The Killer’s Game is a dumb-fun pinball machine, a high-calorie action caper that’s all elbows and B-movie brio, careening between pulp gags and neon guts, knocking you around for 90 minutes, and then blowing you a kiss on the way out the door.
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.
Certain movies don’t entertain; they happen to you—a mugging in the parking lot of your own expectations. “Aftermath” is that kind of disaster: a movie so resolutely, invincibly witless that it may single-handedly set the action thriller back to before the invention of the bridge. Patrick Lussier’s slab of hostage nonsense is something you don’t so much watch as endure, like a flood in your basement when all you wanted was a cold shower.
If ever there was a “fever dream” of the American biopic, Derek Estlin Purvis’ The Ballad of Davy Crockett is it. But don’t expect psychotropic colors or a narrative that flares and fizzes. No, this is the sort of celluloid nightmare where you wander through soggy wilderness for ninety minutes without a compass—except, perhaps, for the one lost somewhere on the cutting-room floor.
Sony’s “Kraven the Hunter” doesn’t so much pounce as lurch onto the scene—a feral miscalculation, claws unsheathed but utterly declawed by its own stupidity. If cinema is indeed a jungle, this is the lost, mange-ridden coyote wandering the outskirts, yapping for attention and finding only echoes. What’s left of the Marvel-machine’s dignity is here chewed up and spat out with a wet, unceremonious plop.
Let’s cut through the mariachi fireworks and that oily blast of DayGlo costumes: Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez is the sort of cinematic incident that makes you want to retroactively warn yourself away—like a bad tattoo or tequila made in a plastic barrel. “Where did the movies go wrong?” isn’t a question you ask as the credits roll, it’s a question you’re muttering thirty minutes into this so-called musical, when cultural resonance has been replaced by the clop-clop choreography of farce.