Movies

Let Me Make You a Martyr is one of those films that arrives with so much sulfurous promise it almost dares you not to be excited. An indie southern-gothic revenge tale with Marilyn Manson putatively playing an assassination angel named Pope? That’s the kind of casting stroke that wakes up even the most jaded cinephile. On paper, it's a ready-made baroque: broken family loyalties, incestuous chemistry, violence steeped in religious delirium, Sons of Anarchy but with the lights turned down and the metaphysics dialed up.

The first jolt of The Founder isn’t the sizzle of a burger hitting the griddle; it’s the smack of Michael Keaton walking into the frame like capitalism’s answer to a grinning shark. Keaton, who’s been on a late-career tear ever since Birdman, doesn’t merely play Ray Kroc; he seems to inhale him, then exhale an all-American fog of hustle, charm, and predation. If Daniel Day-Lewis gave us petroleum-slick ambition in There Will Be Blood and Jesse Eisenberg did the hoodie-clad math in The Social Network, Keaton supplies the ketchup-red swagger: a salesman’s smile that curdles, scene by scene, into something closer to manifest destiny with a milkshake machine.

There are movies which, with all their gloss and calculated ambition, remain pieces of machinery, oiled and in motion, but never quite alive. The Accountant is not one of those. It rumbles, clicks, and suddenly roars as if its protagonist’s sharp edges were etched with lightning, each narrative gear turning inevitably toward violence and revelation. That familiar yet unexpected pleasure, the sensation of a genre movie actually delivering on its promises, finds a rare showcase here. For once, the machine’s hum is exhilarating.

Is there anything more liberating than watching a movie that understands—it really knows—that coherence is just another rule waiting to be elbowed aside for the sake of a good time? Shane Black’s “The Nice Guys” is not so much a film as a lark in polyester trousers, a two-hour tumble through the sun...

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.

There is, let’s be honest, a certain adolescent joy in being bad for the sheer, unlaundered thrill of it—a kind of cackling, slippery impudence most modern horror movies outgrow in favor of handwringing, pious detours into “trauma,” and a double-locked justification for every sharp object. Watching Terrifier is like giving a chainsaw to the class clown and seeing how many teachers he can send packing: it doesn’t care about lessons, or roots, or the sob story behind the mask. It’s a daft, dangerous revel stripping horror down to the giggle you stifle when you know you shouldn’t laugh, but can’t help yourself.

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?

Let’s be honest: no one needed another “Ben-Hur,” certainly not in 2016, and yet here comes Timur Bekmambetov storming the gates, CGI in one hand and the weight of a dozen cinematic ghosts in the other, determined to prove that this saga still matters. Does it? Well, not always in the way the greats hoped, but it moves like mad, flashes prettily, and—God help us—actually tries for some feeling amid the dust and digital splatter.