Every year I watch the journey of smarmy weatherman Bill Murray’s path to enlightenment while providing coverage for the annual Groundhog Festival in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. It’s a role that Murray perfectly encapsulates at perhaps the height of his career. I’m not generally a fan of Andie MacDowell, but even as a love interest, she mostly gets out of the way of Bill’s journey. The rest of the wonderful cast just supports the process. The settings are perfectly captured from the downtown area to the bed and breakfast to the recreation of Gobbler’s Knob. Each year I find new questions to ask myself about the timeline and the changes Murray experiences and the choices he makes.      

A headstrong Englishwoman Wendy Hiller travels to the Hebrides to fulfill her life’s goal of marrying a rich industrialist. On the last leg of her journey, she is waylaid due to a storm that prevents transport between the islands. Unexpectedly stranded, she meets a bevy of characters whose outlook on life greatly differs from her own. It’s an adorable film with a gorgeous Scottish backdrop where Hiller must figure out whether to follow her head or heart.  

In the days following the Civil War, Union colonel John Wayne leads his men west to gather and sell wild horses while his counterpart Confederate colonel Rock Hudson, disgusted with the actions of carpetbaggers in the south, gathers his family and neighbors to caravan to Mexico to help the French in their invasion. The two groups meet on their disparate paths south. As a fan of Hudson, he was the main draw for me to watch this film, but from a modern perspective, his character is fairly dislikable in the film. In fact, the film glorifies the Southern cause to uncomfortable degrees. I preferred John Wayne’s character here over some of his other work I’ve seen, but even he was uncomfortably sympathetic to the Confederates.