Amazeballs

The Hundred-Foot Journey isn’t so much a movie as it is a lavish buffet—one of those spreads where you get a little giddy piling your plate high, knowing full well it’s all been sweetened for mass tastes. Lasse Hallström, who has become a sort of cinematic caterer to the comfortable (he’s given us Chocolat and enough charming Swedes to fill a Volvo), brings his gentle hand to the story of culinary warfare in a twee French village—warfare here meaning a territorial pissing match with garam masala.

There’s a delicious, fizzy pleasure to an action comedy that knows it’s a cocktail—equal parts sweet, sour, and shamelessly silly. “Novocaine,” directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, arrives in our cinematic bloodstream like a jolt of—well, you know—something that deadens all but our delight. This is the rare studio product in which the soundtrack isn’t just wallpaper but a running vein, from the beautifully melancholic “Everybody Hurts” (R.E.M., that old-wound anthem for generation after generation of walking wounded) to the glitzy throb of “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” It’s musical nostalgia used as time machine and emotional shortcut—and it works, sometimes earning more feeling than the plot does.

Sometimes a movie unspools with the comforting hum of déjà vu—a story you know by heart even as the unfamiliar faces of another country’s cinema strut and stumble before you. Monga, directed by Doze Niu, is that kind of film, a Taiwanese gangster saga that aches to be muscle and poetry both, splashing its neon lights across Taipei like it’s trying to reinvent the shadows themselves. As the camera drifts through the back alleys and discos of 1980s Wanhua, you recognize the ritual: we’re being asked to believe in brotherhood carved out of bruises and blood, loyalty and its slow rot. And I was ready—I wanted the sweet, sickly rush of a genre picture that tilts toward heartbreak.

Is there a deeper, more queasy thrill in American war movies than Oliver Stone’s Platoon? Here, the old Hollywood war drum—once a loopy rhythm of self-sacrifice and pyrotechnic heroics—gets drowned out by the thump of jungle rot, by the insectile chitter of paranoia, and above all, by a sense that Vietnam will never release those it swallows. Released in 1986—ten years after the helicopter rotors beat their retreat from Saigon—this is a film that refuses to let the audience clap themselves on the back; Stone, carrying the scars and the nightmares of his own tour, rewrites the Book of War as a catalogue of wounds, psychological and otherwise.

There are films that scrape so close to the bone—so unflinching in their autopsy of the young and desperate—that you exit not just shaken, but wobbled, a little raw around the soul. In Youth We Trust, Puttipong Nakthong’s feverish plunge into the bruising world of teenage lockup, is this kind of movie: a tightly-wound cry set behind the gritty cinderblocks of juvenile detention, a kind of Bangkok Scum cooked in the pressure cooker of loyalty, despair, and institutional doom.

The tricky thing about sequels—even in the golden age of movie franchising—is that familiarity can breed not just contempt, but lethargy. Phuttipong Nakthong’s 4 Kings II doesn’t just pick up where its predecessor left off; it throws us back into the same roaring bonfire of Thai vocational school rivalries where machismo and adolescent chaos burn like cheap gasoline. We’re drawn again into a world where an ill-timed stare or the wrong colors on a uniform can mean blood on the tiles. Yet, while the first film was a revelation—crackling with an emotional honesty that could leave you bruised—this follow-up is an uneven resuscitation, nobler in intent than in execution.