Amazeballs

You walk into The Meg half ready to sneer, armed with all your righteous cineaste skepticism: here comes Jason Statham wrestling a dinosaur fish, and if that’s not enough to send you running for Bergman, nothing is. I wanted to hate it. Honestly, I did. And so, the first surprise: it’s possible, in this perverse landscape where studios toss millions at shark movies, to actually enjoy yourself despite yourself. The shame isn’t the ludicrous premise or the overblown CGI — it’s how you’re grinning by the time the third aquatic monstrosity explodes out of the Pacific, Statham bracing himself for another winking one-liner.

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.

It would be generous to call Red Sparrow a thriller in the classic sense—what Francis Lawrence has delivered is more of a stylish fever dream of espionage, its patchwork of betrayals pinned together with body blows and performances that shiver with self-awareness. Emerging from the current Hollywood fixation on shadow governments and the bruised souls who serve them, Red Sparrow strives for the sophistication of le Carré but gives us the lurid pulps of a post-Snowden universe instead: sex as weapon, trust as currency, trauma as curriculum vitae.

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.

If ever a film strutted in wearing Vegas fringe and a confession booth hangover, it’s “Bad Times at the El Royale.” Drew Goddard’s caper comes at you as if to say, “Sure, you’ve seen the corpse of American optimism before, sprawled out in a cheap motel—let’s see if it can still dance.” And for a while, under the hot glare of Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography, it does. The place looks like it was pried loose from a Sinatra fever dream: shag carpeting, artifice, sex lurking in the drapes. Retro isn’t decor here—it’s a cancer that’s metastasized into the bones.