Movies

Somewhere between the battered neon nostalgia of the original “Road House,” with its Patrick Swayze, Zen-and-fisticuffs swagger, and the pulse of high-gloss, 2024 bombast, I settled into my seat, half-expecting that singular jolt movies sometimes deliver—the kind that reminds you you’re watching a piece of pop detritus turned, against all odds, into folk art. There’s a peculiar ache that comes with these remakes: will the new kid on the block dare to dance like Swayze, or just step on my toes?

Dev Patel, that gangly charmer who skip-traced his way into our hearts in “Slumdog Millionaire,” comes roaring through (or is it swinging through?) with his directorial debut, “Monkey Man,” and I have to admit, I went in with my soft spot for him already exposed. But what I found wasn’t just a talented actor flexing his new muscles—it was Patel unleashing a ferocious, turbo-charged vision, as if he’d been storing years of performance energy in his bones and it finally detonated behind the camera. What a high.

Civil War is less a movie than a diagnosis—the kind you receive in a stranger’s waiting room, where the tick of the clock and the hum of distant sirens seem to foretell something terminal, but you’re too mesmerized to get up and leave. Alex Garland looks at America as if it’s an elegantly set table that’s just been upended; the film drags you headlong through the debris, offering glimpses of the familiar and the ghastly, fused and inseparable, seen through the battered lenses of war correspondents.

Of all the things I expected to find myself enjoying in a post-ironic movie landscape half-worshipful of VHS gutters and half-terrified of sincerity, a pint-sized Canadian freakspawn like Frankie Freako was nowhere near the top of my predictions. I’m someone whose tastes, I’ll admit, veer toward the clean lines and careful sounds of other genres entirely—so much so that I’d usually spot a grimy puppet and run screaming for Bergman. But here I am, confessing it outright: Steven Kostanski’s affectionate, anarchic ode to '80s sleazoid creature shams, Frankie Freako, had me grinning, as if I’d found a rubber monster in my lunchbox and decided what the hell, I’d eat it.

What a joyless, magnificent mess of unintended comedy this is, a late-period fever dream so overloaded with Significance and “cinematic history” that it’s hard to know if Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis comes to us as a time capsule from the future of movies, or as the smoldering effluence of Hollywood’s oldest, dearest delusions.

If revenge movies are the honey of action cinema, “The Beekeeper” is a fiercely sweet jar delivered with a sledgehammer. Jason Statham, an actor who flashes more punch than pathos, takes his turn as Adam Clay—a retired covert hive-minder (forgive me, the bee metaphors come with the territory) turned literal beekeeper. He’s minding his own buzz until his landlady, a kindly Eloise Parker, swallows a phishing scam and then heartbreakingly, herself. There’s your setup: one jar of honey, spectacularly smashed.

Where does one even begin with a movie like this—a cinematic bag of potato chips that’s all salt, no flavor, and leaves you wondering why you even opened it? “Chief of Station” (2024)—let’s just pause and savor those quotation marks, because any film so adamant about being a “gem” should take a long, honest look in the mirror—stars the usually capable Aaron Eckhart as Ben Malloy, a man who, judging by his performance, seems to have signed on before reading anything past “Action/Thriller” at the top of the script.

Should not have resurrected The Crow. That, in a sentence, is the wisest epitaph for an undead franchise whose new lease on life feels, if not actively damned, then at least embalmed in every frame. Hollywood loves to exhume its corpses; here, though, the necromancy is not just joyless—it’s grotesque. Watching Bill Skarsgård lurching through all that smeared makeup like a moping IT clown forced into Hot Topic drag—and that’s the last cloudburst this city needed. Lionsgate, when you next crawl back to the mausoleum, maybe try releasing a film that resonates with audiences for good reasons, not just out of contractual obligation. Just a suggestion!

Is there a modern moviegoing ritual more reliable than the late-career star vehicle disguised as an “action farce”? I settled in for Cash Out, hoping perhaps for the electric surge of genuine idiocy—something so audaciously silly it loops all the way back to fun. Instead, what I got was a master class in professional inertia: a movie so locked inside its own clichés that you can almost hear the screen yawning back at you.

Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is a brash, full-throttle collision—Gangs of New York after a few rounds with Kung Fu Hustle. What a galvanizing jolt to the system: to step into a movie that practically dares you to remember your youth, back when Hong Kong cinema was deliriously off the leash, and the formula for a good time was a heroic bloodbath, some dirt under the nails, and a soundtrack of testosterone and betrayal. Here, Cheang invites us to mainline nostalgia—this is genre-movie pleasure as pure, as heady, as chow fun in a back alley at 2 a.m.