Amazeballs

There’s a moment in Steve Jobs, one of those dangerous little intervals between a volley of Sorkinian wit and the next bracing clash of egos when you realize: this is not, and never has been, about computers. It’s about the performance, jobs (no pun intended) as theater, invention as drama, genius as soliloquy. The curtain rises, the orchestra tunes, and our hero snappish, mercurial, blazingly single-minded, takes center stage, a maestro of microchips who can’t solder a wire but can bend the collective will of a room as if it were his own personal instrument. Aaron Sorkin has never met a conference room he couldn’t set aflame with words, but Danny Boyle, all kinetic energy and pulsing light, turns these corridors and backstage wings into a kind of nervy, flickering proscenium. Forget the dreary rest of the “biopic” genre; Steve Jobs isn’t here to teach you the story of Apple. It’s here to make you feel that strange, unholy exhilaration of watching the right mind crash mercilessly, ecstatically, against the world.

Is there any scene in “The Social Network” that isn’t about performance? Not just Eisenberg’s brittle, arms-folded, owl-eyed Mark Zuckerberg, a man so locked in his own circuitry he might as well be the world’s first AI pod person, but the entire film, with Aaron Sorkin’s words snapping like the coldest branch on a Cambridge winter, and Fincher’s camera gliding, unsmiling, over the asphalt and brains of Harvard. Everyone’s playing at something: friendship, genius, vengeance, American myth, and, inevitably, wealth. And the show they put on, fifteen years later, still fascinates, even as the history recedes into legend and legend ossifies into yet another “origin story” for the streaming age.

There’s a moment in Empire of the Sun if you’re not too numb or calloused to notice it when eleven-year-old Jim Graham, perched amid the rubble of wartime Shanghai, tries to recall his parents’ faces and can’t quite conjure them up. That blankness, that terror, is like an air raid siren going off inside a child’s mind, and Spielberg, whose name floats above this adolescent epic like some well-meaning guardian angel lets us feel every jagged pulse of it. There are dozens of war films, even more coming-of-age stories, but it’s not often that a director with Steven Spielberg’s technical bravado and Disney-nursed heart contrives to put a child (and the audience) through the meat grinder of history with the open-eyed panic that Empire of the Sun delivers.

Some films put you in a vice and tighten, click by click, until you’re not sure if you’re gasping from shock or from the giddy pleasure of being so expertly, so utterly manipulated. “Gone Girl,” that lurid psychothriller by David Fincher, wears its heart (if one can call it a heart: more like a bloodied, glinting knife) on its sleeve. This is the rare mainstream film that seduces us into collusion with its sociopath, pats our leg, and whispers, “Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes, don’t be squeamish, darling, it’s just your happily ever after with its throat slit.”

Ron Howard, that most tepid of Hollywood craftspeople, squinting into the Galápagos sun and discovering, at last, his inner savage. “Eden” wants to flay you alive with the spectacle of decaying Europeans, squabbling, rutting, and violently shedding the last rags of civilization, and surprise of surprises: it bloody well does. Not because Howard uncorks some hidden visionary genius, but because he finally let himself wallow gleefully in the mud and blood.

There’s a mordant joke running through “The Killer”—practically a pulse, arranged with the precision of a Smiths beat—that might be missed by anyone still taking their assassins straight and their directors at their own promotional word. Here is David Fincher, once the feverish chronicler of men unraveling in the glow of green computer screens and kitchen fluorescents, now orchestrating a liturgy of control and cold-blooded process so sharp it’s almost a parody of itself: the assassin as Ikea monk, building murder out of flat-packed routines and hide-in-plain-sight anonymity. Nothing, not even the violence, is ever allowed to descend into real chaos—not while there are yoga stretches to be done and a running tally of BPM on the Apple Watch.