In the comic, satirical webzine The Babylon Bee, the hits outweigh the misses. It’s worth reading. To me, the misses, though, are quite frequent in the Bee’s short videos I watch on YouTube; but the hits are certifiably there too. This is political satire—right-leaning hilarity. One of the best videos is “What If We Abolished Prisons and Defunded the Police?,” a pet democratic socialist cause. Here, a judge’s “harshest sentence” for murder is . . . to pleadingly ask the defendant not to do it again. The defendant must be an illegal immigrant.

Clever, too, is a skit in which a pair of adults cannot define the word “woman” for a boy in a spelling bee who requests the definition. I also like the very brief “Upsides to Socialism.” These are funny items coming from the same folks who recently purveyed on their website the header, “Lindsey Clancy Honored With Planned Parenthood Lifetime Achievement Award.”

Wyatt Earp (Joel McCrea) is the main character in Jacques Tourneur‘s Wichita (1955). Wichita is not yet a boom town in 1874, and local bigwigs are afraid Earp, the new marshal,* is a threat to the town’s prosperity and existence. Earp tries to disarm the visiting, cattle-driving cowboys—Wichita providers—because their rowdiness routinely turns to violence. Scripted by Daniel Ullman, the pic would be a perfect Fifties TV movie. As it is, it’s a non-great but involving Western in color and with a palatable Western hero in McCrea. The cast is familiar and enjoyable, except that Edgar Buchanan is just Edgar Buchanan and Vera Miles is underwhelming.

*Ahistorical

Written and directed by Curry Barker, Obsession (2026) is a decent entertainment, a comedic horror flick that by and by loses the comedy. Which is fine; it retains its integrity. Michael Johnston plays teenaged Bear with amiable authority and sensitivity, while Inde Navarette plays teenaged Nikki with hair-raising credibility, with stunning stamina. Too, she is unforgettably sensual. This is the one about an occultic wish that comes true and leads Nikki not just to love but also to obsess over, with a deranged mind, the too-shy Bear. It’s very interesting if not quite perfect, and a big moneymaker.

Although it is often potently, admirably shot, The Neon Demon (2016), by Nicolas Winding Refn, is dissatisfying. Elle Fanning stars as a young model who is almost beauty itself. She becomes the object of jealousy, erotic hunger, and ridiculous violence. The film is art—poor art, because it’s sensationalistic and tawdry; and it pretends to offer insight into a few things. Pretends. What it offers instead, you’ll see,* is the physical uglification of actress Jena Malone. Refn has a new film out—Her Private Hell—which I hope is a step up.

*If you’re a spectator of this thing

A silent film by Ernst Lubitsch, The Doll (1919) is cinematic artifice at its most curious. Lubitsch pretends it is crafted from what he pulls out of a toy chest, and a story gets underway presenting a babyish, hypersensitive young man (Hermann Thimig, fascinating) who refuses to get married. What he does instead, to gain an uncle’s dowry (for some gluttonous monks!), is to “marry” what he believes to be a mechanical doll. But not so. The dollmaker’s daughter is pretending to be the doll. Ossi by name, she is played by Ossi Oswalda, a German actress who attained a lot of fame in the Silent era and, in ill health, died at only 48. Here, she seamlessly displays the daughter’s mischievousness and is a luminous delight. In fact, so is The Doll. Anyone who is getting into Lubitsch must see it.