Amazeballs

There’s a moment in Steve Jobs, one of those dangerous little intervals between a volley of Sorkinian wit and the next bracing clash of egos when you realize: this is not, and never has been, about computers. It’s about the performance, jobs (no pun intended) as theater, invention as drama, genius as soliloquy. The curtain rises, the orchestra tunes, and our hero snappish, mercurial, blazingly single-minded, takes center stage, a maestro of microchips who can’t solder a wire but can bend the collective will of a room as if it were his own personal instrument. Aaron Sorkin has never met a conference room he couldn’t set aflame with words, but Danny Boyle, all kinetic energy and pulsing light, turns these corridors and backstage wings into a kind of nervy, flickering proscenium. Forget the dreary rest of the “biopic” genre; Steve Jobs isn’t here to teach you the story of Apple. It’s here to make you feel that strange, unholy exhilaration of watching the right mind crash mercilessly, ecstatically, against the world.

Is there any scene in “The Social Network” that isn’t about performance? Not just Eisenberg’s brittle, arms-folded, owl-eyed Mark Zuckerberg, a man so locked in his own circuitry he might as well be the world’s first AI pod person, but the entire film, with Aaron Sorkin’s words snapping like the coldest branch on a Cambridge winter, and Fincher’s camera gliding, unsmiling, over the asphalt and brains of Harvard. Everyone’s playing at something: friendship, genius, vengeance, American myth, and, inevitably, wealth. And the show they put on, fifteen years later, still fascinates, even as the history recedes into legend and legend ossifies into yet another “origin story” for the streaming age.

If anyone had told me that a new Superman film—one not starring the implacably handsome Henry Cavill but helmed instead by the broad-shouldered, blithely anonymous David Corenswet—would soar, I would have rolled my eyes faster than a Kryptonian in mid-spin. But James Gunn’s Superman propels itself out of the crate marked “2020s franchise relaunches” and straight into pop delirium, unexpectedly bristling with wit, irreverence, and yes, a genuine affection for tights, capes, and Clark’s enduring decency.

Let’s mark STRAW’s arrival on the Netflix scroll not as a quiet debut but with the thudding, dissonant crash of a fire alarm, one of those pulpy, middle-of-the-night interruptions you half resent and won’t soon forget. This is Tyler Perry pushing melodrama to the edge of the precinct, a kitchen-sink-pressure-cooker tragedy with more indignities than a daytime soap marathon, yet fierce enough in its final moments to repay (if not quite justify) the ordeal. It’s equal parts a how-bad-can-it-get gauntlet and a surprisingly alive, wounded scream from the cracked ribcage of America’s social machinery.

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.

There’s something bracingly cold in the Korean morning after, and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance unspools as if Park Chan-wook had gathered up every post-war trauma, every splintered family, and boiled them down to their reasonless elemental grudge. If the opening salvo to the so-called “Vengeance Trilogy” feels like an autopsy of the revenge thriller, it’s only because Park is dissecting not just genre, but the black, sodden heart of the human condition itself. How often do we watch films about vengeance and walk out, buoyed by the giddiness of catharsis? Not here. Here, you stagger out like you’ve come from a wake, the taste of rust clinging to your tongue.