Amazeballs

Some films put you in a vice and tighten, click by click, until you’re not sure if you’re gasping from shock or from the giddy pleasure of being so expertly, so utterly manipulated. “Gone Girl,” that lurid psychothriller by David Fincher, wears its heart (if one can call it a heart: more like a bloodied, glinting knife) on its sleeve. This is the rare mainstream film that seduces us into collusion with its sociopath, pats our leg, and whispers, “Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes, don’t be squeamish, darling, it’s just your happily ever after with its throat slit.”

How do you make a disaster film in 2020, when going outside to check the mailbox felt like auditioning for “Contagion 2”? The answer, in “Greenland,” is with impressive restraint: it’s a comet-disaster movie that, instead of blowing up the White House for the nineteenth time, asks you to remember to bring your son’s insulin.

Is there anything sweeter than a genre picture that tries to sneak a love story past a firing squad of monsters, bioweapons, and the apocalypse itself—and half-succeeds not by brute force, but by the sheer force of its leads? Hollywood, that eternal laboratory of hybrid creatures, has never tired of shoving its pretty faces into the trenches of the end times, but Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge practically begs to ask: if the world was ending, wouldn’t you fall in love if you could? (Especially if Miles Teller was across the way with a rifle and Anya Taylor-Joy was the voice in your headset?) Well, how could you not.

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.