A Sexy Blog

There are films that scrape so close to the bone—so unflinching in their autopsy of the young and desperate—that you exit not just shaken, but wobbled, a little raw around the soul. In Youth We Trust, Puttipong Nakthong’s feverish plunge into the bruising world of teenage lockup, is this kind of movie: a tightly-wound cry set behind the gritty cinderblocks of juvenile detention, a kind of Bangkok Scum cooked in the pressure cooker of loyalty, despair, and institutional doom.

The tricky thing about sequels—even in the golden age of movie franchising—is that familiarity can breed not just contempt, but lethargy. Phuttipong Nakthong’s 4 Kings II doesn’t just pick up where its predecessor left off; it throws us back into the same roaring bonfire of Thai vocational school rivalries where machismo and adolescent chaos burn like cheap gasoline. We’re drawn again into a world where an ill-timed stare or the wrong colors on a uniform can mean blood on the tiles. Yet, while the first film was a revelation—crackling with an emotional honesty that could leave you bruised—this follow-up is an uneven resuscitation, nobler in intent than in execution.

What does it mean to come of age on the wrong side of the tracks, in an era when a school blazer is both a uniform and a battle flag? Phuttipong Nakthong’s 4 Kings slips us into the fever hallways and bruised afternoons of 1990s Thailand, where vocational schools function as both families and war zones. And the miracle here—the surprise, really—is that the film doesn’t just wallow in nostalgia or gangster-movie clichés; it bristles with anguish, tenderness, and an ache for lost possibilities.

Just when you think you’ve seen every action movie variation—a relentless barrage of bullets, a battered hero bleeding patriotism in the dust, evil men with nicknames like “The Stinger”—along comes Counterattack, a film that throws itself into the jungle firefight with reckless abandon, only to get pinned down by the most familiar artillery in the screenwriter’s arsenal. If the action genre has become the cinematic equivalent of a well-worn pair of combat boots, this international effort polishes the leather but never changes the tread.

You sit down to Cold Wallet expecting slick Netflix-bait, a digital-age caper that promises to surf the froth and confusion of the cryptocurrency world—and you get exactly that, for better or worse. It’s a thriller with a gamified conscience, a morality tale dressed up in meme-charged adrenaline, hustling for attention like a day-trader chasing the next meme coin. Cutter Hodierne’s direction thrusts us into a jittery, claustrophobic world where Redditors become bumbling revolutionaries overnight, and the real drama isn’t wealth lost or gained, but the feeble, ever-shifting ground on which contemporary ethics stand. The irony? The lesson is larger—infinitely larger—than the story.

For nearly a decade, the idea that Donald J. Trump might be an agent of Russia has been dismissed as a paranoid fantasy—a fever dream of the so-called resistance, a conspiracy theory fit for the darkest corners of the internet. But as President Trump settles into his second term, openly siding with Vladimir Putin in the war against Ukraine, we must ask: What if the wildest theory of them all was true?

Did Frank Grillo gamble away his dignity on a late-night poker game, or did someone slip a “Bangladeshi Bond” clause into his contract between sips of cheap tequila? This is the idle question that haunts you after enduring MR-9: Do or Die, a cross-cultural concoction that plays less like a spy thriller and more like a xenophobic prank from the gods of genre schlock. Asif Akbar, the architect behind this mad cross-continental experiment (U.S. and Bangladesh mucking about like oil and water in a leaky martini shaker), seems to have mistaken trash for treasure and—amazingly—isn’t alone in that delusion.

Let us not mince words: Battle Over Britain is one of those rare cinematic crash-landings where you don’t merely see the fuselage flaming—you feel the passenger nausea, too. I adore a great war film—I’ve thrilled to every thunderous strafing run ever conjured by Hollywood’s golden generation. But what we have here is not so much a movie as an act of cinematic self-immolation, meticulously recorded and distributed (thank you, Prime) for the unwitting streaming masses.

Let us all give a moment of silence—not just for what once was the luminous Star Trek franchise, but for the unsuspecting audience, who, wandering into Section 31, finds themselves trapped in a malfunctioning holodeck, gasping for escape. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when corporate storytelling steers a beloved odyssey into the black hole of mediocrity, look no further: Section 31 is a galactic punchline with none of the set-up, and all the pratfall.

How do you make a biopic about Vladimir Putin, the ogre of our current news cycle? If you’re Patryk Vega, you hammer it together with such reckless abandon that you’d think you’d stumbled into a Cold War-themed escape room designed by circus clowns. Nobody expects nuance, perhaps, but nobody expects this—a cinematic vodka shot that leaves you not so much woozy as existentially seasick. This is not the movie Putin deserves; it’s the movie assigned to late-night cable purgatory, a cautionary tale for future film students and insomniacs alike.