It’s unfortunate that the racist overtones of Peter Sellers’s brown-faced Indian character overwhelms this movie. It’s otherwise a delightful fish-out-of-water romp about a bumbling actor who is accidentally invited to an elite Hollywood party. There are plenty of crazy crowd scenes reminiscent of the best films of Jacques Tati. The colorful, swinging 60s pad provides ample settings for the madcap antics, particularly with the pool/fountain running throughout the living space. Oddly this is my second Gavin MacLeod film in as many days. It’s just really unfortunate about that racial caricature.

Four crooks are trying to acquire uranium-rich land in Kenya. They’ve coerced Humphrey Bogart to join them in their plans, unfortunately they are waylaid by unreliable transport from Italy and a suspicious British couple waiting for passage on the same ship. This could be a serious heist film, but instead it’s a parody of the same. Jennifer Jones is the female half of the British couple and her primary personality feature is telling stories of pure fantasy. It’s a silly farce that doesn’t overstay its welcome thanks to a fairly short runtime.

This is the wild story of how the three widows of Frankie Lymon, famed singer of the titular song, battled for the claim of his royalties. Told through courtroom scenes and flashbacks detailing each of Frankie’s relationships, the film is buoyed by over the top performances by the three women (and some unfortunate aging makeup), played by Vivica A. Fox, Halle Berry, and Lela Rochon. It ends up being a fun biopic that belies the tragedy of Frankie Lymon’s life, dead of a heroin overdose at the age of 25.

With the unique story of a teenage girl whose recently-divorced mother converts to Islam, I really wanted to like this film more than I did. The performances are strong, particularly that of Zoe Renee in the lead, but the narrative lets them down. The mother’s conversion feels like the desperate move of someone whose identity is still reeling from the end of their relationship. She is then almost abusive in forcing her new religion onto her daughter, who prior to conversion is a bubbly bisexual whose primary interests are dancing and eating pepperoni. The daughter becomes Muslim, except she seems to have forgotten to investigate at all what was now expected of her in her new religion. The ending tries to resolve all of this in a positive way, but by then I had no faith in the decision making abilities of these characters.

Toward the end of the Korean War, Robert Redford is a wide-eyed addition to a company of infantrymen; John Saxton is a long-time member, prone to going on solo night patrols to gain intel and to kill enemy soldiers. Between them is an orphaned Korean boy, the pull for the boy’s loyalty is the pull on the soldiers’ souls: to let war take them to their darkest selves or to maintain some semblance of innocence. Essentially marking Redford’s film debut, it is also the beginning for Sydney Pollack and Tom Skerritt as other members of the company.