A Sexy Blog

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.

There’s a peculiar ache that settles in when a franchise that used to blitz your nerve endings with every punch decides—politely, apologetically—not to hit you at all. “The Roundup: Punishment” is that strange aftertaste: the fourth swing from a series that once left you reeling, but now feels like watching a once-great bar brawler retire into paperwork and Pilates.

I’ve always believed the best action movies don’t merely throw fists and bullets, but let you feel the grime under your fingernails—the sweat, the laughter, the moral rot, and the fleeting, idiotic joy of being alive. “The Roundup: No Way Out,” the third entry in an already breathless Korean franchise, barrels in with the gleaming, vulgar confidence of a fighter who knows exactly how many teeth he has left to lose and cherishes each one. It’s the sort of riotous, supercharged entertainment that doesn’t ask your approval; it simply pummels you into submission and makes you laugh out loud while it’s at it.

How many times can we bang the same drum and call it music? In Hollywood, they’ll belt out “sequel” like they’re conjuring magic, but more often the rabbit’s already dead in the hat. I sat down to The Roundup with my head full of anxious prophecies—Ma Dong-seok returning for more brutal slapstick, a director only two films deep in the game, and a promised journey from Seoul to a postcard Vietnam. If my knees didn’t quite knock, I still tucked in for another go at what has become a modern Korean ritual: the star vehicle in which the star could actually drive through a brick wall and ask for seconds.

Let me confess—when a director struts into crime cinema for the very first time and comes out swinging with the force of a heavyweight champ, you sit up and take notice. Kang Yoon-sung’s “The Outlaws,” the inaugural strike in what would become “The Roundup” series, barrels out of the gate less like a cautious debut than a slugger firing on all pistons and daring the old guard to keep pace. The wildest surprise? Kang was a rookie. But while veterans sometimes churn out crime genre sausages with the predictability of a midnight noir rerun, here’s a newcomer whose bravado is only matched by his dexterity.

If you go to the movies to be reassured, to be comforted by the amiable fiction that the “good guys” are only ever a few rough nights or wisecracks away from redemption, then steer clear of Olivier Marchal’s “Rogue City.” There’s nothing here but the squall and shriek of compromise, the nervous laugh of doomed men scraping out another day in purgatory. To call it a police procedural is a little like calling Goya’s Black Paintings “a bit gloomy.” Marchal spills bodies and broken loyalties across the screen as deftly as a street painter slinging mud. And damned if I wasn’t riveted.

There’s the art of magic, and then there’s the art of the movies — and sometimes, as in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, you get the blessed, fizzing collision: a celluloid conjuring act so elegantly constructed, you half expect the film canisters to vanish into a swirl of sepia smoke. Here, the camera purrs through the gaslit wunderkammer of 19th-century Vienna, and history itself is spun into a stylish web of intrigue, murder, and—naturally—a little heartbreak. We’re so used to historical dramas treating events as window-dressing or, worse, solemn ballast, that it's a small miracle when a film like this one uses the sweep of real history—the Mayerling incident, no less—as a vital pulse beneath its rolling sleeves and hidden doves.

Sometimes a film comes along so inept, so guileless in its ambition and so transcendently incompetent, that it explodes all the boundaries of ordinary badness and backflips, grinning, into the rarefied territory of cult ecstasy. Troll 2 is that kind of movie: a raucous spectacle of misjudgment that plays like a séance held for the art of scriptwriting—boisterous, deluded, and more fun than most of what shuffles out of the Hollywood Dream Factory on a Friday night.

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.

There have always been two kinds of gangster movies: the ones that prance through mythology—snappy dialogue, tailored suits, violence delivered with cinematic éclat—and the ones where the filth clings to your coat, where the glamour sours, and the body count is just neighborhood news. Black Mass, Scott Cooper’s dark valentine to the Southie underworld, is very much of the latter breed: all winter breath, sickly dim light, and the chill that comes when you realize the American experiment has bred not just outlaws but monsters in suburban haircuts.