Amazeballs

Is there anything sweeter than a genre picture that tries to sneak a love story past a firing squad of monsters, bioweapons, and the apocalypse itself—and half-succeeds not by brute force, but by the sheer force of its leads? Hollywood, that eternal laboratory of hybrid creatures, has never tired of shoving its pretty faces into the trenches of the end times, but Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge practically begs to ask: if the world was ending, wouldn’t you fall in love if you could? (Especially if Miles Teller was across the way with a rifle and Anya Taylor-Joy was the voice in your headset?) Well, how could you not.

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.

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.

There’s a particular horror only dreamt up by the American psyche—a suburban quiet punctured by a bang in the night, an inexplicable exodus of children, doors creaking open into bottomless dread. One can almost smell the musty carpet and the creeping anxiety that sinks in with it. Weapons, Zach Cregger’s vigorously anticipated follow-up to Barbarian, turns that queasy dream into a waking nightmare, and just when you start to think you’ve mapped out where it’s taking you, it flashes a mad grin and tightens the screws another turn. I hated horror movies once, almost on principle, but Cregger’s deviously entertaining sensibility—his ability to lace his darkness with a grim, cackling wit—has pried open a new door in my head.