Amazeballs

By daring to write a review of Fight Club, I’ve already broken the first and second rules—and let me say, it’s a palpable thrill. The aura of sacred secrecy is less a taboo than a dare, and David Fincher’s film, like Chuck Palahniuk’s novel before it, delights in goading you to break taboos and then wallow in the delicious guilt of being caught. Few book-to-screen projects have such a brawl in the ring between source material and adaptation—usually it’s a TKO for mediocrity. But here, Fincher doesn’t just survive the pummeling; he jabs, feints, and emerges with his bruises gleaming.

There’s something almost illicit in the surprise of “Sleeping Dogs”—as if you’d gone to the usual midnight mass of generic thrillers and, in the half-light, found the sermon delivered by Russell Crowe, voice ragged, eyes veiled with embers of regret. In his hands, or more aptly in the shuffling gait and battered dignity of Roy Freeman, Adam Cooper’s directorial debut morphs, unexpectedly, into a meditation on the porousness of memory and the sleight-of-hand of self-forgiveness. If the movie pulls you forward with the sticky taffy of psychological suspense, it’s Crowe who gives the confection its bite.

You drag yourself into Nosferatu expecting to be chloroformed by reverence, sipping the historical significance like bitter medicine—and then, in a mild shock, you’re there, clinging to the edge of your armchair, rationing your interest, waiting for the monster to hurry up and pounce. Yes, I wanted to hate this film, as a preemptive strike against a curriculum of “milestones” that, more often than not, turn out to be sacred cows—bloated, unkillable, and astonishingly inert. But there’s a persistent magic here, of the slow, mossy, ghost-infested variety: Nosferatu defeated my silent-movie prejudice not by winning the argument, but by gnawing at my resistance until I had to surrender.

Is there anything more liberating than watching a movie that understands—it really knows—that coherence is just another rule waiting to be elbowed aside for the sake of a good time? Shane Black’s “The Nice Guys” is not so much a film as a lark in polyester trousers, a two-hour tumble through the sun...

I walked into "Red One" armed with precisely nothing but a minor hunch and perhaps a little hardened prejudice against movies that wear jingling bells on their sleeves. Christmas films—those syrupy retail rituals—usually march in like a mall Santa two cups deep, so forgive me for expecting a rerun of reindeer games. But director Jake Kasdan, of all people, produces something so deliciously unexpected, so giddy in its mash-up of action spectacle and Yuletide lunacy, that half an hour in I found myself grinning in the dark, my inner cynic in full retreat.

Is there anything more perverse—and perversely funny—than watching Hugh Grant, that perennial celluloid charmer, take a swan dive into villainy? In “Heretic,” he does not merely play against type; he dances into the abyss with silk gloves on, turning neighborly warmth into menace so delicious it’s almost camp, except nothing about his performance feels accidental. You watch Grant, and it’s like seeing Cary Grant slip a knife between the ribs—a delight so vertiginous you can’t help but smile before the shiver hits.