Movies

Civil War is less a movie than a diagnosis—the kind you receive in a stranger’s waiting room, where the tick of the clock and the hum of distant sirens seem to foretell something terminal, but you’re too mesmerized to get up and leave. Alex Garland looks at America as if it’s an elegantly set table that’s just been upended; the film drags you headlong through the debris, offering glimpses of the familiar and the ghastly, fused and inseparable, seen through the battered lenses of war correspondents.

Where does one even begin with a movie like this—a cinematic bag of potato chips that’s all salt, no flavor, and leaves you wondering why you even opened it? “Chief of Station” (2024)—let’s just pause and savor those quotation marks, because any film so adamant about being a “gem” should take a long, honest look in the mirror—stars the usually capable Aaron Eckhart as Ben Malloy, a man who, judging by his performance, seems to have signed on before reading anything past “Action/Thriller” at the top of the script.

Should not have resurrected The Crow. That, in a sentence, is the wisest epitaph for an undead franchise whose new lease on life feels, if not actively damned, then at least embalmed in every frame. Hollywood loves to exhume its corpses; here, though, the necromancy is not just joyless—it’s grotesque. Watching Bill Skarsgård lurching through all that smeared makeup like a moping IT clown forced into Hot Topic drag—and that’s the last cloudburst this city needed. Lionsgate, when you next crawl back to the mausoleum, maybe try releasing a film that resonates with audiences for good reasons, not just out of contractual obligation. Just a suggestion!

Is there a modern moviegoing ritual more reliable than the late-career star vehicle disguised as an “action farce”? I settled in for Cash Out, hoping perhaps for the electric surge of genuine idiocy—something so audaciously silly it loops all the way back to fun. Instead, what I got was a master class in professional inertia: a movie so locked inside its own clichés that you can almost hear the screen yawning back at you.

Criminal is the kind of mongrel thriller that seems almost tailor-made to attract critical enmity: jigsaw plotting, characters that come apart if you prod them, and a magpie casting philosophy that shuffles through A-listers as if Hollywood were a novelty gumball machine. The reviews online drip with the sourness of dashed hopes—critics, wringing their hands about “wasted potential,” all but begging the film to be thrown back into the genre stockpot for more seasoning. And yet, perversely, that’s the exact pitch that drew me in. Give me talent forced to dance on rickety scaffolding over mediocrity any day; how else would we ever be surprised?

If you squint at “Canary Black” from the comfort of your own living room—martini glass in hand, perhaps just a little self-consciously nostalgic for the days when spies sparkled and plots had pulse—it might almost pass for a movie. But move in closer, and it’s not so much a cinematic vessel as a soggy, deflating float at the tail end of a parade nobody bothered to attend. What drifts our way, bobbing with all the vigor of a limp flag at half-mast, is the kind of leftover, just-add-water espionage pulp that’s been through every possible recycling bin in Hollywood’s backlot. How many screenwriters were left, we wonder, dangling in the subzero editing bay, before someone finally called it “done”? Deep beneath the chilled surface, “Canary Black” is home to a whole hothouse of misjudged directorial flora: plotting with the finesse of errant GPS, fight scenes borrowed (badly) from late-night aerobics reruns, and a costume budget that feels stitched together entirely from off-season Halloween aisle clearance. Yet here stands Kate Beckinsale, the plucky center of the swirling mediocrity, determined to wear her “notice me, I’m lethal” energy like a badge and a bludgeon.

There’s something almost indecent about the joy with which Kevin Reynolds’s 2002 The Count of Monte Cristo throws open the trapdoor on Dumas’s enduring chest of treasure. It’s not just an adaptation—it’s a swashbuckler, a cocktail of innocence and cold revenge shaken so hard that pearls of melodrama practically fly into the audience’s lap. Where so many literary adaptations settle for stagy reverence, Reynolds, with a wink and a hot air balloon, sweeps you into a storybook France that can’t quite remember if it’s in 1840 or a theme park in Orlando. And for two hours, you’re grateful for the confusion.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2024) doesn’t just dust off Alexandre Dumas’s tale for a new generation—it dips the whole battered novel in a vat of cinematic dye, wrings from it every drop of opulent color and feverish pain, and gives us a revenge saga with enough pulse to rattle modern audiences out of their collective torpor. You sit down expecting Masterpiece Theatre—the kind of earnest, upholstered adaptation that suffocates on its own handsomeness—and instead the film throws you headlong into the glare and grime of 19th-century France, daring you to blink.

Let’s not kid ourselves with polite hedging: “Classified” isn’t a calamity—it’s the industrial accident of modern cinema, a three-car pile-up in the middle of a screenplay dust storm. If negative stars were an option, I’d be petitioning for a rating system that allowed for black holes, just to properly suck the memory of this thing from my mind.