A Sexy Blog

There’s a peculiarly modern grandeur in the way The Two Popes pivots between the corridors of the Vatican and the haunted lamplight of Argentine history, but it’s not the stateliness of ancient marble: it’s the flicker of digital immediacy, the hum of a restless present intruding on institutional ritual. Director Fernando Meirelles takes a story marbled with centuries of doctrinal posturing and, with sly confidence, drapes it in the colors of both a Netflix true-crime doc and an old-master fresco. The contrast is invigorating, sometimes jarring—but rarely less than beautifully framed.

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.

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.

What does it mean for a gangster film—not just in Taiwan, but anywhere in the world—to recite all the liturgies of brotherhood, blood, and betrayal, but leave you with nothing more than the memory of flickering shadows on a wall? Joe Lee’s Gatao (2015) is exactly that: a movie that earnestly checks the boxes of triad cinema, hoping to conjure up some of the lurid energy that made Hong Kong’s Young and Dangerous a pop touchstone—but ending up more like a karaoke version sung after midnight, charming in its recognizability, but never threatening to set the night on fire.

We have reached the late capitalist endgame when even a G20 summit—a gathering that, in theory, represents the convulsions and anxieties of a planet teetering on its own ambitions—becomes a stage for pallid, sticky-fingered action pablum. Patricia Riggen’s G20 strains to dress itself in the grandeur of international consequence, as if draping a polyester tablecloth over a card table could suddenly transform it into Versailles. The result, unfortunately, is not grandeur but the cinematic equivalent of a hotel conference coffee: tepid, thin, and bitterly disappointing, despite the prestigious packaging.

The Western—a genre once rooted in unspoken codes and existential sweat, where violence had gravity and redemption came at the price of a soul—has, with Gunslingers, been exhumed and sent staggering, blank-eyed, into the realm of accidental comedy. Brian Skiba, whose résumé reads more like a warning label than a track record, invites us to Redemption (the film’s town, not its trajectory). Make no mistake: there is no redemption here—except, perhaps, for Nicolas Cage, whose presence is less a saving grace than a feverish hallucination trapped in a desert heatwave.