A Sexy Blog

Gareth Evans, the kinetic firebrand behind The Raid, lets the bullets spray and bones crackle once again in Havoc, his latest Netflix spectacle. There is, at times, something almost musical to his violence—an arrhythmic percussion of bodies against concrete—that has been his signature since he left rural Wales for the Indonesian underworld. Havoc is, if nothing else, a thundering proof that Evans hasn’t lost his taste for bloody spectacle, even if his hand trembles when it comes time to string all the terrific chaos together.

In The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi peels back the gold plating of 1970s New York to reveal an America composed of equal parts ambition and predatory cunning—think Gatsby’s green light flickering in the distance, but this time the dream has a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and the ghostly tutelage of Roy Cohn smoking in the corner. This isn’t just a biopic about Donald Trump’s rise: it’s an X-ray of the American id, and Abbasi seems determined to make us squeamish about what we see.

“Cleaner,” Martin Campbell’s latest and most ill-advised experiment in action, is the sort of movie that emerges when Hollywood so aggressively scrubs its reputation that it winds up erasing every last trace of sense, wit, or consequence. I suppose we should all take a moment here to remember, with something approaching reverence, that this is the man who resuscitated Bond twice over. Campbell, the gallant technician behind “Casino Royale,” now gives us a film whose emotional and intellectual palette can be summed up as: drab, bleak, and sticky-fingered with banality.

After the garish, exhaust-spewing spectacle of most “political” thrillers, Steven Spielberg’s Munich arrives like a shock to the moral system—a slow-burning fever of a film, where triumph is measured not by body counts but by the corrosion of souls. Released in the long winter shadow of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Munich isn’t content with the easy uplift of righteous action. No, Spielberg has something far more unsettling in mind: he gives us the nightmare of retaliation—personal, national, and ultimately, existential—and then refuses to wake us up.

September 5 arrives on the screen as an urgent, bracing slab of historical drama—a kind of fevered docudrama pitched somewhere between the fretful hum of a 1970s control room and the icy dread pressing in from the world outside. Tim Fehlbaum’s direction plunges us into the back corridors of catastrophe: the Munich massacre at the '72 Olympics is no longer simply a horror recalled, but a media spectacle in real-time, filtered through the sweating brows and moral agonies of ABC Sports. Not since Lumet thrust us behind the cameras in Network have we felt the pulse of crisis with such claustrophobic vitality—and with almost as much queasy self-examination.

You could say that WarGames: The Dead Code is an object lesson in Hollywood’s special gift: draining the life out of a semi-classic property, embalming it in digital gloss and algorithmic plotting, and then casting it back onto the market in hopes we’ll confuse the bluish afterglow for old-fashioned excitement. If the original WarGames was a deft adolescent fever dream about the nuclear terrors and computer-age naiveté of Reagan’s America, Gillard’s 2008 “sequel” is a reminder that nostalgia is sometimes best left in mothballs. Watching The Dead Code is like sitting through a pop quiz on modern surveillance anxiety written by copy editors who just discovered what phishing is.

Tyler Perry’s Duplicity—now streaming on Amazon Prime Video—wants to be urgent, topical, and bracing. It arrives with all the signals of “serious intent”: brooding about justice, the jagged aftermath of police violence, and a pair of ambitious Black women set against a system that doesn’t budge for grief or outrage. There is the shape here of a vital film, but what actually transpires is a parade of perfunctory gestures and canned dramatics; it’s as if Perry had borrowed the scaffolding of a social thriller and was content to let it creak.

Some films fail, but do so innocuously. Others fail with more urgency—they mishandle material so important, so inflammable, that their mediocrity becomes a kind of insult. The Vigilante is that sort of film: a chintzy, slapdash action-thriller whose wobbly attempts at blockbuster ferocity trivialize the monstrous reality of child trafficking. There’s no deeper disappointment at the movies than when righteous indignation is reduced to bad lighting, tepid performances, and the hollow rattle of fake gunfire.

WarGames belongs to that rare class of Hollywood entertainments that seem, almost accidentally, to have tapped straight into the anxieties—and hopes—of an entire era. John Badham’s 1983 techno-thriller opens in a haze of early computer geekery: modems squeal, dot-matrix printers grind, and a Seattle teenager named David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) sits hunched over his blue-glowing screen. Within minutes, what begins as an innocent search for a few pirated video games erupts into a pulse-cranking race against nuclear oblivion—a transformation so swift and seamless it’s as if the movie itself is racing the clock.

“Donnie Brasco” is one of those rare crime movies that operates less as a cautionary tale than as an anatomy of yearning—of what we’re willing to counterfeit, and what must finally be, heartbreakingly, real. Directed by Mike Newell (whose touch is lighter than the usual genre brutes), the film plunges us into the rank back rooms and vinyl-upholstered dusk of Mafia New York. Yet what haunts you afterward isn’t the ratcheting tension or the whiff of violence—it’s the look in Al Pacino’s eyes as he walks toward obliteration, and the ache of Johnny Depp’s split, nearly-shattered soul.