A Sexy Blog

Some films fail, but do so innocuously. Others fail with more urgency—they mishandle material so important, so inflammable, that their mediocrity becomes a kind of insult. The Vigilante is that sort of film: a chintzy, slapdash action-thriller whose wobbly attempts at blockbuster ferocity trivialize the monstrous reality of child trafficking. There’s no deeper disappointment at the movies than when righteous indignation is reduced to bad lighting, tepid performances, and the hollow rattle of fake gunfire.

WarGames belongs to that rare class of Hollywood entertainments that seem, almost accidentally, to have tapped straight into the anxieties—and hopes—of an entire era. John Badham’s 1983 techno-thriller opens in a haze of early computer geekery: modems squeal, dot-matrix printers grind, and a Seattle teenager named David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) sits hunched over his blue-glowing screen. Within minutes, what begins as an innocent search for a few pirated video games erupts into a pulse-cranking race against nuclear oblivion—a transformation so swift and seamless it’s as if the movie itself is racing the clock.

“Donnie Brasco” is one of those rare crime movies that operates less as a cautionary tale than as an anatomy of yearning—of what we’re willing to counterfeit, and what must finally be, heartbreakingly, real. Directed by Mike Newell (whose touch is lighter than the usual genre brutes), the film plunges us into the rank back rooms and vinyl-upholstered dusk of Mafia New York. Yet what haunts you afterward isn’t the ratcheting tension or the whiff of violence—it’s the look in Al Pacino’s eyes as he walks toward obliteration, and the ache of Johnny Depp’s split, nearly-shattered soul.

If Alex Parkinson’s Last Breath reminds us of anything, it’s that even the most harrowing true stories can be neatly packaged, pressed into narrative conformity, and, somewhere along the way, lose their vital spark. Parkinson, remaking his own 2019 documentary, attempts to fuse the cold sweat realism of survival thrillers like 127 Hours with the hallucinatory dread of The Abyss, but winds up stranding us not in the abyssal dark, but somewhere in the anodyne blue light of a well-meaning, mildly gripping genre exercise.

Some movies thump and clatter, full of fury and elaborate posturing, but leave you empty—numb with noise. Not this one. “Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween – Decisive Battle” comes roaring off the screen like a freight train barreling through a hall of mirrors. It's the finale to a two-part gangland fable, but don’t make the mistake of expecting another muddled, tragic youth melodrama; this thing shimmies with energy and disreputable heart. If the first half was all mood-setting and foreshadowing—a bit of diary scribbling before the storm—this installment throws you chest-deep into the mud, where loyalty and violence tangle until you can’t tell if you’re wiping away blood or tears.

Middle chapters are supposed to draw blood—the best of them do, not just on the battered faces of its heroes but on the audience’s nerves, on their capacity to care as much as the characters do. “Tokyo Revengers 2 Part 1: Bloody Halloween – Destiny,” the latest cinematic digression in the undead manga juggernaut, takes a look at wounds—metaphorical and literal—that never quite clot, never quite heal. There’s soul, there’s spunk, but not always the pulse.

Every so often a movie arrives that makes you reevaluate every unkind thing you’ve ever said about a “bad” film. If The Hard Hit is an example of “five-star” cinema, then we’re truly living in the era of Yelp-ified delusion, where directors and their unpaid interns feverishly stuff the ballot box, hoping the audience won’t notice the cellophane-and-string held together beneath their fraudulent bravado. I suppose if you squint hard enough through the muddy lens of this movie, you can see why someone might mistake it for a real film—though you’d have to be cross-eyed and twelve whiskey sours deep.

Has there ever been a fantasy quite as potent for the audience of action movies as the one where an ordinary schlub gets to uncork the bottled-up rage of his humdrum existence, smashing open ennui’s skull with a roll of nickels? “Nobody,” directed by Ilya Naishuller, starts as a sneaky parody of that everyman’s power fantasy but quickly escalates into its apotheosis — a well-lubricated, pyrotechnic hoot that leaves the faint whiff of gunpowder and absurdity drifting over the popcorn aisles.

In the glittering labyrinth of modern espionage thrillers, Black Bag stands poised with all the accoutrements—name-brand talent, glossy international backdrops, a moral quandary or two shimmering on the surface—yet somewhere between the Bondian promise and Soderbergh’s cooler-than-cool execution, the pulse goes slack. This should have been a decadent spread, lush with betrayal and sleight-of-hand. Instead, we’re handed a chilly amuse-bouche, the cinematic equivalent of chewing an ice cube and wishing for cognac.

Let’s not kid ourselves: if you buy a ticket for a Jason Statham vehicle directed by David Ayer—co-scripted, for heaven’s sake, by Sylvester Stallone—you know what ride you’re strapping in for. “A Working Man” is another raucous plunge into the shark-infested waters of the action-thriller genre, humming with the familiar bass of vengeance and sweat. The surprise, perhaps, is that there is almost no surprise at all.