Flesh + Blood, Running out of Time 2, & Le Doulos

Flesh + Blood is Paul Verhoeven doing an utterly ridiculous middle ages movie. Rutger Hauer is the lead mercenary, who kidnaps a virgin from the son of the man who refused to pay him for helping to take back his town. It's violent, full of sex (although a fairly explicit rape scene is disturbing), and kind of funny, exactly what you'd expect from Verhoeven's films. It isn't as good as his last Dutch films, or his later English films, but it's enjoyable enough.

Running out of Time 2 is the sequel to the non-2 movie, but this one isn't nearly as good. It's still kinda stylish, but the plot is just extremely silly. A magician basically shuts down all of Hong Kong by being utterly ridiculous and doing very elaborate tricks. Including a lot of coin flips that all end up the same way. Every times I saw him flip coins, all I could think was that they never actually showed the coins. They didn't have to actually flip the coins and have them end up all the same side. This bothered me. Gives you an idea about how much I cared about the plot when this was all I could focus on.

Le Doulos is a Jean-Pierre Melville noir film, and the Netflix summary says "Fedoras, trench coats, dark alleys and jazz pervade this intricate crime drama", which basically should just be "Noir, noir, noir, noir, noir." It's stylish almost to a fault, with a great interrogation scene, but also lots of characters doing stupid things because they look cool. Can you really blame someone for doing something that looks cool rather than being the most sensible thing at the time? It's not as great as Melville's best, but I greatly enjoyed it anyway.