Back in 2020, who would have thought Becky, an indie action lark about a precocious tween violently murdering Nazis, would birth a franchise? But here we are, and thank god, because The Last Temptation of Becky, the third and latest installment, understands one key thing above all else: Killing Nazis is awesome. Now in the hands of director Jenn Wexler (The Ranger), this chapter leans hard into the inherent absurdity of its concept, knowing exactly what it’s doing, and never skimping on the gore.
There are two frequent approaches to horror I do not typically care for. First is found footage. I get what people love about these movies, but with a few exceptions, they do not do much for me. Second we have the anthology approach. Shorts are typically a hard sell for me, and stitching them together doesn’t help matters. No matter how hard I try, no matter how many I watch, these are generally not my favorites.
When five minutes into a movie a man is stabbed, flayed, and eviscerated, then his entrails displayed on a ceiling fan like a macabre art installation, you know you’re in for a wild time. And Ghost in the Cell, the latest from Joko Anwar (Satan’s Slaves, Impetigore), does not let you down on that front. This is a blackly comic prison horror and an acerbic critique of government and corporate corruption, all coated in a thick layer of glistening viscera. Seriously, at one point a man is torn asunder and turned into a shower. (You really have to see it for it to make sense.)
Warnings about new and emerging technology run amok has been a common theme in movies since damn near day one. From Frankenstein to Wells to the Terminator franchise, we’ve been counseled against the hazards of unchecked science we don’t fully grasp yet. With his debut feature, Appofeniacs, prolific music video director Chris Marrs Piliero uses a post-Pulp Fiction maze of rapid banter and intersecting narratives to raise a cautious eyebrow at the use of AI and deepfakes. What lands, lands solid, especially the frequent and ample violence, but what misses whiffs, and the mixed bag of a film winds up mostly a cautionary tale about aggrieved edgelords with no real problems and too much time on their hands.
Fellow tactical action enthusiasts, today is a day worth celebrating, for we can now watch the third installment of the James Nunn/Scott Adkins single-take franchise, One Shot. They follow up the 2021 original and 2024 sequel, One More Shot, with One Last Shot. Presumably the final chapter, at least from the title, I, for one, hope they never stop making these and am way in the bag for One More Last Shot, One More Last Shot Again, and however many they want to churn out.
Desperation pushes people to great extremes, like slogging across the dense wilderness shouldering packs weighed down with purloined bars of gold. When Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke), the protagonist of director Padraic McKinley’s The Weight, finds himself in a brutal work camp in 1930s Oregon, this is the precise deal he accepts, freedom in exchange for a perilous trek.
As much as I love zombie movies, there are so many of them, and many of those are formulaic and forgettable as all hell. Yet, on a regular basis we get offerings that remind us there is still life in the undead. 2016’s Train to Busan was one of these. Director Yeon Sang-ho followed that up with 2020’s Peninsula, set in the same world as Train. Now he’s back in zombie-adjacent territory with Colony. While this doesn’t necessarily do anything entirely new, it’s a reminder why filmmakers return to this subgenre, what makes it an effective storytelling vehicle, and adds enough unique tics to keep things fresh enough to entertain.
