Movies

The war film has always been something of a contract with the audience, a pact that says: come, and I’ll show you the heat of heroism, the terror behind the steel, the struggle of boys made old by violence. What Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland have dared, in Warfare, is to tear up that contract and write something new and starker in its place: this is what it feels like to be trapped in someone else’s war, to be battered by noise and confusion, to never quite know who your enemy is or why you’re here, beyond some abstract equation of duty and disaster.

We have reached the late capitalist endgame when even a G20 summit—a gathering that, in theory, represents the convulsions and anxieties of a planet teetering on its own ambitions—becomes a stage for pallid, sticky-fingered action pablum. Patricia Riggen’s G20 strains to dress itself in the grandeur of international consequence, as if draping a polyester tablecloth over a card table could suddenly transform it into Versailles. The result, unfortunately, is not grandeur but the cinematic equivalent of a hotel conference coffee: tepid, thin, and bitterly disappointing, despite the prestigious packaging.

Romantic action comedies are supposed to be soufflés—light, airy, and just a little dangerous when the temperature rises. Jonathan Eusebio’s Love Hurts instead brings us the cinematic equivalent of a microwave burrito, piping hot in patches but mostly frozen where it matters. We’re promised a gleeful riot in the key of Jackie Chan, but what this film delivers is the sound of laughter caught in the wrong throat.

Every few years, a movie comes along so eager to don the tarnished crown of “epic fantasy”—to conquer, to astonish, to graft itself onto the sagging limbs of a post-Lord of the Rings landscape—that it forgets the very sinews that hold stories together. Into the Lost Lands, Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest incursion into genre upheaval, is not so much an adventure as it is a protracted reminder that the land of cinema has indeed been lost.

Gareth Evans, the kinetic firebrand behind The Raid, lets the bullets spray and bones crackle once again in Havoc, his latest Netflix spectacle. There is, at times, something almost musical to his violence—an arrhythmic percussion of bodies against concrete—that has been his signature since he left rural Wales for the Indonesian underworld. Havoc is, if nothing else, a thundering proof that Evans hasn’t lost his taste for bloody spectacle, even if his hand trembles when it comes time to string all the terrific chaos together.

Just when I thought Martin Campbell had hit rock bottom with Dirty Angels, he’s here holding a pickaxe and a Windex bottle—eager to show us there’s still a few nihilistic layers of schlock to be excavated. Cleaner, the glumly titled thriller that lands with a persuasive thud in the cinematic calendar of 2025, is—let’s be fair—marginally less apocalyptic than last year’s disaster. But that’s only because, after Dirty Angels, even an hour trapped in an actual landfill would feel “kind of a mess” but oddly refreshing.

After the garish, exhaust-spewing spectacle of most “political” thrillers, Steven Spielberg’s Munich arrives like a shock to the moral system—a slow-burning fever of a film, where triumph is measured not by body counts but by the corrosion of souls. Released in the long winter shadow of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Munich isn’t content with the easy uplift of righteous action. No, Spielberg has something far more unsettling in mind: he gives us the nightmare of retaliation—personal, national, and ultimately, existential—and then refuses to wake us up.

Some films fail, but do so innocuously. Others fail with more urgency—they mishandle material so important, so inflammable, that their mediocrity becomes a kind of insult. The Vigilante is that sort of film: a chintzy, slapdash action-thriller whose wobbly attempts at blockbuster ferocity trivialize the monstrous reality of child trafficking. There’s no deeper disappointment at the movies than when righteous indignation is reduced to bad lighting, tepid performances, and the hollow rattle of fake gunfire.

Some movies thump and clatter, full of fury and elaborate posturing, but leave you empty—numb with noise. Not this one. “Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween – Decisive Battle” comes roaring off the screen like a freight train barreling through a hall of mirrors. It's the finale to a two-part gangland fable, but don’t make the mistake of expecting another muddled, tragic youth melodrama; this thing shimmies with energy and disreputable heart. If the first half was all mood-setting and foreshadowing—a bit of diary scribbling before the storm—this installment throws you chest-deep into the mud, where loyalty and violence tangle until you can’t tell if you’re wiping away blood or tears.

Middle chapters are supposed to draw blood—the best of them do, not just on the battered faces of its heroes but on the audience’s nerves, on their capacity to care as much as the characters do. “Tokyo Revengers 2 Part 1: Bloody Halloween – Destiny,” the latest cinematic digression in the undead manga juggernaut, takes a look at wounds—metaphorical and literal—that never quite clot, never quite heal. There’s soul, there’s spunk, but not always the pulse.