Trashtacular

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.

“Cleaner,” Martin Campbell’s latest and most ill-advised experiment in action, is the sort of movie that emerges when Hollywood so aggressively scrubs its reputation that it winds up erasing every last trace of sense, wit, or consequence. I suppose we should all take a moment here to remember, with something approaching reverence, that this is the man who resuscitated Bond twice over. Campbell, the gallant technician behind “Casino Royale,” now gives us a film whose emotional and intellectual palette can be summed up as: drab, bleak, and sticky-fingered with banality.

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.

Carjackers is a haphazard amalgam that could generously be described as cinematic confusion. Streaming on platforms that likely won’t dare claim it as an exclusive, the film tells the story of Nora and her motley crew of valets and bartenders who moonlight as thieves, hitting up unsuspecting wealthy patrons. As if this dual life wasn’t complicated enough, they decide to pull off their biggest heist yet, all while being hunted down by a hitman hired by their own hotel’s director. The premise is tantalizing enough to spark interest, but strap in because this ride is heading straight into the pit of mediocrity.

Popeye's Revenge, the cinematic event of 2025 that nobody asked for but apparently someone thought we needed. This British slasher horror debut, directed by William Stead and written by Harry Boxley—who, let’s be honest, seemed to have one foot in the cereal aisle while brainstorming—takes the beloved spinach-loving sailor and drags him into a realm far more grotesque than the one fans of E.C. Segar could ever imagine. What promises to be a dark transformation of the iconic character ends up traversing dangerous waters, rarely surfacing from the murky depths of absurdity.