A Sexy Blog

There’s a time-honored tradition in cinema, the men-versus-beast saga, that old primal dance where human muscle and nerves are pitted against Nature’s monstrous embodiment. You take a handful of plucky survivors, toss them into a cauldron with a theatrical bloodthirsty menace, and watch them squirm, sweat, and, with luck, reveal the tender, squishy stuff they’re made of. When done well, the air crackles: you’ve got tanned, panicked flesh, gnashing teeth (shark or man, take your pick), and that perfect frisson of horror and black comedy. When done poorly, as in the lamentably misnamed Beast of War, you can practically hear the rubbery props squeak and the actors yawn. The only beast here is monotony, snapping at your ankles.

There’s something peculiarly demoralizing about watching a movie desperate to be clever—a kind of Netflix-age puzzle box that delivers nothing but more boxes, and each lid is glued on with the icy sweat of someone who thinks the riddle is its own reward. Philip Koch’s “Brick” (and has a contemporary German film ever worn a lamer Anglo title with such self-importance?) throws its benighted cast through every doomsday apartment-escape cliché you can think of, as if J.G. Ballard and J.J. Abrams had teamed up for a group project and then swapped out their last pages for a tech manual, all in the forgotten hope of stealing a march on “Black Mirror.” If there’s a greater argument for the superiority of television’s brisk forty minutes over the joyless slog of a two-hour feature, I haven’t seen it.

If you're looking to compare "Ballerina" to its contemporaries, the 2023 South Korean action thriller helmed by Lee Chung-hyun strikes far more resonant chords than the 2025 John Wick spinoff of the same name ever manages. Here’s a film that reminds us, with brutal grace, that in cinema’s often monochrome playground of revenge tales, it’s less about originality of idea and more about the fierce, focused execution—how the story lives or dies under the director's hand.

There’s a particular genre of moviegoing now, call it Franchise Bereavement, where, sitting eyes glazed before the flickering remnants of a once-vital series, you feel less the thrill of pulp than the mournful exhumation of directorial intention, a séance with the ghost of what you thought the movies could be. Ballerina, advertised as “From the World of John Wick,” is less a spin-off than a séance, summoning the spirit of Keanu’s elegiac carnage into a low-lit mausoleum of hurried excess and retrofitted backstory. If its audience’s expectations are sufficiently modest, second-tier shootouts for the matinee crowd, wickless but still faintly smoldering, perhaps it delivers. But in the clear light, you see the grout, and the cracks: this is franchise hand-me-down, draped hastily around Ana de Armas like a borrowed cloak she’s expected to dignify.

If you’d told me, in the braying wake of too many rote horror films recycled through streaming services, that a movie called Barbarian would come bearing wit, ambiguity, and a genuine chill, well, the laugh would have been yours. That laugh, sharp, startled, delighted, is precisely what Zach Cregger’s Barbarian delivers, teasing the nerves and tickling them, too, as if the genre itself were a basement door just waiting to be wrenched open.

It’s not often that a movie about numbers—balance sheets, bonds, the recondite alphabet soup of the financial world—feels like it could blow the roof off a theater. But with The Big Short, director Adam McKay, nimbly adapting Michael Lewis, tries to do precisely that. The film announces its bravura intentions from the opening moments: this isn’t just a disaster movie about the 2008 financial collapse, it’s a corrosive, postmodern vaudeville—with the housing market falling apart, and the fourth wall shattering right alongside it.

In the glittering labyrinth of modern espionage thrillers, Black Bag stands poised with all the accoutrements—name-brand talent, glossy international backdrops, a moral quandary or two shimmering on the surface—yet somewhere between the Bondian promise and Soderbergh’s cooler-than-cool execution, the pulse goes slack. This should have been a decadent spread, lush with betrayal and sleight-of-hand. Instead, we’re handed a chilly amuse-bouche, the cinematic equivalent of chewing an ice cube and wishing for cognac.

Let us not mince words: Battle Over Britain is one of those rare cinematic crash-landings where you don’t merely see the fuselage flaming—you feel the passenger nausea, too. I adore a great war film—I’ve thrilled to every thunderous strafing run ever conjured by Hollywood’s golden generation. But what we have here is not so much a movie as an act of cinematic self-immolation, meticulously recorded and distributed (thank you, Prime) for the unwitting streaming masses.

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.

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.