Amazeballs

Osgood Perkins’s “The Monkey” offers up a carnival of mutilation and tumbling gags, a film so wanton in its pleasures you almost suspect the projectionist of lacing the celluloid with laughing gas. The miracle, if there is one, is that its freshness lies not in reinventing the wheel (or the wind-up monkey) but in letting the wheel wobble, careen, and spin out in a delirious, bloody gymkhana. Stephen King’s reputation hovers somewhere over this project, but for those of us spared the original short story, the movie arrives naked: it must enchant, or revolt, on its own. Whether the King DNA matters is a parlor game for fanatics. What matters is how Perkins handles his inheritance, a prop-shop horror premise that could have been creaky as an attic toy chest.

There is an itch in contemporary science fiction which no number of tight scripts and digital vistas can entirely scratch: the genre longs to mean something again, to be both playground and arena, but all too often balloons out into ponderous “themes” and sterile future-worlds. It’s a relief, a relief laced with a kind of giddy disbelief, to witness Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, a film that doesn’t just cross genres, but seems to tear them up and ball them in one trembling fist.

It would be generous to call Red Sparrow a thriller in the classic sense—what Francis Lawrence has delivered is more of a stylish fever dream of espionage, its patchwork of betrayals pinned together with body blows and performances that shiver with self-awareness. Emerging from the current Hollywood fixation on shadow governments and the bruised souls who serve them, Red Sparrow strives for the sophistication of le Carré but gives us the lurid pulps of a post-Snowden universe instead: sex as weapon, trust as currency, trauma as curriculum vitae.

It’s not often that a movie about numbers—balance sheets, bonds, the recondite alphabet soup of the financial world—feels like it could blow the roof off a theater. But with The Big Short, director Adam McKay, nimbly adapting Michael Lewis, tries to do precisely that. The film announces its bravura intentions from the opening moments: this isn’t just a disaster movie about the 2008 financial collapse, it’s a corrosive, postmodern vaudeville—with the housing market falling apart, and the fourth wall shattering right alongside it.

Gareth Evans, the kinetic firebrand behind The Raid, lets the bullets spray and bones crackle once again in Havoc, his latest Netflix spectacle. There is, at times, something almost musical to his violence—an arrhythmic percussion of bodies against concrete—that has been his signature since he left rural Wales for the Indonesian underworld. Havoc is, if nothing else, a thundering proof that Evans hasn’t lost his taste for bloody spectacle, even if his hand trembles when it comes time to string all the terrific chaos together.

In The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi peels back the gold plating of 1970s New York to reveal an America composed of equal parts ambition and predatory cunning—think Gatsby’s green light flickering in the distance, but this time the dream has a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and the ghostly tutelage of Roy Cohn smoking in the corner. This isn’t just a biopic about Donald Trump’s rise: it’s an X-ray of the American id, and Abbasi seems determined to make us squeamish about what we see.