Mehnificent

There are films that amuse and films that aspire, and then there are the corporate offspring, movies conceived in committee meetings, designed to be clicked, not felt. A Minecraft Movie isn’t just brand extension, it’s brand substitution: a video game adaptation that doesn’t so much build as prefab, a film that wears the pixelated mask of Minecraft but, beneath the surface, runs the codebase of something else entirely. It is, in the argot of the very medium it adapts, a reskin. Or, to use a more distressing analogy from contemporary gaming: Fallout 4 on the bones of Skyrim, everything familiar, just differently textured.

Of all the ways an already mediocre American Western might earn its place in the history books, Rust, Joel Souza’s 2024 genre exercise, had the misfortune of being immortalized by catastrophe rather than by the merits it so earnestly (and so transparently) seeks. Released under a pall as heavy as Wyoming’s own lowering skies, Rust cannot be written about, really, in isolation; the fatal shadow of Halyna Hutchins’ death seeps into every frame, blurring what might have been a straight-plodding piece of entertainment into a cultural memento mori.

In the glittering labyrinth of modern espionage thrillers, Black Bag stands poised with all the accoutrements—name-brand talent, glossy international backdrops, a moral quandary or two shimmering on the surface—yet somewhere between the Bondian promise and Soderbergh’s cooler-than-cool execution, the pulse goes slack. This should have been a decadent spread, lush with betrayal and sleight-of-hand. Instead, we’re handed a chilly amuse-bouche, the cinematic equivalent of chewing an ice cube and wishing for cognac.