Mehnificent

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.

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.