A Sexy Blog

“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.

If Alex Parkinson’s Last Breath reminds us of anything, it’s that even the most harrowing true stories can be neatly packaged, pressed into narrative conformity, and, somewhere along the way, lose their vital spark. Parkinson, remaking his own 2019 documentary, attempts to fuse the cold sweat realism of survival thrillers like 127 Hours with the hallucinatory dread of The Abyss, but winds up stranding us not in the abyssal dark, but somewhere in the anodyne blue light of a well-meaning, mildly gripping genre exercise.

Some movies thump and clatter, full of fury and elaborate posturing, but leave you empty—numb with noise. Not this one. “Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween – Decisive Battle” comes roaring off the screen like a freight train barreling through a hall of mirrors. It's the finale to a two-part gangland fable, but don’t make the mistake of expecting another muddled, tragic youth melodrama; this thing shimmies with energy and disreputable heart. If the first half was all mood-setting and foreshadowing—a bit of diary scribbling before the storm—this installment throws you chest-deep into the mud, where loyalty and violence tangle until you can’t tell if you’re wiping away blood or tears.

Middle chapters are supposed to draw blood—the best of them do, not just on the battered faces of its heroes but on the audience’s nerves, on their capacity to care as much as the characters do. “Tokyo Revengers 2 Part 1: Bloody Halloween – Destiny,” the latest cinematic digression in the undead manga juggernaut, takes a look at wounds—metaphorical and literal—that never quite clot, never quite heal. There’s soul, there’s spunk, but not always the pulse.

Has there ever been a fantasy quite as potent for the audience of action movies as the one where an ordinary schlub gets to uncork the bottled-up rage of his humdrum existence, smashing open ennui’s skull with a roll of nickels? “Nobody,” directed by Ilya Naishuller, starts as a sneaky parody of that everyman’s power fantasy but quickly escalates into its apotheosis — a well-lubricated, pyrotechnic hoot that leaves the faint whiff of gunpowder and absurdity drifting over the popcorn aisles.

Let’s not kid ourselves: if you buy a ticket for a Jason Statham vehicle directed by David Ayer—co-scripted, for heaven’s sake, by Sylvester Stallone—you know what ride you’re strapping in for. “A Working Man” is another raucous plunge into the shark-infested waters of the action-thriller genre, humming with the familiar bass of vengeance and sweat. The surprise, perhaps, is that there is almost no surprise at all.

The Hundred-Foot Journey isn’t so much a movie as it is a lavish buffet—one of those spreads where you get a little giddy piling your plate high, knowing full well it’s all been sweetened for mass tastes. Lasse Hallström, who has become a sort of cinematic caterer to the comfortable (he’s given us Chocolat and enough charming Swedes to fill a Volvo), brings his gentle hand to the story of culinary warfare in a twee French village—warfare here meaning a territorial pissing match with garam masala.

There’s a delicious, fizzy pleasure to an action comedy that knows it’s a cocktail—equal parts sweet, sour, and shamelessly silly. “Novocaine,” directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, arrives in our cinematic bloodstream like a jolt of—well, you know—something that deadens all but our delight. This is the rare studio product in which the soundtrack isn’t just wallpaper but a running vein, from the beautifully melancholic “Everybody Hurts” (R.E.M., that old-wound anthem for generation after generation of walking wounded) to the glitzy throb of “I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” It’s musical nostalgia used as time machine and emotional shortcut—and it works, sometimes earning more feeling than the plot does.

Sometimes a movie unspools with the comforting hum of déjà vu—a story you know by heart even as the unfamiliar faces of another country’s cinema strut and stumble before you. Monga, directed by Doze Niu, is that kind of film, a Taiwanese gangster saga that aches to be muscle and poetry both, splashing its neon lights across Taipei like it’s trying to reinvent the shadows themselves. As the camera drifts through the back alleys and discos of 1980s Wanhua, you recognize the ritual: we’re being asked to believe in brotherhood carved out of bruises and blood, loyalty and its slow rot. And I was ready—I wanted the sweet, sickly rush of a genre picture that tilts toward heartbreak.

Is there a deeper, more queasy thrill in American war movies than Oliver Stone’s Platoon? Here, the old Hollywood war drum—once a loopy rhythm of self-sacrifice and pyrotechnic heroics—gets drowned out by the thump of jungle rot, by the insectile chitter of paranoia, and above all, by a sense that Vietnam will never release those it swallows. Released in 1986—ten years after the helicopter rotors beat their retreat from Saigon—this is a film that refuses to let the audience clap themselves on the back; Stone, carrying the scars and the nightmares of his own tour, rewrites the Book of War as a catalogue of wounds, psychological and otherwise.