Mehnificent

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 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.

You sit down to Cold Wallet expecting slick Netflix-bait, a digital-age caper that promises to surf the froth and confusion of the cryptocurrency world—and you get exactly that, for better or worse. It’s a thriller with a gamified conscience, a morality tale dressed up in meme-charged adrenaline, hustling for attention like a day-trader chasing the next meme coin. Cutter Hodierne’s direction thrusts us into a jittery, claustrophobic world where Redditors become bumbling revolutionaries overnight, and the real drama isn’t wealth lost or gained, but the feeble, ever-shifting ground on which contemporary ethics stand. The irony? The lesson is larger—infinitely larger—than the story.

Where does one even begin with a movie like this—a cinematic bag of potato chips that’s all salt, no flavor, and leaves you wondering why you even opened it? “Chief of Station” (2024)—let’s just pause and savor those quotation marks, because any film so adamant about being a “gem” should take a long, honest look in the mirror—stars the usually capable Aaron Eckhart as Ben Malloy, a man who, judging by his performance, seems to have signed on before reading anything past “Action/Thriller” at the top of the script.

Should not have resurrected The Crow. That, in a sentence, is the wisest epitaph for an undead franchise whose new lease on life feels, if not actively damned, then at least embalmed in every frame. Hollywood loves to exhume its corpses; here, though, the necromancy is not just joyless—it’s grotesque. Watching Bill Skarsgård lurching through all that smeared makeup like a moping IT clown forced into Hot Topic drag—and that’s the last cloudburst this city needed. Lionsgate, when you next crawl back to the mausoleum, maybe try releasing a film that resonates with audiences for good reasons, not just out of contractual obligation. Just a suggestion!

Criminal is the kind of mongrel thriller that seems almost tailor-made to attract critical enmity: jigsaw plotting, characters that come apart if you prod them, and a magpie casting philosophy that shuffles through A-listers as if Hollywood were a novelty gumball machine. The reviews online drip with the sourness of dashed hopes—critics, wringing their hands about “wasted potential,” all but begging the film to be thrown back into the genre stockpot for more seasoning. And yet, perversely, that’s the exact pitch that drew me in. Give me talent forced to dance on rickety scaffolding over mediocrity any day; how else would we ever be surprised?