Movies

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.

If ever there was a “fever dream” of the American biopic, Derek Estlin Purvis’ The Ballad of Davy Crockett is it. But don’t expect psychotropic colors or a narrative that flares and fizzes. No, this is the sort of celluloid nightmare where you wander through soggy wilderness for ninety minutes without a compass—except, perhaps, for the one lost somewhere on the cutting-room floor.

There have always been two kinds of gangster movies: the ones that prance through mythology—snappy dialogue, tailored suits, violence delivered with cinematic éclat—and the ones where the filth clings to your coat, where the glamour sours, and the body count is just neighborhood news. Black Mass, Scott Cooper’s dark valentine to the Southie underworld, is very much of the latter breed: all winter breath, sickly dim light, and the chill that comes when you realize the American experiment has bred not just outlaws but monsters in suburban haircuts.

Let’s talk about Boy Kills World—or, more precisely, let’s talk about a movie that doesn’t so much arrive as come crashing through your door, boots muddy, eyes wild, trailing the scent of a thousand better revenge flicks but insistently upbeat about its own nonsensical mayhem. Moritz Mohr, with the zeal of a film school grad who snorted every frame of John Wick and then washed it down with an energy drink, seems thrilled—no, positively giddy—to show us just how many ways he can make Bill Skarsgård break bodies in electric-neon slow motion. You don’t so much watch Boy Kills World as survive it, battered by waves of choreographed carnage, tongue-in-cheek nonsense, and so much color-grading you start craving sunglasses.

Let’s not pretend that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—yes, the title practically goads you into saying it twice—enters a landscape desperate for more reanimated ’80s phantoms. We have sequels popping up like dandelions in the same graveyard Tim Burton loves to till, but this one… well, I found myself in th...

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.

Let’s not pretend otherwise: “The Beyond” is not a movie that stoops to court your comprehension, let alone your approval. The first thing to say about Lucio Fulci’s 1981 Southern Gothic splatter opera—this fever-dream of congealed dread, oozing viscera, and poetic free-association—is that it laughs in the face of what most filmgoers consider narrative logic. But in so doing, it offers up a delirious orgy of supernatural delirium the likes of which American genre fare, buttoned-up and market-tested, wouldn’t dare attempt.

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.

“Ben-Hur,” that juggernaut rumbling out of 1959 and directed by William Wyler with an Old Testament sense of gravity, is the one Hollywood epic that manages, at least for a good three hours, to make its own size feel like destiny rather than bloat. Adapted from Lew Wallace’s biblically bulging novel...

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.