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.
Within a span of a couple of months we’ve received remakes of early-1980s cult favorite swords-and-sorcery epics. First out of the gate was M.J. Bassett’s take on Red Sonja, and now we have Psycho Goreman mastermind Steven Kostanski’s version of Deathstalker. While the former knows it’s goofy, it plays things relatively straight. The latter, however, leans into the campiness with a winking, over-the-top glee.
Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious is the action movie of the year. It may be the action movie of a few years, because holy hell does it go hard. If having the legendary stunt coordinator and action director in the big chair didn’t already pique your interest, he also enlisted the great Kensuke Sonomura—director of Ghost Killer, Hydra, and Bad City, as well as all around stunt badass—as his action director. Add to this mix a cast fronted by Miao Xie (An Eye For an Eye) and Joe Taslim (The Night Comes For Us), and that heavily features Joey Iwanaga (Baby Assassins 2), Brian Le (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Yayan Ruhian (The Raid), and even an appearance by Jeeja Yanin (Chocolate), and this is action-movie-fan-Christmas.
So often when filmmakers attempt to remake a beloved niche genre film or a cult classic, you wind up with a product that may, on the surface, resemble the earlier version, but that misses the point completely. Or one that doesn’t seem to grasp what people love about the original. Writer/director Macon Blair’s (Green Room) new incarnation of Troma Entertainment favorite The Toxic Avenger is not one of those movies.
On the heels of last fall’s Aftermath, the better of the two armored-car-robbery-on-a-bridge movies that came out within a week of one another (the less said about Sylvester Stallone’s abysmal Armor, the better), Mason Gooding (Scream) and Dylan “Not Jughead” Sprouse are back for another team up. This time they team up for Under Fire, a throwback action comedy that is itself a follow up to director Steven C. Miller’s 2024 Werewolves, which if you haven’t seen, is a fine time.
There’s been talk of a new Red Sonja movie for what feels like forever. Multiple stars and high-profile filmmakers have been attached in one form or another, until it seemed like it was destined to languish just out of reach in development hell. But here we are, in the year of our lord 2025, and M.J. Bassett, the director behind Solomon Kane and Rogue, among others, has finally delivered the goods.
Wilderness survival tales, sagas of human endurance in the face of overwhelming, unrelenting odds, are common fodder for movies. But like other oft-visited genres, they can be the staging grounds for moving, powerful stories. (It feels like I’ve written a lot about this lately when it comes to post-apocalyptic films doing fresh, interesting things.) There’s plenty of room for thrills and edge of your seat tension, and they’re perfect showcases for human resilience, the triumph of man over nature, and that sort of thing. It also helps that they tend to have relatively small casts. And into this fray comes Hugo Keijzer’s directorial debut, The Occupant.
