Amazeballs

By about the third swerve into ethical ambiguity in “Juror #2,” I realized I wasn’t in the courtroom drama Clint Eastwood seemed, at first, so eager to sell me. No, this isn’t just another movie about verdicts and closing arguments. Eastwood, that leathery cinematic preacher of the American conscience, is up to something more squirm-inducing than mere legal theatrics. The film comes at you with white-knuckle dilemmas—shouldering you off your seat and into your own muddled sense of right and wrong. You may arrive expecting “12 Angry Men” by way of the Turner Classic Movies channel, but you’ll leave with your moral reflexes tested and, just possibly, thoroughly rattled.

Let’s not pretend that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—yes, the title practically goads you into saying it twice—enters a landscape desperate for more reanimated ’80s phantoms. We have sequels popping up like dandelions in the same graveyard Tim Burton loves to till, but this one… well, I found myself in th...

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a small town, a crooked police force, an ex-Marine with more guts than common sense, and a rain barrel full of bad odds. But Jeremy Saulnier’s “Rebel Ridge” doesn’t give you the pleasure of seeing the expected bullet ballet. No—Saulnier is in his own, off-speed league. I went in fully bracing myself for a slow-burn revenge bloodbath in the “Blue Ruin” mold, but what Saulnier does here is cooler than that. Literally: cool as fuck.

This American adaptation of Liu Cixin's acclaimed novel series has captivated audiences with its premise rooted in the mystery of extraterrestrial civilizations and humanity’s response.

Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” doesn’t so much open as splatter all over you—like the world’s glitziest acid reflux. Within minutes, you’re somewhere between elation and nausea, the kind that reminds you why you ever loved horror in the first place: it’s meant to rattle not just your nerves but your very sense of what it means to be flesh and woman and watched. Walk in expecting a demure little metaphor about aging, and you’ll find your hands, as mine were, gripping the seat in a bright, queasy trance.

If there’s a pleasure to be found in a political thriller set within the velvet-draped echo chambers of the Vatican, it’s in the sense that every well-pressed cardinal is one false move away from revealing the bit of spinach stuck to his soul. Conclave is a high-stakes ecclesiastical procedural that wants to show you the secret arteries and clogged veins of the Catholic Church—not just a pageant of holy men, but a great, labyrinthine chess game shot through with acid and lamp oil. And if sometimes the chessboard feels more like a conference call where everyone has a different point to make but no one’s listening, the movie at least has the gall to try.