HAVOC is the long-anticipated, straight-to-Netflix fifth film of Gareth Evans, director of the 21st century classic THE RAID. It contains plenty of the brutal, incredible action you’d hope for from such an artist, but it’s a different type of movie, an atmospheric and stylized (but also ridiculously violent) noir about a deadbeat homicide detective whose claim to heroism is that he’s the one guy in a circle of corrupt cops who felty guilty after they executed an undercover cop during a robbery. Now he has no friends or family and he does dirty deeds for a powerful real estate mogul but if he performs this one difficult task he can be out from under his thumb forever. And in the process he might sort of do the right thing for once.
His name is Patrick Walker (Tom Hardy, THE DROP), and he’s introduced buying his daughter (Astrid Fox-Sahan, Young Wallander) last minute Christmas gifts at a mini-mart, then being annoyed that the clerk won’t wrap them for him. So we get it when his wife (Narges Rashidi, UNDER THE SHADOW) won’t let him come over. (I’m unclear if this starts on Christmas Eve, actual Christmas, or what.) (read the rest of this shit…)
In THE ACCOUNTANT2 – yes, that’s the onscreen title – Ben Affleck (
SINNERS is the first original story from writer/director Ryan Coogler. Not that it matters. After the true story of FRUITVALE STATION he added to fictional worlds and characters created by other people – 
O’DESSA is a pretty cool dystopian musical that Searchlight Pictures released straight to Hulu last month. The story involves love and music in the face of fascism – probly not anything anybody would be interested in these days. It’s pretty slick mainstream entertainment, but kind of a cousin to 
Recently I rewatched 
URBAN VENGEANCE, not be confused with Seagal’s 
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE (2022) is about a group of young people who have determined, quite reasonably, that the only voice they really have in stopping an oil company from poisoning their communities and exacerbating climate change is if they figure out how to sabotage their infrastructure enough to disrupt their business and make it less profitable. So that’s what they’re ready to do. They all rendezvous at a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, West Texas, some meeting for the first time, but they all know the plan, and they get to it.
G20 is not a DIE-HARD-on-a-______ movie – it’s an 
MEMOIR OF A SNAIL is a stop motion movie, not trying to be edgy but not appropriate for (most) kids, kind of like a pretty dark indie comedy, except done with clay figures. I haven’t seen MARY AND MAX, the previous feature from writer/director Adam Elliot, so I don’t know how similar or dissimilar they are, but from my experience this is a very unique use of the medium, constantly narrated, and full of quirky novelistic detail and digressions.
Y2K is a 2024 horror comedy that’s the directorial debut of Kyle Mooney. You may or may not know Mooney as a Saturday Night Live cast member from 2013 to 2022, but he also co-wrote and starred in a weird movie called BRIGSBY BEAR (2017) and I would highly recommend Saturday Morning All Star Hits! (S.M.A.S.H.!), an eight episode parody of ‘90s children’s programming he co-created in 2021. This shares with those a surface appearance of millennial nostalgia but with such specific pop cultural observations and such weird comedy ideas that it never feels like “Hey, remember that!?” in a bad way. The joke isn’t ha, we used to have VHS, it’s that an evil VCR kills somebody by ejecting a dubbed and hand-labelled VARSITY BLUES at their head.
