Amazeballs

If anyone had told me that a new Superman film—one not starring the implacably handsome Henry Cavill but helmed instead by the broad-shouldered, blithely anonymous David Corenswet—would soar, I would have rolled my eyes faster than a Kryptonian in mid-spin. But James Gunn’s Superman propels itself out of the crate marked “2020s franchise relaunches” and straight into pop delirium, unexpectedly bristling with wit, irreverence, and yes, a genuine affection for tights, capes, and Clark’s enduring decency.

Let’s mark STRAW’s arrival on the Netflix scroll not as a quiet debut but with the thudding, dissonant crash of a fire alarm, one of those pulpy, middle-of-the-night interruptions you half resent and won’t soon forget. This is Tyler Perry pushing melodrama to the edge of the precinct, a kitchen-sink-pressure-cooker tragedy with more indignities than a daytime soap marathon, yet fierce enough in its final moments to repay (if not quite justify) the ordeal. It’s equal parts a how-bad-can-it-get gauntlet and a surprisingly alive, wounded scream from the cracked ribcage of America’s social machinery.

September 5 arrives on the screen as an urgent, bracing slab of historical drama—a kind of fevered docudrama pitched somewhere between the fretful hum of a 1970s control room and the icy dread pressing in from the world outside. Tim Fehlbaum’s direction plunges us into the back corridors of catastrophe: the Munich massacre at the '72 Olympics is no longer simply a horror recalled, but a media spectacle in real-time, filtered through the sweating brows and moral agonies of ABC Sports. Not since Lumet thrust us behind the cameras in Network have we felt the pulse of crisis with such claustrophobic vitality—and with almost as much queasy self-examination.

In the chilling landscape of South Korean cinema, Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance emerges as a haunting exploration of the human psyche entangled in the web of moral ambiguity.

As a longtime admirer of Russell Crowe, my anticipation for "Sleeping Dogs" was palpable. Directed by debut filmmaker Adam Cooper, this 2021 crime thriller is adapted from E.O. Chirovici's novel "The Book of Mirrors." From the outset, Crowe’s magnetic presence and a compelling narrative enticed me into a world of suspense and psychological reflection that truly kept me at the edge of my seat.

I was eager to see how Perry would navigate the delicate balance between historical accuracy and cinematic storytelling, especially given the heavy emotional weight of the subject matter. What I didn’t expect was to feel both uplifted and somewhat disappointed by the film's execution.