A Sexy Blog

There is something interesting about the “based-on-a-true-story” thriller, that genre with which Hollywood is infatuated—it has the chance to situate historical spectacle in a slick transport suit and drive it with wild abandon under the bridge of plausibility. “The Red Sea Diving Resort,” the directorial debut of Gideon Raff, is one such film, lively and well-produced, featuring Chris Evans as a Mossad member who seems to be auditioning for a secret agent beach calendar. It makes for an agreeable, occasionally entertaining, but ultimately forgettable movie, basically the younger cousin of “Argo” who puts in some effort at the family reunion, but never once threatens to outdo its subtle origins.

How do you make a disaster film in 2020, when going outside to check the mailbox felt like auditioning for “Contagion 2”? The answer, in “Greenland,” is with impressive restraint: it’s a comet-disaster movie that, instead of blowing up the White House for the nineteenth time, asks you to remember to bring your son’s insulin.

There’s a curious electricity that runs through Copycat, a film too calculating in its own self-regard to ever really slip the leash and become what you want it to be—a nervy thriller or a macabre descent or even a sly commentary on its own genre-mad duplicities. But isn’t that late-‘90s Hollywood for you? They always want to have a clever setup, the air of psychological sophistication, and Sigourney Weaver locked in a crystal palace of agoraphobic terror—yet heaven forbid they ever let too much chaos creep in. Copycat is the sort of movie that blows a kiss in the direction of Silence of the Lambs but recoils from Hannibal’s chill. The difference, of course, is that Jonathan Demme’s movie had an actual pulse beneath the politesse and a villain who seemed to spiral out of the cracked American psyche like a bad dream. Here, the nightmares all come from old clippings.

David O. Russell’s Amsterdam is a whodunit that can’t stop tripping over its own borrowed shoes, a picture so prodigiously crammed with stars and incident you’d swear the “business plot” at the heart of the movie was actually some meta-industrial scheme to drive a stake through the heart of Hollywood ensemble films. Oh, how they come: Bale, Robbie, Washington, Rock, Taylor-Joy, De Niro, and (lest we forget, though the film nearly does) poor Taylor Swift, scattered about like confetti thrown before a funeral. Amsterdam is an impeccable study in grandeur curdling to the merely grandiose, a gathering of so many fine elements and name-brand trappings that one finds oneself—slack-jawed, faintly bored—wondering what on earth happened.

“Woman of the Hour” tries to do the near-impossible: juggle the grubby spectacle of 1970s television, the queasy horror of a serial killer stalking the vulnerable margins of American womanhood, and the exhausted genre reflexes of true-crime drama—all in a scant hundred minutes, and as Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, no less. The result, I’m afraid, is something like a psychological profile by way of a production meeting: just enough distress and commentary to call itself “important,” but too unsure of its identity to settle into anything worth remembering.

If there’s a chill in “The Stranger”—and there is, a gray-blue, suffocating fog that seeps in under the doors and seeps, ultimately, into your bones—it is not the chill of intellectual rigor, or even of well-honed genre machinery. No, what Thomas M. Wright (whose name, one suspects, is stiflingly respectable but also suspiciously absent from the pantheon of directors who actually terrify us) gives us is a thriller so restrained in its horror, so unsure of its own human subjects, that it might have been devised by police proceduralists who, after a long day filling out forms, briefly remembered they had souls. “The Stranger” is heavy with atmosphere, but the air is so thick it deadens more than it haunts.

Scott Adkins, God bless him, is the sort of one-man genre rescue mission only the British could produce—a demolition expert for busted action franchises and the patron saint of straight-to-streaming also-rans. In Prisoner of War, he’s parachuted (or rather crash-landed, with his jaw set to “unbreakable”) into the kind of pseudo-epic, sun-bleached World War II slog that once would have starred John Wayne—in a century when the “Great Escape” meant climbing out of Malibu traffic, not a bamboo stockade.

What we have in Until Dawn is less a horror film than a breathless round of charades performed at the world’s noisiest sleepover—everyone putting on their most rubbery "terrified" faces but nobody remembering quite what play they’re in. The filmmakers, with the game’s title in one hand and an empty grab bag of horror clichés in the other, seem to have asked themselves, “Should we tell the story so many cared about?”—and then tossed the question straight down the mineshaft.

When George Clooney and Brad Pitt show up together in a movie these days, it’s like old royalty strutting through Times Square in sunglasses: you don’t care why they’re there, you just want to watch them soak up every inch of spotlight. That’s Wolfs—Jon Watts’s breezy, over-familiar caper where the plot is more a rumor than a skeleton, but the charm is thick enough to swim in. Was I enthralled? Not exactly. But did I have a hell of a time? Absolutely. This is the sort of picture that glides on charisma and the friction of two megawatt stars shoulder-bumping through a city that knows how to keep its secrets tucked behind neon and hotel doors.

Is it possible, even now, for an old master to turn the American epic inside out and force us, blinking, into the full view of our own historical obscenities? With “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese—half a century after Mean Streets, still careening down the byways of national guilt—gives us a film that arrives not like a gift, but as a reckoning. Even coming in at a prodigious three-and-a-half hours, the movie—anchored by Scorsese’s sure hand, thrilling, raw-silk visuals, and a cast so fine-tuned they seem to bleed right off the screen—never feels like indulgence. It’s a sustained, merciless symphony of American sin.