Movies

Let’s be honest: it takes a particular kind of foolhardy courage—or maybe the sweet-mad gambler’s spirit of the real movie-lover—to watch a disaster picture about a storm-tossed plane while you’re actually on one, ricocheting through the clouds. The world outside your window is rattling with electricity, each jolt of turbulence a drumroll for the next on-screen catastrophe, and all you’re braced for is to be tossed overboard by a couple of hours of mechanical clichés. But Jean-François Richet’s “Plane”—wrapped up in its 2023 action-thriller drag—delivers a jolt of its own: it lifts you right out of the seat-gripping dread and into something damn near rapturous. By the time Gerard Butler and Mike Colter are wrestling fate on a jungle runway, your heart isn’t just in your throat—it’s applauding.

Certain movies don’t entertain; they happen to you—a mugging in the parking lot of your own expectations. “Aftermath” is that kind of disaster: a movie so resolutely, invincibly witless that it may single-handedly set the action thriller back to before the invention of the bridge. Patrick Lussier’s slab of hostage nonsense is something you don’t so much watch as endure, like a flood in your basement when all you wanted was a cold shower.

If ever there was a “fever dream” of the American biopic, Derek Estlin Purvis’ The Ballad of Davy Crockett is it. But don’t expect psychotropic colors or a narrative that flares and fizzes. No, this is the sort of celluloid nightmare where you wander through soggy wilderness for ninety minutes without a compass—except, perhaps, for the one lost somewhere on the cutting-room floor.

If you’ve ever felt the jolt of electricity that comes with the first few minutes of a genuinely promising crime film—where the air thickens with possibility and dread—you’ll know something of the elation I felt plunging into Yoon Jong-bin’s Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time. Here is a movie steeped in all the genre trappings: the smoky taverns and smoke-filled back rooms of Busan in the ‘80s and ‘90s, corruption so foul you can almost taste it, men in sharp suits who wield their loyalty like a battering ram—except this time, refreshingly, nothing comes at you in the simple, blunt-force trauma of a cheap triad flick.

There’s a peculiar ache that settles in when a franchise that used to blitz your nerve endings with every punch decides—politely, apologetically—not to hit you at all. “The Roundup: Punishment” is that strange aftertaste: the fourth swing from a series that once left you reeling, but now feels like watching a once-great bar brawler retire into paperwork and Pilates.

I’ve always believed the best action movies don’t merely throw fists and bullets, but let you feel the grime under your fingernails—the sweat, the laughter, the moral rot, and the fleeting, idiotic joy of being alive. “The Roundup: No Way Out,” the third entry in an already breathless Korean franchise, barrels in with the gleaming, vulgar confidence of a fighter who knows exactly how many teeth he has left to lose and cherishes each one. It’s the sort of riotous, supercharged entertainment that doesn’t ask your approval; it simply pummels you into submission and makes you laugh out loud while it’s at it.

How many times can we bang the same drum and call it music? In Hollywood, they’ll belt out “sequel” like they’re conjuring magic, but more often the rabbit’s already dead in the hat. I sat down to The Roundup with my head full of anxious prophecies—Ma Dong-seok returning for more brutal slapstick, a director only two films deep in the game, and a promised journey from Seoul to a postcard Vietnam. If my knees didn’t quite knock, I still tucked in for another go at what has become a modern Korean ritual: the star vehicle in which the star could actually drive through a brick wall and ask for seconds.

Let me confess—when a director struts into crime cinema for the very first time and comes out swinging with the force of a heavyweight champ, you sit up and take notice. Kang Yoon-sung’s “The Outlaws,” the inaugural strike in what would become “The Roundup” series, barrels out of the gate less like a cautious debut than a slugger firing on all pistons and daring the old guard to keep pace. The wildest surprise? Kang was a rookie. But while veterans sometimes churn out crime genre sausages with the predictability of a midnight noir rerun, here’s a newcomer whose bravado is only matched by his dexterity.

If you go to the movies to be reassured, to be comforted by the amiable fiction that the “good guys” are only ever a few rough nights or wisecracks away from redemption, then steer clear of Olivier Marchal’s “Rogue City.” There’s nothing here but the squall and shriek of compromise, the nervous laugh of doomed men scraping out another day in purgatory. To call it a police procedural is a little like calling Goya’s Black Paintings “a bit gloomy.” Marchal spills bodies and broken loyalties across the screen as deftly as a street painter slinging mud. And damned if I wasn’t riveted.

There’s the art of magic, and then there’s the art of the movies — and sometimes, as in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, you get the blessed, fizzing collision: a celluloid conjuring act so elegantly constructed, you half expect the film canisters to vanish into a swirl of sepia smoke. Here, the camera purrs through the gaslit wunderkammer of 19th-century Vienna, and history itself is spun into a stylish web of intrigue, murder, and—naturally—a little heartbreak. We’re so used to historical dramas treating events as window-dressing or, worse, solemn ballast, that it's a small miracle when a film like this one uses the sweep of real history—the Mayerling incident, no less—as a vital pulse beneath its rolling sleeves and hidden doves.