A Sexy Blog

Argo isn’t merely a tense, glossy recounting of a CIA caper, it’s Hollywood’s sneakiest sleight-of-hand on itself, a canny distillation of the movies' perpetual promise and perennial absurdity. I went into Affleck’s film without foreknowledge, as untutored as the embassy staffers in their makeshift hideout, and the result was a giddy, queasy experience, poised on a knife-edge between farce and terror. “Based on a true story,” it insists, an audacious phrase in this context, considering what follows.

Beyond Outrage—Takeshi Kitano’s sledgehammer sequel, a movie that swings with both the assured brutality of a mob execution and the abstract rigor of a calligraphic brushstroke. Here, Kitano isn’t merely following up his 2010 "Outrage," he’s detonating its aftermath, spraying the screen with ricocheting betrayals, power grabs, and—like some kabuki bloodletting—splashes of crimson artistry. If "Outrage" gave us an acid bath in internecine yakuza plotting, "Beyond Outrage" is the industrial-strength sequel, boiling the genre down to its ruthless chemical core.

If you’ve ever felt the jolt of electricity that comes with the first few minutes of a genuinely promising crime film—where the air thickens with possibility and dread—you’ll know something of the elation I felt plunging into Yoon Jong-bin’s Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time. Here is a movie steeped in all the genre trappings: the smoky taverns and smoke-filled back rooms of Busan in the ‘80s and ‘90s, corruption so foul you can almost taste it, men in sharp suits who wield their loyalty like a battering ram—except this time, refreshingly, nothing comes at you in the simple, blunt-force trauma of a cheap triad flick.