Amazeballs

You walk into The Meg half ready to sneer, armed with all your righteous cineaste skepticism: here comes Jason Statham wrestling a dinosaur fish, and if that’s not enough to send you running for Bergman, nothing is. I wanted to hate it. Honestly, I did. And so, the first surprise: it’s possible, in this perverse landscape where studios toss millions at shark movies, to actually enjoy yourself despite yourself. The shame isn’t the ludicrous premise or the overblown CGI — it’s how you’re grinning by the time the third aquatic monstrosity explodes out of the Pacific, Statham bracing himself for another winking one-liner.

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.

Osgood Perkins’s “The Monkey” offers up a carnival of mutilation and tumbling gags, a film so wanton in its pleasures you almost suspect the projectionist of lacing the celluloid with laughing gas. The miracle, if there is one, is that its freshness lies not in reinventing the wheel (or the wind-up monkey) but in letting the wheel wobble, careen, and spin out in a delirious, bloody gymkhana. Stephen King’s reputation hovers somewhere over this project, but for those of us spared the original short story, the movie arrives naked: it must enchant, or revolt, on its own. Whether the King DNA matters is a parlor game for fanatics. What matters is how Perkins handles his inheritance, a prop-shop horror premise that could have been creaky as an attic toy chest.

There is an itch in contemporary science fiction which no number of tight scripts and digital vistas can entirely scratch: the genre longs to mean something again, to be both playground and arena, but all too often balloons out into ponderous “themes” and sterile future-worlds. It’s a relief, a relief laced with a kind of giddy disbelief, to witness Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, a film that doesn’t just cross genres, but seems to tear them up and ball them in one trembling fist.

After the garish, exhaust-spewing spectacle of most “political” thrillers, Steven Spielberg’s Munich arrives like a shock to the moral system—a slow-burning fever of a film, where triumph is measured not by body counts but by the corrosion of souls. Released in the long winter shadow of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Munich isn’t content with the easy uplift of righteous action. No, Spielberg has something far more unsettling in mind: he gives us the nightmare of retaliation—personal, national, and ultimately, existential—and then refuses to wake us up.

Sometimes a movie unspools with the comforting hum of déjà vu—a story you know by heart even as the unfamiliar faces of another country’s cinema strut and stumble before you. Monga, directed by Doze Niu, is that kind of film, a Taiwanese gangster saga that aches to be muscle and poetry both, splashing its neon lights across Taipei like it’s trying to reinvent the shadows themselves. As the camera drifts through the back alleys and discos of 1980s Wanhua, you recognize the ritual: we’re being asked to believe in brotherhood carved out of bruises and blood, loyalty and its slow rot. And I was ready—I wanted the sweet, sickly rush of a genre picture that tilts toward heartbreak.