A Sexy Blog

Boxer (2024) doesn’t just string together a dozen rounds of punishment—it dares you to stay in your seat, wipes the sweat off your brow, and leaves you weirdly elated that you just watched a sports movie built the old-fashioned way: bruise by bruise, heart by heart, with no shortcuts and not a whiff of prefab inspiration in sight.

Criminal is the kind of mongrel thriller that seems almost tailor-made to attract critical enmity: jigsaw plotting, characters that come apart if you prod them, and a magpie casting philosophy that shuffles through A-listers as if Hollywood were a novelty gumball machine. The reviews online drip with the sourness of dashed hopes—critics, wringing their hands about “wasted potential,” all but begging the film to be thrown back into the genre stockpot for more seasoning. And yet, perversely, that’s the exact pitch that drew me in. Give me talent forced to dance on rickety scaffolding over mediocrity any day; how else would we ever be surprised?

If you squint at “Canary Black” from the comfort of your own living room—martini glass in hand, perhaps just a little self-consciously nostalgic for the days when spies sparkled and plots had pulse—it might almost pass for a movie. But move in closer, and it’s not so much a cinematic vessel as a soggy, deflating float at the tail end of a parade nobody bothered to attend. What drifts our way, bobbing with all the vigor of a limp flag at half-mast, is the kind of leftover, just-add-water espionage pulp that’s been through every possible recycling bin in Hollywood’s backlot. How many screenwriters were left, we wonder, dangling in the subzero editing bay, before someone finally called it “done”? Deep beneath the chilled surface, “Canary Black” is home to a whole hothouse of misjudged directorial flora: plotting with the finesse of errant GPS, fight scenes borrowed (badly) from late-night aerobics reruns, and a costume budget that feels stitched together entirely from off-season Halloween aisle clearance. Yet here stands Kate Beckinsale, the plucky center of the swirling mediocrity, determined to wear her “notice me, I’m lethal” energy like a badge and a bludgeon.

There are movies that tug you under, not with suspense or terror, but with the blithe, inexorable weight of their own conventions. "You're Killing Me," directed by Beth Hanna and Jerren Lauder, tries to strut through the haunted funhouse of privilege and amorality, but somewhere along the way, it gets lost in its own fog machine. I wanted shock, I wanted stakes—hell, I wanted something that didn’t leave me counting ceiling tiles during the third act.

Take Cover — the title suggests a mad dash and a hearty thud behind the nearest flaming oil drum, but what you get, with Scott Adkins at the prow, is something slyer and more self-aware. This is action cinema with a sly wink—half tactical ballet, half armchair philosophy, and more than a few swigs of that fizzy stuff called character charm.

Let’s be honest: no one needed another “Ben-Hur,” certainly not in 2016, and yet here comes Timur Bekmambetov storming the gates, CGI in one hand and the weight of a dozen cinematic ghosts in the other, determined to prove that this saga still matters. Does it? Well, not always in the way the greats hoped, but it moves like mad, flashes prettily, and—God help us—actually tries for some feeling amid the dust and digital splatter.

If we’ve learned anything from the last decade of action movies, it’s that the genre survives on reinventions of silence—moody loners, voiceless avengers, and, now, a deaf cop lumbering through another hour of plot-optional philosophy about justice in America. Brad Anderson’s “The Silent Hour” arrives with a grandiose hush, promising that, if we just listen hard enough, we’ll hear something new. But what we get is less revelation and more the faint clatter of old clichés, recycled under the guise of representation.

There’s something almost indecent about the joy with which Kevin Reynolds’s 2002 The Count of Monte Cristo throws open the trapdoor on Dumas’s enduring chest of treasure. It’s not just an adaptation—it’s a swashbuckler, a cocktail of innocence and cold revenge shaken so hard that pearls of melodrama practically fly into the audience’s lap. Where so many literary adaptations settle for stagy reverence, Reynolds, with a wink and a hot air balloon, sweeps you into a storybook France that can’t quite remember if it’s in 1840 or a theme park in Orlando. And for two hours, you’re grateful for the confusion.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2024) doesn’t just dust off Alexandre Dumas’s tale for a new generation—it dips the whole battered novel in a vat of cinematic dye, wrings from it every drop of opulent color and feverish pain, and gives us a revenge saga with enough pulse to rattle modern audiences out of their collective torpor. You sit down expecting Masterpiece Theatre—the kind of earnest, upholstered adaptation that suffocates on its own handsomeness—and instead the film throws you headlong into the glare and grime of 19th-century France, daring you to blink.

Is Guy Ritchie the last true showman of our smirking age, or is he just the only one shameless enough to relight the fuse on the old war-comic dynamite? With The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, he hauls his bag of cheeky tricks to World War II—history, for Ritchie, is less a backdrop than a soundstage for swagger, shootouts, and blokes with accents sharp enough to slice through Nazi brass.