What Could Have Been: New York Ninja

Sometimes, certain films just seem destined to underperform at the box office, only to fall into more of a cult status down the road... and this could likely be the case for writer/director Damien Chazelle’s epic depiction of late 1920s, early 1930s Hollywood in Babylon (2022). Clocking in at three hours, nine minutes, if Chazelle’s 2016 musical La La Land was a love letter to current Hollywood, then this could easily be considered something similar to the growth and birth of the place. In some ways reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 feature Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (which also gives the viewer a bird’s-eye view into the movie making business), the aptly named Babylon is perhaps not for the faint of heart, but will be rewarding for anyone intrigued by the silent and the 30s Pre-Code era (or for people who are simply looking to learn more about this cinematic time).

If someone was told that a movie had earned almost 110 million in just over two weeks at the box office, most people would just shrug it off and say that isn’t all that special... but with this film being made for somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million dollars, that makes it a whole different thing. Utterly impressive in this day and age, the psychological horror film Obsession (released back at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025), written, directed, and edited by Curry Barker, is taking the cinema world by storm. Aptly titled, the rather timid, lonely, and lackluster Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey (Michael Johnston) is rather infatuated with coworker and longtime friend Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette). Working in the same music store along with co-friends Ian (a boisterous Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah Harper (Megan Lawless) – whose father Carter (Andy Richter – yes Conan O’Brien’s longtime sidekick) runs the store, it has become a sort of frustrating groundhog’s day for the man – who has long fretted over making his feelings known to the girl.

Originally meant to be a satire... though of a film very few have ever seen nowadays, the Norman Z. McLeod western comedy The Paleface (1948), written by Frank Tashlin about 1929's Virginian, infuriated the man in how it was directed (as a more generic spoof of the western)... but funnily enough, despite the screenwriter’s opinion, until Blazing Saddles (1974) came out, it was the highest grossing western parody of all-time and spawned a sequel in Son of Paleface (1952), while it was also remade as the Don Knotts vehicle The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968). After government agents tasked with tracking down an illegal gun smuggling ring turn up dead, the infamous Calamity Jane (Jane Russell) is secretly broken out of jail by Gov. Johnson (Charles Trowbridge) with the hope that she will take a pardon for going undercover to get to the bottom of this rebel-rousing (similar to rabble-rousing) gang in the frontier land.

Sometimes, even the immediacy of a mesmeric score setting the mood for what is to come tells the viewer that they are likely in for something really special. Case in point, Bernard Herrmann’s intense opening composition for 1962's Cape Fear, directed by J. Lee Thompson (Happy Birthday to Me). Produced by and starring Gregory Peck (To Kill a Mockingbird; On the Beach), he plays small town attorney Sam Bowden – a well respected family man within the quaint community in Georgia. Soon to be met with a harbinger of much danger, Max Cady (Robert Mitchum – Out of the Past; Where Danger Lives) – who was put behind bars by the soft spoken lawyer eight years ago after he testified at his trial, has made it quite clear that Sam’s wife Peggy (Polly Bergen) and daughter Nancy (Lori Martin) are in just as much danger, if not more.

After the success of 2022's eighteenth century set Prey, director Dan Trachtenberg has returned to the Predator franchise once more, this feature titled Predator: Badlands (2025), again coming up with a wholly different concept that transports the story in an engaging new direction. Taking place about as far away as possible from his previous effort (a concept developed by Trachtenberg and Patrick Aison, the latter then writing the screenplay), this one opens on Yautja Prime, the home planet of the Predators (who are formally known as Yautja), where the audience meets Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) – the weakling runt of the family who hasn’t earned his camouflaging cloak... which, if you known Predator culture, is not a good thing.

elebrating its 85th anniversary this year, Arthur Lubin’s Buck Privates started Bud Abbott and Lou Costello on their path to superstardom. Though they had already gained some fame on the vaudeville and burlesque comedy circuits, as well as gathering some traction on the radio (and lest we forget their small roles in their first film, One Night in the Tropics, the year before), things would be wholly different soon after. Combining their very different talents as the perfect straight and funny men (their longtime writer and ideas man John Grant came along for the ride – and would be involved on most of their future movies), it also didn’t hurt that cinema goers found plenty of comedic fun in its topical premise as tensions grew around the fears of the lengthening World War II – making Universal the most money it had ever earned up until that point (four million dollars – a lot of cash when tickets were between ten cents and a quarter depending on the location).