Trashtacular

There’s something almost touching, almost, about a movie so desperate to wrap itself in the gravitas of “true crime” mythology that it ends up draped in wet, mildewed football scarves. “Rise of the Footsoldier” is less a film than a brute-force memory dump, a feverish scrapbook of loutish glory so in love with its subject that it never pauses to consider whether anyone else could possibly care. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you force-fed a biopic to a slot machine, pulling the lever every time someone gets bottled or called a four-letter word, look no further.

Is there a particular word in the English language for when you watch a movie with the quiet hope that this time, the star you once admired will drag herself out of direct-to-video purgatory and surprise you? If there is, “Stolen Girl” killed it dead. It’s the sort of film that leaves you looking at the title and wishing it applied to your ticket money.

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.

Let us not mince words: Battle Over Britain is one of those rare cinematic crash-landings where you don’t merely see the fuselage flaming—you feel the passenger nausea, too. I adore a great war film—I’ve thrilled to every thunderous strafing run ever conjured by Hollywood’s golden generation. But what we have here is not so much a movie as an act of cinematic self-immolation, meticulously recorded and distributed (thank you, Prime) for the unwitting streaming masses.

How do you make a biopic about Vladimir Putin, the ogre of our current news cycle? If you’re Patryk Vega, you hammer it together with such reckless abandon that you’d think you’d stumbled into a Cold War-themed escape room designed by circus clowns. Nobody expects nuance, perhaps, but nobody expects this—a cinematic vodka shot that leaves you not so much woozy as existentially seasick. This is not the movie Putin deserves; it’s the movie assigned to late-night cable purgatory, a cautionary tale for future film students and insomniacs alike.

“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.