Amazeballs

If you’ve ever been so bored in the opening minutes of a film that you nearly jettisoned it into the in-flight void, you’re in the ideal state for TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY—a valentine slipped to those of us who remember when ‘spy movie’ didn’t mean Tom Cruise careening down Burj Khalifa on a dental floss. I confess: I nearly passed it by. I have the attention span of a dog in a squirrel sanctuary, and when I first met Tomas Alfredson’s version of Le Carré’s labyrinth, I almost bolted. But once I resolved to commit—strapped three hours’ worth of expectation and peanuts—I found myself confronted with a piece of sustained, high-stakes espionage art that refuses—politely, dourly—to pander to anybody’s need for instant payoff.

Is it possible for a corporate thriller to wear its adrenaline on its sleeve and still sneak in—amid the boardroom jousting—moments of sly vulnerability? Sitting down to The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch, I was bracing myself for the usual tidied-up action pulp, clipped of imagination, and dully reverent to its source material (the Belgian comic series, in this case). Instead, the film lured me in with its mixture of shameless melodrama and genuinely clever backroom shenanigans. Director Jérôme Salle concocts a movie that is a brisk, terrifically twisted chess match masquerading as a summer blockbuster—an entertainment with both gloss and glimmer, if not quite bite.

Leave it to Justin Kurzel—a director who swoops into American blood and folklore with the sensibility of a poet scavenger—to dig up one of the country’s ugliest buried skeletons and rattle it until the audience feels the bones knocking inside their own skins. “The Order”—which bridges the gap between lawman melodrama and social horror show—doesn’t snuggle up to its true-crime credentials for a moment. It’s not the sort of drama that leaves you with your hand over your heart in admiration for the FBI, or cleaning your nails on the armrest, coolly detached. No, this is a movie that comes after you, hounding your conscience with every bark of a German shepherd and every flicker of fluorescent supermarket nightmare.

Once in a while, a film comes drifting in on the wind, caught by almost no one, championed by even fewer, carrying the kind of oddball, heart-clutching enchantment that threatens to restore faith in the very act of cinema. Fish Story, Yoshihiro Nakamura’s time-hopping wonder, is precisely that sort of late-breaking revelation: a freewheeling, postmodern fable, at once as headlong and as intricately assembled as the punk anthem at its core. It’s hard to think of a movie, in these battered days, that is so bracingly, disarmingly optimistic—so resolutely happy to believe that music, and thus art, can literally save the world. And damned if the movie doesn’t just about convince you.

Let’s skip the salute and call it what it is: “Greyhound” isn’t here to make you feel safe, or inspired, or even—God forbid—sentimental. No, Aaron Schneider’s relentless, nerve-needling orchestration, with Tom Hanks multitasking as both star and the hand sanding the script, is a straight shot of adrenaline distilled from the brine and gunmetal of war. Forget mothball nostalgia—this is war by way of a stress test, and every ping on the sonar is a test of your pulse-ox.

To readers who’ve never drawn breath in a room trembling with the thrum of a Game Boy and the sound of falling blocks—a film called Tetris may sound like yet another slab of corporate product-mongering, as if someone at Apple TV+ put on a cheap Soviet hat and decided to shovel us “content” with extra pixels. But sometimes you walk in wary and come out with a head full of adrenaline and an unexpected faith in the heart of the humble video game.