A Sexy Blog

There’s a peculiar ache that settles in when a franchise that used to blitz your nerve endings with every punch decides—politely, apologetically—not to hit you at all. “The Roundup: Punishment” is that strange aftertaste: the fourth swing from a series that once left you reeling, but now feels like watching a once-great bar brawler retire into paperwork and Pilates.

I’ve always believed the best action movies don’t merely throw fists and bullets, but let you feel the grime under your fingernails—the sweat, the laughter, the moral rot, and the fleeting, idiotic joy of being alive. “The Roundup: No Way Out,” the third entry in an already breathless Korean franchise, barrels in with the gleaming, vulgar confidence of a fighter who knows exactly how many teeth he has left to lose and cherishes each one. It’s the sort of riotous, supercharged entertainment that doesn’t ask your approval; it simply pummels you into submission and makes you laugh out loud while it’s at it.

How many times can we bang the same drum and call it music? In Hollywood, they’ll belt out “sequel” like they’re conjuring magic, but more often the rabbit’s already dead in the hat. I sat down to The Roundup with my head full of anxious prophecies—Ma Dong-seok returning for more brutal slapstick, a director only two films deep in the game, and a promised journey from Seoul to a postcard Vietnam. If my knees didn’t quite knock, I still tucked in for another go at what has become a modern Korean ritual: the star vehicle in which the star could actually drive through a brick wall and ask for seconds.

Let me confess—when a director struts into crime cinema for the very first time and comes out swinging with the force of a heavyweight champ, you sit up and take notice. Kang Yoon-sung’s “The Outlaws,” the inaugural strike in what would become “The Roundup” series, barrels out of the gate less like a cautious debut than a slugger firing on all pistons and daring the old guard to keep pace. The wildest surprise? Kang was a rookie. But while veterans sometimes churn out crime genre sausages with the predictability of a midnight noir rerun, here’s a newcomer whose bravado is only matched by his dexterity.

If you go to the movies to be reassured, to be comforted by the amiable fiction that the “good guys” are only ever a few rough nights or wisecracks away from redemption, then steer clear of Olivier Marchal’s “Rogue City.” There’s nothing here but the squall and shriek of compromise, the nervous laugh of doomed men scraping out another day in purgatory. To call it a police procedural is a little like calling Goya’s Black Paintings “a bit gloomy.” Marchal spills bodies and broken loyalties across the screen as deftly as a street painter slinging mud. And damned if I wasn’t riveted.

There have always been two kinds of gangster movies: the ones that prance through mythology—snappy dialogue, tailored suits, violence delivered with cinematic éclat—and the ones where the filth clings to your coat, where the glamour sours, and the body count is just neighborhood news. Black Mass, Scott Cooper’s dark valentine to the Southie underworld, is very much of the latter breed: all winter breath, sickly dim light, and the chill that comes when you realize the American experiment has bred not just outlaws but monsters in suburban haircuts.

Let’s get this out of the way: “Hackers” is nonsense—the kind of sprightly, neon-smeared nonsense that only the ‘90s, flush with dot-com optimism and cyberpunk delusions, could have produced. But what nonsense! Iain Softley’s 1995 ode to digital counterculture is the movie equivalent of pounding a c...

Leave it to Justin Kurzel—a director who swoops into American blood and folklore with the sensibility of a poet scavenger—to dig up one of the country’s ugliest buried skeletons and rattle it until the audience feels the bones knocking inside their own skins. “The Order”—which bridges the gap between lawman melodrama and social horror show—doesn’t snuggle up to its true-crime credentials for a moment. It’s not the sort of drama that leaves you with your hand over your heart in admiration for the FBI, or cleaning your nails on the armrest, coolly detached. No, this is a movie that comes after you, hounding your conscience with every bark of a German shepherd and every flicker of fluorescent supermarket nightmare.

Let’s not beat around the casket: “Absolution,” Hans Petter Moland’s all-American exercise in adrift action-thriller posturing, is a movie that feels as if it started forgetting itself somewhere around the opening credits and never found its way home. If movies could check their pockets and realize they’d left the keys in the wrong genre, here’s a film that would be stuck on the curb, repeating “Where did I park?” to a passing parade of indifference.