
Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro at the One Night Only premiere on Monday.
Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Universal Pictures
In the earliest, earliest days of cinema, the camera wasn’t pointed at actors living imaginary lives; it was pointed at real human beings doing real human things. They walked home from work, they got on and off trains, they snuggled their pets. I remain convinced that although movies can show us wonders that will never exist in the real world, it is especially entrancing to watch something that actually happened, especially when what happened frickin’ rules.
You don’t have to watch a documentary to see something real. Many of the best fictional films take advantage of incredible human achievements. Gene Kelly’s daredevil roller skating dance in “It’s Always Fair Weather” is more awe-inspiring than most CGI battle scenes. When Tony Jaa flings himself feet and face first through a tiny coil of barbed wire in “Ong-Bak,” it will always elicit a gasp, long after our digital monsters become ho-hum. I say this with no disrespect to VFX films, because a lot of them are pure magic, but there’s a special admiration we reserve for movies and performers who go the extra mile and perform feats of derring-do in person, not just in post.
Great dance movies and great fight movies invigorate the nerves and, I think, the soul. So it is with great pleasure that I watched Kenji Tanigaki’s “The Furious,” which doesn’t have any dancing but is one of the best fight movies of the 21st century. It’s a spectacular, run-and-gun, beat ‘em up, martial arts extravaganza and Tanigaki knows exactly how to film his acrobatic fighters to highlight their uncanny ability to wail on each other in new, gut-wrenching ways.
The plot is simplicity, and thank goodness, because no one goes to a fight movie for the plot. Xie Miao stars as Wei, a handyman whose daughter, Rainy (Yang Enyou), is abducted by child traffickers. Boy, did those guys make a huge mistake. Wei chases their truck on foot and they get beat down harder than Karen Carpenter’s drum set. (I realize this reference might be obscure, but trust me, Karen Carpenter was a hell of a drummer.)
The villains get lucky and speed away, and of course the cops are corrupt, because even an over-the-top fight movie can be realistic sometimes. So Wei tracks the traffickers down and, understandably, cracks their rib cages open with a ball-peen hammer. Along the way, he also fights Navin, played by Joe Taslim, a grieving husband who goes undercover to stop the trafficking ring and find out what happened to his missing wife, a reporter who tried to expose this crime wave. Our heroes kick each other’s butts before realizing, in classic comic book fashion, they should team up and punch evil dudes in the face together.
As a story, that’s about it. Wei and/or Navin fight in an MMA octagon, in an ice factory filled with frozen corpses, on motorcycles driving in hallways, everywhere they could think of with every prop they have handy. At one point, two characters fight to the death with bicycles. Not on bicycles, with bicycles. Just beating the crap out of each other using Schwinns like Klingon bat’leths. How can you not love that?
Every fight after the halfway point plays like a boss battle, so the only way you’ll know the movie isn’t over is because there’s someone left to kill. Joe Taslim’s “The Raid” co-star Yayan Ruhian shows up at the beginning with a bow and arrow, and if he’s still alive, there’s gotta be more movie left, because no filmmaker in their right mind wouldn’t end “The Furious” with those two fighting with a ladder and climbing all over that thing, because that’s cool as hell. Joey Iwanaga plays the handsome young business guy who’s secretly running the trafficking ring, and you know damn well he’ll be a homicidal badass eventually. When he proves it, that’s when “The Furious” goes off the rails in the best possible way.
It’s nice when an exciting genre film is about something, and “The Furious” technically is, but the messages are so simple and unassailable that they’re hardly worth exploring. Obviously child trafficking is evil, and everyone involved deserves the violent deaths that await them. Fathers will do anything to protect their children, or at least they should, and who can argue with that? Wei’s daughter bonds with another traumatized captive who did whatever he had to do to survive and fears he’s beyond redemption, and there’s a tragedy to that, but it still boils down to basic human empathy and forgiveness. There’s nothing wrong with this stuff. It’s just not complex.
“The Furious” hits like a sledgehammer — frequently with a sledgehammer — and it leaves a refreshing aftertaste. Oh what a sweet, sweet concussion “The Furious” is. Fast-paced, intense, stunning to behold, jam-packed with fight choreography that’s hard to describe in words. “It has to be seen to be believed” is a copout, as far as criticism goes, but that’s why movie cameras were invented — so you can see it, you can believe it and you can experience genuine wonder.
“The Furious” hits theaters in Hong Kong on Friday after premiering at TIFF.
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Ever since the official trailer dropped for the Callum Turner–Monica Barbaro rom-com One Night Only, quickly racking up millions of views on its way to its nearly 40 million total, internet commentators have had a lot of questions about the film’s central premise in which premarital sex is illegal apart from one 12-hour period a year.
How is this law enforced? Are people breaking the law? How did this legislation pass? What counts as “sex” under this new mandate? Are marriage (and divorce) rates skyrocketing? What about affairs?
Rest assured: Some of those questions are answered in the movie, and explanations are starting to trickle out online for those unconcerned about spoilers. Beyond that, One Night Only writer, Travis Braun, who saw his screenplay top the 2024 Black List, has answers, but they’re not all in the Will Gluck-directed Universal movie now in theaters.
“I set out to write a movie about the circus that is modern dating, and I thought how fun if we could set that all in one night, and I have answers to those questions, and some of them are in the movie,” Braun told The Hollywood Reporter at the One Night Only premiere earlier this week in New York.
Braun said he definitely thought about the specific rules of the film’s alternate reality, framed as three years on from the no-sex act being passed, but didn’t want to get too deep into the politics of the world of the movie.
“There’s a big mythology that I’ve built out and then as you develop a movie you start to pare down and you go: What does an audience really care about, and what are they showing up to see? For me the answer is always a love story, romance,” he told THR. “I hope they can come in and we’ll show them how this world functions, and then they can just enjoy the movie and have fun. The whole focus of this was love story and romance first, and the world-building obviously has to make sense and has to be there, but ultimately we weren’t interested in getting into the politics of it. We wanted to tell a story about these two incredible people trying to find love on this crazy night.”
Producer Jacqueline Monetta, who brought Braun’s script to Gluck, said they didn’t want moviegoers to have all of the answers.
“I had a million questions. I was like, ‘What does this mean? What does this world look like? How do people communicate? What’s different?’ And that’s I think what’s so smart about it,” she said of One Night Only‘s “big idea, high-concept” premise. “We don’t answer every question in the movie, purposefully, because we want those questions to be had on the car ride home. We want people to keep talking about it and really think about what would this mean for our world, what does it mean for our world now. But I think Will and I were really specific on what questions we wanted to answer.”
In a recent Reddit AMA, Gluck also detailed how he and his team approached the world building of the movie while not wanting it to be all about the mandate and offered prospective moviegoers hints for where to find the answers to their questions.
“We spent a lot of time talking about the rules of the world, and if you’ve seen the movie, or when you see the movie, you’ll see that the rules of the world and the world building are all in the background,” he said. “It’s on TVs, signage, in thrown-away lines, because we didn’t want to give the world short shrift, but we didn’t want the movie to be about that. It’s another way I want people to see this. If they see it more than once, they’ll pick up so many more rules of the world in the background. A lot of the questions that I’ve been getting after people have seen the movie are actually answered in the movie, which is by design because I want people maybe not to know them. So, yes, it was a tricky tightrope to have them there, but not for the movie to be about it.”
Turner meanwhile echoes Braun’s advice for curious prospective moviegoers: “Go see the film!”
“You’ll realize pretty quickly what the realm is that you’re working within and it’s a comedy,” Turner says of what inquisitive filmgoers will find. “There are no great political undertones, I don’t think. This is just a place where you can escape for an hour and a half, two hours and enjoy and laugh your head off.”
One Night Only is now in theaters.

Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro at the One Night Only premiere on Monday.
Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Universal Pictures
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Although the live-action remake of Moana hasn’t quite been able to catch a wave at the box office, Dwayne Johnson is proud of what they made.
The Golden Globe nominee said the Disney movie’s negative reviews, which currently sit at 32% on Rotten Tomatoes, are “just the way it goes” in the entertainment industry, and what “really mattered” was that “the culture really stood up” in the Polynesian-inspired tale.
“Our first two reviews came out. I’ll never forget it… They were amazing. I was like, wow,” he told People, noting the reviews then “went another way, as sometimes happens.”
“That’s just the way it goes because we’re in this business,” added Johnson.
A decade after he voiced the demigod Maui in Disney’s animated film Moana, Johnson reprised the role in the Thomas Kail-helmed live-action adaptation.

“The challenge was, okay, let’s remember, though, what’s going to be beyond this opening weekend. Let’s remember what’s happening right now and the noise that’s happening right now,” said Johnson. “If you love it, great. If you don’t, no problem.”
Following Moana‘s July 10 premiere, the movie has gone on to make $266M at the global box office. Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro addressed the low turnout in a letter to shareholders.
“Even when our franchise films don’t meet our box office expectations, as with The Mandalorian and Grogu and the live-action Moana, our investments in these core properties fuel other parts of our company,” said D’Amaro, noting that Moana is “expected to be a strong title on Disney+, building on the success of the original film, which is one of the most streamed movies of all time.”
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Hunter Biden doesn’t have plans of running for office himself, but he still has some strong opinions when it comes to the presidency. In fact, President Joe Biden’s son just called President Donald Trump “the singular existential threat” to planet Earth.
During his wide-ranging interview with BBC Newsnight’s Paddy O’Connell on Friday, the 56-year-old artist opened up about receiving a pardon from his father during his last weeks in office back in December 2024 — and how Trump’s behavior may have impacted the decision.
“I am the most privileged person, as it relates to that, that there could possibly be. I was one of one, and I am eternally grateful for it,” Hunter shared. “I am eternally grateful for it because I think that Donald Trump has proven to be exactly who my dad thought he was going to be, as it relates to the revenge and retribution that he would seek on his political enemies.”
“Was it good for our Constitution? Was it good for the American people? Was it good for my dad’s legacy? No, on all counts,” he further admitted.
President Biden pardoned his son just weeks ahead of his sentencing on tax evasion and federal gun charges. At the time, Trump called the act “an abuse and miscarriage of justice.” A year and half later, Hunter remains equally unimpressed by his father’s successor (who was also, notably, his predecessor).
“I’m not going to stop talking about Donald Trump,” he concluded. “Donald Trump is the singular existential threat to this globe. Donald Trump is, literally, a greater threat than we have faced in any of our lifetimes.”
Elsewhere in his interview, Hunter fought tears while sharing a painful update on his father’s prostate cancer metastasizing to his bones: “My dad is, to this day, remains the center of our family. Not just because of who he is as the the public person, but completely because of who he is to each one of us. It’s really, really hard and it’s really sad to watch.”
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