Movies

Ron Howard’s Rush is one of those rare biopics that doesn’t just aim to commemorate a sporting rivalry but detonates it—the screen ignites with the combustive, contrary energies of two men locked in the dance of mortal ambition. It’s almost a shock to realize how few films about sports—especially Formula 1, that most hermetic and mathematical of sports—are ever this fevered, this alive. To watch Rush after the slick digital simulation of F1 (2025, all charisma and CGI with Brad Pitt doing his Chuck Yeager-for-the-Instagram-era routine) is to remember what the movies can do when they’re brave enough to embrace mess and contradiction, and to dignify sport’s delirium rather than just illustrate it.

Let’s be honest for a moment: I don’t follow Formula 1, and if you’d asked me to pick Daniel Ricciardo out of a lineup before Joseph Kosinski’s F1 went roaring across the IMAX, I’d have shrugged and asked for directions to pit lane. But I do go for any motorsport race I can, and I’m not immune to the thrall—the primal narcotic—of the engine’s scream and the crowd’s feverish pulse. The surprise here, sitting in a cavernous, digital theater, is that Kosinski’s film makes you almost forget about the physical sensation of the track. “Almost” is the key. The sound and the snarl are so close, so constantly engineered, you can sense the popcorn rattle, but never quite smell the gasoline.

If anyone had told me that a new Superman film—one not starring the implacably handsome Henry Cavill but helmed instead by the broad-shouldered, blithely anonymous David Corenswet—would soar, I would have rolled my eyes faster than a Kryptonian in mid-spin. But James Gunn’s Superman propels itself out of the crate marked “2020s franchise relaunches” and straight into pop delirium, unexpectedly bristling with wit, irreverence, and yes, a genuine affection for tights, capes, and Clark’s enduring decency.

When the curtain rises (or, more accurately, the CGI Alps blink awake) on Nick Hamm’s William Tell, we brace for that hot prickle of cultural muscle, the promise of rebellion, the ice-pure Swiss myth being cracked open and gutted on the grand stage of the epic. Instead, we find ourselves wading ankle-deep through a fog of déjà vu, draped in armor already rusted and patched, the cinematic equivalent of a Renaissance fair where nobody can remember why they’re there.

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.

If you're looking to compare "Ballerina" to its contemporaries, the 2023 South Korean action thriller helmed by Lee Chung-hyun strikes far more resonant chords than the 2025 John Wick spinoff of the same name ever manages. Here’s a film that reminds us, with brutal grace, that in cinema’s often monochrome playground of revenge tales, it’s less about originality of idea and more about the fierce, focused execution—how the story lives or dies under the director's hand.

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.