Movies

There’s something almost indecent about the joy with which Kevin Reynolds’s 2002 The Count of Monte Cristo throws open the trapdoor on Dumas’s enduring chest of treasure. It’s not just an adaptation—it’s a swashbuckler, a cocktail of innocence and cold revenge shaken so hard that pearls of melodrama practically fly into the audience’s lap. Where so many literary adaptations settle for stagy reverence, Reynolds, with a wink and a hot air balloon, sweeps you into a storybook France that can’t quite remember if it’s in 1840 or a theme park in Orlando. And for two hours, you’re grateful for the confusion.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2024) doesn’t just dust off Alexandre Dumas’s tale for a new generation—it dips the whole battered novel in a vat of cinematic dye, wrings from it every drop of opulent color and feverish pain, and gives us a revenge saga with enough pulse to rattle modern audiences out of their collective torpor. You sit down expecting Masterpiece Theatre—the kind of earnest, upholstered adaptation that suffocates on its own handsomeness—and instead the film throws you headlong into the glare and grime of 19th-century France, daring you to blink.

Is Guy Ritchie the last true showman of our smirking age, or is he just the only one shameless enough to relight the fuse on the old war-comic dynamite? With The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, he hauls his bag of cheeky tricks to World War II—history, for Ritchie, is less a backdrop than a soundstage for swagger, shootouts, and blokes with accents sharp enough to slice through Nazi brass.

You sit in the theater—nervous, skeptical, weirdly hopeful. If ever a movie dared the audience to ask “why ARE we doing this?” before the lights even dim, it’s Joker: Folie à Deux: a sequel that announces itself with a musical number, fingers everyone in the eye (twice for the trouble), and then dares you to care.

There are movies that claim to “go there,” and then there’s 8mm—a movie that finds the locked door, kicks it open, and drags you into a darkness so absolute you forget the way out. Joel Schumacher, who usually deals in gloss and glitter, here trades the neon for bruise-purples and cigarette-ash shadows. The result? A drama that should come with a warning label: THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS ‘JUST LOOKING’ ANYMORE.

Settling into my seat for Schindler’s List, I felt a nervous charge—equal parts anticipation and foreboding, as if I were about to audit a master class in empathy while simultaneously standing trial for the history of my own species. Spielberg has, over the years, proven himself a virtuoso in the theater of the heart, but with this film he trades in his usual sentimental coin for something far harsher, sharper—a shank, not a valentine.

When I first boarded Snowpiercer, I didn’t brace myself for a study in controlled chaos on rails—a high-concept apocalypse that whips by so quickly, you barely have time to clutch your sensibilities, let alone your popcorn. If, in the first ten minutes, you thought you were signing up for just another dystopian drudge, Bong Joon-ho’s locomotive vision, at once fevered and hermetically sealed, sets you straight: settle in, there are no real stops, and derailing is not on the menu.

Let’s strip away the illusion: Land of Bad is the cinematic equivalent of a greasy cheeseburger at midnight—no one will claim it’s haute cuisine, but good lord, sometimes you just need it. It’s the type of picture that wears its lack of originality like dog tags, draped proudly over a flak vest of tropes. Oscars? Not unless they start giving out awards for Most Satisfying Detonation or Best Use of a Helicopter in a Crisis. But when you’re hungry for sensory overload—explosions, cussed camaraderie, men shouting “Go! Go! Go!” into static—who’s keeping score?

The original Platform—the Spanish dystopian riot from 2019—arrived like an incendiary pamphlet stuffed in your lunchbox, urging you to gnaw on all that’s rotten in social hierarchy until your teeth cracked on the metaphors. I left that movie feeling as if I’d been clobbered by class struggle, seduced by horror, starved and force-fed in equal measure—and I liked it. You wandered its vertical prison with Goreng, whose backbone and dwindling hope pulled you, one slippery floor at a time, through a fable of survival so bare-boned and unyielding you could feel the jailer’s breath.

Fasten your spandex—Marvel’s most obnoxious court jester has stormed the palace and, with an exhausted growl, dragged along cinema’s most battered—if not beloved—mutt: Wolverine. Ryan Reynolds, as Deadpool, doesn’t simply arrive in the MCU—he crash-lands, splattered across the screen with the sort of anarchic acid you expect when a franchise finally stops playing spin-the-bottle and just licks the wounds. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, back from the grave, looks at once chewed up and feral—he’s the aging gunslinger who’s realized the last bar’s happy hour is over and the piano man’s dead.