Movies

Is there a deeper, more queasy thrill in American war movies than Oliver Stone’s Platoon? Here, the old Hollywood war drum—once a loopy rhythm of self-sacrifice and pyrotechnic heroics—gets drowned out by the thump of jungle rot, by the insectile chitter of paranoia, and above all, by a sense that Vietnam will never release those it swallows. Released in 1986—ten years after the helicopter rotors beat their retreat from Saigon—this is a film that refuses to let the audience clap themselves on the back; Stone, carrying the scars and the nightmares of his own tour, rewrites the Book of War as a catalogue of wounds, psychological and otherwise.

Just when you think you’ve seen every action movie variation—a relentless barrage of bullets, a battered hero bleeding patriotism in the dust, evil men with nicknames like “The Stinger”—along comes Counterattack, a film that throws itself into the jungle firefight with reckless abandon, only to get pinned down by the most familiar artillery in the screenwriter’s arsenal. If the action genre has become the cinematic equivalent of a well-worn pair of combat boots, this international effort polishes the leather but never changes the tread.

Did Frank Grillo gamble away his dignity on a late-night poker game, or did someone slip a “Bangladeshi Bond” clause into his contract between sips of cheap tequila? This is the idle question that haunts you after enduring MR-9: Do or Die, a cross-cultural concoction that plays less like a spy thriller and more like a xenophobic prank from the gods of genre schlock. Asif Akbar, the architect behind this mad cross-continental experiment (U.S. and Bangladesh mucking about like oil and water in a leaky martini shaker), seems to have mistaken trash for treasure and—amazingly—isn’t alone in that delusion.

If Takeshi Kitano ever felt compelled to sign off from the yakuza genre with a blood-red signature, Outrage Coda is it—a film drenched in betrayal, inscrutable silences, and the kind of violence that doesn’t so much escalate as metastasize. Kitano, in his quietly volcanic way, delivers what may be the only logical conclusion to a trilogy built on the tattered flags of honor and revenge: an ending that’s less grand opera than a slow, inexorable lowering of the curtain. If you go looking for the high-def shocks that made the original Outrage sting, you might think you’re being offered leftovers. But here’s the trick: even at his most subdued, “Beat” Takeshi never once lets you forget he’s on screen—weathered, stone-faced, and radiating danger like a knife tucked under a pressed suit.

Beyond Outrage—Takeshi Kitano’s sledgehammer sequel, a movie that swings with both the assured brutality of a mob execution and the abstract rigor of a calligraphic brushstroke. Here, Kitano isn’t merely following up his 2010 "Outrage," he’s detonating its aftermath, spraying the screen with ricocheting betrayals, power grabs, and—like some kabuki bloodletting—splashes of crimson artistry. If "Outrage" gave us an acid bath in internecine yakuza plotting, "Beyond Outrage" is the industrial-strength sequel, boiling the genre down to its ruthless chemical core.

Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage lands not just as a gangster flick but as a battered, blood-soaked ledger of every debt—emotional, familial, plain old monetary—the yakuza world has ever dared to hold. You sit there, braced by the opening scene, and suddenly you’re getting battered from all sides: black suits, bad habits, and a bloodlust that feels as methodical and joyless as balancing the books at a slaughterhouse. Kitano doesn’t ask if you’d like to go for this ride—he locks the doors and throws away the keys. This isn’t the steamy, choreographed violence of American pop-gangster films; it’s a meat grinder, and the only question is how many fingers, arms, and heads will get caught in the gears before it grinds to a finish.

Some movies bleed. Some movies howl. And then there’s The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil, which cannonballs straight into the cesspool of our pretensions about right and wrong and dares us to gulp it down. Lee Won-tae’s pit-fight of a thriller isn’t just a crime movie—it’s a baptism, but the water is curdled with blood, sweat, and the stink of men who mistake punishment for penance. This isn’t filmmaking—it’s a bare-knuckle sermon delivered from the gutter.

There are experiments and then there are detonations. Takeshi Kitano’s “Broken Rage” doesn’t so much break the mold as lob a cherry bomb into its center and giggle at the splatter. This is the Kitano some of us grin for—a filmmaker who looks trouble straight in the eye, shrugs, and lights a fuse anyway. But “Broken Rage,” his latest genre daredevil act, is also proof that sometimes the fuse runs to a soggy pile of confusion instead of a cathartic bang.

Let’s be honest: it takes a particular kind of foolhardy courage—or maybe the sweet-mad gambler’s spirit of the real movie-lover—to watch a disaster picture about a storm-tossed plane while you’re actually on one, ricocheting through the clouds. The world outside your window is rattling with electricity, each jolt of turbulence a drumroll for the next on-screen catastrophe, and all you’re braced for is to be tossed overboard by a couple of hours of mechanical clichés. But Jean-François Richet’s “Plane”—wrapped up in its 2023 action-thriller drag—delivers a jolt of its own: it lifts you right out of the seat-gripping dread and into something damn near rapturous. By the time Gerard Butler and Mike Colter are wrestling fate on a jungle runway, your heart isn’t just in your throat—it’s applauding.

Certain movies don’t entertain; they happen to you—a mugging in the parking lot of your own expectations. “Aftermath” is that kind of disaster: a movie so resolutely, invincibly witless that it may single-handedly set the action thriller back to before the invention of the bridge. Patrick Lussier’s slab of hostage nonsense is something you don’t so much watch as endure, like a flood in your basement when all you wanted was a cold shower.