Movies

If ever a film strutted in wearing Vegas fringe and a confession booth hangover, it’s “Bad Times at the El Royale.” Drew Goddard’s caper comes at you as if to say, “Sure, you’ve seen the corpse of American optimism before, sprawled out in a cheap motel—let’s see if it can still dance.” And for a while, under the hot glare of Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography, it does. The place looks like it was pried loose from a Sinatra fever dream: shag carpeting, artifice, sex lurking in the drapes. Retro isn’t decor here—it’s a cancer that’s metastasized into the bones.

Boxer (2024) doesn’t just string together a dozen rounds of punishment—it dares you to stay in your seat, wipes the sweat off your brow, and leaves you weirdly elated that you just watched a sports movie built the old-fashioned way: bruise by bruise, heart by heart, with no shortcuts and not a whiff of prefab inspiration in sight.

Let’s be honest: no one needed another “Ben-Hur,” certainly not in 2016, and yet here comes Timur Bekmambetov storming the gates, CGI in one hand and the weight of a dozen cinematic ghosts in the other, determined to prove that this saga still matters. Does it? Well, not always in the way the greats hoped, but it moves like mad, flashes prettily, and—God help us—actually tries for some feeling amid the dust and digital splatter.