Movies

Sequels, by design, are inheritances, too often, like any suspect will, they squander the family fortune on wasted violence and reheated melodrama. For a while, Inside Furioza looks set to repeat the pattern: the first act unspools with the weight and momentum of last year’s pierogi, and you fear it’ll languish in the shadow of its predecessor’s best moments. But then, almost as if the movie itself sobers up, the violence starts to matter, the betrayals burn, and the familiar bruised psychology of this franchise kicks in hard.

There’s a certain kind of movie poster, bald head gleaming, tattoos crawling across the chest, a scowl carved with care, like granite beneath floodlights that comes on like a challenge. It dares you not to take it seriously, to file it away with the endless parade of hooligan pulp, football thugs, or East End bruisers with the personality of a discarded can. And so Furioza, by all appearances, looked ready to step right into that gutter. But what a joy, what a rare, mean-spirited joy to be proven so gloriously wrong.

Wes Anderson has never been interested in narrative momentum, not really—he’s always preferred the aromatic whiff of narrative, the barest hint of plot beaten into candy glass and served up in a diorama, with the flavorings drawn from a Boy’s Own Adventure half-remembered in French. With “The French Dispatch,” he takes this already rarefied style and, with the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old let loose in the stationery aisle at Agnès B., multiplies it, refracts it, permutes it like a box of Ladurée macarons spilled across a New Yorker back-issue. It would be tempting, if you are not careful, to call this his ultimate film—the ur-Wes, the platonic ideal of his own butterfly-souled unreality—until, of course, you remember that this particular train has only gained steam over the years. If Anderson follows this path for another decade, we’ll need not a theater but a clockmaker’s bench and an electron microscope just to glimpse the latest nesting doll.

Let’s be honest for a moment: I don’t follow Formula 1, and if you’d asked me to pick Daniel Ricciardo out of a lineup before Joseph Kosinski’s F1 went roaring across the IMAX, I’d have shrugged and asked for directions to pit lane. But I do go for any motorsport race I can, and I’m not immune to the thrall—the primal narcotic—of the engine’s scream and the crowd’s feverish pulse. The surprise here, sitting in a cavernous, digital theater, is that Kosinski’s film makes you almost forget about the physical sensation of the track. “Almost” is the key. The sound and the snarl are so close, so constantly engineered, you can sense the popcorn rattle, but never quite smell the gasoline.

There’s something to be said for the kind of movie that doesn’t so much ask for your suspension of disbelief as it hustles you aboard, pumps the cabin full of intoxicating nonsense, and dares you to care how, or whether, the plane lands. Fight or Flight, James Madigan’s boisterous midair free-for-all, gives us the cinematic equivalent of a B-grade cocktail: fizzy, shallow, and exactly right after a long week of seriousness. In other words, it’s a film that understands the difference between “original” and “necessary”, and, frankly, doesn’t trouble itself about either.

Oh dear, it’s always a little heartbreaking to watch a film trundle out its aspirations with confetti and sashes, only to trip over its own parade float and land face-first in the mud. Founders Day wants so much to be a cheeky contribution to the crowded boudoir of holiday slashers, a genre already thick with gore-soaked in-jokes and severed limbs of irony, but the result is the sort of limp, confounding spectacle which leaves you dazed at the exit, wondering whether you’ve seen a movie at all or simply sat through a particularly aggressive PTA meeting with unfortunate casualties.

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.

If ever you wanted a feature-length infomercial for streaming’s law of diminishing returns, Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk is your final boarding call. In a career littered with fury, fire, and the occasional flayed highlander, Gibson’s latest lands with the exhausted thump of an airline meal tray dumped in your lap at 30,000 feet. Once, he stormed battlements and made mayhem in Aramaic; now, he strands three actors in a metal tube and expects us to call it drama.

By daring to write a review of Fight Club, I’ve already broken the first and second rules—and let me say, it’s a palpable thrill. The aura of sacred secrecy is less a taboo than a dare, and David Fincher’s film, like Chuck Palahniuk’s novel before it, delights in goading you to break taboos and then wallow in the delicious guilt of being caught. Few book-to-screen projects have such a brawl in the ring between source material and adaptation—usually it’s a TKO for mediocrity. But here, Fincher doesn’t just survive the pummeling; he jabs, feints, and emerges with his bruises gleaming.