Gerard Butler returns—looking like crumpled asphalt and bearing the worn emotional palette of a man who’s stared too long into the abyss of bad cop depravity. In the inaugural Den of Thieves (a veritable classic), Butler was all grizzle and grit: a broken undercover officer and deadbeat husband clinging to bravado, booze, and a badge as his only shield from the void. In Pantera, he gradually transforms into something else entirely—a renegade force of chaos and charisma, trading L.A. smog…

Queer doesn’t merely adapt Burroughs — it inhabits his drugged-out, libidinally charged psyche. Luca’s revisionist riff on the novel trudges forward like a soporific séance, constantly slipping away like a lucid dream. Akin to Burroughs’s prose, lacunae abound: time and experience become elliptical, disted, riddled with absences. Narrative is lost in an ancillary dimension, subsumed by spectral longings, phantom limbs, the pangs of delayed, unrequited yearning; a self-absorbed cosmos where desire is taunted by a nonchalant twink, blithely existing just…

Two for the Money emerges steeped in the early 2000s sheen of corporate excess and televised bravado—offices awash in fluorescent hum, a chorus of ringing phones, and characters inhabiting a liminal space between Wall Street’s rapaciousness and the raw, bruising spectacle of professional sports betting.

Straddling genres with an uneasy grace, it awkwardly blends the financial sleaze of Wall Street with the visceral grit of Any Given Sunday. Its dramatized excesses and divergent storylines quickly grow as tangled as the…

Rounders exists in the same spiritual sphere as Good Will Hunting and Fight Club. It’s drenched in that late-90s Miramax vibe: melancholic voice-over, Xanax-era detachment, Ivy League intellect meets outsider angst. As Mike McDermott, Matt Damon plays a gifted card shark torn between two worlds—law school respectability and the underworld of backroom poker dens. His voice-over haunts the film. It echoes Will Hunting’s analytical melancholy, but filtered through a darker, lonelier .

Philosophically, success in poker is initially defined as…