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13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi has so many beefy bearded guys in it, we thought we had wandered into a friend’s fantasy sequence. Then we realized that the gratuitous hotness does have a point. Michael Bay’s version of the events at the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi in 2012 is so messy, the only way we could know whom to root for was to look for the hot guys. It doesn’t help that in Libya, everyone has facial hair.

The movie’s not awful, and we’re talking about a director who has plumbed new depths of awfulness with the Transformers movies. It’s thrilling in parts, reminding us how much we enjoyed the early Bay movie, The Rock. It also reminds us that there should be a legal limit to how much slow-motion a filmmaker may use. Worse, it has no notion of geography. We don’t know where the American installation is relative to anything, which part of the villa Ambassador Chris Stevens is in, where the attackers are coming from…jeez, we can’t even tell which ones the attackers are. But show us John Krasinski in a tight t-shirt, and immediately we know whose side we’re on. (Good for you, Emily Blunt, please make an action thriller with your husband.)

Read our reviews at InterAksyon.

Drogon as the Graboid in Tremors (1990) starring Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward.

FROM THE TITLE I thought it was an adaptation of Fitzcarraldo, the Werner Herzog movie about a would-be rubber baron who dreams of building an opera house in the Amazon. The mad glare of Klaus Kinski emanating from a TV screen — the prospect is both terrifying and thrilling. But the jungle in the title of the Amazon series is strictly concrete: New York City, home of the fictional New York Symphony. Its resident madman Rodrigo De Souza, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, does his own glaring, with the opposite effect. Like a video of a cat surprised by a cucumber, it’s adorable.

Created by Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzmann and Alex Timbers, Mozart in the Jungle is a comedy about classical musicians, eccentric geniuses, and the everlasting clash between money and art. “Do we raise funds in order to make music, or make music in order to raise funds?” asks Rodrigo, who is so famous he goes by one name. A former child prodigy, he has replaced the conductor and musical director Thomas Pembridge (Malcolm McDowell). When he’s not upsetting tradition by holding open auditions, changing the program, or taking the orchestra out for an unsanctioned open-air performance, he’s at fund-raisers, trundled out like Exhibit A for society matrons with checkbooks. He’ll play the game, but he has his limits, rejecting an ad campaign called “Hear the Hair,” then sawing off his famous locks.

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