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.

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.

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 The Amateur is what happens when “Mr. Robot” and “Jason Bourne” cross DNA with too little care for the ugly offspring, this is a child born of genre cliché and laughs in the face of plausibility. Call it Mr. Squirrel: The Euro-Tour of Absurdity, Rami Malek’s twitchy everyman hacking government files by day and unmasked terrorism by night, in a world where Interpol has apparently decided to go on holiday, the CIA chases its own tail, and not a single Parisian security official or Spanish detective can be bothered to even blink at an American cryptographer detonating pools and bodies in their midst.

How delicious, in this era of franchise bloat and less-than-simple sequels, to be handed a second helping that leaves you sated rather than queasy. If Paul Feig's Another Simple Favor is a cocktail, it's one shaken with a confidence, a dash of vermouth and a twist of lemon, sipped poolside in Capri while the bodies float by (sometimes literally, sometimes, more enjoyably, in spirit). Rarely does a film invite the audience to marvel at its gorgeous surface and still let them dive, giggling, into its undertow. Here, we have that rare, effervescent tonic: a thriller that dresses up as a comedy, or the other way 'round; a parade of “thrills” that remembers to be, above all, fun.

There are films that, like a splashy dinner party hosted between power surges, seem to teeter joyfully on the brink of self-immolation: too bright, too eager, altogether too much. A Simple Favor, Paul Feig’s giddy, knowing leap into nonsensical noir (with quotation marks around both “noir” and “knowing”), belongs to that breed. One watches it, if one watches it at all, and I admit I was blissfully unaware of its existence until the 2025 sequel crept up like a podcast auto-play, and feels at once the tug of modern anxieties and the shriek of a fashionista’s ringtone: Are we to be shocked, amused, or both at these women’s deadly games of friendship and deception?