A Sexy Blog

The gangs of America have always gone Hollywood sooner or later, and in The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols opens the throttle and lets the Vandals Motorcycle Club—outlaws ripped from Danny Lyon’s mythic photographs—tear through the screen like thunder in church. Here’s a picture that understands motorcycles as not just machines but battered totems of belonging, and it wears its period cool with such nonchalance you half expect the film stock itself to start rumbling.

Somewhere between the battered neon nostalgia of the original “Road House,” with its Patrick Swayze, Zen-and-fisticuffs swagger, and the pulse of high-gloss, 2024 bombast, I settled into my seat, half-expecting that singular jolt movies sometimes deliver—the kind that reminds you you’re watching a piece of pop detritus turned, against all odds, into folk art. There’s a peculiar ache that comes with these remakes: will the new kid on the block dare to dance like Swayze, or just step on my toes?

There is, let’s be honest, a certain adolescent joy in being bad for the sheer, unlaundered thrill of it—a kind of cackling, slippery impudence most modern horror movies outgrow in favor of handwringing, pious detours into “trauma,” and a double-locked justification for every sharp object. Watching Terrifier is like giving a chainsaw to the class clown and seeing how many teachers he can send packing: it doesn’t care about lessons, or roots, or the sob story behind the mask. It’s a daft, dangerous revel stripping horror down to the giggle you stifle when you know you shouldn’t laugh, but can’t help yourself.

Dev Patel, that gangly charmer who skip-traced his way into our hearts in “Slumdog Millionaire,” comes roaring through (or is it swinging through?) with his directorial debut, “Monkey Man,” and I have to admit, I went in with my soft spot for him already exposed. But what I found wasn’t just a talented actor flexing his new muscles—it was Patel unleashing a ferocious, turbo-charged vision, as if he’d been storing years of performance energy in his bones and it finally detonated behind the camera. What a high.

Civil War is less a movie than a diagnosis—the kind you receive in a stranger’s waiting room, where the tick of the clock and the hum of distant sirens seem to foretell something terminal, but you’re too mesmerized to get up and leave. Alex Garland looks at America as if it’s an elegantly set table that’s just been upended; the film drags you headlong through the debris, offering glimpses of the familiar and the ghastly, fused and inseparable, seen through the battered lenses of war correspondents.

“Ben-Hur,” that juggernaut rumbling out of 1959 and directed by William Wyler with an Old Testament sense of gravity, is the one Hollywood epic that manages, at least for a good three hours, to make its own size feel like destiny rather than bloat. Adapted from Lew Wallace’s biblically bulging novel...

Is there any modern screen fantasy more seductive than the con artist—our era’s answer to the movie gangster, only happier to work out of a hotel bar than a speakeasy, and more at home lifting watches or hearts than gunning anyone down? In Focus, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa try to fine-tune that old grift-and-romance two-step for the millennial crowd, trotting out Will Smith as a slick virtuoso of deception, whose real legerdemain ends up being the ability to keep Margot Robbie (who, here, has the sparkle and bounce of a new convertible) on her toes, and, at least for a while, the audience on theirs.

Of all the things I expected to find myself enjoying in a post-ironic movie landscape half-worshipful of VHS gutters and half-terrified of sincerity, a pint-sized Canadian freakspawn like Frankie Freako was nowhere near the top of my predictions. I’m someone whose tastes, I’ll admit, veer toward the clean lines and careful sounds of other genres entirely—so much so that I’d usually spot a grimy puppet and run screaming for Bergman. But here I am, confessing it outright: Steven Kostanski’s affectionate, anarchic ode to '80s sleazoid creature shams, Frankie Freako, had me grinning, as if I’d found a rubber monster in my lunchbox and decided what the hell, I’d eat it.

What a joyless, magnificent mess of unintended comedy this is, a late-period fever dream so overloaded with Significance and “cinematic history” that it’s hard to know if Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis comes to us as a time capsule from the future of movies, or as the smoldering effluence of Hollywood’s oldest, dearest delusions.

Some movies slip so quietly under the radar that stumbling into them feels like a lucky accident in an age of algorithmic “recommendations.” "The Gentlemen" was my unexpected prize at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box—a happy surprise that reminded me of why Guy Ritchie, at his best, can take the old song-and-dance of criminal enterprise and make it feel like a brisk new tune. Here is a movie that doesn’t seduce you with empty flash; it sits you down in the plush, dangerous lounge of the underworld and dares you to keep up as everyone circles the whisky decanter.