A Sexy Blog

This review contains spoilers.

King Ivory comes packaged with all the signifiers and promises that Hollywood (or its independent outposts) have learned to wield like weapons: “Based on extensive research”, the first phrase that glimmers in the dark like a parolee’s tattoo, ready to be flashed for credibility before the first shank hits the yard. John Swab, the director, claims proximity, he knows this world, these corners of Tulsa, these prison phone banks and gangland protocols. But proximity is not the same as revelation. King Ivory isn’t the first to slip you a look behind the penitentiary curtain and, unfortunately, it still leaves you peering through the mesh.

If a Western can still deliver that warm, gently boozy glow, the kind that sits comfortably in the stomach and maybe tickles the mind while you nurse the dregs of your drink, then Unholy Trinity is that sort of well-poured shot. Not the top shelf, mind you, but sturdy and palatable and with just enough bite to remind you why we keep returning to these dusty crossroads. Westerns, after all, are our American fables, endlessly rewritten, and here, under the steady if uninspired hand of Richard Gray, the archetypes are dusted off, creaked upright, and made to dance one more time.

The date on which Exterritorial rolled out on Netflix is not likely to be emblazoned on the calendars of film lovers, unless, perhaps, as a cautionary tale for aspiring directors on how a minor thrill premise can be spun into an inextricable web of misdirection, empty conspiracy, and conspicuous plot-fumbling. If Christian Zübert set out to make a woman-on-the-brink action yarn about the delirium of maternal loss and the cruel machinery of power, what we get instead is a would-be mystery that squanders its own slender promise, often wandering the consulate’s echoing corridors with as little purpose (and with as much head-scratching immunity to security) as its protagonist.

The first jolt of The Founder isn’t the sizzle of a burger hitting the griddle; it’s the smack of Michael Keaton walking into the frame like capitalism’s answer to a grinning shark. Keaton, who’s been on a late-career tear ever since Birdman, doesn’t merely play Ray Kroc; he seems to inhale him, then exhale an all-American fog of hustle, charm, and predation. If Daniel Day-Lewis gave us petroleum-slick ambition in There Will Be Blood and Jesse Eisenberg did the hoodie-clad math in The Social Network, Keaton supplies the ketchup-red swagger: a salesman’s smile that curdles, scene by scene, into something closer to manifest destiny with a milkshake machine.

There are films so spectacularly, unassumingly mediocre that one can simply shrug and move on: the sort of flick that tumbles out of the streaming deluge like another pair of socks in a laundry basket you never meant to sort. Tin Soldier is not that fortunate. This is an extravaganza of delusion, an action-thriller so abject in its self-regard, so confoundingly malformed, that you don’t merely endure its two senseless hours, you wage a month-long campaign for basic comprehension and actionable relief. Failed blockbusters usually suffer the indignity of audience indifference; here, Brad Furman assembles a cadre of Oscar winners, genre veterans and nepo-baby dynamite and still manages to create something more embarrassing than a TikTok fad gone stale by noon.

If the original Jurassic Park was the cinematic equivalent of hearing Beethoven's Fifth for the first time, disruptive, awe-inspiring, and strangely primal, then this seventh fossilized entry, Jurassic World Rebirth, is what happens when you ask an algorithm to remix that symphony using only elevator chimes and the incessant crinkle of a Snickers wrapper. That wrapper, tossed by an over-caffeinated, under-written scientist in this film’s opening moments, is perhaps more memorable than anything that follows, a literal flake of trash that signals the lazy entropy setting in, not just in the movie’s security system, but in the script, direction, and spirit of this once vital franchise.

This review contains spoilers.

There are films that hit with the brute-force exhilaration of a madman hammering on your front door, and then there is 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s triumphant resurrection of their own, personal apocalypse. What do we call it when a once-buried genre franchise lurches (or, in this case, sprints, full naked dicks akimbo) back into the light, louder, stranger, more ludicrously alive than ever before? Sometimes, art sneers at gentility and sends in the swinging cocks as a greeting committee.

Has any horror film ever been sabotaged quite so thoroughly by its own intelligence (or rather, the conspicuous lack thereof) as 28 Weeks Later? The film begins with such ruthless, pulse-jacking precision, Danny Boyle’s kinetic ghost lingering over the savage, merciless prologue, that for a few brief, breathless minutes one feels the rare thrill of a sequel that might justify its own existence. That opening, with its madcap flight through a cottage-turned-meat-grinder and the image of Don (Robert Carlyle, desperately scraping together a character out of animal panic) abandoning his wife to the horde, one of the finest acts of cinematic cowardice, played for eyeball-widening horror and not, as is depressingly common, for laughs. As Don paddles away across the nightmare water, you even ask yourself: would I do the same? The movie dares you to admit it.

The first shock of 28 Days Later, before you know a Rage virus from a droplet of Thames rain, is Cillian Murphy, shivering into sentience among the plastic flowers of a London hospital, naked as Adam and just as raw. It’s a beginning unclothed in every sense, stripping away the reassuring illusions of civilization as effectively as the virus that, we come to learn, has erased all the comforting bustle of the city. Danny Boyle has always been a kinetic filmmaker, one who moves with the pulse of the streets and the shuffle of fast-talking characters, but here, those streets are hauntingly, disturbingly empty. The effect is eerily transformative: in 2002, this was less an apocalypse than a waking dream.

If the original Happy Gilmore was the cinematic equivalent of being blindsided by a pie in the face. A pie filled with golf balls, beer, and genuine pathos, then Happy Gilmore 2 is what happens when someone throws three pies at you at once, turns the sprinklers on mid-swing, and then asks if you remember the taste of the original filling. It’s a legacy sequel that, for all its Frankensteinian splicing of silly and serious, still manages to resurrect Sandler’s battered but buoyant Happy with enough vigor to remind us why we ever rooted for this idiot savant and his primal swing.