Amazeballs

There’s something irresistible about the clamor a movie like Us creates, like a distant siren, it lures you not just to watch, but to theorize, to fret, to explain yourself (or explain away the film’s shortcomings with a gesture at its “genius”). Jordan Peele’s sophomore feature has become one of those post-screening litmus tests: Did you see the twist coming? Did you catch all the “clues”? Congratulations, you’re either too clever or, more likely, you’re scrambling in the dark just as Peele wanted. Us is that rare horror film which, above all, wants to be iconic, and while it achieves a kind of feverish originality, it also proves that cleverness can be both a blessing and a curse.

Jordan Peele remains the elusive showman of modern American cinema, and with Nope he pulls off his boldest hat trick yet—a genre spectacle that is as enthralling as it is unnerving, as self-consciously mythic as it is eerily ambiguous. At a time when every new alien movie tries to out-gloom its predecessors, Peele has the audacity to make the unknown not just frightening, but beautiful and indecently entertaining.

It’s tempting, fatally easy, really, to call Jordan Peele’s Get Out a “game-changer” or the sort of genre-bending thing destined to lard itself in film syllabi until the discourse wrings it dry. But here is a rare debut that actually lives up to the clickbait: a film that sears itself into your nerves, not just for the way it jolts and twists, but for how it rebuilds the entire nervous system of American horror from the ground up.

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.

Argo isn’t merely a tense, glossy recounting of a CIA caper, it’s Hollywood’s sneakiest sleight-of-hand on itself, a canny distillation of the movies' perpetual promise and perennial absurdity. I went into Affleck’s film without foreknowledge, as untutored as the embassy staffers in their makeshift hideout, and the result was a giddy, queasy experience, poised on a knife-edge between farce and terror. “Based on a true story,” it insists, an audacious phrase in this context, considering what follows.

If you’d told me, in the braying wake of too many rote horror films recycled through streaming services, that a movie called Barbarian would come bearing wit, ambiguity, and a genuine chill, well, the laugh would have been yours. That laugh, sharp, startled, delighted, is precisely what Zach Cregger’s Barbarian delivers, teasing the nerves and tickling them, too, as if the genre itself were a basement door just waiting to be wrenched open.