A Sexy Blog

God help me, I got dirty thoughts watching this movie. That’s as fitting a confession as any because “It’s What’s Inside” operates on the queasy, ticklish nerve where comedy, anxiety, lust, and a weird species of social dread all mingle together in the trunk of an Uber, hungry for a fight or a kiss. I love when a film makes you wonder, in the cackling recesses of your mind, “What would I do if I were dropped inside someone else’s body for a night?” Not just the old switcheroo, but the real, squirming, terrifying, exhilarating thing—and not with anonymous ninnies, mind you, but your oldest, most untrustworthy friends.

Once in a while, a film comes drifting in on the wind, caught by almost no one, championed by even fewer, carrying the kind of oddball, heart-clutching enchantment that threatens to restore faith in the very act of cinema. Fish Story, Yoshihiro Nakamura’s time-hopping wonder, is precisely that sort of late-breaking revelation: a freewheeling, postmodern fable, at once as headlong and as intricately assembled as the punk anthem at its core. It’s hard to think of a movie, in these battered days, that is so bracingly, disarmingly optimistic—so resolutely happy to believe that music, and thus art, can literally save the world. And damned if the movie doesn’t just about convince you.

Let’s skip the salute and call it what it is: “Greyhound” isn’t here to make you feel safe, or inspired, or even—God forbid—sentimental. No, Aaron Schneider’s relentless, nerve-needling orchestration, with Tom Hanks multitasking as both star and the hand sanding the script, is a straight shot of adrenaline distilled from the brine and gunmetal of war. Forget mothball nostalgia—this is war by way of a stress test, and every ping on the sonar is a test of your pulse-ox.

To readers who’ve never drawn breath in a room trembling with the thrum of a Game Boy and the sound of falling blocks—a film called Tetris may sound like yet another slab of corporate product-mongering, as if someone at Apple TV+ put on a cheap Soviet hat and decided to shovel us “content” with extra pixels. But sometimes you walk in wary and come out with a head full of adrenaline and an unexpected faith in the heart of the humble video game.

I went into “The Six Triple Eight” with the hungry anticipation of someone starved for history not just dusted off, but spun into living, breathing cinema. I wanted to see whether Tyler Perry—a director more haunted by melodrama than most soap operas—could swing the emotional sledgehammer of the 6888th’s story without demolishing its nuanced bones. Uplift and disappointment wound themselves together in ways I hadn’t quite bargained on. This is a film that, like the letters our heroines deliver, manages to arrive at its destination—but the journey is messier than the postmark might suggest.

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.

There’s a certain kind of preemptive relief that washes over you when you enter a theater (or, as the streaming era mandates, your living room) already anticipating disaster, and then discover the film in question is just—well, not quite as calamitous as you’d braced yourself for. “Under Paris,” Xavier Gens’s new entry in the ever-indestructible shark-ploitation genre, is that rare specimen: a movie aiming squarely for the gutter, yet content to wallow in the predictable muck of mediocrity rather than launching itself into the fireworks of glorious failure. Reader, I was steeled for a catastrophe; I got something amusingly, frustratingly in-between—a B-movie so determined to be ‘meh’ that it wound up swimming in place.

How often does a film promise fun, suspense, and genuine romance, and—miracle of miracles—actually deliver all three? “Hit Man” is the kind of briskly entertaining, tonally slippery, deeply pleasurable movie experience that leaves you with a big, silly grin in the dark, and a faint suspicion you might’ve just been lovingly cheated. And isn’t that the magic of movies? Richard Linklater, whose work is so often preoccupied with talky, meandering souls lost somewhere between philosophy and the parking lot, here lays down a genre bender that barrels through romantic comedy, crime caper, and existential disguise, and—against all odds—makes it look almost too easy.

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.