Amazeballs

Civil War is less a movie than a diagnosis—the kind you receive in a stranger’s waiting room, where the tick of the clock and the hum of distant sirens seem to foretell something terminal, but you’re too mesmerized to get up and leave. Alex Garland looks at America as if it’s an elegantly set table that’s just been upended; the film drags you headlong through the debris, offering glimpses of the familiar and the ghastly, fused and inseparable, seen through the battered lenses of war correspondents.

Of all the things I expected to find myself enjoying in a post-ironic movie landscape half-worshipful of VHS gutters and half-terrified of sincerity, a pint-sized Canadian freakspawn like Frankie Freako was nowhere near the top of my predictions. I’m someone whose tastes, I’ll admit, veer toward the clean lines and careful sounds of other genres entirely—so much so that I’d usually spot a grimy puppet and run screaming for Bergman. But here I am, confessing it outright: Steven Kostanski’s affectionate, anarchic ode to '80s sleazoid creature shams, Frankie Freako, had me grinning, as if I’d found a rubber monster in my lunchbox and decided what the hell, I’d eat it.

If revenge movies are the honey of action cinema, “The Beekeeper” is a fiercely sweet jar delivered with a sledgehammer. Jason Statham, an actor who flashes more punch than pathos, takes his turn as Adam Clay—a retired covert hive-minder (forgive me, the bee metaphors come with the territory) turned literal beekeeper. He’s minding his own buzz until his landlady, a kindly Eloise Parker, swallows a phishing scam and then heartbreakingly, herself. There’s your setup: one jar of honey, spectacularly smashed.

Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is a brash, full-throttle collision—Gangs of New York after a few rounds with Kung Fu Hustle. What a galvanizing jolt to the system: to step into a movie that practically dares you to remember your youth, back when Hong Kong cinema was deliriously off the leash, and the formula for a good time was a heroic bloodbath, some dirt under the nails, and a soundtrack of testosterone and betrayal. Here, Cheang invites us to mainline nostalgia—this is genre-movie pleasure as pure, as heady, as chow fun in a back alley at 2 a.m.

Boxer (2024) doesn’t just string together a dozen rounds of punishment—it dares you to stay in your seat, wipes the sweat off your brow, and leaves you weirdly elated that you just watched a sports movie built the old-fashioned way: bruise by bruise, heart by heart, with no shortcuts and not a whiff of prefab inspiration in sight.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2024) doesn’t just dust off Alexandre Dumas’s tale for a new generation—it dips the whole battered novel in a vat of cinematic dye, wrings from it every drop of opulent color and feverish pain, and gives us a revenge saga with enough pulse to rattle modern audiences out of their collective torpor. You sit down expecting Masterpiece Theatre—the kind of earnest, upholstered adaptation that suffocates on its own handsomeness—and instead the film throws you headlong into the glare and grime of 19th-century France, daring you to blink.