Mehnificent

To paraphrase that old Greco-Roman epigram, blessed is the film that knows how to quit while it’s ahead. For the first forty minutes or so, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite turns the otherwise stultifying business of Situation Room protocol and nuclear hair-trigger bureaucracy into a kind of collective nervous breakdown, cross-bred with a heist film’s mounting tension. It’s the closest she’s come to her Zero Dark Thirty high, a surgical re-immersion in the world of men and women doing “the job”, capital letters implied, even if that job looks, from without, like holding conference calls and watching red blips crawl toward American soil.

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.

If you ever wanted to see American family dysfunction tiptoe right up to the precipice, peer over, consider taking a leap into delicious manic farce, and then, ever-so-polite, decide it’d rather just shuffle a little awkwardly for ninety minutes “Adulthood” is your movie.

Is it possible for a movie to trip over its own cleverness and bounce back up, grinning, clutching a Santa hat in one hand and a sawed-off shotgun in the other? Shane Black seems to think so, bless him—he’s made a career of fusing Christmas lights onto grisly pulp, stapling wisecracks to bodies before the blood dries. With “Play Dirty,” he takes Donald Westlake’s Parker, criminal mastermind, eternal sourpuss, the sort of man who’d rob his grandmother if you left her in a counting room and sends him stumbling through a minefield of Black’s signature goofball banter and Yuletide noir.

If you had told me last year that Darren Aronofsky the celluloid high priest of psychological torment, chronicler of dancers, addicts, and whales perpetually spiraling into their own obsessions, would stage a Guy Ritchie caper comedy, “with a cat,” I’d have assumed you’d been drinking what the denizens of Paul’s Bar are serving. Yet here is Caught Stealing, a film so unrecognizable as Aronofsky’s that your main clue to his involvement is the perverse glee with which the violence arrives not with the velvet caress of fate, but like a sledgehammer wrapped in Pop Rocks.

There’s something peculiarly demoralizing about watching a movie desperate to be clever—a kind of Netflix-age puzzle box that delivers nothing but more boxes, and each lid is glued on with the icy sweat of someone who thinks the riddle is its own reward. Philip Koch’s “Brick” (and has a contemporary German film ever worn a lamer Anglo title with such self-importance?) throws its benighted cast through every doomsday apartment-escape cliché you can think of, as if J.G. Ballard and J.J. Abrams had teamed up for a group project and then swapped out their last pages for a tech manual, all in the forgotten hope of stealing a march on “Black Mirror.” If there’s a greater argument for the superiority of television’s brisk forty minutes over the joyless slog of a two-hour feature, I haven’t seen it.