A Sexy Blog

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...

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.

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.

If revenge movies are the honey of action cinema, “The Beekeeper” is a fiercely sweet jar delivered with a sledgehammer. Jason Statham, an actor who flashes more punch than pathos, takes his turn as Adam Clay—a retired covert hive-minder (forgive me, the bee metaphors come with the territory) turned literal beekeeper. He’s minding his own buzz until his landlady, a kindly Eloise Parker, swallows a phishing scam and then heartbreakingly, herself. There’s your setup: one jar of honey, spectacularly smashed.

If ever a film strutted in wearing Vegas fringe and a confession booth hangover, it’s “Bad Times at the El Royale.” Drew Goddard’s caper comes at you as if to say, “Sure, you’ve seen the corpse of American optimism before, sprawled out in a cheap motel—let’s see if it can still dance.” And for a while, under the hot glare of Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography, it does. The place looks like it was pried loose from a Sinatra fever dream: shag carpeting, artifice, sex lurking in the drapes. Retro isn’t decor here—it’s a cancer that’s metastasized into the bones.

For a decade and a half, Scott Adkins action movies have felt like the amuse-bouches of the genre: you don’t go for the movie itself, you go for that single, exquisite fight—brutal, fast, clean, then back to whatever sorry goulash the plot is serving up. But with Avengement, someone, glory of glories, has seen sense and decided to cook the entire meal out of pure, red-blooded Adkins. It’s as if The Raid was adopted by Guy Ritchie’s least photogenic cousins and stranded in the back room of a decrepit British pub. The miracle? It works, start to finish—genuine, knuckle-bruising working-class catharsis.

Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is a brash, full-throttle collision—Gangs of New York after a few rounds with Kung Fu Hustle. What a galvanizing jolt to the system: to step into a movie that practically dares you to remember your youth, back when Hong Kong cinema was deliriously off the leash, and the formula for a good time was a heroic bloodbath, some dirt under the nails, and a soundtrack of testosterone and betrayal. Here, Cheang invites us to mainline nostalgia—this is genre-movie pleasure as pure, as heady, as chow fun in a back alley at 2 a.m.

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.

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.