A Sexy Blog

When the news broke that Spike Lee and Denzel Washington were reuniting, I imagine half of New York felt that pulse of anticipation: the sort of glee you reserve for a holiday, or spotting Brando’s name in a cast list again. What could go wrong with this pairing? Everything, it turns out—at least, in that most poignant way of contemporary American filmmaking, where the result is less artistic combustion and more accidental kitchen sink fire.

“Hostage” is the kind of British miniseries that seems designed by committee to fool you into mistaking formula for craft. Its premise drips with promise: a Prime Minister (Suranne Jones) and a French President (Julie Delpy) caught in the same noose of blackmail and international intrigue, their personal and political fates entwined as the world watches. What we get, instead, is a muddled soufflé of clichés, the kind that deflates before it’s even made it to the table.

If the original Happy Gilmore was the cinematic equivalent of being blindsided by a pie in the face. A pie filled with golf balls, beer, and genuine pathos, then Happy Gilmore 2 is what happens when someone throws three pies at you at once, turns the sprinklers on mid-swing, and then asks if you remember the taste of the original filling. It’s a legacy sequel that, for all its Frankensteinian splicing of silly and serious, still manages to resurrect Sandler’s battered but buoyant Happy with enough vigor to remind us why we ever rooted for this idiot savant and his primal swing.

Gareth Evans, the kinetic firebrand behind The Raid, lets the bullets spray and bones crackle once again in Havoc, his latest Netflix spectacle. There is, at times, something almost musical to his violence—an arrhythmic percussion of bodies against concrete—that has been his signature since he left rural Wales for the Indonesian underworld. Havoc is, if nothing else, a thundering proof that Evans hasn’t lost his taste for bloody spectacle, even if his hand trembles when it comes time to string all the terrific chaos together.

Every so often a movie arrives that makes you reevaluate every unkind thing you’ve ever said about a “bad” film. If The Hard Hit is an example of “five-star” cinema, then we’re truly living in the era of Yelp-ified delusion, where directors and their unpaid interns feverishly stuff the ballot box, hoping the audience won’t notice the cellophane-and-string held together beneath their fraudulent bravado. I suppose if you squint hard enough through the muddy lens of this movie, you can see why someone might mistake it for a real film—though you’d have to be cross-eyed and twelve whiskey sours deep.

Hellhound is the kind of movie that slips in through the back door of midnight cable and hopes you’re too groggy or forgiving to notice. I wish I could tell you it’s camp, or subversively bad, or even one of those so-bad-you-have-to-write-home-about-it curios, but its ambitions don’t even aim that high. No, this is a film that scrounges at the bottom of the hitman-movie barrel and comes up clutching the genre’s most threadbare clichés like a child rooting through a box of moth-eaten sweaters. It’s a weird little time capsule of every tired assassin-for-one-last-job scenario you thought moviemaking had outgrown, and somehow, it’s still marginally less humiliating than Nicolas Cage’s Bangkok Dangerous—though only just.

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...

“Harry Brown” promises us a plunge into the urban underworld—a movie fit for the midnight oil, bruised and bruising, starring Michael Caine as a one-man answer to the cancer of youth violence. It’s a promise, I’m sorry to say, about as reliable as a travel brochure for Chernobyl.

Is there anything more perverse—and perversely funny—than watching Hugh Grant, that perennial celluloid charmer, take a swan dive into villainy? In “Heretic,” he does not merely play against type; he dances into the abyss with silk gloves on, turning neighborly warmth into menace so delicious it’s almost camp, except nothing about his performance feels accidental. You watch Grant, and it’s like seeing Cary Grant slip a knife between the ribs—a delight so vertiginous you can’t help but smile before the shiver hits.

How often does a film promise fun, suspense, and genuine romance, and—miracle of miracles—actually deliver all three? “Hit Man” is the kind of briskly entertaining, tonally slippery, deeply pleasurable movie experience that leaves you with a big, silly grin in the dark, and a faint suspicion you might’ve just been lovingly cheated. And isn’t that the magic of movies? Richard Linklater, whose work is so often preoccupied with talky, meandering souls lost somewhere between philosophy and the parking lot, here lays down a genre bender that barrels through romantic comedy, crime caper, and existential disguise, and—against all odds—makes it look almost too easy.