Movies

The tricky thing about sequels—even in the golden age of movie franchising—is that familiarity can breed not just contempt, but lethargy. Phuttipong Nakthong’s 4 Kings II doesn’t just pick up where its predecessor left off; it throws us back into the same roaring bonfire of Thai vocational school rivalries where machismo and adolescent chaos burn like cheap gasoline. We’re drawn again into a world where an ill-timed stare or the wrong colors on a uniform can mean blood on the tiles. Yet, while the first film was a revelation—crackling with an emotional honesty that could leave you bruised—this follow-up is an uneven resuscitation, nobler in intent than in execution.

What does it mean to come of age on the wrong side of the tracks, in an era when a school blazer is both a uniform and a battle flag? Phuttipong Nakthong’s 4 Kings slips us into the fever hallways and bruised afternoons of 1990s Thailand, where vocational schools function as both families and war zones. And the miracle here—the surprise, really—is that the film doesn’t just wallow in nostalgia or gangster-movie clichés; it bristles with anguish, tenderness, and an ache for lost possibilities.

Let us not mince words: Battle Over Britain is one of those rare cinematic crash-landings where you don’t merely see the fuselage flaming—you feel the passenger nausea, too. I adore a great war film—I’ve thrilled to every thunderous strafing run ever conjured by Hollywood’s golden generation. But what we have here is not so much a movie as an act of cinematic self-immolation, meticulously recorded and distributed (thank you, Prime) for the unwitting streaming masses.

How do you make a biopic about Vladimir Putin, the ogre of our current news cycle? If you’re Patryk Vega, you hammer it together with such reckless abandon that you’d think you’d stumbled into a Cold War-themed escape room designed by circus clowns. Nobody expects nuance, perhaps, but nobody expects this—a cinematic vodka shot that leaves you not so much woozy as existentially seasick. This is not the movie Putin deserves; it’s the movie assigned to late-night cable purgatory, a cautionary tale for future film students and insomniacs alike.

If you’ve ever felt the jolt of electricity that comes with the first few minutes of a genuinely promising crime film—where the air thickens with possibility and dread—you’ll know something of the elation I felt plunging into Yoon Jong-bin’s Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time. Here is a movie steeped in all the genre trappings: the smoky taverns and smoke-filled back rooms of Busan in the ‘80s and ‘90s, corruption so foul you can almost taste it, men in sharp suits who wield their loyalty like a battering ram—except this time, refreshingly, nothing comes at you in the simple, blunt-force trauma of a cheap triad flick.

The Ides of March is George Clooney’s bloodletting of the American campaign trail—a lacerating little melodrama disguised as a modern-day Julius Caesar for the cable-news set. Clooney, that ever-affable, silver-tongued wolf, teams up with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon to spin a silky, venomous web that looks like hope and tastes like old, cold heartbreak. Watching this film, you don’t just witness the sausage of democracy being made; you’re tossed straight into the meat grinder and asked to pick which bit of your conscience you’d like to keep.

“Harry Brown” promises us a plunge into the urban underworld—a movie fit for the midnight oil, bruised and bruising, starring Michael Caine as a one-man answer to the cancer of youth violence. It’s a promise, I’m sorry to say, about as reliable as a travel brochure for Chernobyl.

There’s something almost perversely frustrating about watching a film that’s desperate to be important but allergic to getting its hands dirty. Small Things Like These turns the Magdalene Laundries—a subject with the fury of a thousand scandals—into a very slow, very wet walk in the Irish mist. You...

There are movies made for adults, and then there are movies that confuse “adult” with “adolescent in a wet-dream stupor.” Anora, Sean Baker’s latest stumble masquerading as a comedy-drama, is a film with all of its clothes off and nothing to show but skin. The only thing less substantial than the threadbare plot is the flimsily clad pretense that we ought to care about this endless, joyless parade of nudity and nonsense.

To readers who’ve never drawn breath in a room trembling with the thrum of a Game Boy and the sound of falling blocks—a film called Tetris may sound like yet another slab of corporate product-mongering, as if someone at Apple TV+ put on a cheap Soviet hat and decided to shovel us “content” with extra pixels. But sometimes you walk in wary and come out with a head full of adrenaline and an unexpected faith in the heart of the humble video game.