Amazeballs

September 5 arrives on the screen as an urgent, bracing slab of historical drama—a kind of fevered docudrama pitched somewhere between the fretful hum of a 1970s control room and the icy dread pressing in from the world outside. Tim Fehlbaum’s direction plunges us into the back corridors of catastrophe: the Munich massacre at the '72 Olympics is no longer simply a horror recalled, but a media spectacle in real-time, filtered through the sweating brows and moral agonies of ABC Sports. Not since Lumet thrust us behind the cameras in Network have we felt the pulse of crisis with such claustrophobic vitality—and with almost as much queasy self-examination.

There are films that scrape so close to the bone—so unflinching in their autopsy of the young and desperate—that you exit not just shaken, but wobbled, a little raw around the soul. In Youth We Trust, Puttipong Nakthong’s feverish plunge into the bruising world of teenage lockup, is this kind of movie: a tightly-wound cry set behind the gritty cinderblocks of juvenile detention, a kind of Bangkok Scum cooked in the pressure cooker of loyalty, despair, and institutional doom.

Let’s step into the flickering half-light—the one cast not just by moonlit castle windows, but by nearly a century of cinematic shadow—the legacy of Murnau’s original “Nosferatu” looming long, thin, and predatory across the wall. Robert Eggers’ 2024 reimagining doesn’t so much resurrect the silent classic as it exhumes it, dusts it off with reverence, and then sinks its own sharp teeth into the mythos, drawing fresh blood for a new era. The old Count is back—and he’s hungry.

There’s something almost illicit in the surprise of “Sleeping Dogs”—as if you’d gone to the usual midnight mass of generic thrillers and, in the half-light, found the sermon delivered by Russell Crowe, voice ragged, eyes veiled with embers of regret. In his hands, or more aptly in the shuffling gait and battered dignity of Roy Freeman, Adam Cooper’s directorial debut morphs, unexpectedly, into a meditation on the porousness of memory and the sleight-of-hand of self-forgiveness. If the movie pulls you forward with the sticky taffy of psychological suspense, it’s Crowe who gives the confection its bite.

I walked into "Red One" armed with precisely nothing but a minor hunch and perhaps a little hardened prejudice against movies that wear jingling bells on their sleeves. Christmas films—those syrupy retail rituals—usually march in like a mall Santa two cups deep, so forgive me for expecting a rerun of reindeer games. But director Jake Kasdan, of all people, produces something so deliciously unexpected, so giddy in its mash-up of action spectacle and Yuletide lunacy, that half an hour in I found myself grinning in the dark, my inner cynic in full retreat.

Is there anything more perverse—and perversely funny—than watching Hugh Grant, that perennial celluloid charmer, take a swan dive into villainy? In “Heretic,” he does not merely play against type; he dances into the abyss with silk gloves on, turning neighborly warmth into menace so delicious it’s almost camp, except nothing about his performance feels accidental. You watch Grant, and it’s like seeing Cary Grant slip a knife between the ribs—a delight so vertiginous you can’t help but smile before the shiver hits.