Amazeballs

“Lifeline” is the kind of taut, haunted psychological drama that feels like it’s been mistakenly shipped to the Science Fiction shelf by a jittery intern, where it sits in the company of time-travelers and androids, looking around, appalled at the company it keeps. The film, directed by Feras Alfuqaha, has the brooding nerve to face the black and blue marks left by trauma, personal and societal, and invites you to press your thumb to the bruise. To call it science fiction is to miss the point with the earnestness only a certain kind of literalist can muster. The tricks with reality, disorienting, elliptical, aren’t flights to the moon but dives into a mind coming apart, or maybe clawing for unity in the first place. “Lifeline” wants not just to test its protagonist, Steven Thomas (played with a wonderful, agitated delicacy by Josh Stewart), but to prod at the audience’s own nerves, the little lingering doubts and regrets we all ferry around. There’s a current of self-examination running through this film that curls right back into the viewer’s lap, whether we like it or not.

If Alex Parkinson’s Last Breath reminds us of anything, it’s that even the most harrowing true stories can be neatly packaged, pressed into narrative conformity, and, somewhere along the way, lose their vital spark. Parkinson, remaking his own 2019 documentary, attempts to fuse the cold sweat realism of survival thrillers like 127 Hours with the hallucinatory dread of The Abyss, but winds up stranding us not in the abyssal dark, but somewhere in the anodyne blue light of a well-meaning, mildly gripping genre exercise.

Vengeance is no simple business, as anyone who’s ever sat through a Park Chan-wook film with their fingernails dug into the armrest can attest. If “Oldboy” is a primal scream—rampant violence, delirious Freudian nightmares, crimson-drenched corridors—“Lady Vengeance” is the hush that follows, the cruelty made coldly mathematical, the retribution so artfully calculated you can taste the copper in your mouth. In his trilogy’s closing chapter, Park trades in the electric fury of testosterone for something subtler and, paradoxically, more lacerating: the slow-burn agony of the wronged woman forced to knit her own soul back together from the unravelled threads of innocence lost.

Is it possible for a corporate thriller to wear its adrenaline on its sleeve and still sneak in—amid the boardroom jousting—moments of sly vulnerability? Sitting down to The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch, I was bracing myself for the usual tidied-up action pulp, clipped of imagination, and dully reverent to its source material (the Belgian comic series, in this case). Instead, the film lured me in with its mixture of shameless melodrama and genuinely clever backroom shenanigans. Director Jérôme Salle concocts a movie that is a brisk, terrifically twisted chess match masquerading as a summer blockbuster—an entertainment with both gloss and glimmer, if not quite bite.

“Life,” Daniel Espinosa’s slick sci-fi scare machine, wants to have you clutching your popcorn like a flotation device, while it slings you around the International Space Station with all the delirious glee of a B-movie with an A-team budget. It’s both a love letter and a ransom note to the genre—cheerfully pilfering from “Alien,” “Gravity,” and every ISS-daydreamer’s worst-case scenario, as if genre tropes were for the taking, like ketchup packets from a diner.

Let’s strip away the illusion: Land of Bad is the cinematic equivalent of a greasy cheeseburger at midnight—no one will claim it’s haute cuisine, but good lord, sometimes you just need it. It’s the type of picture that wears its lack of originality like dog tags, draped proudly over a flak vest of tropes. Oscars? Not unless they start giving out awards for Most Satisfying Detonation or Best Use of a Helicopter in a Crisis. But when you’re hungry for sensory overload—explosions, cussed camaraderie, men shouting “Go! Go! Go!” into static—who’s keeping score?