Movies

Let’s cut through the mariachi fireworks and that oily blast of DayGlo costumes: Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez is the sort of cinematic incident that makes you want to retroactively warn yourself away—like a bad tattoo or tequila made in a plastic barrel. “Where did the movies go wrong?” isn’t a question you ask as the credits roll, it’s a question you’re muttering thirty minutes into this so-called musical, when cultural resonance has been replaced by the clop-clop choreography of farce.

There’s something almost illicit in the surprise of “Sleeping Dogs”—as if you’d gone to the usual midnight mass of generic thrillers and, in the half-light, found the sermon delivered by Russell Crowe, voice ragged, eyes veiled with embers of regret. In his hands, or more aptly in the shuffling gait and battered dignity of Roy Freeman, Adam Cooper’s directorial debut morphs, unexpectedly, into a meditation on the porousness of memory and the sleight-of-hand of self-forgiveness. If the movie pulls you forward with the sticky taffy of psychological suspense, it’s Crowe who gives the confection its bite.

With a title that should promise whiplash-inducing emerald spectacle—witches crooning, spellbooks ablaze, and enough glitter to bankrupt a drag parade—I traipsed into Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” salivating for a good bewitching. Stacked with a director who once spun “Crazy Rich Asians” into a fuchsia daydream and fronted by the goddess-voiced Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and pop pixie Ariana Grande (Glinda), this screen adaptation had every excuse to split the difference between “The Wizard of Oz” and a Manhattan karaoke bar at four a.m. But you know the old line: Don’t judge a broomstick by its bristles. Within minutes, I could tell this wasn’t the yellow brick road—just a treadmill in Technicolor.

I went into Elevation knowing it would be bad—there’s something liberating in having your low expectations met so precisely, like watching a car accelerate off a cliff with immaculate predictability. George Nolfi’s latest exercise in post-apocalyptic hand-wringing arrives already embalmed, wheeling Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin out like two alluring mannequins about to be discarded. It is a feat to make actors this lively feel this bored; by the end, you could almost hear the cameraman nodding off.

I walked into "Red One" armed with precisely nothing but a minor hunch and perhaps a little hardened prejudice against movies that wear jingling bells on their sleeves. Christmas films—those syrupy retail rituals—usually march in like a mall Santa two cups deep, so forgive me for expecting a rerun of reindeer games. But director Jake Kasdan, of all people, produces something so deliciously unexpected, so giddy in its mash-up of action spectacle and Yuletide lunacy, that half an hour in I found myself grinning in the dark, my inner cynic in full retreat.

There is a kind of filmic purgatory, a cinema of stalled ambition and aesthetic vacancy, where the only thing more oppressive than the endless hours of tedium is the lingering sense of money misspent. Armor is not just another addition to the b-movie landfill, it’s the sound of late-career legacy clanging hollowly on the asphalt of a bridge, the celluloid equivalent of watching Sylvester Stallone doze in real time, bracketed by echoes of his own mythos and, faintly, the dying whinny of a studio accountant’s last desperate crackle.

Is there anything more perverse—and perversely funny—than watching Hugh Grant, that perennial celluloid charmer, take a swan dive into villainy? In “Heretic,” he does not merely play against type; he dances into the abyss with silk gloves on, turning neighborly warmth into menace so delicious it’s almost camp, except nothing about his performance feels accidental. You watch Grant, and it’s like seeing Cary Grant slip a knife between the ribs—a delight so vertiginous you can’t help but smile before the shiver hits.

There are times, guiltily, when you press on with a franchise not out of hope but out of a kind of cinematic masochism—a need, maybe, to see how low the bough bends before it snaps. With Largo Winch: The Price of Money, we don’t get the snap; we get the soft, damp thump of a weary branch coughing up another mediocre fruit, doomed to rot at our feet. And yet, like any movie masochist, I brushed off my sense of déjà vu, clung to my last embers of fondness for Tomer Sisley’s grifter-boy charm, and hit “play,” half in mockery, half in slender faith. What followed wasn’t so much disastrous as dispiriting, an ill-advised reunion tour playing to an empty barroom.

Is that a penis? No, really—is that Ralph Fiennes’s penis? I suppose we have to start there, because in Uberto Pasolini’s sepulchral take on the Odyssey, we’re given not just emotional bareness but the full-frontal variety—Ralph, exposed to the elements and the audience, and you do a little double-take in your seat. It’s the sort of unblushing exposure that might’ve stirred old Homer to put away his lyre and blink into the firelight. “They show you everything these days,” you can hear the gallery whisper—a groin-level “welcome home” that’s somehow more shocking than gods or monsters.

There’s something almost perversely frustrating about watching a film that’s desperate to be important but allergic to getting its hands dirty. Small Things Like These turns the Magdalene Laundries—a subject with the fury of a thousand scandals—into a very slow, very wet walk in the Irish mist. You...