Amazeballs

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.

There’s a peculiarly modern grandeur in the way The Two Popes pivots between the corridors of the Vatican and the haunted lamplight of Argentine history, but it’s not the stateliness of ancient marble: it’s the flicker of digital immediacy, the hum of a restless present intruding on institutional ritual. Director Fernando Meirelles takes a story marbled with centuries of doctrinal posturing and, with sly confidence, drapes it in the colors of both a Netflix true-crime doc and an old-master fresco. The contrast is invigorating, sometimes jarring—but rarely less than beautifully framed.

When I first learned about Adolescence, a four-episode British miniseries released by Netflix on March 13, 2025, I anticipated a serious examination of contemporary youth issues, particularly those surrounding toxic masculinity, incel culture, and social media influence. With a talented creative team led by co-creators Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham—who also stars—the series promised an intense, immersive viewing experience. The compelling premise of following a teenage boy accused of murder, filmed entirely in single continuous takes, heightened my expectations regarding technical mastery and emotional depth. Knowing Graham’s previous work in Boiling Point, I was prepared for a raw, visceral journey that would challenge and disturb but also enlighten.

It’s not often that a movie about numbers—balance sheets, bonds, the recondite alphabet soup of the financial world—feels like it could blow the roof off a theater. But with The Big Short, director Adam McKay, nimbly adapting Michael Lewis, tries to do precisely that. The film announces its bravura intentions from the opening moments: this isn’t just a disaster movie about the 2008 financial collapse, it’s a corrosive, postmodern vaudeville—with the housing market falling apart, and the fourth wall shattering right alongside it.

In The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi peels back the gold plating of 1970s New York to reveal an America composed of equal parts ambition and predatory cunning—think Gatsby’s green light flickering in the distance, but this time the dream has a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and the ghostly tutelage of Roy Cohn smoking in the corner. This isn’t just a biopic about Donald Trump’s rise: it’s an X-ray of the American id, and Abbasi seems determined to make us squeamish about what we see.

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.