Amazeballs

When I first heard about "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga," I felt that distinctive, twitchy blend of anticipation and dread—the kind peculiar to long-running franchises and whatever anarchic fever dream George Miller might have stashed up his sleeve. The casting alone was its own Mad Maxian gamble: Anya Taylor-Joy—an actress as persuasively haunted as she is hypnotically camera-ready—marching into apocalypse territory, her porcelain features smeared in Wasteland grime. Would she disappear into the fury, or would she seem, as actresses so often do in dystopian blockbusters, like a Vogue cover model after a sandstorm?

The gangs of America have always gone Hollywood sooner or later, and in The Bikeriders, Jeff Nichols opens the throttle and lets the Vandals Motorcycle Club—outlaws ripped from Danny Lyon’s mythic photographs—tear through the screen like thunder in church. Here’s a picture that understands motorcycles as not just machines but battered totems of belonging, and it wears its period cool with such nonchalance you half expect the film stock itself to start rumbling.

Somewhere between the battered neon nostalgia of the original “Road House,” with its Patrick Swayze, Zen-and-fisticuffs swagger, and the pulse of high-gloss, 2024 bombast, I settled into my seat, half-expecting that singular jolt movies sometimes deliver—the kind that reminds you you’re watching a piece of pop detritus turned, against all odds, into folk art. There’s a peculiar ache that comes with these remakes: will the new kid on the block dare to dance like Swayze, or just step on my toes?

Dev Patel, that gangly charmer who skip-traced his way into our hearts in “Slumdog Millionaire,” comes roaring through (or is it swinging through?) with his directorial debut, “Monkey Man,” and I have to admit, I went in with my soft spot for him already exposed. But what I found wasn’t just a talented actor flexing his new muscles—it was Patel unleashing a ferocious, turbo-charged vision, as if he’d been storing years of performance energy in his bones and it finally detonated behind the camera. What a high.

Civil War is less a movie than a diagnosis—the kind you receive in a stranger’s waiting room, where the tick of the clock and the hum of distant sirens seem to foretell something terminal, but you’re too mesmerized to get up and leave. Alex Garland looks at America as if it’s an elegantly set table that’s just been upended; the film drags you headlong through the debris, offering glimpses of the familiar and the ghastly, fused and inseparable, seen through the battered lenses of war correspondents.

“Ben-Hur,” that juggernaut rumbling out of 1959 and directed by William Wyler with an Old Testament sense of gravity, is the one Hollywood epic that manages, at least for a good three hours, to make its own size feel like destiny rather than bloat. Adapted from Lew Wallace’s biblically bulging novel...