Amazeballs

Every aging franchise wants its last gasp to blow out the speakers, flood the screen, and blister the eyeballs—so it’s almost traditional that The Final Reckoning dares you to measure it against its own legend. A big, bruising spectacle trying to catch up to its own shadow, the film is cinema as a kind of decathlon, with Tom Cruise sprinting, leaping, and tumbling his way toward a finish line that never quite has the guts to feel like the end.

From its first, brash wink at the audience—Clive Owen, all gallows cool, staring right through the screen and telling us, with devilish confidence, how he will commit the “perfect robbery”—Spike Lee’s “Inside Man” broadcasts what so many lesser heist films merely whimper: this one is playing a totally different game. What Lee is pulling off here, working with Russell Gewirtz’s Rube Goldberg screenplay (which, for once, doesn’t collapse under its own cleverness), is a kind of conjurer’s trick—not just a “how did they do it?” but a “what are they doing, and why?” And, miraculously, by the end you might just feel like an accomplice, too.

Wes Anderson has never been interested in narrative momentum, not really—he’s always preferred the aromatic whiff of narrative, the barest hint of plot beaten into candy glass and served up in a diorama, with the flavorings drawn from a Boy’s Own Adventure half-remembered in French. With “The French Dispatch,” he takes this already rarefied style and, with the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old let loose in the stationery aisle at Agnès B., multiplies it, refracts it, permutes it like a box of Ladurée macarons spilled across a New Yorker back-issue. It would be tempting, if you are not careful, to call this his ultimate film—the ur-Wes, the platonic ideal of his own butterfly-souled unreality—until, of course, you remember that this particular train has only gained steam over the years. If Anderson follows this path for another decade, we’ll need not a theater but a clockmaker’s bench and an electron microscope just to glimpse the latest nesting doll.

Primitive War lurches to life as if someone siphoned the lunacy from Platoon, spliced it with the animal anarchism of Jurassic Park, set the blender to “puree,” and handed the results not to Spielberg and Oliver Stone, but an upstart Aussie with a larcenous joy in genre. If you stroll into Luke Sparke’s dino-in-the-jungle opus expecting a childish rerun or Syfy-channel barrel-scraping, prepare for a rude, exuberant awakening. This is a film that knows exactly how daft its premise sounds but, by some ferocious, inexplicable alchemy, ends up giving the last three Jurassic World movies a savage trouncing.

From its first, quietly clinical shot—a warehouse of flickering screens and the glazed-over faces behind them—American Sweatshop aims not to shock, but to seep under your skin, repellently but irresistibly, like a light leak in an otherwise airtight coffin. Every so often you see a film that doesn’t just depict the contemporary horror show, it lets you marinate in it. This is one of those.

Nobody 2 is what happens when you order “one more round” at a bar that’s already run out of top-shelf liquor. This is a film that wears its predecessor’s bathrobe, parading out the same bundle of ultra-violence and dad-joke stoicism that made the first Nobody a minor miracle, and then proceeds to recite the formula with the half-drowsy confidence of someone who’s only half-listening. You can hardly blame Bob Odenkirk’s Hutch for needing a vacation—after a few minutes watching this sequel, I felt like I needed one too.