Movies

Let’s mark STRAW’s arrival on the Netflix scroll not as a quiet debut but with the thudding, dissonant crash of a fire alarm, one of those pulpy, middle-of-the-night interruptions you half resent and won’t soon forget. This is Tyler Perry pushing melodrama to the edge of the precinct, a kitchen-sink-pressure-cooker tragedy with more indignities than a daytime soap marathon, yet fierce enough in its final moments to repay (if not quite justify) the ordeal. It’s equal parts a how-bad-can-it-get gauntlet and a surprisingly alive, wounded scream from the cracked ribcage of America’s social machinery.

This review contains spoilers.

King Ivory comes packaged with all the signifiers and promises that Hollywood (or its independent outposts) have learned to wield like weapons: “Based on extensive research”, the first phrase that glimmers in the dark like a parolee’s tattoo, ready to be flashed for credibility before the first shank hits the yard. John Swab, the director, claims proximity, he knows this world, these corners of Tulsa, these prison phone banks and gangland protocols. But proximity is not the same as revelation. King Ivory isn’t the first to slip you a look behind the penitentiary curtain and, unfortunately, it still leaves you peering through the mesh.

The date on which Exterritorial rolled out on Netflix is not likely to be emblazoned on the calendars of film lovers, unless, perhaps, as a cautionary tale for aspiring directors on how a minor thrill premise can be spun into an inextricable web of misdirection, empty conspiracy, and conspicuous plot-fumbling. If Christian Zübert set out to make a woman-on-the-brink action yarn about the delirium of maternal loss and the cruel machinery of power, what we get instead is a would-be mystery that squanders its own slender promise, often wandering the consulate’s echoing corridors with as little purpose (and with as much head-scratching immunity to security) as its protagonist.

There are films so spectacularly, unassumingly mediocre that one can simply shrug and move on: the sort of flick that tumbles out of the streaming deluge like another pair of socks in a laundry basket you never meant to sort. Tin Soldier is not that fortunate. This is an extravaganza of delusion, an action-thriller so abject in its self-regard, so confoundingly malformed, that you don’t merely endure its two senseless hours, you wage a month-long campaign for basic comprehension and actionable relief. Failed blockbusters usually suffer the indignity of audience indifference; here, Brad Furman assembles a cadre of Oscar winners, genre veterans and nepo-baby dynamite and still manages to create something more embarrassing than a TikTok fad gone stale by noon.

If the original Jurassic Park was the cinematic equivalent of hearing Beethoven's Fifth for the first time, disruptive, awe-inspiring, and strangely primal, then this seventh fossilized entry, Jurassic World Rebirth, is what happens when you ask an algorithm to remix that symphony using only elevator chimes and the incessant crinkle of a Snickers wrapper. That wrapper, tossed by an over-caffeinated, under-written scientist in this film’s opening moments, is perhaps more memorable than anything that follows, a literal flake of trash that signals the lazy entropy setting in, not just in the movie’s security system, but in the script, direction, and spirit of this once vital franchise.

This review contains spoilers.

There are films that hit with the brute-force exhilaration of a madman hammering on your front door, and then there is 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s triumphant resurrection of their own, personal apocalypse. What do we call it when a once-buried genre franchise lurches (or, in this case, sprints, full naked dicks akimbo) back into the light, louder, stranger, more ludicrously alive than ever before? Sometimes, art sneers at gentility and sends in the swinging cocks as a greeting committee.

If the original Happy Gilmore was the cinematic equivalent of being blindsided by a pie in the face. A pie filled with golf balls, beer, and genuine pathos, then Happy Gilmore 2 is what happens when someone throws three pies at you at once, turns the sprinklers on mid-swing, and then asks if you remember the taste of the original filling. It’s a legacy sequel that, for all its Frankensteinian splicing of silly and serious, still manages to resurrect Sandler’s battered but buoyant Happy with enough vigor to remind us why we ever rooted for this idiot savant and his primal swing.

There’s a particular genre of moviegoing now, call it Franchise Bereavement, where, sitting eyes glazed before the flickering remnants of a once-vital series, you feel less the thrill of pulp than the mournful exhumation of directorial intention, a séance with the ghost of what you thought the movies could be. Ballerina, advertised as “From the World of John Wick,” is less a spin-off than a séance, summoning the spirit of Keanu’s elegiac carnage into a low-lit mausoleum of hurried excess and retrofitted backstory. If its audience’s expectations are sufficiently modest, second-tier shootouts for the matinee crowd, wickless but still faintly smoldering, perhaps it delivers. But in the clear light, you see the grout, and the cracks: this is franchise hand-me-down, draped hastily around Ana de Armas like a borrowed cloak she’s expected to dignify.

If The Amateur is what happens when “Mr. Robot” and “Jason Bourne” cross DNA with too little care for the ugly offspring, this is a child born of genre cliché and laughs in the face of plausibility. Call it Mr. Squirrel: The Euro-Tour of Absurdity, Rami Malek’s twitchy everyman hacking government files by day and unmasked terrorism by night, in a world where Interpol has apparently decided to go on holiday, the CIA chases its own tail, and not a single Parisian security official or Spanish detective can be bothered to even blink at an American cryptographer detonating pools and bodies in their midst.

There’s a particular sound that reverberates in the mind when you realize that even your dependable genre heroes have begun to phone it in, a sort of dull, metallic clank, like the start of a fight scene you hoped would end differently. With Diablo, Scott Adkins charges in alongside Marko Zaror for a billed “assassin-laced redemption movie on steroids.” But what crashes onto the screen isn’t a revelation or even a sturdy brawl in the rain; it’s more like a day shift at a cookie-cutter action factory, misfiring on every cylinder except, occasionally, the one that relates to punches and kicks.