Amazeballs

Is there anything more perversely thrilling in American cinema than the spectacle of watching a tough man—whose life’s been varnished in blood and bad decisions—suddenly confronted with the plummeting black-out of his mind? “Knox Goes Away,” Michael Keaton’s brooding directorial vehicle (and, yes, he pilots this thing from both sides of the camera), is, at heart, a haunting, slow-burn elegy for the hired gun as the light in his memory flickers and gutters.

Some movies slip so quietly under the radar that stumbling into them feels like a lucky accident in an age of algorithmic “recommendations.” "The Gentlemen" was my unexpected prize at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box—a happy surprise that reminded me of why Guy Ritchie, at his best, can take the old song-and-dance of criminal enterprise and make it feel like a brisk new tune. Here is a movie that doesn’t seduce you with empty flash; it sits you down in the plush, dangerous lounge of the underworld and dares you to keep up as everyone circles the whisky decanter.