Amazeballs

With “Violent Cop,” Takeshi Kitano enters Japanese cinema not as a guest but as a one-man demolition squad—a laconic, poker-faced wrecker in a world so morally bankrupt that the cockroaches are considering an exodus. This is neo-noir at its most parched and asphyxiating, the kind of hard-boiled procedural that makes the whole notion of “procedure” look like a quaint bedtime story for children who still believe their parents will keep them safe. Kitano, directing himself with the offhand nihilism of a man who’s read too much Dostoevsky and refuses to be impressed, lets the camera sit and stare, as if daring us to look away first.

Some movies bleed. Some movies howl. And then there’s The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil, which cannonballs straight into the cesspool of our pretensions about right and wrong and dares us to gulp it down. Lee Won-tae’s pit-fight of a thriller isn’t just a crime movie—it’s a baptism, but the water is curdled with blood, sweat, and the stink of men who mistake punishment for penance. This isn’t filmmaking—it’s a bare-knuckle sermon delivered from the gutter.

Let’s be honest: it takes a particular kind of foolhardy courage—or maybe the sweet-mad gambler’s spirit of the real movie-lover—to watch a disaster picture about a storm-tossed plane while you’re actually on one, ricocheting through the clouds. The world outside your window is rattling with electricity, each jolt of turbulence a drumroll for the next on-screen catastrophe, and all you’re braced for is to be tossed overboard by a couple of hours of mechanical clichés. But Jean-François Richet’s “Plane”—wrapped up in its 2023 action-thriller drag—delivers a jolt of its own: it lifts you right out of the seat-gripping dread and into something damn near rapturous. By the time Gerard Butler and Mike Colter are wrestling fate on a jungle runway, your heart isn’t just in your throat—it’s applauding.

If you’ve ever felt the jolt of electricity that comes with the first few minutes of a genuinely promising crime film—where the air thickens with possibility and dread—you’ll know something of the elation I felt plunging into Yoon Jong-bin’s Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time. Here is a movie steeped in all the genre trappings: the smoky taverns and smoke-filled back rooms of Busan in the ‘80s and ‘90s, corruption so foul you can almost taste it, men in sharp suits who wield their loyalty like a battering ram—except this time, refreshingly, nothing comes at you in the simple, blunt-force trauma of a cheap triad flick.

I’ve always believed the best action movies don’t merely throw fists and bullets, but let you feel the grime under your fingernails—the sweat, the laughter, the moral rot, and the fleeting, idiotic joy of being alive. “The Roundup: No Way Out,” the third entry in an already breathless Korean franchise, barrels in with the gleaming, vulgar confidence of a fighter who knows exactly how many teeth he has left to lose and cherishes each one. It’s the sort of riotous, supercharged entertainment that doesn’t ask your approval; it simply pummels you into submission and makes you laugh out loud while it’s at it.

How many times can we bang the same drum and call it music? In Hollywood, they’ll belt out “sequel” like they’re conjuring magic, but more often the rabbit’s already dead in the hat. I sat down to The Roundup with my head full of anxious prophecies—Ma Dong-seok returning for more brutal slapstick, a director only two films deep in the game, and a promised journey from Seoul to a postcard Vietnam. If my knees didn’t quite knock, I still tucked in for another go at what has become a modern Korean ritual: the star vehicle in which the star could actually drive through a brick wall and ask for seconds.