Amazeballs

Ron Howard, that most tepid of Hollywood craftspeople, squinting into the Galápagos sun and discovering, at last, his inner savage. “Eden” wants to flay you alive with the spectacle of decaying Europeans, squabbling, rutting, and violently shedding the last rags of civilization, and surprise of surprises: it bloody well does. Not because Howard uncorks some hidden visionary genius, but because he finally let himself wallow gleefully in the mud and blood.

When George Clooney and Brad Pitt show up together in a movie these days, it’s like old royalty strutting through Times Square in sunglasses: you don’t care why they’re there, you just want to watch them soak up every inch of spotlight. That’s Wolfs—Jon Watts’s breezy, over-familiar caper where the plot is more a rumor than a skeleton, but the charm is thick enough to swim in. Was I enthralled? Not exactly. But did I have a hell of a time? Absolutely. This is the sort of picture that glides on charisma and the friction of two megawatt stars shoulder-bumping through a city that knows how to keep its secrets tucked behind neon and hotel doors.

If a Western can still deliver that warm, gently boozy glow, the kind that sits comfortably in the stomach and maybe tickles the mind while you nurse the dregs of your drink, then Unholy Trinity is that sort of well-poured shot. Not the top shelf, mind you, but sturdy and palatable and with just enough bite to remind you why we keep returning to these dusty crossroads. Westerns, after all, are our American fables, endlessly rewritten, and here, under the steady if uninspired hand of Richard Gray, the archetypes are dusted off, creaked upright, and made to dance one more time.

There is a peculiar kind of pride to be found in a series that wears its lineage on its sleeve, and with Gatao: Like Father Like Son, we have reached the origin myth: the gangster saga’s answer to the Book of Genesis. Ray Jiang’s fourth foray into the Gatao universe is not so much a mere prequel as a ritual exhumation, painstakingly unearthing the sturdy bones of grudge, loyalty, and ambition that have propped up the franchise through three films already.

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.