Movies

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.

This is supposed to be the season of goodwill, eggnog, and the kind of joy you’re only ever forced to feel in December. But what do we actually get? Sleigh bells drowned out by sirens, cinnamon-scented pandemonium—yes, Virginia, it’s time for movies that crank the holiday insanity to eleven. If Christmas is a circus, why settle for gentle elephants when you could have rabid reindeer? My Christmas list, this year, is for those who like their tinsel twisted: Gremlins, Violent Night, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and, yes, Terrifier 3. Fasten your seatbelt with a candy cane.

When I first heard about "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga," I felt that distinctive, twitchy blend of anticipation and dread—the kind peculiar to long-running franchises and whatever anarchic fever dream George Miller might have stashed up his sleeve. The casting alone was its own Mad Maxian gamble: Anya Taylor-Joy—an actress as persuasively haunted as she is hypnotically camera-ready—marching into apocalypse territory, her porcelain features smeared in Wasteland grime. Would she disappear into the fury, or would she seem, as actresses so often do in dystopian blockbusters, like a Vogue cover model after a sandstorm?

The gangs of America have always gone Hollywood sooner or later, and in The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols opens the throttle and lets the Vandals Motorcycle Club—outlaws ripped from Danny Lyon’s mythic photographs—tear through the screen like thunder in church. Here’s a picture that understands motorcycles as not just machines but battered totems of belonging, and it wears its period cool with such nonchalance you half expect the film stock itself to start rumbling.

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.

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.

For a decade and a half, Scott Adkins action movies have felt like the amuse-bouches of the genre: you don’t go for the movie itself, you go for that single, exquisite fight—brutal, fast, clean, then back to whatever sorry goulash the plot is serving up. But with Avengement, someone, glory of glories, has seen sense and decided to cook the entire meal out of pure, red-blooded Adkins. It’s as if The Raid was adopted by Guy Ritchie’s least photogenic cousins and stranded in the back room of a decrepit British pub. The miracle? It works, start to finish—genuine, knuckle-bruising working-class catharsis.