Movies

Every so often a movie arrives that makes you reevaluate every unkind thing you’ve ever said about a “bad” film. If The Hard Hit is an example of “five-star” cinema, then we’re truly living in the era of Yelp-ified delusion, where directors and their unpaid interns feverishly stuff the ballot box, hoping the audience won’t notice the cellophane-and-string held together beneath their fraudulent bravado. I suppose if you squint hard enough through the muddy lens of this movie, you can see why someone might mistake it for a real film—though you’d have to be cross-eyed and twelve whiskey sours deep.

Has there ever been a fantasy quite as potent for the audience of action movies as the one where an ordinary schlub gets to uncork the bottled-up rage of his humdrum existence, smashing open ennui’s skull with a roll of nickels? “Nobody,” directed by Ilya Naishuller, starts as a sneaky parody of that everyman’s power fantasy but quickly escalates into its apotheosis — a well-lubricated, pyrotechnic hoot that leaves the faint whiff of gunpowder and absurdity drifting over the popcorn aisles.

In the glittering labyrinth of modern espionage thrillers, Black Bag stands poised with all the accoutrements—name-brand talent, glossy international backdrops, a moral quandary or two shimmering on the surface—yet somewhere between the Bondian promise and Soderbergh’s cooler-than-cool execution, the pulse goes slack. This should have been a decadent spread, lush with betrayal and sleight-of-hand. Instead, we’re handed a chilly amuse-bouche, the cinematic equivalent of chewing an ice cube and wishing for cognac.

Let’s not kid ourselves: if you buy a ticket for a Jason Statham vehicle directed by David Ayer—co-scripted, for heaven’s sake, by Sylvester Stallone—you know what ride you’re strapping in for. “A Working Man” is another raucous plunge into the shark-infested waters of the action-thriller genre, humming with the familiar bass of vengeance and sweat. The surprise, perhaps, is that there is almost no surprise at all.

Hellhound is the kind of movie that slips in through the back door of midnight cable and hopes you’re too groggy or forgiving to notice. I wish I could tell you it’s camp, or subversively bad, or even one of those so-bad-you-have-to-write-home-about-it curios, but its ambitions don’t even aim that high. No, this is a film that scrounges at the bottom of the hitman-movie barrel and comes up clutching the genre’s most threadbare clichés like a child rooting through a box of moth-eaten sweaters. It’s a weird little time capsule of every tired assassin-for-one-last-job scenario you thought moviemaking had outgrown, and somehow, it’s still marginally less humiliating than Nicolas Cage’s Bangkok Dangerous—though only just.

There’s a delicious, fizzy pleasure to an action comedy that knows it’s a cocktail—equal parts sweet, sour, and shamelessly silly. “Novocaine,” directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, arrives in our cinematic bloodstream like a jolt of—well, you know—something that deadens all but our delight. This is the rare studio product in which the soundtrack isn’t just wallpaper but a running vein, from the beautifully melancholic “Everybody Hurts” (R.E.M., that old-wound anthem for generation after generation of walking wounded) to the glitzy throb of “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” It’s musical nostalgia used as time machine and emotional shortcut—and it works, sometimes earning more feeling than the plot does.

Carjackers is the cinematic equivalent of a fast-food burger eaten under fluorescent lighting: nothing poisonous, nothing memorable, just diet mediocrity slouching in a wrapper that pretends at rebellion. You might stumble on it, buried in the streaming bin of shame—one of those algorithmic offerings recommended after midnight when the platforms think your standards (and will to live) have flagged. The premise ought to be piquant enough to keep us awake: a ragtag band of valets and bartenders, moonlighting as amateur Robin Hoods, targeting the swollen wallets of the rich who can afford bland hotel restaurants and overpriced whiskey. When their moonlighting collides with an ill-advised “big score”—and the hotel director sends a hitman after them—you'd hope, or at least pray, for some pulse-raising chaos. Instead, buckle in: this getaway car is stuck in reverse, and the ride is more padded than perilous.

There are movies that wear their ambitions like borrowed suits a size too large, and then there is The Prosecutor, a film that struts into the courtroom with the swagger of Donnie Yen and leaves you wondering if it’s about to deliver an impassioned plea or break into a roundhouse kick. Donnie Yen, Hong Kong’s tireless apologist for action set-pieces, both acts and co-produces here, and makes his usual promise—a punch with a side of principle. Yet what we get is a genre hybrid so muddled it feels like it’s been shaken, not stirred, and then poorly strained by legal censorship.

If the movies have taught us anything about time travel, it’s that the past might be a playground for regret—an endless loop of adolescent screwups getting a second (or third, or twentieth) shot at rewriting the fate of humanity, or at least saving their high school sweetheart. Tokyo Revengers, a turbo-charged punk vacuum pressed into gangland melodrama and science-fiction stripes, wants desperately to ride that carousel—sometimes dizzy, sometimes earnest, and blessedly, just self-serious enough to keep you from rolling your eyes straight out of your skull.

Sometimes a movie unspools with the comforting hum of déjà vu—a story you know by heart even as the unfamiliar faces of another country’s cinema strut and stumble before you. Monga, directed by Doze Niu, is that kind of film, a Taiwanese gangster saga that aches to be muscle and poetry both, splashing its neon lights across Taipei like it’s trying to reinvent the shadows themselves. As the camera drifts through the back alleys and discos of 1980s Wanhua, you recognize the ritual: we’re being asked to believe in brotherhood carved out of bruises and blood, loyalty and its slow rot. And I was ready—I wanted the sweet, sickly rush of a genre picture that tilts toward heartbreak.