Amazeballs

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.

In a climate where every other weekend threatens to bury us under grainy, self-important crime dramas or slick, plasticine “thrillers,” Eenie Meanie breezed onto my screen with the confidence of a film that knows it’s here for a good time, not a long one—and the sense, at least in its opening stretches, that cinema can admit to a little pulp without losing its nerve. I wasn’t expecting much, but—bless this fractured genre landscape—I found myself having, yes, actual fun.

Ron Howard’s Rush is one of those rare biopics that doesn’t just aim to commemorate a sporting rivalry but detonates it—the screen ignites with the combustive, contrary energies of two men locked in the dance of mortal ambition. It’s almost a shock to realize how few films about sports—especially Formula 1, that most hermetic and mathematical of sports—are ever this fevered, this alive. To watch Rush after the slick digital simulation of F1 (2025, all charisma and CGI with Brad Pitt doing his Chuck Yeager-for-the-Instagram-era routine) is to remember what the movies can do when they’re brave enough to embrace mess and contradiction, and to dignify sport’s delirium rather than just illustrate it.