Amazeballs

Some films put you in a vice and tighten, click by click, until you’re not sure if you’re gasping from shock or from the giddy pleasure of being so expertly, so utterly manipulated. “Gone Girl,” that lurid psychothriller by David Fincher, wears its heart (if one can call it a heart: more like a bloodied, glinting knife) on its sleeve. This is the rare mainstream film that seduces us into collusion with its sociopath, pats our leg, and whispers, “Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes, don’t be squeamish, darling, it’s just your happily ever after with its throat slit.”

There’s a mordant joke running through “The Killer”—practically a pulse, arranged with the precision of a Smiths beat—that might be missed by anyone still taking their assassins straight and their directors at their own promotional word. Here is David Fincher, once the feverish chronicler of men unraveling in the glow of green computer screens and kitchen fluorescents, now orchestrating a liturgy of control and cold-blooded process so sharp it’s almost a parody of itself: the assassin as Ikea monk, building murder out of flat-packed routines and hide-in-plain-sight anonymity. Nothing, not even the violence, is ever allowed to descend into real chaos—not while there are yoga stretches to be done and a running tally of BPM on the Apple Watch.

From its first, brash wink at the audience—Clive Owen, all gallows cool, staring right through the screen and telling us, with devilish confidence, how he will commit the “perfect robbery”—Spike Lee’s “Inside Man” broadcasts what so many lesser heist films merely whimper: this one is playing a totally different game. What Lee is pulling off here, working with Russell Gewirtz’s Rube Goldberg screenplay (which, for once, doesn’t collapse under its own cleverness), is a kind of conjurer’s trick—not just a “how did they do it?” but a “what are they doing, and why?” And, miraculously, by the end you might just feel like an accomplice, too.

From its first, quietly clinical shot—a warehouse of flickering screens and the glazed-over faces behind them—American Sweatshop aims not to shock, but to seep under your skin, repellently but irresistibly, like a light leak in an otherwise airtight coffin. Every so often you see a film that doesn’t just depict the contemporary horror show, it lets you marinate in it. This is one of those.

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.