Amazeballs

There’s a mordant joke running through “The Killer”—practically a pulse, arranged with the precision of a Smiths beat—that might be missed by anyone still taking their assassins straight and their directors at their own promotional word. Here is David Fincher, once the feverish chronicler of men unraveling in the glow of green computer screens and kitchen fluorescents, now orchestrating a liturgy of control and cold-blooded process so sharp it’s almost a parody of itself: the assassin as Ikea monk, building murder out of flat-packed routines and hide-in-plain-sight anonymity. Nothing, not even the violence, is ever allowed to descend into real chaos—not while there are yoga stretches to be done and a running tally of BPM on the Apple Watch.

There is something interesting about the “based-on-a-true-story” thriller, that genre with which Hollywood is infatuated—it has the chance to situate historical spectacle in a slick transport suit and drive it with wild abandon under the bridge of plausibility. “The Red Sea Diving Resort,” the directorial debut of Gideon Raff, is one such film, lively and well-produced, featuring Chris Evans as a Mossad member who seems to be auditioning for a secret agent beach calendar. It makes for an agreeable, occasionally entertaining, but ultimately forgettable movie, basically the younger cousin of “Argo” who puts in some effort at the family reunion, but never once threatens to outdo its subtle origins.

How do you make a disaster film in 2020, when going outside to check the mailbox felt like auditioning for “Contagion 2”? The answer, in “Greenland,” is with impressive restraint: it’s a comet-disaster movie that, instead of blowing up the White House for the nineteenth time, asks you to remember to bring your son’s insulin.

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.

From its first, brash wink at the audience—Clive Owen, all gallows cool, staring right through the screen and telling us, with devilish confidence, how he will commit the “perfect robbery”—Spike Lee’s “Inside Man” broadcasts what so many lesser heist films merely whimper: this one is playing a totally different game. What Lee is pulling off here, working with Russell Gewirtz’s Rube Goldberg screenplay (which, for once, doesn’t collapse under its own cleverness), is a kind of conjurer’s trick—not just a “how did they do it?” but a “what are they doing, and why?” And, miraculously, by the end you might just feel like an accomplice, too.

Wes Anderson has never been interested in narrative momentum, not really—he’s always preferred the aromatic whiff of narrative, the barest hint of plot beaten into candy glass and served up in a diorama, with the flavorings drawn from a Boy’s Own Adventure half-remembered in French. With “The French Dispatch,” he takes this already rarefied style and, with the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old let loose in the stationery aisle at Agnès B., multiplies it, refracts it, permutes it like a box of Ladurée macarons spilled across a New Yorker back-issue. It would be tempting, if you are not careful, to call this his ultimate film—the ur-Wes, the platonic ideal of his own butterfly-souled unreality—until, of course, you remember that this particular train has only gained steam over the years. If Anderson follows this path for another decade, we’ll need not a theater but a clockmaker’s bench and an electron microscope just to glimpse the latest nesting doll.