A Sexy Blog

If there’s a pleasure to be found in a political thriller set within the velvet-draped echo chambers of the Vatican, it’s in the sense that every well-pressed cardinal is one false move away from revealing the bit of spinach stuck to his soul. Conclave is a high-stakes ecclesiastical procedural that wants to show you the secret arteries and clogged veins of the Catholic Church—not just a pageant of holy men, but a great, labyrinthine chess game shot through with acid and lamp oil. And if sometimes the chessboard feels more like a conference call where everyone has a different point to make but no one’s listening, the movie at least has the gall to try.

“Life,” Daniel Espinosa’s slick sci-fi scare machine, wants to have you clutching your popcorn like a flotation device, while it slings you around the International Space Station with all the delirious glee of a B-movie with an A-team budget. It’s both a love letter and a ransom note to the genre—cheerfully pilfering from “Alien,” “Gravity,” and every ISS-daydreamer’s worst-case scenario, as if genre tropes were for the taking, like ketchup packets from a diner.

This is supposed to be the season of goodwill, eggnog, and the kind of joy you’re only ever forced to feel in December. But what do we actually get? Sleigh bells drowned out by sirens, cinnamon-scented pandemonium—yes, Virginia, it’s time for movies that crank the holiday insanity to eleven. If Christmas is a circus, why settle for gentle elephants when you could have rabid reindeer? My Christmas list, this year, is for those who like their tinsel twisted: Gremlins, Violent Night, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and, yes, Terrifier 3. Fasten your seatbelt with a candy cane.

Well, I settled into my seat for Alien: Romulus prepared for a ride that might soar or clunk—either way, I was ready to have my nerves worked over. You go to an Alien movie these days with more than just popcorn and a sense of dread; you come armed with a small arsenal of skepticism. Fede Álvarez, bless him, shoulders the Sisyphean task of giving the xenomorph mythos another go, determined to please both sweaty-palmed newcomers and the crusty acolytes who have studied Giger’s monsters as if they were cave paintings. What we get isn’t a catastrophe—far from it. But if your idea of greatness means trembling, wide-eyed awe, Romulus won’t have you seeing gods in the horror flicker. It’s good, yes—just not unforgettable.

Is there anything more perversely thrilling in American cinema than the spectacle of watching a tough man—whose life’s been varnished in blood and bad decisions—suddenly confronted with the plummeting black-out of his mind? “Knox Goes Away,” Michael Keaton’s brooding directorial vehicle (and, yes, he pilots this thing from both sides of the camera), is, at heart, a haunting, slow-burn elegy for the hired gun as the light in his memory flickers and gutters.

You find yourself at a “Terrifier” marathon the way you might wander into a crumbling, weed-choked funhouse: half-wary, half-eager, and maybe—against your better judgment—hoping to stumble out dazed, altered, or at least grinning through the scream. Damien Leone’s trilogy, born from a short so brash it barely counts as a calling card, is less a suite of movies than a dare. Sit through the whole grotesque pageant and you discover, under the shriek and squish, a saga that’s more about what horror can provoke than what it can explain.

There’s a peculiar pleasure—equal parts guilt, shock, and something close to glee—in tumbling headlong into a franchise you’d once dismissed as the province of adolescent gorehounds and basement-dwelling sadists, only to find—three blood-soaked entries later—that what you’d mistaken for mere carnage is, in fact, a nastily enchanting, almost romantic ode to cheerful misanthropy. With “Terrifier 3,” Damien Leone doesn’t so much revive his series as he yanks the franchise’s twitching corpse onto center stage, spangles it in tinsel, and hands it a candy cane shiv—a yuletide pageant for those of us who like our eggnog spiced with hemoglobin.

There’s an audaciousness in “Terrifier 2”—not simply the audacity to exist, but to linger, to stretch and claw at the very possibility of what a midnight slasher can become in 2022. Damien Leone, with the calm lunacy of a late-shift carnie, yanks his beloved Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton, a leering demon mime who must dream in Bosch triptychs) back out of cult infamy and puts him center stage, handing him the keys to the slasher kingdom and daring anyone in the peanut gallery to flinch.

Frank Herbert’s “Dune”—the shimmering mirage that has sent both readers and filmmakers staggering deliriously across the cinematic wastelands—is the sort of Everest that seems to breed not triumph but splendid, gasping misadventure. The mythos is so overstuffed, so cryptic and unyielding, that every fresh assault on its slopes promises a new brand of madness: what you get, more often than not, is altitude sickness in Dolby Surround.

When I first heard about "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga," I felt that distinctive, twitchy blend of anticipation and dread—the kind peculiar to long-running franchises and whatever anarchic fever dream George Miller might have stashed up his sleeve. The casting alone was its own Mad Maxian gamble: Anya Taylor-Joy—an actress as persuasively haunted as she is hypnotically camera-ready—marching into apocalypse territory, her porcelain features smeared in Wasteland grime. Would she disappear into the fury, or would she seem, as actresses so often do in dystopian blockbusters, like a Vogue cover model after a sandstorm?