Movies

You know the apocryphal story about critics who walk into an action movie wishing for a glimmer of difference—a splash of personality amid the prefab booms and glowering hostage negotiators? “Carry-On” waltzed onto my screen promising nothing new except a Christmastime setting and a Netflix logo, and about fifteen minutes in, I realized my cynicism had been mugged. Here is a film that doesn’t just meet the genre’s half-hearted handshake; it throws its arms around every cliché in the terminal, spins them twice, then has the nerve to wink.

You sit down with a movie like Dominique the way you’d order a late-night plate of bar wings at a dive bar: you know what you’re in for, and all you’re hoping is that it brings enough heat to be worth gnawing on. As action programmers go, this one checks all the boxes out of sheer necessity rather than finesse. We’re basically in the realm of “Die Hard by way of Bogotá,” or maybe, more honestly, as if John Wick lost her passport and was forced to improvise with whatever household hardware happened to be lying around—a Ukrainian takeout menu, heavy on grit, low on budget, zestily unconcerned with nutrition.

If only blasphemy could be a cinematic genre, then D.J. Caruso’s Mary would stand as its gaudy gold-plated altar—an epic exercise in misdirection, confusion, and tasteless embellishment. I approached this Netflix offering (the Nativity, retold as a streaming event!) with a faint, foolish hope: the epic biblical narrative is one of the inexhaustible wells of the popular imagination. My hope lasted exactly as long as it took for the credits to fade and for the first flagrant absurdity to rear its cartoonish head. If the soothsayers said Megalopolis would be the turkey of the year, they failed to foresee this bird—a toneless monstrosity that squawks when it ought to sing.

Let’s talk about “Wake Up,” the latest would-be horror satire directed (or, more accurately, jury-rigged) by François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell. This is a picture with ambitions lodged somewhere between eco-activist screed and cut-rate slasher—imagine if “Mall Cop” crashed head...

By about the third swerve into ethical ambiguity in “Juror #2,” I realized I wasn’t in the courtroom drama Clint Eastwood seemed, at first, so eager to sell me. No, this isn’t just another movie about verdicts and closing arguments. Eastwood, that leathery cinematic preacher of the American conscience, is up to something more squirm-inducing than mere legal theatrics. The film comes at you with white-knuckle dilemmas—shouldering you off your seat and into your own muddled sense of right and wrong. You may arrive expecting “12 Angry Men” by way of the Turner Classic Movies channel, but you’ll leave with your moral reflexes tested and, just possibly, thoroughly rattled.

Let’s not beat around the casket: “Absolution,” Hans Petter Moland’s all-American exercise in adrift action-thriller posturing, is a movie that feels as if it started forgetting itself somewhere around the opening credits and never found its way home. If movies could check their pockets and realize they’d left the keys in the wrong genre, here’s a film that would be stuck on the curb, repeating “Where did I park?” to a passing parade of indifference.

Every now and then, Hollywood hatches a marketing campaign so clever it's almost tempting to review the movie poster and be done with it. “Longlegs,” the latest generation of viral internet bogeyman, slithered into theaters on a fog of clickbait. It arrived, stuffed to the gills with promises—a “new Silence of the Lambs,” “the scariest movie of the century!”—as if mere dread could be manufactured wholesale, like bootleg perfume. I kept waiting for the stench of brimstone to hit me in the nose, but mostly all I caught was the distinct aroma of overbaked expectation.

Let’s not pretend that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—yes, the title practically goads you into saying it twice—enters a landscape desperate for more reanimated ’80s phantoms. We have sequels popping up like dandelions in the same graveyard Tim Burton loves to till, but this one… well, I found myself in th...

By all rights, Borderlands should have been a pyrotechnic delight—a giddy, over-caffeinated bullet-train of pulp chaos and gonzo world-building, driven by the acid irreverence of its video game namesake. Instead, what Eli Roth has delivered is an improbable feat: a science fiction action comedy that is simultaneously cacophonous and catatonically dull. Sitting there, under the suffocating weight of so much squandered star power, I found myself awash in a unique mixture of irritation and melancholy—a sort of cinematic Stockholm syndrome, except nobody falls in love with the captor. I simply prayed for release.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a small town, a crooked police force, an ex-Marine with more guts than common sense, and a rain barrel full of bad odds. But Jeremy Saulnier’s “Rebel Ridge” doesn’t give you the pleasure of seeing the expected bullet ballet. No—Saulnier is in his own, off-speed league. I went in fully bracing myself for a slow-burn revenge bloodbath in the “Blue Ruin” mold, but what Saulnier does here is cooler than that. Literally: cool as fuck.