Amazeballs

There’s a mordant joke running through “The Killer”—practically a pulse, arranged with the precision of a Smiths beat—that might be missed by anyone still taking their assassins straight and their directors at their own promotional word. Here is David Fincher, once the feverish chronicler of men unraveling in the glow of green computer screens and kitchen fluorescents, now orchestrating a liturgy of control and cold-blooded process so sharp it’s almost a parody of itself: the assassin as Ikea monk, building murder out of flat-packed routines and hide-in-plain-sight anonymity. Nothing, not even the violence, is ever allowed to descend into real chaos—not while there are yoga stretches to be done and a running tally of BPM on the Apple Watch.

Is it possible, even now, for an old master to turn the American epic inside out and force us, blinking, into the full view of our own historical obscenities? With “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese—half a century after Mean Streets, still careening down the byways of national guilt—gives us a film that arrives not like a gift, but as a reckoning. Even coming in at a prodigious three-and-a-half hours, the movie—anchored by Scorsese’s sure hand, thrilling, raw-silk visuals, and a cast so fine-tuned they seem to bleed right off the screen—never feels like indulgence. It’s a sustained, merciless symphony of American sin.

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.

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.

Some movies thump and clatter, full of fury and elaborate posturing, but leave you empty—numb with noise. Not this one. “Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween – Decisive Battle” comes roaring off the screen like a freight train barreling through a hall of mirrors. It's the finale to a two-part gangland fable, but don’t make the mistake of expecting another muddled, tragic youth melodrama; this thing shimmies with energy and disreputable heart. If the first half was all mood-setting and foreshadowing—a bit of diary scribbling before the storm—this installment throws you chest-deep into the mud, where loyalty and violence tangle until you can’t tell if you’re wiping away blood or tears.

Middle chapters are supposed to draw blood—the best of them do, not just on the battered faces of its heroes but on the audience’s nerves, on their capacity to care as much as the characters do. “Tokyo Revengers 2 Part 1: Bloody Halloween – Destiny,” the latest cinematic digression in the undead manga juggernaut, takes a look at wounds—metaphorical and literal—that never quite clot, never quite heal. There’s soul, there’s spunk, but not always the pulse.