Amazeballs

Every so often, a movie lurches onto the screen loaded for bear—raw, brash, unapologetically lumpy. Den of Thieves is that swaggering bastard at the bar: outsize, unwashed, reeking of testosterone and cheap vodka, but if you try to look away, you’ll miss the most electrifying fistfight of the year. Christian Gudegast’s brute-force LA heist marathon marches up to “Heat,” flexes for comparison, and then belches gunpowder in its face. If Michael Mann made ballet, Gudegast gives us a mosh pit—Elvis in Kevlar.

Vengeance is no simple business, as anyone who’s ever sat through a Park Chan-wook film with their fingernails dug into the armrest can attest. If “Oldboy” is a primal scream—rampant violence, delirious Freudian nightmares, crimson-drenched corridors—“Lady Vengeance” is the hush that follows, the cruelty made coldly mathematical, the retribution so artfully calculated you can taste the copper in your mouth. In his trilogy’s closing chapter, Park trades in the electric fury of testosterone for something subtler and, paradoxically, more lacerating: the slow-burn agony of the wronged woman forced to knit her own soul back together from the unravelled threads of innocence lost.

Let’s get this out of the way: “Hackers” is nonsense—the kind of sprightly, neon-smeared nonsense that only the ‘90s, flush with dot-com optimism and cyberpunk delusions, could have produced. But what nonsense! Iain Softley’s 1995 ode to digital counterculture is the movie equivalent of pounding a c...

There’s something bracingly cold in the Korean morning after, and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance unspools as if Park Chan-wook had gathered up every post-war trauma, every splintered family, and boiled them down to their reasonless elemental grudge. If the opening salvo to the so-called “Vengeance Trilogy” feels like an autopsy of the revenge thriller, it’s only because Park is dissecting not just genre, but the black, sodden heart of the human condition itself. How often do we watch films about vengeance and walk out, buoyed by the giddiness of catharsis? Not here. Here, you stagger out like you’ve come from a wake, the taste of rust clinging to your tongue.

Let’s step into the flickering half-light—the one cast not just by moonlit castle windows, but by nearly a century of cinematic shadow—the legacy of Murnau’s original “Nosferatu” looming long, thin, and predatory across the wall. Robert Eggers’ 2024 reimagining doesn’t so much resurrect the silent classic as it exhumes it, dusts it off with reverence, and then sinks its own sharp teeth into the mythos, drawing fresh blood for a new era. The old Count is back—and he’s hungry.

The Ides of March is George Clooney’s bloodletting of the American campaign trail—a lacerating little melodrama disguised as a modern-day Julius Caesar for the cable-news set. Clooney, that ever-affable, silver-tongued wolf, teams up with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon to spin a silky, venomous web that looks like hope and tastes like old, cold heartbreak. Watching this film, you don’t just witness the sausage of democracy being made; you’re tossed straight into the meat grinder and asked to pick which bit of your conscience you’d like to keep.