Movies

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.

Certain movies don’t entertain; they happen to you—a mugging in the parking lot of your own expectations. “Aftermath” is that kind of disaster: a movie so resolutely, invincibly witless that it may single-handedly set the action thriller back to before the invention of the bridge. Patrick Lussier’s slab of hostage nonsense is something you don’t so much watch as endure, like a flood in your basement when all you wanted was a cold shower.

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.

Trash, pure and unfiltered. “Man with No Past” is a cinematic blackout—if the goal was to have the audience identify deeply with the protagonist’s amnesia, consider it an unqualified triumph. You won’t just forget where you are; you’ll begin to forget why you ever loved movies in the first place.

Sony’s “Kraven the Hunter” doesn’t so much pounce as lurch onto the scene—a feral miscalculation, claws unsheathed but utterly declawed by its own stupidity. If cinema is indeed a jungle, this is the lost, mange-ridden coyote wandering the outskirts, yapping for attention and finding only echoes. What’s left of the Marvel-machine’s dignity is here chewed up and spat out with a wet, unceremonious plop.

I went into Alarum thinking, perhaps out of misplaced optimism, or just that basic human longing for improvement, that it has to be better than Armor, the last shitty Randal Emmett movie with Stallone. But you know what? It's not! If cinema is meant to offer us hope and reinvention, here is a sequel in spirit, though not in name, that squanders even that. To its defence, Alarum brings a few new weak spots to the autopsy table, but much of the decay is depressingly familiar.

Let’s cut through the mariachi fireworks and that oily blast of DayGlo costumes: Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez is the sort of cinematic incident that makes you want to retroactively warn yourself away—like a bad tattoo or tequila made in a plastic barrel. “Where did the movies go wrong?” isn’t a question you ask as the credits roll, it’s a question you’re muttering thirty minutes into this so-called musical, when cultural resonance has been replaced by the clop-clop choreography of farce.

“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 are dreadful movies, there are glorious ones, and then there are those—like this laugh-riot of a mockbuster—that leap into the yawning abyss between, flailing their cardboard limbs, and come up gasping, ridiculous, and (miraculously!) alive. Planet Dune isn't just bad. It's an epic car crash, a filmic yard sale, a Walmart-brand space opera that dares—gallingly—to sidle up to the grandeur of Villeneuve’s Dune and ask, “Can I copy your homework?”

I went into Elevation knowing it would be bad—there’s something liberating in having your low expectations met so precisely, like watching a car accelerate off a cliff with immaculate predictability. George Nolfi’s latest exercise in post-apocalyptic hand-wringing arrives already embalmed, wheeling Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin out like two alluring mannequins about to be discarded. It is a feat to make actors this lively feel this bored; by the end, you could almost hear the cameraman nodding off.