A Sexy Blog

If the movies have always been a kind of fever-dream export, then “Brother” is Takeshi Kitano’s midnight shipment—an East-meets-West yakuza odyssey dipped in Los Angeles neon, redolent with the sweet jasmine of gunpowder. Here’s a gangster film that grinds its teeth on the concrete of two cultures, where ritual silence means as much as spilled blood, and loyalty is currency spent and spent again. It’s a picture that, for better and occasionally for worse, gleams with the eccentric fingerprints of Kitano—who, with a gaze as blank as a shut safe and an enigmatic half-smile, turns the genre inside out until the expected comes out looking like a magician’s trick you can’t quite catch.

Steve Buscemi’s Animal Factory wants very badly to be that scalding, claustrophobic plunge into America’s penal underbelly—shadows slithering across dank concrete, sorrow corroding the air, all the usual tropes rattling their chains. But what you actually get is a drab shuffle through the same old cellblock, a movie so enamored of its own grimy surfaces that it forgets to find something compelling lurking beneath. It postures as neo-noir, but it might be the most ordinary thing ever dragged through a barred window.

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.