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.

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.

“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.

If there’s a chill in “The Stranger”—and there is, a gray-blue, suffocating fog that seeps in under the doors and seeps, ultimately, into your bones—it is not the chill of intellectual rigor, or even of well-honed genre machinery. No, what Thomas M. Wright (whose name, one suspects, is stiflingly respectable but also suspiciously absent from the pantheon of directors who actually terrify us) gives us is a thriller so restrained in its horror, so unsure of its own human subjects, that it might have been devised by police proceduralists who, after a long day filling out forms, briefly remembered they had souls. “The Stranger” is heavy with atmosphere, but the air is so thick it deadens more than it haunts.

As directors go, David Mackenzie always struck me as someone who refused to drift through genre on autopilot. Hell or High Water was a jolt to the “modern Western” in the way an electric current perks up a tired body—full of sunbaked grit and genuine desperation. So it’s almost a perverse accomplishment that Relay, despite carrying all the trappings of a high-concept, glossy paranoia thriller, manages to take the zeitgeist by the throat and promptly doze off. You can practically hear the film’s pulse rate dropping as the credits roll.

It’s almost a shame, watching Untamed, to see how little faith the show has in the very wilderness it fetishizes. From its opening moments—where a body falls off El Capitan, landing with the grace of a screenwriter’s design rather than the force of gravity—we are meant to believe we’re entering that coveted realm: the prestige procedural, taut with secrets and wound as tightly as a coil of survival rope. And yet, by episode two—somewhere between the first heavy downpour (that leaves nary a footprint erased) and the second miraculous rescue in a park the size of Luxembourg—the spell begins to lift and what’s left is a potboiler searching for a kettle.