons, and insect kaiju encounters. While the grown-ups fret and search for their missing kids, the youth embark on a backyard survival adventure with stakes both internal — “can I convince this cute girl to like me?” — and external — “is this scorpion going to eat me?”

What’s astonishing about watching this in 2025 is the mind-blowing practical production. Coming in the last decade before CGI, this feels like the culmination of a century of production and camera tricks to make the journey physical and so very real. The texture of every oversized Cheerio and slick blade of grass pops off the screen. It revels in the daunting majesty of a tiny world brought to life. A decade or so later, these sets would be over-polished mo-cap CGI — think Spy Kids 3’s garishly fake and ugly world. But here, when a giant Lego brick becomes shelter or a water droplet becomes a bomb falling from the sky, it offers a daunting and immersive physicality.

It is, in fact, rather frightening to an imaginative childhood brain, which is no accident: Honey, I Shrunk the Kids marks the directorial debut of Joe Johnston, who cut his teeth as a visual effects artist at Industrial Light & Magic, but he was not the progenitor of the story. The original concept came from cult horror icons and Re-Animator duo Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna. The horror filmmakers both left the project before completion, but its roots in pint-sized terror persist.

I’m a bit colder on anything in the movie that isn’t its production: The performances are a mixed bag, though it’s hard to imagine anyone in the leading role other than Moranis, who brings his usual neurotic sweetness, well grounded here in wounded dad energy. (John Candy turned down the role, and it’s tough to imagine what the movie would be like with Candy as Wayne.) The kids actually have more to do in the screenplay than Moranis, but are much less memorable, played by a quartet of young actors with barely enough charm and angst to avoid torpedoing the film. Matt Frewer plays the neighbor’s dad with a distinct dark streak.

The dialogue and character development are a bit stodgy and unpleasant. The kids are written with that late ‘80s/early ‘90s version of “teen cool” where sarcastic and snotty ruled the day, like early Simpsons without any wit. It mostly means everyone is an asshole to each other. But the story ultimately builds to a payoff of family and community toegetherness which is effective enough at tying the film together.

Watching this again in the Disney+ era, it’s easy to see why this one stuck around in the consciousness of kids who grew up in the ‘90s. It has some punch and some really remarkable moments of adventure. The sequels get goofier, but the original is balanced and well-realized, a high concept that actually executes on its ambitious pitch. It’s a relic both in its depiction of family dynamics and in its dedication to practical production, but still charming decades later.

The film takes shape from this stark, terrific setup, turning into a creature feature procedural mystery: Detectives and scientists collaborate to piece together what the root of this destruction might be. (Whatever it is, its destructive power has faint echoes of the nuclear testing that took place in that very desert.) Unless you’re a scientist or crossword puzzle enthusiast, the “formic acid” references might not give it away. As the investigators home in on a culprit, they put some of that formic acid under the traumatized girl’s nose. She bolts upright and shouts her first word:

“THEM!”

The big reveal comes a few minutes later with what is genuinely one of my favorite heart-stopping jump-scare moments in the movies. We finally see what “them” are, enormous freaking ants, when one towers over a scientist.

This slow-burn opening is masterpiece B-movie material, brilliant tension and mood-setting. Described from the outside, it may not sound all that different from a Teenagers from Outer Space-type story. The handful of American ‘50s sci-fi I’ve seen shares the earnestness of this, but executed with a junkiness that deflates a sense of danger, rather than the steady hand and clear vision that Them! offers courtesy director Gordon Douglas.

The real star of Them! is investigative, scientific procedure, but here’s a quick intro to the cast partaking in that process: Sgt. Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) is a local cop, and he’s aided by FBI agent Robert Graham (James Arness). They team up with scientist Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and his daughter Dr. Pat Medford (Joan Weldon) to identify, contain, and eradicate this peculiar threat in the New Mexico sands. Eventually, they pull in more civilian and military helpers and ant-spotters: an Air Force officer (Sean McClory), a ranch foreman (Fess Parker), and a charismatic alcoholic (Olin Howland).

The film withholds its ants for what feels like ages (really about a third of the film), but when they do arrive, they’re a terrific piece of production with real heft and texture, combining large-scale animatronics, forced perspective, and clever editing to make the creatures huge and terrifying. And when they die, it’s usually by actual fire: flamethrowers torch the creatures to ash.

The film deflates after its miraculously taut opening act in which the crew discovers the ants, and deflates even more when they snuff out the first hive. But we’re barely past the halfway point when this happens, triggering a narrative reset that sucks the film’s momentum just a little. The ants have spread out, though the movie conveniently eliminates all of the hives except the one in the Los Angeles sewer system, meaning the film climaxes with a focused urban battle.

What makes Them! pop is a combination of strong fundamentals in the visual craft and excellent writing. The script is full of sharp commentary evocative of the headlines. Douglas keeps the movie brisk and punchy, never dull. Even when a scene is just briefing-room jargon, the tempo has a clean, forward lean to it. The black-and-white photography is crisp, though I am a little disappointed that Warner Bros balked at its pre-production plan of full-color 3D ants. But it’s Them!’s sound design that really gets under your skin: a high, needling drone always appears before the ants do, priming your nerves so their eventual imposing appearance lands harder.

The movie offers a compelling read of Cold War anxieties. Its main theme, the dangers of nuclear warfare, gets said out loud in no uncertain terms: nukes are identified as the source of the size-altering mutation in the ants. The film ends with a scientist’s monologue about the apocalyptic danger of nuclear weapons and proliferation. That last bit of narration would be tacky if it didn’t provide an effectively somber finale fitting the film’s tone very well. In the film’s second half, the ants also fly, which we only witness through testimony. This evokes flying saucer paranoia, a few years pre-Sputnik. The flying ants are dangers in the sky that are only witnessed and documented by outsiders. The public perceives these UFO-believers as having a screw loose, which the government can exploit to keep the investigation hush-hush.

If Them! has any emotional arc, it’s Sgt. Peterson and co. learning to embrace the human element of their operations, particularly as it relates to saving the children of Mrs. Lodge (Mary Alan Hokanson), who are stuck in LA’s pipes with the jumbo-sized insects. The film’s second half offers some surprisingly nuanced ambivalence about the government manipulating institutions in the name of public safety, steamrolling some ordinary people in their rush to save humanity.

Them! would make an intriguing double-feature with the original Godzilla, which also came out in 1954. Godzilla is an all-time great monster film, and its Japanese view of nuclear terror is very different from Them!’s distinctly American viewpoint. Them! depicts bureaucracy, science, and reasonable but assertive containment saving the day, even if some overreach is required. Compare that to the apocalyptic ruin of Godzilla, and Them! starts to seem a bit tame, operating in the hypothetical “duck and cover” space rather than the experience of seeing your cities burn in an instant that Toho’s film reflected.

In the broad sweep of atomic age creature features, Them! became the quintessential standard-bearer for a reason. It’s a serious and eminently watchable film even 70+ years later, wonderfully and sturdily assembled. Even when it fails to live up to its phenomenal opening, it’s nothing short of great.

Doctor Dolittle (the 1998 version) finds cinema at the precipice of the CGI takeover (post-Toy Story, pre-Shrek). It combines the rubbery elasticity of practical creature effects with the early wobbles of CGI. The mode recalls Disney’s live-action oddities and musicals from earlier decades, like Darby O’Gill and the Little People. They didn’t have CGI, but they had the same wholesome, adventurous, rewind-the-VHS spirit. In fact, many of these ‘90s movies — Flubber, The Nutty Professor, George of the Jungle, and this — were revivals of IP, less out of reverence than as trust of tried-and-true premises that would tickle parents’ nostalgia and appeal to kids. The ‘90s versions of these stories are mostly springboards for marquee stars to mug, riff, and learn a heartfelt lesson from a talking animal or CGI creation, with an extra layer of fart jokes and post-Simpsons sarcasm.

Doctor Dolittle kicks off with five-year-old John Dolittle (Dari Gerard Smith) chatting it up with the family dog, blissfully unaware that this is not typical kindergarten behavior. When his canine-pal’s advice to get to know someone by sniffing their butt backfires, John’s dad (Ossie Davis) brings in a priest for an exorcism. The shame of the incident shuts down John’s animal-talking powers for three decades until a near-miss car accident with a dog named Lucky flips the switch back on. Grown-up John (Eddie Murphy) is now a high-functioning surgeon with a busy suburban family. But he finds himself hearing animal voices once more, and before long is doing medical consults for pigeons, rats, and a tiger with a debilitating migraine. Hijinks ensue. In the background is the future of John’s medical practice as he considers selling it to a big corporation to line his family’s pockets but lose touch with his compassion.

If you’re familiar with the books or have read my review of the 1967 film or 1928 shorts, you will notice that this really isn’t an adaptation of the Hugh Lofting books at all, but a total reinvention and modernization. That is fine by me. Despite my binge and coverage of films with the “Dolittle” moniker, I hold little reverence for the source IP. The original Dr. Dolittle books excel more as a talk-to-the-animals springboard than an actual story or character sketch. They have a lot of baggage of imperialism and racial insensitivity that is understandable in the context of the publication of the book series but tough to reckon with decades later.

I’m inclined to give any “live-action-cartoon” movie that puts forth a good faith effort and a brisk runtime a baseline grade of C-plus (read: 4 out of 8 on the Is It Good? Scale). But I need not equivocate too much with Doctor Dolittle. It’s not the funniest movie of its ‘90s batch of films (Men in Black, probably), nor the benefactor of the most cheerful vibes (George of the Jungle, probably), but the screenplay has shape and more heft than I expected. That’s what gives it the tiniest bump into positive territory (and my favorite Doctor Dolittle adaptation), even with the unrefined humor.

Unlike the 1967 musical and the many Dolittle books upon which these are ostensibly based, the story here has a coherent internal arc for the title character. The film is a solid blend of shenanigans and character development. This isn’t strictly about cavorting with a pushmi-pullyu (though one does show up briefly as a little nod). Instead, it’s about a man confronting his inner weirdness and growing stronger from it. It’s a classic self-actualization story, but thoughtfully rendered given the target audience and tone. The story offers a tidy thematic overlap between John’s rediscovery of his gift and the film’s corporate B-plot, in which he has to decide whether to sell his life’s work to a soulless conglomerate. And while the film doesn’t make a big point of it, it even offers a subtle charge in seeing a Black doctor navigating a white corporate world, his difference treated as a burden until it becomes a strength. (It is much sharper in this regard than Ghost Dad.)

But the real draw here is, of course, the talking animals. Director Betty Thomas, with a boost from the Jim Henson Creature Shop, nails the look and spirit, with effects that still mostly hold up. It’s nearly Babe-tier in terms of animal expressiveness, of animatronics and CGI that blend seamlessly. In some moments I honestly wasn’t sure whether I was looking at a puppet, a digitally enhanced dog, or just a very well-trained collie. The production MVP is Lucky, voiced by Norm Macdonald, whose droll delivery is welcome. (Macdonald continued voicing Lucky through all four of this movie’s sequels, including the DTV releases.)

I won’t pretend the film is a work of high art or a comic masterpiece. Its main joke is: Butts are funny. (And what’s wrong with that? Butts are funny. They smell bad. They are big and fleshy and slightly awkward. Even as children, we are inexplicably drawn to them.) That’s the flip side of being a shameless ‘90s family comedy: The script is absolutely riddled with body part and function gags calibrated for maximum second-grader satisfaction. Subjectively, I find it toes right up to “obnoxious” without entirely crossing over that line, though your mileage may vary.

One of the most surprising choices the film makes is placing John Dolittle as a straight man. Eddie Murphy gets to be funny, but it’s remarkably restrained relative to the likes of The Nutty Professor and Norbit. Even stranger still, Murphy actually acts a little: He plays John as a man teetering on the edge, trying to keep his life together while animal chaos stews around him. It’s a surprisingly unfussy and assured lead performance, though not exactly Oscar material.

Despite negative reviews, Doctor Dolittle was the sixth-highest grossing film in the U.S. in 1998. We tweens craved these kinds of movies. Inevitably, Fox made a sequel and a string of lower-rent, direct-to-video spin-offs. It’s no long-lost gem, but I find Doctor Dolittle to be weirdly satisfying, though I admit I cannot entirely separate it from my nostalgia for its ilk of summer cinema. It is a time capsule of an era when a family movie required actual sets, actors, and production. It has a solid R&B soundtrack. It is 88 minutes long. Make America greenlight mid-budget family comedies again.

So here’s where I swoop in and say, “not so fast,” right? I’m always a bit of a skeptic of universal praise or universal hatred, so I came in hoping to like this. To quote Kinemalogue’s Hunter Allen on his Letterboxd capsule of this film: “I like liking things.” Amen to that. But alas. I don’t like it. I do not think it is the worst Best Picture nominee of all time, not when Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close exists, but I will unfortunately not be the contrarian here.

Doctor Dolittle has its charms, though. In fact, many of the traits that got it labeled stodgy in its day are now endearingly old-fashioned: It’s a massive, lumbering, whimsical musical with a shaggy plot. It relishes its own sprawl. Its production offers something you might generously call grandeur: elaborate sets, a huge menagerie of animals, and a busy original recitative score by Leslie Bricusse (who also wrote the screenplay). The many millions of dollars that Fox poured into it offered a baseline of watchable Hollywood spectacle even though it never goes much past that baseline.

The story draws from three of Hugh Lofting’s Dolittle books: The Story of Doctor Dolittle (as also seen in the 1928 adaptation), The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, and Doctor Dolittle’s Circus (books 1, 2 and 4 in the series, respectively). This helps explain the film’s meandering structure. We’re introduced to the eccentric Doctor John Dolittle (Rex Harrison), a former physician turned animal whisperer and vet; his lackey Matthew (Anthony Newley); young apprentice Tommy (William Dix); and a talkative macaw named Polynesia (voiced by Ginny Tyler) who teaches Dolittle how to understand animal “language” via gestures. (Notably, no voiceover of the animals “talking” other than Polynesia.) The character of Emma Fairfax (Samantha Eggar) is a movie invention, here to lend the film some misguided feminine charm and romantic ballast.

The plot starts as a sort of English countryside hangout film: Dolittle’s Victorian home doubles as a zoo of sorts, which makes him persona non grata to the fuddy-duddies of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. After a slow flashback introducing this setup, the borderline-nonsense episodes ensue: His attempt to finance a new expedition leads to him showcasing a two-headed llama called a pushmi-pullyu at a circus. He also falls in love with a lady seal and helps her return home by tossing her into the ocean in a human disguise. This results in his arrest for murder, as spectators believe he threw an actual person off a cliff. This, in turn, leads to a courtroom drama sequence debating the merits of vegetarianism. Dr. Dolittle escapes the attempts of the masses to throw him in an insane asylum, which sets off a globetrotting quest for a giant pink snail…

That’s a whole lot of plot, and yet all of that narrative gibberish happens before the intermission. Even more insanely, the film packs in all of that and somehow still has a leaden, get-on-with-it-already pacing.

The second half kicks off with Dolittle setting sail, flanked by his crew: Matthew, Tommy, a few animals, and Emma, who pivots from spunky, aristocracy-spiting feminist to horribly executed romantic interest for the seemingly asexual (or maybe seal-sexual) Dr. Dolittle. And the rest of the film follows their journey and visit to the exotic Sea Star Island.

Sea Star Island, the potential grand payoff, plays like a fever dream, with Bricusse scrambling to subvert the racism of Lofting’s books. The natives are unexpectedly wise and articulate, their leader named Willie Shakespeare (Geoffrey Holder), a reinvention of “Prince Bumpo” of the books. Eventually, we meet the pink snail. It’s not a detailed or intricate construction, but I actually like its imposing, alien, abstract design. I particularly enjoyed the short scene set inside its fake-glass body.

Across its bloated runtime, some of Doctor Dolittle’s episodes are mildly charming in isolation, but the big storytelling problem is that Bricusse and director Richard Fleischer fail to string them together with any energy or direction. Where a film like Mary Poppins spins its digressions with a delightful sense of childlike wonder that accumulates to a feeling of grand giddiness, Doctor Dolittle offers meandering nothings that rarely connect emotionally or dramatically. Every new incident feels like another 20-minute detour and another deflation of momentum.

Plenty of bad storytelling decisions compound the sense of narrative malaise. The late-breaking romance between Dolittle and Emma is a catastrophic misfire. The winking narrative moments, like Dolittle blindly guessing the exact spot in the world that the snail would show up, offer serious eye rolls rather than any sort of amusement. And the acting chemistry is all off; Harrison’s presence is haughty rather than delightful, and he has no rapport with anyone else in the cast.

Doctor Dolittle is also not much of a musical. Most of the soundtrack is built around Harrison’s tuneless singing style, half-declared half-mumbled, which is certainly a swing (or maybe an anti-swing) and motivated by maximizing the talents of the actor. Harrison is admittedly quite good at the kind of “singing” asked of him. But the result is that nothing is an earworm as performed; that “Talk to the Animals” won an Oscar and became a standard is a triumph of marketing. Multiple big-name artists released their own versions of the song (and others in the soundtrack) with the film’s release, and it’s telling that it’s hard to find clips of the original version of the song from the movie online, with the more heartily sung covers much more popular on Spotify and YouTube. The film’s songs that are anything other than Harrison recitations fail to do much except reveal how half-baked the Bricusse compositions here are.

In almost every way, the story of Doctor Dolittle’s production, as fastidiously documented in Pictures at a Revolution, is much more exciting than anything on screen. It’s a full-blown Hollywood disaster saga: millions over budget, sets destroyed by weather, animal logistics that spiraled into chaos. The English town of Castle Combe, forced to hide their TV antennas and modern trappings for the shoot, became so annoyed by the production that a young Ranulph Fiennes (the explorer, not the actor) allegedly tried to blow up a concrete dam the studio installed. At one point, producers had to buy a second set of animals because they forgot that the UK’s quarantine laws meant the ones they bought couldn’t be used right away for shooting internationally.

And that’s not even getting into the human drama. Rex Harrison reportedly feuded with nearly everyone, pushing Sammy Davis Jr. off the cast list for not being a “real actor” (gee, I wonder why Fox wanted to cast Davis Jr. in a musical). Harrison, who leveraged tremendous control during pre-production negotiations following the massive success of My Fair Lady, did Fox few favors with erratic demands and behavior. Bricusse was far from the first choice to script the film, and he inadvertently plagiarized the plot point of animals forming a union from Helen Winston’s discarded script draft to which Fox didn’t hold the rights. He had incorrectly assumed it had come from the books he was adapting (which he’d only skimmed). The result was a big lawsuit and payout to Winston. Meanwhile, Harrison sabotaged and phoned in scenes with Anthony Newley, whom he hated at least in part due to antisemitism. Geoffrey Holder endured racism from Harrison’s entourage, which hung around production at Harrison’s insistence. Harrison briefly quit the project, and Fox hired Christopher Plummer; when Harrison returned to the project, Fox was still on the hook for Plummer’s salary even though he didn’t film a single take.

Even after bombing with both critics and audiences (making back barely half of its then-astronomical $17 million budget and recouping little of its investment in merchandising), Doctor Dolittle emerged with nine Academy Award nominations including one win, for “Talk to the Animals.” This is regarded in retrospect (and, according to some quotes in Pictures at a Revolution, in real time) as a case of a studio muscling its sway with Academy voters, probably the most notorious on record until Harvey Weinstein turned Academy manipulation into an art form in the ‘90s. But I can’t really hold it against either Fox or the Academy too much. This kind of voter coaxing has happened since Hollywood started giving itself awards; Doctor Dolittle just represented a particularly egregious and against-consensus example. I suspect it was effective in part because the Academy had the muscle memory of giving this kind of movie lots of awards. In the previous few years alone, both My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, in the same genre as Doctor Dolittle, had won Best Picture and cleaned up on Oscar night. (Harrison even won Best Actor for the former).

Most of this review has been skewering, so let’s pause to remember that the film has its merits. When Doctor Dolittle embraces its identity as a sprawling, roadshow spectacle, it offers a fun, colorful production. Having a menagerie of real animals on screen is a treat. Robert Surtees’ cinematography has received a bad rap in recent years, but I like it. It is lush and painterly, and the sets are mostly wonderful, with a bit of that Mary Poppins Victorian England dollhouse aesthetic. The sea voyage segments, as narratively listless as they are, still look terrific. And the film always keeps its finger on the pulse of the premise, the charm of a world where animals are your partners in mischief for grand adventures. For what it’s worth, and I think it’s not very much, this is also the most book-accurate adaptation of Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle stories aside from the 1928 silhouette animation shorts by Lotte Reiniger.

But also I ask myself: Who should watch this movie? Best Picture nominee completionists will, of course. Aficionados of mid-century bloated musicals might have a good time. Lovers of animal hijinks hoping to soak in the many beasts on screen will get their fill. I just think this film represents a lower-end experience for each of those moviegoing groups. Then again, I understand feeling a pull to a film like this; I even admire it. It has enough idiosyncrasies to stand out in a crooked sort of way: Even when it is not good, Doctor Dolittle is flavorful and peculiar, which goes a long way towards inspiring curiosity. Its combination of high-powered roadshow production, distinct musical recitative style, imagination-sparking premise, tint of psychedelia, and car-crash atonality is truly special. Just not good-special.

(Shout out especially to my podcast co-host Brian who wrote a tribute to the film in 2013 when he ranked it as one of his favorite movies. I admire against-the-grain takes that are well-founded and not simply contrarian, and his love of this film is a great example. It was his selection of the film for discussion on our podcast that’s the reason I ended up watching any of these Dolittle movies in the first place.)

Doctor Dolittle is not a great film, and it’s closer to outright bad than it is to good in my eyes. Where it has enduring value is schadenfreude, if doom-watching is your jam (it is not mine). And even beyond that, it’s a historical artifact: It came out the same year that “New Hollywood” really established itself and reshaped American filmmaking, and is thus a twilight production of a great era of Hollywood musical, informative and fascinating as a comparison point to other films of the time. But like most historical artifacts, it’s ultimately best viewed from a distance.

Here’s the story concocted by Lofting: Doctor John Dolittle is a country physician who starts treating animals, aided by his parrot Polynesia, who teaches him to speak all animal languages. Eventually, his ambitions expand beyond his little English village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. He sails for Africa to cure an epidemic among apes. On his journey, he survives a shipwreck, outwits tyrannical tribesmen, adopts a pushmi-pullyu (two-headed llama), evades pirates, and encounters an abundance of diversions and side characters. The books are short and whimsical, featuring themes of naturalism and colonial adventure. Lofting wrote more than a dozen of them, sometimes told through the eyes of young assistant Tommy Stubbins, sometimes from Dolittle himself, but always with a fondness for his growing menagerie.

The filmed adaptations of Doctor Dolittle’s stories have been surprisingly diverse, reflecting various filmmaking trends and approaches, though they have one thing in common: They are almost universally hated. Worst of the decade-type reputation in some cases. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about several Dolittle adaptations, each with its own peculiar (and often doomed) approach to the talking-animal doctor. If this were Kinemalogue, I’d be calling it “Dolittle Week,” or if I were in a snarky mood, “Please Do Less Week.” We also recently dropped an episode on The Goods: A Film Podcast discussing the 1967 version in depth and reviewing various others.

Some problems the adaptations have faced are predictable: For one, Hugh Lofting operated in the Rudyard Kipling space of English authors who loved writing about just how uncivilized the fringes of his monarch’s empire were. This informed many of his stories that involved Dr. Dolittle going out into some wild exotic place, including Africa, and encountering “savages.” Thus, many of his stories are filled with racism and caricature. Plots use white-savior tropes, and Lofting’s prose frequently deploys slurs. The occasional illustrations are the kind you’d find today in a museum exhibit on colonial propaganda. Later editions scrubbed or revised some of the most egregious material, but the DNA remains. Any faithful adaptation of these books will inevitably confront the question of how to handle representation of colonial subjects and indigenous people.

Also, as much as the concept of a kooky vet who can talk with animals makes for an intriguing setup and premise, it does not naturally lead into large-scale narratives. The books themselves are loose and episodic, full of detours and self-contained shenanigans. It’s little surprise to me that the two highest-rated adaptations of Doctor Dolittle (per IMDb) are animated TV shows that support case-of-the-week storytelling. One of these is the 1970 TV series co-created by Looney Tunes great Fritz Freleng and produced by 20th Century Fox. The other is a 1984 Japanese cartoon (with English-language voice acting).

But among filmed adaptations, the most faithful to the source is probably the very first, a piece of silhouette animation by German animator Lotte Reiniger. She is best known as the creator of The Adventures of Prince Achmed from 1926, the earliest surviving animated feature film. That film is a terrific execution of an old-fashioned form of animation: paper-cut silhouettes, often constructed with multiple layers to create a sense of visual shading and depth. Though Prince Achmed is Reiniger’s most famous work, she was a prolific animator: she released nearly 70 films over her career, most of them short-form adaptations of fables, operas, and fairy tales in that silhouette animation style. Her “Dr. Dolittle und seine Tiere” aka “Doctor Dolittle and His Animals” is both a continuation of that approach and a curio within it: an engagement with contemporary material, not Reiniger’s usual subject matter.

I use the word “probably” in describing this Dolittle adaptation in part because it is difficult to say with clarity what it actually is and when it was made. I confess I haven’t managed to get to the bottom of it, as I’ve found conflicting sources online. I’m most inclined to trust the 2017 biography of Reiniger written by Whitney Grace, but I can only read small snippets of it at a time via its Google Books page. (I’m not shelling out $30+ for a copy, and my library does not have it in stock.) The portions I read from the bio suggest that the Dolittle episodes were animated by Reiniger between September 1927 and April 1928, and most movie databases apply a 1928 release date. An article in Animation World Network Magazine by William Moritz about Reiniger’s career lists a premiere of her Dolittle film in Berlin of December 15, 1928, which aligns with this.

Where it gets cloudy is on The Criterion Channel, which has a robust set of Reiniger films and is the only non-bootleg streaming service with this film. Based on the production company logos when streaming from Criterion Channel, their copies of the Dolittle shorts seem to be the ones included as bonus features on the Blu-ray release of The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Milestone Films and Kino Lorber. Oddly, both Criterion and the Milestone/Kino Lorber Blu-ray list the Dolittle film as being from 1923 rather than 1928. I assume Criterion pulled this year from Milestone. I haven’t seen 1923 used as a production or release date anywhere else, but it’s not impossible Reiniger’s Dolittle film existed in some embryonic form then. One piece of evidence that could support this is that the animation here is much simpler than the work in Prince Achmed, which might suggest an earlier stage in Reiniger’s craft. But more likely, the simpler style was a pragmatic and stylistic choice. The Dolittle shorts were aimed at kids, produced much faster and less painstakingly than Prince Achmed was, and not intended for art-house moviegoers. I’m inclined to trust the 1928 release consensus of all sources except Criterion and Milestone on this one.

Then there’s the matter of what the format and duration of the film is. Almost universally, the agreement seems to be that the film is composed of three sequential episodes totaling about 30–35 minutes. I’ve seen no concrete reporting on whether the shorts were initially screened together or shown piecemeal. The only source that defies this 30-35 minute consensus is Moritz in AWN Magazine, who calls “Dr. Dolittle und seine Tiere” a feature-length project totaling 65 minutes. If that’s true, there’s zero evidence of where the missing 30-ish minutes went. Moritz does note that later TV versions (including a TV broadcast with added voiceover) sped up the silent footage, which might explain a few minutes’ difference, but not half the runtime. Did Reiniger animate footage that’s now lost? Or was Moritz simply mistaken? (The latter seems likely.) Interestingly, Reiniger herself suggested in her book Shadow Puppets, Shadow Theatres, and Shadow Film that Dolittle’s stories were best suited to 10–15 minute silhouette plays aimed at children. That would seem to argue for short-form episodes.

The last matter of confusion is whether the film is “unfinished.” The third and final episode concludes at the end of Lofting’s first book, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, so it seems like a natural stopping point. Grace’s biography of Reiniger claims the shorts end on a “cliffhanger,” but that’s not the version I watched. (Unless you count Dolittle wistfully looking off into a sunset as a cliffhanger.) A German animation fan site says Reiniger never got the funding to continue her vision of expanding her adaptation of the Dolittle novels, which makes sense to me, but that claim doesn’t appear in the Grace excerpts I could find. My read: Reiniger, who knew Lofting personally according to the linked site, adapted the first book in full, and had ambitions to do more but was ultimately stymied by the usual suspects: money and time. That’s not so much an “unfinished” film as an “unrealized sequel” situation.

Regardless, it seems that the Düsseldorf Film Museum has copies of the films, and probably answers to some of the questions I posed above. The museum catalog, accessible online, lists numerous entries related to the film, but even aside the language barrier it’s hard to parse the metadata to get any concrete answers.

So I watched the first and third episodes on Criterion Channel, but the streaming service is missing the second episode without any explanation. Maybe that’s an intentional omission: the second short is the one that contains the most overtly racist imagery, portraying a group of indigenous African “cannibals” as grotesque Black savage caricatures who imprison Dolittle and his animals. But YouTube currently hosts the TV edit of the second episode (sans intertitles). Thus, as far as I can tell, I’ve seen the entirety of Reiniger’s adaptation in some form.

With all that background: What’s actually here? Reiniger’s film is a charming and visually clever adaptation of the Doctor Dolittle origin story, rendered in Reiniger’s trademark style. We meet the rotund Doctor in Puddleby, see him learn to speak animal languages, watch him set sail for Africa with his menagerie, and follow him through a series of gentle misadventures: a trip to Africa to aid some sick monkeys, getting captured by “cannibals,” and plucking a thorn from the foot of a lion. No pushmi-pullyu, sadly. The film wraps up with Dolittle in Africa having helped some animals, smiling serenely as the camera fades: mission accomplished.

The animation is, unsurprisingly, delightful. Reiniger’s silhouettes remain expressive and fluid, and her ability to conjure action and emotion from simple shapes is as well-formed here as in Prince Achmed. That said, the production feels pared down. Gone are the color tints and suggestion of depth with layered silhouette arrangements; many scenes play out in a single, flat silhouette against a white background. It fits the lighter, less mythic tone of the Dolittle material, but I was hoping for a bit more visual flourish.

But one major piece is missing: voice. Maybe it’s because this is a silent film, but this is the only adaptation I’ve seen that doesn’t make a point of dramatizing Dolittle’s ability to communicate with animals. In the books, and nearly every other adaptation, this is the main point, of course. It’s the source of the comedy, wonder, and chaos. Here, we just see him nodding and gesturing at his loyal animal companions, and they respond in kind. The concept is implied, I suppose, but the absence of any communication makes the magic a bit more abstract. To be fair, Dolittle’s ability to understand animals is nonverbal in the source books, and rendered as such in the 1967 adaptation (whereas most later adaptations use voiceover when animals “talk”). But Dolittle conversing with animals in one form or another is always there, except for this one.

So here it is: the first and most attractive adaptation of Doctor Dolittle. It’s brisk and hews closely to the core arc of Lofting’s novel (racist ickiness and all). Watching it, it’s easy to detect ideas explored in the (too) many future adaptations, a barely extant little sprout of a film. It’s a bit of a shame it’s slipped through the fingers of film history. Reiniger’s film deserves to be remembered not only as a historical artifact, but as a charming piece of animation.

But seen today, Lotte Reiniger’s Dr. Dolittle und seine Tiere is both too slight and too marred with the baggage of the story to count as a hidden gem. Even still, there’s a case to be made it’s the best theatrically released or feature length adaptation of Doctor Dolittle ever produced. (I have another pick, but this one is probably second place for me.) That’s not a high bar, but that’s the nature of Dolittle adaptations.

And it didn’t slow down from there. By 1929, silent cinema had matured into its own sophisticated art form, just as aeronautical scientists looked to the stars. That year, the two industries crashed together. Fritz Lang, the great German director, teamed up with rocket scientist Hermann Oberth, a groundbreaking engineer (and a future Nazi). Together, they came up with Woman in the Moon, a milestone in sci-fi cinema as the first on-screen depiction of realistic space flight.

Lang collaborated with his wife and frequent partner, Thea von Harbou (another future Nazi), who adapted her own novel from the previous year into a screenplay. Their depiction of a mission to the moon is lightyears beyond Melies’ whimsy. Woman in the Moon is remarkably plausible in the broad strokes, decades before the space race even properly began. They even got some details right: In Woman in the Moon, a huge shuttle lifts off from a launchpad after a countdown sequence (cinema’s first ever), followed by a quiet, zero-gravity journey toward lunar orbit. These are some beats and images we take for granted a century later in the likes of First Man and Ad Astra.

Of course, this was still forty years before Neil Armstrong took his small step, and plenty of finer points are hilariously misguided. Lang knew the Earth-facing side of the moon had no atmosphere, but depicts the Moon’s far side as a comfortable, breathable environment (which was even then a crackpot theory), where astronauts casually stroll around in street clothes, no helmets necessary. Even funnier is how Lang portrays G-forces after liftoff like some mild seasickness: it’ll make some passengers woozy while others casually pace around the rocket. It’s jarring to see the mistakes when other moments nail the details, like the delightful depiction of weightlessness demonstrated with a floating wine bottle. Sadly no potato chips (”careful, they’re ruffled!”).

Woman in the Moon follows Helius (Willy Fritsch), a wealthy entrepreneur whose fascination with space travel leads him to collaborate with the eccentric Professor Mannfeldt (Klaus Pohl). Mannfeldt’s theory about gold deposits on the Moon earns him ridicule from peers but grabs the attention of a shady cabal of businessmen who plant the villainous spy Turner (Fritz Rasp) among the expedition crew. Meanwhile, Helius secretly pines for his assistant Friede (Gerda Maurus), who’s engaged to their cowardly colleague Windegger (Gustav von Wangenheim). The rocket launches with this colorful crew assembled: Helius, Mannfeldt, Friede, Windegger, Turner, and a young stowaway named Gustav (Gustl Gstettenbaur), who brings along his favorite pulp sci-fi magazines for some ironic read-along material.

It’s an interesting and well-realized story, but the real fly in the ointment is the pacing. Like Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, the film has the pace of an old-timey serial à la The Vampires or Lang’s own The Spiders, with endless episodes of minor incident that drag on for hours before we even get a whiff of space… Yes, hours, plural. The film’s runtime is 2 hours and 50 minutes, and liftoff doesn’t occur until well more than halfway into that. We have a whole feature of buildup that really ought to be about fifteen or twenty minutes.

But even the slow parts are not bad so much as they are modest. Lang is an outstanding filmmaker, and many of these sequences are excellent in isolation: mini-heists and melodramas. Lang’s skill in crafting images of crushing modernity never fails him. One of my favorite images comes from one of the first scenes and recurs throughout the first half of the film: Mannfeldt tosses a hat onto a lit, angular chandelier. The glowing from a head-cover suggests illumination and genius. But the heat of the light slowly singes the hat. It perfectly conveys without words Mannfeldt’s erratic brilliance causing danger and trouble.

But the main event here isn’t corporate espionage and love triangles. It’s outer space. Lang, two years off the landmark expressionism of Metropolis, balances realism with spectacle in the film’s much more consistently engaging second half. Once the ship readies for takeoff, the film transforms into something truly special.

The film’s masterpiece sequence is the preparation for the launch. We witness, via miniatures and camera tricks, a giant rocket carted from a warehouse, docked on a launching pad, and taking off into a starry sky in front of a crowd of cheering spectators. The editing is tense and quick here, and the compositions are astonishing feats of geometry. One specific shot taken from the ground upwards of the rocket approaching the launch pad ranks among the most awe-inspiring shots from any silent film I’ve ever seen.

The entire second and final hour of the film — the preparation and launch plus the space mission — is excellent and exciting. After the launch and some wonder-filled depiction of space flight, the rocket lands, and the rest of the film unfolds as drama on the surface of the moon, in which various plot threads come together in a surprisingly twisty finale.

The film is in the public domain, and Eureka released a sensational restoration of the film on Blu-ray. It’s one of the more pristine and attractive silent restorations I’ve seen, with gorgeous, shaded lighting, crisp detail, and sharp contrast. The motion is extremely steady, and the effects still look great. The restoration has no tinting at all; I’m not sure if this reflects how theaters projected it in 1929.

As with Dr. Mabuse and some other silent features that drag into multiple hours, Woman in the Moon is tedious to sit through with modern eyes, and that really degrades what should be a genuinely great moviegoing experience to more of a flawed but rich curiosity. Even the better second half takes its time telling its story. Three-hour movies can be an attention span challenge in general; slow-paced silent films especially so.

But I’m still very glad I watched Woman in the Moon, and at a minimum I would recommend the film’s greatest hits (the launch, the weightlessness, the lunar surface) as borderline essential for sci-fi cinema enthusiasts. Woman in the Moon is not quite the genre-definer that Lang’s Metropolis was, but it’s a visionary piece of near-future, realistic speculative fiction.

Here are a few more images from the film:

Gray, it seems, is a bit like cilantro: either he gives deliciously earnest flavor, or he tastes like soap. I’m in the “soap” camp, it seems. This is the second film of his I’ve seen, the first being Armageddon Time, another movie that wanted badly to be soulful and heartfelt but ended up a clumsy seminar in “big ideas we should all learn” (wow, racism is bad). Gray doesn’t write stories, it seems; he dictates concepts into story shape.

Set in a near future where humanity has developed the infrastructure to commute casually to the Moon and Mars, the film follows Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), a famously unflappable astronaut tapped for a mission that’s half interplanetary diplomacy, half therapy session. After a series of devastating power surges rattle Earth, Roy learns they may come from the Lima Project, a long-lost expedition to Neptune captained by his presumed-dead father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), a Buzz Aldrin-esque spacefaring pioneer. The solution is to send Roy on a cross-system journey to record a voicemail for his dad, asking him to pretty please stop unleashing gamma lasers on the homeworld. It’s a journey that takes Roy farther and farther from Earth, both literally and spiritually.

As Roy travels outward — first to the Moon, then Mars, then eventually beyond that — society thins out with him. Civilization becomes less ordered. Lunar malls give way to Martian bunkers, which give way to a sparse frontier. Roy’s journey is structurally an inverted version of Dante’s Inferno — concentric circles of sci-fi landscape, growing icier and more dangerous as you go further out rather than further in. Each planetary ring is another emotional crucible. By the time he reaches the destination of the climax, civilization is just a whisper in the void, and he’s almost literally talking to ghosts.

But just describing the plot doesn’t quite convey the experience of watching Ad Astra. The film’s most distinguishing feature might be its sound design: hushed, enclosed, chilly. We hear what Roy hears in his helmet: dampened voices, distant clangs, and the subtle thrum of space travel isolation. It’s beautifully executed and fully in sync with Roy’s inner world, his desperate attempts to connect with something or someone besides protocol, which is all his dad left him. The whole sound design has a narcotic calm to it. I actually had to watch in multiple sittings because I kept dozing off, and I mean that as a compliment. Few films have such a meditative, almost ASMR texture.

And then there’s the voiceover. Oh Lord, the voiceover. It’s not just a narrative crutch, it’s a full-on narrative exoskeleton. Roy narrates everything: his feelings, his non-feelings, his dad, his not-dad, his job, his thoughts about his job, his childhood trauma, his hopes, his absence of hope. I’m no voiceover prude — I think The Wonder Years is one of the great American texts — but this is the bad kind of narration. It’s ponderous and flabby, crowding out the images and flattening the mood. Pitt delivers it in a stern, introspective cadence that enhanced my sleepiness.

What images, though. If Gray’s pen is clumsy, his camera is astounding. With cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, doing his best “what if Roger Deakins shot an Apollo mission?” imitation, Ad Astra conjures some of the most striking sci-fi compositions and lighting since, well, Deakins’ Blade Runner 2049. We get planetary vistas rendered in striking color palettes, ships riding the precipice between darkness and sunlight, zero-G corridors that twist into near-abstraction. Even when the script dodders along, the visuals stay steady, immersive, and often extraordinary. Production designer Kevin Thompson and costume designer Albert Wolsky also deserve shout-outs for crafting a universe that feels not just near-future functional, but a bit haunted: practical tech as a counterpoint to a story operating in the mode of dreams.

At the center of all this is Brad Pitt, who has the unenviable task of carrying the movie both in screen presence and psychological depth. He does it well, but not well enough to fully convince me he’s the right man for the job. Pitt brings a composed, aging gravitas to Roy that reads as stoic, even noble, but the role seems built for someone less composed, more nervy, and younger. (I thought of Miles Teller.) Still, Pitt makes the most of it in quiet flashes, like when his eyes gently twitch as he undergoes a verbal psychological exam. My reservations on his casting aside, it’s a great performance that captures interior oceans of ache, mostly via small gestures and line readings.

Ad Astra is a movie I suspect inspires unusually subjective and divisive movie-watching experiences, depending on how allergic each viewer is to James Gray’s storytelling choices and how much they’re willing to suffer through tedious explication. The narrative is simultaneously overcooked and obtuse: characters announce emotional turning points with cue-card directness, even as major ideas — like the briefly suggested existence of aliens (that we can infer might be God), or how, exactly, a small station near Neptune managed to launch bursts energy flares across the solar system (antimatter or something?) — drift away unresolved or shrugged off. Sometimes the movie is both over-engineered and under-developed at once, like in the bizarre CGI baboon attack sequence, in which Roy encounters a murderous space monkey (which he declares, in voiceover, reminds him of his dad) that he never mentions or thinks about again.

For me, Ad Astra lands just on the right side of the recommendation line. The craft is just that terrific, the audiovisual texture just that rich and immersive. This film has jaw-dropping moments of scope, and even a handful of tear-jerking sequences in which the emotion successfully seeps through the spongy writing. But my recommendation comes with an asteroid-sized asterisk: Ad Astra is a frustrating film. It never fully gets out of its own damn way. For as much as the presentation and scenario suggest a quiet film about isolation and cosmic emptiness, the actual movie is cluttered and constantly distracting. Ad Astra is ultimately a beautiful, hollow object — as distant and easily forgotten as an absent glance into a starry sky.

If you’ve consumed any pop culture from the past 50 years, you’ve surely encountered a parody of Beach Party and its kin. Its most famous image is the artificial wave riding: footage of actors fake-surfing in front of obvious rear projection. The style also inevitably includes tiki bar hangouts, bikinis, outdated hairstyles, and a lot of righteous, indecipherable slang. The colors are cranked up past nature’s limits, and the whole affair feels both groovy and a little deranged. The entire aesthetic became a shorthand for a certain kind of instantly-dated but endearing youth culture, ripe for spoof.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that: Beach Party was already kind of a parody. It knows how ridiculous it is. Perhaps the films most directly in its lineage these days are the Disney Channel Original Movie musicals. Of course, near-masterpiece Teen Beach Movie would use Beach Party as a starting point, but this film most reminds me of Z-O-M-B-I-E-S, similarly targeting a teen audience while nudging them in the ribs. The movie thrives on the blurry edge between authentic and ironic representation.

The film’s identity didn’t start that way. It was birthed by the low-budget production machine that was American International Pictures (AIP), a studio that operated with an explicit desire to both follow trends for a quick buck and try to manufacture new ones. AIP, helmed by the notoriously efficient and savvy duo James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, specialized in quick, cheap genre films: juvenile delinquency dramas, drive-in horror, biker flicks, etc. Subtlety was not on the call sheet, but shamelessness was. The studio often allowed quirky or unheralded talent a chance to crank out a quick B-movie, so it’s not a surprise that some films AIP made or distributed have gone down as cult classics: The Amityville Horror, The Masque of Red Death, Blacula, Brian De Palma’s Sisters, and many more. They sometimes bought the American distribution rights to low-budget films made internationally, like Mad Max.

In 1962, the two studio heads caught a forgettable Italian film about older men lusting after scantily clad beach girls. AIP didn’t buy the rights to the film, but they dug the setting. Nicholson and Arkoff had the genius idea to make their own teen-targeted film set on a Calfironia beach. (Although I’ve read multiple sources recounting this genesis, none actually state what that original Italian film was, just noting that it was minor and forgettable.) They sent word back to one of their regular screenwriters, Lou Rusoff, to write a teen beach drama. Rusoff turned in a standard juvenile delinquent script, but set on a shoreline. But when they reached out to William Asher, a veteran TV director with experience on I Love Lucy and The Twilight Zone, he only agreed to helm the film on the condition that he be allowed to rework the film into a musical comedy. Nicholson and Arkoff agreed, and Asher rewrote the script with Robert Dillon, a Roger Corman and AIP hand. That pivot was the film’s turning point: Out went melodrama; in came a larger bikini wardrobe budget, an upbeat Les Baxter score, and an abundance of sitcommy shenanigans.

(Asher and Dillon insisted Rusoff keep the film’s writing credit so he could use the wages to pay for his brain cancer treatment. Sadly, Rusoff passed away before Beach Party’s premiere.)

With the pivot to a lighter tone and an acclaimed sitcom director at the helm, AIP decided to broaden its potential audience. They figured they could pull in some adults as well. That meant spending a little extra and bringing in more Hollywood gravitas than usual for the studio: B-lister Bob Cummings and Oscar winner Dorothy Malone. For the younger set, AIP made a deal with Disney to loan out rising star Annette Funicello, under the strict condition that she remain chaste. No belly buttons allowed. After negotiations with Fabian Forte fell apart, AIP lucked into Frankie Avalon. Avalon had just enough babyfaced charisma to straddle the line between heartthrob and goofball. More importantly, he and Funicello had terrific onscreen chemistry. Their old-married-couple bickering is believable and endearing.

The result is strange and delicious smoothie of tones and ideas: a beach movie, a teen rom-com, a musical, a satire, a B-movie cash grab, and a perfect time capsule of ‘60s surf culture. The overarching story is a simple arc of lovers quarreling then reuniting, and that simplicity is fine, as it lets the film breathe and try on different hats. Of all the film’s ambitions, the most frictionless and charming one is offering a hangout time capsule: The pseudo-documentary footage of ’60s beach life. Large chunks of the movie are dedicated to showing teens doing teen things on the shore: tanning, flirting, surfing, busting each other’s balls. These segments have an effortless sense of fun and even beauty, with gorgeous sunsets and beach horizons. Part of me always wishes Beach Party was a full-on, Linklater-style hangout movie from start to finish, conflict and narrative arcs be damned. Even with what we have, you can soak it all in, or you can apply a literary read on it: The beach is a threshold and transitional space just as adolescence is the shift from childhood into adulthood. In an ever-changing and scary adult world, the tide is reliable and steadfast. The foam rolling in and out, over and over, mirrors the push-pull of hormones and the rhythm of sex.

The action shifts at night to Big Daddy’s, a coffeehouse modeled after the real-life Laguna Beach spot Café Frankenstein, where late ‘50s beatniks and stoners once mingled and birthed surfer culture. This set is a total standout: a multilevel loft with glowing signage, tiki ephemera, and an elevated stage that gives the performers unique space for performing. It’s here that Dick Dale and the Del Tones bring the house down, anchoring the movie in some authentic cool, even as everything around it gets cartoonier. Asher clearly tapped into an emerging culture, or, at a minimum, faked it into something believable and vibrant.

The film’s central scenario is a tiff between Frankie (Avalon) and Dolores (Funicello), which mostly serves as a delivery system for barely coded innuendo. Beach Party might be the horniest film ever made that’s still a soft PG. Nearly every line out of Frankie’s mouth is some variation of “when are we gonna do it already?” while Dolores fends him off with witty deflections. She invites all their friends to join them at the beach hut to dodge alone time with Frankie, fully aware of his intentions… and more-or-less explicitly admitting she reciprocates his sexual desires but doesn’t feel ready to seal the deal. Frankie retaliates by flirting with Ava (Eva Six), the sultry Hungarian waitress from Big Daddy’s, and Dolores escalates the situation by throwing herself into the arms of the next warm body to pass… one who turns out to be an anthropologist professor.

That would be Professor Sutwell, played by Cummings with a mix of low-key detachment and double-take bafflement. He’s in town to study teen behavior as if it is an indigenous tribe — specifically their “primitive mating rituals” — which gives the film license to both ogle and deconstruct the teens’ sexual frustration and erratic behavior. (It also apparently gives the film license for lots of dated jokes about exotic cultures.) Sutwell is trailed by his pining assistant Marianne (Malone), who keeps waiting for him to notice she exists. Instead, he is drawn to Dolores as a subject for his “research,” treating her romantic overtures as enthusiastic academic assistance.

I really love Sutwell’s storyline, aided by Cummings’ clearly best-in-show performance. His plot offers sharp satire of the entire teen media industry, featuring adults chasing the meaning and weight of youth culture, trying to “figure out” the American adolescent when such a thing is diverse and ever-changing. Sutwell is essentially a stand-in for every adult trying to decode how teens click, particularly movie studios and cultural critics. This obsession with “cracking” teens inevitably results in a fetishization and vicarious participation in teen totems. By the end of the film, the same has happened to Sutwell, as he gradually transforms into a surfing teen himself. The satire stays light and avoids cynicism; the takeaway isn’t that the teens’ lifestyle and social dynamics are pointless trifle; rather, that they’re as ineffable and magical as they are silly and obtuse.

(Side note: Much derision and debate is devoted to the beard Cummings sports at the start of the film but trims later on. Beards being a symbol of old-fashioned stodginess is not something that holds true in the 2020s.)

The film’s final plot thread, if you can even call it such, follows a biker gang called The Rats led by Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck). Von Zipper is the closest the movie gets to a traditional antagonist, but even that’s not quite right. Lembeck shows the movie leaning on its parody aspirations, as he’s a pretty direct riff on Marlon Brando’s character in The Wild One, but with less-than-zero sense of danger and sex appeal, an inverse of ‘50s Brando. Von Zipper is a chubby, pint-sized, middle-aged blowhard who gets repeatedly outwitted by Professor Sutwell and falls victim to his paralyzing “nerve pinch.” The Rats are about as threatening as a group of boy scouts on scooters, and they have exaggerated speaking affectations. Their antics are the one portion of the film that is a bit too loud, chaotic, and broad for my tastes. I do admire Lembeck’s commitment to the bit, though, and his willingness to flail and degrade himself in front of a camera. Von Zipper would become the franchise’s comic relief mascot.

In addition to everything else going on, Beach Party makes room for a handful of musical numbers. The songs are a blend of diegetic numbers performed at Big Daddy’s and non-diegetic numbers where characters, mostly Dolores, break out into song. The biggest highlight is Dick Dale and the Del Tones’ “Swingin’ and a-Surfin’,” a full on banger and textbook slice of surf rock. The film opens with a sunny (if slight) duet between Avalon and Funicello that practically bursts with saccharine charm as they croon from a beach buggy. And even Annette’s solo, “Treat Him Nicely,” has a harmless earworm quality to it. Les Baxter’s score adds to the film’s inviting texture, giving the film a cinematic sweep despite its shagginess.

The performances ride the same tonal surfboard as the rest of the movie: straddling the entire spectrum between sincere and wacky. Avalon is not much of an actor, per se, but he carries his role with breezy self-assurance that’s just right. Funicello, meanwhile, plays Dolores with both warmth and restraint, never letting the character become either a full-on flirt or a total square (a balancing act Maia Mitchell couldn’t replicate in Teen Beach Movie). Cummings, as mentioned, gives the most layered performance, and frankly the funniest. His off-kilter quality brings Sutwell to life. Vincent Price makes a late cameo as Big Daddy, the oft-sleeping proprietor of the cafe. He name-drops his AIP film The Pit and the Pendulum. (“Bring me my pendulum, kiddies, I feel like swinging.”)

What makes Beach Party so culturally sticky, so recognizable 60+ years later, isn’t the music or the colors or the comic mayhem. It’s the weird, singular flavor of all those pieces coming together. Beach Party is its own mini universe you want to spend time in. It captures something real about being a teenager, too: the performative bravado, the omnipresent libido, the constant negotiation between vulnerability and tough swagger.

Beach Party’s lack of edginess ultimately makes it timeless kitsch in the way that something like Gidget, which also captured a strand of teen beach culture the previous year with a more JD-adjacent drama plot, is not. I tend to believe that the best way to capture eternal truths about human nature is to, paradoxically, focus on very specific times and places, and Beach Party is no exception. As much as it’s a product of the pre-Summer of Love ‘60s in Orange County (or “The OC” as it would be called in another iconic teen beach property 40 years later) it’s also a manifesto of what makes teens tick, rendered in a pop art package.

At the same time, the movie is proudly a cheap cartoon, a throwaway piece of fluff. It embraces silliness whenever the mood strikes; approximately every 30 seconds or so. A pervasive, heightened comic mood, bordering on postmodern, pervades the film: Dolores sings a duet with her own reflection in the mirror (with some underwhelming effects). Candy Johnson wiggles uncontrollably whenever she’s on screen, her tassled dress performing a kind of hypnosis. A sidekick inexplicably has the name of Deadhead. A climactic fight at Big Daddy’s ends with pie-throwing and resolves via Sutwell giving kung fu paralysis to the brawlers one at a time, such that everyone is standing around, stock still, when it’s through. Locations occasionally bend logic with dubious continuity, turning into surreal, liminal spaces. The film has a dreamlike fluidity in how it treats setting and mood. One scene resembles a stage play; the next could pass for a half-remembered TV commercial; the next a gorgeous beach vista. To watch it is to ride the wave.

American International Pictures knew “hooting” when they saw it. Beach Party cost somewhere between $200,000 and $300,000 to make and pulled in $2.3 million, a monstrous return for a penny-pinching outfit. AIP didn’t hesitate: by the end of 1965, just two years later, they released a whopping nine sequels or spin-offs, most with the same cast and William Asher behind the camera. These follow-ups upped the zaniness and ditched whatever subtlety and introspection Beach Party boasted: though the teens showed up to the box office, the grown-ups mostly stayed home, so the more ambitious, cerebral bent of Sutwell’s subplot disappeared from later entries. The most famous follow-up (and the best) is the fifth entry, Beach Blanket Bingo, which probably surpasses the original in name recognition at this point. But none of its sequels — at least, of the five I’ve seen — have quite the same sharpness and color and wit of the original Beach Party.