A Sexy Blog

If there is one thing the Netflix machine does better than most of the Hollywood conglomerates that blunder through genre as if they’re bobbing for apples in a vat of clichés, it’s churning out the kind of shredded comfort food that coaxes out your half-remembered adolescent idiot grin. Night Teeth is exactly the sort of movie you suspect you’ll find yourself loathing on principle—supermodel vampires, neon-L.A. nightlife, and a plot straining to be both “gritty urban” and “Instagram ready”—but, half an hour in, you’ve stopped counting the script’s shortcuts and started absent-mindedly tapping your foot to a bass-bloated, mortifying soundtrack. So: maybe you feel a little ashamed to admit how much you’re enjoying it. I wouldn’t blame you.

If “Inside Man: Most Wanted” were a painting, you’d see the fingerprints of more talented artists beneath a slapdash coat of knockoff red—Money Heist jumpsuits, borrowed swagger, and all the desperation of a studio aching to wring one more drop from a well gone dry. What’s most astonishing is how a sequel about robbing the Federal Reserve manages to steal absolutely nothing from the intelligence, suspense, or style of Spike Lee’s superb original.

As directors go, David Mackenzie always struck me as someone who refused to drift through genre on autopilot. Hell or High Water was a jolt to the “modern Western” in the way an electric current perks up a tired body—full of sunbaked grit and genuine desperation. So it’s almost a perverse accomplishment that Relay, despite carrying all the trappings of a high-concept, glossy paranoia thriller, manages to take the zeitgeist by the throat and promptly doze off. You can practically hear the film’s pulse rate dropping as the credits roll.

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.

It’s almost a shame, watching Untamed, to see how little faith the show has in the very wilderness it fetishizes. From its opening moments—where a body falls off El Capitan, landing with the grace of a screenwriter’s design rather than the force of gravity—we are meant to believe we’re entering that coveted realm: the prestige procedural, taut with secrets and wound as tightly as a coil of survival rope. And yet, by episode two—somewhere between the first heavy downpour (that leaves nary a footprint erased) and the second miraculous rescue in a park the size of Luxembourg—the spell begins to lift and what’s left is a potboiler searching for a kettle.

Let Me Make You a Martyr is one of those films that arrives with so much sulfurous promise it almost dares you not to be excited. An indie southern-gothic revenge tale with Marilyn Manson putatively playing an assassination angel named Pope? That’s the kind of casting stroke that wakes up even the most jaded cinephile. On paper, it's a ready-made baroque: broken family loyalties, incestuous chemistry, violence steeped in religious delirium, Sons of Anarchy but with the lights turned down and the metaphysics dialed up.

When the curtain rises (or, more accurately, the CGI Alps blink awake) on Nick Hamm’s William Tell, we brace for that hot prickle of cultural muscle, the promise of rebellion, the ice-pure Swiss myth being cracked open and gutted on the grand stage of the epic. Instead, we find ourselves wading ankle-deep through a fog of déjà vu, draped in armor already rusted and patched, the cinematic equivalent of a Renaissance fair where nobody can remember why they’re there.

The date on which Exterritorial rolled out on Netflix is not likely to be emblazoned on the calendars of film lovers, unless, perhaps, as a cautionary tale for aspiring directors on how a minor thrill premise can be spun into an inextricable web of misdirection, empty conspiracy, and conspicuous plot-fumbling. If Christian Zübert set out to make a woman-on-the-brink action yarn about the delirium of maternal loss and the cruel machinery of power, what we get instead is a would-be mystery that squanders its own slender promise, often wandering the consulate’s echoing corridors with as little purpose (and with as much head-scratching immunity to security) as its protagonist.

Has any horror film ever been sabotaged quite so thoroughly by its own intelligence (or rather, the conspicuous lack thereof) as 28 Weeks Later? The film begins with such ruthless, pulse-jacking precision, Danny Boyle’s kinetic ghost lingering over the savage, merciless prologue, that for a few brief, breathless minutes one feels the rare thrill of a sequel that might justify its own existence. That opening, with its madcap flight through a cottage-turned-meat-grinder and the image of Don (Robert Carlyle, desperately scraping together a character out of animal panic) abandoning his wife to the horde, one of the finest acts of cinematic cowardice, played for eyeball-widening horror and not, as is depressingly common, for laughs. As Don paddles away across the nightmare water, you even ask yourself: would I do the same? The movie dares you to admit it.

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.