comedy

Maisie Goes to Reno (1944)

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In a somewhat baffling move, the makers of the Maisie film series decided, in the eighth of ten films and at the eleventh hour, to suddenly start paying some lip service to continuity between the comic outings of our beloved Maisie Ravier (Ann Sothern). When we last saw our heroine, she had joined the war effort as a riveter at Victory Air, and this film opens with her still in this job. Sweet Maisie has been burning the candle at both ends, continuing to work her swing shift while volunteering at the nursery to support the mothers working the day shift. Unfortunately for her (and to the comic delight of the audience), this has led her to develop a facial tic, causing her to wink frequently, usually at the most inopportune times. The doctor prescribes her two weeks paid vacation, and as luck would have it, an old friend is passing through on his way to Reno, where they could use a song and dance girl for a two week engagement at his hotel. Last time, we got to see just how far she would go to prevent a patriotic soldier from marrying the wrong woman. This time around, we get to see how willing she is to put herself in danger to stop a woman from divorcing the right patriotic soldier. Specifically, after buying the last plane ticket off of a woman who has rethought her Reno divorce, Maisie meets a young soldier named Bill Fullerton (Tom Drake), whose wife Gloria (Ava Gardner) has gone to Nevada under the mistaken belief that Bill married her for her vast family fortune, when the boy didn’t know anything about it until after the marriage. Maisie agrees to personally deliver a letter to Gloria, and sets out west for adventure (again). 

Shortly after arriving, Maisie meets this film’s love interest, “Flip” Hennahan (John Hodiak, who would star in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat the following year), a blackjack dealer at the hotel where they are both employed. Flip agrees to take Maisie to the ranch where Gloria Fullerton is staying, and although the reception Maisie meets there is cold, she feels satisfied in having done her duty. When she realizes she’s accidentally made off with Mrs. Fullerton’s matchbox, she asks to go back, but Flip admits that she can meet her basically any time, as the hotel’s manager is serving as the legal witness to Mrs. Fullerton’s residency for her divorce proceedings, and as such she comes to the hotel daily for lunch. Maisie’s quite taken with Flip’s willingness to sacrifice his gasoline rations on a frivolity just to spend the day with her, but the plot takes a turn when she recognizes “Gloria Fullerton” the next day. The woman in question is actually the real Gloria’s traitorous secretary Wini Ashbourne, who is in league with Gloria’s business manager Pelham (Paul Cavanagh, who previously played the largely absent patriarch in Maisie Was a Lady) to get Bill out of the picture so that they can embezzle Gloria out of house and home. To that end, they’ve employed master forger Clave, who’s staying across the hall from Maisie in the hotel. Rounding out the supporting cast is a truly charming performance by nascent choreographer (and future model for Disney’s Peter Pan) Roland Dupree, as a bellboy whose infatuation with Maisie leads him to play sidekick for her, even as she goes to increasingly extreme measures to stop the Fullertons from divorcing. Oh, and if you were worried about what happened to Breezy from Swing Shift Maisie, for once we also find out what happened to Maisie’s last boyfriend; specifically, “He got a little too interested in the native dancers … of Dallas.” 

This has all the hallmarks we’ve come to expect of a Maisie picture. Once again, her love interest is a man with a silly nickname (“Slim” in Maisie, “Skeets” in Ringside Maisie, “Hap” in Maisie Gets Her Man, and “Breezy” last time around). Maisie herself is brassy, funny, and occasionally pouty. She gets to do a big song and dance number, entitled “Panhandle Pete,” in which she pretends to make trick revolver shots and is pulled into and out of the performance area on a wheeled pony, to show off Ann Sothern’s talents at both. But there’s also some great novelty in this go-round as well. Flip is a different kind of love interest for Maisie, one that she’s interested in but doesn’t have to protect from the wiles of any other women, and Hodiak plays him as both quite taken with Maisie while also being frequently frustrated by her, and it’s a nice dynamic. He’s occasionally flustered by her endless questions, although “Are you married?” and “Are you a draft dodger?” are fairly reasonable ones to ask, all things considered. I was slightly disappointed that Swing Shift Maisie didn’t decide to go all in and have an espionage plot, but the filmmakers make up for that this time around. Although the scheme to defraud and embezzle Gloria isn’t exactly a spy thriller, it plays like one, so much so that when the three co-conspirators corner Maisie in her hotel room and hold her at gunpoint, it feels for the first time that Maisie is in real, actual danger. Pelham even slaps her across the face to shut her up, and I gasped aloud at this sudden intrusion of realistic violence into a series of films that, the potential starvation of the dust bowl migrants in Gold Rush Maisie aside, has had stakes about as high as an episode of my beloved I Love Lucy. 

The ending is high octane and slapstick in equal measure. Maisie has allowed Jerry the bellboy to come to believe that she’s working for the FBI after he catches her getting Clave drunk in order to get a confession out of him. Flip has become completely convinced that Maisie’s accusations of massive fraud and potential identity theft are the results of a breakdown; it’s patronizing, but the fact that Maisie was given leave from war work due to a nervous condition means that he has some decent grounds to believe that Maisie just needs help. With no evidence other than her word, Maisie enlists Jerry to help her kidnap Gloria from the courthouse before her divorce proceedings can begin, just to hold her long enough for Bill to arrive, as he’s finally been granted leave from the army, but won’t be in Reno until the afternoon. When they accidentally also abduct Wini, who was posing as Gloria to divert the paparazzi, all four of them are taken to the jailhouse by a traffic officer. There, Maisie must plead her case, while Flip arrives with a psychologist to try and convince the board to release Maisie into his care rather than be imprisoned. Maisie feigns a fainting spell and pretends to be completely out of it, which drops everyone’s guard long enough for her to escape custody, find Bill, and sprint to the courthouse to stop Gloria before it’s too late. In the end, they all end up locked in the judge’s chambers with dozens of looky-loos and court reporters trying to break the doors down. It’s terrific stuff, and I’m starting to feel a little disappointed that the end of the Maisie series is approaching, with only two features left. This one is definitely in the top three so far, and they’ve only gotten better as the movies have gone along. Nevertheless, the next time we see Maisie, the war will be over, and I can’t wait to see what our heroine is getting up to then. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Swing Shift Maisie (1943)

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We’ve met Maisie, seen her take a misguided detour on the Congo River, watched her riff on Grapes of Wrath and Knockout, get paired off with Red Skelton, and even be a proper lady. At last, in 1943, we get to see Maisie (Ann Sothern) join the war effort in a film that could alternately be titled Maisie the Riveter. We once again find our heroine at the foot of her Sisyphean mountain: broke, single, and working a lousy showbiz job. This time, she’s in a dog circus, although she gets let go from this when test pilot “Breezy” McLaughlin (James Craig) gets into an argument over the phone with his employer about Breezy’s voluntary enlistment in the air force. The repartee that follows Breezy and Maisie’s meet-cute leads her to decide she’s going to go get a job at Victory Air Co., declaring that “if [he] can fly planes, then brother [Maisie] can build ‘em.” 

Maisie hits a snag early on when she’s unable to present her birth certificate (“You can see I was born,” she says, “There’s not much doubt it was in Brooklyn”), but she convinces a man to perjure himself by swearing an affidavit that he’s known her all his life and can vouch for her citizenship. She also settles into a boarding house run by matronly Maw (Connie Gilchrist), where she meets former Abilene beauty queen Iris Reed (Jean Rogers) in the process of trying to suffocate herself with an open gas pipe after failing to find acting work. Maisie encourages Iris to get a job at Victory Air with her, and to leave her private room and share one with Maisie, to help her money stretch further. Iris agrees, and initially the two of them hit it off rather well, before Iris meets Breezy and begins to make designs to steal Maisie’s man. Before he’s sent out for training maneuvers, she’s succeeded, and the two of them confess to Maisie that they’re planning to wed. Maisie has no hard feelings, and even promises to look after Iris on Breezy’s behalf while he’s away, but this ends up proving more difficult than expected when it turns out Iris has no intention of remaining true to Breezy in his absence. 

Rogers plays Iris as a hell of a vamp, and having a true heel to play against makes for a very strong comedic outing this time around. Maisie’s attempts to keep Iris from wandering astray by trying to get her involved in several of the social clubs in the boarding house and the surrounding neighborhood make for a humorous, if not uproarious, montage. Iris has to be dragged away from the photography club because the teacher is a little too eager to take her into the darkroom for private instruction; Iris surreptitiously sneaks away from the lady’s singing club during a high note; Iris lies in order to leave a meeting of the virtuous wives and girlfriends’ club. When Maisie catches her in the last of these, Iris claims she’s simply going for more knitting wool, to which Maisie retorts, “To pull over whose eyes?” All of Maisie’s ministrations of morality come to naught, however. Iris’s consistent refusal to wear her safety scarf results in her hair getting caught in machinery, and when she explodes at the foreperson afterwards, she’s fired, but quickly accepts an offer from one of the men in the factory to let him pay for a room for her in his building. She makes sure to shake down Maisie one last time on the way out. 

When Maisie first talks to Iris about the factory job, there’s a bit of a to-do about Iris’s birth certificate, and at first I thought that this might be leading up to the revelation that Iris was a spy, which would have been a very bold direction for a Maisie picture to take. Instead, it comes back around in a different fashion, and puts Maisie in some of the worst real danger she’s been in. After a series of misunderstandings, including being caught slipping encouraging notes into the cockpits of planes she’s working on and being observed reuniting with some German expatriate acrobats of her acquaintance (and doing a poorly considered old routine with them), Iris decides to rid herself of the nuisance that is Maisie Ravier. When Breezy lets the girls know that he’s taking leave in order to come back and get married to Iris sooner than later, Iris throws up as many roadblocks between Maisie and Breezy as possible, including telling the authorities about Maisie’s forged affidavit letter in order to paint Maisie as an enemy infiltrator, which leads to her detention by the authorities. Maisie, caring more about making sure that Breezy doesn’t marry an unfaithful woman, falsely confesses to this in order to get the police to stop Breezy and Iris from leaving town by claiming that they are co-conspirators. 

I do think it would have been more fun if Iris had been a Nazi spy, but it’s still a blast to see Maisie with such a strong foil for once. Jean Rogers brings a bit of prestige to the piece, and her breathy, narcissistic performance as Iris is a delight. The elements of war pictures that you’re more likely to associate with the time—intrigue, pining women who long for the return of their brave soldiers, the duty of sacrifice—are pretty absent here. Instead, we get a bit of a propaganda piece about staying true to the men who are over there sticking blades in Nazi guts, with the audience of virtuous women seeing themselves represented on screen as steadfast and loyal, those who are too cowardly to break things off or are using the men for their own ends get to be told off by Maisie through an on-screen avatar, and our boys over there can rest assured that Maisie’s keeping their girls back home in line. It’s not as emotionally honest as, say, To Be or Not To Be or Trouble in Paradise, but it’s great to see Maisie really go toe-to-toe with someone who can hold their own against her. Definitely a top tier outing for our girl. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Maisie Gets Her Man (1942)

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May is getting far behind us, but in my heart, it’s still Maisie May. It’s once again time to check in with our favorite perpetually down-on-her-luck showgirl, Maisie Ravier. Not since Maisie has Ann Sothern shared equal billing with anyone (where she was, bizarrely, credited behind co-star Robert Young). This time, it’s presumably because her co-lead was an honest-to-goodness star. 

Maisie’s Sisyphean existence continues, in which she finds herself beginning every film in dire straits with no mention of her past loves or fortunes. This time, she’s the living target for a knife-throwing stage act, but when the great Professor Orco allows his recent break-up to influence how he feels about women and how careful he is with his act, nearly killing her, she once again finds herself pounding pavement. Maisie takes an offer from a man who operates a strange kind of boarding house. Like Gold Rush Maisie, Maisie Gets Her Man draws on then-current events, with a contemporary review of the film from The New York Times citing that the place Maisie finds herself is a “background that seems to have been suggested by A. J. Liebling’s Jollity Building series in the New Yorker.” (That A.J. Liebling was already writing pieces about boxing for the New Yorker which would eventually lead to the publication of The Sweet Science is also probably not a coincidence.) Pappy Goodring (Allen Jenkins) owns a building where he rents out office spaces, although many of them are also currently occupied by people who can’t afford real lodgings. Everyone there has fallen on hard times; basement cafe operator Jasper is hypervigilant about potential dining and dashing, Ears Coffin (Rags Ragland) is a former wrestler who has become a talent agent who couldn’t book St. Paul on TBN, and Pappy himself is staring down bankruptcy, in no small part because of his soft heart for his tenants and their hot checks. The operation gets a cash injection with the arrival of Marshall Denningham (Lloyd Corrigan), who has come to the city to market his new mineral water. 

You may have noticed that Red Skelton isn’t mentioned at all in that paragraph. Frankly, this movie would almost be better without him. Skelton plays Hap Hixby, a wannabe comedian who’s come to the city from the sticks to try and peddle his particular brand of annoying prop comedy. He and Maisie first meet each other in Ears Coffin’s office, and he’s extremely obnoxious right out of the gate. Maisie seems exasperated with him from the first scene that they share, which leads me to believe that he’s supposed to be unpleasant, but the comedy of that only works if a character is annoying to the other characters and funny to us in the audience, which Hap is decidedly not. Luckily, we only have to put up with this for a little while, since the first time that he actually goes on in front of an audience (with Maisie as his plant), he freezes with such stage fright that he drops most of his more exhausting bits for the rest of the film. After a bunch of rigmarole, Hap ends up as vice president of Denningham’s Sapphire River Tonic, and the success of the business means that Pappy is able to fend off the bankruptcy proceedings of his creditors, a process that is helped along by Maisie accidentally getting drunk with said creditor on Denningham’s Sparkling Tonic (which is just tap water and hard liquor) and giving him the old Maisie speech. 

She and Hap confess their love for one another, but the following morning, his fiance from back home arrives in Chicago, and Maisie once again leaves without saying goodbye. As with Maisie, she finds out later that her former beau has gotten himself into legal trouble, namely that Denningham’s con has been found out and that he had taken on Hap as his partner so that he could leave him behind to face the ramifications while he skipped town. Unlike last time this happened, however, she has a much more active role in the action. Having joined a traveling song and dance troupe, she finds Denningham in the midst of his next scam and is able to trick him into telling her all the details while she sends for the police. She next sees Hap when her group performs a USO-style revue at the camp where he’s enlisted, which is the first time that any of these films have alluded to WWII at all; she does a patriotic number entitled “Cooking with Gas,” and the end card encourages the audience to buy war bonds and stamps in that very theater. It’s a strange tonal dissonance that seems to come out of nowhere, but at least the music is lively and the film ends on an upbeat note. 

This film has some of my favorite Maisie-isms so far. When she manages to fend off an apoplectic Professor Orco, she commands the men who intervene to “Let him loose boys, so [she] can claim self-defense.” After Ringside Maisie’s lamentation asking what kind of stars must have been over Brooklyn when she was born, Maisie this time says that “They must have repealed the law of averages when [she] was born.” She’s able to really give it to Hap a few times, too, with my favorite line being “Go ahead and open it; they don’t mail summonses, honey.” Unfortunately, this does very little to counterbalance the extremely unfunny third of the film that features Red Skelton trying and failing to find the line between annoying to Maisie and annoying to the audience. As that aforementioned 1942 NYT review said it best: “Maisie, no doubt, will recover. She will dismiss her failure with a shrug, then brighten up for her next adventure. We like her, cheap tinsel and all. We hope she gets her break next time.”

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ringside Maisie (1941)

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Ringside Maisie is a film in one of my least favorite genres: a sports comedy. Despite this, it manages to be pretty good. Considering that most of the sports films that I do end up liking generally tend to be ones about boxing or martial arts (like Creed), I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise. 

Once again, Maisie Ravier is en route to another job, and she’s run out of money, which prompts her to be ejected from the train on which she has stowed away. Why she needs to work after falling in love with a rich bachelor who was ready to settle down at the end of Maisie Was a Lady is unknown, just as we never hear why she never went back to the Bar-O Ranch that she inherited at the end of Maisie, or if/why things didn’t work out with Slim, her love interest in that film. Walking along the tracks, Maisie gets picked up by a young boxer named Terry Dolan (Robert Sterling, Ann Sothern’s real-life husband), who takes her back to the training facility. Terry’s manager, “Skeets” Maguire (George Murphy), is immediately suspicious of Maisie, assuming that she’s an athlete chaser of some kind, but he softens to her as the two get to know one another better. Terry admits to Maisie that he and his girlfriend Cissy (Natalie Thompson) are currently lying to Terry’s mother (Margaret Moffatt) about Terry’s line of work. When Maisie is fired from her job as a dancer for refusing to put out for her boss, she finds work as Mrs. Dolan’s companion, which gives her more time to develop a fondness for Skeets. When she learns that Terry wants to quit boxing and open a grocery store like the one his father ran before they lost their savings, Maisie encourages him to tell Skeets, insisting that the manager will understand, but Skeets instead insists that Terry must finish out his contract. When his next bout results in Terry being blinded, perhaps permanently, Maisie once again delivers an impassioned speech that makes everything right. 

Despite this being the longest Maisie picture so far, clocking in at 95 minutes, there’s not much more substantial to say about this one than any of the others. That having been said, I enjoyed this one immensely. I didn’t really buy the budding romance between Maisie and Skeets (perhaps because she has, naturally, more chemistry with Terry), but I did like the sweet relationship that forms between Maisie and Mrs. Dolan. Maisie is a woman for whom her forthrightness is a virtue, and she can’t be relied upon to be dishonest for very long. I was also shocked by the late-in-the-film sudden change in Cissy, who had theretofore seemed like she really and truly loved Terry, but who was ready to ditch him immediately. Watching Maisie tear into her for her fairweather love was as fun as it was watching her give Skeets a talking-to about his treatment of Terry. The tension continues to build throughout, especially once a specialist is brought in from Boston to perform a hail mary operation on Terry to reduce the swelling in his brain and restore his eyesight, which has the most immediate stakes of any of these films. It’s a fun watch, perhaps second only to Maisie Was a Lady so far. Will this love between Maisie and Skeets last? I doubt it, given that the next film is titled Maisie Gets Her Man. We’ll find out together, next time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #266: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026) & Matt Johnson

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Welcome to Episode #266 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Hanna discuss the directorial career of alt-comedy prankster Matt Johnson, starting with his recent time-traveling sitcom sequel Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026).

00:00 Welcome
02:22 A Chinese Torture Chamber Story (1994)
12:12 Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies (1992)
18:51 Caroline Leaf & Suzan Pitt

28:55 Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
55:00 The Dirties (2013)
1:13:36 Operation Avalanche (2016)
1:26:00 BlackBerry (2023)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Turksploitation sci-fi parody Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973).

00:00 Welcome
02:37 Maisie Was a Lady (1941)
06:47 Ringside Maisie (1941)
10:56 Maisie Gets Her Man (1942)
15:32 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
18:58 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
20:15 The Man Who Laughs (1928)
25:11 Die Nibelungen (1924)
35:15 All Monsters Attack (1969)
38:53 Happiness (1998)
46:13 Chungking Express (1994)
50:05 Obsession (2026)
1:00:45 Blue Film (2026)
1:06:16 How to Make a Killing (2026)
1:11:10 Scream 7 (2026)
1:16:44 Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks (2026)
1:21:26 I Love Boosters (2026)
1:35:00 Is God Is (2026)
1:39:28 Backrooms (2026)

2:01:45 Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

I Love Boosters (2026)

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I Love Boosters is many things. It’s a heist movie that takes a sharp left turn into science fiction territory. It’s a jeremiad about the life-destroying conditions of the sweat shops in which most of our clothing is manufactured. It’s a meditation on the material conditions of entry level retail work, and it’s a barely exaggerated take on C-suite self-aggrandization, and it’s a satire that takes the concept of “crisis actors” to an absurd extreme. It’s a parable about the way that consent is manufactured across multiple social tiers, and a slumber party movie for fashion girlies, and a call for unionization and collective action. It’s also a Scooby Doo cartoon where Keke Palmer peels out, legs cycling, as she tries to get her footing in a slanted room. What a delight! 

Corvette (Palmer) is the ringleader of a group of Bay Area “boosters,” people who steal merchandise, specifically quasi-high end retail fashion in this case, and resell it. She and friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) have been dubbed “The Velvet Gang” by the media, and their primary target is Metro Designers, a chain of shops owned and operated by fashion “genius” Christie Smith (Demi Moore), whom Corvette admires and despises in equal measure. Corvette has dreams of becoming a designer herself, and they’re not hampered by the fact that her current living conditions find her squatting in a defunct fast-food restaurant, although she’s beginning to lose hope. While casually fending off the flirtatious advances of an unnamed bargain fashion model (LaKeith Stanfield), Corvette also finds herself plagued with visions about a giant rolling ball of trash. When Corvette finds herself offered a job at Metro Designs by authoritarian store manager Grayson (Will Poulter) during an interview that’s only meant to be a distraction, the trio decides to infiltrate the store and clean it out completely. Then things go really sideways. 

Most of us can only wish we had half the imagination and vision that Boots Riley does. This movie is as vibrantly beautiful as it is chaotic and bizarre. At times, the entire frame is completely dominated by a single color, either through the use of saturation from red lights or because each Metro Designers location is monochromatic (as Christie says on the in-store displays, “If you want it in a different color, go to another location!”) on a monthly rotating basis. At other times, through their coordinated-to-clash outfits, the frame is filled with so many candy colors that once can’t help but be lost in the fantasia of it all. There is stop motion animation and there are car chases that appear to be done in Number Seventeen-esque miniature, alongside low-tech old school cinematic techniques like having a character shapeshift by having one performer sink out of frame while the other rises into it and having an entire set built at an angle to emulate a crooked building. The film is a feast for the eyes and an utter delight. 

Lest you think that the director of Sorry to Bother You has decided to make a film that’s all style and no substance, let me allay your fears. The film is entirely about the methods by which every individual is kept disenfranchised exist at every level, and it’s insidious everywhere it goes. Workers die from unsafe working conditions and CEOs respond to collective action with violence and retribution. Local “guru” Dr. Jack (Don Cheadle) is the head of a very successful “friends being friendly” con that is a literal pyramid scheme. Metro Designers employee Violeta (Eiza González)’s paycheck is less than $40, with Christie’s rotating monochromatic color scheme forcing the store clerks to update their workwear every month with the cost of their new outfits deducted from their pay. Christie’s office features a photo of her with Barack Obama next to the awards documenting her involvement with “Democracy Forge,” which sounds like the handle of blue check Twitter Lib and is just as sinister; this ultimately connects with the “man on the street” style interviews we see throughout the film with chyron-identified characters like Based Young Dude, Crying Black Mother, and Upstanding Community Member, but I won’t spoil the surprise of how. 

Just do yourself a favor, and see this one on the biggest screen you can. You won’t be disappointed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Sheep Detectives (2026)

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I had zero interest in seeing The Sheep Detectives. Any film that advertises itself as being “from the director of Minions and Despicable Me 3” knows that it is both reaching out to its intended audience as well as forewarning those, like me, who are not part of that number. I also don’t normally bother with family films; I have no children and know almost none, but I got to meet my partner’s family last weekend and, since our choices were either Obsession, Passenger, or The Sheep Detectives, we packed into two cars and drove to the AMC in Deerfield, Illinois (birthplace of Kitty Pryde!) to watch Hugh Jackman get murdered, in a PG way. 

George Hardy (Jackman) is a vegetarian shepherd who is adored by his flock and either ignored or disliked by most of the human residents of the village of Denbrook. He has a deep and abiding dislike for both butcher Ham Gilyard (who, for his part, says he can tolerate vegetarianism in women but finds it distasteful in men) and a fellow shepherd named Caleb (Tosin Cole) who leases meadowland from George. There’s also some amount of friction between him and local innkeeper Beth (Hong Chau) and Reverend Hillcoate (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), although the nature of their beef is part of the mystery. His flock, however, adores him as their caregiver. Notable members of the herd include a mysterious recent addition named Sebastian (Bryan Cranston) with a dark and troubled past, the elderly and stentorious contagious ecthyma sufferer Sir Richfield (Patrick Stewart), the beautiful diva Cloud (Regina Hall), and oddball Mopple (Chris O’Dowd). George’s pride and joy, however, is Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), who is named for George’s late wife and who is, by the other sheep’s reckoning, the smartest sheep in the world. After all, she’s the only one who always figures out who the killer is in the mystery novels that George reads to the flock nightly. 

Shortly after the arrival of Elliott Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine), an obituary reporter who has come to Denbrook to cover their “heritage festival” only to discover it consists of three folding tables behind the inn, George is murdered. Local constable Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun) is a clumsy oaf who has little hope of solving the killing and enlists Elliott to assist him. Further complicating matters is the arrival of George’s fancy lawyer Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson), who reveals that George’s home-brewed remedy for contagious ecthyma has been sold to a major farm pharmaceutical company, and that she has brought George’s long-lost daughter Rebecca (Molly Gordon) to Denbrook for the reading of the will. 

When I texted Brandon about the film, he mentioned that he had seen it reviewed elsewhere as “Knives Out meets Babe,” and I’ve seen it referred to that way in other places as well. That’s fairly accurate, but what’s most striking about the film is the way that it handles the internal lives of the sheep who make up most of its cast. They have a cosmological theology, namely that they believe sheep eventually turn into clouds at the end of their lives, the same clouds which rain down and nourish the grass of future generations. They also have the ability to willfully forget any information which bothers them or gives them anxiety, which means that even though Lily herself witnessed the death of her parents, she has Men in Blacked herself into hanging onto her beliefs. Only Mopple, who is treated as somewhat disabled by the other sheep for his inability to intentionally forget, understands the reality of the world, and has to bear this alone. This also means that the sheep have no real concept of “death,” thinking of murder as a literary device only, not something that could happen to their beloved shepherd. And, instinctively, they reject a lamb born in the winter rather than the spring (a behavior of real sheep) for being “wrong” in ways that they never articulate and probably couldn’t if they tried. 

It’s all fascinating stuff, but given that this is a family feature, it’s only explored insofar as it relates to the main mystery. Although there were a couple of scenes that were frightening for our nine-year-old viewing companion (most notably a fight between some frightening guard dogs and Sebastian), this is a movie where the biggest clue to the murderer’s identity requires no more sophisticated knowledge than blue + yellow = green. It’s the kind of film that you see and think to yourself that now you know what you should watch with your parents the next time you can’t agree on something during the holidays. I’m a huge fan of cozy mysteries, but the actual mystery here is on par with a slightly below average episode of Murder, She Wrote, succeeding mostly in getting into the alien minds of the sheep characters more than it does as a whodunnit. Still, there’s a place in this world for films like this, and if this sounds like something you’d like, you probably will. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

How to Make a Killing (2026)

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I was intrigued by the initial trailers for John Patton Ford’s modern update on Kind Hearts and Coronets, How to Make a Killing. Glen Powell as the disenfranchised heir to a massive fortune who has to pick off his awful relatives one by one, what’s not to love? Unfortunately, a better question would have been “What’s there to love?”, and the answer is “Not very much.” 

The extravagantly wealthy Redfellow clan exiles daughter Mary when she gets pregnant with the child of a commoner and refuses to abort it. The father of said child, whom Mary names Becket, dies on the day of his birth, and Mary spends the first several years of his life indoctrinating Becket into the belief that he “deserves” “the right kind of life.” Despite being a lowly civil servant, Mary ensures that Becket gets archery lessons and all of the other hallmarks of an upper class upbringing, which brings him into contact with Julia, an upper class girl with whom he falls in love. Becket shares with Julia that the Redfellow patriarch stipulated in his will that the last surviving member of the Redfellow clan inherits the entire $28M fortune, even those who were previously disinherited. As an adult, Becket (Powell) has a chance run-in with recently married Julia (Margaret Qualley) at the Manhattan haberdasherie where he works, where he’s reminded that she’s upper class and awful; it’s all very Kate Beaton’s Wuthering Heights.

When he is demoted from salesman to warehouse work at his job because the owner’s son is being slotted into Becket’s position, Becket decides to look into the whole “Let’s kill off my cousins so I can inherit everything” option. He starts with tech money halfwit Taylor (Jude Law’s son Raff), and his attendance of Taylor’s funeral brings him in contact with his uncle Warren (Bill Camp), who confesses that he always felt guilty about what happened to Mary but was powerless to stand up to current family head Whitelaw Redfellow (Ed Harris); Warren offers Taylor’s old job to Becket, who accepts. Becket sets sights on his second victim/cousin, Noah (Zach Woods), a pretentious Brooklyn hipster in the mold of Pulp’s “Common People,” whose girlfriend Ruth (Jessica Fenwick) falls for Becket after Noah’s death. Now that he has the love of a paternal figure, a job that he excels in and which nets him enough money to rent a luxurious NY apartment, and a down-to-earth girlfriend, Becket has the life he “deserves,” but it’s still not quite enough. In quick succession, he knocks off his megachurch money laundering cousin (Topher Grace), aviation obsessed uncle McArthur, and faux-humanitarian mega-adopter aunt Cassandra, leaving only Becket, Uncle Warren, and Grandpa Whitelaw in the Redfellow clan’s tontine, at which point Becket takes a pause to decide if he wants to continue with his murder spree. This is complicated by Julia’s re-entry to Becket’s life, begging for a loan for her in-over-his-head husband, and despite Becket’s “careful” alibi-creation for all of the deaths of his relatives, Julia has the evidence that would put him away if he refuses to bail her and her husband out. When Warren dies of natural causes, it all comes down to a showdown with Whitelaw, which we assume can only end one way, since we’ve been told this entire story via flashback that is set in a framing device of Becket in prison awaiting his execution. 

This film has no idea what it wants to be. It’s not quite funny enough to be a true comedy and instead takes a sharp turn into knockoff noir territory, especially when it comes to Julia’s late-film-twist transformation into the femme fatale to serve as a foil to Ruth’s good girl. Qualley is horribly miscast in this role; I’ve been an advocate for her based on her performances in The Substance and Kinds of Kindness despite seeing her plumb the depths with Drive Away Dolls, but it might be time to throw in the towel on defending her against the accusations that she’s just not a very good actor. That may not entirely be her fault, though; this is just a bad movie, and no one comes off well here. I’m generally charmed by Powell and adore Fenwick, but both are underwhelming here, and even Powell’s charisma isn’t enough to make Becket someone in whom we can become emotionally invested. This is a movie about nepotism, explicitly and textually, and I can’t tell if Qualley and Law were cast with a sense of irony or not, but no one “deserves” the kind of life that a multimillion-dollar fortune provides. The only performance that I genuinely loved was Topher Grace’s, who appears in a single scene. Most of the pruning of the Redfellow family tree is done almost perfunctorily, when spending a little more time with them and their awfulness would lend at least some sense of justice to Becket’s actions. Instead, one gets the sense that we’re supposed to find them loathsome despite the fact that their sins are enjoying their wealth in the same way that we see Becket enjoy his when he starts to have his own folding money. A more sincere effort to inspect that would have been more effective, but then that wouldn’t leave enough room for the “comedy” that the film was sold on. It’s messy and inconsistent. How to Make a Killing is too many things and nothing at all: a noir with all of its grit sanded off, a comedy that isn’t very funny, good and bad actors alike having no charisma with one another, and all of it shot with flat, featureless Netflix lighting. No wonder it had no staying power in cinemas.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Maisie Was a Lady (1941)

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For the first time, we open a Maisie picture (this is the fourth) with our leading lady already employed. It’s not very dignified, unfortunately; she’s in a carnival sideshow set up in a contraption with a mirror that makes her appear headless. When troublemaking wealthy alcoholic Bob Rawlston (Lew Ayres) tickles her on stage and costs her the job, he allows her to borrow his car to get into town. Maisie takes him up on this offer but ends up spending the night in jail after being pulled over on suspicion of stealing the vehicle. When the judge lets her off per Bob’s admission of complicity in Maisie’s firing and his permission to use the car, he also requires Bob to pay Maisie the amount that she was supposed to receive for the remainder of her sideshow contract, Maisie refuses to take money for nothing, and it all shakes out that Bob will keep her on for the two months of her contract at the sprawling Rawlston manse as a maid. Maisie is taken to the house and introduced to family butler Walpole (C. Aubrey Smith). 

On her first day, she meets Bob’s sister Abigail (Maureen O’Sullivan) as well as her fiancé, Link Phillips (Edward Ashley), but is not aware of their relationship until after Link has tried (and failed) to make a pass at her. The house is full of guests who will be in attendance at the upcoming engagement party for Link and Abigail. They’re all rather hoity-toity and rude to Maisie, embarrassing Abigail so thoroughly that she asks Maisie to be her personal maid, to which our heroine agrees. We get to spend some time with Abigail and learn that, despite all her wealth and finery, the Rawlston family is in disarray; after Mrs. Rawlston’s death, the family patriarch, “Cap,” has become a largely absent presence, sending jewelry that Abigail never wears or cares about in lieu of being present in her (or Bob’s) life. We learn about most of this from Abigail herself, while Walpole relates the same is true for Bob, who won a scholarship for some kind of aviation innovation, but for whom a lack of fatherly interest meant that he abandoned all of his ambitions. Tensions in the house reach a boiling point with the arrival of Diana Webley, a woman Link Phillips previously spurned; he doesn’t see any reason that his money marriage to Abigail should spoil all of the fun that they could have together, and it’s up to Maisie to, once again, save the day. 

Maisie Was a Lady is the best of the Maisie series by a decent margin. Maisie wasn’t terrible, of course, but it wasn’t all that memorable, either, whereas this one hits the ground running right out of the gate. Maisie is still independent, witty, and vivacious, and as the series goes along, she’s simply dropped into place until she gets the chance to observe everyone’s foibles, then deliver a no-nonsense monologue to give them the what-for that sets everything right. For the first time since Maisie, she also gets a love interest in the form of Bob Rawlston, even if their sudden affection for each other comes out of left field in the film’s final moments. With peace restored to the Rawlston household, Abigail asks Maisie to go to Honolulu with the family and to stay on as her companion. Maisie’s eyes light up as she considers it, possibly considering what adventures she might get up to in Honolulu Maisie, but then asks Walpole what kind of woman he foresees for Bob, prompting the old butler to rattle off a description of old money gentility that causes those lights to dim. After the leading men in Congo Maisie and Gold Rush Maisie both turned out to be false flag romantic leads, perhaps I should have seen it coming that Bob was going to win Maisie’s heart in the final moments even if there was no indication of that kind of affection between them in the film’s first hour. It almost feels like this was hastily added at the end to give Maisie a happy ending, should this be the last time that we saw Ann Sothern in this role. 

The screenplay for this one is credited to Betty Reinhardt and Mary C. McCall, Jr., just as the previous films were, but this is the first time that there’s no credit given for Wilson Collison, other than “characters created by.” Reinhardt shares story credit with frequent Frank Capra collaborator Myles Connolly, which may be why this one soars out of all the Maisies so far. It’s almost an obvious choice to have Maisie play “downstairs” in a rich family’s home; this gives her the opportunity to have comic friction with both the guests and the other servants, who are accustomed to the kind of bowing and scraping that it never even occurs to Maisie to consider. It’s all in good fun, although it takes a melodramatic turn in the final act that’s very similar to the one that set up the final events of Maisie. Since these films are all essentially self-contained, it really doesn’t matter if you decide to pick one up at random and give it a chance, and this one is the best so far and doesn’t really require you to know anything about the previous; you could treat this as a standalone picture and have just as much fun (if not more) than if you didn’t know who Maisie was in the first place. 

The film has its old-timey moments, of course. When Mr. Rawlston finally returns to the manor after the one-two punch of his absence and the revelation of Link’s gold-digging nature sends poor Abigail over the edge, Maisie reads him the riot act. Notably, she compares him unfavorably to the abusive fathers of her Brooklyn neighborhood, because at least they knew their children, and, according to Maisie, “Givin’ em the flat of your hand stacks up against giving them nothing.” It’s the only noteworthy tone-deaf moment in an otherwise blistering scorcher of a dressing down, so it gets a pass. Maisie Was a Lady gives us a heaping helping of the gal we love, and, though predictable in the extreme, is worth the eighty minutes it’ll cost you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond