Movies

How delicious, in this era of franchise bloat and less-than-simple sequels, to be handed a second helping that leaves you sated rather than queasy. If Paul Feig's Another Simple Favor is a cocktail, it's one shaken with a confidence, a dash of vermouth and a twist of lemon, sipped poolside in Capri while the bodies float by (sometimes literally, sometimes, more enjoyably, in spirit). Rarely does a film invite the audience to marvel at its gorgeous surface and still let them dive, giggling, into its undertow. Here, we have that rare, effervescent tonic: a thriller that dresses up as a comedy, or the other way 'round; a parade of “thrills” that remembers to be, above all, fun.

There’s a special kind of letdown reserved for sequels to movies that had no business being as bracing as they were. The Accountant (2016) was, in its own chilly way, a genre cocktail so sharp it could clean wounds, a pulpy thriller where Ben Affleck’s Christian Wolff moved through the world with the precision of a human abacus lashed to a suppressed scream. The violence, when it landed, felt both willed and suffered; every bruise, a mark on his actuarial soul. It was a film content to be odd, morose, even embarrassing in its sincerity, neurosis and action stitched together with genuine ache for difference.

There are films that amuse and films that aspire, and then there are the corporate offspring, movies conceived in committee meetings, designed to be clicked, not felt. A Minecraft Movie isn’t just brand extension, it’s brand substitution: a video game adaptation that doesn’t so much build as prefab, a film that wears the pixelated mask of Minecraft but, beneath the surface, runs the codebase of something else entirely. It is, in the argot of the very medium it adapts, a reskin. Or, to use a more distressing analogy from contemporary gaming: Fallout 4 on the bones of Skyrim, everything familiar, just differently textured.

There’s something to be said for the kind of movie that doesn’t so much ask for your suspension of disbelief as it hustles you aboard, pumps the cabin full of intoxicating nonsense, and dares you to care how, or whether, the plane lands. Fight or Flight, James Madigan’s boisterous midair free-for-all, gives us the cinematic equivalent of a B-grade cocktail: fizzy, shallow, and exactly right after a long week of seriousness. In other words, it’s a film that understands the difference between “original” and “necessary”, and, frankly, doesn’t trouble itself about either.

Of all the ways an already mediocre American Western might earn its place in the history books, Rust, Joel Souza’s 2024 genre exercise, had the misfortune of being immortalized by catastrophe rather than by the merits it so earnestly (and so transparently) seeks. Released under a pall as heavy as Wyoming’s own lowering skies, Rust cannot be written about, really, in isolation; the fatal shadow of Halyna Hutchins’ death seeps into every frame, blurring what might have been a straight-plodding piece of entertainment into a cultural memento mori.

There’s something very contemporary about Companion, that sense of ordinary people, lacquered in anxiety, stumbling into catastrophe by way of a Silicon Valley fever dream. Drew Hancock, no hack, has made a movie that wants to stare at the icy void where technology and human vanity collide, then crack a joke so the void doesn’t stare back too hard. It’s a science fiction thriller in horror makeup, but with the nervous giggle of a dinner party gone off the rails.

The war film has always been something of a contract with the audience, a pact that says: come, and I’ll show you the heat of heroism, the terror behind the steel, the struggle of boys made old by violence. What Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland have dared, in Warfare, is to tear up that contract and write something new and starker in its place: this is what it feels like to be trapped in someone else’s war, to be battered by noise and confusion, to never quite know who your enemy is or why you’re here, beyond some abstract equation of duty and disaster.

We have reached the late capitalist endgame when even a G20 summit—a gathering that, in theory, represents the convulsions and anxieties of a planet teetering on its own ambitions—becomes a stage for pallid, sticky-fingered action pablum. Patricia Riggen’s G20 strains to dress itself in the grandeur of international consequence, as if draping a polyester tablecloth over a card table could suddenly transform it into Versailles. The result, unfortunately, is not grandeur but the cinematic equivalent of a hotel conference coffee: tepid, thin, and bitterly disappointing, despite the prestigious packaging.

The Western—a genre once rooted in unspoken codes and existential sweat, where violence had gravity and redemption came at the price of a soul—has, with Gunslingers, been exhumed and sent staggering, blank-eyed, into the realm of accidental comedy. Brian Skiba, whose résumé reads more like a warning label than a track record, invites us to Redemption (the film’s town, not its trajectory). Make no mistake: there is no redemption here—except, perhaps, for Nicolas Cage, whose presence is less a saving grace than a feverish hallucination trapped in a desert heatwave.

“Lifeline” is the kind of taut, haunted psychological drama that feels like it’s been mistakenly shipped to the Science Fiction shelf by a jittery intern, where it sits in the company of time-travelers and androids, looking around, appalled at the company it keeps. The film, directed by Feras Alfuqaha, has the brooding nerve to face the black and blue marks left by trauma, personal and societal, and invites you to press your thumb to the bruise. To call it science fiction is to miss the point with the earnestness only a certain kind of literalist can muster. The tricks with reality, disorienting, elliptical, aren’t flights to the moon but dives into a mind coming apart, or maybe clawing for unity in the first place. “Lifeline” wants not just to test its protagonist, Steven Thomas (played with a wonderful, agitated delicacy by Josh Stewart), but to prod at the audience’s own nerves, the little lingering doubts and regrets we all ferry around. There’s a current of self-examination running through this film that curls right back into the viewer’s lap, whether we like it or not.