Mehnificent

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.

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.

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.

“Woman of the Hour” tries to do the near-impossible: juggle the grubby spectacle of 1970s television, the queasy horror of a serial killer stalking the vulnerable margins of American womanhood, and the exhausted genre reflexes of true-crime drama—all in a scant hundred minutes, and as Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, no less. The result, I’m afraid, is something like a psychological profile by way of a production meeting: just enough distress and commentary to call itself “important,” but too unsure of its identity to settle into anything worth remembering.