Movies

Sometimes a film comes along so inept, so guileless in its ambition and so transcendently incompetent, that it explodes all the boundaries of ordinary badness and backflips, grinning, into the rarefied territory of cult ecstasy. Troll 2 is that kind of movie: a raucous spectacle of misjudgment that plays like a séance held for the art of scriptwriting—boisterous, deluded, and more fun than most of what shuffles out of the Hollywood Dream Factory on a Friday night.

Trash, pure and unfiltered. “Man with No Past” is a cinematic blackout—if the goal was to have the audience identify deeply with the protagonist’s amnesia, consider it an unqualified triumph. You won’t just forget where you are; you’ll begin to forget why you ever loved movies in the first place.

There have always been two kinds of gangster movies: the ones that prance through mythology—snappy dialogue, tailored suits, violence delivered with cinematic éclat—and the ones where the filth clings to your coat, where the glamour sours, and the body count is just neighborhood news. Black Mass, Scott Cooper’s dark valentine to the Southie underworld, is very much of the latter breed: all winter breath, sickly dim light, and the chill that comes when you realize the American experiment has bred not just outlaws but monsters in suburban haircuts.

You don’t expect the second act of a pulp saga to step out dressed like a debonair European count, its American whiskey burn now decanted into a highball of perfume and precision. But “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” does just that. With Christian Gudegast at the helm again, this time the director seems less intent on breaking bottles over your head and more interested in swirling the contents around until the bouquet rises—a sequel that charges out of L.A.’s dusty streets and into a velvet-draped, neon-lit Europe, trading in bare-knuckled bravado for continental sophistication. It’s everything about the first film sanded and buffed until we can see our disbelieving reflection in every shimmering diamond.

Every so often, a movie lurches onto the screen loaded for bear—raw, brash, unapologetically lumpy. Den of Thieves is that swaggering bastard at the bar: outsize, unwashed, reeking of testosterone and cheap vodka, but if you try to look away, you’ll miss the most electrifying fistfight of the year. Christian Gudegast’s brute-force LA heist marathon marches up to “Heat,” flexes for comparison, and then belches gunpowder in its face. If Michael Mann made ballet, Gudegast gives us a mosh pit—Elvis in Kevlar.

Vengeance is no simple business, as anyone who’s ever sat through a Park Chan-wook film with their fingernails dug into the armrest can attest. If “Oldboy” is a primal scream—rampant violence, delirious Freudian nightmares, crimson-drenched corridors—“Lady Vengeance” is the hush that follows, the cruelty made coldly mathematical, the retribution so artfully calculated you can taste the copper in your mouth. In his trilogy’s closing chapter, Park trades in the electric fury of testosterone for something subtler and, paradoxically, more lacerating: the slow-burn agony of the wronged woman forced to knit her own soul back together from the unravelled threads of innocence lost.

Let’s get this out of the way: “Hackers” is nonsense—the kind of sprightly, neon-smeared nonsense that only the ‘90s, flush with dot-com optimism and cyberpunk delusions, could have produced. But what nonsense! Iain Softley’s 1995 ode to digital counterculture is the movie equivalent of pounding a c...

There’s something bracingly cold in the Korean morning after, and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance unspools as if Park Chan-wook had gathered up every post-war trauma, every splintered family, and boiled them down to their reasonless elemental grudge. If the opening salvo to the so-called “Vengeance Trilogy” feels like an autopsy of the revenge thriller, it’s only because Park is dissecting not just genre, but the black, sodden heart of the human condition itself. How often do we watch films about vengeance and walk out, buoyed by the giddiness of catharsis? Not here. Here, you stagger out like you’ve come from a wake, the taste of rust clinging to your tongue.

Let’s step into the flickering half-light—the one cast not just by moonlit castle windows, but by nearly a century of cinematic shadow—the legacy of Murnau’s original “Nosferatu” looming long, thin, and predatory across the wall. Robert Eggers’ 2024 reimagining doesn’t so much resurrect the silent classic as it exhumes it, dusts it off with reverence, and then sinks its own sharp teeth into the mythos, drawing fresh blood for a new era. The old Count is back—and he’s hungry.

Sony’s “Kraven the Hunter” doesn’t so much pounce as lurch onto the scene—a feral miscalculation, claws unsheathed but utterly declawed by its own stupidity. If cinema is indeed a jungle, this is the lost, mange-ridden coyote wandering the outskirts, yapping for attention and finding only echoes. What’s left of the Marvel-machine’s dignity is here chewed up and spat out with a wet, unceremonious plop.