Amazeballs

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.

This review contains spoilers.

King Ivory comes packaged with all the signifiers and promises that Hollywood (or its independent outposts) have learned to wield like weapons: “Based on extensive research”, the first phrase that glimmers in the dark like a parolee’s tattoo, ready to be flashed for credibility before the first shank hits the yard. John Swab, the director, claims proximity, he knows this world, these corners of Tulsa, these prison phone banks and gangland protocols. But proximity is not the same as revelation. King Ivory isn’t the first to slip you a look behind the penitentiary curtain and, unfortunately, it still leaves you peering through the mesh.

If a Western can still deliver that warm, gently boozy glow, the kind that sits comfortably in the stomach and maybe tickles the mind while you nurse the dregs of your drink, then Unholy Trinity is that sort of well-poured shot. Not the top shelf, mind you, but sturdy and palatable and with just enough bite to remind you why we keep returning to these dusty crossroads. Westerns, after all, are our American fables, endlessly rewritten, and here, under the steady if uninspired hand of Richard Gray, the archetypes are dusted off, creaked upright, and made to dance one more time.

This review contains spoilers.

There are films that hit with the brute-force exhilaration of a madman hammering on your front door, and then there is 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s triumphant resurrection of their own, personal apocalypse. What do we call it when a once-buried genre franchise lurches (or, in this case, sprints, full naked dicks akimbo) back into the light, louder, stranger, more ludicrously alive than ever before? Sometimes, art sneers at gentility and sends in the swinging cocks as a greeting committee.

The first shock of 28 Days Later, before you know a Rage virus from a droplet of Thames rain, is Cillian Murphy, shivering into sentience among the plastic flowers of a London hospital, naked as Adam and just as raw. It’s a beginning unclothed in every sense, stripping away the reassuring illusions of civilization as effectively as the virus that, we come to learn, has erased all the comforting bustle of the city. Danny Boyle has always been a kinetic filmmaker, one who moves with the pulse of the streets and the shuffle of fast-talking characters, but here, those streets are hauntingly, disturbingly empty. The effect is eerily transformative: in 2002, this was less an apocalypse than a waking dream.

If you're looking to compare "Ballerina" to its contemporaries, the 2023 South Korean action thriller helmed by Lee Chung-hyun strikes far more resonant chords than the 2025 John Wick spinoff of the same name ever manages. Here’s a film that reminds us, with brutal grace, that in cinema’s often monochrome playground of revenge tales, it’s less about originality of idea and more about the fierce, focused execution—how the story lives or dies under the director's hand.