Movies

Let’s be honest: some film critics will spend pages decrying the “worst film ever made” as if to purge themselves of the memory. But to really atone for our moviegoing sins? We must watch Night of Horror (1981)—the cinematic equivalent of receiving a broccoli-flavored ice cream cone at your own birthday party. And as punishments go, this is less “walk of shame” than “forced march of mirth.” Yes, dear reader, I lost a bet, and this scraggly, haunted little opus was my penance. Was it agony? A little. Did I enjoy myself anyway? More than I care to admit.

There is a kind of filmic purgatory, a cinema of stalled ambition and aesthetic vacancy, where the only thing more oppressive than the endless hours of tedium is the lingering sense of money misspent. Armor is not just another addition to the b-movie landfill, it’s the sound of late-career legacy clanging hollowly on the asphalt of a bridge, the celluloid equivalent of watching Sylvester Stallone doze in real time, bracketed by echoes of his own mythos and, faintly, the dying whinny of a studio accountant’s last desperate crackle.

There are times, guiltily, when you press on with a franchise not out of hope but out of a kind of cinematic masochism—a need, maybe, to see how low the bough bends before it snaps. With Largo Winch: The Price of Money, we don’t get the snap; we get the soft, damp thump of a weary branch coughing up another mediocre fruit, doomed to rot at our feet. And yet, like any movie masochist, I brushed off my sense of déjà vu, clung to my last embers of fondness for Tomer Sisley’s grifter-boy charm, and hit “play,” half in mockery, half in slender faith. What followed wasn’t so much disastrous as dispiriting, an ill-advised reunion tour playing to an empty barroom.

There are sequels that grow out of their originals like wild, ungovernable vines, and ones that wither into dead appendages, waving forlornly at the memory of what once, however mediocrely, worked. Largo Winch 2—or, if the European flavor tempts you, The Burma Conspiracy—manages neither flourish nor rot with grace: it just sits there, inert, a cardboard cutout of a “thriller” flapping in the breeze. If the original Largo Winch was no undiscovered classic, it still had the nervous charm of a scrappy upstart—a corporate action-drama that lived (barely) by the slyness of its twists and hero’s uncertain soul. This sequel, though, lumbers on, encased in a leaden coffin of clichés, as if produced by a committee of MBAs who once watched a Bond movie by accident and only remembered the gadgets and the running.

I never thought I’d live to see Jean Reno in the twilight of his career forced to act opposite a snowdrift and lose. "Cold Blood Legacy" (also known simply as "Cold Blood," a name with all the intrigue of a tax filing) is the sort of movie you hope to find by accident at 2AM on cable—a tired assassin in a picturesque cabin, a mysterious young intruder, a snowstorm of clichés drifting in through every frame. What I didn’t expect: a genre film so inept, so embarrassing, that its only claim to suspense is whether any of the cast will make it to the next scene conscious.

There’s a particular variety of agony reserved for a movie that owes you nothing but revenge for your ticket price—Dirty Angels, that screeching travesty, is the kind of picture that makes you long for the cleansing reset of a fire alarm at the multiplex. I wandered into this on the power of Eva Green’s name—Green, the bewitching sphinx of Casino Royale, the only actress in Europe who could make absinthe seem like a food group for grown-ups, a woman so regal she can elevate bad prose by the simple motion of an eyebrow. Here? I was cursing at the screen, and when the closing credits limped into view, I found out, to my horror, that this circus wasn’t the product of a neophyte director with TikTok aspirations—but Martin Campbell himself. Yes, the same Campbell who gave us GoldenEye’s gleaming coolness and Casino Royale’s athletic grace. Is there another Martin Campbell out there, brazenly collecting paychecks for things like Dirty Angels? If not, someone had better warn the Directors Guild.

Let’s not kid ourselves: there’s a certain thrill in seeing a name like Jessica Alba headline a streaming movie after years of cinematic absence—a return, we hope, on par with a Barbra Streisand coming-out concert or, hell, just a slap of fresh paint on tired walls. But nobody warned me that “Trigger Warning”—with a title practically begging for meme-ification—would showcase less a comeback than a one-way trip to career purgatory; it stumbles onto Netflix drier than a box of saltines on the wrong side of the apocalypse.

If only blasphemy could be a cinematic genre, then D.J. Caruso’s Mary would stand as its gaudy gold-plated altar—an epic exercise in misdirection, confusion, and tasteless embellishment. I approached this Netflix offering (the Nativity, retold as a streaming event!) with a faint, foolish hope: the epic biblical narrative is one of the inexhaustible wells of the popular imagination. My hope lasted exactly as long as it took for the credits to fade and for the first flagrant absurdity to rear its cartoonish head. If the soothsayers said Megalopolis would be the turkey of the year, they failed to foresee this bird—a toneless monstrosity that squawks when it ought to sing.

Let’s not beat around the casket: “Absolution,” Hans Petter Moland’s all-American exercise in adrift action-thriller posturing, is a movie that feels as if it started forgetting itself somewhere around the opening credits and never found its way home. If movies could check their pockets and realize they’d left the keys in the wrong genre, here’s a film that would be stuck on the curb, repeating “Where did I park?” to a passing parade of indifference.

By all rights, Borderlands should have been a pyrotechnic delight—a giddy, over-caffeinated bullet-train of pulp chaos and gonzo world-building, driven by the acid irreverence of its video game namesake. Instead, what Eli Roth has delivered is an improbable feat: a science fiction action comedy that is simultaneously cacophonous and catatonically dull. Sitting there, under the suffocating weight of so much squandered star power, I found myself awash in a unique mixture of irritation and melancholy—a sort of cinematic Stockholm syndrome, except nobody falls in love with the captor. I simply prayed for release.