Amazeballs

Let me confess—when a director struts into crime cinema for the very first time and comes out swinging with the force of a heavyweight champ, you sit up and take notice. Kang Yoon-sung’s “The Outlaws,” the inaugural strike in what would become “The Roundup” series, barrels out of the gate less like a cautious debut than a slugger firing on all pistons and daring the old guard to keep pace. The wildest surprise? Kang was a rookie. But while veterans sometimes churn out crime genre sausages with the predictability of a midnight noir rerun, here’s a newcomer whose bravado is only matched by his dexterity.

If you go to the movies to be reassured, to be comforted by the amiable fiction that the “good guys” are only ever a few rough nights or wisecracks away from redemption, then steer clear of Olivier Marchal’s “Rogue City.” There’s nothing here but the squall and shriek of compromise, the nervous laugh of doomed men scraping out another day in purgatory. To call it a police procedural is a little like calling Goya’s Black Paintings “a bit gloomy.” Marchal spills bodies and broken loyalties across the screen as deftly as a street painter slinging mud. And damned if I wasn’t riveted.

There’s the art of magic, and then there’s the art of the movies — and sometimes, as in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, you get the blessed, fizzing collision: a celluloid conjuring act so elegantly constructed, you half expect the film canisters to vanish into a swirl of sepia smoke. Here, the camera purrs through the gaslit wunderkammer of 19th-century Vienna, and history itself is spun into a stylish web of intrigue, murder, and—naturally—a little heartbreak. We’re so used to historical dramas treating events as window-dressing or, worse, solemn ballast, that it's a small miracle when a film like this one uses the sweep of real history—the Mayerling incident, no less—as a vital pulse beneath its rolling sleeves and hidden doves.

Sometimes a film comes along so inept, so guileless in its ambition and so transcendently incompetent, that it explodes all the boundaries of ordinary badness and backflips, grinning, into the rarefied territory of cult ecstasy. Troll 2 is that kind of movie: a raucous spectacle of misjudgment that plays like a séance held for the art of scriptwriting—boisterous, deluded, and more fun than most of what shuffles out of the Hollywood Dream Factory on a Friday night.

There have always been two kinds of gangster movies: the ones that prance through mythology—snappy dialogue, tailored suits, violence delivered with cinematic éclat—and the ones where the filth clings to your coat, where the glamour sours, and the body count is just neighborhood news. Black Mass, Scott Cooper’s dark valentine to the Southie underworld, is very much of the latter breed: all winter breath, sickly dim light, and the chill that comes when you realize the American experiment has bred not just outlaws but monsters in suburban haircuts.

You don’t expect the second act of a pulp saga to step out dressed like a debonair European count, its American whiskey burn now decanted into a highball of perfume and precision. But “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” does just that. With Christian Gudegast at the helm again, this time the director seems less intent on breaking bottles over your head and more interested in swirling the contents around until the bouquet rises—a sequel that charges out of L.A.’s dusty streets and into a velvet-draped, neon-lit Europe, trading in bare-knuckled bravado for continental sophistication. It’s everything about the first film sanded and buffed until we can see our disbelieving reflection in every shimmering diamond.