Amazeballs

There is a peculiar kind of pride to be found in a series that wears its lineage on its sleeve, and with Gatao: Like Father Like Son, we have reached the origin myth: the gangster saga’s answer to the Book of Genesis. Ray Jiang’s fourth foray into the Gatao universe is not so much a mere prequel as a ritual exhumation, painstakingly unearthing the sturdy bones of grudge, loyalty, and ambition that have propped up the franchise through three films already.

The gangster film has long been a proving ground for young countries and unsettled hearts—an arena where braggadocio and blood, pride and punishment, come clattering together under the guise of masculine ritual. But with Gatao: The Last Stray, director Jui-Chih Chiang offers something rarer: a film that embraces the genre’s traditions only to sidestep its usual temptations, trading operatic violence for introspection and carving out, amidst the noise, a corner for genuine feeling.

One sits down for Gatao 2: Rise of the King expecting, at most, a competent riff on the familiar gangster recipe—a pinch of violence here, a patina of brotherhood there, all slathered in the genre’s lacquer of betrayal and blood. What director Yen Cheng-Kuo delivers is something else: a movie that moves with the heedless energy of a street brawl, inhaling the cologne of loyalty and machismo until you’re nearly suffocated—and, to its credit, occasionally exhilarated—by the heady fumes of its own ambition.

“Lifeline” is the kind of taut, haunted psychological drama that feels like it’s been mistakenly shipped to the Science Fiction shelf by a jittery intern, where it sits in the company of time-travelers and androids, looking around, appalled at the company it keeps. The film, directed by Feras Alfuqaha, has the brooding nerve to face the black and blue marks left by trauma, personal and societal, and invites you to press your thumb to the bruise. To call it science fiction is to miss the point with the earnestness only a certain kind of literalist can muster. The tricks with reality, disorienting, elliptical, aren’t flights to the moon but dives into a mind coming apart, or maybe clawing for unity in the first place. “Lifeline” wants not just to test its protagonist, Steven Thomas (played with a wonderful, agitated delicacy by Josh Stewart), but to prod at the audience’s own nerves, the little lingering doubts and regrets we all ferry around. There’s a current of self-examination running through this film that curls right back into the viewer’s lap, whether we like it or not.

Osgood Perkins’s “The Monkey” offers up a carnival of mutilation and tumbling gags, a film so wanton in its pleasures you almost suspect the projectionist of lacing the celluloid with laughing gas. The miracle, if there is one, is that its freshness lies not in reinventing the wheel (or the wind-up monkey) but in letting the wheel wobble, careen, and spin out in a delirious, bloody gymkhana. Stephen King’s reputation hovers somewhere over this project, but for those of us spared the original short story, the movie arrives naked: it must enchant, or revolt, on its own. Whether the King DNA matters is a parlor game for fanatics. What matters is how Perkins handles his inheritance, a prop-shop horror premise that could have been creaky as an attic toy chest.

There is an itch in contemporary science fiction which no number of tight scripts and digital vistas can entirely scratch: the genre longs to mean something again, to be both playground and arena, but all too often balloons out into ponderous “themes” and sterile future-worlds. It’s a relief, a relief laced with a kind of giddy disbelief, to witness Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, a film that doesn’t just cross genres, but seems to tear them up and ball them in one trembling fist.