From its first, quietly clinical shot—a warehouse of flickering screens and the glazed-over faces behind them—American Sweatshop aims not to shock, but to seep under your skin, repellently but irresistibly, like a light leak in an otherwise airtight coffin. Every so often you see a film that doesn’t just depict the contemporary horror show, it lets you marinate in it. This is one of those.
Argo isn’t merely a tense, glossy recounting of a CIA caper, it’s Hollywood’s sneakiest sleight-of-hand on itself, a canny distillation of the movies' perpetual promise and perennial absurdity. I went into Affleck’s film without foreknowledge, as untutored as the embassy staffers in their makeshift hideout, and the result was a giddy, queasy experience, poised on a knife-edge between farce and terror. “Based on a true story,” it insists, an audacious phrase in this context, considering what follows.
There are movies which, with all their gloss and calculated ambition, remain pieces of machinery, oiled and in motion, but never quite alive. The Accountant is not one of those. It rumbles, clicks, and suddenly roars as if its protagonist’s sharp edges were etched with lightning, each narrative gear turning inevitably toward violence and revelation. That familiar yet unexpected pleasure, the sensation of a genre movie actually delivering on its promises, finds a rare showcase here. For once, the machine’s hum is exhilarating.
When I first learned about Adolescence, a four-episode British miniseries released by Netflix on March 13, 2025, I anticipated a serious examination of contemporary youth issues, particularly those surrounding toxic masculinity, incel culture, and social media influence. With a talented creative team led by co-creators Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham—who also stars—the series promised an intense, immersive viewing experience. The compelling premise of following a teenage boy accused of murder, filmed entirely in single continuous takes, heightened my expectations regarding technical mastery and emotional depth. Knowing Graham’s previous work in Boiling Point, I was prepared for a raw, visceral journey that would challenge and disturb but also enlighten.
In The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi peels back the gold plating of 1970s New York to reveal an America composed of equal parts ambition and predatory cunning—think Gatsby’s green light flickering in the distance, but this time the dream has a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and the ghostly tutelage of Roy Cohn smoking in the corner. This isn’t just a biopic about Donald Trump’s rise: it’s an X-ray of the American id, and Abbasi seems determined to make us squeamish about what we see.
For a decade and a half, Scott Adkins action movies have felt like the amuse-bouches of the genre: you don’t go for the movie itself, you go for that single, exquisite fight—brutal, fast, clean, then back to whatever sorry goulash the plot is serving up. But with Avengement, someone, glory of glories, has seen sense and decided to cook the entire meal out of pure, red-blooded Adkins. It’s as if The Raid was adopted by Guy Ritchie’s least photogenic cousins and stranded in the back room of a decrepit British pub. The miracle? It works, start to finish—genuine, knuckle-bruising working-class catharsis.