Movies

Has there ever been a fantasy quite as potent for the audience of action movies as the one where an ordinary schlub gets to uncork the bottled-up rage of his humdrum existence, smashing open ennui’s skull with a roll of nickels? “Nobody,” directed by Ilya Naishuller, starts as a sneaky parody of that everyman’s power fantasy but quickly escalates into its apotheosis — a well-lubricated, pyrotechnic hoot that leaves the faint whiff of gunpowder and absurdity drifting over the popcorn aisles.

The Ides of March is George Clooney’s bloodletting of the American campaign trail—a lacerating little melodrama disguised as a modern-day Julius Caesar for the cable-news set. Clooney, that ever-affable, silver-tongued wolf, teams up with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon to spin a silky, venomous web that looks like hope and tastes like old, cold heartbreak. Watching this film, you don’t just witness the sausage of democracy being made; you’re tossed straight into the meat grinder and asked to pick which bit of your conscience you’d like to keep.

If you’ve ever been so bored in the opening minutes of a film that you nearly jettisoned it into the in-flight void, you’re in the ideal state for TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY—a valentine slipped to those of us who remember when ‘spy movie’ didn’t mean Tom Cruise careening down Burj Khalifa on a dental floss. I confess: I nearly passed it by. I have the attention span of a dog in a squirrel sanctuary, and when I first met Tomas Alfredson’s version of Le Carré’s labyrinth, I almost bolted. But once I resolved to commit—strapped three hours’ worth of expectation and peanuts—I found myself confronted with a piece of sustained, high-stakes espionage art that refuses—politely, dourly—to pander to anybody’s need for instant payoff.

There are sequels that grow out of their originals like wild, ungovernable vines, and ones that wither into dead appendages, waving forlornly at the memory of what once, however mediocrely, worked. Largo Winch 2—or, if the European flavor tempts you, The Burma Conspiracy—manages neither flourish nor rot with grace: it just sits there, inert, a cardboard cutout of a “thriller” flapping in the breeze. If the original Largo Winch was no undiscovered classic, it still had the nervous charm of a scrappy upstart—a corporate action-drama that lived (barely) by the slyness of its twists and hero’s uncertain soul. This sequel, though, lumbers on, encased in a leaden coffin of clichés, as if produced by a committee of MBAs who once watched a Bond movie by accident and only remembered the gadgets and the running.

You find yourself at a “Terrifier” marathon the way you might wander into a crumbling, weed-choked funhouse: half-wary, half-eager, and maybe—against your better judgment—hoping to stumble out dazed, altered, or at least grinning through the scream. Damien Leone’s trilogy, born from a short so brash it barely counts as a calling card, is less a suite of movies than a dare. Sit through the whole grotesque pageant and you discover, under the shriek and squish, a saga that’s more about what horror can provoke than what it can explain.