Movies

Sometimes a movie unspools with the comforting hum of déjà vu—a story you know by heart even as the unfamiliar faces of another country’s cinema strut and stumble before you. Monga, directed by Doze Niu, is that kind of film, a Taiwanese gangster saga that aches to be muscle and poetry both, splashing its neon lights across Taipei like it’s trying to reinvent the shadows themselves. As the camera drifts through the back alleys and discos of 1980s Wanhua, you recognize the ritual: we’re being asked to believe in brotherhood carved out of bruises and blood, loyalty and its slow rot. And I was ready—I wanted the sweet, sickly rush of a genre picture that tilts toward heartbreak.

Is there a deeper, more queasy thrill in American war movies than Oliver Stone’s Platoon? Here, the old Hollywood war drum—once a loopy rhythm of self-sacrifice and pyrotechnic heroics—gets drowned out by the thump of jungle rot, by the insectile chitter of paranoia, and above all, by a sense that Vietnam will never release those it swallows. Released in 1986—ten years after the helicopter rotors beat their retreat from Saigon—this is a film that refuses to let the audience clap themselves on the back; Stone, carrying the scars and the nightmares of his own tour, rewrites the Book of War as a catalogue of wounds, psychological and otherwise.

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.

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.