A Sexy Blog

“Hostage” is the kind of British miniseries that seems designed by committee to fool you into mistaking formula for craft. Its premise drips with promise: a Prime Minister (Suranne Jones) and a French President (Julie Delpy) caught in the same noose of blackmail and international intrigue, their personal and political fates entwined as the world watches. What we get, instead, is a muddled soufflé of clichés, the kind that deflates before it’s even made it to the table.

Let’s be honest for a moment: I don’t follow Formula 1, and if you’d asked me to pick Daniel Ricciardo out of a lineup before Joseph Kosinski’s F1 went roaring across the IMAX, I’d have shrugged and asked for directions to pit lane. But I do go for any motorsport race I can, and I’m not immune to the thrall—the primal narcotic—of the engine’s scream and the crowd’s feverish pulse. The surprise here, sitting in a cavernous, digital theater, is that Kosinski’s film makes you almost forget about the physical sensation of the track. “Almost” is the key. The sound and the snarl are so close, so constantly engineered, you can sense the popcorn rattle, but never quite smell the gasoline.

There’s something irresistible about the clamor a movie like Us creates, like a distant siren, it lures you not just to watch, but to theorize, to fret, to explain yourself (or explain away the film’s shortcomings with a gesture at its “genius”). Jordan Peele’s sophomore feature has become one of those post-screening litmus tests: Did you see the twist coming? Did you catch all the “clues”? Congratulations, you’re either too clever or, more likely, you’re scrambling in the dark just as Peele wanted. Us is that rare horror film which, above all, wants to be iconic, and while it achieves a kind of feverish originality, it also proves that cleverness can be both a blessing and a curse.

Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is that rare confection—delicate in the details, unashamedly artificial, and yet so lovingly precise that each shot seems to have been placed by a court jeweler. Watching it, I found myself seduced, not by plot in the traditional sense, but by the madcap energy of images that kept assembling themselves before my eyes like intricate pastries in a display window. Every frame could hang comfortably—if not always respectfully—beside the garish masterworks of the fictional Zubrowkan aristocracy. To call Anderson’s style a signature is almost too tame; the man works in flourishes, borders, and uproarious symmetry, composing each sequence as if it’s to be beamed through time, immune to the half-life decay of fashion. I can say, with a degree of confidence seldom afforded to contemporary cinema, that The Grand Budapest Hotel will look as good—and taste as odd—in a century as it does today.

If anyone had told me that a new Superman film—one not starring the implacably handsome Henry Cavill but helmed instead by the broad-shouldered, blithely anonymous David Corenswet—would soar, I would have rolled my eyes faster than a Kryptonian in mid-spin. But James Gunn’s Superman propels itself out of the crate marked “2020s franchise relaunches” and straight into pop delirium, unexpectedly bristling with wit, irreverence, and yes, a genuine affection for tights, capes, and Clark’s enduring decency.

Jordan Peele remains the elusive showman of modern American cinema, and with Nope he pulls off his boldest hat trick yet—a genre spectacle that is as enthralling as it is unnerving, as self-consciously mythic as it is eerily ambiguous. At a time when every new alien movie tries to out-gloom its predecessors, Peele has the audacity to make the unknown not just frightening, but beautiful and indecently entertaining.

It’s tempting, fatally easy, really, to call Jordan Peele’s Get Out a “game-changer” or the sort of genre-bending thing destined to lard itself in film syllabi until the discourse wrings it dry. But here is a rare debut that actually lives up to the clickbait: a film that sears itself into your nerves, not just for the way it jolts and twists, but for how it rebuilds the entire nervous system of American horror from the ground up.

Let Me Make You a Martyr is one of those films that arrives with so much sulfurous promise it almost dares you not to be excited. An indie southern-gothic revenge tale with Marilyn Manson putatively playing an assassination angel named Pope? That’s the kind of casting stroke that wakes up even the most jaded cinephile. On paper, it's a ready-made baroque: broken family loyalties, incestuous chemistry, violence steeped in religious delirium, Sons of Anarchy but with the lights turned down and the metaphysics dialed up.

When the curtain rises (or, more accurately, the CGI Alps blink awake) on Nick Hamm’s William Tell, we brace for that hot prickle of cultural muscle, the promise of rebellion, the ice-pure Swiss myth being cracked open and gutted on the grand stage of the epic. Instead, we find ourselves wading ankle-deep through a fog of déjà vu, draped in armor already rusted and patched, the cinematic equivalent of a Renaissance fair where nobody can remember why they’re there.

Let’s mark STRAW’s arrival on the Netflix scroll not as a quiet debut but with the thudding, dissonant crash of a fire alarm, one of those pulpy, middle-of-the-night interruptions you half resent and won’t soon forget. This is Tyler Perry pushing melodrama to the edge of the precinct, a kitchen-sink-pressure-cooker tragedy with more indignities than a daytime soap marathon, yet fierce enough in its final moments to repay (if not quite justify) the ordeal. It’s equal parts a how-bad-can-it-get gauntlet and a surprisingly alive, wounded scream from the cracked ribcage of America’s social machinery.