Romantic action comedies are supposed to be soufflés—light, airy, and just a little dangerous when the temperature rises. Jonathan Eusebio’s Love Hurts instead brings us the cinematic equivalent of a microwave burrito, piping hot in patches but mostly frozen where it matters. We’re promised a gleeful riot in the key of Jackie Chan, but what this film delivers is the sound of laughter caught in the wrong throat.
Every few years, a movie comes along so eager to don the tarnished crown of “epic fantasy”—to conquer, to astonish, to graft itself onto the sagging limbs of a post-Lord of the Rings landscape—that it forgets the very sinews that hold stories together. Into the Lost Lands, Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest incursion into genre upheaval, is not so much an adventure as it is a protracted reminder that the land of cinema has indeed been lost.
There’s nothing quite as dispiriting in cinema as a film that mistakes product placement for dramatic architecture, and with iHostage, director Bobby Boermans seems to treat the glass walls and minimalist spaces of Amsterdam’s Apple Store as if they lend themselves to the gravitas of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. But iHostage only proves that you can’t transcend your ingredients by virtue of logos and lighting alone. This movie—as colorless as the inside of an after-hours Apple showroom—manages to turn a genre built on suspense into an extended exercise in waiting for the Genius Bar to call your name.
Just when I thought Martin Campbell had hit rock bottom with Dirty Angels, he’s here holding a pickaxe and a Windex bottle—eager to show us there’s still a few nihilistic layers of schlock to be excavated. Cleaner, the glumly titled thriller that lands with a persuasive thud in the cinematic calendar of 2025, is—let’s be fair—marginally less apocalyptic than last year’s disaster. But that’s only because, after Dirty Angels, even an hour trapped in an actual landfill would feel “kind of a mess” but oddly refreshing.
You could say that WarGames: The Dead Code is an object lesson in Hollywood’s special gift: draining the life out of a semi-classic property, embalming it in digital gloss and algorithmic plotting, and then casting it back onto the market in hopes we’ll confuse the bluish afterglow for old-fashioned excitement. If the original WarGames was a deft adolescent fever dream about the nuclear terrors and computer-age naiveté of Reagan’s America, Gillard’s 2008 “sequel” is a reminder that nostalgia is sometimes best left in mothballs. Watching The Dead Code is like sitting through a pop quiz on modern surveillance anxiety written by copy editors who just discovered what phishing is.
Tyler Perry’s Duplicity—now streaming on Amazon Prime Video—wants to be urgent, topical, and bracing. It arrives with all the signals of “serious intent”: brooding about justice, the jagged aftermath of police violence, and a pair of ambitious Black women set against a system that doesn’t budge for grief or outrage. There is the shape here of a vital film, but what actually transpires is a parade of perfunctory gestures and canned dramatics; it’s as if Perry had borrowed the scaffolding of a social thriller and was content to let it creak.