A Sexy Blog

There are times, guiltily, when you press on with a franchise not out of hope but out of a kind of cinematic masochism—a need, maybe, to see how low the bough bends before it snaps. With Largo Winch: The Price of Money, we don’t get the snap; we get the soft, damp thump of a weary branch coughing up another mediocre fruit, doomed to rot at our feet. And yet, like any movie masochist, I brushed off my sense of déjà vu, clung to my last embers of fondness for Tomer Sisley’s grifter-boy charm, and hit “play,” half in mockery, half in slender faith. What followed wasn’t so much disastrous as dispiriting, an ill-advised reunion tour playing to an empty barroom.

There are sequels that grow out of their originals like wild, ungovernable vines, and ones that wither into dead appendages, waving forlornly at the memory of what once, however mediocrely, worked. Largo Winch 2—or, if the European flavor tempts you, The Burma Conspiracy—manages neither flourish nor rot with grace: it just sits there, inert, a cardboard cutout of a “thriller” flapping in the breeze. If the original Largo Winch was no undiscovered classic, it still had the nervous charm of a scrappy upstart—a corporate action-drama that lived (barely) by the slyness of its twists and hero’s uncertain soul. This sequel, though, lumbers on, encased in a leaden coffin of clichés, as if produced by a committee of MBAs who once watched a Bond movie by accident and only remembered the gadgets and the running.

Is it possible for a corporate thriller to wear its adrenaline on its sleeve and still sneak in—amid the boardroom jousting—moments of sly vulnerability? Sitting down to The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch, I was bracing myself for the usual tidied-up action pulp, clipped of imagination, and dully reverent to its source material (the Belgian comic series, in this case). Instead, the film lured me in with its mixture of shameless melodrama and genuinely clever backroom shenanigans. Director Jérôme Salle concocts a movie that is a brisk, terrifically twisted chess match masquerading as a summer blockbuster—an entertainment with both gloss and glimmer, if not quite bite.

Is that a penis? No, really—is that Ralph Fiennes’s penis? I suppose we have to start there, because in Uberto Pasolini’s sepulchral take on the Odyssey, we’re given not just emotional bareness but the full-frontal variety—Ralph, exposed to the elements and the audience, and you do a little double-take in your seat. It’s the sort of unblushing exposure that might’ve stirred old Homer to put away his lyre and blink into the firelight. “They show you everything these days,” you can hear the gallery whisper—a groin-level “welcome home” that’s somehow more shocking than gods or monsters.

There’s something almost perversely frustrating about watching a film that’s desperate to be important but allergic to getting its hands dirty. Small Things Like These turns the Magdalene Laundries—a subject with the fury of a thousand scandals—into a very slow, very wet walk in the Irish mist. You...

Leave it to Justin Kurzel—a director who swoops into American blood and folklore with the sensibility of a poet scavenger—to dig up one of the country’s ugliest buried skeletons and rattle it until the audience feels the bones knocking inside their own skins. “The Order”—which bridges the gap between lawman melodrama and social horror show—doesn’t snuggle up to its true-crime credentials for a moment. It’s not the sort of drama that leaves you with your hand over your heart in admiration for the FBI, or cleaning your nails on the armrest, coolly detached. No, this is a movie that comes after you, hounding your conscience with every bark of a German shepherd and every flicker of fluorescent supermarket nightmare.

There are movies made for adults, and then there are movies that confuse “adult” with “adolescent in a wet-dream stupor.” Anora, Sean Baker’s latest stumble masquerading as a comedy-drama, is a film with all of its clothes off and nothing to show but skin. The only thing less substantial than the threadbare plot is the flimsily clad pretense that we ought to care about this endless, joyless parade of nudity and nonsense.

Let’s start where the air gets thin and the coliseum fills with water: be honest—did you ever expect Ridley Scott, the master of “muscular history,” to burst gladiatorial combat wide open with the introduction of actual sharks? Gladiator II, for all its sweat-drenched howls of reverence toward the original, is less Maximus’s solemn march to myth than a glittering, full-throttle fever dream—part sequel, part spectacle, and not altogether sure which side it wants to fight for.

God help me, I got dirty thoughts watching this movie. That’s as fitting a confession as any because “It’s What’s Inside” operates on the queasy, ticklish nerve where comedy, anxiety, lust, and a weird species of social dread all mingle together in the trunk of an Uber, hungry for a fight or a kiss. I love when a film makes you wonder, in the cackling recesses of your mind, “What would I do if I were dropped inside someone else’s body for a night?” Not just the old switcheroo, but the real, squirming, terrifying, exhilarating thing—and not with anonymous ninnies, mind you, but your oldest, most untrustworthy friends.

Once in a while, a film comes drifting in on the wind, caught by almost no one, championed by even fewer, carrying the kind of oddball, heart-clutching enchantment that threatens to restore faith in the very act of cinema. Fish Story, Yoshihiro Nakamura’s time-hopping wonder, is precisely that sort of late-breaking revelation: a freewheeling, postmodern fable, at once as headlong and as intricately assembled as the punk anthem at its core. It’s hard to think of a movie, in these battered days, that is so bracingly, disarmingly optimistic—so resolutely happy to believe that music, and thus art, can literally save the world. And damned if the movie doesn’t just about convince you.