Movies

There’s a moment in Steve Jobs, one of those dangerous little intervals between a volley of Sorkinian wit and the next bracing clash of egos when you realize: this is not, and never has been, about computers. It’s about the performance, jobs (no pun intended) as theater, invention as drama, genius as soliloquy. The curtain rises, the orchestra tunes, and our hero snappish, mercurial, blazingly single-minded, takes center stage, a maestro of microchips who can’t solder a wire but can bend the collective will of a room as if it were his own personal instrument. Aaron Sorkin has never met a conference room he couldn’t set aflame with words, but Danny Boyle, all kinetic energy and pulsing light, turns these corridors and backstage wings into a kind of nervy, flickering proscenium. Forget the dreary rest of the “biopic” genre; Steve Jobs isn’t here to teach you the story of Apple. It’s here to make you feel that strange, unholy exhilaration of watching the right mind crash mercilessly, ecstatically, against the world.

What does it mean for a gangster film—not just in Taiwan, but anywhere in the world—to recite all the liturgies of brotherhood, blood, and betrayal, but leave you with nothing more than the memory of flickering shadows on a wall? Joe Lee’s Gatao (2015) is exactly that: a movie that earnestly checks the boxes of triad cinema, hoping to conjure up some of the lurid energy that made Hong Kong’s Young and Dangerous a pop touchstone—but ending up more like a karaoke version sung after midnight, charming in its recognizability, but never threatening to set the night on fire.

It’s not often that a movie about numbers—balance sheets, bonds, the recondite alphabet soup of the financial world—feels like it could blow the roof off a theater. But with The Big Short, director Adam McKay, nimbly adapting Michael Lewis, tries to do precisely that. The film announces its bravura intentions from the opening moments: this isn’t just a disaster movie about the 2008 financial collapse, it’s a corrosive, postmodern vaudeville—with the housing market falling apart, and the fourth wall shattering right alongside it.

There have always been two kinds of gangster movies: the ones that prance through mythology—snappy dialogue, tailored suits, violence delivered with cinematic éclat—and the ones where the filth clings to your coat, where the glamour sours, and the body count is just neighborhood news. Black Mass, Scott Cooper’s dark valentine to the Southie underworld, is very much of the latter breed: all winter breath, sickly dim light, and the chill that comes when you realize the American experiment has bred not just outlaws but monsters in suburban haircuts.

Is there any modern screen fantasy more seductive than the con artist—our era’s answer to the movie gangster, only happier to work out of a hotel bar than a speakeasy, and more at home lifting watches or hearts than gunning anyone down? In Focus, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa try to fine-tune that old grift-and-romance two-step for the millennial crowd, trotting out Will Smith as a slick virtuoso of deception, whose real legerdemain ends up being the ability to keep Margot Robbie (who, here, has the sparkle and bounce of a new convertible) on her toes, and, at least for a while, the audience on theirs.